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Spa Marketing Made Easy | Spa Business Growth
SMME #483 The CEO Time Audit: How to Find 10 Hidden Hours in Your Spa Week
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Hello, my dears. Daniela here, and welcome back to Spa Marketing Made Easy. If you are new here, I am so glad that you found us. This podcast is for aesthetic professionals who are done working harder and who are ready to work smarter, building businesses that are profitable and sustainable and built around the life you actually want to live. Okay, so I want to start by telling you about a conversation that I had inside of our Growth Factor implementation program recently, because it really perfectly captures what I want to talk with you about today. So, one of our students was describing her goals for the quarter. She said she wanted more admin time, and I had to stop her mid sentence because there were two changes of language. Number one, you're not doing admin time. You're doing CEO time. Okay, but here's the deal. When you are thinking about what a CEO actually does, your AI tools can handle admin. So inbox management, routine, scheduling, supply orders, the hundreds of small tasks that keep the light on. But the vision, the strategy, the connection with your community, the development of your team, those things are not admin tasks. They are irreplaceable. And the moment that you start calling your work as the CEO admin time, you start treating it like something that can wait. It cannot wait. Because everything that you are working towards, the freedom, the revenue growth, the team that actually runs without you, all of it lives on the other side of you, protecting this one thing. So today we are doing a CEO time audit, and we're gonna talk about what CEO time actually is and. And what it's not. We're going to look at why so many spa owners keep sacrificing it, even when they know better. And I'm going to walk you through exactly how to audit your week so you can find where the hours are going and start reclaiming them. Now, I want to start with that language correction, because I think it's doing more work than it might seem. Admin time and CEO time are not the same thing. Not even close. And when spa owners confuse them, they end up protecting the wrong one. Admin time is spent keeping your business running at its current level, answering emails, managing the scheduling, ordering supplies, handling the hundreds of small operational tasks that are genuinely necessary but do not, on their own, move your business forward. These tasks need to get done, but they can be delegated. And increasingly, many of them can be automated. CEO time is spent working on your business rather than in it. It's the time where you're doing things that only you, as the CEO can do. So I'm talking about things like Overseeing the five divisions of your business. So fulfillment operations, sales and marketing, HR and finance. Developing your team so that they can grow into greater capability and ownership. Building community relationships and strategic partners that bring in consistent new clients. Setting your vision and long term strategy. Analyzing your offers and your pricing to make sure you are positioned correctly. Building the systems and AI tools that act as additional employees in your business. That is CEO work and it's not something that your inbox can do for you. So here's what I find when I look at where most spa owners are spending their time. The majority of the week is going into fulfillment, meaning treatment hours and everything that surrounds them. Then a portion goes into operations, a little into sales and marketing, A a small amount into HR and finance and CEO work. Sometimes there's as little as 2% of the week dedicated to that. Now, my goal for every spa owner inside of our programs is at minimum, absolute minimum, to get to 64%. Not immediately, not overnight, but as the destination that you are building towards. Because when you are spending the majority of your time on CEO level work, your business starts growing even when you are not in the treatment room. And that is the shift that changes everything. But to get you there, you first have to see clearly where you are now. And most spa owners don't know. They feel busy, they feel overwhelmed, and they assume they're spending their time on the right things. But the audit changes that. So if CEO time is important, why does it keep getting cut? Well, here is what I see happening and I want to name it plainly because I think that this is going to resonate. It is a scarcity trap. And it sounds like this. I'm the primary revenue generator in this business. If I step out of the treatment room, I lose money. So every hour I spend on CEO work is an hour of revenue that I am not generating in the short term. For some spa owners, that's true. Taking half a day out of the treatment room does mean fewer services that day. Not going to pretend that that cost is not real. And that's exactly why inside of growth factor implementation, we don't just tell spa owners to, you know, step back from the treatment room and trust the process. We build a specific, specific, calculated plan for it. We work through a step by step process to get clear on the exact amount of revenue that your team needs to be generating before it makes strategic sense for you to drop a day. Because you are the primary revenue generator in your business and most of our clients are. So pulling you out of the room without a plan is Not a CEO move. It's a gamble. And we do not gamble with your livelihood. The process looks at your current personal production, your team's current capacity, your fixed cost, and the gap between those numbers. It tells you here's what needs to be true before you drop this day. And then we build towards that. Sometimes that timeline is six months, sometimes it's two years. And I want to be clear, the length of the timeline is not the point. The intentionality is the point. A spa owner who takes two years to drop a day strategically without disrupting her revenue is in a far stronger position than one who drops it tomorrow and spends the next three months anxious about her numbers. The goal isn't speed. The goal is sustainability. Remember, your business is a marathon, not a sprint. So think about what you can create with a half day dedicated to CEO tasks. You could spend it building a partnership with another brand in your community that sends you consistent new clients for months. You could spend it developing a team member so that she becomes better and better and can serve more clients without you. You could spend it building a new funnel, analyzing your offers, looking at your cost of treatment, and making sure that your pricing