Starting A Spa Business Strategies

Starting a spa or salon business is exiting but at the same time a tremendous challenge to handle so many essential requirements  and not drowning in hundreds of demands coming to you from all sides. It is very easy not to see the wood any more standing amongst all those trees shielding you from the light and blocking your way forward.

To stay in this picture, every tree you are facing or are cutting will cost you money, which can become an expensive learning curve.  Getting help at that early stage from someone, who has gone through all of this, means improving your bottom line right from the beginning, even more so in the future by setting the course right to reach your goal: a profitable health and beauty business.

Here come my tips for starting a spa business, which I recommend to study and follow carefully in order to avoid the mistakes, which has cost me thousands of dollars and a lot of time.

1.  Don’t compromise with the interior fixtures as once it is done, it will be very difficult – if not impossible – and expensive to change. Rather spend a few dollars more, so that you (and your clients) are happy for a long time.

2.  Select carefully your equipment and negotiate prices.  Especially in a weak economy, suppliers are keen for your order, a fact you can take advantage of and which will save you a lot of money  Look for well-maintained 2nd hand equipment, if you have a tight budget. It can be as good as new for half price or less.

3.  Don’t forget to implement the three basic, often neclected facilities: kitchenette for preparing drinks and snacks (often forgotten in salons), a staff rest room, and sufficient storage space (towels, products,….). It is very frustrating later if those are improvised last minute or unavailable.

4.  Select your skin care range less as per your personal liking but rather from an economic and clients point of view.  Look at issues like completeness including samples (!), retail affordability for the majority of your clients, and good customer service. Before deciding, ask other (local) users (spa/salon owners) about their satisfaction with the supplier.  Don’t forget, you bmay get a worldwide brand but with bad local management having a lousy service mentality! (> opt-in for our e-course/newsletter to get the skin care selection matrix software for FREE!)

5.  Starting a spa business means beginning your marketing well in advance of your planned opening date, otherwise you and your staff can play monopoly all day. The absolute minimum is 3 months, even better 6 months ahead.  Create a buzz, even if your place is or looks like a construction site at that moment.  Image is key nowadays! (> Our eBook gives you dozens of ideas how to create that buzz!)

6.  Select your most valuable asset, your staff, not last minute in a rush. How good the applicants CV may look, ask the people, who employed them before, for their opinion.  Some girls are masters in acting like Hollywood starlets! Just believe in hard, objective facts, not words and appearance.

7.  Try, if ever possible, to get all staff first on a probation contract for 3 months.  Make sure (or enforce) that you can dismiss them for all relevant reasons. A wrong selection and a permanent contract is bad news. Worse news I can see only in having no clients at all.

8.  Put in place a strict control mechanism for your staff right from the beginning.  Once you allow them privileges and are generous with punctuality, treatment time and product spending, it will be difficult, if not impossible to correct their habits later.  And even worse, staff will expand on those “luxuries” seeing that they do get away with it. Here you are risking the future of your business!

9.  Look early for someone (manager), whom you can trust to run the business for you for at least a week or two. There can always be a reason that you are unable to run the show (sickness, family matters, business travel etc).  If there is nobody with that quality, it can mean a substantial financial drop in that period and worse – significant image damage.

10.  Last but not least, have no illusions: you are in not for a 8 to 5 job and there will be no holidays for quite some time to come.  Make sure that you have the full support of your family and enough financial backing as the cash flow projections are nearly always much too optimistic. Yours will hardly be the exception to the rule!

I hope these starting-a spa-business-tips will help you to focus on the core matters in order to get your spa or salon flying very soon.  Many more ideas and advices you will find in the eBook

Spa Success Strategies

, which summarizes my way into the Top 20 destination spas in the world as voted by the readers of Conde Nast Traveller, which was an exciting but nevertheless a costly and often nerve wrecking experience. There was not much guidance from anybody in the early days of holistic health spas.

The idea of starting a spa business and owning our own health spa arose from three main motivations: to let people know about the benefits of living a healthy lifestyle, working in a truly stimulating, beautiful environment and the freedom one gets by being your own boss.  The fact that one can, if successful, earn a good income was clearly not overlooked but is indeed the most uncertain issue as it depends on a number of influences, which one can only partially or not control at all (e.g. a general economic crisis).  In contrast, the first three facts will always be part of your lifestyle as a spa owner and are there to stay! Let’s look at those a bit more in detail.

