Sensible Ways to Increase Your Spa’s Bottom Line

In order to make the most of your spa business, you need to come up with creative and revenue producing ways to increase you spa’s bottom line. Adjusting and tweaking your overall plan as business ebbs and flows is the best way to stay profitable throughout the year.

The most important thing for your spa is to maintain a high level of rescheduled appointments. This can be done by creating a rewards program for returning clients. However, the rewards need to be something your clients actually want, such as free services or discounts on prepaid or bundled services.

Create programs that will bring clients back week after week rather than every other month. This can be done by offering special multi-week programs that focus on weight loss, body transformation, detoxification, or wedding day preparation where clients come in once a week for 4-8 weeks in order to reach a specific goal.

You also want to staff your spa with quality personnel in order to create an atmosphere focused on customer service and client satisfaction. Offer employee incentives to keep your turnover rates low and establish performance-based incentives to keep customer service high.

Sensible Ways to Increase Your Spa’s Bottom Line

In order to make the most of your spa business, you need to come up with creative and revenue producing ways to increase you spa’s bottom line. Adjusting and tweaking your overall plan as business ebbs and flows is the best way to stay profitable throughout the year.

The most important thing for your spa is to maintain a high level of rescheduled appointments. This can be done by creating a rewards program for returning clients. However, the rewards need to be something your clients actually want, such as free services or discounts on prepaid or bundled services.

Create programs that will bring clients back week after week rather than every other month. This can be done by offering special multi-week programs that focus on weight loss, body transformation, detoxification, or wedding day preparation where clients come in once a week for 4-8 weeks in order to reach a specific goal.

You also want to staff your spa with quality personnel in order to create an atmosphere focused on customer service and client satisfaction. Offer employee incentives to keep your turnover rates low and establish performance-based incentives to keep customer service high.

Forget Summer Classes in the Heat, Take Spa Management Online Year Round with ISM

It’s difficult enough going to school, going to work, and dealing with the issues of your everyday life, but add a little summer heat and it can be downright impossible to get motivated about your education. So, rather than taking classes in a hot and stuffy classroom, why not advance your career by taking spa management courses online in the air-conditioned comfort of your own home?The Institute of Spa Management (ISM) offers online classes year-round, making it easier than ever to achieve your goals quickly and easily. Whether you are new to the spa industry or a seasoned spa professional, ISM has a program for you.

At ISM you can choose the all-inclusive Spa Management course that covers all areas of spa management, including finance, public relations, client services, marketing, and more. At the end of the course you will be fully qualified to fill any spa management position available.

You can also take individual courses, such as conflict management, human resources, customer service, and others. It’s up to you how you want to spend your summer months, but spending it advancing your career goals with ISM in the comfort of your own home makes it easier than ever.

Support and Encourage Your Spa Staff: In Turn, They Will Deliver Exceptional Client Services

You’ve heard the old adage, treat people the way you would like to be treated.  This doesn’t just apply to your clients, it also applies to your staff.  Sometimes it’s easy to overlook your employees on a day to day basis.  While you might truly appreciate the work that they do, there is no substitute for actually showing it or saying it in some form or fashion.

If your employees don’t feel appreciated or supported they may lose interest in doing a good job.  This will only come back to hurt you because unhappy employees will create unhappy clients and this is not good for any business.  So, what you need to do is set aside a specific time every day or every week to make sure you are truly encouraging and supporting the wants and needs of your staff, just as you would for your clients.

This might mean having weekly staff meetings, creating an open door policy where employees can come to you without fear of repercussions, providing regular training, developing individual goals, or even just having a pizza party once a month to let everyone blow off some steam.  Remember, happy employees will make for happy clients.

The Flipside of a Standard Printed Business Card: Hands Down, The Most Under Utilized Marketing Tool

Are you using your spa’s business card to the best of its abilities? If you are only putting information on one side of it, then the answer is no. When you think about it, your business card can be one of the most distributed and visible pieces of marketing that your spa has.

So, why are you only taking advantage of fifty percent of this valuable promotional piece’s available advertising space? Is it just because that is how it has always been done? Is it because you never thought about it? Well, now that you have thought about it, it’s time to make a change and effectively use that unused space.

While the front of your business card should include your spa’s logo, name, address, contact information, and the staff person’s name, you should also consider adding some other useful information to the back. Consider listing your spa’s hours of operation, a map with directions, a list of your most popular services, prices, or even some interesting facts about your spa or healthy living. You can also print out an invitation on the back inviting people to special events, use it for appointment making, or print special one-time coupons.

Getting Back to Management Basics is the Best Way to Get Your Spa Business Back on Track (K.I.S.S)

When running your spa you can easily find yourself forgetting about the basics when it comes to managing your business and your people.  Therapies change, complications arrive, theories evolve, but you need to make sure that you don’t get so carried away that you forget the basics that probably served you well before things got complicated.
What this means is not losing sight of the basic goal of business management, getting things done through skilled leadership, organization, communication, and planning.  When carried out properly, using your basic management skills will effectively run or help any business.

