How to Find More Time to Lead Your Spa Business

How to find more time to lead your spa business: whether you’re a team leader or a solo spa owner, there is a 99.9% chance that you are crunched for time… to the point that it’s taken over your life!

If the time it takes to run your spa business is dominating (or has dominated in the past) any or all of the following:

• Time with loved ones
• Time for yourself
• Time spent meeting your business goals and improving on existing processes

...Then drop what you’re doing: this is the guidance you’ve been looking for.

Why is it Vital For Both Yourself and Your Biz to Find More Time to Lead Your Spa Business

As a former spa business owner myself, I’ve been in your exact shoes: I, too, have felt that I was spending so much time keeping my spa business afloat that I had no time to finish my growth initiatives, no time to spend with my family, and no time to rest and recharge.

The result? If kept up year after year, you’ll not only run your business into the ground… you’ll run your health and emotional well-being into the ground as well. (And trust me: people aren’t kidding when they say, “Health is wealth!”)

When that happens, you’ll find that you lose your spark due to being the bottleneck in your biz. So many of my coaching clients come to me at their wits’ end because they have run headlong into burnout and now don’t feel equipped to dig themselves out of it.

Why Leading is Your Spa Business is Different Than Running Your Spa (and Why Knowing the Difference Matters)

I’ll preface my tips with this: these are not productivity hacks. This is not advice for how to get more done in your day. On the contrary, I will be outlining how less is often more… and how leading your business means equipping both yourself and those you work with with the tools to function independently so that you can dedicate more time to the long-term growth initiatives, self-care, and family time that matters.

How to Find More Time to Lead Your Spa Business? Start With Getting Out of the Treatment Room

I know, I know: as service providers we love being hands-on with our clients. However, know that, if you’re still in the treatment room more than once a week, you need to make a decision and a plan to extract yourself from it.

Why? Because if you’re in the treatment room you’re not focused on growing your spa business. You aren’t focused on marketing, or hiring, or sales; you’re not focused on supporting your team or refining your existing processes. Instead, you’re the inadvertent bottleneck with no time for admin tasks… which need to fall to you as the leader!

While most of us spa owners feel the most connected when we’re in the treatment room with our clients, the only way to reverse entrepreneurial burnout, grow your business, and support your staff is to digest this hard-to-swallow pill and start being honest about how many hours you really have in a week. (And where they should be spent!)

Take Advantage of the Clockwork 4D Exercise

As one of my favourite how-to books for entrepreneurs, “Run Like Clockwork”, showcases, the Clockwork 4D exercise forces business owners to look at the four D’s that our time is divided into.

These D’s are:

• Doing
• Deciding
• Delegating
• Designing

Now, if you analyze how much of your time is going into each of these four sections and see that the bulk of your time is dedicated to “Doing” and “Deciding” vs. “Delegating” and “Designing” then you know you have some serious work to do!

(In fact, I still return to this exercise when I’m feeling squeezed for time. It frequently reality-checks me and helps me to decide how to better reallocate my time.)

Set Up Your Spa Systems

As we chat about in my private spa owners-only Facebook group, Spa Business Mastery, standardizing your systems, protocols, and communication is your key to success.

Common inclusions for this are:

• Services
• Selling
• Guest experience
• Communication

The best part? All of these can be documented in an operations manual! Versus having this information stored in your head, requiring you to be hands-on 24/7, documenting these systems, protocols, and communication via an operations manual better keeps all those involved with your business more informed and more accountable.

Are You Ready to Implement These Tips for How to Find More Time to Lead Your Spa Business?

Leadership is a position that you have to choose daily.

After all, not making a decision about your lack of time is also a decision!

If you know it’s time to buck up and make a decision about what needs to be restructured in order to better lead your spa biz, reach out to me today for help getting started!