December 2017 - Wynne Business | Spa Consulting and Education

It’s Time For Your Spa’s Post-Holiday Clean Up

Everyone loves the holiday season, whatever one you celebrate, but the season does have to come to an end. You may be the kind of person who likes to leave their Christmas tree up until mid-January, but the longer we drag out the holidays in a business setting, the harder it is to get the clients excited for next year.

In this, the last week of the year, it’s time to take stock of your facility and retail area. Hopefully your careful planning in purchasing and displaying a carefully selected variety of holiday merchandise resulted in positive sales increases for Q4, but no doubt you have some merchandise left over.

Now, what should you do with the remnants?

When is the holiday officially over? The answer is January 2.

I’ve walked into some salons and spas in mid-January and found them still decorated to the hilt with ribbons, bows, and fading poinsettias. I believe that this is an area in which you should take your cues from major retailers, and denude your facility of holiday detritus sooner than later. Just like Starbucks switches back to those plain white cups right after New Year’s, it’s time to start fresh.

First, box up and put away all of the reusable decorations for next, or another, year. If you have living décors such as amaryllis, poinsettia or lilies, send them home with your staff members. Remove stringed and hanging lights and decals from windows. Drink up the Christmas blend coffee and distribute among staff and friends the rest of the cookies, cakes and other treats.

How about merchandise?

It’s okay to put merchandise on sale, but only for a short time. Gather up all of the remaining bits and have a holiday sale table, for a week or two, but then it’s time to move on. If they didn’t sell, bite the bullet and be decisive. Some high quality unsold holiday-themed gift merchandise such as makeup brushes, jewelry, cosmetic bags and household décor items can be stored and reintroduced next October, but the rest you should remove from both your shelves and your balance sheets. Offer it to staff for a fraction of the original price, sell it off (by the lot) on eBay, or give it to charity.

Purchased too many nail polishes or body lotions? Negotiate with your vendors and see if you can trade for new spring items. Overstocks of non-holiday themed items are particularly useful as grab bag rewards for client referral or loyalty programs.

Did you add special holiday services to your menu? If any of these was a particularly good seller, you may want to consider adding a version of it permanently to your treatment menu, just make sure that you remove something else when you do, to ensure against a swelling menu selection. Run a service sales report for the year, and consider removing any services that you performed 30 or less of.

The onset of a new year is also an ideal time for a good spit-and-polish cleaning of your whole facility, top to bottom. This is often best accomplished by hiring an outside cleaning company, not your usual cleaners who by now are ignoring the same continual problem areas that you were when you handled the cleaning, or may still. Fresh eyes and elbow grease are welcome. Or, find a 4 to 5-hour window of time when the facility is closed and invite your staff to come pitch in; reward those who show up with pizza, sushi and/or movie tickets. Perhaps, you can even give out raffle tickets for baskets of leftover holiday retail!

Are you ready to launch 2018 with new ideas and treatments? Do you need help putting together your plan? Tap into our experience and contact us for a free consultation.

Developing Your Spa Leadership Vision

When is the last time your spa management to-do list said “plan for tomorrow?”

I don’t know about you, but I’m a list-maker. I keep piles of pads near my desk, and every day I make a list and date it. I place the high priority at the top, low at the bottom. Every other week I take the pile of notes with half-scratched-off items and start over. It’s an old-fashioned system but it works for me.

Spa Directors and managers never need to sit down and make a list of what they will do each day, in fact, they rarely get the chance. Spa operations are very fluid and in-the-moment, and it’s easy to just go with the flow. Chatting with clients, listening to an idea or complaint from a staff member, meeting with a vendor who stops by unannounced (so annoying!), taking a call from the media, and maybe you get a chance to review yesterday’s numbers somewhere in the mix. Spa management is definitely not a desk job, although sometimes you may long for a few minutes alone in your office.

Is this a good thing?

It’s certainly essential that spa management is readily available, and up-to-speed on everything that is happening in the spa on a daily basis. But this focus on the here-and-now can result in a lack of focus on the future. Thinking about the future feels like a luxury to many spa managers. However, it is no luxury for the health of the business; it is essential that someone is thinking about tomorrow.

So where is the balance?

