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Hey Daniela here. And I am so excited to share that right now for the entire month of November we are offering the absolute best deal to join Growth Factor Fundamentals that we are going to offer in the next year. Our annual price is discounted to 797, $797 for the entire year which is essentially four months for free. You get coaching, community and over 50 done for you resources plus so much more help you build a systems based business. Go to auto aesthetics.com There's a big announcement bar there right up at the top and it's going to get you all of the details. We cannot wait to welcome you into Growth Factor Fundamentals. Hello my dears and welcome back to Spa Marketing Made Easy. I am Daniela Warner and if you are new here, welcome. We love to talk about all of the things related to running a systems based spa that supports the life that you want to live. And today we're talking about what you need to do as the CEO in Q4. So think of it as a checklist of sorts because who doesn't love a good checklist, right? Okay. So I know that Q4 is a very busy time. You're running promotions, you're focusing your attention on revenue and that you should. Q4 Revenue should be priority number. This is typically the most profitable quarter for spas and you need to have your foot on the gas pedal when it comes to revenue generation. But here's the deal. If you don't do these things in Q4, there can be serious consequences in the coming year. Consequences that can cost you a lot of time and money. So don't start the new year in complete chaos. Don't be reactive instead of proactive. Don't spend your time putting out fires instead of preventing them. And don't lose precious momentum that could propel you towards your goals. So today I want to give you a deep dive tactical checklist for the work that you need to do before December 31st. Okay. I'm going to call it your November checklist because it's November. But the reality is is this is really what you should be looking at between October and and December. Okay. Just get all of this done before the new year begins. So first up is your team performance reviews. Okay. I typically recommend doing these in October and I actually recommend that you do all of your reviews at once. So when we're teaching the hiring and onboarding and development process in Growth Factor, we look at bringing somebody on so they have their during their probationary period, which is the first 90 days we're doing a 30 day review, a 60 day review and a 90 day review, that's going to place them into whatever pay band is appropriate for that year. And then at the review time in October, that's when you'll determine if they'll be moving up or, or as I recommend, also have the ability to move down if they're not performing in their role, if they're not hitting their metrics. Okay, so why do it all at once instead of on their anniversary? A lot of practices will say, well, we're going to review everybody on their one year anniversary. If you do that and think about it, even if you have a team of just 5, the productivity of having to go in and do a review five times a year is it's going to affect your budget, it's going to affect your timing. So there's a lot of benefits to be doing this all at once. You're going to be able to identify trends that you're seeing among providers. You're going to be able to be very clear with your payroll numbers and calculating your budget for the coming year. Okay. It makes strategic planning so much easier when you understand what pay band everybody is going to be at for the coming year. Now, when I talk about doing a review, it's not just, hey, you're doing great, here's a raise, right? No, these are strategic discussions about performance, growth, alignment and your business goals. And so what we need to do as CEOs, as leaders, as founders of our companies, we, we've got to give the feedback to our team to help them get better. And I know a lot of times we don't like to give critical feedback. It feels uncomfortable, it feels just not good. I was talking with a Growth factor member and she said, you know, I have someone on my team that cries a lot and it makes me hesitant to give her feedback because I don't want to make her cry. And it was super relatable, right? Because we become really close with our employees, we become really close with our team. If you're building a positive company culture. And so when we're giving critical feedback to people that we deeply care about and love and consider family, in a lot of situations, it, it's hard, right? So I am going to quote Brene Brown who says, clear is kind. I think that's a really, really important statement to remember. Clear is kind. So whenever you're giving any type of critical feedback to your team, there's a few things that I like to keep in mind. So when I'm giving the feedback it's, hey, I believe in you so much and I believe in your capabilities and your potential, and that's why we brought you on the team. And I'm going to be giving you some feedback from my perspective of things that I see that, number one, you're doing incredibly well. I'm going to also share where I see some areas of opportunity for your growth, of what you can grow into to reach your full potential. And please know that everything that I'm saying, I'm saying with love to help make you better, to help you grow, and to help reach your