“The Role of the Day Spa Owner”

I’m sure that most of you have attended many seminars and educational sessions during your career. If you’re anything like me, you always come back from the sessions full of hope, great ideas and motivated to make changes or improvements. Yet, when you get back to the spa, somehow, you never get around to implementing those great plans you had when you were sitting in the audience. You get busy again.

So, what are you so busy doing? What would prevent you prevent from implementing a great idea that would improve your business bottom line and profitability? If, as a spa owner, you are also a fully booked service provider, you already have a full time job servicing clients. That’s what keeps you so busy. So who has the job of operating and managing your business? If it’s also you, now you have two jobs, each requiring different skill sets, each with different responsibilities and accountabilities and more work than can be accomplished in a normal work day.

According to the 2007 Day Spa Magazine Spa Owners Report, 50% of spa owners and directors are fully booked service providers. Another 25% are booked for services for some portion of each day. That is logical because the majority of spa owners are practitioners that decided to open their own spa business. They have a passion for what they do and trained long and hard to acquire the skills to be the best at what they do. However, how were the skills acquired for running a business? Most spa practitioner training includes very few hours of business education, yet, as a spa owner, you need a very high level of business skills to be profitable at what you do.

A great number of spa owners are in the position where they have to make some hard choices. The first decision is where your primary personal goals lie. If your primary goal is to be the owner of a profitable spa, then you need to acquire business education and the skills to run your business in a productive and profitable manner and let go of the full time, hands on service role. If your primary goal is to continue to practice your professional skills on clients, and still own a profitable spa, then you need to recruit and hire a business professional to fulfill the very important role and responsibilities for achieving productivity and profitability for your spa.

In order to own and operate a profitable spa, the organizational structure must include, at a minimum,

one full time equivalent for each key area. The key areas include (1) Spa Owner = Marketing, Sales, Public Relations and Strategic Planning, (2) Spa Director = Professional Staff Management, Training and Education, and (3) Operations Director = Finance, Human Resources, Support Staff Management, Training and Education.

If you are thinking…….who can afford to do that? The answer is……..a profitable day spa. The reality is that you cannot afford not do it. If you bury yourself in a treatment room, on a full time basis, your business is at high risk of financial failure due to neglect and the failure to implement sound business practices.

How do you see your role as a spa owner?