New Year. New Hair. New Business Goals.
3 tips to stay on your resolutions
Did you know?
Barber stylists are entrepreneurs.
From the day a barber stylist steps onto the floor of a salon or barbershop, they start building a reputation and a business for themselves.
We barber stylists have to stick together if we want to promote ourselves AND our community of creative entrepreneurs. As we welcome the new year, we welcome the new and exciting changes that are waiting for us. We make resolutions every year in the hopes of reaching bigger and better goals, right?
So, let’s make our resolutions come true. With this blog, we want to help you stay focused and share our 3 tried and true tips to keep you on track all. year. long.
Whether you’re a new student in a hair program or thinking of turning a new page on your already established business, these 3 tips will make your resolutions less of a chore and more of a fun way to self improvement.
Tip 1:
Positivity from within.
This one goes to the top of your list and stays there all year.
If you’re listening to anything about positive outlook, you’ve heard that it comes from inside. A barber stylist career does a good job of showing you who you are. It is not only a career, but a business. The business is YOU and YOUR incredible skills.
So, if you are not feeling confident in yourself, you can’t possibly feel confident in your hair skills and thus, your business. We know we have faltered in the past with our self esteem and it will happen again at some point in this new year. What are you going to do about it?
Tip 1 is to GET AHEAD of your negative feelings. Make a plan to pick your future self up and keep going towards those goals and resolutions!
Examples for doing this can include:
- Write a letter to yourself that YOU GOT THIS
- Keep a journal with positive affirmations
- Make post-its with motivational quotes and put them on your mirror
- Print out pictures of your best hair cuts and styles, put them on your wall to be proud of
- Keep reminders to turn to your hobbies that involve exercise or the things you love
- Surround yourself with like-minded, goal oriented, positive people!
Tip 2:
Write out your plan.
Keeping a rough plan in your head causes anxiety. You can’t focus on baby steps or small goals if the entire plan is buzzing in your head simultaneously.
Write it down!
This is a great way to start in January 2020, writing out your marketing plan.
First, before you can start making the marketing plan, evaluate what your plan has been. You can only improve as a barber stylist by reviewing how you’ve done so far. Do some market research.
Start by asking yourself these 3 questions:
- What have I been doing in the past that was or wasn’t successful?
- What do my customers love about me?
- What is my competition doing?
Here is a complete and easy guide for do-it-yourself market research.
Second, decide how you want your physical marketing plan displayed. Some options are:
- A journal
- Binder with sections
- Dry erase board that stays on your wall all year
- Vision board or book with ideas and inspirations
Consider how you like to read things. Do you like visuals or lists? This will determine how to put your goals on paper. There is no specific order you should put your goals down in. Be as rough as you want to be at first. You can always reorganize your thoughts. A suggestion is to write your biggest or most important ones first, then continue writing as many that come to mind.
Remember, these are goals and resolutions for the year. Make sure they are goals that you can physically implement in a year. For example, if you are a recent graduate from a barber stylist program, achieving fame and business ownership CAN come in one year, however, you should write down your short term goals that will help achieve your ultimate goal.
Examples for barber stylists at all levels from graduates to long time owners include:
- Improve my social media presence, get 1,000 new followers
- Find a place/school for ongoing education as needed
- Increase my revenue by 20% by the end of the year
- Remodel part of my barbershop
- Find other salons/barbershops in the area to work for (especially if you are unhappy where you are or want to experience new environments)
To download a sample marketing plan with a step-by-step guide to organizing your goals, try this great example.
Tip 3:
Turn your plan into resolutions.
You wrote all your plans down in your marketing plan. Don’t worry. They can be loose plans. Now, we’re going to turn those ideas into real steps and do the work!
Say one of your goals in your marketing plan is to increase your revenue (for yourself or for your barbershop/salon) by 20%. Well, something has to change in order for that to happen. We suggest you work smarter instead of simply increasing your labor or hours. How do you do this?
Scheduling and changing your daily habits. It’s simple now that you have your plan on paper. Here’s how:
First, using your marketing plan, take your top 3 biggest goals for the year and write each one at the top of a piece of paper. Then, write underneath, the actual steps you will take to achieve that specific goal. For example, if the goal is to increase your instagram followers or to increase visitors to your business, you will write actual times of the week when you will dedicate time towards this goal. Only 3 hours a week makes a HUGE difference if you use that time to research what to do and how other people do it. After just a few weeks, you’ll be doing it yourself.
Step into your new barber stylist habits.
Taking a little bit of time out of your week, in a focused and dedicated manner, will give you an enormous upper hand this year.
Achieving even the smallest goal every week with the time that you are able to dedicate to one goal at a time, will give you immense confidence. This will be your fuel to jump to the next resolution and the next.
Changing your habits changes everything. Daily and weekly habits mean the difference between being a complacent barber stylist or stepping towards the best barber stylist you can possibly be!
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