goals. So we're wanting to really set the tone so that they're not, you know, taking it in that personal way. Now. I also just kind of side note here. I think it's also very important for the staff to be able to have the opportunity to provide feedback for leadership. If there's blind spots that you may have or ways that you're communicating now, it doesn't mean that you always have to act on that feedback, but it's really important to create a culture where feedback is welcome and encouraged in the proper channels. Right. And when done with the desire to move the business and the team into a growth state. Right. So super, super important there. So when we are doing our reviews, we also want to make sure that we have objective data. Okay? So we want to understand their retention rates. We want to understand rebooking average ticket retail to service. If you are doing any kind of customer satisfaction or like counting the number of reviews that mention that provider by name, you want to have that in there as well. If you're doing front desk, like, what are the KPIs for the front desk? Is it booking efficiency? Is it customer service feedback? Is it administrative accuracy? Is it answering the phone by the third ring? What are the things that we're looking at? And for the managers, what do they have ownership of? Okay, so is it team performance metrics? Is it operational efficiency? Is it resourcefulness? We're looking at these particular things. And again, you want to have these outlined on your growth plan for your providers. I was talking a little bit about pay bands earlier. And when we set these up, when we set up how we're structuring how to pay your staff, we have different categories. Like, our esthetician growth plan is a junior esthetician, an esthetician and a lead. And there's requirements under each of those categories of what the KPIs are and the other requirements for that particular role. And it's going to give you a pay range that falls into that category. Okay. So it's making it very structured and objective. Okay. So really important thing that your staff knows what's expected from them in advance. And yes, I recommend doing reviews, like formalized reviews in October. But I also recommend meeting with your team, in short one on ones on a quarterly basis so you can give them feedback of where they are. You can give them insight as to, hey, if you're wanting to get into this next band, then here's the things that you want to focus on and how can I support you to reach your specific goals? Okay, so really, really important there that we're creating a continuous culture and environment of support and growth. Okay. So again, what should they continue doing? What should they start doing, what should they stop doing? What are the goals for them, what's going on in their, in their life? We want to understand all of those things. And then you're to take that and you're going to choose if it makes sense to give them a raise. Now one thing that's really important is that there are set bands, right? Like I'm not going to become a millionaire being a barista at Starbucks, right? So we have to look at like what is the role and what is expected. And here is the set band for the hourly rate. And if you're wanting to generate additional revenue, here's the ways that you can do that by contributing to the company's growth in this way. Okay? So we want to make sure that compensation and how to get to those compensation levels are clearly communicated from the hiring to the onboarding, to the quarterly check ins, to the actual reviews. Okay. That is going to make your life so much easier. Okay, so what do you do if a team member is not doing great? What if you realize that what got you here won't get you there and you have a team member who is maybe not performing as they should. Maybe they're pretty good, but they're not great. Maybe they show up, but they don't go above and beyond. Maybe they require constant management instead of taking ownership. You cannot afford to carry dead weight and you've got to have a players in every position. Okay? So your team and I, this is something my husband always says. I know it's a lot of people say this, but you're only as strong as your weakest link, right? So we've got to make sure that we are developing our people into their full potential and we've got to make sure that we are giving that feedback for growth. Now this doesn't mean that everybody has to be perfect. We all have room for improvement and growth, but we've got to be committed to that. We can't be apathetic. Okay? So I know this is really hard, especially if you have like a personal relationship and genuinely care about this person. But you've got to have that boundary where you can say, right now I'm wearing my friend hat and right now I'm wearing my CEO hat. And these are my expectations as a CEO. And this is, you know, we're always going to be friends and I'm going to, you know, keep that friendship over here. But when I'm wearing this hat, this is the feedback that I have to give. Okay? Now, super important to document everything. All right? You want to make sure that all of the conversations that you're having, good and bad, are documented. This is really important for future conversations that you're going to have with that team member or in case anything unfortunate comes up and there is some sort of conflict. Okay. All right. So let's kind of transition