As an accompaniment to last week’s “When and How to Prepare For Your Next Spa Hire”, I had the pleasure of sitting down with training, development, and coaching expert Holly Hayes.

Holly is also a waxing trainer and instructor who has managed her fair share of teams (and helps others do so as well!) Team training is widely considered to be a “forgotten art” within the spa industry; after all, amid running your spa, knowing that you need to grow, and knowing that you need to grow fast while still juggling your day-to-day duties, team training often, understandably, falls to the bottom of the to-do list… and stays there until you see a new team member tanking!

So how do you fix this before it becomes a problem? Without further ado, let’s talk team training with Holly Hayes!

The Importance of Team Training

For Holly personally, she was first an esthetician before becoming a waxing brand trainer, which she has been now for eight years. Throughout her journey in both Australia, where most of her career has been based, and now Canada, she has seen with her own eyes how much room for improvement there is in both the waxing room and spas in general regarding team training.

The pitfall she’s seen the most of? Spa owners maintaining the mantra of, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ While Holly herself has predominantly seen a lack of training and innovation surrounding training waxing specialists, this problem extends to all corners of the spa industry. 

“I love talking about this topic because I’ve been on both ends of it,” Holly says. “I’ve worked in the spa as a manager and, on the other side, having to organize the training as the instructor who has been hired to do the training. I think that it’s important, first of all, to say that consistency is key for [team training]. 

As an example, waxing is my specialty; it’s my bread and butter and it has been for the last eight years. As such, I love going in and doing this sort of spa team training because waxing-based spas think that they don’t need it. Often, they seem to be resistant to it. They think, ‘Okay, we’ll attend this demonstration’ or ‘Okay, we’ll maybe get Holly in to have a chat’ only to realize how big of a gap there is with things that we can change within the waxing room.”

The Gap Between What Spa Owners Think That They Should Be Doing For Their Spa Team Training And What They Should Actually Be Doing For Their Spa Team Training

I have seen Holly’s sentiment echoed in my own private coaching, as well as in my spa-owners only Facebook group Spa Business Mastery.

Namely, I frequently see:

• Spa owners not realizing the scope and depth involved with team training 

• Spa owners not realizing that team training falls to them personally

• Spa owners not realizing that team training is crucial to retaining consistency with spa branding, sales, marketing, and client relations

• Spa owners not realizing that team training is a long-term investment

If you cut your new team member loose after giving them a tour of the spa and a refresh of how to conduct a facial, then these pain points may pertain to you!

Holly chalks this up to the ever-present stress the majority of spa owners are under. “It’s sink or swim [before hiring begins]”, she says. “Spa owners throw them in because it’s hard to find good staff in our industry. When we’re down a staff member, all we’re thinking is that we need to fill that gap in the books. So yes, quite often the training process is a quick little tour, a run-down of product ingredients, a quick test wax, and off they go to the treatment room!

“That’s where the problems start, however… and it’s much harder to fix things once a client has had a poor experience, once the reputation of the spa has been damaged instead of during the training phase. Alternatively, it’s much harder to fix things once a service provider has gotten into bad habits in the treatment room without you knowing. I always say that I’d rather work with a blank canvas versus someone who has been given the room to form bad habits!”

So what should spa owners be doing during team training instead?

• Making a training program, not just a two-hour tour and test: Expect your training program to run for 1 - 2 months. This should include a spa team handbook, Operations Manual and a continuous hands-on walkthrough of your spa vision, positioning, products, treatments, and existing client relations. (Pro tip: record your training program for both your own reference and other hires’!)

• Have your spa business’s systems locked into place: While a spa team handbook is a key step to this, ensure that your spa vision, sales system, marketing system, and training system is in place before bringing anyone onboard. Trust me, you’ll thank yourself later!

• Know that this consistency is a revenue-builder: When all team members are trained in a consistent and thorough way, employees leaving no longer becomes a deal-breaker for clients. Clients can be reassured that, even if their favourite service provider leaves, your team members have all been run through your spa’s specialized training program and that they’ll be in good hands

• Acknowledge that it’s a long-term investment: Remember to hire slow and fire fast! Because good employees are hard to come by, ensure that you are sinking your time investment into the right people

• Know just how important innovation is (yes, even with spa team training!): Spa team training goes beyond just your team’s treatment and product know-how. It dictates their behaviour, technique, and sales capability. While your team training process may not be broken, necessarily, innovating your process may be the difference between oodles of new clients and having your numbers continue to chug along at its same rate 

What’s Broken About the Spa Team Hiring Trends

A great example of innovation leading to bolstered revenue is, back before I was a spa owner and, now, a spa business coach, I was actually taught how to speed-wax at an interview I had gone to in Vancouver. I was a new esthetic grad looking for work and I was shocked that I wasn’t taught such an easy, efficient technique at school!

Holly mirrors this experience of leaning heavily on what has been taught to spa owners and estheticians via text books… and witnessing first-hand the difference that learning via experience makes! So often, resorting to tradition without keeping an eye out for the opportunities that innovation brings can leave our potential for growth in the dust. (For example, after my hands-on speed-waxing tutorial my revenue potential shot way up!)

What’s broken about the spa team hiring trends? Number one is to, if you can, not go straight from school to owning a business. Getting your hands “dirty” in the treatment room (preferably alongside many different mentors and other team members) will teach you faster and better than working off of hypotheticals ever could. 

Number two? That, in the spa industry, there is a high burnout rate with employees. “What if I sink time into this person and they take the knowledge I give them and go open up their own biz?” the majority of spa owners worry. “What if I sink time into this person and they quit within two to three months?”

The solution to this is to vet your potential hires thoroughly before bringing them on. Does this person reflect my spa’s vision? What are there long-term plans in the industry? Are there any conflicts of interest? Is there capacity to learn high? Do they have a personality and attitude that jives with my vision for this role? All of these questions should be reflected on before investing time into any hires, no matter the role.

Let’s Talk Team Training With Holly Hayes: Our Top Tips for Nailing Down Your Spa Team Training Program

• Tip #1: As mentioned before, consider recording your team training sessions. After all, not everyone learns the same way; having these sessions recordings guarantees that you have a solid reference for later trainings while ensuring that video-learners are learning in the best and fastest way for them personally

• Tip #2: Ensure that your spa team handbook is provided to all of your team members, not just the most recent ones. This acts as a refresher for everyone involved in your spa biz and even grants old employees the opportunity to ask questions if there is a new (or updated) policy that has been recently introduced

• Tip #3: Reframe team training as setting your entire business up for success. Worry less about team members potentially leaving and more about how what you focus on grows. And your spa biz deserves to be focused on!

• Tip #4: Keep things simple and consistent to ensure that you, as the spa owner, can follow through with it.

• Tip #5: Be honest with yourself about the current state of your spa team training process and put yourself in the position to do something about it (versus keeping your head in the sand!)

“My biggest message to anyone reading this today is to be consistent,” Holly says. “Spa owners sometimes hire me to come in, we do this great two-hour session, we commit to benchmarks, and then bam! Suddenly things get busy. Someone gets sick; someone resigns… and then they won’t commit to even one-hour weekly trainings. They consider themselves too busy to make it consistent, and then it falls off the radar for them entirely.

“The first point of contact is to reach out to your local distributor; the majority of them are offering both free and paid training so that you can see where your gaps are. From there, you can find a specialist in your area to see where the gaps are in your training process.”

For waxing specifically, Holly is located in Vancouver, British Columbia and is currently running wax-centric boot camps just in time for Spring.

As for spa team handbooks and general process makeovers? Kirsten Foss Coaching is here to restructure your spa biz for long-term growth. Reach out today!