EP 467: Why Winging It Is Costing You Growth (And What To Do Instead)

Hello my dears and welcome to Spa Marketing Made Easy. I am your host, Daniela Woerner, and I am so happy that you are here today. If you’re new here, welcome. We focus on sharing actionable strategies specific to esthetic professionals to help you build a systems based business. And right now it is. It’s just such an interesting time. Things are changing so rapidly with the way that we are doing business. Yes, I’m talking about AI. I’ve been talking about AI for, I feel like two years now, how it’s incorporated into all aspects of our daily lives, and we are still just at the very beginning. That’s so incredible to me. So a friend of mine, tan, he runs a company called Asian efficiency. He’s actually going to be speaking at our Texas event, our spa CEO intensive, which I’m super excited about. And his newsletter this week said that we are in the adoption stage of AI, like at the level of being adopted in our daily lives, the same place that we were with the internet in 1996 so I’m turning 45 this year, in just a few months. So if you are in that kind of same age range, that same bracket. You remember when the Internet became like a thing. It would people had AOL, and it would like it would take minutes for a website to upload. I remember buying airline tickets, and I thought it was like the most incredible thing. I was probably in college, and I would just be sitting there waiting for the page to load, and it was still like, oh my gosh, what is this? I mean, I grew up in a time when you used Encyclopedia Britannica to do your book reports, and today, my five year old is shocked if we lose Wi Fi in the van for like less than two minutes. So we’re in one of those transitions, and it’s going to be even more drastic than the internet. We’re going through that massive shift, not just in the way that we do business, but in the way that the world operates. I mean, it is such a huge transition, and I in no way want to scare you.

I don’t like scare tactics, but I just want to be very honest, very transparent in my thoughts, and that is that you will simply not be able to compete in business if you do not adopt AI into your business operations, your payroll will be too high, your operations will be too slow, and that is exactly why I wanted to talk about today’s topic of why winging it is going to cost you growth is going to cost you your business, and what to do instead. Okay, so when you first start your business, you’re winging it all right? We’ve been in business for over a decade. We’ve worked with over 1700 spas. So please believe me when I tell you that everyone is winging it when they first start. It’s like sort of this rite of passage in the entrepreneurial space. So you’re figuring it out as you go. You’re posting on social media whenever inspiration strikes. You’re running promotions based on what feels right in the moment. You’re handling everything yourself because you’re the only one there. And you know what that scrappy figure out. Figure it out as you go. Energy can absolutely get you to your first six figures. There’s a lot of hustle and a lot of grind that happens in that first 250,000 that first 250,000 of annual revenue.

You’re in the treatment room constantly. You’re answering DMS at 10pm you’re creating Black Friday sales on November 20, because you just remembered that Black Friday exists and you have a business, and you should probably participate in that. You’re your own receptionist, marketer, bookkeeper, service provider, and somehow it all works. Your clients love you. Your revenue is coming in. You’re growing. But here’s what I see when clients spa owners come to Addo esthetics. Clients in that space, they come to Addo esthetics for support, they hit that wall between the 20 to 35,000 per month in revenue, and they’re stuck. It’s a revenue plateau. They’re like, what is going on? Winging It is not working. It does not work past that, okay, that approach that got you to that 250,000 ish mark in annual revenue is not going to get you to 500,000 and it 1000, and it definitely won’t get you to a million and plus. So the hustle and grind that felt empowering and scrappy in the beginning and exciting in the beginning, honestly, it starts to feel exhausting and chaos. Robotic as you grow. So what worked when it was just you in a treatment room three days a week, completely falls apart when you have five team members, dozens of clients and business that is supposed to run whether you are there or not, okay? And now we’re layering AI into the mix this whole other aspect. So today we’re going to talk about exactly where winging it shows up in your business, how much it’s actually costing you, and, most importantly, what to do instead. Okay, so let’s start by getting really honest about what winging it actually looks like in a spa that’s trying to scale past that kind of mid six figures mark. So it’s November 20. You’re scrolling through Instagram, and suddenly you realize, oh, crap, Black Friday is in five days. Everyone else is promoting their sales. You should probably do something too, right? So you panic, create a promotion. Maybe you’re doing 20% off everything. Maybe you’re doing a gift card with a bonus value add. It’s literally whatever sounds good in the moment. You throw together a graphic in Canva, you post it on Instagram.

