Intro: Do you feel like you were meant to have a kick-ass career as a hair stylist? Like you got into this industry to make big things happen?
Maybe you’re struggling to build a solid base and want some stability. Maybe you know social media is important, but it feels like a waste of time because you aren’t seeing any results. Maybe you’ve already had some amazing success but are craving more. Maybe you’re ready to truly enjoy the freedom and flexibility this industry has to offer.
Cutting and coloring skills will only get you so far, but to build a lifelong career as a wealthy stylist, it takes business skills and a serious marketing strategy. When you’re ready to quit just working in your business and start working on it, join us here where we share real success stories from real stylists.
I’m Britt Seva, social media and marketing strategist just for hair stylists, and this is the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
Britt Seva: What is up and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I’m your host, Britt Seva, and I am going to teach you as best I can in one single podcast episode how to create a one-year plan for your business.
Now I’m releasing this episode at the top of 2023, so if you’re listening to this in real time, happy New Year to you. But even if you’re not listening to this in real time, creating a one-year plan for your business isn’t something that happens based on the weather outside, the date on the calendar, or what your financial advisor tells you to do.
I like to create a one-year plan for my business. Anytime I’m feeling burnt out, overwhelmed, lost, this is the way to recenter all of your efforts to ensure that any work that’s being done is aligned work.
Let me ask you this: do you ever feel like you’re working really hard but you’re not making much progress? Or you’re working really hard and you can feel yourself getting busier, but maybe you’re not making more money? Or you’re working really hard and you feel like you’re doing the right things, but you’re not seeing the desired result? Those are all really great indicators that it’s a good time to hit pause on your business efforts for a moment and create a one-year business plan.
So I do this exercise twice a year, always. Usually I do it once towards the end of the year, so November, December and then I do it again late spring, early summer. But every six months I get in the habit of doing this. What I find is that a lot changes in a business in six months and so I’ll do this exercise once and then revisit what I had planned upon about six months in to see am I still going in this direction? What’s changed? Has the environment changed? Has the economy changed? Have my goals changed? Has my life changed and does this still suit me?
If you’re listening to this at the start of the new year, amazing, happy New Year, great time to do this. If you’re listening to this in April, amazing, great time to do this. You’ll need a few things in order to do this properly and if you don’t have these things handy, that’s okay. I’m going to give you a supply list and you can grab them whenever you’re ready.
Whenever I’m sitting down to create an annual plan, there’s four things that I always make sure I have handy: Post-Its, if you didn’t know, now you know, I’m a huge fan of Post-It planning. I started Post-It planning probably back in 2016 and I think it was one of the things I brought to the industry that people really grabbed onto.
Post-It planning can be a really huge tool in planning out any kind of process or project because it allows you to be strategic while being flexible at the same time.
So Post-Its. I know this is going to sound very picky, but the size of Post-Its matter. If you are going to be able to get big, huge sheets of paper, like have you ever seen the Post-It white sheets that you’re able to put on the wall? They’re probably two feet wide by three feet long. If you’re able to get those, then you can use full size Post-Its. If you’re not able to get those because A, they’re expensive and B, you can’t always get those big huge Post-It sheets, you can simply also use regular sheets of paper with mini Post-Its.
I either want you to get the full size Post-Its, which I believe are a two and a half by two and a half inch square or mini Post-Its if you’re not able to get those big huge sticker Post-It sheets because the next thing we need is paper.
Like I said, if you want to use eight and a half by 11 sheets, that will work great. If you want to use the big sticky Post-It wall sheets that are two by three feet, those are great too. If you are doing this in a group setting, which we’ll talk about in a moment, I strongly suggest doing the larger sheets of paper with the bigger Post-It so everybody can see visually what you’re doing. But if you’re doing this by yourself, mini Post-Its and a single sheet of paper works just fine too.
Then you’re also going to need markers or pens. And then lastly, you’re going to need an annual planning tool to put all these pieces together.
What I’m going to do is have you brainstorm and deconstruct all of the ideas that are rattling around in your brain, and then we’re going to put them all together in a cohesive and strategic plan.
What most people do when they’re creating an annual plan is they start by setting a goal and then working their way backwards to make that goal possible. That I do not believe is the best way to create an annual plan ever.