from the team reviews and the budgetary advantages that it gives you from understanding what your payroll is going to be to financial planning and tax strategy. And this is something that you should be sitting down with your cpa. I talk to my CPA every October, November. We do an estimate of tax liability. Now this is important that your ce, your CPA is involved in this. So you may have had a really incredible year and increased profit significantly. You may have had a down year and decreased profit significantly. You may have had changes in your household income. You may have crossed a threshold where it's now time to transition and take an S Corp election. Rather than staying a single member llc, you may need to take some sort of tax strategy like introducing a 401k plan or bringing your children on as employees and paying them. So there's a lot of different things that your CPA should be connecting with you, sharing this is what your projected tax liability is going to be. And I also like to understand what your tax percentage is estimated to be for the coming year. So we always teach profit first when it comes to your cash flow management. And the benchmarks that we Talk about are 40% payroll, 30% operations, 15% tax, 15% percent profit. These are very different. These are guidelines, right? So if you are a wax studio and you are an anti aging studio, you're going to have very different operational expenses, right? So keep in, keep that in mind. But the kind of hard rule of thumb is Never go above 40% payroll. Your operations, your Profit and your tax liability are going to shift based on your niche, based on the location that you're in, and based on your personal household income. But those percentages should be given to you every single year by your cpa. And if you're wondering, like, okay, my operational expenses are out of hand, go through your P and L, look at what are nice to haves and what are need to haves. We did a big audit last year with everything happening with AI and really taking a good look at the softwares that we were using. We switched over our email software and saved $10,000 a year. I mean, that was an incredible. That was worth my time to be able to look at that and go through the P and L and make the shift in the software, which, yes, it's a pain. Anytime that you have to shift software, you go and cry for a little bit and you're like, oh my gosh, this is such a bigger project than I anticipated. But once you get through it and get it done, saves you money and saves you time ultimately. I mean, it did for us. Like, the software we're using now is a million times easier than what we were using before and less expensive. Okay, then we're going to. When you're doing that financial planning, doing the projections, the percentages, all of that with your cpa, then you're using that to kind of set your goals. Are you going to shift your profit margin goals a little bit? Like, what are your goals for the year? I also, if you really want to get into this, you look at your kind of internal advisory team, which I consider to be your cpa, your financial advisor, and your attorney. And if you can get them all on a zoom call together and talk about your personal goals, talk about the goals of the business. I always set the goals of the business based off of what I need to pay myself for the year. And that is based off of the financial goals that I have for my household. Right. So getting everybody in the room and getting people that are smarter than me in these areas can really help you to make sure that you're making the right choices for your business. That brings us to your. Your pricing strategy and profitability. Okay, so we have this document called the Cost of Treatment and Profitability Tracker. It's an incredible document. A lot of our growth factor members are like, this spreadsheet changed my life. And what it does is just really help you to get an understanding of the profitability of each service so that you can make database decisions around how you should be pricing your services. And which ones you should be focusing on promoting throughout the year. Now here's the thing. You can't just do this once and set it and forget it. You get increases in your prices every single year. We're seeing that a lot this year, right? Some vendors have even increased multiple times throughout the year. So if you are not taking a look at that and increasing, you know, adjusting what is your consumable cost and then adjusting payroll, right? If you do choose to give some of your providers raises, you're going to have to adjust that in your cost of treatment and profitability tracker. And just a general rule of thumb is that we want to be increasing 2 to 5% every single year in our prices once your prices are set appropriately with the appropriate margins just to be able to keep up with inflation. So we want to ensure that we're adjusting consumable cost, that we're adjusting payroll cost, and that we're also adjusting for inflation. I think it's great to do this once a year, right? It's easy, it's predictable. People don't like uncertainty. And so when you have the ability to say, okay, it's January, here's our updated menu of services and prices, you know, it's. And when it's just a minimal price increase the 2 to 5%, we don't have to make this huge announcement about it. I mean, I don't think that Starbucks or Target will send you an email and let