EP 472: AI Agents for Your Spa: How to Automate Revenue, Retention, and Operations with Maeve Ferguson, Khairy Varre, and Ajit Nawalkha

All right, hello, my dears, Daniela here and welcome back to another episode of Spa Marketing Made easy. We are doing something fun today, something that I am really, really excited, something different. We are actually live streaming this recording of this episode right now into the spa marketing made it easy Facebook group. So if you’re in there, let us know. Let us know your thoughts. Do you like it when we are live streaming in, we always are looking way for new ways to support you, to provide additional value. So we’re testing this out. Let us know what you think. All right, so today’s episode is something that I know is I’ve heard from many of you keeps you up at night, and that is delegation. So my guess is that many of you know that you should be delegating, but you’re actually not doing it and not delegating is costing you so much more than you realize. It is costing you time with your family. It is costing you your mental health, your sanity, and it’s absolutely costing you revenue. So today I want to talk about delegating without fear, and how you can actually let go without losing control. That’s a really important distinction, okay, how can you let go without losing control? So when you think about handing off tasks, especially ones that are client facing around, client, communication, follow ups, the relationship, touch points. It can feel like you’re choosing between staying overwhelmed or just completely losing control of your business. But here’s the deal, you cannot scale past where you’re at right now. If you’re holding on to everything, you you just can’t there’s only so much capacity that you have as a human being. And I’m not saying that to be harsh. I’m saying that because I care about you. I care about your business. I don’t want to see you spinning your wheels. I don’t want to see you operating your business from a place of overwork and overwhelm, and the solution to that problem is delegation. Okay? So by the end of this episode, I hope that I have shifted your perspective. I hope that I have reframed some of your fears, that you will be able to take just one action to get you to start moving forward little by little, all right, and we’re going to dive into, we’re going to talk about why delegation feels scary. We’re going to look at like dismantling those biggest fears, and we’re going to talk about the mindset shifts that need to happen if you are serious about building a company, not a really hard job for yourself. And when I say a really hard job for yourself, I mean a position that you are in when you’re wearing 17 hats, you’re working at all hours.

You never have a time to unplug, unwind, recharge, all right, you can only go at that pace for so long before you just question, is this really what I want to do with my life, with my time? Okay, so let’s, let’s start that conversation. So why is delegation so hard, and specifically for providers, for spa owners, right? And I personally think it’s because so many of us, and not all of us, but the majority of us who are starting spas, we started as providers. We started as aestheticians or as nurses, and that became a part of our identity. We love helping people. We love transformations. We love seeing our clients light up when they look in the mirror. We love the connection, the relationship. It’s not just part of the job, it is the job. It’s part of our identity. And then when we decided to kind of take that next step and open our own business, and we’re wearing all of the hats. We are exhausted. We’re the aesthetician, the front desk, the marketer, the bookkeeper, the Social Media Manager, the cleaning crew. We are all of it. We get really, really good at figuring things out ourselves. Okay? We figure it out. We make it work. It becomes our identity. And listen that up to about 250,000 you can do it’s it’s normal. Most of us in that phase. From starting point up to 250,000 we are in full blown hustle mode. I. Yes, but if you want to get past that revenue plateau, you’ve got to delegate, right? You’ve got to change the way that you’re running things to be able to get to that next level. Okay? And that requires delegation and a mindset shift of knowing that you are not the only person that can do everything well, all right, I don’t want you to hit a ceiling. I don’t want you to be maxed out. I don’t want you to be working 50 or 60 hours a week or answering text at 9pm I don’t want you to be doing client follow ups on Sunday morning. I don’t want you to not be able to take a vacation because your business won’t run without you. I want the opposite. I want you to feel. What I believe is that entrepreneurship is such a blessing. It is such a gift, and it is so it can impact our lives positively in so many ways, not just from the financial aspects, also from the personal development aspects that we’re forced, we’re forced to face our own stuff when we become entrepreneurs and and work through it and grow as humans and grow into our potential, in our capacity. Okay, now my guess is that somewhere in the back of your mind, you know that you need help, you know that you need to delegate. But every time that you think about handing something off, especially something that is deeply important to you, like the communication or relationship or touch points with your clients and patients, it makes you kind of feel like you’re going to throw up, right? Like, oh, I’ve worked so hard I can’t lose this client.

