Starting A Spa Business Strategies

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.