Why You’re Always Busy but Still Not Growing

Hello, my friends. Welcome back to The Modern Hairstylist Podcast. Here is one of the biggest things that I have been known for and been teaching for years now, since the very beginning, which is giving you more time back in your business and in your personal life as a hairstylist. I talk about this a lot, where you sign up for the full-time job of being a hairstylist, of just doing the damn hair, right?

But what we didn't realize when we signed up to this career is that you also signed up for a ton of other part-time jobs, right? Such as being the receptionist sometime ... so, but, such as being the inventory specialist, such as being the accountant, and the bookkeeper, and the financial advisor, and being the education person who has to create all this strategy, being the marketer, the social media guru. You hold so many responsibilities.

And so because of that, your time and how you use it is so massively important and valuable, and it just seems as time moves forward, every single year, every single month, the amount of time that you have seems to shrink and the amount of responsibilities that you have seem to just pile and pile and pile. And so my job and my wish for everybody is to make it so we are making sure we are identifying what are the most important things that you need to be spending your very small amount of time that you have on to move the needle forward the most? What is it in your business, in your life right now that is actually sucking up a lot of time that we can get rid of? And then how can we make it so when you use your time and you're actually getting to work that you're doing it in the most efficient, productive way possible?

And that's exactly why I created The Modern Hairstylist Tour, because here's the tea. We do a lot of awesome essential education online that we just could not do in person, right? However, in-person education, even on the business side, is so absolutely important and still relevant to your acumen as a hairstylist, because there is n- gonna never be anything like you being able to interact with the community, have physical eyeballs and connection on your business, with your business, about your business, with peers that are like-minded to you in the same room at the same time for an extended period of time. Because nobody's sitting on a Zoom call for eight hours at a time for three days in a row without falling asleep, getting distracted, or getting pulled away from something else in their life.

So, that's why we created The Modern Hairstylist Tour, where the entire theme is productivity and efficiency. And we have, we have accomplished three amazing successful dates so far, in Dallas, Tampa, and Philadelphia, with 95% five-star reviews from every attendee. And we have seen these people be able to have so much more clarity and so many more tools in their tool belt that allow them to show up much more efficiently in their business so they actually can get some time back in their life and move the needle forward in their career, and maybe enjoy their summer and go on vacation without having to stress about it. So, today, what I'm gonna be doing in this episode is talking to you about the different things that we actually do at the tour to get those things back, that time back, and also to understand where your time needs to be used the most in order for you to actually make the needle move forward, because I guarantee you, every single person listening to this podcast, 'cause we all feel like this as business owners, if you feel like you are working your ass off all the time, right, but your income is not growing, it's because you are most likely working on the wrong thing.

Because if the science, if the mathematical equation was the more you work, the more money that you would make, if that was accurate, right, then we should all be fucking billionaires, because we're all spending a ton of time working on the business, right? And we have no time left to work on it. Amen. But the real truth is, is when we work smarter, not harder, and we take the small amount of time that you have and we treat it as a very valuable, precious resource, and we protect it and we allot it and delegate it to the most important things that will actually get you to where you need to go right now, that's when you see consistent, sustainable, and exciting growth that gives you more time and more money to then multiply and compound the interest and the amount of those resources that you have.

So, today, I'm gonna be sharing with you exactly what we do at The Modern Hairstylist Tour to make that happen, why it's important, and why you should consider to do that right now. But before I get into it, I wanna just quickly mention Jodi Brown, 'cause she'll be a voice on the podcast today, as per usual. What's going on, Jodi Brown? How are you today?

Hunter, I'm so excited to dive into this. One of my favorite things you've ever said is how to treat your time like investing, and I feel like this is exactly what we're gonna talk about, and I can't wait. I'm excited. Hell yeah, dude.

You have two resources, okay? You have two resources. You have money and time. And in order to make money and time, you have to invest money or time, right?

100%. And the difference between money and time, and you guys may have heard me say this before, other people say this before, money is a regenerative resource. You can always make more money, a lot of it in a short amount of time, if you would like to. Where time, you only have a certain amount of time in your life that is granted to you.

And you get to decide how you use that time, and it is, as a business owner, so important that you treat it almost more importantly than money. I am so willing to throw money at getting more time back into my life. But of course, we wanna do it in the most profitable way, and we also wanna make sure that we're spending that time, or getting back the time, in the department of the business that needs the most attention.... and energy.

And so, that's actually one of the very first things that we do on the Modern Hairstylist Tour, is we audit every single one of the attendees' businesses. And we figure out, what is it... What are the tasks, what are the departments that you are lacking in right now that need the most attention? Because if you focus on that one and you give it 100% of your time, then you're going to get into a space where you have even more time and more money to grow the business even more, or just be able to afford more in your personal life and have more time for your personal life, right?

But what ends up happening is, is we put 10% here in this department, in the social media. We put 10% into the client communication side of things. We put 10% into growing our skills behind the chair. We put 10% into taking this education and actually implementing it.