All of those things we what if they don’t do it as good as me? What if a client get upset? Gets upset? What if the standard slip, what if people start saying is just not the same anymore? What if people leave, okay, that is a technician mindset, that is a provider mindset, and that mindset served you when you were starting out right? It helped you get to where you are today. But it is also the same thing that’s keeping you stuck right. We’ve got to continue to grow and evolve as we move to new levels in our business. So the technician is believing that they are the only ones that can do a particular thing. It feels good when our patients or clients say, I don’t want to see anybody else. That’s our ego that’s being stroked. And the thing that I say to our growth factor students, when I get this kind of pushback is if you say yes to this, what are you saying no to? If you say yes to staying in the room, to doing everything yourself, you’re saying no to picking your kids up from school every day. You’re saying no to being able to take a vacation. You’re saying no to insert whatever thing is a part of the reason that you created the business for in the first place. Okay, but when we look at the CEO, and we like to identify her as this boss, CEO, this boss. CEO, knows the value of the business is in systems. How do I create a process that is so good, that is so detailed, that my team can deliver the same incredible results, or even better than me every single time? That’s the mindset shift. Okay, so let’s dive into some of these fears, because I know that that is the the thing that’s paralyzing us right now, no one can do it as well as I can, all right? That’s probably one of the biggest, biggest fears, and you might be right. You might be right at this point in time, no one can do it as good as you, but your job is to pour into your team and develop your team with the intention of making them better than you. And that’s, you know, side note. That’s where the personal development comes in. Because we like to be the best. It feels good to be the best, right? You’re You’re always taught to be the best version of yourself. And now, if we’re trying to make other people better than us, that feels weird or off, but what we’re trying to do is make the best business right, make the best experience for our clients, and that means that we can’t do everything all ourself. So when we move into systems and how we’re going to create that we have to look at, we have to look at how we’re actually going to break down the details. And if you have not done that before, then start to think about that now.

That’s going to be part of your homework this week, when you’re going through. And I want you to ask yourself, like, yeah, you might be doing everything, and you might have the capability to do everything really well, but when you are overworked and overwhelmed, you are tired, are you actually giving every single patient 100% or are they getting 70% it answer that yourself, right? You don’t have to share that with anybody, but really look in and say, Did I give every single piece of myself to that patient? Was I fully present with them, or was I thinking about what I was going to make for dinner? Was I fully present with them, or was I thinking about the inventory that I needed to order. Was I fully present with them, or was I worried about the phone that was ringing at the front desk while I was in here with the room and thinking about that potential client or patient that I missed? Okay, now, if we hire a provider and train them. Maybe at your best you’re at 100% and at their best they’re at 85% because there is, you know, value in time and experience in our space. You’ve got to get your hands on people to be able to get that actual experience, and many of you have been in the industry 10 plus years, it’s a lot of time. That’s a lot of value, that’s a lot that you can’t learn from a book. But if we can get that new provider up to even 75% if your overworked and overwhelmed self was only doing 70% you’re still doing you’re still doing better, right? So think about it in that way.