This means applying the KISS principle to any business model or situation.  An acronym for Keep It Simple, Stupid, it is meant to remind you that no matter how complicated things get, you can always address or solve problems by using simple methods.  In other words, the best solution is usually the easiest or least complicated one.

Even if your spa business seems to be spiraling out of control, you can probably get it back on track again by keeping it basic and keeping it simple.  Overcomplicating things in business, as in life, usually just leads to more complications and fewer resolutions.

Progressive Management through Quality Education (Without Leaving Home): Think ISM

In business, particularly the spa business, things are always changing, evolving, and moving forward on a day to day basis. What used to be popular or the norm yesterday may no longer be the norm today. So, it is essential that you keep abreast of the latest news, ideas, and methods that are being used in the spa industry today. The best way to do this is to continuously educate yourself as to what is happening in the spa industry, but who has the time?

At the Institute of Spa Management (ISM), you always have the time to learn the latest about spa management and improve your leadership skills through their online learning courses. Whether you are looking to get into the spa industry or are a seasoned professional, ISM has a variety of different management courses that can get you up to speed or help you improve upon your current skill set. The best thing is, you don’t even need to leave home or the office to get this quality education because it is available 24-hours a day, 7-days a week, so you can study at your own pace and on your own terms.

Spa Management: How to Determine Spa Hours of Business

As you know, your spa’s business can ebb and flow from one week to the next. This is especially noticeable after the busy holiday rush. This rollercoaster of high business times and low business times can also fluctuate throughout the week and even hour by hour, so determining the best hours of operation for your spa business can be a tricky task.

Depending on where your spa is located and what the lifestyles of your surrounding client base are can dictate what your spa hours should be. Perhaps you are located in a middleclass neighborhood where most people work during the day. You will probably find that most of your spa business takes place in the evenings or on the weekends. Or you might be in an upper-class area where your business spikes in the morning and during the week due to more flexible client schedules.

You need to keep track of these trends in order to understand who your clients are and what their lifestyles are as related to your spa business. Once you determine your high times and your low times, you can set your spa hours based on these trends in order to increase your profitability.

Institute of Spa Management Meets the Need via Distance Education

The ISM Spa Management Program is offered via self-paced, distance education, allowing students the ability to keep a full-time job and still study towards a rewarding spa industry career. Payment plans and scholarship opportunities are available for all students.

Brooklyn, NY (PRWEB) December 27, 2007 — The ISM Spa Management Program is offered via self-paced, distance education, allowing students the ability to keep a full-time job and still study towards a rewarding spa industry career. Payment plans and scholarship opportunities are available for all students.

Across the spa industry, in North America and around the globe, one of the greatest hurdles is figuring out how to manage clients, revenues and business growth in a competitive industry that is continually shifting, changing and evolving. There simply are not enough qualified spa managers to meet the need, and this very subject was a major topic of discussion at the Global Spa Summit in May, 2007. Offering training via distance education to students worldwide, The Institute of Spa Management is committed to educating the spa industry, one professional at a time.

In 2007, the Institute of Spa Management received more than 9,500 requests for the Spa Management Program curriculum outline; reported full enrollment for August through December, and awarded more than $40,000 in full and partial scholarships.

Abby Cavanaugh, Director of Admissions and Student Services, “It takes a trained business professional to juggle spa operations, marketing, demanding clients and a diverse team of spa professionals. We don’t teach massage therapy; nor will we teach students to be an aesthetician or a skin care therapist. We challenge each management student to be a world class leader, via current management teaching models, theories and processes that are used by MBA graduates and CEO’s all over the globe, but which ISM has customized to meet the unique management needs of the spa industry worldwide. We only teach Spa Management and our expertise becomes our students.”

At the Institute of Spa Management, the organization’s primary goal is to further the spa industry through quality management education and professional training for adults. Information about programs, courses and scholarships is available by visiting http://www.spacollege.org

About Institute of Spa Management

Institute of Spa Management (ISM) offers high quality distance education programs and courses at reasonable prices in a dynamic format that enables learning and knowledge retention. ISM believes that the future of the spa industry belongs to those who treat clients with the highest level of integrity and provide cutting edge services in well run facilities.

Want to Get to Know Your Competitors? Spend the Day in their Spa As a Paying Guest

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer is a saying you should keep in mind when considering your spa’s competition.  You should always be keeping informed of what your competition is doing in order to keep your existing clients from jumping ship and learning new ways to attract new clients.

The best way to stay educated about what your competition is doing is to regularly visit them as a paying customer.  Seeing how they treat their clients and what products or services they are providing firsthand is a great way to gather important information about your competition.

Most successful businesses use secret shoppers to keep informed of what their competition is doing, so your spa should do the same.  You might want to allot money in your monthly budget for these spa site visits and send different employees each month to remain as anonymous as possible.  You can also turn it into a competition for your own employees by rewarding them with the opportunity to getting free spa treatments while at the same time reporting back to you valuable information about what the other spas in your area are up to.