Maybe you’re sending out a quick email, if you remember that part and you’re just hoping for the best. And listen, you might get some sales from that, but there is a huge opportunity cost. Okay? The opportunity cost is the potential sales, the money that you are leaving on the table by not strategically planning, intentionally planning your promotion specific to your ICA. ICA is your ideal client avatar. So when you plan your Black Friday promotion, say, in September or even early October, you’re going to have time to really craft an offer that drives the behavior that you want. Maybe you want to pre book January appointments, and that’s a bonus for your Black Friday offer. January, you want to get filled up, right? Maybe you want to build anticipation with your audience through kind of teaser and education content on social and in emails. You want to have emails going out to your list to let them know what’s going on. You want to coordinate with your team so that everybody knows the offer, so that they can talk about it with their clients as they’re coming in beforehand. You want to know what to track, and you want to actually track what is working and what is not working. And you also want to ensure that you have adequate inventory and appropriate appointment availability to promote something Okay, when you randomly throw something together on November 20, you don’t get any of that. You are throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping that something sticks. This is winging it.

Okay, this pattern is going to show up in a lot of different places in your business. Last minute Instagram post because you should probably post something today, reactive email campaign sent out only when you notice that your schedule has openings promotions created based on what sounds fun or cool, rather than what your specific ICA really needs. Winging it in your marketing means that you are constantly in reaction mode, and reaction mode is exhausting. It’s also significantly less effective, and the goal is intentional marketing specifically for your ICA, okay, another symptom of winging it is having all of your systems living in your head. All right, so everything you know about how you run your business is inside of here. You know how to check someone in, you know how to fold the towels. You know which clients prefer which treatment rooms or which services are done in which treatment rooms? You know exactly the way that you want the phone answered. You know your pricing, you know your cancelation policy. You know what you’ll discount for and what you won’t discount for, but nobody else does, because it’s all in your head. So what happens every time that you are not physically in the spa, things fall apart.

Team members are texting you constantly. Where do I keep this? Where do we find that? How do I process this package purchase? What do I tell this client who’s asking about you know, X, Y or Z, you cannot take a vacation without your phone blowing up. You can’t even take a full day off without checking in multiple times. Your business, quite literally, cannot run without you. And when that happens, you don’t actually own a business, you have a really hard, demanding issue. Job that you can’t quit. So when everything lives in your head, you become the bottleneck of every single operation in your spa. You want more clients. You’re the bottleneck because you’re the only one that knows how to schedule appropriately, or how to market or who the ICA even is right. Want to hire someone new. You’re the bottleneck because you’re the only one who can actually train them. Want to grow impossible, because growth requires systems, and you don’t have systems. You have knowledge that exists nowhere except your brain. So how do you fix this? All right? Well, here is one of the cool ways that you’re going to see AI being incorporated in two businesses. You can create a custom password, protected GPT that you share with your team that you are training on your system. Shout out to Kyrie. She is a dear friend of mine. She came in and did an AI talk inside of our growth factor group, and gave us some of these great ideas of how we can simply, effectively and at a very low cost, if not free, incorporate these into our business. You can create a custom GPT for free. You can share that with your team for free, and this can give you a tremendous ROI on your time, your energy and revenue generated in your business. All right, so how do you create a custom GPT? You are creating and training one inside of any of these AI tools. You can do this in Claude. You can do this in chat. GBT, that is for another episode. But how you train it is. You spend 15 minutes a day sharing your knowledge around systems. Okay, you spend 15 minutes a day sharing how you operate your business so that GPT becomes the source that your staff can ask. It’s essentially cloning yourself. Okay, so AI is not just for helping you write copy for your next social media post. Think of custom gpts as team members in your business. Okay, so let’s move on to hiring without onboarding. And this is a major place that we see problems. This is a major place where spa owners, especially at that 20 to 35,000 per month revenue Mark, this is one of the major reasons that they get stuck. They need to hire a spa manager. That’s a kind of a plateau mark where they need someone to help with operations, but they cannot onboard, whether that is the manager that they’re trying to onboard, an additional provider if they’re going to be in the role of manager. So they’re hiring someone, they’re drowning and desperate, and they’re trying to grow strategically, and we’re saying, Okay, I’ve got to get someone else. I’ve got to bring someone on the team. You hire them, and then you throw them in the deep end, and they hope that they swim. Maybe you’ve given them a quick tour.