you know about their price increase when it's, you know, not this significant amount. Okay. If you are increasing a significant amount, then, you know, I just prefer the rip the band aid off, do it all at once, right? Instead of like increase, increase, increase, increase, just do it all at once. Give your clients advance notice, right? Send an email, do a post on social media, have your front desk announce it, have a signage up there, you know, get clear on your messaging on how you want to position that increase. Did you move to a new location? Have you invested in new equipment? What are you doing? What is the purpose for increasing the pricing? I believe in honoring the appointments that are already booked at the existing price, which is why we want to give notice, right? So if somebody's already booked and already on the calendar, you don't you want to give notice that like, hey, the price is going to be going up, but if they're there for that month, then honor the price that it was, you know, before package holders, you want to grandfather those in, right? If they purchase the package already, you're going to honor the price of that and a cool thing that you can do is do a price increase promotion. So if you're going to be increasing the prices in January, you can be talking about it, but then do like a package promotion or something along those lines to get people to purchase at the lower price. All right, next up on our Q4 checklist is deciding if this is a growth year or a sustainability sustain year for you. Okay. A growth year is when you're actively scaling. You're. You're heavily investing in marketing, you're hiring new team members, you might be expanding your space, you might be increasing, you know, your service offerings. You are pushing hard on revenue growth. Okay. Your profit margins may be a little tighter because you're investing into expansion. Growth years require more of everything. Cash, energy, risk tolerance, more systems capacity. Right. If you're planning a growth year, you've got to be prepared for the intensity that comes with it. Now, a sustained year is when you're optimizing what you've already built. You're not necessarily pushing hard for, like, huge revenue increases, but you're focused on improving profit margins, tightening operations, developing your team, strengthening your foundation. You might be catching your breath after a big growth year, and you need to really make sure that you didn't grow too fast. Okay. It's a very common problem. As entrepreneurs, we have this, like, hustle mentality and we want to grow, grow, grow because it's exciting, it's a high. Right. Feels good to have that level of growth. And it doesn't feel normal to kind of go inside and streamline things and clean things up and tighten things up. But sustained years are not failures, and they're not boring. They are very strategic. And sometimes they are the smartest thing that you can do to solidify your foundation before the next year. Okay, so how do you decide? Well, operationally, you look at like, are my systems solid? Can they handle more volume? If I added 20% new clients tomorrow, would my operations hold up or would they fall apart financially? Do you have the cash reserves to invest in growth? Growth requires a lot of upfront investment. Right. You've got to invest in ads, which can take a couple of months before you really figure out what is working for you. So if you're cash strapped, pushing for growth might create a crisis. Your team capacity. Can your current team handle more clients or your location capacity as well? Right. If you need to hire, do you have the infrastructure to onboard and train new employees effectively? Personal capacity, what's going on with you? Right. In your personal life as well? Do you have the mental and emotional energy for a growth year. Are you in a season where you're burned out, you're tired, you're caring for a parent, you have small children at home, right? And so pushing for an aggressive growth here could just be a recipe for disaster. Care for yourself. You are your business's greatest asset. Okay? You also want to understand what's happening in the market, right? So is there an opportunity for expansion or is the market saturated? Are there economic factors that you need to consider? Now, once you make this decision, then everything else falls into place. Your marketing budget, your hiring plans, your infrastructure investments, they all flow from whether this is a growth year or a sustained year. Okay? And there is not a right or wrong answer. You can have sustained years for five years in a row. Nothing wrong with that. Okay? Are you going to grow as fast? No. But you are building a business around the life that you want to live. Okay? So really ensure that you are building something that allows you to be the best version of yourself, to be the best leader for that business. Now, once you have decided if you are having a growth year or a sustained year, then we want to map out our marketing. Okay? So get an annual marketing calendar. Are you doing monthly promotional themes? If you're membership, you know, are you going to be doing members only events? Are you doing any type of mini events? We had a lot of our growth factor members doing Peel parties and shed the Deads in October, which was really fun. Are you going to really invest in building your email list? Are you focusing on a particular