We put 10% into all these different departments, and we wonder why things are moving so slow and why we're working so hard and we have the least amount of time than we ever have had before, but nothing is moving. It's because you aren't giving the thing that actually needs it the most time that it actually needs and the energy that it needs to actually make you some progress. Right? Yeah.

What are your thoughts about that, Jodi? I am thinking back to an analogy that I heard a really long time ago from one of my mentors, and it was about basically, like, kicking soccer balls across a field, right? It's like, say you have, like, five balls lined up and you're going and you're kicking one and then you're coming back to the finish line and then you're kicking another one, and then you're coming back and you're doing that time and time again. You're just randomly kicking those balls, right?

It is gonna take you so much longer to get all of those five balls across the field than if you would have just taken one and just kicked it all the way across the field. And so that's kind of... And then come back and done the other ones. And that's kind of what I think of as you're, as you're talking.

It's like taking the most important thing and really pouring your time and energy into that so you can complete that, so you can get that ball across the field. And that way, you're... Like, it's off your plate. It is completed.

And then, like, maybe you'll realize that you don't need to kick those other balls at all. Like, everything is fine- Yes. once you've done that one. So, I think that's a really, really important thing, because there are so many tasks and it's easy to weight all of them with equal importance, and often it's just not the case.

They're just not equally important. Yeah, 100%. And it's also really easy to not be able to see past it and really reflect on your own habits and how you're showing up in the business as well. And it's also really difficult when you're in your own head and you're, uh, especially if you're an independent stylist, to be able to see where the gaps are, maybe in the department that you need to be focusing on that's gonna make the biggest difference, when you don't have another set of eyeballs to help you see that, right?

Like, when you're in it, you're so blind to it. I know that everybody can relate to this, right? Like, maybe you can give the best dating advice to all your best friends, but when it comes to your own dating life, you never take your own advice, right? It's the same for business for me, right?

Like, I, I would say that for a lot of the things that I teach, I definitely do walk my talk, right? However, of course, I'm all- I'm just a human being and we're all just human beings, and you can only see so much that's ahead of you and right in front of you. And so, having peers and a experienced mentor to consistently check in on you and dive into and dissect all the things that you're doing right now to help you decide what is the department that you need to be focusing in right now and what is sucking up all of your time that should not be sucking up your time, that is really holding you back. And how can we streamline those things and how can we approach it in the best way possible to make it so the things that you actually are doing to grow the business are actually the most efficient and productive ways to do it, right?

Because there is no such thing, there is no super successful entrepreneur in the world who has gotten to where they are without other people. So true. Other people are very hard to deal with and they're very hard to access, but they are absolutely 100% essential to your success. Yeah.

So again, another reason why we created an opportunity for people to physically gather in one room, and why I create opportunities all year round online with my programs, like Modern Stylist Movement, for us to come together, for us to put eyeballs on each other's work, to get out of our own heads and get outside perspectives to give us a little bit more clarity move for- moving forward that we could otherwise not see, 'cause we all have our blind spots. So for example, at the Modern Hairstylist Tour, one of our, uh, attendees, we have these hot seats. So basically, we get into small breakout groups and everybody, one, each person has a turn. And everybody within the group gives that one person their full attention and then gives them the feedback that they need to give, to tell them what they may not be seeing.

Okay? And so one of our attendees during their hot seat, they were like, "Why is it taking me hours and hours and hours to do these same services that it's taking y'all to do half the time?" Because obviously that is something that is holding this person back from making a lot more money, because time is money. If this person could cut their services in half and then be able to take in double the clients, that would literally, statistically, mathematically double this person's income immediately.

Right? 100%. That is insane. So, what we ended up doing is asking her to break down her entire process for how she's approaching these services, step by step by step, and we were all able to identify multiple places where she could be saving time, where she was really overthinking, and different products that she could use to streamline the process, and it completely blew her mind.

And now, words on the street say that she has literally cut her application time in half. Wow.And so what we're also doing during the Modern Hairstylist Tour, particularly at the San Francisco date, you guys may already know Jay Ladner is gonna be joining us. And Jay Ladner, his entire thing is teaching hairstylists how to be more efficient behind the chair when it comes to majoritively color and highlighting techniques.

And so Jay is gonna have an entire segment that's gonna be teaching you guys exactly this. He personally helped me slash my application time down by a lot- Wow. in my own business behind the chair, and a lot of my students as well. And so he'll be coming in, and he'll be teaching you exactly how to do that as well too.

So I'm really excited to have him as a part of it. And then the last part of this all is, okay, now you know where you need to streamline your time, right? Now you know where you need to be spending your time to actually move the needle to create the most results as quickly as you possibly can to get back some of the time, right? But we still have other tasks that we have to do, right?

Yeah. We still have just essential maintenance tasks that come up every single day, no matter what the department is that we need to be focusing on 100%. And so we need to figure out how to actually streamline those things, delegate those things, making it so all those things are taken care of as quickly as possible, as automatically as possible. So the last part of the Modern Hairstylist Tour is we break down AI, ChatGPT, and other automation tools to show you every single way that you can streamline the majority of the processes that you have in your business and your personal life.

