Someone asked me a question recently that completely stopped me in my tracks: “What’s your method with clients?” I didn’t really have an answer. I know what I do, I teach this, I teach that, I teach a bit of everything! But it made me think, do I actually have a method?
I started looking back over the last 18-plus years throughout which I’ve opened salons, training academies, launched coaching, an app, trying to work out how I’d built everything. And I realised, there was a system there the whole time. I’d just never written it down, because it had always come so naturally to me that I didn’t even clock I was doing it.
I’ve called it The KG Clockwork Method, and I’m going to talk you through it, because I think if you’re honest with yourself while you read this, you’ll see exactly where your own business is strong and exactly where it’s been quietly letting you down.
It starts with mindset, and I know that might sound like the soft, fluffy bit you skip past to get to the “real business” stuff. But with my lived experience I believe it is the foundation everything else sits on. Business is genuinely hard, and the businesses that make it to year 10, 20, or 30 aren’t run by people who’ve never struggled. They’re run by people who had the resilience to keep going anyway. If your business still feels like a job rather than something that could run without you, that’s mindset talking, not circumstance.
Then there’s visibility and personal brand. I started building a personal brand at 13 years old in the modelling world, long before I ever opened a salon, and I didn’t even realise that’s what I was doing at the time. The hard truth is that you can be the best in your industry, and it won’t matter one bit if nobody knows you exist. Being the best-kept secret isn’t a compliment so much as a problem! Luckily, I can promise you that the fix is rarely “get more polished,” it’s usually the opposite. Just be you! Show up as you, consistently, in more places than you currently are.
Marketing and sales get lumped together constantly, but they are definitely not the same job. Marketing is about how many places and how many times you’re being seen, and if you’re only relying on social media, that’s not enough on its own. Sales is everything that happens once someone’s actually in front of you: your rebooking, your upselling, your cross-selling, your follow-up. Looking at your own system, are you actually doing both well, or just the one that feels more comfortable?
Now, money. I bet you just felt your shoulders tense up a bit! I get it, I’m dyslexic, I’ve
got no GCSEs, and yet I know my numbers inside out because I made myself learn them. You do not need to be an accountant. But you do need to know your outgoings, your margins, your pricing. Because if you’re making great money and somehow ending every month with nothing left, that’s not bad luck or the economy. That’s a numbers problem, and it’s perfectly fixable. You can use something like the Salon Success Manager to check your pricing and your money in a really easy way. There’s a free trial at www.salonsuccessmanager.com
Team and leadership applies to you whether you employ anyone or not, because it’s about how you show up as the leader of your business. I learned this one the hard way with a client early on who kept pushing my boundaries further and further, and I let her, because I was scared of losing the money. It taught me something I still teach every client now: boundaries equal respect. Not the other way round. Hold the boundary, and people will find a way to work with it.
And finally, systems and operations. People tend to underrate this, mostly because
when a system’s working well, it becomes invisible. But every repeatable thing you do is a system, whether you’ve ever called it that or not. Your rebooking process, your onboarding, how you bring on new clients, these are all systems. And building them properly is what eventually lets your business run without you standing in the middle of it, and what makes it something you could actually sell one day.
None of these six pillars is a groundbreaking idea on its own. But here’s what I want you to take away from this: the businesses that last aren’t the ones that nail one pillar and ignore the rest. They’re the ones built, deliberately or, like mine, completely by accident, on all six at once.
So take a moment to ask yourself, which of these are you strong on? And which one have you been quietly avoiding? Because that’s usually exactly where your next breakthrough is hiding.