Let’s talk about what we should do, what we shouldn’t do, and best practices, and then I’m going to talk about what we are going to walk away with at the end of this plan. You’re going to end up with some great takeaways and then we’ll start diving into it.
First of all, when you’re creating an annual plan, should you include your entire team? Let’s say you’re a salon owner and you’re like, “All right, I want to do this annual planning thing that Britt’s talking about. Should I include my whole team in the process?” My answer is yes and no.
I’ve been taught how to annual plan from a few different people. In 2020, it was actually just as the pandemic was quieting down a little bit here in California, so it’s probably the end of 2020, my team and I flew out a strategic business coach, his name’s John, we love him. We still work with him every single year and he taught us a new way of doing annual planning that really suited us well. One of the things that he said is, “The only thing more dangerous than having too many voices in the room is only having one.” I was like, “What the heck does that mean?” What he said is, “There’s two ways to do annual planning wrong. One is everybody’s opinion matters.” And he said, “What happens is if you go into an annual planning session, and let’s say you have eight people or 10 people or 20 people? All they’re sharing is ideas. What you’re going to end up with is a brainstorming session. Annual planning is not a brainstorming session. It is a strategic planning session.”
They’re two very different things. Brainstorming is fun, brainstorming is creative. Visionaries love brainstorming because it’s just like tossing ideas around. It’s fun, it’s playful, there’s no repercussions to brainstorming. Strategic planning is often painful. There are repercussions and it has to be done in a really organized way, otherwise you end up with just a to-do list that’s not actionable.
What he said was, “If you get too many people in the room, it becomes a brainstorming session which you don’t want. And if you don’t have enough people in the room,” which is what he said, “The only thing worse than having too many opinions is only having one.” He said if people try and do strategic planning or annual business planning on their own, they’re seeing their world, their lens, their business through a very filtered view, and often human beings lack self-awareness. And he said what will happen is in your efforts to create this shiny new, beautiful life, you will end up repeating a lot of the same patterns that you’ve always done in the past because you are not self-aware enough to realize you have to get out of your own way in order to make real strategic process. That for me and my entire team was such a breakthrough.
If you are annual planning, please don’t try to do it alone. Either have a business coach walk you through it, use a system to help you, do it with a group of others, but you don’t want to just be shouting into a void, hoping something amazing comes together. It helps to have somebody to crosscheck you, to bounce ideas off of, or to be using a proven system that’s going to help you to be organized in the process.
When we’re working with a salon team and we start to say, “Okay, well, Britt, if I’m not supposed to have all 12 of my stylists there, who should I have?” The way that John taught it to us is you want to have representatives from each of the main areas of your business.
What are the five key roles in our business? I talk about this in all of my coaching. We have the CFO, the CEO, the COO, the CMO, and the talent.
CEO is the main visionary in any company. COO is the chief operations officer. Operations is everything that happens in the day-to-day guest experience of your business. CMO is your chief marketing officer, so representing the marketing side of things. The CFO is the finance officer, the money person, and then the talent is the person actually doing the work.
In my company, I do have directors that sit in each of those seats, so for me, it was me and six people who got together in-person to do this annual planning. We left the other 12 members of the team at home, but I’ll tell you how we included them in just a second.
But the reason why you do this is so that every area of your business is represented, but it’s not just a massive brainstorming session. You want there to be healthy tension between the departments. You want the marketing department to fight for more budget and you want the CFO to say, “You don’t have it, you can’t do it.” You want the operations person to fight for more budget and you want the CFO to go back and forth with them about what is actually possible.
Now if you’re a solopreneur, if you’re a studio suite owner and you’re like, “Britt, I don’t have a CFO, I am the chief marketing officer,” that’s still great. You want to imagine yourself in each of those seats as you’re doing the annual planning and ask yourself, “What would a good director of marketing say in this position?” “What would somebody say if they were fighting for the operations of my studio suite?” You have to be the one to wear all the hats, but if you have a salon team, you bring in key leaders and key players of your team to represent in the annual planning, you don’t bring in everybody.