For example, we even teach you how to manage your projects and use AI to help you figure out your project management, your schedule, your time, how you're working, when you're working on the different things, to then make it so you are working on the things in the most efficient way possible and everything is clean and laid out for you. Because a lot of the times when we sit down and we look at our to-do list, or we sit down and we're like, "Okay, we're gonna work hard on our business today," we look at our to-do list or we think about our to-do list, or we think about our task and we get completely overwhelmed. And we're going to this tab, and then we're scrolling on this phone, and then we're taking this picture and uploading it here, and then we're figuring out where to write the caption, right? We don't have a system for making it happen.

And so I'm gonna teach you, and I've, what I've been teaching our people who have been attending the tour, is exactly how you can use AI to make that much more efficient for you, and then also make your content creation and all the other things that you have to create in your business w- a lot faster and easier to where you don't have to keep re-prompting ChatGPT to give you a great answer, to make it s- like s- so it sounds like you, so it is something that you can read, make sure that it's good, and then very easily and quickly maybe polish up and then copy and paste and move forward. Right. So I'm giving you everything that you need to approach your business more efficiently, to first off know where it is that you need to be spending your time right now to make the most amount of money, experience the most amount of growth in the m- fastest way possible, and then make it so now that you know where you need to be focusing on your ti- focusing your time and spending your time, that you're using that time wisely, working smarter, not harder, and that you have as m- you get as much time back into your life so you can actually enjoy your fucking life. Yeah.

I think it's so important to embrace these new things. And, you know, it's like if we think back, I mean, when I started back in the Stone Age in the hair industry, um, it was like you couldn't even order things online from your supplier, right? So like, if we think about how much, you know, yes, all of our responsibilities have expanded, but also, like you used to have to go to the supplier and get everything manually. You used to have to book every single client in, like by hand.

You used to have to do all of these things. And so I think it's very easy to get like, you know, think about these new tools as something that is going to take a whole bunch of your time to learn. But if you look back at how much time we actually save now as a result of technology, incorporating these things that you're teaching at the tour into your business as a hairstylist, I think is the best way to really stay ahead of the curve and get all that time back, 'cause we could never have imagined that our clients would be booking themselves even 15 years ago, right? Yeah.

Very true. And I remember, I mean, I've been in the game for like 11, 12 years now, I think. And I remember like the second year of being in the industry- Mm-hmm. our salon started online booking, and it was like this earth shattering situation.

Wow. That early? Wow. And, and I mean, every, I, it was early.

I mean, I was lucky- Yeah. to be in a salo- s- just kind of be raised in a salon that was- Yeah. pretty forward thinking, very, very much into educating themselves, working as efficiently as possible, all the things. Stylists were terrified.

Mm-hmm. And luckily the salon owner was like, "Well, y'all gotta deal with it. It is what it is." Yeah.

Um, and I mean, now this is the norm, you know? Now like online booking is just like, it's something that consumers prefer- Yeah. something that obviously streamline things a lot. And maybe right now all these crazy automations and advanced things seem so overwhelming and crazy, but I promise you, the way that I break them down for you at the tour, it's ways that you can tangibly use them right now that makes sense for your workflow, and that will actually be useful for you and actually streamline your time.

That is something that I always guarantee with my in-person events is you will get actual tangible return on your investment. Yeah. There is a little bit of motivational speak, a little bit of something that might make you cry and light a fire under your ass or have a breakthrough, right? But we don't just talk about fluff when you're in my education.

We talk about shit that's actually gonna make a difference in your life, 'cause that's what I care about. That's what I wanna see is actual impact in your life and your career, because that is what's possible for you, and that's what I'm dedicated to. So when you come to the Modern Hairstylist Tour, it's not gonna be a bunch of motivational speakers making you cry and making you feel excited and you go home and you do nothing with the information. It's gonna be shit that you can actually use right now that you're actually gonna practice when you're there with us- Yeah.

that will change your fucking life and your business. Yeah. Period. So if you wanna join us at the Modern Hairstylist Tour, go to hunterdonow.

com/tour. Go ahead and check out the show notes if you wanna just click that and easily get there. We have two dates left. And probably by the time you're listening to this, the timer has started as far as when we're gonna sell out of tickets and when we're gonna stop selling tickets, because the time is coming up and I gotta tell our vendors how many people we have.

So if you wanna join us on the Modern Hairstylist Tour, we have two dates left. We have Indianapolis and we have San Francisco. San Francisco is gonna be July 20th and the 21st, and we're gonna have our special guest Jay Ladner at Maven & Co. Salon.

And then we have Indianapolis with Lisa Hough at Kimber Chapman Salon, and that's gonna be the 27th and the 28th. And you can check out hunterdonow.com/tour to get your tickets now. Jodi, thank you so much for being here on the podcast with us today.

My friend, thank you so much for tuning in to the podcast. I hope to see you out on the tour and I appreciate you so much and I'll catch you in the next episode. Peace out, girl scout. Bye-bye.

End of transcript. © 2025 Hunter Donia LLC.