is actually working for you. You could spend it building an AI tool that will function like another employee in your business. These are short term investments. You might take a half day out of the room, but over time, that half day gains you hours upon hours. That's the trade. And when you see that clearly, the math starts to look very different. The second reason CEO time keeps getting sacrificed is what I call the Suzy problem. You build a protected block into your week. You have everything planned out, every intention of keeping that. And then Susie calls and she really needs to get in. And you think, oh, it's just this once. And then you move the block and. And then it happens again and again. And little by little, the CEO time that was supposed to be yours disappears. Your client's appointments are available. When your schedule is available, you do your best to accommodate them. But the CEO block time is non negotiable. That block has a name on it and it's yours. Protecting it is not selfish. It's what makes everything else possible. Our business at Atto is structured very much like a spa. I'm the CEO. My coaches are my providers. And just like any spa owner who's been in business for a while, I've had seasons where I was fully in the room and seasons where I have backed out. Right now, inside of our growth factor implementation program, there are 16 one on one calls included. Some of those calls are are ones that I only handle. Others I've removed myself from entirely. If I look at 2025, I was fully out of the room. In 2026, I made the decision to step back in for specific calls. And I could if I wanted to run calls from 8 in the morning till 5 in the afternoon, Monday through Friday. The demand is there, but that would be a short term gain that would cost us a long term growth. So instead I'm investing my time in building AI tools to support my coaching staff and in making myself available for their development so that they get better and better at delivering results for our clients. Once a coach can run a call as well as I can or better, I remove myself from that call. That's the standard, that's the process. Your business will work the same way. There will be seasons where you're more present in the treatment room and seasons where you're further from it. Neither one is a failure. Both are strategic. The key is that it's always a season and you're always working to ensure that the tasks on your plate are ones that genuinely require you. Now that we understand why the CEO, what CEO time is, and why it keeps getting eroded, let's talk about how to actually find it in your week. Because you cannot protect what you cannot see. Now, we run a time tracking exercise twice a year, usually every January and June with our entire team. And the purpose is simple, to understand what everyone is actually doing, when they're doing it, and what can we get off of their plate. Because busyness is not the same as productivity and most people, when they actually track their time, are surprised by where it's going. This year we've actually added the time tracker and again we did two weeks in March. Because we are so heavily invested in AI right now and building out our own AI team, we need to ensure that that each person on the team is doing only the things that they can do. So let me tell you how the time audit works. So for one week, you are going to track every single hour by listing what you're doing in 15 minute increments, not just your work hours every hour, across both your work and life categories, you're looking for the full picture of where your time is actually going, not just where you think it's going. Once you have that, then you're going to go back through that week and you're going to color code your time blocks by category. Fulfillment, operations, sales and marketing, hr, finance and CEO. Everything outside of work, family, personal care, household tasks, what you end up with is essentially a pie chart of your actual week. And most spa owners, when they see it for the first time, have one of two reactions. Either they're shocked by how much time is going into fulfillment and how little time is going into CEO work, or they discover that a significant portion of their week is disappearing into tasks they didn't even consciously register. Things that felt productive but were not really moving anything forward. So this is why it's important to do all of your hours and not just your working hours. Because the goal is to build a business around the life you want to live. That means having quality time available for your kids, for yourself, for your friends, for your hobbies. For me, I've been in seasons where I've worked 12 hour days, and that was normal. That is not fun, that is not balanced, that is not sustainable. So I like to look at what I'm doing with my time from the moment I wake up to the time that I go to bed. I did this exercise myself to during a very busy season when my husband was traveling quite a bit for work. I sat down, I did an honest tracking of my week, and I found that I was spending about 30 hours a week on household tasks. Not because those tasks weren't necessary, but because I had not looked at that number clearly before. I'm talking about food prep, laundry, unpacking the Amazon boxes, right? So seeing it clearly on paper changed how I thought about it. It was no longer just keeping the house running. It was 30 hours that were not available for anything else. And that data led me to hire a housekeeper, which freed up both time for my family and dedicated time for work that I did not have before. The numbers do not lie. And sometimes the thing that needs to change is not the thing that you were expecting. So once you've done the audit and you can see clearly where your time is going, the next question is, what can I do about it? There are really three options for any time block that should not be yours. You delegate it, you eliminate it, or you hand it to AI. My goal for every spa owner who does this exercise is to find about 10 hours per week that we can get off of your schedule. You can 10 hours that are currently being spent on things that do not require you, specifically that we can redirect to CEO work. That's the target. And more often than not, when you do the honest audit, those 10 hours are there. They're just hidden inside of habits and assumptions and tasks that you've never questioned before. So when you start Protecting CEO time, you will face a very specific kind of pressure. The pressure of all of the things that feel important that are suddenly not fitting into your schedule. And I want to give you a new way of thinking about that. Because not everything that feels important actually belongs in your week. Right now there's a way to look at your