EP 452: From Chaos to Clarity: How Spa CEOs Can Reflect, Reset, and Profit Big in Q4 2025

Welcome back to another episode of the Spa Marketing Made Easy Podcast. I am Daniela, and I am so happy to have you here. Now, if this is your first time tuning in, we love to talk about all the things business as related to the aesthetics industry. I am a big believer in systems and a both and lifestyle, meaning that you can be a wildly successful spa owner and be a present and devoted mother. They are not mutually exclusive. So if you like that, you’re going to fit in great here. 

Now. Can you believe that we are already wrapping up Q3 I feel like the older that I get, the faster that time goes. And every year, I’m sure in a year from now, I’m going to be saying the same thing, but gosh, this year is flying by. But what I’m noticing this year, which is a welcomed difference is that the energy right now is good last year, 2024 summer of 2024 was a really slow summer. It was one of the slowest summers to date, and that was kind of hard to come off of Q4. 

Was still good last year, but it wasn’t this, like overwhelming busy that we are used to in Q4 in the esthetics industry, but I feel the energy is different this year we you know, right now, we’re working with a couple 100 accounts and spas all over the United States and Canada, and I talk to them every single week, multiple times a week, hear how they’re doing. What’s the updates, what’s the vibe, what’s the energy like, where they are at, and it’s definitely in a good direction. So I hope that that gives you hope. I hope that gives you excitement as we are moving into Busy, busy season. 

And you know, I mean, it has been a weird couple of years. It’s been a weird five years, but there’s so much opportunity on the horizon for us in the aesthetics industry as leaders and as CEOs now, before we dive into the strategy around this episode, I want to share something a little personal with you. So if you guys have been listening for a while or following my journey for a while, you know that this past year for me, we went through a lot of structure changes. Went through just a lot of shifting in our business, and there’s been a lot for me, has been about slowing down to speed up. It was one of the most challenging years in my life in some aspects, but also one of the most incredible years of growth in my life. And it’s definitely going to be one of those years that I’m going to look back and I’m going to be like, Whoa. That was a huge turning point. 

That was the place where big shifts happen. That was the start of my next level, my next big focus. And you know, for me, it was definitely a year that I focused on my health in a whole different way than I had before, on grounding my energy, for those of you that are into astrology, like I have seven signs in air, so it’s very important for me to focus on grounding and really just pausing and being intentional, looking at like making sure that what I am building in my business is actually aligned and sustainable for the season of life that I’m in. So I slowed down. I slowed down, I shifted things. And when you give yourself that gift, that gift of slowing down, of pausing, of being intentional, you actually create space for new ideas and for momentum. And I’m actually feeling that momentum now. I’m so I’m so excited, you know, I went through the hardest part, through the shifts and the change and the the messiness and so much, but we’re in such a good place now. 

We’ve shifted our primary offer of growth factor into two different tiers. Our community is thriving, and I just feel so energized and excited for what’s ahead, and that’s a really great place to be in. Also going into kind of winter, which for me is always the hardest season. I love going into winter feeling so excited for what’s ahead. And the reason that I wanted to share that is because I know that for a lot of you, you’ve been in that place too. You’ve been juggling everything. You’ve been feeling pulled in so many different directions. Sometimes you forget why you started your spa in the first place. And I just want to remind you that building a business is a marathon, not a sprint. It’s okay to pause, it’s okay to recalibrate, and when you do when you give yourself that gift, the clarity, the energy on the other side, are exactly what you need to be able to move forward in a strong, intentional and focused way. Now I am not going to sit here and pretend like I had everything figured out there were a lot of messy moments, a lot of messy moments. God bless my team. They are so incredible. And, you know, I had to let team members go. 

I had to let team members go that I cared deeply about, but I just kept trusting myself, and I was doing, you know, one step at a time, what I felt was right, and little by little, everything kept coming together. And when it all finally did come together, it was better than I could have ever imagined. And that just shows like your intuition. When you especially lean into that feminine energy and your intuition, you’re able to see like you’re able to know the right steps, even if you logically don’t have them all mapped out, you’re going to be guided because the answers are already inside of you.

