Spa Staffing Preparations You Should Be Making This Fall

For many spa business owners, September is a quiet time of year, and if you are busy in the summer, your strategic fall planning is often forgotten and/or left to the last minute. If this is your reality, you really need to prioritize creating a plan for seasonal business success.

Last week I talked about preparing your fall spa business analysis before any planning happens and using the SWOT worksheet to map out your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities & threats. Did you get the worksheet? Email me if you didn’t.

In your overarching spa business strategy, you will have several categories to plan for, but today, we are focusing on your preparing your team and two common situations that often come up for spa owners in September.

1. The Situation - You need to hire guest services & service providers to support client booking levels.

The Plan - If you don’t have a spa recruiting system, capture it while you’re in the process of doing so. Here’s what you'll need:

1. Job Descriptions - Lay out the job description of the employee on paper, so both you and your staff know what the expectations of the job. The last thing you want if for your team members to be making their own job descriptions!

2. Job ads – Use your job description and summarize it into an ad.

3. A way to track where you’re posting & what you’re spending – This can be as easy as creating a spreadsheet to list of all the places that you have posted your ad and the usernames and passwords of any recruiting websites. Now, the next time you need to recruit you will already have everything captured, and if you have a spa manager or lead esthetician that you want to delegate this job to, it easy to pass it off. 

4. An Interview Process

   1. The Phone interview to screen candidates

   2. The Meet & Greet Interview to make sure the potential candidate will be a good fit

   3. The Practical Interview if you are hiring a service provider

   4. The Job offer meeting to go over the contract with the new team member

   5. And, then you need a staff training system!

I know it seems a lot, but when you create this once, it’s easily repeatable!

2. The Situation - Spa bookings slow down in Sept & your staff get nervous about job/paycheck security

The Plan - Start your marketing plan now! This can't wait. And consider a bounce back offer to August clients to come back again in September.

For those of you who are not sure about offering discounts, it is essential to remember that if you want more traffic coming through your spa business in September, a bounce back coupon given in August to be used only for September is a fantastic tool to get them in. 

Another Plan - Organize a fall spa in-service. We used to have in-services all the time when I was a lifeguard in my late teens. Every month we came together as a team for training, so we were all brushed up on our skills. Monthly training isn’t always possible, but you may want to weave it into your monthly staff meetings and alternate between practical training & business training. If you know your spa slows down in the fall, turn lemons into lemonade and use this time wisely to polish up the guest experience. It builds team culture, improves skill, and establishes trust in your leadership when you provide this type of team support. Ultimately spa in-services serve your business outcomes when it comes to sales, pre-booking, client retention and average ticket, to name just a few.

Block Your Admin Time

So, whether September is quiet, busy, or a little bit of both, there are lots of opportunities for you to be able to take advantage of whichever scenario you might be experiencing in your spa business. I would encourage you to take some time on your next admin day to use this new knowledge and the information you gathered from your business analysis and start planning for your teams fall strategy. Don't want to wait until things have gone sideways before you try to make any changes to your business systems - that’s just choosing to be stressed out.

If you need any help with your fall team strategy, please contact me.  Wherever you are at in your spa business, my team and I can help get you started so you can take your system and run with it, or we can create, implement, and manage your system for you.