Are you wasting time with your business admin?

No one is saying that admin isn’t important. You have to do the accounts, client records, end of day banking, staff rostering, wages, stock take, and client management so that when you open your doors in the morning, everything runs like clockwork.

When you’re a business owner, you rarely work a 40 hour week like everyone else does. It’s usually more like 40 hours, plus your admin on top. And then there are things you need to do and people you need to see outside of work that makes your schedule

We polled 39 salon business owners, and discovered that the median time they spent doing admin was about 10 hours a week. While several did say 20 hours, and some said less than 10, the majority of business owners are putting in about 9-12 hours a week.

What are these hours spent doing?

Mostly accounting, staff rostering, emails, and client management. How much time the salon owner spent doing admin really depended on how that business worked.

Smaller businesses had less admin, since the business owner was also seeing clients fairly regularly. What ended up happening though is that admin piled up for weekends and late nights, instead of being done during the day. In bigger businesses, the owner spent most of the time managing the calendar, doing the staff roster, looking at the numbers, and planning for the week ahead.

How much time are you spending on admin?

Salon business owners who have been the industry for 20+ years say that a big mistake they made when they were starting out is not blocking out time in their calendar for all the little activities that fall into the admin category. They’d come home late at night, do a couple hours of extra work for the next day, and get up the next day to do it again without realising how much time was spent.

The first step then, is to block out periods of time in your calendar that are dedicated to those smaller tasks. This will give you an easy way to see how much time you’re really spending, and if you need to spend more or less time doing these tasks.

No matter what size your business is, your admin time shouldn’t become so great that it prevents you from doing what you love to do. Whether that’s taking care of your clients or spending time with your family, there are proven ways to cut down on time spent doing admin activities.