social media channel? Are you going to figure out paid ads, all of these types of things. You want to get really clear and remember that businesses, corporations will plan in 18 month cycles and execute in quarters. So know that like, hey, you may not know exactly what's going to happen in 18 months. There's a lot of things that can change, as we've seen in the past five years in business. But we want to have the vision, the direction of what we're working towards and where we're going and also give ourselves permission and grace that if we change our mind, we can change our mind. But when we're in execution mode in that quarter, we want to be really focusing on that. Because I like to create all of that in advance so that I don't feel like I'm, you know, rushing around and just constantly on these last minute deadlines. Which is not good for your nervous system. Right? It's not good for anxiety. You need to have time to really feel that you're prepared that you're organized. Right? Okay. And next up is systems and software review. So we talked about this a little bit when we were looking through the P and L and I was talking about, you know, the software switch that we made. But right now with AI, there's so many bits of software that every two months there's something new. Right? So this is an. And until we really reach market saturation, until we really get to the point that everybody has adopted AI and it just becomes a part of how we are living our day to day lives, then there's going to continue to be changes that happen every single month. So when we're looking at the AI tools that we're using, and I've heard some feedback from some of our students that say, gosh, I just don't want to add all these subscriptions. And yes, it's true that they're 20 bucks a month or 25 bucks a month, they're not expensive. However, we can feel like we're, you know, those little things really add up. What I want you to look at is where does that save you? If you are able to, with a, you know, $200 a year Claude subscription, able to completely replace your copywriter, that was far more than $200 a year, right. Then that subscription is far worth it. And so it's going to be lowering your payroll because you may not need a copywriter, but you are then going to have to figure out how do I train, how do I create a custom GPT, how do I create a project that's really trained on my voice, my brand voice that anybody on my team can plug content into and it comes out sounding perfect, Right? So these are the things that we're focusing on and looking on right now, but really going through and understanding, you know, do we have the right tech stack in place? Do are we using AI to its full potential? Is there a better or more efficient tool than something that we're already using? You guys know we're huge fans of Mango Mint, right? So Mango Mint is the spa booking software that we highly recommend. So consider all of the things. Look at your goals, look at your budget, and then decide, like, what could this do? Could this software change, affect or help me to reach the goals that I have for the business? Right? So you want to look at all of your systems as well. So your data analysis, are you optimizing your schedule? Do you have inventory management, marketing, all of these things, like what is the system or process that you can shift or adapt or change to make more efficient, to make more aligned with the goals that you have for yourself. All right? This includes opening and closing procedures, client intake consultations, service protocols, retail sale processes, emergency procedures. Right? So really looking at all of these things together. So I know this feels like a lot, right? We talked about some really big topics, but when you take each section and you just put it to your business, focus on a little bit each month, right? In Q4, if you are already running a pretty systems based business, these things are just tasks that you're going to add to your Monday board. You're going to add them on your CEO tasks and block off the time in 2026. Do that now. Go into October. Block off a week of time that you're going to be prepping for your employee reviews and performing your employee reviews. Block off the time that you're going to be meeting with your cpa. Block off the time that you're going to be doing your annual planning and reviewing P. Ls and softwares and all of those things. This will set you up for success. Do this now before the calendar gets super full, right? So that you know that you are making time for the things that will move the needle in your business. And if you need help, then get help, right? Reach out to your cpa, reach out to your attorney, reach out to and SD Bestie. Bring on a coach or a consultant. There are experts around you that can help you to reach your goals. Okay? So remember, Q4, revenue is the priority. We want to really bring that revenue in. But these tasks that we're talking about in AS completing as the CEO tasks, this can make a massive difference in the success of your business in the coming year. Okay? So thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for hanging out with me. I am so appreciative and so grateful for your time and your presence and your listening. And I'm wishing you all the best in your own business that you are building to support. Start the life you want to live. All right, I will catch you on the next episode.