The origins and milestones of the development can be found HERE

I was lucky enough to learn healthy living from my father who inspired me after my teenage years to follow in his tracks. The mere fact that he conquered the dreaded aging with his active, high quality lifestyle far into his eighties motivated me finally to plan and implement the holistic health spa idea, together with my wife. She had experienced the opposite with her father: his untimely death in his early sixties, which was clearly linked to a much less healthy living pattern.  Teaching our guests the three pillars of good health “Optimal nutrition” – “Regular, situation adapted exercising” - “Mindful relaxation”, all based on my deeply rooted conviction – very different to acquired theoretical, literature knowledge! – of the benefits of healthy living, always gave me a feeling of making a valuable contribution to society. In the majority of cases, this feeling was amplified by happy and regularly returning guests.

Click here for exploring our eBook “Spa Success Strategies”

To live and work in a health spa is certainly a privilege, in spite of all the hard work it requires to get and keep the place in top shape.  The smell of aroma oils and the sound of spiritual music in the rooms and relaxation areas, the availability of herbal teas and light snacks and salads throughout the day, and the possibility of enjoying inhouse fitness center, sauna annd steam bath (and even a massage from time to time), which employer can compete with such an environment? Strangely enough, not all staff members did always appreciate these privileges.  Although such applies mostly to the younger ones who had not yet experienced other work places.

There is no need to say too much about the value of personal freedom, when being your own employer.  Any spa or salon of whatever size offers this freedom of making your own decisions, and it is my believe, this fact on its own is worth to create such a place, if you are attracted by health and beauty matters.  Yet freedom is inherently linked to responsibility – two different sides of the same medal! – , which one should not overlook: responsibility towards clients as well as staff.  It is very obvious that only when such responsibility is taken seriously by the owner, a spa operation can be successful in the long run as the image of the establishment is directly proportional to the responsibility practiced by the owner(s).

The chapter  “Guest Services” of the ebook is accessible here.

In conclusion, the day I knew that I would dedicate all my energy to creating my health spa vision and actively starting into my spa business was the beginning of an incredible challenge, well knowing that the rewards one day will by far exceed the blood, sweat and tears needed to make the business a success story.

If you would like to learn about the 7 strategies for a successful spa operation, we invite you to subscribe to our mini e-course on the right sidebar. As our appreciation for your interest and subscription, you will receive the spa planning and benchmarking software, which are part of our eBook “Spa Success Strategies”, completely free of charge for immediate download.

As a future or existing spa or salon owner, you need to have a clear picture about the key strategies, which you have to understand and ensure that they are applied on a day-to-day basis by management and every staff member.  It is my experience that as soon as the owner loses sight of one of those even for a short period of time, things start to deteriorate.  This will be reflected mostly sooner than later in your income situation and not long afterwards will affect the image of your establishment too.

“Click here to discover how these strategies are implemented in day-by-day spa practice”

So let’s have a quick look what those Seven Success Strategies are:

SS 1. It all starts with having a clear vision, what kind of spa or salon you want to have.  Many owners neglect that point and believe they get away with what others have done, basically copying their operation. Your vision to create something beyond the standard in the marketplace makes or breaks your future success.  All other strategies only have one purpose: to make such vision everyday reality!

SS 2. The second strategy is to materialize your vision in form of your spa location, interior design and products and services you will offer.  If all those elements do not reflect your vision in a homogenous manner, you will never be able to exceed mediocrity and come to fame.  Where should fame come from?

SS 3.   Strategy number 3 is the human element. Your staff has to be educated to live that vision.  The fact that your clients may be in a very special, beautiful environment does not mean thay they feel special while being there.  People only feel special, if they are treated in a special, not the common way. Common is that everybody does care for him-/herself.  But if you get genuine attention and care from somebody, you automatically feel special, appreciated, worthy. For such an experience people are prepared to pay money, good money. Your staff must understand that (again and again) to their own benefit (tips!).

“Click here to discover the 36 vital elements of outstanding guest services”

SS 4.  If your staff practices all those elements, it will be your job to ensure that it is practiced by everybody every day.  In other words, be there to enforce and control that continuity and consistency in high quality services is what your clients are getting each and every time they come for a visit.  Mc Donald’s is  a success story just because of that and not because their hamburgers taste better than all others in town.