 I deeply believe that if you have a dream in your heart, if you have that vision, you have everything you need inside of you to be able to create it. You just have to trust yourself. And when you’re feeling guided, take that step, even if you don’t understand. So if you’re in a messy moment, trust yourself. Believe in yourself doing a Q3 reflection, which is what I want to go through today, is quite literally the best thing that you can do to really get understanding of what’s going on in your business and what it is that you’re actually building. Okay, so let’s talk about moving forward, and specifically, let’s talk about wrapping up Q3 and heading into the busiest, the most profitable time of year for most of you in the esthetics industry, which is Q4

Okay, so we’re gonna start with reflection, and specifically reflection around Q3 and Q3 is always it’s this interesting quarter, because for most, and I know I’ve got my waxers out there and different people, you know, seasonal locations where the summer is just slam packed, right? But for the majority of the esthetics industry, the summer is going to slow down a bit. Okay? You’ve got your clients or patients traveling, the kids are home from school. Routines are just out of sync, and so I say this is the perfect time to look at your financials and really dive into those things that we say that we never have enough time for, because we’re always putting out all these fires. Use this time anytime that you have a slowdown of any sort, use it to do the CEO work. 

Look at your revenue and look at you know, What trends are you noticing? Check out your memberships. How are they performing? Are they giving you the predictable cash flow that you need? What is your churn rate? Are you know, what is the feedback that you’re getting on the membership? Did you run any successful promotions or events that you want to repeat or refine for coming years? This is where I want you to really think like a spa CEO, not a service provider. Okay, your financial foundation is everything. We are not running a charity. Here we are building a business. And so you’ve got to generate revenue. You’ve got to generate profit, more importantly. So that’s one of the reasons that I love membership so much. If you’re leaning into memberships, if you’re building that recurring revenue, just say you are ahead of the game. 

Make sure that you are staying on that tracking that keeping your focus, your marketing, focus on those memberships, supporting your members, making sure that you’re building community, all of those things. Memberships give you that predictable cash flow. They give you stronger client retention. They give you the confidence to make bigger decisions, to take bigger risks, because you can feel stable that with reasonable certainty you know how much revenue is going to be coming in through your memberships for the next six months or so, right? Depending on the commitment that you have now, you might. Want to hire, you might want to invest in a new technology, you may want to pay yourself a higher amount more consistently. All of those things are easier when you have predictable cash flow. So when you’re going through and you’re looking at your financials, ask yourself, what revenue streams were the strongest for us, did we feel stretched anywhere, where what has the most opportunity or possibility as we’re heading into Q4 now for me, as I was going through this kind of transition of our business, of restructuring, of aligning our services to make sure that they’re actually relevant in the world of AI, and incorporating AI into our offerings in a huge way. 

We’ve been going through we’ve been dissecting our business to understand what is a nice to have, what is a need to have. And this is a lot of work, because every couple of months, there’s some new AI tool that can do all these incredible things in your business, and we actually drastically cut our operational cost over the past year, and yet we 5x the productivity of our team. So we used to do a podcast every Monday, and we had a much larger team, and now we do a podcast every Monday, we do a blog. Every Tuesday, we do a spa Marketing School episode. 

Every Thursday, we do the entire growth factor magazine every single month, this is like a 44 page magazine with lots of deep dive content. I mean, it is incredible, the amount of productivity that we are able to have with such a lean team, okay? And it’s all about using AI the right way. And trust me, there is a wrong way to use it. So as far as metrics for this year, the KPI that I have been really obsessed with more than other years is client acquisition cost. And so client acquisition cost is essentially, if you’re not familiar what that is is, how much does it cost you to get a new client? So typically, when we’re looking at new clients coming in, and that is something that you should be tracking every single day. We want to look at that every single month and see how many new clients or patients came in, and then where did they come from? 

The three areas that most of the time, the big three for client acquisition is word of mouth, referrals, social media or SEO, those are the three places. Some people are going to have strategic partnerships. Some people are going to have walk ins. But the big three are SEO, social media and word of mouth. Well, I want to know if you’re investing in those things. So if you are getting most of your people from social media, and you’re spending, you know, $1,000 a month on ads or spending however much money on content creation, etc, then you’re going to take that dollar amount that you spend and divide it by the number of new patients that came in from that channel, and you’ll understand what it costs you to acquire that new patient. And we actually built a whole tracker inside of our growth factor elite program that is going to track all of this. For you, it’s really easy to use, but for me, that has the the question is, where should I be spending my time and when you know, like, I’m always going to say revenue, because everything else that you want to do in your business is going to be a heck of a lot easier if you have revenue coming in. And so the fastest way to understand how are we going to increase revenue is to understand, how are we getting new clients? And what is the least expensive way to get new clients? If you’re not tracking that information, you’re not going to know. 

