BUT I DON’T HAVE TIME! By Kym Krey

One of the questions I hear so often from my Salon Owner clients is….. ‘How Can I Get My Staff To Perform? They’re nowhere near target!’ Whilst we initially tend to place the blame squarely on our staff for their lack of performance, in most cases, the answer requires us to look closely at ourselves.

I won’t be the first person to have told you that consistently high staff performance requires a continual coaching routine. A dedicated schedule of small blocks of time devoted to sitting with each member of your team, both one-on-one and as a group, reconnecting with your vision, values and expectations and reviewing their progress toward them.

It’s absolutely essential that your people know exactly what’s expected, how they’re going from your perspective and what they need to do to make those numbers move or get where they need to go.

No guessing. No assumptions. No ‘it’s just common sense’. No ‘shouldn’t they just know?’

But that’s not what we’re talking about today.

What we’ll focus on here is the response that usually comes after that conversation about what it takes to get great performance from their team, and that’s…..

“But I don’t have time to do that!”

And now we get to the real issue.

Your focus has been on being a great hairdresser: perfecting your skills, building your clientele, and getting busy.

You’re the one making all the money, right? You’re booked to the eyeballs with a waiting list, and making tonnes of money but the staff you employed to take some of the pressure off aren’t anywhere near target, right?

If you take time out of your schedule to coach and grow your staff, you’ll be turning away clients which means turning away income, and that’s something you just can’t afford to do. So, you tell yourself you don’t have time to do it.

In order to be able to spend that time with your staff, you would need to have convenient pockets of time magically open up that would allow you to have these conversations without any inconvenience or disruption to your schedule.

Can you see the issue? That’s never going to happen. So you’re going to keep squeezing in those clients to make enough money but also keep going home frustrated that you’re doing three times the work of your staff …. and that situation isn’t going to magically change by itself.

You’re stuck. You can’t sustain working the hours/pace you’re currently doing (hello… burnout) but won’t allocate the time to resolve the problem. It’s a chicken and egg scenario.

The answer is in your mindset. We need to tweak how you’re looking at the problem.

What stops you from doing what you need to do to start correcting the problem (i.e. developing your team and resolving issues there) is that you’re not willing to forego that short term $150 or so that you think you’d make doing a client in that time instead. You’re thinking that each time I sit with my team member instead of taking that haircut, it’s costing me $120.

But is it?

If, as a result of your spending 15 minutes in a quick one-on-one ‘Powerchat’ or weekly review with that staff member, their shift in focus meant that they generated another $60 just today…. and then another $60 tomorrow etc… by the end of that week, how much would that 15 minute block of time have generated for you? At this quite conservative rate, it would have been about $300.

For 15 minutes.

Now, do that again with your next staff member…… and there’s another $300 (conservatively).

At this rate, you’re generating about $1200 an hour if your coaching conversations are on point. How does that now compare to your fear of losing $120 for that haircut?

If I could do 4 x 15 minute PowerChats in my hour that elevated my staff’s results by even $300 week each, I’ll take that result over my $120 haircut any day of the week!

When you develop the skills of growing and guiding your people, you literally multiply your capacity to generate income. There are several of you now generating at this level, rather than just you doing all the work while your staff underperform.

To me, if you ever want to get out of the situation you’re in (i.e. doing all the work and burning yourself out) this shift in priority is essential.

You must do the work of:

• Giving your team a clear and inspiring big picture ‘why’

• Making your expectations super clear and making sure each one clearly understand exactly what is required to be able to meet those expectations easily. (Don’t just make demands. Make sure you’ve demonstrated exactly how to do what they need to do)

• Link your KPIs to important core values. In many cases, they won’t care about the numbers. What they care about is their responsibility and service to their clients.

• Continually tracking their outcomes in line with your service expectations

• Giving feedback and coaching on what’s causing the ‘gap’

• Noticing when they do things well!

These essential conversations must be a BIG ROCK- a key priority that goes into the schedule first, then all other competing issues (yes, even clients) are booked around your remaining availability.

What you focus on expands. What you ignore ….. continues not to happen!

You’ll be conducting a mix of shorter conversations under 15 minutes (such as Morning Huddle, night Review, Weekly PowerChat) with some longer, more detailed conversations of up to an hour (Monthly review, Full Performance Review) but there’s no need to feel overwhelmed by the thought.

The key is to introduce these conversations gradually, one-by-one, over several months.

Start by just doing your Morning Huddle (Start the day in a focused way… it’s SHOWTIME!) and a quick, fun review of how everyone went at the end of the day. Finish with a big high-5 and send them home with a Thank you and a smile. Keep doing that for a month or 2 until you feel read to add the next level.

Next, add a 10-minute one-on-one PowerChat with each team member to work through their Weekly Report and unpack their actions and results from last week. This is when you really start to build accountability!

Again…. keep that routine, morning, night & weekly review for another one or two until you have it nailed.

Ready to bring out the big guns? Then we’re ready to add a more detailed Monthly Review and so on. Easy Peasey!

Want to learn how to master these conversations? Leaders Lab Online is NOW OPEN and will walk you through all essential aspects of staff management!

And just to complete the process of transferring workload from your own column to your team’s, you’re likely to come up against one or two more key issues that may need review:

• Tiering your prices: If I can pay the same amount for YOU (the prestigious Salon Owner) to do my hair as I can for a younger, less experienced staff member (in my perception), of course I’m going to choose you every time! There’s lies the problem. If I want the most experienced/popular/indemand person, I’m going to pay a premium. Tiering your prices can essentially pay for the additional time you need to focus on developing your team. You’ll be earning significantly more working fewer hours on clients. BOOM!

• Cleaning up skills & service issues: If you’ve tried moving a client to a team member before but they bounced right back to your column- never to leave again, there’s a reason why that’s happening, and you need to find out what it is. There’s clearly a difference between what you’re doing and what your staff are doing when it comes to creating an experience or result for that client.

Success here comes from making sure that how you look after your clients is how they look after their clients… It becomes ‘this is how we do it here’. That requires getting the knowledge out your head and into a format that can be used to train each of your team. It doesn’t need to be fancy or complicated, it just needs to happens, so grab your phone and start making one short video each week until you’ve captured your entire client service process. Now you have your very own staff training library. Then, continually track, observe and review to ensure that each one of your staff live and breathe that method, every client, every day.

That business that you had in mind when you started? You know, the one where you were profitable but also had time to have a life, enjoy your work and earn a decent income? It’s entirely possible… but it’s not going to happen by chaining yourself to the chair and doing all the work!

Discover the magic of duplicating your income and invest in becoming an effective leader and an exceptional developer of people.

Want to learn how to become an inspiring leader and get serious results from your team? Leaders Lab, the industry’s most successful leadership program, is finally ONLINE! Grab your spot here: www.kymkrey.kartra.com/ page/LeadersLabOnline