When I owned my salon, one of the best lessons I ever learned was the value of having a vision and a plan for my business. I did not start out with much of one. In fact, for the first few years, I just flew by the seat of my pants, without any kind of actual plan. Well, I suppose this was the plan: “Let’s open a salon! A really cool one! With really talented people! And awesome clients! And we can be all artsy and creative and it’ll be great!”
In some ways, it worked fine…sort of. I mean, it WAS a cool salon, and we DID have really great people, both staff and clients. And we got a bunch of press and publicity and business without really trying too much. We grew big, pretty fast.
But somehow, we ended up with all kinds of things going on that we never anticipated. Things to which we said “sure, why not?” when presented with the opportunity. Things that, in retrospect, were pretty stupid to take on (espresso bar? Sure! Valet parking? Okay! Twice as much square footage as you planned for? Sure, we’ll figure out a way to use it!). Note to others: I do not recommend using “sure, why not? as a standard way of making business decisions.
To add to the situation, my staff wanted to know where we were heading. They wanted a clear picture of what we were all about as a business, what we stood for, what we were working toward as a team, and why any of it mattered. They wanted leadership. They wanted a clear vision that they could get on board with.
And I didn’t have a very good answer. I just knew that I was a person who was tired of working in someone else’s salon, and figured I could do it better than the guy I was working for, so why not start my own business. How hard could it be, right? Isn’t that enough of a vision?
Turns out, no, it’s not enough. It’s not enough to just want to have your own gig. It’s not enough because things are going to get hard, for you and for anyone you work with, and if you don’t have a clear, compelling reason for the hard work, and a specific, tangible vision of what you’re aiming for, you’ll lose traction pretty quickly. You may even end up spinning your wheels and go nowhere fast.
I’ll skip a bunch of the story, but want to share one big “aha!” moment. My business was struggling, for a bunch of reasons. Yet out of the struggle came the impetus to finally do something useful: hire somebody to come and facilitate an off-site retreat for our staff, to define what we would stand for as a company. To reconnect as a team. To get clear about what we wanted to work towards and what we needed to focus on in order to be successful. And to define what success was really looked like for us, anyway.
As a business owner, it was a major learning experience. I had never really understood the value of having a clear plan, of knowing what my priorities were, of having clear business values and principles, and having ways to put those into action in my business. And now I had not just a plan—I had a living, breathing tool to help me figure out how to grow and develop the business.
And you know what? It made a HUGE difference for me as an owner. Sure, I still worked hard. Of course, there were still challenges and bumps along the way. But knowing what I was aiming for and why it mattered helped me stay on track, do the important things, and make better decisions when faced with tough choices.
This is one of the reasons I have created a workshop called The Small Biz (re)Boot Camp this fall–because I want to give small business owners the kind of help I could have used when I was growing my salon. I see so many people who are in business for themselves, floundering because they don’t have that clear picture of where they’re headed. They don’t have effective strategies in place, and they need help figuring out a realistic, achievable plan that will bring them the results they are hoping for. I know what it’s like, I know that it doesn’t have to be that way, and I want to help those people quit struggling and start thriving!
You can find more info here about The Small Biz (re)Boot Camp, and if you know anyone who could benefit from this program please forward this along to them–I really appreciate it!
