You are busy to build your hair business, but there are so many opportunities you want to make sure you grab. You eye that awesome little store in the center of your town that is still for rent. You are looking for the best hair supplier and you found a market niche nobody else have been thinking of yet. If you only had more time in a day!
The secret is, you do not need more time to build your hair business. If you still would need more, there is no way to get more hours in a day. 24 hours that is the max. You should make fewer but better choices about your business activities. Do not try to do too much because you fear you will miss opportunities. Do not drown in opportunities. Better to upgrade the use of your time.
How to upgrade your use of time?
Do start to tell “But I do not have enough time!”, because you have all the time. No need to ask for more time, better to be more selective where you spend the time on. Take some time to think about where you spent your time on. Find the things what matters most.
What is creating value in your hair business?
It is generally known that 80% of what you do, leads to 20% of the result. For example, 80% of your clients will generate 20% of your revenue. 20% of your clients will generate 80% of your revenue. This goes also for expenses, time spent etcetera.
We are going to use this wisdom to improve the quality of the time you spent. Now you can focus your time on the highest valuable activities.
The easy part is to think of those activities (that consume 80% of your time), everybody is doing, but are not generating high value. The time you use for these activities will generate low results, let’s call them D time.
Think about:
- sorting mail
- checking low level email (newsletters you once signed up but do not give added value)
- customer service to people who never bought from you,
- dealing with supplier that will not be your preferred supplier but you are too polite to ignore them.
- Check the news at office work
- Lost files, lost things
Delete these tasks and free up your calendar for more valuable activities. If not needed skip them, unsubscribe, write one farwell letter, avoid dealing with this again. Or find ways to automate them.
Delegate if somebody else can do these activities better.
Defer, delay it some time.
Design it out, get rid of spam mail, set rules on your mail app. Make tutorials for your clients, improve the FAQ on your website, or create an introduction kit for new clients.
The remaining 20%, remember D time absorbed 80%, are activities that generate value. 80% of the result so this means with only one day a week you generate 16 times more! Figure out what of these tasks you can delegate to somebody, or instead of having one on ones, organize meetings with people with the same needs. Think about a webinar.
Do not invest time in the design of your hair business website. Better to focus on how to build your hair business and have someone else create the website.
If you discover you often reply to clients the same way, with a little personal note, make sure you have email templates. Save time, but not the message.
But there is still room for more improvement! The B time!
With 20%& of the C time you generate much more result. Most of these are the items you have been working on to improve in the previous step. This time you are going to use them.
Use only standardized emails, look for a partner to build your hair business, investor or somebody in an industry that is complementary to your service offering.
Now every quarter go through your list and see if you freed up time in the D class and have moved activities from the higher to the lower value activities class. From B time to D time for example. This will free up time, without losing the result!
Now leaving only 1% (20% of the 20%) the time spent in this class is going to generate top results! This is the time for your business strategy, your top revenue drivers or time with potential investors. This time is not urgent, but will have huge impact.
Structure your week to grow your hair business
Look for one day a week to Focus on only the two highest levels of activities. The a and B time class. Make sure you have enough energy to work on these important and high value activities. Do not lock yourself up, be sure you communicate with people but on the agenda, you only have the A and B time activities. These activities are different for every business. It does help to stay focused so turn of the email, use the voicemail and off the TV. If possible, go out, visit the library or local café. This will not only help you to focus, a change of environment will also free your unconscious a huge brain capacity 200 times larger than your conscious! No upgrade needed, it’s all available.
The rest of the days you have push days, days you work to push your hair business one step ahead. If you do only have push days you will get a static business without growth potential or worse that will dissolve over time. If you only have focus days, you can be very happy but with no business to run.
Schedule your focus day in your agenda and plan on every other day 90 minutes at your best time of your day. In these 90 minutes, you work on two items that matter most for your business and one that is important for you. After all, it’s crucial to keep a healthy working / private life balance.
Make sure you stay committed to this strategy, look for a coach or other person to keep you on track. Keep in mind your own rhythm, ask for help if needed and attend to the actions needed, in a step-by-step way. Do not fear to ask others to help you to stay disciplined.
Feel free to contact me as your coach to build your hair business together!
