How to find a better work-life balance as a nail pro
By Guest Writer | 30 April 2024 | Expert Advice, Feature
Hair & beauty business coach, Maddi Cook of Boss Your Salon, shares top tips for nail pros to achieve a better work-life balance…
Howdy nail bosses! Work-life balance is like a unicorn in this industry – often talked about, yet never seen. In fact, it’s one of the most common challenges nail bosses face, and I’m not surprised when you think about how many hats you wear in your business, combined with how physical a job you’re doing, being a creative and making your clients’ visits as enjoyable as possible.
As someone who has pushed themselves way beyond the beginnings of burnout, I’d love to share some tips so you don’t have to.
1. Stop wearing busy like a Blue Peter badge
Your bestie asks how you are, and you reply: “Oh good, yeah. Just busy, I can’t complain!” How about being able to say, “Brilliant, thanks… I’ve just had my fortnightly massage and tomorrow is Wednesday so I’ll see you for drag brunch with the girls after my yoga class!” Busy is out, balanced is in.
2. Time is a non-renewable resource
Remember when you were at school and learned how coal will run out in your lifetime, and it filled you with horror? Well, wait until you hear about time, my friend. I know it can feel like an eternity waiting a week for the next instalment of your favourite TV series (or in the case of Traitors, 24 hours felt like a lifetime). Well, the thing with time is that once it’s gone, you can never get it back. Even if you were Bezos-rich, you can’t buy yesterday back.
3. When you say yes to something, what are you saying no to?
On that note, until someone perfects a cloning machine, there’s only one of you, so you can pick and choose what you do with your precious time – but choose wisely. When you say yes to squeezing in that nightmare client who never books in advance and can only do 9pm on a Saturday night, you’re saying no to your mate’s birthday trip, or even just a night in with Netflix and your cat.
4. You don’t have to do everything
Not only are you a badass nail artist: you’re also a bookkeeper, social media manager, receptionist, graphic designer, copywriter, videographer, customer relations, visual merchandiser, buyer and the rest. And that’s before you even consider having an actual social life. Look at the tasks that you do in a week and see which ones you can delegate, automate or ditch altogether. Doing fewer things better, is way more effective than doing 12 things poorly.
5. Sharpen your axe
There’s a quote that I love from Abraham Lincoln: “If I only had an hour to chop down a tree, I would spend the first 45 minutes sharpening my axe”. Are you busy trying to chop down your business tree with your proverbial blunt axe? For example, filling your day with ‘busy work’, using a paper diary and spending hours back and forth arranging appointments, making social media posts on the fly, stuffing receipts in random boxes because ‘that’s a problem for later’? Or are you sharpening your axe, by putting things into place in the present, to give yourself an easier life in the future?
This might look like: investing in and setting up an online booking system, creating auto-responders for your social media page messages, updating your policies, giving your website a spring clean, creating a process to help you stay on top of your accounts or hiring a cleaner at home so there’s one less hat for you to wear.
Do the future you a favour. They deserve it!
Maddi x