Spa Business Stress: Sometimes It's a Choice

This month I’ve been talking about spa owner stress, how to manage it, mitigate it, and how to put it in perspective because there will be stress in your business. It’s unrealistic to expect that everything is going to be smooth sailing all the time.

What you can do to manage how much stress you have to deal with is to organize & optimize your spa business with systems so that you are keeping your stress level at a minimum. By working on the logical structure & progressions of your guest experience and spa staff, common operational problems are kept to a minimum.

It’s very natural for business owners to have their ups and downs. There are times when you’re flying high, and there are times where you may be questioning your decision even to be an entrepreneur.

In my opinion, you have two different kinds of stress in your spa business; planned and unplanned stress. Today I want to help you understand that sometimes you have a choice when it comes to your stress level in entrepreneurship.

Planned Stress – This is a situation where you have planned a growth initiative such as opening or expanding your spa business, hiring team members, or bringing in a new product line or equipment, and although it may be exciting and fun, it will also be stressful. But the key word here is planned, and one of the reasons that most spa business owners stress level is so high during these growth initiatives is that they do not give themselves enough time to plan, research, create a strategy, and map out their action steps.

There is also the planning that goes into your leadership of this growth initiative. How are you going to handle all this change and growth?

As you can see, if you are jumping into something too quickly and without planning and how you are going to implement the initiative, it can come back to bite you in the butt. And if this is the first time you are working on a growth initiative, start documenting your steps so you’re creating the system while you are in the process of implementation, so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time you do another one. This method is called “capturing the system”.

Unplanned Stress – Unplanned stress is part of life. And it’s definitely part of being an entrepreneur! But if you feel like you are continually dealing with the same issues over & over again in your spa business (you can’t get your social media strategy or posting schedule organized, or most of your new hires have been duds) it is chosen stress.

You may not want to hear this, but if you are choosing to fly by the seat of your pants, you are choosing to be stressed. I get that some people do not like to be locked into things because they want to “be flexible” and be able to pivot in their business. But I’m here to give you the honest truth: if you do not have a system for any processes in your business, you are simply choosing to be more stressed than you need to be. This has nothing to do with business flexibility. Those that are able to pivot successfully do so with a great deal of strategy and planning.

The bottom line here is that if you do not want to be stressed, you need to be more organized, and you do that with systems.

A few years ago, I wrote a blog post about something called The Transition Curve where I talk about the concept of a transition curve. This comes from the book “Double Double” by Cameron Herald, where he writes about this business & leadership pattern - a bit of a hero’s journey, if you will.

In the first part of the entrepreneurial journey, you ascend the hill with “uninformed optimism” where everything seems amazing and fun! But when you get to the top, you start to realize that this is a lot harder than what you thought it would be and have entered into “informed pessimism”; you now know enough to be concerned. At this point, you start to descend the curve (this part is oh-so-stressful!) and about halfway down you hit a “Crisis of Meaning” and questioning all your decisions. It’s at this place you’re faced with a choice; you can create systems in areas of your business that are creating stress to make your life easier, or you can continue to chose to do what you are doing, bottom out, and “crash and burn”.

Sometimes life throws chaos your way, and you’ll need to step up your self awareness and leadership to deal with it. But when it comes to unplanned stress in your spa business, by organizing & optimizing with systems you have a choice of whether it needs to be chaos at all. And with planned stress, you can choose to be stressed for growth, but it’s all about how you want to manage that stress (remember: radical self care during those times)

If you happen to be nearing (or in) the crash and burn phase of your spa business and you’re reconsidering your approach to stress, please contact me. I can help you design the systems you need, or my team & I can create and manage them for you, including Social Media Management. You do not need to do this alone…we’re here to help!