Maybe you did a shadow day, or maybe even two shadow days, but there’s no real onboarding process. There’s no documented procedures. There’s no clear expectations of what you want them, what KPIs you want them to reach. There’s no training timeline. There’s no check ins to see how they’re progressing. You just expect them to figure it out, and you want to do that because it’s like it takes so much time to train somebody. You don’t want to do that every time you have turnover. And what we see is because new team members are not onboarded properly, it can take 2345, hires before we find the right person for that fit. That’s a lot of time and a heck of a lot of money to go through to find that role. So let’s do it better when you

When, when that team member that you hired does not figure it out in the timeline that you want. You get frustrated when they don’t do things the way that you would like them. You get annoyed when they ask you questions. You feel irritated because they should know this by now, but they can’t know what you have not taught them. They are not mind readers, and if you have not taught and documented that they’re not going to know so winging it in your business means high turnover. It means frustrated team members. It means a not so great reputation in your community, having a difficult place to work. Means you’re constantly training new people instead of developing experienced team members who could actually help you grow. It means you’re working harder, not smarter, and again, that is costing you a ton of money. So how do we fix this? Again, a new AI solution. You can have a custom GPT trained on your internal policy and training you want to keep them meaning, when you’re creating a custom GPT, you’re going to have multiple gpts in your business, multiple custom gpts. Okay, so this is a skill that you’ll want to learn, or you’ll want to hire somebody to build these for you, and you have to know how to train them. Okay? So you want to have one focused on policy and training. You are going to constantly train them. Say, on your skincare philosophy. All right, what are the skincare lines that you carry? How are you recommending those products based on the skin conditions and concerns? And the more data that you put in there, the better. Okay, in past years, hustle and grit could totally get you ahead, but now with the low cost of AI that’s available, there’s no amount of hustle and grind that’s going to be able to beat the speed of AI. So it is time now 2026 to step up your level of leadership. It’s time to set boundaries and keep them around, what you accept, what you tolerate and what you do not. There are no AI experts out there. There’s people that know a lot, there’s people that put themselves out there. There’s people that are testing and trying new things and accomplishing really cool things. But the truth of the matter is, AI changes every two months. So it’s impossible to be an expert. There’s experienced people who have tried and tested things, but no one is truly an expert in this space as of right now. Okay, so let’s build strategic systems based businesses where success is predictable and repeatable instead of random and exhausting. Okay, no more winging it. I don’t want to over complicate your business. I don’t want to make it this corporate bureaucracy, okay, I don’t want to lose the personal touch that makes your spa special.

