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Spa Marketing Made Easy | Spa Business Growth
SMME #472 AI Agents for Your Spa: How to Automate Revenue, Retention, and Operations with Maeve Ferguson, Khairy Varre, and Ajit Nawalkha
00:30:28
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign Daniela here. And welcome back to the Spa Marketing Made Easy podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for going down the AI
- [00:12]
B
rabbit hole with me. It's been about two and a half years that I have really been over
- [00:17]
A
in the deep end, learning how it works, what you can do with it, what's good to do with it and not good to do with it, all sorts of things. We this year actually building our first AI agents, which is really exciting. We've done lot of custom GPTs, but now we're really moving into the agent space. We've got three right now, but I know that we are going to continue on with many more because they're taking such a huge administrative burden off of our team. They're greatly improving the quality and details of the deliverables that we are providing our clients with. And most importantly, they are allowing us to have more human to human connection time with our clients because we're able to remove the administrative burden of the other tasks. So I look at it as just,
- [01:08]
B
just a win win all around.
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A
Now, our first week back to work In January of 2026, we hosted something called AI Week over in Growth Factor Elite. And I brought in three friends of mine who are about as expert as you can be in this space. And I say that because AI is changing so fast that you're lucky if you get two months of something in before it changes or there's some update or some new AI tool that just completely changes the landscape. And I know this from firsthand experience. So back In July of 2025, we ran a beta version of Growth Factor Elite and we had revamped our programs to incorporate AI because the way we do business is just completely different. So we, we took some time, we updated everything and wanted to run through the beta version. We did that from, you know, July to December. And then January
- [02:12]
B
comes around, we're doing
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A
our 2026 cohort and so much of the content is already different and has changed, and so much so that I actually will not do my slides more than two weeks in advance because I'm wanting to stay as up to d date as possible. So it's exciting times, my friends, exciting times. Keeping us on our toes for sure. Okay, so let me give you the background of my three friends that came in to speak to our group. Each of them had an hour to talk to the group, so you're just going to hear kind of snippets from each of them. But it was such great content. These are such, just incredible humans. I wanted to be sure that I shared their expertise with our podcast community as well.
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B
Okay, so first up up is my
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A
dear friend Maeve and I'm going to read her bio. I'll actually read everybody's bio for you and then we'll get into this mashup episode. So Maeve Ferguson is the authority architect, the strategist behind the diagnostic infrastructure that transforms established thought leaders from respected but replaceable to category of one. She's the creator of the Client Engine and and works with seven to nine figure thought leaders, bestselling authors and industry authorities. She has a background in Big four accounting and private equity and Maeve brings data driven precision to an industry drowning in tactics. Her methodology helps clients build diagnostic authority that rivals the Myers Briggs and Strength Finder in sophistication. She runs her consultancy from a working horse farm in Northern Ireland while raising two young children. Proof that brilliance with infrastructure actually works. I love that. Okay, and then our next guest is Agit. And Agit is a globally sought after business coach and entrepreneur who specializes in helping founders and CEOs 10x their businesses without burning out or compromising their culture. As the former CEO of Mindvalley, Ajit scaled the company to 40 million and over 200 employees before starting his own company, Evercoach. He went on to certify over 15,000 coaches and was acquired by Mindvalley in 2024 for a multi eight figure deal. Ajit is the author of Live Big and the Big Book of Coaching with over 3200 testimonials making him the most reviewed author on Mindvalley. Entrepreneurs and executives have utilized his frameworks for personal transformation. His frameworks thinking enables innovative ease of scale while fostering a culture of excellence. His talks blend strategy, inner game mastery and immediately actionable tools designed for entrepreneurs who lead at the highest level. He is incredible and finally, last but not least, another incredible human being. Ms. Kyrie she is the co founder and CEO or COO of AI District Enablement, a consulting firm that designs ethical human centered AI systems to help companies scale with clarity, efficiency and integrity. She is a business mentor with 20 years of experience driving transformation across high growth, multi million dollar companies and ventures valued up to 6 billion. A master at simplifying complexity, she's helped thousands of founders across the globe scale with clarity, margin and momentum. Her genius lies in designing intellectual, high growth, AI powered business and leadership models that reduce chaos and unlock momentum at every stage of scale. As you can see, I hope you can see that these are some incredible people that I am so grateful to call friends and so excited to share with you. I hope that you enjoy this mashup episode of these three incredible people. And let's go ahead and play that interview.
