EP 492: Your Midyear Spa Business Audit

Well, hello, my neighbors. Daniela here, and welcome to Spa Marketing Made Easy. Today we are doing something a little different. I don’t have any frameworks for you to install. I don’t have any systems for you to build. We don’t have any tactical deep dive. We’re doing a check-in, a real check-in. Okay, so it is July. It is midyear. It’s such an important thing for you to do to check in. Where are you at? Where are you aligned? How are you feeling? And with that data that you get, you have the ability to make change, you have the ability to influence the outcome of the rest of the year. Okay, so we are working with a lot of spa owners right now who are already taking action for what Q4 is going to be for them. They’re in our implementation program, they’re like, “Gosh, can I do a call every single week because I want to have more spaciousness on my schedule for Q4 so that I can fully serve my clients there? Right. So they’re planning ahead. They’re working on their marketing. They’re working on their offers. They’re working on their strategy. They’re not just flying by the seat of their pants for Q4. They are getting prepared to make Q4 one of the strongest ever for them. Right, that’s how we need to operate. And the thing is, Q4 is coming faster than you think. It’s already July, people. It’s already July. Now that energy, that anticipation, that desire to use summer intentionally, rather than just survive it, or rather than say, “Oh, it’s our summer slowdown. This, you know, it slows down a bit, unless you’re like a a waxing or sugaring studio. Like I know there’s or there’s a lot of different kind of models that have very busy summers, but we do see in a lot of practices there’s a summer slowdown. Right, you have families on vacation. You know they’re maybe getting more sun exposure than they typically would, and this is the perfect time to get prepared to do the work up front, so that you have an incredible Q4. All right, so we’re going to do a mid-year audit together. I’m going to walk you through the numbers you should be looking at, the questions you should be asking about your business, and we’re going to be looking at how you are doing, how you are feeling because you are your business’s greatest asset, and so it’s not just about the numbers. It’s about building a business that supports the life you want to live, and that means that you need to be happy and joyful in what it is that you’re doing. Okay, and so we are going to go through this entire process, so let’s start with the the business check-in. All right, so if you set goals for the beginning of the year, then we’re going to look at those goals, and we’re going to see kind of where you’re at. Right? How how are you faring compared to what you intended to do? Because now that we’re in July, okay, so we’ve got half the year behind us. We’ve got a good amount of data, but we still have plenty of time to make meaningful adjustments. And some of the numbers that we’re going to be looking at are the numbers that you will be able to be focusing on that’ll help you make those meaningful adjustments. Now, we obviously don’t have time to like start completely over. We’re not going to be able to fix every single system in your business, but we are able to identify what is working and really double down on that, and we have the opportunity to stop what’s not working, and we can finish this year and go into busy season with clarity instead of chaos.

Okay, so here’s the numbers that I want you to pull this week. So your revenue of where you’re at versus the goal that you set for yourself. Okay, what did you project that you would hit this year, and where are you actually tracking? Right. So not just total revenue, but I want you to look at where you’re at right now, and as a percentage, right, and where you need to be by December. So if you’re 45% of your annual goal in July, you’re slightly behind pace.