I’m not talking about sucking the joy out of your business. I’m talking about working smarter, not harder. I’m talking about creating a business that can scale without you sacrificing your life, your health or your family time. So let’s talk about what strategic systems based businesses look like all right, so instead, when we’re looking at your marketing, instead of just posting on social media, whenever you remember, you have a content calendar. You know what you’re posting, you know when you’re posting, you know why you’re posting it. You’ve batch created content in advance, you have a clear strategy for how your content moves people from awareness to consideration to purchase. Instead of creating promotions five days before you start, you plan them quarters in advance. Your q1 promotion is designed and ready to go before q1 begins. You know exactly what offer you’re making, who it’s for, what it’s solving, and how you’re going to market it. You’ve built anticipation, you’ve built awareness, you’ve created the email sequences, you’ve trained your team, your gpts, any agents that you’re using. I know that sounds like a lot, but with the power of AI utilized in your business, when you learn how to use AI as a tool, you can move so incredibly fast. The amount that you can do, the amount that you can produce in so much less time for so much less money is unbelievable. So instead of hoping clients book their their next appointment or buy their next retail you have a sales system. Every single client goes through the consultation process where you’re identifying their goals, you’re creating their treatment plan, you’re creating their maintenance plan. You’ve got protocols for their follow up. You’ve got systems in place for their retention. You’ve got a defined process for how clients move through your business.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t be spontaneous or creative. It means that your baseline operations run systematically, which frees you up to be strict. Teaching and creative. When those opportunities arise, we want you to have a documented systems and procedures in place. So instead of everything living in your head, you need to document how things work in your business. Again, this does not have to be complicated. There’s an incredible software called loom. It’s about $100 a year, maybe even a little bit less than that. It video records you, video record you doing a task. You drop it into chat, GPT, have it create the SOPs for you. And hey, you can even build a custom GPT for all your SOPs. Okay, so there’s so much that you can do to document this and get it out of your head. That is how you’re going to scale. Now, here’s the amazing thing, the act of actually documenting the things that you’re doing reveals inefficiencies that you may not know even existed. So when you have to write out your process for onboarding a new client, you might realize that the process is actually way more complicated than it needs to be, or you might realize that you’re missing a ton of opportunity to get people to come back to your business documentation creates clarity, and clarity creates improvement. All right, so let’s talk about a structured onboarding process and team development. So instead of just throwing new hires into the deep end, let’s create a structured onboarding process.

So the way that we do this, inside of growth factor, we actually have a two week onboarding process. So week one, they’re learning all of the specific like the traditional way of learning. So your policies and procedures, you’re getting the spa tour, you’re getting the training on the software, you’re watching any videos around the skincare lines that are carried anything like that. So it’s we’re really focusing on the traditional way of learning. Then Week two is all hands on. We want to see how they’re performing the services. Okay? So we have regular check ins. We have clear milestones. We have documented expectations at different parts of the onboarding process, and when you do this correctly, when they start week three, their first day of services, their day is full, and that is a completely different energy that you can start a new provider with. Okay, so this doesn’t just help your new team members, it’s helping you, because instead of spending weeks and months frustrated that someone isn’t reading your mind, you have a clear timeline for development. You know exactly what they should know by when you can identify gaps quickly and you can address them. And this structured onboarding means less turnover, faster time to productivity and team members who actually know how to do their jobs well, which means you can scale without the chaos. Now, there is a mindset shift required, and I know mindset is one of those things that’s kind of hard, but it is such a powerful thing in business. So when you’re moving from winging it to Strategic Systems, it’s not just about tactics. There is a fundamental mindset shift that takes place. You have to stop identifying as an esthetic professional, a service provider, and start identifying as a CEO. Okay, that is who you are. When someone says, Who are you, you don’t say, I’m an esthetician, I’m a nurse. You say, I’m a spa CEO. Okay, that’s a huge identity shift. All right, so when we are service providers or esthetic professionals, a lot of times we’re reacting when we’re CEOs. We’re strategizing when we are service providers. We often are doing everything ourselves. When we are CEOs, we are building systems. We are building teams. When we’re a service provider, we are measuring our success by how busy we are when we are a CEO, we’re measuring the outcomes of the business. Service providers are winging it. CEOs create predictable, repeatable processes, okay, and I’m talking about service providers as business owners, okay, I don’t want to get confused there, because our businesses need service providers. We need incredible providers that are of the employee mindset. There is a big difference between entrepreneurs and employees. The world needs both to function. Okay, we need both to build. And our vision of our spa that we want to create. Okay, so I’m when I am referring to a service provider winging it, I’m talking about a service provider who’s still in the room the majority of the time, which means you’re not giving the dedicated time, energy and focus to the role of CEO, which is damaging your company. So the shift is uncomfortable, all right, because what got you to that, you know, 250 ish 1000 mark annually, the hustle, the grit, the doing everything yourself. They’re not the skills that are going to get you to seven figures. In fact, those skills actually become liabilities if you don’t evolve past them. So getting to seven figures a million dollar spa, that’s going to require strategic planning. It requires letting go of control. It requires trusting systems and team members. It requires working on your business instead of in your business. This is hard. Okay, I am not going to say it is easy at all, especially when the majority of us start as aestheticians, as nurses, right? It’s, it’s the few and far between that actually are not service providers that start spas. Okay? So we have this identity of we went to a school for a specific trade for a specific thing, and now we need to let that go and focus on business leadership. We learned how to do the work, not how to build the systems that do the work.