task list that puts every item into one of four buckets. So urgent and truly important. Those things need to get done immediately. Important but not urgent. Those need to get scheduled into your protected CEO time. Urgent but not actually important. Those get delegated and neither urgent nor important. Those get eliminated. Most spa owners are spending the majority of their time in that third bucket. Things that feel urgent but are not actually moving the business forward, the reactive scheduling, the problems that they jump to fix because they are there and because fixing those things feels productive. And the CEO level work, the things that are genuinely important but not screaming at them, keeps getting pushed. So the filter that I want you to apply is this. What are the two or three things that if I focused on them consistently, would have the biggest compounding effect on my business over the next 90 days? Everything else gets held in that filter. If it does not move on one of those things forward, it waits. It might be a great idea for next quarter or maybe next year, but right now the only thing that you are focused on is this. James Clear, who wrote Atomic Habits, talks about the idea of getting 1% better every day. Not a dramatic overhaul, just consistent small progress compounded over time. That is what CEO time does for your business. You might not see the result of a protected CEO block in week one, but six months of protected CEO time builds into something that no amount of reactive busyness can build. There's also something worth naming about how time expands to fill the container that you give it. If you give yourself eight hours to complete something, it will take you eight hours to complete. If you give yourself two hours, it will take two hours. Constraints are not the enemy of good work. They are often the condition for it. So when you're building your CEO time blocks, the be intentional about the container. A protected two hour block with a clear agenda will almost always outperform an open ended afternoon with no defined purpose. And I also want to throw something in here about Shiny object syndrome, because it is real, my friends, and it's one of the biggest threats to CEO calendar discipline. There's always been a million good ideas available to you at any given moment. New platforms, new strategies, new tactics that worked for someone else and might work for you every one of them has some merit. But not every good idea deserves your attention this quarter. The spa owner who tries to do everything ends up doing nothing well, and little by little. The focused spot owner, the one who knows exactly what she's doing, what she's working on this quarter, and says no to everything else. Build something that the scattered one cannot. Most sponsors already know how to build a schedule. They know how to block time. They know conceptually that CEO time matters. The thing that they do not know how to do is hold the boundary once they've built it. So it's not really a calendar problem, it's an accountability problem. And I just want to add a side note here that this is such a real problem that we actually brought Coach Candice on to help our spa owners who struggle with accountability. The ones who have all the systems done, they've been through our programs, they put everything in place, but they're not actually using them. If that's you, please book a call with Candice. She is amazing. But of course, for the sake of this podcast, I want to give you something actionable that you could try as well. Name your time blocks after the person or the thing that they are protecting. If you have a hard stop at three because your daughter needs you, put her name on that block. Make it visible. Because when you are tempted to run late and put a client into that time, it's much harder to cross a line that has your daughter's name on it than to cross a line that just says hard stop. The same principle applies to CEO time. Do not just block it. Name it. Name what you are building in that block. Which partnership call, which team development conversation, which system you are creating. Give the block a purpose and a recipient, even if that recipient is your future business. Accountability partners also work, and I do not mean that in a vague way, a specific person or a small group who knows your CEO time commitment and who you can check in with regularly. And I just want to add, start small. Okay? You do not have to overhaul your entire calendar tomorrow. Can you first make sure that you're eating lunch every single day? Can you protect a one or two hour block each week, just one, and actually hold it for the next four weeks? Little by little you build the habit and then the habit builds the schedule and the schedule builds the business. You are an entrepreneur. You are your own boss. Complete control of your schedule is one of the genuine privileges of this path. And if something is wrong with your schedule right now, that's information, not a verdict. You can look at it, figure out what's not working and adjust. You have the ability to fix it and you have the ability to build something that works for your business and the life that that you are trying to build. All right my dears, that is a wrap on today's episode and I want to leave you with one action item because action creates clarity. This week I want you to do a time tracker. Not guess where your time is going, but an actual hour by hour record of one full week, work time and lifetime everything. Then go back and color code it by category. Fulfillment, Operations, Marketing, hr, Finance and CEO. Everything outside of work. Look at what you find and ask yourself three questions. Where is more time going than I realized? What on this list does not actually require me? And are there 10 hours that I could redirect towards CEO work? That's your homework. One week of honest tracking and I promise you that the data is going to tell you something important. So if today's episode resonated with you, I would be so grateful if you could take 30 seconds and leave us a review on Apple Podcast. Reviews are the lifeblood of this show. They are how other aesthetic professionals find us and they mean the world to me personally. I read every single one and if you know a spa owner who needs to hear this today, please share it with her. Forward the episode, drop it in your Instagram stories and send it in a group chat. Let's get it into the hands of the people who need it. I appreciate you so much my dears. Thank you and I will catch you in the next episode. 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 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.attoesthetics.com podcast and watch the systems shift. That's grow.attoesthetics.Com podcast.