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Spa Marketing Made Easy | Spa Business Growth
SMME #481 The Delegation Decision: What Only You Can Do as a Spa CEO
00:13:56
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Hello, my dears. Danielle here, and welcome back to Spa Marketing Made Easy. I want to paint a picture for you. You're a skilled injector, or maybe you're an esthetician who's built a beautiful team of providers, and somehow you're also the one who's answering the phone between clients, approving social media posts from the treatment room, handling payroll questions on your lunch break, and spending your Sunday nights doing things that have nothing to do with why you got into this industry in the first place. Sit with that for a minute. An injector who is spending half of her day doing basic administrative work is not operating at the highest level of her scope. And neither are you when you are stuck in the weeds of tasks that someone else or something else could be handling. Today we're talking about the delegation decision. What belongs in your hands and what needs to leave them. This is one of the most important mindset shifts that you will make as a spa CEO, and that is exactly what we are going to work through together today. So let's get into it. All right, so the phrase that I want you to hold onto throughout this entire episode is highest level of scope. Now, in the clinical world, this concept is clear. If you have a nurse practitioner on your team, you want her doing the things that are within her scope that an esthetician cannot do. Injections, energy based devices, advanced procedures. You're not going to have your NP doing something that an RN could do, just like we're not going to have an RN doing something that an esthetician could do. That would be a waste of her training, her licensure, and frankly, her earning potential. Every single role in your business should work the same way your NP does NP level work. Your RN should do RN level work. Your esthetician should do esthetician level work. Your front desk should do front desk work. And you, as the CEO should do CEO level work. The problem is that most spa owners I work with are not doing CEO level work. They're doing a little bit of everything. And that's not a character flaw. That is a systems and organization problem. So let's talk about what CEO level work actually looks like, because there's a lot of fuzziness here. I hear it all the time from our students when they first get out of the treatment room and they're like, I don't know what to do with myself. My team is doing just fine without me. I feel like I'm not needed anymore. They go through this, like, crisis because they don't know what to do. And here's the deal. That feeling is actually a sign that your team is working. Your job is not to be the one that everyone depends on for every little thing. Your job as the CEO is vision, strategy, connection with your community, development of your team. Those are not administrative tasks. Those are CEO tasks. Your GPTs, your virtual assistants, your software can handle admin. But vision strategy, developing, your people, getting involved in your community, that's yours and only yours. Now, I want to make an important distinction that's going to change how you think about your role in every department of your business. And that distinction is the difference between ownership and involvement. These are two very different things. And conflating them is one of the biggest reasons that spa owners stay stuck. So let's look at an example. Let's say that you work with a bookkeeping or an accounting firm. They own your bookkeeping, they're responsible for it. They produce the financial statements every single month. But you're involved. You are the one reading those statements, reviewing the data, making the decisions based on what you see. You're not doing the bookkeeping, but you are not checked out either. You own the oversight, they own the execution. Same thing with marketing. If you have a marketing manager, a good one is going to come to you with recommendations. So they might say, hey, here's what I think that we should do this quarter. Here's the strategy. They bring ideas to the table. You elevate, you say yes or no. You hold the vision, they own the execution. Do you see the difference? So you are involved as the CEO, but you're not absent. You're not in the weeds either. This is the thing that trips so many people up. They think delegation means disappearing. It does not. It means being involved at the right level. And the right level for you is the CEO level. But there's a lot of fear in delegation, right? You might feel a sense of scarcity around stepping back from the treatment room, around handing off tasks, around trusting other people to do the things that you have always done yourself. And often what is underneath that scarcity is a belief that sounds something like, if I'm not the one generating revenue directly, I'm going to lose money. If I'm not in the treatment room, the business is going to suffer. If I let go of this task, it's not going to get done right. And for a short season. Some of that may be true. When you step back from direct revenue generation to invest time in CEO level work, there can be a transition period. But it's just that a transition period when you start using that time to build a referral partnership with another local brand, to develop your team so that your providers get better and better and better, to build a new funnel to analyze your offers, to build a GPT that acts like another team member. Those investments, they compound. So maybe you took a half day out of the room, but over time, that half day gains you hours upon hours of capacity, work, revenue and freedom. The scarcity mindset says I can't afford to step back. The CEO mindset says I can't afford not to now, when you're moving fast and putting out fires all day, every task feels equally urgent. The supply order and the strategic vision feel like they have the same weight because they're both sitting on your plate. But they do not have the same weight. One of them only you can do. The other absolutely does not need to be you. The shift happens