Business Management Life

When you enter the spa business, you think youre joining a holistic community, learning to live a better life and becoming a voice for a conscious approach to wellness.

Although this is true, you also discover that a spa is a business that often leaves owners and directors exhausted and feeling detached from the relaxed and refreshed images their spas project. Running a spa involves a lot of paperwork, regulatory compliance, facilities management, inventory control, complex equipment maintenance and the training of a staff that comes and goes, leaving many wondering, What happened to my dream?

If you have ever felt challenged by the business of operating a spa, you are not alone. According to ISPA (International Spa Association) more than 12,000 spas are operating in the U.S. with vast majority being smaller operations, many of which are owned and directed by women and men who are struggling to keep up with the work their businesses generate. In an industry that has grown and matured quickly, management of this unique service and retail industry continues to be a challenge.

The good news is, there are ways to lift you and your spa director out of the daily swirl of activities, to have the spa run profitably and productively in your absence and to leave you free to add strategic value to the organization. In this article, Ill provide a few approaches that have proved successful in my own experience and that of others.
How I got here

I have owned and operated a 5,000-square-foot day spa in the resort town of La Jolla, California since 1997, and I have run into many challenges along the way, ranging from rapid growth that left me struggling to keep up to feeling burdened by doing the same tasks year after year without a lot of progress. After arriving at a revenue plateau and feeling constrained by the size of the spa as well as frustrated by repetitious problem solving, I began to look for answers on how to improve my business and free up my time. I was introduced to Michael Gerbers book, The E-Myth Revisited.

In his book, Gerber poses the question (and I paraphrase), How can you structure your business so that you can not have the same problems day in and day out, so you can truly add value and not just tread water? While considering this question, I first identified some of the obstacles that were unavoidable, such as employee turnover. Even though my spa had a good track record for retaining employees, peoples lives changed and so did their jobs.

Given that insight, I started to work on structuring my business around systems and processes rather than people who would come and go. Using Gerbers Key Frustrations Process for thinking systematically, I sought to create a system or manual of operations that employees could consult (rather than consulting me) to ensure consistency in training and the quality of our operations with the goal of freeing my time to strengthen other areas of the business.

The Key Frustrations Process guided me to do the following:

1) First, document one business frustration and briefly describe it.
2) Next, determine the primary cause and ask, Is it predominantly the absence of a system or am I or someone or something else the cause of the frustration? (Gerber notes that when we see ourselves or someone else as the cause of a problem it is necessary to depersonalize it and restate it as a systems-directed frustration.)
3) Then, determine how the frustration impacts the business.
4) Finally, ask, What are the results I am not getting because of this frustration?
Using this process I quickly recognized that a systems-based approach would take the focus off blaming a person if something went wrong. Instead of figuring out who was at fault, Id gather my staff together to look for the root cause of a problem from a systems perspective. Once we discovered the cause of the problem, we would brainstorm and document how we might alter the system to deliver the ideal outcome, whether that involved new ways of communicating, documenting, training or introducing new levels of accountability. When people saw how much easier this made their jobs, they quickly got on board.

Operating this way was a win-win solution for everyone. By creating systems and documenting best practices, employees gained a transparent, easy-to-access guide on how to win in their jobs. Managers were freed from solving the same problems over and over again. And our customers frequented a spa that delivered a reliable, consistent experience every time they visited, no matter who was operating that day. Today I find myself with a transformed organization, one than can operates profitably and productively whether I am there or not and one that is insulated from the costs and impact of employee turnover.

I recently tested this systems-based strategy with our inventory manager, who left our organization after three years of employment. She was very skilled at what she did and had valuable experience using our spa software to keep our inventory moving and preventing it from becoming obsolete. Fortunately, during the last seven months of her employment, I had her document her systems and how to use the software. Business development through documentation of systems became part of her job description. When she left and we hired a new person, the training for our new hire consisted of showing her the system, sharing the instructions, helping her to understand the data and then letting her do her job. This was so different from previous experiences, when the bulk of the work of a departed employee would fall back on me as a new hire spent weeks to ramp up!

Your turn how to shape up your spa business
To shape up the operations of your spa, first ask yourself, How can I keep this spa operating flawlessly in my absence? Another way to approach this is to ask, How can I add value to my spa business so that it lives beyond me, whether I want to sell the business or pass it on to a future generation?

Pretty quickly youll come to realize, as I did, that developing a solid set of systems and processes is the answer to both of these questions. To get you started in developing these systems, I recommend a couple of practices.

First document every problem (frustration) that you would like to eliminate.
Determine from a systems perspective what needs to be added or changed to achieve the ideal result and eliminate the problem. Engage employees in this process as well. Create a master file for the processes and systems, one that is easily accessed by key staff. If you keep these on a PC that has web access, consider subscribing to gotomypc.com to allow people to access, edit and print documentation from other computers.

Verify that every staff member has an e-mail account and make sure you use e-mail communications to send updates, changes and important information to each person directly. Relying on information to be delivered by printed memo or conveyed word of mouth is far less effective and reliable.

Once youve documented your systems and your business is operating from a systems-based perspective you will find that as an owner, manager or director that your precious resource, time, has increased.

Step two, track what you do. Once youve handled the most burning problems or frustrations, take 10 working days to list every activity you spend time on as you do it and indicate whether this activity could be delegated if you had a person to delegate it to and a system to support its delegation.

Tracking your activities will help you to see where you are devoting your time and where you can delegate. Typically, your time will be consumed by four areas: spa marketing, spa operations, leading and managing and the bottom line. As you begin to delegate spa operations, for example, you may have greater time to devote to marketing and increasing revenues for your spa.
If you begin to implement these practices, I guarantee that you will quickly see results in your business and in your experience of owning or operating a spa. As a professional in the spa industry, you will always face employee attrition, inventory issues, paperwork and the need to remain competitive. However, by standardizing much of the operations of your spa, you will free up your time to be more strategic, competitive and, hopefully, creative in owning and operating the spa of your dreamsfully executing on the vision that first prompted you to enter our community of beauty and wellness.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 28th, 2007 at 12:13 pm and is filed under Leadership, Management, Hiring, Ideas, Tips, Blog Carnival. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.