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See if this sounds familiar. Your esthetics or massage practice has blossomed over the years. In order not to turn away new customers you’ve added employees, expanded services and facilities, and have shelves brimming with fast-selling  retail products. Sales have grown beyond your expectations and everyone you know comments on your spectacular success. This is one fairytale life you have now, or is supposed to be, right?
Privately, when the doors are closed and you’re on that second glass of wine, you know you have had some real problems hectoring you in the wake of all this business growth. Demanding and uncooperative employees, customer service complaints, ominous shortages of operating cash have moved in to spoil your dream of financial and occupational
independence. Worse, with all this, if you’re still servicing a full schedule of clients then you’re facing some long, lonely hours of work and stress. You’ve got it made alright, a nice little prison of your own design!
Probably the bitterest advice I deliver to the spa and salon business owners I coach is the case for giving up treatment work and picking up the reigns of management. The reasoning is simple if unwelcome: It’s your business, it’s under-managed, and it’s never going to improve until you provide the supervision and direction it needs, period. As your business grows even larger your management challenges will intensify and threaten the sustainability of the operation. Sooner or later you’ll have to face this reality and, most likely for the first time, actually learn what your business is about.
 Okay, in all fairness, I know what a terrifying prospect this can be. All manner of grim images run amok in our thoughts. We imagine our sales plummeting, employees running off with long-standing loyal customers, conflict and confrontation, and being strapped with a list of unpleasant daily tasks. The most frequent protest I hear involves dire predictions of lost income. The incredulous client tells me, “If I leave the treatment room I may as well set fire to my business!”
My partner and I, both former estheticians, once believed similarly. Though we were overwhelmed with routine management duties in our busy day spa we absolutely could not imagine retiring our service careers and risking those valuable customers with employees. What finally forced our hand was the realization that no matter how many clients we saw each week, and we saw a lot of them, we could not find a way to increase our own compensation. Sales skyrocketed but additional employees, new facilities costs, and dozens of other expenses outpaced our revenues. We were growing right into bankruptcy. It became clear that we could actually make more money for ourselves with a very small skincare practice, just the two of us, and one receptionist.
It was very, very tempting to opt for this reverse direction. But a weekend of some deep personal and company examination produced the insightful revelations which changed our careers, our finances, and our lives. Let me will share with you what has become my signature argument for re-engineering the way you view and work in your own business.
The Fear: “ If I stop performing services we won’t make enough money to stay in business.”
The Truth: Yes, you will make enough money. In fact you should make more, in time. You’ve convinced yourself that your treatment work is critical to company cash flow but this is only true because you’ve permitted it to be so. What most of us fail to realize is that while we’re laboring over a packed client schedule in a closed room, supposedly making money, our unsupervised employees are throwing it away at more than twice the rate we earn it. I’m referring to the receptionist who fails to convince new call-in prospects to schedule an appointment. How many times a day might this happen? Do they alienate repeat customers with personal phone calls, long holds, or lackluster attention? Are they accurate in their sales transactions, show up on time, or quit frequently? Have they even been properly trained to sell your services or retail products? All of this is extremely expensive to your company and it’s happening every business hour.
Are your service employees’ retail and service sales up to par or lagging far behind your own? Do they have client retention problems and become bored and unmotivated when their schedules are spotty? Is there employee resistance to attending staff meetings, chronic tardiness in arriving to work and working on time? Are you giving away more and more services to customers due to quality complaints? Very expensive stuff here. It points to the fact that your business is suffering from invisible and inconsistent management. We all know that dysfunctional families are often the product of inattentive and permissive parents. Your business family is subject to the same unhappy consequences when leadership and direction is thin or non-existent. Try if you will but you’ll never overtake these income losses or repair customer service damage by working harder in a treatment room. The numbers are against you.
The Fear: “What if an employee steals all my regular clients?”
 The Truth: They’re probably hard at work on this already. While your busy in that little room fussing over your customers ignored and under-trained staff are dreaming up how much better their spa or salon will be than yours is now. Somehow they think they can run one of these operations better than you can (and there might be some truth here.) Even good employees will not hesitate to dip into your client list to seed their own business so why wouldn’t one who hasn’t seen a solid future with yours? A single lost client is potentially worth many thousands of dollars in future sales and new customer referrals. But if you’re too busy tending to your little flock you won’t see what’s happening to the herd.