Finding balance is a different trick for everyone, and there is no quick or obvious solution. But one key is to notice that you need it and to start looking for ways to create it. Yes, the everyday details of the business need to be dealt with, but very quickly you will find yourself immersed in today (and sometimes yesterday) and leaving the “plan for next week, month, year” entry unticked on your to-do list. Spa business managers often operate from a reactive, rather than proactive, approach, because of the non-stop demands on their time. The only way to stop this is to carve out a period each day, or even a few days per week, to have some quality alone-time; this may be more readily accomplished out of the spa, in fact.

Start small – an uninterrupted 30 minutes can do wonders and can be a springboard to more regular time-outs in the near future. Make some rules for yourself; this is not review time, it is forward-thinking time. Whether you use it to catch up on ideas from the spa trade magazines or to read the latest in business management trends and new concepts from Inc, Wired or HBR Magazines, or you just wander the local shopping mall and observe the stores and the people in them, you will open your mind to ideas and possibilities.

The hugely popular Mindful Magazine has many tips and methods to help you find some balance between high levels of activity and mindful pursuits. We can’t turn away completely from the demands of our daily schedule, but we do need to ensure that we create a plan to move the business forward, not just put out fires all day.

Help is only a few finger taps away; the Wynne Business Spa Director’s Management Intensive is now available as a self-paced online course. We offer an entire module dedicated to spa leadership essentials. Make 2018 your year to advance and register today.

Learn More About The Spa Director’s Management Intensive

You versus Your Spa Competition: What makes a client choose your spa?

Unless you are a resort spa, directly after the holiday season, you are likely to see some quieting in your books, and perhaps even your regulars are MIA. What is your plan to attract new consumers, and how will your spa stand out from all of the competition?

You Vs. Your Competition

What Makes a Client Choose Your Spa?

Clients are becoming more aware than ever of the need for spa and wellness services; the messages cannot be escaped, even in mainstream media. But there are plenty of people who are still not sure what happens in a spa, and even more who don’t know what wellness entails.

The nature of the spa industry in America is such that the word spa has no clear connotation; it may be attached to a nail, tanning salon or hair salon as often as it is used in conjunction with skin and body services. The ubiquitous nature of the word is good for marketing in the sense that consumers are seeing it often and that reinforces the idea that spa is not just for special occasions. But it’s not helpful if consumers don’t know what it is. Therefore, one of the main concepts framing your spa marketing plan has to be clear communication of what your particular spa is, and is not.

It is likely that you have massage, body and/or skin care services on the menu, but beyond that, what words or concepts help to define your spa?

Is it botanical, holistic, organic?

Do you use Italian products?

Are you known for your customer service or outstanding results?

Is your staff highly-trained?

Many spa owners try an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to creating spa businesses; long lists of every treatment imaginable, but no soul or clear identity. The more facilities like this exist, the more commoditized spa services become, and if your spa does not have a distinct identity or point of view, you will be lost in the crowd.

This article on branding gives some helpful hints on the best approach. Certainly, one of the important focal points in developing a brand identity is to make sure it resonates with your previously identified target audience. Don’t develop a spa concept or treatment menu because it interests you, make sure there is a community of prospective clients who need/want what you are offering, and also ensure that your spa is conveniently located for those prospects.

With this approach in place, you’ll have something to build on.

This article appeared first on the Booker blog.

Spa Therapist Salary: What should a spa therapist be paid?

Despite the lack of standard base salary, U.S. therapists earn the most worldwide.

Therapists in the U.S. are the best paid in the world and can earn up to US$4,166 (€3,100, £2,700) a month. Meanwhile their counterparts in Malaysia, with the worst salaries, only bring in US$308 (€231, £200). These were the findings of Real Numbers on Esthetician Compensation, a report published by leading industry body the Global Spa & Wellness Summit (GSWS) in April. One of the first analyses on global therapist pay, it marked the debut of the GSWS’s Metric Minutes – compilations of anonymously-sourced, industry data and stakeholder interviews that are designed to “simply start the conversation”.

Here, the GSWS has updated its findings to provide a snapshot of how aestheticians are paid in a selection of different countries – and the reasons why salaries vary so widely. The overview is intended to help operators and owners learn more about how our industry makes money (and in some cases does not).

On commission

Whether cultural, regulatory, or just habit, different countries pay beauty therapists in very different ways. Even taking into account the cost of living from one place to another, there are still major variances in average monthly pay.