Then the question becomes, “Aren’t people going to have their feelings hurt?” Not in a well-run business. In a well-run business, it’s not about what do we have to do so that nobody gets sad?0 When nobody’s sad, when the business is profitable, that’s when nobody is sad. And so nobody in my company complains about not being a part of the annual planning. All they do is hope that the leaders come back with a great plan and that’s what you want to happen as well.
With that, one of the deliverables we’re going to create through this process is called the issues list. The issues list is a running document. We start creating our issues list about one week before we do annual planning. If you’re a solopreneur, you still do this. You make a list of all of the things that went funky in your business over the last year. It can be personality things, it can be conflict things, it can be financial things, it can be guest operations things. It can be “Our website is terrible.” It can be “We’re not getting enough traction on Instagram.” It can be “We don’t have enough online reviews.” Anything that is an issue or our problem in your business makes the list.
Everybody in the salon gets a chance to contribute to that list. Your receptionist, your salon cleaning team, anybody who is a part of your salon business I would invite to add issues to the list because you want to be able to knock out all of those things in annual planning. If you’re a solopreneur, you’re a booth renter, you rent a chair somewhere, you still make a list of all the issues in your business about one week before you sit down to annual plan.
This issues list is the running list. It can be digital, it can be physical, you can do it through a survey. I did survey my entire team to understand their issues, but then we also had a physical list that we hung up in the office as well. You can do it a multiple multitude of ways, but you want to have an ongoing list where everybody feels like they can brain dump all of the things that went wrong in the business.
If you’re in my Wealthiest Year Yet program, we do this through the reflect section, right? But this is a way to do it in a really big way and it’s scale. Okay, so you include your entire team in a way or in a sense, but you want to do it on a micro scale.
The next question that comes up with annual planning is should you start with financial goals? I don’t believe so. I think you actually start with lifestyle goals and then you figure out how the financial goals fit into them. Because what happens is if people start out with financial goals, when the annual plan, you will kill yourself in the process. You will be like, “I want to double my income in the next year,” and then when you sit down to make the plan to make it possible, it’s like, “Well, I’m going to lose my marriage in the process. I’m going to lose my sanity. I won’t sleep at night. I have to become a content wizard. I’ll be taking clients 12 hours a day, but I’ll double my income.” That’s not a life well lived. So you don’t start with the financial goals, you start with the lifestyle goals.
But then the question becomes how do you know that you have a good annual plan? This is where it all comes together. A good annual plan needs to be three things: measurable, achievable, and it has to have action steps.
Most people don’t do all three. Most people are good at measurable. Measurable would be saying, “I want to have a full book of clients by the end of the year.” “I want to have three new booth renters by the end of the year.” “I want to open my first salon.” “I want to make $250,000.” All of those things are measurable. Most of you are good at that part. The part you’re not good at is creating action steps and then having those action steps be achievable, right? You’ll make this huge grandiose vision in your mind and then come April or three or four months after you create the annual plan, you’re like “Wow, this is a lot harder than I thought,” so you retire the plan because you hate yourself for creating a plan that was so difficult. Then not only do you not double your income in a whole year, you actually make the same amount of money as you made the year before and then you feel badly about yourself for not making progress.
That’s a lot of industry professionals’ life story and I don’t want that for you.
We want it to be measurable, achievable, and have action steps, and I want to help you to do that today. Before we get into the questions that I’m going to have you ask yourself as you annual plan, these are the three things you’re going to walk away with if you do this properly. You’re going to walk away with the issues list, which I already talked about. The issues list is that pre-brainstorming that you do about your business a week ahead of the annual planning, but it also helps to become the project list for the year ahead.
I still have my issues list hanging up in my office. We created it as a company three weeks ago, but it’s still hanging up because I still reflect on it.
So you have an issues list you’re going to walk away with as a deliverable. You’re going to have a social content calendar and a projects calendar.
With this method of annual planning, you walk away with all of those three things. Sounds pretty good, right? A list of all your issues, a social content calendar, and a project calendar for the year. Not too bad.
There’s only a handful of questions that I think you really need to ask yourself to create a really good strategic annual plan. The first one—like I said, is we don’t start with the finance, we start with the lifestyle and the first question I want you to ask yourself is what do you want your lifestyle to look like over the next 365 days?