You can be as we’ve been going through this, I’ve seen people that are getting 50, 6070, people a month through SEO, and they’re paying zero attention to it. They’re not updating their Google business profile. They’re not focusing on reviews. They are not investing in SEO for their website. Huge opportunity. Huge opportunity. There friends, if you’re seeing you’re getting that many people through that channel. Let’s put a little bit of love in there. Let’s put a little bit of focus and attention. And that doesn’t always mean that you have to invest dollars, but let’s really focus on like, hey, if this is where most of our leads are coming from, instead of 70, could I get 100 if I just put a little extra effort? And instead, these people are often investing 1000s of dollars in social media and getting three people. In from social media. So we’ve got to have the information and really understand what is working for my business. Does that make sense? Why that’s important? So okay, so if you’re not tracking client acquisition cost, this is a great time to start doing that. And then I want you to go through and as part of the reflection, I want you to ask yourself some questions. So what accomplishments are you the most proud of? 

Let’s you know, I know that it always seems like you’re like light years behind where you actually want to be, but we need to acknowledge the steps that we’ve taken, the growth that we have made. So look back. What are you most proud of? What are you most grateful for? Are there any specific ways that you saved financially this quarter that you want to take note of? Are there any situations that you could have handled better? Were there places that you overspent this quarter? What in your business can be automated. And how can you get your team to be proactive in helping you create more streamlined systems in your business? This is a big thing that I see. Is spa CEOs. They’ll come into our programs. They love the idea of building a systems based business, and they’re like, Okay, my goal for q1 is get my business systemized, get all my systems in place. And I’m like, okay, it doesn’t really work that way.

We can, you know, take a stab at and we can start to establish your system for creating systems, but it’s not all you. Your team has to be on board. It is a culture of your company to operate a systems based business. 

So we want to make sure that your team is involved in that process. We also want to look at our financials. So what was your total revenue? What were your total expenses? What was your profit? How much did you pay yourself and the other metrics that you’re focusing on? Are they where you want them? Were there some that were higher, some that are lower. Really look at those. Take the time to look at those. And I like to just journal these things out. So it’s really helpful. If you ever are having a moment where you’re like, What am I even doing? Am I even making progress? You can go back to your Q, your quarterly review journals, in your annual review journals, and you can look at like, what was on your mind last quarter, what was your focus last quarter? What was your focus that year? Just keep a binder and just keep them all in there. It’s a really, really incredible activity to do for yourself to really see your growth. 

Okay, so now let’s shift gears a minute, because Q4 is coming, and for most of us, this is our busy season. Not just busy like in the spa, but it’s also busy in life, right? We’ve got October. A lot of you are doing a shed the dead event. We’ve got Thanksgiving here in the US. I think Canadian Thanksgiving is in October. We’ve got Christmas, Hanukkah, whatever holidays you have over December. Lot of end of year school stuff. Kids are out for the holidays. There’s just a lot going on, okay, but I want to be really crystal clear is that the more that you plan now, the more you will profit later. We don’t want to throw together the amount of times that I’ve heard people like on four days before Black Friday. They’re like, I think I’m going to do a Black Friday promotion. Like, what?

Let’s, let’s plan this out a little bit more. Okay? Because if we’re going to put that energy and effort, we want to really make sure that we are making the most of it. So if you are thinking about hosting a shed the dead in October, like, towards the end of October, now’s the time to get those details finalized. Okay? If you are running a Black Friday or Small Business Saturday promotion, start mapping out your marketing emails, your social posts, the graphics. Get all of that done now. Don’t do it just right before, okay, so you do not want to get to the week of Thanksgiving. Be exhausted. Your team is stressed. You just want to be making your turkey. You know, whatever you make for Thanksgiving. I love turkey. I like brine. My turkey for like, three days before. I want to be focused on that, right, and not running some sort of promotion, trying to pull things together in a very reactive state that’s not going to be good for your business, that’s not just a overall good vibe for the for the company in general. Okay, so we want to be proactive. As spa CEOs, we want you to plan ahead. Your promotions are not just discounts. These are going to become true. Cash infusions for your business. Okay? They give you the breathing room and the margin to be able to finish the year strong. And remember, it’s not just about this promo itself, it’s the system behind the promo. Do you have the right sales funnels in place? Do you know which team members are going to be you’re going to be driving bookings to like, if you’re doing a shed the dead to get a specific provider busy, you know, who is that provider? Do we have assets that we have from a previous year? Do we need to revise those if we’re creating for them for the first time? Are we doing it in a way that it’s very easy to repurpose them for the next year? Okay, this is long term thinking, systems and planning are what makes the difference between a successful holiday season, a profitable holiday season, a joyful holiday season. 

