You hear the term “leveraging your business” a lot when it comes to growth and development. But what does it actually mean?

Typically, leveraging your business is something you would be doing when you start up your company, and you are trying to leverage money. But after start-up, leveraging your business tends to mean that you are trying to piggyback on the success that you already have.

In the spa industry, there are various parts to your business that you are trying to leverage: clients, money, time & staff. But before you can create change with any of them, you need to be able to identify what is missing in your business that could be affecting growth.

Doing a business analysis is a vital part of discovering what parts of your spa business need fixing so you can leverage.

Which Spa Systems Are You Missing?

Back in June, I created a Spa Systems Checklist (sorry, this checklist has been retired from my freebies) that contains a list of 20 spa systems you need for your spa business to run smoothly. So, if you are struggling with where to begin to analyze your business, grab that freebie because it will point you in the right direction.

If you “don’t know what you don’t know”, how can you even begin to find the information that you need? 

Now that you know about the 20 systems you should have in your spa business, you can start to look at what’s working and what’s not working.

You may notice a pattern in certain areas where you’re inadvertently repeating what is not working. You might be doing these mistakes because you’ve simply been unaware it was an issue, or sometimes it’s because you are so busy that you don’t have time to change it. Regardless, I hope you’re beginning to understand that identifying where the gaps are in your spa business is the first part of leveraging your business.

Another easy way to identify gaps is to sit down and write out what is driving you crazy in your spa business. It might look something like this:

• I don’t have time to get to my social media marketing

• I don’t have time to get to email marketing

• I can’t attract or retain decent team members

• I’m not good a writing for marketing

• I hate social media because I never know what to post

• Why aren’t we retaining clients?

If you feel like one of the systems or even a part of a system is not working for you, I suggest that you might need more support with it. So rather than ditching part of a system - such as email marketing - outsource it because it’s power to generate bookings and sales isn’t something to ignore.

On a bright note, through your analysis you may have some aha moments where you realize that you have systems that are giving your great business outcomes!

If it is working, do more of it!

Which Spa Business Systems to Analyze First?

Here are a few common spa systems issues you might find in your business:

Client Retention System: Client retention directly reflects your client happiness. If they don’t like what they see or experience, they won’t be rebooking. For those of you with teams, lacking a Client Retention System means you have more opportunity to dig bigger holes into your “revenue bucket”.

Questions to ask during analysis:

• What is the full guest experience, and how are you ensuring that it happens consistently?

• Where in your client retention system could there holes? Service provider skill set, no customer service scripts, disorganized spa flow?

• If you are a solo, where could you slacking off with the guest experience?

• What were you doing differently when you first opened your spa business compared to now? Are you skipping details that you wouldn’t have when you first started your spa business?

 Marketing System: The easiest way to analyze your marketing system is to break it down into marketing categories and document what’s missing or not working.

• Website

• Email

• In spa conversations

• Social Media

• Posters

• Referral/Loyalty programs

• Memberships

• Events

Staff Retention System: Attracting and retaining talent is as important as attracting and retaining new clients. Keep in mind, strong service providers know their value and if you’re leadership is disorganized and/or weak, why would they want to work for you? Not sure where to start with a staff retention system? Consider…

• Implementing your core values and company culture as a pillar of your recruiting and training system. If you don’t have documented core values or a company culture statement, you need to get on that immediately because this is how you attract and keep staff that have aligned mindsets and goals.

• Implementing a complete spa training program with ongoing coaching and support so each team member gives consistent client outcomes, regardless of who they book with.

• Upgrade your team communication system. How you communicate with staff directly impacts how your team handles their daily workflow as well as problem solving (we love using Slack because of its robust functionality).

• Do you offer yearly staff reviews? This isn’t just to keep them abreast of the quality of their work, but it’s an opportunity to help them develop their passion projects (maybe a wish to learn Microneedling or Lash Extensions?) that would be an asset for your spa to form a win-win bond in your relationship.

Money System. I know y’all hate tracking metrics other than your total sales, but if you bury your head in the sand about developing your financial systems, I’m sorry to say exceptional growth will always be elusive.

I’ve definitely noticed that money and numbers are usually a spa owners last hold-out due to their own wonky belief systems about value and worthiness. But the good news is that once they start exploring their emotional triggers and challenging their thinking, the heaviness of creating and working with financial systems isn’t as bad as they thought! In fact, they can be down right fascinating because it’s giving your valuable information about where you can grow! Start with two simple questions

• Do you know which spa metrics to track each month? Productivity, retail to service ratio, number of products sold, pre-booking ratio, average ticket, client retention, number of new clients are the usual line up of metrics you should be tracking for the spa as a whole as well as each service provider (so you can see who may be responsible for the gaps).

• Do you know what is going on with your cash flow? In layman’s terms, are you actively tracking and analysing the money coming in AND out of your spa business? If you want more sales, you have to get clear and present with where you are now in order to create a strong strategy to get there!

What happens next?

Strategize & Prioritize

When you are prioritizing which of your systems you should start with, I would recommend that you work on your client retention system first. The reasoning behind this is because you don’t want to spend a lot of time and energy in your marketing system to bring in more clients if you are not retaining them.

Now, if you have holes in your client retention system, you most likely have holes in your training system. This means you will need to include your training system as a priority with your client retention system. There is a good possibility that you will need to do some re-training with your staff if retention is an issue. 

Once you have your client retention system in place, you can move on to your staffing system. The quality of their skill sets and their values will directly affect your client retention metrics.

Once you are stable in client retention and staffing, then you can move onto marketing.

Brainstorm Ideas to Improve Your System

It’s time to start thinking about what kind of resources you’ll need to implement these changes. For example, if you need more time, you’ll first need to strategize how you are going to carve out more time to work on your growth initiatives! Do you need people support? Perhaps you need to outsource low-level management tasks because or you might need to find a stellar instructor in a specific area like Facebook ads. Either way, include a list of resources that can support you during your organizational design so you don’t get stuck in the process of creation & implementation.

 If you have any questions about leveraging your spa business or you need help with analyzing or implementing any of your spa systems, reach out to me. My team and I will work with you to help get your spa systems on track and help you leverage your business giving you more of what you desire.