Think about it in the experience of the patient, and so your team can absolutely learn your standards, but only if you are creating the system for them to follow. All right, so fear number two, I’m going to lose the relationships with my clients. And this can be really important. This can be the fulfillment aspect of our job. When we build those deep relationships, you have the patients that are bringing you holiday gifts, you’re having very deeply connected, emotional conversations, because the just because the nature of our relationship, we are supporting them. They’re telling us the thing very vulnerable conversations, there’s a deep level of trust, and we realize that you know not every single person that’s on your table, but there are a good number of people that you form genuine, deep relationships with. And if you get out of the room, and if you start delegating things, you’re going to fear that you’re going to lose those relationships, relationships of people that have been with you since you started. They know you. They ask for you. And the thought of someone else being their point of contact feels like you’re handing off something precious. But I want you to reframe that process again. Your focus is pouring into how do you make your team better than you. You can still check in with that patient, you can still send them an email or a text. You can still talk with them when you see them on the schedule. It’s a shifting relationship. And you know, I have, I have a lot of friends right now that are in different stages of parenting, and my kids are young. They’re five and eight, and a lot of I have another girlfriend who her kids are teenagers, and she’s getting really worried about the transition their own I think next year is the year that they graduate. One of them graduates, and that whole identity that she has had around being a mother, and what does it look like when my kids graduate and and I think a lot of parents go through this of like that transition of, is the relationship going to be different, and are we mourning the loss of like this season of life with our children? And I mean, I even talked to my therapist for a long time about this, this topic of, you know, the their childhood seems to be fleeting and going so quickly, and how do I make sure that I’m staying present with all of it. It’s very similar to the same fear that we’re talking about here in the practice. It’s like the relation. The relationship doesn’t mean that it has to be over. It’s just shifting. It’s taking a different shape. It’s taking. Different focus, and that might, it might end up being better. It might end up being different, but it’s it’s just shifting the way that it is, but the relationship is still there, and if you put the work into it, because we cannot take relationships for granted, whether it’s with our family, whether it’s with our friends, whether it’s with colleagues and team members or whether it’s with strategic partners. Relationships need to be nurtured. They require work, and so if you are just aware of that, and you put attention and focus into ensuring that the relationships with your patients and clients are still there and are nurtured, and they know how much you value them and want to make sure that they have a great experience. It just changes shape. It just changes shape. Okay? So it’s a really, really important aspect to remember, all right, fear number three, it takes more time to train than to just do it myself and listen this. This might be true for a month, okay, but what we are looking at when we look at our business, is that a business is a marathon, not a sprint.

And so yes, for one month, it might be faster for you to do it yourself, but if you are stuck doing it yourself every single month, think about the hours upon hours that you are losing by doing this task that could be passed off to someone else. Now, in our growth factor program, we we typically start it off with a time tracker, and it’s kind of a tedious exercise. We track everything that we’re doing every 15 minutes for an entire week, and we break it into what is actual work time. What is fun? Do we have any fun in our life? What is administrative work at home, like laundry, cleaning, you know, things like that. What is quality family time, and what is self care. And so we break down these different categories, and we’re identifying what we’re doing, and we’re the spreadsheet that we have takes the percentage of all of these and really breaks it into like, wow, you spent this amount of time on household items, or you spent this amount of time, this percentage of your week was on this particular thing. And so it really glaringly shows you where you’re spending your time. And we go through and then we highlight and we look at like what can be passed off. And if we can free up 10 hours a week from your schedule, and you could dedicate 10 hours a week towards systemizing your business, or 10 hours a week towards learning a new skill, or 10 hours a week towards leadership development or training your team. Think about how things like that would compound. So there is an opportunity cost for every single thing that you do, meaning, if I stay handling these tasks that someone else actually could do instead of little by little. And I don’t want you to rip the band aid off, right? I don’t want you to delegate everything all at once. I want you to understand how something works. I want you to create the system, and then I want you to delegate it to ensure that it goes smoothly, so that we are not, you know, causing additional problems down the line. All right, so that’s a really important thing. And side note here, a lot of times people will see that there’s problems. They don’t know how to do it, and they think that just hiring is the problem. Is the problem, and they hire, and then it turns out badly, and it reinforces their beliefs that it’s just better if I do it myself. But instead, the problem is that there was no system there for that person in the first place they came into a new business, something that you intimately know and you just expected them to thrive? No, you’ve got to set them up for success. You’ve got to develop them, you’ve got to train them. You’ve got to give them the step by step system that you want them to follow. That’s how they’re going to thrive. Okay, systems equal freedom. I’m going to say that over and over and over again.