If you’re 50-5% you have a little bit of room to breathe. But also keep in mind that is only if you set your goals based on past performance, because so much of the revenue that comes in comes in during q4 and. So this is total side note here, but if you want to have a million dollar spa, you don’t take a million and divide it by 12 and say my goal for every single month is 83,333 You take the what you actually do in those number, like what percentage. So if you had $100,000 month one month, and you had a $70,000 month another month, you’re going to look at the percentages of each of those months and break that million dollars up accordingly, so that you’re going with the kind of ebbs and flows and the seasonality of your own business. Okay, so you may be at 45% but that might be actually right on track of where you’re supposed to be for July because of the amount of revenue that comes in in q4 Okay, so keep all of that in mind. Now, here’s what I want you to think about, and just like there’s not a right or wrong answer, but are you still aligned with the goal that you set in January, there may have been life changes. There may have been business shifts. There may be vision shifts. And if we spend the second half of the year chasing a target that doesn’t actually reflect where we want to go anymore, that’s important data, right? We’ve got to course correct. We’ve got to. We’re going to talk about that. We have like a self reflection section, but I want you to be aware of that. If something is feeling off internally, but hold that for now. Okay, just keep that in mind. Now let’s look at revenue and profit, right? Revenue and profit are not the same thing. Okay, a spa doing 600,000 a year with $590,000 of expenses. Well, that’s not really the business that I would want to be running. That is stressful and overwhelming, and can feel like an expensive hobby, right? Profit is the number that funds your life, that pays you what you desire, that gives the businesses the business the reserves that it actually needs to grow without you just white knuckling every single slow week. Revenue tells you what the clients are paying you. Profit tells you what your business is actually worth to you, right? So profit over revenue all day, every day. That’s what we want our focus. If your revenue actually went down, but your profit went up, massive success, massive success, right? Because we are looking at building a business around the life that you want to live, and profit is what funds that life. Now, retail to service percentage. I’m obsessed with retail. I think it’s incredibly, incredibly important, and this is often overlooked, right? But it is one of the fastest levers to increase profitability without adding a single new client. So, if your retail disservice percentage is low, pull that number right now if you don’t know it. Okay, so go and look at that, and that is potential. It’s what we call low-hanging fruit in your business, right? We want to capture that opportunity because your clients, your patients are purchasing retail, guaranteed. They are not not using any type of cleanser or product, right? They are using it, so we want them to get that product from you. Now, what I expect for retail to services kind of benchmarks is that if you are a day spa or if you’re what I call med spa light, I want you at 50% retail to service. If you are a true, you know, physician on site med spa, lots of energy based devices, higher-priced services, or your surgical center. If you work at a plastic surgeon’s office or are a plastic surgeon, we’re typically looking at a 30% retail-to-service. Okay, and the reason for that is we want to capture as much as we’d like our patients to come in every single month. Not all of them do, okay. But we still want them to purchase retail from us, so we’re looking at that. We’re getting our retail to service percentage up because even when a patient is not coming in for an esthetic service, they’re still purchasing the retail for us.

So that’s going to go against the company wide retail to service percentage really really important really low hanging fruit really great way to increase you know different levers that you’re looking to pull also there are studies that show that a client or patient who purchases three or more retail products has a 90% likelihood. Of coming back for another service, so it’s not just about you know selling them a bunch of products. It’s about like the whole system, right? The retail is what they’re doing every single day at home. Very, very important metric to track and to pay attention to if you’re not doing that already.

The other one that I really like to check in on during a midyear review or any quarterly review, for that matter, is your client acquisition cost. So, how much does it cost you to get a new client in the door? And more importantly, do you know which channel is producing your best clients-not the most clients, but the ones who rebook and buy retail and refer their friends. Now we have this document called the Client Acquisition Cost Tracker inside of Growth Factor Implementation, and we’re looking at Google SEO. We’re looking at walk-ins. We’re looking at social media. We’re looking at strategic partners. We’re looking at just a variety of ways that people are coming in, referrals, obviously, but we’re also tracking a whole slew of other data to to really understand the the quality and quantity. Now, you may get more clients from Instagram, but they’re not rebooking, they’re not purchasing product, they’re not joining your membership, and so it may seem that those are the right ones. But then you’re seeing everybody that comes to you through Google, it may be less, but they are joining the membership, they are purchasing retail, they are referring their friends. That’s going to let us know that we have a higher quality from Google or SEO than we do from Instagram, and it may be vice versa. It’s not the both can be true. It’s for your specific ICA. Where are you finding them, and how are you getting them into your practice? This is some of the most valuable data because it can help us as a spa CEO make the decision of where am I going to put my time and energy when I’m focusing on marketing for Q4, right? We don’t want to throw spaghetti at the wall and be like, okay, I need to get more clients. I’ve identified that I have a lead flow problem and not a retention problem, and we all have to get you know we lose about 20% of our clients every single year for a variety of reasons, often that have nothing to do with you. Right, financial situations change. Someone may get pregnant or be nursing, someone may move. Right there’s there’s so many different things that you know we can’t take any of that personally. But if we want to grow, we want to look at okay. Well, if I want to just stay the same, then I need to get at least 20% new clients coming in. If I want to grow, I need to get you know 25 30% new clients, but we also want to be able to retain them. Remember, I was saying, is it a lead flow problem or a retention problem? Our minds often go straight to lead flow. I need more people coming in, but if they’re just dropping off the back end, then that’s a recipe for like a hamster wheel problem that’s going to lead to exhaustion, right? So we want to look at that, and if we know, hey, we’ve got to get new clients in, we want to understand how much it cost us to get a new client and what the quality is. So it’s really important, and it’s a really simple way to get that data so that you are not just again like throwing spaghetti at the wall. Okay, so I want to talk about profitability. Okay, so not profitability of the practice, but I also want to talk about profitability of each individual service that you’re offering.

