Stop Running in Circles: How to Focus, Commit, and Smash your Goals in 2025!

By Dwight Hodge

Last December was the time to plan for a successful and profitable 2025. The second-best time is NOW! You’ve nearly lost ten per cent of the year, so now is the time to salvage 2025.

What is the one thing you need to do to finish 2025 in a stronger position than you finished 2024?

In my experience, it’s focus.

A common thread weaves its way through salon businesses that fail or at least fail to meet their expectations: a lack of focus. This presents itself in a couple of different ways:

- the first is living in the moment, focusing on the client in your chair, and simply getting through the day. You’re stuck in the detail and can’t see the big picture.

- the second is when you attempt to focus on ten things at once and are distracted by too many opportunities and ideas. Distraction kills any chance of success. You’re better to focus 100% on one thing than 10% on ten things.

Only focusing on the client sitting in your chair and getting through the day is like running 100-meter sprints around an athletics track. By the end of the day, you’re worn out, dead tired and right back where you started from. You might have been busy all day, but you’ve just been running around in circles, getting nowhere. It doesn’t matter how many days you show up or how many laps you run; you finish each day at the same place you started, making no progress.

Even worse is dividing your attention between 10 different things. Doing this is like sitting in the grandstand next to the athletics track, deciding whether to run the 100-metre, 400-metre, 5-kilometre or half marathon. Without committing to one, you never get on the track.

Achieving your goals and having a successful and profitable 2025 is like running a marathon. You don’t just front up to a marathon and successfully cross the finish line after running 42.2 km.

You need to train to improve and to get better day by day. It requires focus, commitment and a plan—the same as growing and developing your salon throughout 2025.

Step 1. Focus on one clear and specific goal.

Step 2. Commit to achieving your goal.

Step 3. Break your goal into smaller steps.

Step 4. Create a detailed plan.

Step 5. Follow the plan.

What is your one clear and specific goal for 2025?

Will it be related to your guest experience, financial success, team experience, life balance, or salon culture?

When setting your goal, you can think outside the box and don’t feel restricted by what other salon owners say and do. You are running your own race, and everyone’s idea of success differs. Focusing on your idea of success before setting your goal will ensure a successful year and, more importantly, a fulfilling one.

When you have a clear goal and intention for the year, it is easier to know what to do this month, week and day to step closer to your goal.

If you think back to the marathon analogy, you set a goal to run a marathon and then committed to it! You can create your own training plan, work with a coach, or download a 12-week training plan. The plan will tell you how many kilometres you need to run between now and the marathon, what needs to be done each week and what you need to do each day: run, cross-train, strength or rest.

If you look at day one of the plan, a 5 km run, you may think, how will I ever run a marathon if all I do is run 5 km? But over time, with the right training, strength work and recovery, you build your strength and, week by week, move towards running 42.2 kilometres. Here are three tips to smash your goals in 2025.

Start Lean.

Just as a marathon runner moves faster the leaner they are, so will you in your business. I like to clean out my wardrobe, desk, and emails and declutter anything that may slow me down or distract me from my focus.

Focus. set a clear and specific goal for 2025, and focus on your plan and what you need to do each week. Also, be aware of distractions. Someone may present you with an incredible opportunity. However, remember what your focus and goals are for the year. No matter how fantastic the opportunity is, it is still a distraction if it takes your focus off your goals and intentions for 2025.

Repeat.

It’s easy to look at successful people and think they must have all the knowledge and wisdom that the average salon owner doesn’t. I can tell you that is 100% untrue. What they do that the average salon owner doesn’t is stick to the basics, find something that works and repeat it.

You became a successful hairstylist because of repetition. You learnt basic cutting and colouring skills and repeated them thousands of times until you mastered them. Successful salon owners do the same. They find a plan that works for them and stick to it. Repeating the basics day after day, client after client. Mastering those little things that are easy to do but often easier not to do.

Start Lean. Get Focused and Repeat. dwight@dwighthodge.com