When I annual planned with my leadership team, I asked everybody to silently journal on that question, and it was really interesting to hear what everybody had to say. Some people said, “I want to work with focus.” “I want to work less but work harder.” “I want to have time to work more.” Everybody had different ideas of what they wanted and having an understanding for ourselves, like really taking that good hard look at ourselves and those around us helped us to refine the projects for the year.
What do you want your lifestyle to look like? Now if you’re in Wealthiest Year Yet, which is my annual planning system and physical planner, I asked you really poignant questions for you to very clearly define what you want your lifestyle to look like. I’ve come to realize a lot of people don’t even know. They know they want to be happy, they know they want to feel financial peace of mind, but beyond that they haven’t actually defined the lifestyle.
What you do is you want to reflect and dream strategically so that you are very clear on what you want your lifestyle to look like.
One of my favorite questions to ask when we’re doing this kind of reflection is if a year from now we were to celebrate the person you’ve become, what would we say about you? That question alone should bring you a lot of clarity as far as what you want from your life and from your business in the year ahead.
Next we ask, “Okay, so if that’s the lifestyle you want, what are the things that you will need to do to achieve that lifestyle?” ‘Cause here’s the rub: if everything you were already doing was leading you to that dream lifestyle, you would likely already have it. The reason you don’t have it is you’re not doing all of the things you need to do to become the person who lives that dream life that you are envisioning. That’s the truth of it.
Next week on the podcast, we’re actually going to talk a little bit about self-awareness and I hope those tools will help you a bit. But at this stage, you ask yourself, “Okay, what needs to happen so that those things come together?” This is the stage of annual planning where you start to create your projects list and this is where the Post-Its come out.
What my team and I did is we said, “Okay, what is our dream lifestyle?” The dream lifestyle that we created was for each of us on the team, how much money we wanted the business to make, what were the action steps that we felt like it was important as a company to achieve in 2023. We decided where we were going. I’d call that creating the North Star. But as we created our lifestyle vision that I talked about in step one, that became very clear, okay, this is what Flourish Salon Business Development needs to do in 2023 and we had a clear vision of that.
Then when we asked, “How will we achieve it?”, I gave everybody a stack of Post-Its—you can either do this as a team or do this by yourself—and we wrote down all the potential things that could possibly happen in order to make our goals a reality. We wrote down probably 400 Post-Its, I mean there’s a gajillion things that we could do. We narrowed it down to 60, so we went from 400 to 60. So less than 20% of the potential projects were actually chosen to become actionable over the course of a year.
That’s what this effective annual planning process should look like. We spent quite a bit of time writing down on these Post-Its what are the things that we could do to better market the business. What are the things that we could do to make operations better? What are the things that we could do to make finances better? And for us—remember I said you need Post-Its and pieces of paper? Well, what we did is as we were writing down the project ideas on the Post-Its, we organized them on the pieces of paper.
You could title your pieces of paper however you want. Ours were categorized by department, which for us, departments are also the same as initiatives. We had operations, we had marketing, we had finance, we had human resources, right? If you want to hire in the year ahead, you probably are going to need a human resources, right, sheet of paper. Think about all of the things you could possibly need in the year ahead.
The reason why you organize it is it helps you to organize your thoughts when we get into the strategic planning, which we’re going to get into next.
Now, if organizing your thoughts that way doesn’t make sense for you, you could also label the piece of paper something like Instagram, and then you could write down on the Post-Its all the things that you feel like you could improve on Instagram with to have a better year next year. Maybe you would have one that was called finance and you’d write down all of the things that you feel like you could do financially as a stylist that would help you to have a better year next year than you did this year. The pieces of paper become buckets for all of the projects and all of the ideas. That’s how we organized our thoughts.
Now, the next question you ask yourself is, “Okay, looking at all of these potential projects, what are the ones that will be critical in ensuring that my ideal vision for the year ahead becomes a reality?” When you start to ask yourself that question, you’ll realize, well, some of these Post-Its are things that I think I should be doing or my friend is doing, or that would be cool to do, but they’re not actually necessarily going to push me towards the reality I want for myself. When you ask that question, it really refines the project list. This is when you go through and churn and you say, “Okay, maybe I don’t need to do 20 things on Instagram to get to where I want to be, but what are the four most important things I should do that are going to push me towards my goals?” Right?