All right, but the great thing is, is you can learn this. You can do this, and it is extremely important that you commit to learning the skills that will help you get there, that you commit to implementing the systems that will help you get there, that you commit and you decide to stop winging it and start building strategically. Okay? You don’t have to do this all at once. Building a business is a marathon, not a sprint. All right, I really am focusing, especially right now, with the students in our growth factor program, on not allowing all of these changes to overwhelm them. Okay, so we want to focus on the can I get 1% of this done? Can I build this bridge and then move to the next thing? Okay, so I want to give you a brief action plan on how to start making this shift. Okay, I’m going to give you a couple of steps. First, I want you to take a real look at your business. Be honest with yourself. Where are you just making it up as you go? Where do you lack systems? Where are you the bottleneck? Write it all down. Okay, this is nothing you have to share with anybody. This is for yourself, but just be honest with yourself. And sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know. Oftentimes you don’t know what you don’t know. But list out be as as reflective and honest as you can. That’s the only way. If we don’t know what the problem is, we don’t know how to fix it. Okay, second prioritize based on impact. So you are not going to be able to fix everything at once.

So start with the area that causes you the most pain or is costing you the most money. So for most spa CEOs at your level, that’s going to be marketing and sales or team operations. Okay, third, commit to one quarter of strategic planning. Don’t try and plan the whole year. Okay, we do that in October. We’ll have an event that we do that together in October. But right now, let’s just focus on q2 okay, let’s say, What am I doing? Don’t even try and finish the rest of q1 What are you going to be doing in q2 okay, what promotions are you going to run? What marketing content will you create? How will you support your team? Put it in the calendar. Fourth, I want you to document as you go, so every time you find yourself explaining something to your team and or explaining to them the third or fourth time, stop and document it every time you do a key process, record it. Start building that library of systems of processes, of procedures. Do it little by little and fifth, get support that might be joining a program like growth factor, that might be hiring a coach, that might just be finding an accountability partner. You need support for this transition, okay, because trying to shift from winging it to Strategic Systems while still running your business day to day is really hard to do alone. All right, so. So it’s a new year. If there were ever a moment to commit to doing business differently, let’s take advantage of this new year energy to stop winging it and start building strategically. You’ve proven that you can build a successful spa. You’ve hit six figures. You might be closing in on the half a million mark. That is no small feat. That is something you should be very proud of. But I know that you listen to this podcast because you want more. You want to scale. You want to build a seven figure business. You want a team that operates without your constant oversight. You want systems that create predictability. You want to work smarter, not harder, and all of that is absolutely possible, but not while you’re winging it. The choice is yours, but I really hope that you start to build strategically this year. Okay, thank you so much for hanging out with me today. I’m so appreciative. I’m so grateful. And I do have a quick ask for you. So this year we can you believe this year we are going to hit our 500th episode of the spot marketing Made Easy podcast. We started back in April of 2018 we have been going strong, releasing an episode every single week, and my goal is to hit 500 reviews on Apple podcast before we hit our 500th episode this year. So if you found value in today’s episode or any of our episodes that you’ve listened to.

Could you please take two minutes right now and leave a review? It is truly the best way to support this podcast, to help other spa owners find the podcast to help our industry. We often say a rising tide floats all boats. I would be so incredibly grateful. So thank you so much for being here. Thank you for investing time into your business. Thank you for doing the hard work of building something meaningful for your team, for your community. I’m grateful for you, and I will see you in the next episode.