What's Your Spa Queen Bee Role?

Whether you are a solo spa business owner, or you have team, I still see most of you trying to do it all.

As my dad would say, you’ve ended up being the “Chief cook and bottle washer" - which means you’re responsible of practically every aspect in your business. But, if you’re the chief cook in your spa business, why would you want to be the bottle washer as well? Seems like a waste of your hard-earned talent, no?

Mike Michalowitz, the co-founder of Profit First Professionals, coined the concept of the “Queen Bee Role” in business in his book Clockwork. After exploring the hive behaviour of bees, he realized their actions and outcomes offers entrepreneurs a powerful analogy to scale their business easily and with great speed.

What is a Queen Bee?

In a bee colony, the most important role of the worker bees is to take care of and protect the Queen Bee. They do this because the role of the Queen Bee is to lay eggs because if she doesn’t lay enough eggs, the colony will not survive. The health, comfort and safety of the Queen Bee is Priority One of the hive and worker bees does only two things and always in the same order; protect & serve the Queen, then go to their primary job; collecting pollen, making wax, housekeeping, and feeding the drones, larvae and the queen. Worker bees know exactly what their job is, and this system allows the colony to grow quickly and efficiently.

By now, you can probably see how you can overlay this thinking construct to your spa business by creating systems, structure and strategy that protect and support your Queen Bee Roll (QBR) so you are able to scale your growth with less effort.

"The queen bee role is the one role in your business that is generating income; you need to make that the most efficient role."

I want to point out something vital about the Queen Bee role though. You, the spa business owner, are not necessarily the Queen Bee Role. The Queen Bee role is not dependent on a leadership position but is more a set of tasks or systems that are necessary to keep the company going.

The point here is that we need to be very clear about what the queen bee role is so that we can protect it. And by protect it I mean that we have enough time to spend on creating a more efficient organization.

I come across a lot of spa owners who are struggling to know where to put their time and energy and often with that limited time and energy you end up focusing on tasks that aren't critical to the Queen Bee role.

Which brings us to the conversation of TIME.

In the book Clockwork, the step before discussing the Queen Bee roll is Time Analysis. As a spa business coach, when I hear from my clients "I don't have time" I always ask more questions. More often than not, they’re in a habit of prioritizing tasks or projects that aren’t a great use of their time.

How to you determine where your time is going in your spa biz and if those tasks are actually supporting your spa growth? Start with a time audit on yourself and, if have a spa manager have them complete one too. Like with any growth initiative, fixing your time issues starts with analysis to find out “where are we now” so we can create a strategy for “where we want to be” and a clear plan for “how we’re going to get there.”

Mike Michalowitz has a precise method of analyzing your time called the Optimal 4D mix. These are the 4 Tasks (or 4 D's) that take up your time in your business.

• Doing

• Deciding

• Delegating

• Designing

The bulk of your time should be spent in delegating and designing (this is the visionary work you are doing as an entrepreneur), and a small percentage will be spent delegating. But if you find that you are spending most of your time Doing……Can you see why you are frustrated and struggling with trying to get your growth initiatives of the ground and implemented!

If you’re frustrated with lack of time (both in business & your personal life), it’s time to step up your leadership and complete a time audit to find out exactly where you are spending your time. When I did this exercise, I realized I was spending way too much time doing tasks that were not in my zone of genius. And because it was right there in front of me on the page, I understood that I needed to hire more people to do those jobs.

I’m curious - are you aware of your own time and how much of it is spent doing vs delegating, designing and deciding in your spa business? If you're a Solo spa owner…this is even more critical to discern because, by the nature of your business model, much of your time is spent doing. And that means you need a plan to carve out more time for designing, deciding, and delegating so your growth isn’t stalled out.

If you buy the book, there are links to websites that will walk you through doing a time audit. I also recommend using a time tracking app such as Toggl to track each task that you do in your spa business to find out how much time you are spending doing, deciding, delegating and designing in a normal work week.

This whole month I will be focusing on organizing your spa business, but before you start anything…analysis is your first step. Don't put the cart before the horse or you’re just wasting more time!

If you need any help analyzing or organizing your spa business, my team and I can help. Reach out to me, and we can talk about what you are struggling with and how I can best help you.