Time management for hair store owners

Last week I spoke a nice woman, let’s call her Sandra, and she was the proud hair store owner. We had a chat about the business opportunities in her market. She wanted to grow her business, sales have been lacking behind expectations.

We discussed how she could, next to her online store, organize some events, with local hair salons or at the home of some of her clients. The hair business is all about trust and with an online store it’s not always that easy to convince your visitors to buy your hair.

It helps to market the hair, if you wear it and show it on public events, but also if you organize special events for your existing clientele who can invite their friends.

Sandra was enthusiastic, but she hesitated also. She told me she was five people in one, since she started selling hair. She was:

1. in charge of the inventory, looking for suppliers and checking the hair
2. dealing with customers as sales person
3. busy with the payments and bookkeeping
4. very busy trying to be social on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and
5. all the other stuff a shop owner has to do

and now she needed to organise events?

It was just too much, she admitted it was a good thing to do, but Hey she was not with 5 people, it was only her!

I gave her some advice on time management, sometimes you need to spent time to win time.

Time management is about organizing and planning the tasks you have to do, so even if you are not 5 people or more in one, you still can much more than only one person can do.

First of all, do your brains a favor

Your brains keep track of everything you have been doing, are doing and will be doing in the future. A great way to relax your precious brains is to make use of an agenda, and other filing system. This can be on paper or in the cloud, as long as you register your appointments a.s.a.p. in that calendar. Things to do for a client, do not keep it in mind, but place it in your calendar, client file or customer relations management system.

Free up space in your brains, because instead of remembering all the things to do, you only will remember to check on a regular basis your calendar or customer relations system. Do you see the benefit of time management already?

Make appointments with yourself

What you do if you have meetings with clients, or suppliers? You block time in your agenda, nobody will disturb you anymore at that time of the day. So you can focus on the meeting. Perfect and very productive. But why you do not block time in your calendar for meetings with the boss of your hair store? If you have to prepare a new marketing campaign, why should it be of less importance than a meeting with a client? Block the time in your agenda to think, research, analyse and plan your marketing campaign. This will increase the productivity of working on that campaign, and the result will be much higher than when you do it in between other important things.

Use every second if it’s your last

The world is mobile, your clients visit your website while they are stuck in a traffic jam, order the hair will they wait for their kids to leave school. What about you?  If you have to wait in the shop to buy office supplies, what do you do? If you have to travel and you have some time between two connections? What do you do? You quickly call that client who you couldn’t call earlier, right?

Wrong, your client is the most important person in your business life, sorry boss. So she or he deserves your full attention and preparation. Instead to make quick unprepared call with your client, better to use the time in between other things to prepare your campaign, to eavesdrop on people talking about hair or other stores. Make notes to use later and your marketing campaign will be much more enriched. Call your client when you are back in the office or store and read the files before you call.

If you still lack time, and you want to grow your business with a marketing campaign more social media presence or any other support to grow your business call your coach. You are not alone!