Okay, and I want all of those things for you, so as you’re looking into what you want to accomplish in Q4 ask yourself the following questions, are there any commitments that I need to back out of in order to make time for what is the most important? Raise your hand if you’re a people pleaser and you say yes to things even though you know you shouldn’t or you don’t have time. You don’t have the desire. You’re saying yes because you don’t want to let somebody down. What of those things do you need to back out of to make sure that you’re focusing on the things that are truly aligned for your desires and the benefit of your family? Are there certain days of the week that you already know are going to be strenuous, like, for example, there’s three days a week that my kids have after activities, between karate and gymnastics, and it just is a really long day. 

So I want to make sure that I am, you know, I already know what’s going to be for dinner, and that I’ve have those kind of things prepped ahead of time, that I’m not adding something or doing a day that I’m back to back calls the whole day, and then just running and not even getting home until seven o’clock at night, after a long work day. So we really want to make sure that we’re mapping our days based on our energy, okay, based on making sure that we always have enough energy, that we’re enough balance. Have enough balance to be able to be present for our kids, for our family, to be present at work, with our clients and patients and our team, right? We’ve got to manage our energy on our schedule. It’s a really important thing. So look through what’s happening, make sure that you’re blocking off time appropriately, and then what are the things that you’ve been doing that you really don’t enjoy that just drain you, right? Look at those things and see what you’re able to get off of your plate so that you can have that energy to be really focused, to be really clear and lead your team as your best self. Okay, so let’s bring this all together. All right, I want to give you some action items so you know exactly what to do. So I want you to review your numbers. That’s a really important one. You might feel uncomfortable. You might not feel like you’re a numbers person. Just get in the habit, right? This is just for you. You don’t have to share these with anybody else. Just get in the habit of understanding what your business is telling you through the numbers, where the revenue come from, where how are your memberships performing, what promotions or events drove the most results. Okay. Numbers are giving you information. They are telling you a story about the health of your business, and you need to pay attention to that. Okay? Number two, plan your holiday Promotions Now, all right, if you’re doing a shed the dead in October, finalize it this week. If you’re running Black Friday or Small Business Saturday deals, map that out now. Okay, map out the full plan, the offer, the timeline, the email, the graphics. If you are in growth factor, fundamentals, we’ve got a ton of done for you. Graphic templates for the holiday season, for Black Friday, for small business, Saturday, we’ve got some for mini events. We’ve got a lot of graphics already done for you, so be sure to grab those if that’s going to be a time saver. And then, number three, build the system behind the strategy. Okay, don’t just run a promo. Build a repeatable system around it. Create the templates for the emails, the landing pages, the graphics,All of those things. Make sure that you’re not just putting this energy into a one off promotion. If you’re doing a shed the dead, you can do a shed the dead every October. Let’s template it and make this easier and easier for you every single time that you do it. Okay, so friends, Q4, is here. 

It’s going to be a good year. It’s going to be a good quarter. It’s going to be a good quarter and a good year. All right, I am excited about what is to come. I’m excited. For you. I’m excited for this opportunity to finish the year strong. So remember that slowing down reflection, this is not wasted time. Okay, this is exactly the thing that’s going to allow you to speed up. If you ever heard you’ve gotta slow down to speed up, or sometimes your setbacks or your setups. All right, these are the things that are helping you reach your goals. All right, it’s what helps you step into your role as spa CEO to lead with confidence and not just create a profitable business that is a really important thing, but a profitable business that supports the life that you want to live. Okay, so take action on those to do’s those three action items. Block out some on time on your calendar. Get it done this week. I promise you’ll thank yourself when December rolls around and you’re not scrambling. But instead you’re like, Oh my gosh. I’m so glad I took that time to plan things out, and I see you celebrating an incredible year. Okay, so that is what I have for you today. Thank you so much for listening. I am so grateful for your presence and listening to this podcast episode. If you want to continue this conversation, please join us over in the Spa Marketing Made Easy Facebook group. It’s a great time over there. We’d love to have you if you’re not in there already, and here is to your success.