SS 5.  Strategy number 5 is to create an automatism (procedures), which ensures that consistency. Without precise and transparent rules, which all staff has to adhere to, believe me, you will lose that battle. Staff wants to maximize their life, not yours.  So don’t fool yourself, they will always try to make their life more comfortable and some are very smart in doing so – at the expense of the owner.  Trust is good but control is better, I even say absolutely necessary in a spa operation!

SS 6.  It is no rocket science that a business needs traffic, which is another word for customers.   Customers may come, if they know about your existence and when they believe they get something, which helps or pleases them. Word-of-mouth is known to be always the best marketing you can ever have but at the beginning, it simply does not exist.  So your strategy has to be to be creative in marketing your place.  We are living in the internet age, where there is no shortage of  incredible opportunities to get the word out, locally and beyond. No excuses for not making clever use of those!

SS 7.  Strategy number seven is to be on top of things, knowing, where your business is earning money and where it is losing it.  This looks rather obvious at a first glance, but diving a little deeper, trust me, you may discover that even relatively harmless looking matters drain your income to a frightening degree. Find those leaks early enough before serious damage is done. As important is clearly to maximise turnover, not missing real income opportunities.

If you feel it would be worthwhile to enter into the various issues in more detail, the access is just a mouse click away.

And don’t miss the three minutes slide show in this blog by entering the page “Helpful Article”.

“Click here to learn how to make your spa world class ”

Estate agents tell you that only three issues matter when buying a real estate: location, location, location.  The reason is obvious: once you have it, this is it – no correction possible!

If you are planning to start a spa business, I would square the above said as a wrong location can be detrimental, if not disastrous to your business in the medium to long term. Why is that?  Because spa visitors today have a pretty distinct expectation about the experience  during their visit, which is detemined not only by the treatment but the whole setup, including the spa surroundings. This expectation obviously depends on the kind of spa visited and will be different for hotel, destination, day and medical spas, just to name four of the major spa types.

Therefore it is necessary to put as much diligence and intelligence into that matter as possible taking into account not only your vision of your future spa but the competition situation in your area too.  If their is an established competitor within reach of your future clients, you better think twice if you can outrank him in spite of the saying “competition is good for the business”. It’s is always safer to start from the pole position, not only in Formula 1!

But there may still be something unexpected lurking in the background. When we bought our destination spa premises after over 9 months of carefully going through the selection process, we thought we had found the golden egg and stayed in that belief, while the business was developing.

Yet, after three years, when we had a well established business and the time had come to enter into phase 2, the extension of our room offering from 14 to 25, we unexpectedly hit the wall.  We learned that the zoning regulations in our basically residential area allowed only for those 14 rooms, more would require the approval of all (!) neighbours around us, more than 12 individuals. This was a killer requirement as more than one neighbour already had uttered openly his dissatisfaction with the traffic caused by our clients. So our hopes for multiplying our income had come to an abrupt halt.

Life tends to come up with surprises, for better or for worse. In this case clearly for worse.  Yet, I can’t dismiss the thought that we could have avoided this happening, if we would have investigated this issue more thoroughly before buying the property.

I believe this real life example illustrates quite well, what I mean with applying much diligence in location and object selection. Your spa business will depend decisively on your choice. More about this topic you can find  in www.spasuccessstrategies.com.

Before any owner of a new spa business should dive into the nitty gritty of all the necessities to get the spa operation off the ground, there must be an intensive phase of brainstorming about the vision and the requirements for its implementation. It is strongly recommended that, only after this process is finished, one should start looking for the place, where such vision can be materialized.

In my case, the brainstorming phase lasted not hours or days but weeks and months because my ambition was to create something new, non-existing in South Africa at that time: a 5 star holistic destination spa.  And only when the first foggy ideas became more and more concrete, the time had come to start looking for a suitable location and object, which reflected this vision as much as possible.  We investigated more than 20 objects in various provinces before we succeeded.

Because haste in making the location decision can lead to the realization soon afterwards that the original vision can not be implemented or must be abolished, as the place does not match at all, what the vision was all about in the first place. Example:  if you acquire a plot at the border of a forest for your “Pure Nature Spa” and 2 years later, a shopping center pops up in your neighbourhood, your vision of a nature spa has become quickly obsolete.

So my advice is: take your time, as the decisions you make in those early days of your new venture will determine the character of  your spa business and will lay the foundation for its future success.