The Fear: “If I don’t know how to manage my business I’ll just make matters worse by barging into it.”
The Truth: You’re at least partly right in this thinking. A sudden “take charge” attitude without the benefit of some management and sensitivity training may indeed create a mass exodus of staff and clients. Overbearing managers are often high in employee suspicion, weak in business skills, and intolerant. Some spa and salon owners vent their resentment of managing employees through the application of rigid company rules and dire consequences for infractions. Is this you or someone you have worked for?
 The Solution? The first step is in recognizing the considerable rewards of managing your business well. You, my partner, and I did not become service professionals because we were excited about eventually supervising people and facilities full time. In fact most of us in the spa and salon industry are not business inclined at all. We’re in love with service work not administration. Many of us are independent minded and have a particular aversion to being bossed by or becoming the boss of others.
But businesses are investments and, believe it or not, have one over-riding and primary purpose: to make money. This does not imply a narrow-minded and avaricious lust for operating profits only. But you must recognize that a business that is not profitable and suffers from internal struggles and quality consistency is not a business worth owning. What you have is a crushing and underpaid job that will not increase in value or decrease in headaches.
Real freedom comes when you own a business that pays you well for being a great business person. You, the owner, are supposed to make your income from business profits, not from doing the work employees can do that generate those profits. We we’re scared to death when we initially left the treatment room for a new career in managing our day spa. We had problems, made mistakes (lots of them!), and hated some of our responsibilities. The rewards however have been enormous. Much of management is now delegated to home-grown supervisors which leaves us with time to work on big-picture projects, improve service quality, and network with industry leaders who have helped to make our company famous. We enjoy financial independence, own a business with real equity and brand value, and are getting back some of those long hours invested in our spa over the years. None of this could have been possible without a commitment to assuming lead roles in company management.
While there are numerous skills you’ll have to master as business manager you should begin with a transitional plan in order to have the time and resources needed to get the process moving. Consider the following outline as a potential model for your own career metamorphosis.
 1. Start with clear, personally valued goals and a solid business plan. Great destinations begin with careful planning. But you first have to know what you really want to accomplish. Is it a certain amount of personal income? Would you like to reduce your working hours? Do you want to improve the quality and cooperation of your staff? Does national media attention regarding your business and services appeal to you? Whatever it is that motivates you to alter your career activity be sure it inspires genuine passion within you, and definitely sweat the details!
The second and equally important component of your career transition is its financial feasibility. In order to get this information you’ll need (and should have anyway) a business plan. A good place to begin would be the preparation of a financial statement, the document that lists all of your company’s revenues (sales), and its various expenses. You’ll probably need the assistance of a book keeper or accountant to produce your statement, and plenty of time to dig up scattered purchase receipts and sales records. Your financial statement will show you how much it costs to run your business and what, if anything, remains after its various expenses have been met. Included in these business expenses must be a salary to support you. Unless you can get someone to manage your business free of charge you have to add the cost of hiring this person into your business budget.
Begin by determining what you need in order to meet your personal living expenses and mark your salary requirement at that point. You’ve probably been taking draws from your business revenues already and these draws will be converted into the funding for your manager’s salary. If this formula appears to leave the business short of its ability to pay you and cover other expenses you must then examine your operating costs and search for ways to reduce them. Are your wholesale costs for professional supplies too high, and can you reduce them? Is your employee commission structure excessive? Can you learn how other businesses successfully hire and keep people on a lower scale? Do you use strict treatment room economy in terms of efficient service timing and product usage? Are your service prices too low, retail product costs eating up profits, and sales in general what they could be? Now you are beginning to understand the vital importance of having a full-time manager on the job and the critical value of their work. And you thought all you needed was a clone of yourself in the treatment room!