In a large number of countries, the standard method of pay for beauty therapists is a monthly salary. Although, as shown in the table, there doesn’t appear to be any rhyme or reason to the amount of the salary. In almost every country, except for in the U.S., the salary makes up the lion’s share of monthly income, with commissions on services or retail comprising the rest. Service commissions are typically 5-10 percent of the cost of the treatment provided and are added to the monthly base salary.

In the U.S., however, it’s quite common for beauty therapists in day spas – which make up the vast majority of country’s spa establishments – to receive absolutely no base salary, earning all of their income as a commission on the treatment prices charged by the business. While this sounds unfair and quixotic, the result is that American therapists are the most highly paid in the world.

The U.S. also provides the biggest variety of pay plans which vary between states and cities or even two businesses in the same block. As there is no one-way things are done, methods of pay can be quite creative. Rather than paying a straight percentage for all therapists, for example, operators could offer more compensation to those who reach set benchmarks – such as better client retention rates and average customer spend – that help drive business. Alternatively, they can vary the percentage of compensation according to different services: paying less for treatments where a high amount has been spent on pieces of equipment, for example, to get a quicker return on investment. Slowly and incrementally, this is helping to offset the high staff overhead that U.S. spas face.

Retail commission – where therapists get a percentage of revenue from products they sell – is another possible add-on for salaries as spas all over the world offer products for home use. Globally, retail commission levels are fairly consistent at 5-10 percent of the retail price, which is typically all a business can afford on branded merchandise that already has high markup costs.

Benefits and taxes

Every country also has its own legal and cultural requirements for employers paying therapists concerning issues such as health insurance, retirement/pensions, and other social service benefits. The costs vary widely also, from an approximate 11 percent of payroll in the U.S. to as much as 40 percent in Sweden. It’s certainly incumbent on any spa business opening in a new country to fully understand all the different taxes and benefits that its expected to pay in addition to service provider salaries.

There’s no correlation between a therapist’s education and pay. Some countries require licensing for beauty therapy which typically involves up to two years of study. Meanwhile, in the U.S. an aesthetics license can be earned in many states in four months of full-time schooling; and there are still many countries, such as China, South Africa, Cambodia, the Philippines, and Brazil, where no license is required at all. However, the countries with the highest education costs are not those that pay the most. This could be a false economy – while an operator could potentially save money by hiring unlicensed therapists, the spa may develop a less desirable reputation, and incur additional in-house training costs as a result.

Something that is standard internationally is workers typically receiving 21 to 28 days of paid holiday a year. In China and Hong Kong, staff gets an extra months’ pay for Chinese New Year, along with two weeks off. That said, many global workers put in a lot of time and effort to earn such benefits – regularly putting in a six-day workweek, and in some resorts or on cruise ships working daily for two to three weeks before taking a day off.

In the U.S., paid time off is less generous: small spas will provide no paid leave, while spas that are part of larger brands will offer a week off after a year of employment, and that may increase to two weeks after two or three years of steady employment. Therapist schedules are also becoming shorter, often three to four days per week and part-time shifts are becoming more frequent as mandated health-care costs for full-time workers increase.

Growing concerns

Staff pay is, in most markets, the single biggest expense in spa business operations. This makes sense, as the inherent strength of spas is a labor-intensive product. But as companies continue to expand, and brands proliferate across country regions and borders, spa management teams should be aware of the differing pay, benefit and tax conventions. It’s not safe to assume that “what you’ve always done” in one country will be accepted in another, and this makes projecting turnover and profits more complex.

It’s no surprise that countries which pay the least in direct salary also have the lowest cost of living, however, this may also be a reflection of the importance of personal care to a specific locale or region, or the value placed on overall health and appearance. Spa services sit right at the crossroads of beauty services and healthcare, and in most countries spas are attracting increasing numbers of practitioners, who deserve the right to a fair living wage. But in situations where the desired pay is outsized compared to other overheads, it can make the ability for a business to earn a profit almost impossible, and negatively impact the growth potential for the industry as a whole.

If you have questions about spa employee pay and how to find what works for your business and your team, give us a call. Schedule a free 30-minute needs assessment here.

This article was originally published in Spa Business Magazine and on the Spa Business blog.