This is another really important thing that we do inside of our programs is we get super crystal clear on the consumable and payroll cost of every service that you’re offering, and if we, you know, that’s another way that we can say, hey, we can increase profitability if we find the overlap between our most profitable services and the services that give effective results that we enjoy doing that also serve our ICA, right? Those are all really important pieces. Now, I cannot tell you how many times we’ve started working with a spa and done the cost of treatment analysis and found that the services on their menu they’re actually losing money. Like I’m not exaggerating at all. Like they are losing money. It is costing them money to do those services. Okay, so every time that service gets booked, the CEO who’s working so hard to attract that client is actually. Losing money on that service, and the owner had no idea because overall the practice is profitable. The lights were on, the payrolls getting covered, the revenue looked okay, but what was happening underneath was the more profitable services-the energy-based devices, the waxing, the sugaring, the services with low consumables and higher margins. They were carrying that low margin load, the high consumable services that were actually quietly draining the practice. Okay, so I’ve shared a couple of times. This is a this was like a moment that my mind was completely blown because we were working with a spa owner, and she was she had two. She charged 299 for enzyme an enzyme treatment, and then she also charged 299 for microneedling, and she was only looking at the retail price. She was not looking at profitability, and like she, this is not uncommon, right? This is not this like, oh, how could she not know that? It’s it’s a very common thing, and like no judgment here, right? We work with so many people that are so clinically competent and so focused on solving the problems of their patients, and when it comes to business, they just that hasn’t crossed their mind. They’re only looking at solving the problem of the patient, and that’s where she was. Right? She was saying, “Okay, well, I’ve got this treatment. I’ve got this service. They’re both 299 I’m bringing the same money into the practice. But she was not. It was like not even close the difference in profitability, and she had been promoting the other service that was so much less profitable when both were equivalent, right? In the results that they were going to, what she was, you know, trying to attract. So, so important here for bigger picture, to understand the profitability of each of your own services, and so if you have a gap to make up between now and the end of the year, we again want to understand: Are we promoting the right services? Right. It’s not just getting new clients in that is the only lever that we can pull, or getting our existing clients to rebook more frequently. It’s really looking at these numbers and understanding, like when you hear people talking about working harder, not smarter, or other way, other way, working smarter, not harder. This is what they’re doing, right? They are looking at these specific numbers to really lead with the things that are going to ultimately help their business bigger picture. All right, so let’s talk about operations and systems. It’s because your midyear check-in is not just numbers, right? We want to look at efficiency. We want to look at productivity. We want to look at you know whether your business is actually set to handle what’s coming in Q4, right? So Q4 for almost every business model, it’s the busiest. It’s peel season. It’s holidays. It’s you know for whatever reason everybody you know wants to. You’ve got Thanksgiving, you’ve got Christmas, you’ve got New Year’s Eve. There’s the whole New Year, New You. Everybody’s got this like motivated energy. So we’ve got a lot of things going on. That Q4, it’s gift cards, right? Like there’s just like a massive surge of energy in Q4, and without fail, I have spot owners that like you know four days before Black Friday are like I’m gonna run a gift card special, and I’m like okay great, and they do well.

