A well balanced combination of real world advice mixed with the latest in business systems, Spa Management Best Practices is a must for spa owners and managers or for anyone considering opening their spa facility. 339 pages.

Exerpt

Troubleshooting
Although many spa owners are business veterans, managing a spa can be a unique experience for many reasons:
§ The staff is primarily female and the clientele is primarily female.
§ Instead of selling tangible goods a spa sells intangible results-oriented experiences and products that by their very nature are supposed to change the way the purchaser looks and feels.
§ Spa treatments and products are luxuries and although that should be a part of everyone's lifestyle, a bit more is expected even in the best economic times to justify the splurge on the part of the purchaser.
§ A more intimate level of contact between spa technicians and retail sales staff makes the relationship between client and caregiver unique.
§ The range of spa technician's backgrounds and socio-economic status vary as do the range of backgrounds for clients making that relationship harder to manage than most business situations.
§ Customers in the spa business have heightened expectations. It is difficult to keep the staff continually motivated to give superb service under these conditions.
§ Employee compensation, overhead, marketing costs and facility development are all expensive meaning that the spa needs to be very carefully managed just to show a profit.

Your spa is a combination of Disneyland, a five star restaurant, a psychotherapy office and an all-inclusive resort. Given the demands on your staff, it is difficult to keep everyone motivated and happy while enforcing strict standards of service. However, there are management secrets that work in this unique environment and that can ensure that you can juggle staff issues as well as create a first rate experience for clients in your spa.

Motivating
How do you keep your staff upbeat, motivated, hungry for clients and one-hundred percent professional? One of the secrets of this is creating professional addiction to your company. This is really nothing new. In fact, creating addictions to your brand is a marketing mainstay at this point. Creating internal addiction to your facility and brand is all about unleashing the power of personal potential. This can be done in many ways. Part of your training program might offer as a tie-in self help education like an Anthony Robbin's book, a tape series by Dr. Wayne Dyer or a Steven Covey video tape series. Once your staff is on the road to self-improvement there are very few who will turn back, leave, complain or infect the others with self-doubt, negativity or rebellion. Once you are known for being a "sky's the limit" spa your facility will attract winners. Some successful spas using this concept continue their employee's progress with motivational trips to far off lands, spiritual journeys to sacred places and educational benefits for employees to pursue their inner passions. It's not surprising that contented employees are the best folks to work in your spa. Moreover, women make up over 70% of spa-goers and they judge a business on many counts by the treatment of that company's employees.

Internal Competition: Setting the Standard
Interestingly, children have been found to be experts at internal competition. When you set a standard of behavior for 3-5 year olds and some children achieve that standard, the other children want to mimic their success. The same concept works without fail in the spa. Once employees think that their piers are behaving in a certain way they begin to study one another. As with children they begin to compete almost immediately and keep track of one another's ability to out-perform the other, please management-or parents. When a job well done is praised and expected again it is almost always repeated. Furthermore, employees tend to start to mentor this type of behavior within their inner circles creating an internal focus of self-management among spa teams and departments. Again, as with parenting the standard of basic treatment to one's siblings is formed and then either you have fighting siblings or a bonified, fully functioning team/family. The most amazing part of this paradigm is the culture that you create at the onstart continues for generations of employees to come.

Reinforcing the Standard
Once the bar is set high it is management's job to keep it there. This is also somewhat simple with careful behavior management. One of the best ways of keeping your standard of performance and service high is to assume and act as if that is the way the world works…the earth is round…and that is it! Another method is to act as if that is the way your company has always been and create a corporate culture based on that fact. As a consequence when a new employee is introduced to your spa they should also be given a booklet of expected behaviors, rules, disciplinary steps and a calendar of dates for their performance to be further reviewed. It is always most ideal to have each employee sign key documents like the corporate mission statement, rules and procedures and educational/technical expectations. Having employees read and then sign documentation is legally reinforcing of their employment agreement with you. A signature also reinforces that you are serious about your company's policies and you expect them to be as well. The more that the human resources portion of documentation, performance review and behavioral conditioning can be presented as a corporate ritual, the more that employees will embrace the standard.

Cloning your Best Employees
Have you ever sat down and thought about what makes a great employee? Why are they great employees exactly? Some things that make them stand out might be the way they approach difficult situations, a positive attitude, their technical ability, their salesmanship standards. If you were trying to bake award winning éclairs you would start with a wonderful recipe and fine-tune that recipe until each batch turned out perfectly. Employees are individuals but creating great employees is similar to following a recipe and then consistently following the guidelines of the formula. Start by brainstorming what you want in an employee down to the most specific detail. Then begin to cultivate some of your best staffers into seed employees. Establishing a mentoring program using the employees that best represent your ideal is then helpful in all sorts of ways. Not only does it create a friendly and informational introduction for new employees, it also is a reminder of the corporate standard of behavior expected from all employees.