EP 441: Still on Track? How to Use a Mid‑Year Review to Save Your Spa’s 2025 Goals

Welcome back to another episode of Spa Marketing Made Easy. I am your host, Daniela Woerner, and today we are diving into something that is so incredibly important for every spa CEO to prioritize right now, and that is a mid year business review. So let me ask you, how often do you pause and really reflect on your business outside of hustle mode, which, let’s be honest, this year, I know you’ve been in hustle mode more than you would like to admit, more than you would desire, right? It’s one thing to like set goals in January, we’re full of excitement. It’s a new year, new you all this fun stuff going on, but it’s another thing to actually check in with those goals six months later, especially as I said, like life and business and the economy, they’re all kind of throwing us curveballs right in this in this exciting journey that we call entrepreneurship.

So if you’re like, wait, what were my goals again? If you don’t even remember what your goals are, because these six months have flown by, first, you’re not alone. Okay, that’s there’s a lot of you out there that would be raising your hand for that. But second, this is your chance to realign and recalibrate. Okay, I wanted to create this episode to help you do just that. So today we’re gonna walk through five key steps that you can take today to assess your alignment, check your metrics, make informed and empowered decisions about the rest of the year. Remember, every day is a new day. We get to start fresh. This is your clean slate, your blank piece of paper and your brand new journal to realign and reset this year based on what your goals are, whether you’re increasing them or decreasing them, whether you’re focusing, you know, moving full steam ahead with your original vision or your pivoting, okay, we just want to make sure that we are making informed, empowered decisions about the rest of the year. Okay?

And of course, to make it actionable, I created a worksheet to guide you through this process. You can download it in the show notes. There’s a link there. So I want to make sure that you do that, because, again, this exercise is so incredibly helpful. Okay, so why does this even matter? Well, when you’re a spa CEO, especially one with a team clients to serve, and maybe you’re still in the treatment room, your time is stretched. You are in. Just go, go, go mode constantly. And why you may feel like you’re just too busy to slow down and actually work on the business. The truth is this pause, this hour long, pause, right? This is not going to take you more than an hour to really go through. Is what is going to prevent burnout, prevent stagnation, prevent misalignment, and really help you move forward in the right direction.

Now, why mid year? Well, it’s a natural turning point. Right? We are halfway through the calendar year. You’ve got six months behind you, full of data, full of wins, full of challenges, full of lessons, and six months ahead of you, and that makes this the perfect time to reflect on what’s working, what’s not, and what you need to shift. And let’s be real. Okay, the spa industry is shifting. We’ve seen changes to different services, medically assisted. Weight loss is having some shifts. We’ve seen a lot of shifts in scope of practice. We’ve seen consumer behavior shifting. The economy is shifting. Okay? So we’ve got to be nimble. If your goals and strategies are not evolving with those shifts, you’re not setting yourself up for success. Okay? Today’s episode is about reclaiming that power and clarity for your business.

So let’s just start with the big question, okay, what are the top three goals that you had at the beginning of the year? Now, if you’re drawing a blank, here no shame. Go back look at your planner. Did you do some sort of goal setting exercise? Did you create a January vision board if you didn’t go back to your Instagram post and look at like, what were you posting about? What were you talking about? What were you hoping to achieve? Did you launch a membership? Were you trying to hire a new team member. Were you solely focused on hitting a specific revenue goal? Maybe you’re trying to get out of the treatment room identify those goals and ask, Where are you with those each day? Was it something that you just wrote in the beginning of the year because you thought it sounded cool? But you actually didn’t put any effort into it. Was it something that shifted? Maybe something happened in your personal life that changed your goals and desires with your business? So really look at each of those goals. Where do you stand with each one today? Is it still important to you? Is that still something that you truly desire? Are you on track with those things? Have you made any progress? Have you put any effort in and most importantly, do these goals still reflect the life and business that you want, the life that you are wanting to build? Does your business support that?

Because, again, things can shift. All right. Oh, okay, business. I’m thinking of myself. Why I just took that pause, because something can come up personally, whether it’s a health issue with a family member, whether it’s it’s an unexpected curveball that can completely shift your focus. Those are okay. Okay, that’s okay. That is actually the beauty of being an entrepreneur, is that we get permission to shift and change and build the business around the life that we want to live. Okay? So what is that for? You give yourself permission to pivot if the goals are no longer aligning with the life you want to live, I want you to get the worksheet, make sure that you download that, get it out of your head and onto paper. That’s going to make it real. That’s going to make it tangible. Tell a friend, tell your spouse, tell your partner, tell somebody that you trust, and at very minimum, write it in your journal, so that at least you’re getting it out of your head and making it more tangible.

