Spa Events in the News

Jaya Schillinger
small business coach
Roundtable 1: Key Operational Challenges of the Day Spa Director and Manage

While this session was slated as being presented by Jaya Schillinger, Douglas Preston of Preston, Inc. did most of the talking. Topics planned to be discussed included: Effective leadership and communication, Employee recruitment, Front desk performance, Customer service and quality control, Personal time management and task prioritizing. However, the first slide was never finished. The entire 2+ hour discussion focused on employee recruitment and hiring - Challenge 1: Finding Quality Staff and Challenge 2 Interviewing Effectively (what he wants to hear from a candidate and what he doesn't want to hear, hypothetical questions to ask, etc.). He didn't get to Challenge 3- Negotiating Compensation. Again the acoustics were poor. Questions asked from the floor could not be heard - only the answers. The material covered was very good, but perhaps it was covered in too much depth. There was a lot of audience dissatisfaction and frustration with the pace of the discussion and the difficulty in hearing.

George Lopez
Director of Operations for Natural Resources Spa Consulting
Creating a Spa Experience

George talked about how each spa has a story to tell and this story is how each spa differentiates itself from others. The story starts when the client first sees an ad for the spa. By the time the client enters the spa, he/she should have "experienced" the spa and its story 3 times (ad, phone, exterior). He talked about developing a spa concept, knowing your niche and integrating the look with the products. He encouraged the use of focus groups to give you feedback and encouraged spas to take action on that feedback. He talked about placement of retail items (display what you want to move on a table to the right of the entry with the items lined up with a sign showing the product information and price). He talked about operational flow, back of the house movement, the use of the elements and feng shui, creating a menu of services (the reader should be relaxed just by reading the description of the service) and exceptional customer service.

Skip Williams
Vice President in charge of Spa Development for Resources & Development and Author of The Reluctant Spa Director and the Mission Dream
Roundtable 3: Starting Up A New Day Spa (The ABCs of A Smart Plan)

This was the last presentation I attended. Skip opened with the "Norwegian Wood Spa," an entertaining medley of Beatles songs that set the challenges of starting a new day spa to music. Skip took steps to avoid the acoustical problems experienced in earlier talks by asking people with questions to step up to a microphone to ask them. He laid out an opening process - from start to grand opening - and gave a rough time line on what needed to be done when and how it would affect the profitability of the spa - business plan, financing, finding a location, design the space, construction, marketing, design the menu, select product lines, purchase equipment, write employee manual and SOPs, select employees, training, customer service concepts, install equipment, install technology, more training, grand opening, continuous analysis and improvement and much more. Articles containing the contents of this presentation can be found HERE (part 1) and HERE (part 2).

A few words of wisdom from Skip:
"If you can't make money, you can't help anybody."
"Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard."
"Opening a spa is like aligning the planets."
"Turn art (spa creation) into science (repeatable, business)"
and from Peter Drucker
"Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work."