Even business professionals have to indulge in a guilty pleasure every now and then. One of mine is Tabatha’s Salon Takeover, a reality show where a seasoned veteran salon owner comes in to a struggling hair studio and whips the whole place into shape in the space of one week.

Let’s admit it, the fun of reality TV has to do with the exaggerated personalities and situations. Tabatha is no different. How she finds these salons teetering on the brink of ruin week after week, is a mystery to me. The stylists are mostly larger than life characters whose spandex-wrapped egos invariably clash with Tabatha’s reality checks.

The challenges, however, often mirror those we find when we work with entrepreneurs and business owners:

• Employees are not functioning as a winning team.
• The manager is caught up in day-to-day details and doesn’t have a handle on the numbers.
• The manager isn’t actively marketing the salon.
• There are no systems and structures in place to insure quality, financial stability, or even safety.
• The employees have no written job descriptions and are not committed to the salon’s success.

And that’s the tip of Tabatha’s iceberg. What I found interesting as I watched the show, is how Tabatha gets real with the salon owners. She challenges them to look at how much money they need to make and how many customers they need to pull in. She gets them to see that the current situation isn’t working, and then leads them down a new path to what will work.

This is the very thing we stress to our own clients. There is no room in business to put up with what isn’t working. And it’s everyone’s responsibility to be aware of what isn’t working. You have to be committed to what will work, even if that means making tough decisions like letting go of poor performers or firing problem clients.

While Tabatha’s world may be a bit more colorful than most business environments, the principles are still the same. Commit to a result you want to achieve in your business, and then work hard every day to achieve that result. Working with a coach is one of the best ways to hold yourself accountable to what you have set out to do. We make sure that you deliver on your intentions, and that you are always doing what works.

Even a guilty pleasure can have winning results!