- [06:26]
B
So let's talk about a sales agent because most people are going to be interested in revenue, obviously. How are they going to get an roi like with our employees. We want our employees to be paying for themselves. And you know, we, we look at those types of things. How much are they generating for how much are we paying? And when you're in spa, there's obviously some clinical knowledge that you have to be aware of. So how would I go about like what would a sales agent do as a sponsor? Someone that's, or a robot that's responding in the DMS to inquiries that are coming in. How are we building something like this?
- [07:04]
C
Yes, yes, those, those would be very basic agents that I would say that so that they're, they're literally, you know, here's this thing. Do you want it? And allowing that entire kind of sales transaction to go through. So that, that's kind of a, an early stage one. So like super, super simple to plug things like that in. Where it starts to get more sophisticated is where you can say for example, a buyer re engagement agent. Okay. So this is for somebody like, like me, I don't go to the spa that often, but if I got an email from my spa or a message from my spa, you know, seven weeks after my last massage, do you want another one? Because the agent has the intelligence of when the last one happened and all of that kind of thing, it can actually, the agent can act as a re engagement sales agent for you. Okay. And that's for people who've already been customers. Other agents you could have would be an upsell opportunity agent. So where the. These agents are able to analyze massive amounts of data, understand patterns of behavior. So for example, if you see the people who always get the facial X also would be a really good fit for massage Y the agents can analyze all of those patterns over time and then recommend the appropriate upsells to the right type of person who's been seen to kind of spend a lot of money over and over again. Okay. So we can literally teach these agents to do anything we want them to do. It's just a matter of the business owner saying like here, here where they, you know, here, here's where our processes are falling down. Here's where we are losing the seal. Here's where we have even for example, gap analysis across a, an appointment schedule where you can Start to see look like it's 2:30 every single Thursday. There's like a 90 minute window of wasted revenue because there's nobody booked in there. The AI agent can start to spot all for you and then do like optimal pricing techniques to get people in for that spot. Whenever we don't have these agents doing that sort of analysis, we, we are manually looking at our stuff, guessing most of the time we're too busy. We don't get actually get to look at it. And it just becomes, you know, a wasted opportunity for sales. Another one that I was thinking of earlier is like a, a booking follow up agent. So where somebody sends in a booking inquiry form but they don't actually follow through and book the appointment. An agent would be able to spot something like that, follow up with the person and then get them actually booked in so they become a paying customer. So if you think of your kind of your end to end process of complete stranger to paying client and paying client to ongoing client, you can build these agents for every single step of the process to just close the leaky holes in your bucket every single step of the way. And all of those tiny incremental changes are obviously going to increase your revenue over time. But it doesn't actually take more from your team who are already stretched in, they're already busy. Because these AI agents are programmed to run autonomously. So they just do their job and we dictate when they do their job. So if we wanted them to do it every single day, we program it to do that. If it's a once a month activity where we're maybe doing a deep dive analysis of everything that went on in the company that month, you know, it would be a monthly task. We tell it what to do and when to do it.
- [10:35]
B
And I think when we're thinking about SPA too, we want to. You're still going to need a front desk, right? The front. There's, there's certain things that can make that are very important in our industry. But imagine if your front Desk didn't have 500 administrative tasks to do and could be really engaged.
- [10:55]
C
Really good. Yeah. What they're supposed to do. Yeah. And again that's a really good point. I think AI agents are, because again a lot of the overheads that we're killing off, we're able just to put them onto higher value activities. So things that are more important that they either weren't getting to or they weren't doing well because they were doing all of this other stuff that now AI agents are handling and it's looking at your business. And it's like, as Danielle said, what are the most important pieces where we want humans to be doing it? And what are all of those repeatable, low level administrative things that happen over and over and over again like clockwork for every single client. But not just client facing things, it's like the entire running of the business, the vast majority of that can be turned into AI agents that do this work for you. And a big thing that I see is that, and this was for all of us, we don't know what we don't know. So if we don't know that something exists, if we don't know that this is actually possible for all of your accounting to be done for you by AI agents, if we don't know that it's possible, then we're never going to look into doing it for ourselves because we just don't know what exists. And the exciting thing about this is the things that I am building, building right now for both my own company and for clients companies. It didn't even exist six months ago, it wasn't even possible then. So it's just the, the opportunities. We have like custom proposals now off the back of a sales conversation, we have a sales conversation where like it's pretty high ticket to work with us in the, the diagnostics space. So it's custom proposals that used to be like, you know, chatting and PDF documents and all of that and now it's like automated, completely bespoke, custom co proposals that go off prepared within 30 minutes of a sales conversation. It's a few months ago that wasn't even possible.