Okay, then you have also it’s documented, so that in the end of the year, when you’re doing your annual review, you can look back and easily see where was your head at? What were you focusing on? What was important to you in business at the midway part of the year? It’s also a great I know I’m kind of going on a tangent here, but one of the reasons that I love this is because, as entrepreneurs, if you’re like me, like it’s hard to we set really big goals for ourselves, right? We have these big expectations, and sometimes we fall short of those goals, and it can make us feel like, Oh, what am I even doing? But then if you go back to your mid year review, or your annual review, you can actually measure all of the things that you accomplished, all of the progress that you made. Right? And it’s often like because we’re not celebrating our wins as much as we should be, we’re not getting to see how much progress we’ve actually made, and how much growth we’ve actually made. I mean, all I have to do is go back and look, look at my very first YouTube videos, which are horrific, by the way, but it’s a great example of, like, just starting and keep going and getting better and better and better, and putting yourself out there and doing the thing, right? That’s how we’re able to measure progress.

Okay, so business is all about numbers, right? That is the Language of Business. So no mid year review can be complete without taking a dive into our metrics. Okay, so we’re not going to look at every single metric under the sun, but just some of the big ones, right? Remember, numbers are neutral. They’re not emotional. They’re just information. It’s just data that we are using to make decisions, all right? This is what you do as a CEO. So what I want you to look at the kind of big ones would be your revenue year to date with your expenses, right? So we want to understand revenue and expenses and profit, okay, so all the dollars that came in, all the dollars that went out, and what is left over after, if you divide your profit into your revenue, that is going to give you your profit percentage.

And so we want to understand, I find it easiest, because revenue and expenses can go up and down, but the most important thing is our profit, and what percentage of our revenue is coming in as profit. So we want to understand where we’re at for the year with all of those things. If you are membership based, we definitely want to look at how many active members you have, and you should, well, you should, I highly recommend using a membership tracker so that you know how many active members you have every single month. What point are they canceling? You know all of the data that you. Need for memberships. Okay?

I believe, you know, I used to say that you get to pick if you want to be membership based or not, as we’re continuing, you know, as this is our 11th year in business now, I am at like, a 99% recommendation for every single spa to have some type of membership, because the recurring revenue is it just helps you lead in a better way. There’s a few exceptions here and there, but for 99% of spas out there, I highly recommend having a membership. So understanding your membership data, how many active members you have? Are you growing them? You know, all of that type of stuff. We want to look at that and analyze that.

And then this one is something that I’ve been paying extra close attention to this year, and that’s your client acquisition cost. So how much are we spending to bring in a new client, and where specifically are those clients coming from? So as we’re, you know, we’re getting ready for Growth Factor Beta or by the time that this is released, we’ll either just be, we might be like in the first week of our Growth Factor Beta program. And one of the things that we’re doing inside of there is a business audit. And so we put together these forms where we’re analyzing the different stages of your business. So our Growth Factor framework is sales, social, system, structure, scale. Okay, that’s what we’ve used for every iteration of Growth Factor. But for this one, we’re kind of taking that initial like pre work section, we’ve revamped it into a full business audit, and in the Google Form, I’m asking specific questions related to sales, specific questions related to social and so on.

And I was going through the business audit of a client who has a really, really successful spa, incredible spa owner, true CEO. And we were looking at, you know, how many new leads came in from SEO? How many new leads came in from social, and how many new leads came in from referral? And it was really interesting, because most of her leads were coming in from search. They were coming in from Google, yet she was trying to put all of her energy and attention onto social and figuring out like, do I need to do ads? Am I doing reels every day? Am I doing all of these things? And it really was able to give us the alignment of like, okay, well, let’s actually take our marketing dollars and invest in search in a way that, you know, we can get that moving. Well, that’s like step one, right?

So step one is understanding where, how many leads are coming from each of those areas. And then am I spending my marketing dollars in the right place? And then is that channel actually attracting my person, because it may be the lowest acquisition cost, but it may not be your person. So there’s this whole process around, how can we really spend our dollars in the right place to acquire the right customer, our ideal client, in the lowest cost possible. So if we’re keeping track of overall like client acquisition cost, we’re going to want to have that data to be able to make those decisions in the future. Okay, so there’s a section inside of the workbook for you to input those into the worksheet.

If any of these numbers are hard to find, then that’s also data for you. That’s information that like, Hey, maybe I need to be tracking these, or maybe I need to clean up the KPIs that I’m looking at, you know, maybe I need to add that as something that’s a regular thing during my, you know, CEO time that I am looking at those numbers, because you cannot grow what you do not measure. All right, okay, so let’s move into the next step, which is where we are really essentially doing a debrief on our business.

We do debriefs after events, right? But let’s do a debrief on our entire business to evaluate what is working and what is not working. All right, so we’re gonna go into reflection mode. We’re gonna really zoom out and look at the bigger picture. What is driving results right now, as far as like revenue, okay, what is getting me the most revenue? What marketing channels are converting? Are there areas where you’re consistently struggling or feeling resistance? So in the case of the spa CEO that I was referring to earlier, for her, she was feeling resistance around ads because she didn’t want to be spending so much time on social. But it was actually when we went in and did the audit, SEO was driving the most results, right?