when you sit down long enough to ask a simple question about every single thing that you are touching. Does this actually require me? Not does this feel comfortable for me to hand off? Not Am I the best person to do this? Does it actually genuinely require me? Or. Or am I just the one who's always been doing it? These are two very different things, and until you can tell them apart, you will keep filling your days with tasks that were never yours to own in the first place. One of the practices that I come back to regularly in my own business is asking myself at the end of the week, what felt heavy, what drained me, or what took far more time than it should have. That question alone surfaces so much because the things that actually feel heavy are usually the things that were never meant to live on our plates in the first place. Little by little, as you start asking yourself that question and actually acting on the answers, something shifts. Your plate gets lighter, your team gets stronger, and you start to feel the difference between being busy and being effective. When you do build the confidence to hire, make sure that you're not hiring for tasks, but instead hiring for roles. So here's what hiring for tasks look like. I need someone to do Instagram. So when you have your front desk person post a few things here and there because you know you should be showing up on social but there's zero strategy, there's no accountability for results, there's no one who actually owns the outcome, that is a problem, right? Here's what hiring for a role looks like. I need a marketing coordinator who is responsible for all lead generation activities. That person has a clear scope. They own something, they are accountable for it the difference is not just semantic. When you hire for tasks, you get completion. When you hire for roles, you. You get ownership. And ownership is what drives results. So related to this, unclear role boundaries are one of the most common things that I see holding spa teams back. You've probably heard some version of this before that we all just help each other and that sounds great, it sounds like a team. But when a mistake happens and everyone just helps each other, there's no one accountable for who dropped the ball because nobody owned it. So clear roles, clear expectations, clear accountability. That is how you build a team that can function without you in every conversation. So raise your hand if this is you. You have a spa manager on paper, but you're still the one handling daily operations, inventory, staff training, scheduling, efficiencies, team meetings, employee reviews. If you have your hand up, your spa manager does not have full ownership of her role. She may be doing a great job, but if you are still carrying those things, you are both doing a version of her job. Here's my benchmark for a true spa manager. You can go on vacation for a minimum of two weeks, not check your phone, not worry about a single thing, come back and everything is running profitably and smoothly. That's the standard. Not that you have someone holding down the fort while you check in every day. Full, confident ownership. And to get there, you need two things. You need the right person and you need clear systems. There can be an incredible person in the wrong role, and when that happens, they're not going to thrive. And it's not their fault. People need to be in roles that match their strengths with the expectations that are crystal clear and systems that are set up for success. Okay, now I want to bring this back to the central question of this episode. What only you can do. And the things that only you can do are actually fewer than you think. And the things that are taking up most of your time are usually not on that list. Vision is yours. The relationship that you hold in your community, the culture that you build inside of your team, the direction your business is moving in, the decisions that only a CEO can make, those belong to you. No one else can do them. No assistant, no AI, no team member can hold those things the way that you can. But a supply order, social media, scheduling, routine, client follow ups, not yours. They just ended up on your plate because there was no system to put them anywhere else. The delegation decision is not a one time event. It's a mindset that you practice. It's the ongoing habit of asking every single time something lands in front of you. Does this require me? And if the answer is no, what needs to be true for it to live somewhere else? That shift, practiced consistently, is what separates the spa owner who is drowning from the spa CEO who is leading. And you are more than capable of making it, especially in today's world where we are building your AI spa team and you have access to these incredible GPTs that I look at as employees of your business. Okay? So I want you to really sit with that. Okay? And your homework that I want you to do this week is have a 15 minute conversation with one person on your team. Not a performance review, not a check in, just a focused conversation where you clarify one thing. What do they own and what does ownership actually mean in that role? That one conversation, done with intention, will tell you more about where your delegation gaps are than any list that you could make on your own. All right, my dears, thank you so much for spending this time with me today. This is a topic that is so close to my heart because I know so many of you are carrying so much more than you should be. You've built something incredible. Now it's time to build a business that does not require you to hold it all together. I appreciate you and I will catch you in the next episode.
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Quick reminder before you leave, if your spa growth still depends on you doing more, it's time for a shift. Watch the System Shift, a free training designed to help spa owners break past that 25 to $35,000 month plan plateau without adding more treatment hours. You'll learn the CEO level systems that help you scale while protecting your time, your values and your Peace. Go to grow.autoesthetics.com podcast and watch the systems shift. That's grow.autoesthetics.com Podcast.