Then the next question is, okay, now that I’ve got this list of projects that need to happen in order to make my dream year a reality, what education do I need to make that happen? Again, if you had the knowledge to make it happen, you would have done it already. We’re going to talk about this next week when I talk about self-awareness, but a lot of people don’t realize–they think they know. You don’t know and that’s why you’re not doing something in a way that is producing the result you want it to have.
I know you think you’re doing it right. I totally know you do. Most people don’t walk through life trying to mess things up. Most people walk through life trying to do things accurately, but when you are not seeing the result you want, it means that your efforts are not correct, and so you have to ask yourself, “What are the areas that I need to focus on educationally so that without a doubt, my vision for the future becomes a reality?”
Next, we get into the social project calendar. Like I said, there’s three deliverables you walk away with when you’ve done this correctly. You have the issues list, you have the project list, and you have the social content calendar. When we decide what we want to happen in our life in the year ahead, we say, “Okay, what are the things I need to do on social media to ensure that that comes together?”
I know some of you are like, “Well, that’s so annoying that social media even enters the conversation.” Too bad. Social media is the jet fuel that pushes every business forward today. You don’t have to like it, you do have to play the game. There’s a lot of people who are like, “Well, I’m growing my business and I’m not using social media.” I know, but if I told you that if you use social media effectively, you would make twice as much money next year, would you do it? Most people wouldn’t say no to that question.
Whatever result you’re getting with your mediocre social media efforts, imagine how much better it would be if you embrace the idea that social media is not annoying, it is the jet fuel to your engine. When you just take the time to understand how to use it properly and you understand what to post on your channels to get the result you’re looking for, it is the best thing you could ever do for your business, and it doesn’t have to be hard.
Now what we do is we look at our projects, we look at our goals, we look at our messaging, and we say, “What are the things I need to show up with on social to ensure my vision becomes a reality?”
What’s working in social right now is solving problems. Your posts should solve problems, so taking the time to sit down and say, “Okay, for the month of January, for the month of February, what are the things that I want to focus on on social media so that I am best positioned to serve my market at the highest?” What we did at this juncture is we created an entire social media calendar that spanned the course of an entire year. So I know what my team is going to be posting on social media 11 months from now very clearly because we know what our goals are and what messaging has to go out so that those goals can be accomplished.
The last thing that you do once you’ve done all this brainstorming is you put it all together. This is why I said that you need a tool to organize it all into, so if you have a giant house and nobody lives with you or nobody would mind, you could just have your Post-Its stuck up on your wall all year round. Likely what would happen is a few weeks in they’d start to fall off and then the things would get messy and you’d forget what things meant. Instead, what you want to do at this point, what we did in doing this exercise is we unpacked everything that lives on your heart and in your brain.
What you need to do now is take all of those bits and pieces and organize them into action steps, and this is the piece that most people miss. What we did as a team is we took all of those projects that social media vision are focused for the year, and we created it into an organized step-by-step game plan. And that’s the last piece.
What I want you to do is sit down and say, “Okay, if this is going to be my reality for the year, and these are the projects I’m going to tackle, what are the things I have to do in the next 30 days to ensure this comes together? What are the things I need to do in the next seven days? What are the things I need to do in the next 90 days to make sure that that all comes together?”
Now, I do have the Wealthiest Year Yet planner that helps to make that possible. It also has a training system that shows you how to do all of these things, but even if Wealthiest Year Yet isn’t for you, I hope that this podcast has helped you to understand how I create my annual plan for my business and how you can as well.
A lot of it centers around unpacking the concepts, getting organized with your thoughts, having a good hard look at the true issues that exist within your business, owning the fact, and taking that accountability and that self-awareness that you don’t know everything. There’s more to learn. If you knew it, you’d already be achieving it and doing it, and creating that actionable plan to actually see solid results.
If you have any more questions about this topic, please leave me a rating or review on iTunes with your questions. I will get to as many as I possibly can.
As I always say, so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