- [12:55]
B
So even with what Maeve is saying now, like, what was coming to mind for me is training an AI agent on your skincare philosophy for your consultations. If you have a baby esthetician or you have someone that's maybe not comfortable with your service offerings or product offerings, you, you can plug in, here's the patient, here's their skin type, here's the condition, here's, you know, here's how I
- [13:25]
C
would have done this. Now it's your turn. And even again, like team onboard and staff onboarding, staff training, it's like all of that can be handled for you instead of having to hold somebody's hand through every single stage of the process.
- [13:38]
B
I know everybody is looking at costs and you know, there's inflation, there's all kinds of stuff that's happened in the past year. But when you are looking at this is just like Maeve was saying. Do you Have a virtual assistant that could be replaced by an agent. Are there tasks that your spa manager could handle or be taken off of your spa manager's plate or your plate to then be able to get out in your community, to be present, to do the things that you need the FaceTime for. And anything that you do in your business that takes a time or money investment. You want an ROI on. So, yes, of course we're going to look at like, how is that going to get us an roi? We don't want to do it just for the sake of doing it. We want to do it to be able to measure like, this is the impact that it had on my business, 100%.
- [14:33]
C
There's a great question came in there about cannot integrate with my specific platform. And this is the beauty of agentic AI is we can you the AI agent, you can get it to log on to whatever platform you wanted to log on. So a couple of weeks ago, for example, I was building one just for fun because I'm weird, but like I was having it like log on and order groceries for me. Okay. So it's like, you know, a grocery provider in Northern Ireland. It can act as your computer and then you log in and then it remembers the login and then off it goes and can do whatever, basically whatever you want autonomously.
- [15:12]
B
It's going to take time or money. So you're going to invest in how to learn AI yourself, which will take time and there's an opportunity cost to that. You can hire a company. There's a lot of great companies out
- [15:24]
A
there that do this for you.
- [15:26]
B
If you don't want to be the person that learns how to do it, that's like fine tuning these types of things. But in the long run, when we're looking at like big picture growth, yes, ultimately it will save you a lot of, a lot more money than to hire an ongoing staff to have someone there. Think about hiring a social media manager. To have a good social media manager in the spa space is going to be anywhere between 60 to $100,000 for someone that knows what they're doing. If you follow the, the quiz funnel that Maeve was talking about and get the agents built in there, it's going to be a fraction of that.
- [16:10]
D
Exactly, exactly. So what I'm saying is, and I think we maybe are saying the same thing and maybe I'm just misinterpreting. So correct me if I've not understood this right, but if you decide, let's say, for example, hey, like you said, the Biggest problem is filling the calendar, following up with existing clients. This is all automatable and this is not going to cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars to build. It's like a $5,000 AI project that will be built on your domain. You don't even have to buy a software, you just look for it. I haven't really done that research, but if they're not, then you can. It only just you just. It'll be unique to your company, it'll be unique to your profile, unique to your spa. And it is. A good AI developer costs about $40 an hour on upwork. So it's not that you have to hire them full time. The thing you have to be good at is knowing specifically what you wanted to do, the tool to do. So say for example, if the tool is, hey listen, look at all of the Excel sheet, I'm going to upload off all my clients with their email addresses and phone numbers because hopefully you have that. And send a SMS campaign that runs every Wednesday afternoon saying, hey, this week's, you know, because let's say Wednesday is the drive, like the quiet day that you have or the week is the quiet week or whatever, say between, between 10:00am and 3:00pm, say, hey listen, if you need a quick foot rub or you know, a quick facial, we have a 50 discount. It just runs it for you. You don't need a person to run this, it'll run it for you. A lot of it is already activated in software like ActiveCampaign and so forth. So they're already building all this. If you already have those softwares, they're already allowing that. They just cost a lot of money. But you can, you can do it on your own platform and never even interact with those things because you can create it, it's customized to your spa, creates a unique motor also. And you can update it the way you want, right? For the matter, you can bytecode it straight away yourself. If you are tech bent. If you're not tech bent, don't try to do it. Actually, in my perspective, it's not expensive enough for you to worry about. Oh my God, I have to learn it. You don't have to learn it. You have to learn what AI can do. This is my perspective, I'm not saying this is valid for everyone, but from my perspective, I'm not learning how to code on AI. I'm learning what I want to create for my customers and I'm hiring somebody for 40 bucks an hour and they are coding at me, coding it for me. On AI. I have a full time AI developer on team whose job is to create. And I don't even like, if you go to my website, you'll be like, why do you need AI? Is because if I get a client, I say, listen, my client's struggling with a dashboard and I'm a business, like I'm helping businesses grow, right? So of course my frame of reference is different, but I'll be like, listen, I have this client that is doing about 60 million in revenue and they, they want to work with me to help them grow. I like. But the primary problem is they don't even have a dashboard. They don't even know where the money comes from, where the money goes. It's just they've gotten so good and so they've been in business for 25 years that they've just blown up because of that. I was like, get a dashboard. And all I have to do is tell my guy and it takes two days for him to build a whole dashboard based on their Excel sheets. They just giving me the link of Excel sheet, Excel sheet, Excel sheet. All I'm doing is plugging it together and the dashboard is built in a week. Is an over is is too much time. I'm saying it can probably be done in two days. Right? It's more about how your connectors are working. Right. So it's back end stuff. I don't need to learn it, I don't want to learn it.
