Friday was day 4 of 8 of Operation Get Profitable (OGP) where I visit 10 salons a day for 8 days.

Summary: FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!

Friday, for lack of a better way to put it, sucked. All week I had been pounding the pavement hard and “running the machine” at 100% capacity, and I had a backlog of “maintenance work” to do, like writing thank-you cards (I send hand-written thank-you cards to almost everyone I talk to when I do sales) and entering into my CRM all the salons I had visited. I also had to plan out the next salons I was going to hit, since I’ve already picked all the low-hanging fruit in my geographical area and it’s no longer practical to simply drive down a busy road and look for salons.

All this piled-up administrative work added up to several hours of work and I think it was about 3pm by the time I got done. Since at this point I’m having to drive to neighboring towns to find fresh salons, and since my wife had asked me to pick the kids up from daycare at 5:30 (I’m normally the dropper-offer, not picker-upper), this would have left me with maybe a one-hour or hour-and-a-half window to visit salons, which wouldn’t really have been worth the overhead of driving to another town. Even though I felt like a total loser about it, I decided to use my time more efficiently by staying home to do other crap I had been needing to do anyway (clean inbox, etc.). The day felt really irresponsible since I didn’t do any actual pitching to prospects in person, but I do realize that the work I did was 100% necessary and it would actually have been more irresponsible not to have spent my day the way I did. My fuckup wasn’t that I got lazy on Friday; my fuckup was that I ran the sales machine too hard earlier in the week. (By “the sales machine” I’m referring to “Jason Swett, Sales Machine”.)

So I guess even though it’s physically possible to visit 10+ salons in a day, I was kind of forgetting that every time I visit a prospect I’m also committing to writing a thank-you card, entering the info into my CRM, and potentially planning the visit beforehand. Taking those things into account, 10 is maybe the practical limit, and on those days when I did the “extra” one or two salons beyond 10, I was simply stealing time from myself. In the future I might shoot for a stricter and more regular schedule, even if that means scaling back initially and then throttling up until I find the “speed limit.” (Why all the quotey metaphors today?)

So the total number of salons visited in week 1 was 24. This is 16 short of my target of 40 but still a record high for a single week.