When You Fall Out of Love with Your Salon/Spa
Quite the contrary. It is a journey of wins and losses, highs and lows, pure elation and excruciating stress.
The labor-intensive nature of running a salon/spa can, and will, test the tenacity and leadership skills of all owners. But sometimes, the testing and challenges can become overwhelming.
When it becomes too overwhelming, some owners simply fall out of love with their business. It doesn't mean they throw in the towel ... it just means they stop trying so hard and just go through the motions of dealing with day-to-day operations.
Red warning lights start flashing when an owner falls out of love with his or her business. Why? Because when the owner hates showing up for work ... so do their employees.
Here are some No-Compromise Leadership thoughts on what to do when you stop feeling the love for your business:
- If you don’t ... they don’t: It’s a pretty simple concept. If you no longer like your job as owner, employees are not going to like working for you. No one experiences excitement, inspiration and fulfillment at work when the leader is a miserable disengaged grump. Owners naturally and convincingly blame employees for everything that’s not right in the business. Employees naturally and convincingly blame owners for the funk permeating the culture. As we say at Strategies, culture reflects leadership. Your business will respond to your lack of love by loving your business less. Unless love rebounds, the death spiral will continue until an implosion happens.
- The path to un-loving: A string of setbacks is all it takes for an owner to fall out of love with his or her business. The three most damaging are ugly staff walkouts, broken trust and cash-flow challenges. When one or more busy service providers secretly plot to blindside the owner and leave with as many clients as possible, it’s a blow to the business ... and the owner. Rebuilding can feel much like starting over. To repair a so-called breakup every few years can cause an owner to fall out of love. To have trust broken by those you trained, encouraged and helped to build, makes it hard to trust again. And nothing is more stressful than living day after day, and enduring sleepless nights, under financial stress. Lastly, doing the same work year after year can simply wear an owner down and create a yearning for something new to love. These are all very real issues that all owners eventually encounter. This is where a business coach can truly help.
- Finding love again: The single most effective and empowering path to loving your business again is to create a new path to a new and better reality. Defining the new destination with a dynamic team culture, control over cash flow, debt reduction and newfound leadership confidence, is essential. It’s wonderful to observe the transformation in owners as they follow their new path and begin stringing together wins for the business and themselves. Confidence returns tenfold ... and so does the love for their business. The “I want to get out” thinking transforms into “lets grow this business” positivity. We see this all the time and it makes the hard work of coaching worthwhile.
- Keeping your groove on: It is so easy to allow setbacks to trip you up. It’s so easy to get stuck in all of the stuff that’s wrong with your salon/spa. It’s so very easy to get frustrated with employees and what they do and don’t do. Business is a perpetual work in progress that always requires fine-tuning and, at times, course corrections. This is the work of leadership. The moment you accept and tolerate what you don’t like in your business, the “business love/un-love” meter moves into the un-love zone. Likewise, the moment you engage and take positive corrective action ... even if that means making one or more very tough decisions ... the meter begins to move into the love zone. Keeping your groove on really means engaging and living your role every day as the owner and leader of your salon/spa. Never accept average. Certainly never accept mediocrity.
Here’s my challenge for you: If your love for your business is being tested ... if you’re just not feeling the love ... reread the above bullet points. Write down what you don’t like in your business. Write down what you believe are the causes for those un-loving feelings. Then ... and this is the most important step ... write down where you would take your business if you knew your team would be totally onboard with your chosen destination. If you feel the slightest movement in the “business love/un-love” meter toward the love zone ... put a pin on your business map and begin the journey to a better reality. Don’t hesitate. No Compromise!
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