- [19:34]
B
So I want to, I want to ask a question here that I think is, would be really interesting to get your perspective. So we talk a lot about, so a lot of our spa owners, that all the people here are spa owners and we talk a lot about the difference of what is the role of the CEO in the company. And a lot of them start out as providers, they're in the room, they grow, we advise them to get out of the room so that they can run the company. And you said something that was really interesting is that's not essentially, that's not worth my time to learn how to do this skill. There's a lot of things that we are the driver of the ship, but it doesn't mean that we have to be experts in every single area. And I think that that's where people get so overwhelmed is I don't know how to do Facebook ads or I don't know, I'm not a numbers person or I'm not a whatever.
- [20:27]
A
How are you distinguishing that for yourself
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B
as you know, what is the role
- [20:32]
A
of CEO for you?
- [20:36]
D
So I open your business right now. So I am a little bit more hands on CEO. But if you were to talk to me a year from now, my role would mostly be managing my team. I would probably not touch anything. And that will probably be true a year from now because we'll probably get to 2 or 3 million next year, right? Because we work really fast. So right now I'm hands on. Right now I'm like, okay, I don't have the best social media person and I don't have my messaging dialed in. So yes, I'm working on quad myself to make sure our messaging is dialed in. But if you talk to me about this in six months from now, there's probably somebody else doing that or it's automated. If it is automatable, some things are not automatable and you don't want to automate it because it's. The energy is different, right? Tech energy is different and human energy is different. Right. And you still need somebody to validate whatever the tech did. At least for in the near future you will need that. But for example, things like, I know I want to deliver my clients the best experience possible. So instead of me saying, okay, I have to build this custom website and custom tools, I hire somebody to do that. That. So it really, the job of CEO eventually is to guide the vision of the business. And it's increasingly going to become so because the cost of talent will either go really high or really low, right? It will become really high if the person is wildly skilled and they're the best in the class. The bad news is you'll, you'll not be able to afford them until you cross like 50, 60 million in revenue because you can't afford their salary. Right? So unless you're crossing that line, you already can say, you know what, that talent is out of my reach unless you are like, you know, your private equity backing and all that kind of fun stuff. Great. But if none of that is true, then screw it, you're not going to be able to hire them anyways because they are worth a million dollars a year or 2 million or 3 million dollars a year. You can't afford that, Right? So what you're working with in spa,
- [22:24]
B
we're dealing with a lot of providers, right? So it's still at some point, yes, they have robots that do eyelashes, but like we're dealing with medical professionals, injectors, facialists, waxers, right? So this is a skill that at some point may be taken over, but I don't see that happening in the next five years, right? The things you're doing in 10 years,
- [22:50]
D
even if they build robots for it, it's like, you know, it's a beautiful analogy. Will I am give for music? Because somebody asked him the question, Will I am is from. What's that? Black Eyed Peas, that band. What do you think about AI music? There's are already listening to AI music. He gave a beautiful analogy and I want to repeat it. He said, do you go to Whole Foods and look at organic material and stuff that is not organic? That's the difference between AI and human beings. People who want class will always go to organic. Right? So your markets are very safe. Don't worry about it. Because while I, while I am a guy, I've seen my wife going to the spa. She's not going to the spy just for the treatment. She's going to relax. A machine's not going to get her to relax and chill out. It's a human being.
- [23:40]
B
It's the human touch, it's the human connection.