But I’m like, what if you actually had that planned in the summer, right? And you had you could actually lead into it and start seeding it with your staff and start seeding it with your clients and have all of the marketing materials. How much better would that promotion be if you actually like planned it out? If you gave your whole self to to the CEO work, that’s the kind of stuff that I’m talking about that gets dropped when you’re in the room four days a week, right? Because when else do you have the time to really dive in into things that could support and help the business as a whole? Okay, so right now I want you to look at your systems. If your systems are held together by your constant presence, if your business slows down when you’re not watching it. If your team is still coming to you for the answers that should live somewhere else, if your marketing goes quiet whenever you get busy, Q4 is not going to be a growth season, friends. It is going to be a survival season. So here are the questions that I want you to ask about your operation. Right now, while you still have time to address them, are your team members clear on what they own? Do they own anything? Right, that might be a step back question if you don’t have them owning anything-not just what tasks they do, but what domains they are responsible for and what decisions they can make without you? What success looks like in their role? So if your team is still waiting for your input before they move on anything, that is a bottleneck, and q4 is going to make it worse.

We actually just created this document in our business that’s called like a decision tree, and we went through every single department and documented on a piece of paper who has ownership. At what point does this get escalated to me? Who has the authority to make different decisions? What is the process? It was a long time to create, and thanks to the help with our AI employees, we were able to get through it. But now we have, you know, black and white clarity on the decision tree process. Okay, so when we go back to your team and what they have ownership, is your onboarding process documented? Right, because are you going to be hiring during Q4? Maybe you’re not intending to, but maybe that is you know one of the little gifts of the season is that you’re going to be bringing on a new team member for the holiday season, a provider, a front desk, anyone that you need to be able to onboard. And if you don’t want it to take two weeks of your personal time, if all the onboarding still lives in your head, this is the month to get it out of your head and into a system. Is your marketing set up to run consistently even when you’re slammed? Do you have a content system, a scheduler, a batching process? Do you have AI employees to help you create. That means your Instagram and your emails. We don’t want them to go silent in November because you were too busy to write anything, right? Your clients are going to be making decisions in October and November, and the spa that is consistently showing up in their feed is going to be top of mind for what they do, right? And you know, speaking of AI employees, which ones are you currently using, and how are they reducing your workload? Not which tools have you signed up for, but which ones are you actually using, and are you using them in a manner that they are truly an employee in your business, an asset in your business? Are they saving you time and money? So if you have Claude, are you using it to write one Instagram caption a week? You’re leaving most of what, like 99.9999% of what Claude is capable of. And honestly, that’s yes, it’s going to help you write, but it’s still going to take you a massive amount of time to sit there and prompt. Right, set up AI employees. Set up cowork. Set up quad design. I mean, there’s so many different things that you can be doing to get that marketing off of your plate. All right.

Go back and listen to the delegation episode. I believe it was last week’s episode, and we talk a lot about how to when you’re delegating, how to refine similarly similarly how you do with human employees, how you would do with your AI employees. Super important in the marketing piece. Okay, so I had mentioned that I also really want to do a personal check-in because this is this is extremely important to me. I live and breathe that you are building a business around the life that you want to live. That’s going to shift and change depending on the season that you’re in. You know, for me, I needed to be location independent because my husband was active duty military, and I didn’t want to geo batch, I want to be able to pick my kids up from school. I want to be, I want to be present for my life. Right, I love what I do. I’m obsessed with what I do. I feel so grateful for what I get to do every single day, but it also doesn’t define who I am as a person, right? My family, my relationships-that is the most important thing to me. So you’ve got to check in on how you are doing. How are you doing? How are you feeling, right? Are you in a constant state of overwhelm of stress, right? Not your business, you. And I want you to really answer those questions honestly, right? Not the like, oh, this sounds nice, or I don’t, I’m gonna get it together, whatever, but. Like the real answer, and for my entrepreneurial ladies out there, like you know the obsession that happens when you are like having fun. You’re thinking about your business all the time. I know when Kyle started his company, and I could tell that was the thing, that was like the thing that was going to get off the ground for him because he was thinking about it at dinner, and he was thinking about it when we would go on a walk, and he was thinking about it on the weekends, and so his mind it was just it had captured his interest, right? It was bringing him joy to come up with new ideas, think back to the beginning of your business. The excitement, the joy that you would find, doesn’t mean that it wasn’t hard. Doesn’t mean that you weren’t challenged, but there was still like a joyful and obsessiveness that we have around creation, building, right? And I think that a lot of us really enjoy the build, right? And if you know, you know. But you also have to check in and say, Are you having fun, right? Does this is this still the work that’s lighting you up? How do you feel about your schedule? Are you working the hours that you want to be working? Have you drifted back in the treatment room more days than you planned, or are you doing things in the evening and and kind of not honoring the time blocks that you wanted to protect for yourself? And also, like, how are you defining success this year? Not just financially, but in your life and in the next six months. So, for me, I’ve shared with you many times. You know, I had a really hard year when the year that Kyle was gone for 80% He was 80% travel. He was gone most of it. I was managing the business, the kids, the household, and there was just this sense. I was like, something needs to change, right? Like this is just not. It’s not as joyful as it used to be, and and I actually talk about it in our welcome letter of the July magazine. If you get the magazine, there was this unrest, and there was also this kind of AI on the horizon of what was coming. And I made one of the hardest decisions that I have ever made. Like sometimes I’m still processing it today. Of like, I can’t believe I actually did that, but I’m so I’m so grateful that I did. But like, I decided to slow down. Right, 2025 was a slow down year, and I we had our previous iteration of Growth Factor. We had hundreds of clients that we shut down. We were a very comfortable seven-figure business. We were maybe even considered a boring business, right?