All right, let’s dive into fear number four, and that is that my team will mess it up and hurt my my reputation. Yeah, your team’s gonna mess up. They will, and so will you. You are human. You are human. Mistakes happen. In and the best thing that we can do is acknowledge forgive and find a solution that it doesn’t happen again. Okay, so acknowledge forgive and find a solution that doesn’t happen again. And most importantly, forgive yourself. Give yourself some grace, because you will mess up, you absolutely will mess up on something. And the point is not that you mess up, it’s how you handle it and how you prevent that particular misstep from happening again in the future. I like to call them areas of opportunity. So if there’s a mistake, I always found a new area of opportunity in my business that I can clean up, that I can fix right so most mistakes, most mistakes, are not going to be a huge deal. They are something that can be fixed with clear communication, with a genuine apology if you do something incorrectly, right? But if you are able to have clear and direct communication, then you can solve that problem and then and put a system in place to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. Okay, so if you’re in business long enough, you’re gonna get a negative review you’re going to do, you’re going to have a mistake. It happens. It’s not a question of if, but when. The real skill is, how do I handle that, and how do I ensure that I’m learning from every single thing and making it better so that it doesn’t happen again? Okay, so we’ve talked about the fears. Now I want to talk about the mindset shift, and this is why personal development is such a huge part of entrepreneurship.

Oops, sorry. There was a little notification that scared me there. That’s what happens when we record things live. Okay, so let’s talk about the mindset shift. The limiting factor is not tactical. It’s not, I don’t know how to delegate. It’s, it’s the story that you’re telling yourself about what delegation means. So instead of saying, if I’m not doing everything myself, I’m not really running my business. And this is this may sound silly to some of you, but we, you know, a lot of what we do is help CEOs get out of the room so that they can step into the spa CEO role. So we help them get out of the room. And once they’re out of the room, and once they have their manager delegating everything, they don’t know what to do. What am I supposed to do? I don’t feel useful. My team doesn’t need me. I have no idea what to do as the CEO. There’s a whole job description of what you should be doing as the CEO. But if you’ve been in that operator role, you only know task base. You don’t know the higher level, visionary relationship, building aspects, team, development, aspects that you should be doing as the CEO. But this is a common thing that happens when we get a provider out of the room. If I’m not doing everything myself, I’m not really running my business. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t have control. My team doesn’t need me. All of these things are normal fears, and it’s all about switching that story that the business has been created, the culture of the business is there because you created it. All right. So you’ve really got to be be able to identify that. If you’re telling yourself, I should be able to handle this myself. Start to tell yourself, building a team is not a weakness. It is the only way to scale.

All right, so whatever your belief is, reframe it into something positive with Team, this is non negotiable. So if you want to grow past 2530, 40k, months and beyond, you’ve got to shift your mindset. You’ve got to add a team, okay? Because there’s a certain point you’re going to hit a ceiling, and there’s only going to be so many hours that you can work. That is how we scale and grow little by little. Again, we are not ripping the band aid all off at once, but step by step, milestone by milestone, all right, systems equal freedom. I want you to remember that when you have a documented process, when you have templates, when you have scripts, when you have clear expectations, when you have clear training, it’s not restricting your creativity. It’s not. Restricting your client relationships. It’s creating the foundation that allows you to focus on what actually matters, pouring into your team, deepening the relationship with your clients. So think about Starbucks, right? Starbucks can hire a high school kid that maybe it’s their first job, and because they are so systemized that high school kid all they have to do is be good at following instructions. All right, that’s because clear systems and SOPs exist. So you don’t need to have the same level of systemization as Starbucks does, but you do need enough processes that someone other than you can do different tasks within your business.

Okay? And we’re going to Little by little, increase those. So what I want you to do is take one action this week, commit to one thing, not 10, just one, one thing that you’re going to focus on, something that you are not delegating yet. I want you to decide what it is, and I want you to create the system and start delegating it to your team, perhaps your front desk, if you have a virtual assistant, if you have estheticians that have open spots on their schedule, take that thing clearly communicate it. Create the step by step system and delegate little by little. All right, I want you to document. I want you to adjust based on the needs, and I want you to celebrate, because if you can do that, then you just have to build on that, little by little by little to build a systems based business. Okay, so thank you for being here with me today. Live. I hope you guys liked it live. We’ll see how it goes. I think it was fun, except for my little notification.

But other than that, it’s been really good. I appreciate you. I’m grateful for you, and I hope so much that you do this delegation, that you start to systemize for yourself, it is the key to building a systems based business that gives you the freedom that you desire, the benefit from entrepreneurship. All right, my dears, thank you so much. I appreciate you, and I’ll catch you on next week’s episode.