- [23:42]
D
It's the high quality service. It might be that some market share is gone, but that will only mean your prices will go up. So eventually your market or your ability to earn will probably be the same. It'll just roll differently. And you just want to be ready for that. On how to tweak when it changes. But I don't think anybody has to necessarily be scared unless machines really take over. And if machines really take over, you don't have to be scared because we'll all be dead.
- [24:08]
B
So with spa, we're looking at number one. We want to make sure that our client retention or patient retention is in place before we build a lead system. So once a client has already become a patient of the practice or a client of the spa, then we want to. That's where I would build my first agent if we were looking at like retaining them before we build an entire sales system to attract new people in because we want to make sure that we can keep them once they're there. So I think it was Lonnie or Lisa was asking like, where do I even start? So start with your retention. Because whether you're doing profit or you're doing revenue, you need to make sure that the leads, the clients that you have already attracted into your business are staying there. Whether that is reactivation, you can use an agent to understand can I identify who hasn't come in? Instead of running all these reports and manually going through them, you can have an agent that will run those reports, go through them for you and automatically Send those things on autopilot without you thinking, right? So it'll automatically send them an offer based off of their behavior. When your retention is at 80% or higher, then put your focus and energy into lead flow because you'll save yourself a heck of a lot of time and money by keeping those existing clients and keeping them happy. And do not forget about skincare. There's a lot that we can do with skincare because we have patients that only come in twice a year, but they're still purchasing skincare from us every six weeks or so. So really think about those things. So what are we looking for? You said you can hire an, an agent developer, someone who can build those for you on upwork for around 40 bucks. If we don't know, how do we know? What questions are we asking them? What are we looking for to hire an agent to do these things for us?
- [26:33]
D
It depends on what you're building. But again, most of us will probably building something really simple. We are probably not building some big complicated tech. So just so that you understand, the tech builds are so easy that they're not actually building anything really for you. You can build it if you were really interested in tech, probably by yourself, in two days. What they will build in about a day, mostly because they're more interested and they've been doing it because pretty much anyone that you search for, you're looking for something that's called wide coding, right? And you're looking for people who use platforms like lovable and Cursor. You are not looking for super senior developers, right? Because if you look for super senior developers, what happens is here's how they think. They think, they start taking scale, they start thinking, oh, what if I have 100,000 records? Will this architecture actually hold this right now while we all dream? And maybe one day we will have 100,000 records, which means 100,000 potential clients or actual clients that we have served. That's going to happen maybe in a few years from now. And we don't have to actually build for that complicated tech.
- [27:41]
B
One of the biggest problems right, when we hire providers is we don't want provider A to share something different than provider B. We want one clear message because if our patient goes to one provider, we don't want them to go to the other and then have a different thing. So with the using that would be like an ongoing tool, but how for the onboarding, it, we would be taking them through training, videos, through philosophy of our spa, etc. Like those types of things.
- [28:15]
E
So yeah, the Way that I like to. To do this with clients, even if they already have a team, a lot of times they haven't trained the team in a while, right? So I like to have them actually organize a training with the team that is recorded. And even if you don't have video, but you're recording. One of my favorite tools for recording all things that are related training is either audio pen or granola. They're great even on your phone. So if you're not doing it on zoom like this, but you're in person, having granola on your phone and recording it gives you a really good transcript of the actual meeting. And it can transcribe like hours and hours of it, and it gives you a summary as well. So being able to actually organize a training which forces you to think, okay, what do I need to refresh their memories on? Maybe it is the company's mission. It is what we do. It is how we do it. What are. Who are our, you know, our favorite, favorite partners?
- [29:14]
D
What.
- [29:14]
E
How do we bring on a new client? How do we welcome them? What does the whole process from front desk all the way to the back, like, how does that work? Referrals, and how do we, you know, how do we bring people back? How do we increase. Like, anything that you can think of is almost creating your own curriculum of what it would take to run your, your company or to run that role if you weren't there. And how would you determine if something is being run the right way versus not? AI needs to understand what is yes or no. That's the difference between training an AI versus training a human. A human can infer from what you're saying, right? And sometimes they'll infer not the right way based on their conditioning. AI will just make stuff up. So you have to tell it like, what is a yes, what is a no? What is a one, what is a zero? Like, it has to be so clear and just that exercise increases the quality of your training of your team next time, guaranteed. That's something we're seeing across the board. So if you could organize an actual training and build the curriculum for it, it gives you the clarity, record.