So we understood that, and that, you know how much time and money and just mental space that is going to clear and save in the future just by knowing that information, it’s huge you guys. Okay, so maybe you’re still doing everything yourself, and that might be slowing you down. Maybe you launched a membership in Q1 but didn’t keep up the marketing momentum. It’s fine, no judgment, no shame. All we’re looking at here is getting curious about our business. Okay, we’re trying to understand the data.

So really reflect and think about where you’ve been throughout this year. How did your business feel for you? Did it feel heavy? Did it feel easy? Did it feel fun? Did it feel light? Did it feel confusing like really get curious, not a right or wrong answer, but list out what is working, what feels heavier, outdated. Is there anywhere that you really want to double down? Is there anything that you actually want to release? I like to actually do this with my team as well, so kind of asking them their opinion or their insight around different things, our last team meeting, I actually said, like, Hey, I normally go through and I, you know, give you our metrics, and I tell you kind of what’s coming over for the next month. And today, I actually just want to have a conversation. I want you guys to I want to hear your perspectives about the direction that we’re going, and are there any blind spots that I’m not seeing because your team, they’re in it with you, right? They have incredible perspectives, but oftentimes they don’t give their perspectives, unless you ask so really important thing to remember there as you’re going through that section.

Okay, so let’s get into CEO time. And really like reclaiming that CEO time, one of the biggest signs that something is off is when you literally have no time to think. So my calendar is such a reflection for me of what’s going on in my life. And like, I’m always working for spaciousness. I’m always working for ease. I’m always really going through my calendar and trying to optimize my schedule. And honestly, this has been something. Just ask Christy, God bless her, who I have been working on this for the past 11 years. And your calendar management is very similar to running a systems based business, because you’re never gonna have your systems done. You’re never going to have your calendar fully optimized, because life is busy, right?

When you have kids that have karate and swim and, you know, birthday parties and all of the things, and you’re doing home projects, like we’re building a big garden right now we just got our chickens. Right? So there’s these other parts of our life, and then we’re trying to plug everything nice and neat into our calendar for us to be super productive within that window. It’s an evolving process, but if your calendar is literally jam packed with treatments, you’re still in the room, you’re seeing clients, yet, when are you supposed to operate the business? When are you supposed to deal with team issues? When are you supposed to address the kind of unexpected tasks that come up in operating a brick and mortar spa? It’s no wonder that you’re struggling to feel aligned with your bigger vision. You haven’t given yourself time to even see the forest through the trees.

Okay, so ask yourself, do you have time blocked off each week to work on your business, not just for your mid year review, like dedicated time, like you’re booking it like it’s a patient appointment. I want that for you, that you have dedicated CEO time. Okay, and ask yourself, are you spending the majority of your time in your zone of genius. Or are you in the weeds? Are you playing like Whack a Mole with your business, trying to put out fires every single day? Or are you really allowing yourself to see the vision, to understand your vision, so that you can create a plan to get there?

Okay, your time is your most valuable asset. And if you are going to make big moves in Q3 and Q4 you gotta give yourself space to plan to delegate to lead. So right now, make a promise to yourself. Do this for yourself. Block off one hour you. Okay, complete this worksheet, review these insights and make a plan for the second half of the year. It’s so critical.

Okay, now comes the final section. Once you’ve reviewed your goals, you have assessed your numbers, you’ve reflected on what’s working, you’ve reclaimed your CEO time. It’s time to decide, What business are you building? Are you refining your existing strategy? Are you reimagining your goals altogether? Really look at am I on the right track, or am I needing to pivot?

Okay, sometimes success is just a few little tweaks away. Ah, we were so we just lost our focus on our membership, but that’s actually our thing. So we’re going to redirect, we’re going to correct our course, and we’re going to dive into that membership. Other times, it’s about choosing a completely new direction that feels more aligned with the CEO that you are becoming. Either one is valid, either one is okay, this is your business. Okay.

What’s most important is that you’re making this decision consciously. You’re not drifting, you’re not reacting, but you are choosing your path forward. Okay, use this to create a clear action plan for Q3 and Q4 what are your top three priorities? What is your marketing focus? What do you need to let go of to create space for growth.

All right now, remember, I created the mid year spa CEO review worksheet. It’s simple, it’s powerful, and it will walk you through step by step everything that we covered in this episode. You can grab it right now by using the link in the show notes. Print it out, do it pen and paper style, my brain works so much better that way. I do everything digital. I know I have that because it’s super important, but everything is going in my notebook. There’s just a different experience when you’re filling out the worksheet.

Okay, so print out the worksheet, make the time to do it.

Block out that hour of time and hey for you like Type A’s make that hour a recurring event on your calendar. Make that the start of your CEO time that you are claiming that for yourself to work on your business, not in your business. Okay, alignment creates momentum, and this review can be the spark that turns your year around.

Okay? You are not behind. You are not off track. You are exactly where you need to be to make your next move. You’ve built something powerful, and it’s okay to pause and reflect and re choose the direction that feels most aligned with your values, your goal and your life.

Thank you so much for being here with me today. Thank you so much for being a part of this incredible community. I will see you next week on Spa Marketing Made Easy. Until then, keep taking aligned action, and don’t forget to download that worksheet.