2. Identify exactly what you will and will not do in your role as business manager. Don’t try to take on too much too soon, especially those tasks you know you are not prepared to handle effectively. Will you be the principal trainer of new employees? Do you plan to manage the retail activity in your company? Are you primarily responsible for recruiting, interviewing, and hiring personnel? Who handles the banking, staff scheduling, and marketing needs of the company? Is it you? It’s especially important that everyone’s role and responsibilities on your team is well defined, especially yours. Ambiguities and assumptions lead to confusion, conflict, and poor morale.
 3. Plan to phase out of treatment work in stages. You have developed important personal relationships with your clients over the years. These same customers are going to express some anxiety and possibly a little displeasure over your change in professional status. This must be handled with the utmost sensitivity. When we were making this transition after 15 years in the treatment room we experienced some difficulty convincing certain clients in getting to accept another esthetician as their new service professional. We discovered that by extending our relationship into other venues (suggesting that we meet sometime for a coffee or lunch) the client was much more amenable to switching estheticians.
• Try reducing your service schedule by 25% in the beginning. Plan to transfer your most recently acquired clients first, those who have been with you for a year or less, or who visit the business infrequently. These relationships are not as well established as others on your schedule and will be easier to place with someone else. In 6 months scale back by another 25% using a similar formula until you feel secure enough to eliminate client work altogether. Allow at least a year to complete this transition, especially if you have a large clientele. You’ll also need enough competently trained employees to support this process. It is extremely I important that you announce your upcoming change in professional status with clients a few months before you begin. Give them time to adjust to this idea and be sure you frame the change as a necessary step toward maintaining quality assurance and improved customer service, which it is!
• Raise your personal service prices. Your limited service schedule will make it more difficult for remaining clients to schedule with you. Increased demand warrants higher prices (yes, even when it’s you who made the available appointments scarce.) Higher prices will also decrease some demand for your personal service, and compensate you properly for management attention diverted toward treatment work. Think of the celebrity hairdressers you’ve read about; do you believe they charge average prices?
 4. Enlist the support of your staff to assist you in building better management. Call a meeting of your entire team and share with them the details of your plan as you know it thus far. Tell them why you are assuming the role of manager, what the company benefits will be, and how they can assist you the process. Ask for feedback and input about what they feel are the priority needs for the company. You’ll learn a lot from this exercise and win considerable cooperation from employees who see that management is concerned for their opinion and needs. Ask for their patience and support but don’t grovel or beg for forgiveness over anticipated mistakes. Leadership is about strength and confidence, even when you are temporarily short on it. Don’t telegraph your fear and novice skill level.
5. Get help! Enroll in business management classes and seminars, talk with owners of businesses not related to your own industry, read books on leadership and management. All of these are amazingly helpful resources in your quest for new skills and strategies. Take communication courses such as Dale Carnegie, buy an Anthony Robbins personal motivation and achievement tape program, and attend trade shows that feature business presentations. There is a tremendous wealth of useful information readily available to you and you won’t need an MBA to understand it.
Even armed with all this information you will still be vulnerable to the forces of competition, the economy, and the human factor: employees. You’ll experience substantial difficulties along the way, and that particular loneliness all business managers are familiar with. You can no longer expect to be a seamless part of the staff (employers never really are) and may not be invited to after-work cocktail hour anymore. Your power in the lives of employees will be more evident than ever and even the greatest of bosses are still subject to a little private criticism. Accept this gracefully and never respond by deliberately isolating yourself from your staff. You, the manager, have to be “perfect”, a great role model, and the absolute standard of quality and professionalism in your company.
 In Napoleon Hill’s book, Keys To Success, he tells us, “The Law of Compensation ensures that everything you do will bring you some sort of result of the same kind. To benefit from this, you must always render the most service you are capable of, with the best attitude, and you must do so regardless of your immediate compensation, even if it appears you will receive no immediate compensation.” There are tremendous rewards ahead if you are as successful in managing your business as you have been in starting and building it. You can do this! And, if what you have been doing there has felt more like a trap than a golden opportunity, then your next appointment needs to be with your business advisor and not the 5:00 facial and brow wax. Good luck!
(Editors note: Keys To Success by Napoleon Hill. A Plume publication ISBN 0-452—27281-5) |