It was everything was on on repeat, and then I changed it and I I shut it down and I rebuilt and and you know we took a a lot of steps back in a lot of areas. Our revenue was way down in 2025. It was a very hard year in a lot of ways, but that slowdown was the setup. Okay, because of what we built in 2025, the AI integrated program, right? Like the version of what we’re doing now, the new coaching structure, the the AI employees that we built for our clients. 2026 is on track to be our not only our highest revenue but our highest profit year, not in spite of the hard year but because of it. And I’m talking about like in the entire history of the company, so none of that would have happened if I didn’t have that moment where I was like, “Something’s got to change. Something’s got to shift. Am I aligned with what we’re doing? Am I building something that I believe is the right thing to serve our clients in the future, right? So, right now, today, I want you to grab a journal. I want you to open a notes app. I want you to to voice memo yourself, and on your morning walk, I want you to really ask yourself the deep questions: Are you still excited? Are you still having fun? Is your schedule reflecting the life that you are trying to build, and what needs to happen in the next six months for you to feel like this is a success by your definition, not anyone else’s? Okay, it’s so important, and I’m not saying like you’re not going to have hard moments. That’s it’s super. Normal to have hard moments. It’s super normal to to go through parts of the business that you don’t want to do. Right, I’ll say it to Taya. It’s not all rainbows and unicorns. Right, like there’s there’s certain things that we have to do, even even if it’s something that we love and brings us a massive amount of joy, right? So answer those honestly for yourself. Now, for the business check-in, pull your revenue goal versus your revenue goal, your profit. Compare where you’re at to the goals that you set for yourself, check out your retail to service, your client acquisition, audit your profitability. Those are your levers that are going to be the lowest hanging fruit to help you adjust course moving forward to find the money that you’re leaving on the table. Okay, now the self check in. Just be honest with yourself. No one else has to see this self check in. You just be honest with yourself about how you’re feeling, whether you’re still feeling aligned with the goals that you set in January and what needs to be true by December for this year to feel like a success to you, not just on paper but in your life. Now, I want you to schedule two hours before the end of this week. No clients, no team, no fires. You and your numbers and your honest answers. And I want you to make a clear decision about what the second half of the year is going to look like. Not 20 things, one decision. What is the most important thing you are going to focus on between now and December? All right, q4 is coming, my dears. I feel like I’m saying like winter is coming. q4 is coming. It always does, right? And it feels like it comes faster and faster and faster every single year. I want you to walk into q4 with clarity. I want you to know your numbers. I want you to have your systems in place, and I want you to use the summer right now intentionally, so that you have your best Q4 ever. I am so excited for you to take this and do something with it. Okay, action creates clarity. Don’t just listen. Apply this to your business. This will make a massive difference. Okay, my dears, that is your episode for today.

If this resonated, please let me know. Please tell me what came in in your check-in. You can send me a DM on Instagram. You can send us an email. Please give me the feedback. I love hearing it. I love knowing how I can support you. I love knowing the things that we as a company can do to help elevate this industry. Okay, thank you so so much, and I will catch you on the next episode.