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EP 438: Building a Million-Dollar Waxing Brand with Integrity and Impact: Candice Johnson’s Story

What happens when you blend hustle with heart?

In this powerful episode of Spa Marketing Made Easy, I’m joined by Candice Johnson, the founder of Candee Skin—a waxing and skincare brand that has grown into a million-dollar company with a 16-person team.

Candice’s story is one of resilience, faith, and practical leadership. From being let go from a corporate waxing job to navigating the challenges of COVID, learning her numbers, and dreaming big with franchising—her path proves that “normal” women with a big vision can do extraordinary things.

If you’ve ever struggled with confidence, cash flow, or clarity—this episode is for you.

What you’ll learn during this episode:

  • Why Candice focused on working every role before launching her spa
  • How she grew her brand during COVID by serving her clients and team
  • The moment she couldn’t make payroll—and what changed from that point on
  • How she pays her team well and runs a profitable spa

Her plans to franchise—and how she’s preparing to scale

Resources Mentioned in Episode #438:  Building a Million-Dollar Waxing Brand with Integrity and Impact: Candice Johnson’s Story

  • Follow Candee Skin on Instagram → @candice.mjohnson
  • Connect with Candice on LinkedIn → http://linkedin.com/in/candiceclariett/ 
  • Visit Candice’s website → http://candeeskin.com/ 

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IG / @addoaesthetics

WEB / addoaesthetics.com

YOUTUBE / @addoaesthetics

LINKEDIN / @addoaesthetics

ABOUT THE SPA MARKETING MADE EASY HOST 

About Your Host, Daniela Woerner

Daniela Woerner is the founder and CEO of Addo Aesthetics, a leading community for aesthetic professionals, and the creator of the Growth Factor® Framework—a proven system that has helped 582 six- and seven-figure spa owners scale their businesses with strategy and systems.

With nearly two decades in the aesthetics industry, Daniela has trained alongside top physician-dispensed brands, consulted with leading dermatologists, and helped thousands of spa professionals streamline their operations and maximize profitability.

Her mission? To transform overworked aestheticians into Spa CEOs—building a business and life they love with the strategic systems needed for long-term financial growth.

As the host of the Spa Marketing Made Easy podcast, Daniela brings expert insights, real-world strategies, and in-depth conversations to help spa owners elevate their marketing, optimize their operations, and create sustainable success. With over 400 published episodes, 1 million+ downloads, and a ranking in the top 1% of all podcasts worldwide, Spa Marketing Made Easy is the go-to resource for spa and aesthetic professionals looking to level up.

Tune in each week for actionable strategies, expert interviews, and inspiration to help you build a thriving, systemized, and scalable spa business!

Welcome to Spa Marketing Made Easy. A podcast for spa owners who want to step up their leadership and business skills and step into the role as spa CEO. I’m your host. Daniela Woerner, CEO of Addo Aesthetics and Founder of the Growth Factor Framework Program, where we teach, coach and guide spa owners in scaling their spas to the next level of growth and unlocking freedom in their life and their business. I’m so glad you’re here now. Let’s dive into the show.

Hey, Daniela, here and welcome to the Spa Marketing Made Easy podcast. Now, if this is your first time tuning in, welcome. I’m so happy to have you here. Our primary focus for the show is to provide inspiration, education and bring massive value for aesthetic professionals who want to build a profitable, systemized spa that generates a minimum personal income, your take home pay minimum of 100k per year without sacrificing family Time are burning out.

That is such an important caveat. Now in today’s episode, it’s going to fall into the inspiration category with, of course, some education sprinkled in. I’m interviewing Candice, who’s a longtime spa marketing Made Easy listener and a million dollar spa owner.

She’s sharing her behind the scenes story of how she built such a successful brand, what she visualizes for her future, and what advice she has for spa owners who want to build their own million dollar business. It was such a fun interview for me, because I just love being able to connect with our listeners on a whole new level. And of course, I was inspired by candace’s spirit and her drive. Okay, I’m gonna just do a little snippet of her bio, and then we’re gonna jump into her story so you can hear it from herself. Okay, so a proud Dallas native, Candice became a licensed aesthetician in 2009 in Atlanta, Georgia, with a diverse background and specialty in waxing and skincare.

She held roles as a marketing manager, corporate trainer and location manager until 2015 Candice, then I’m going to just summarize this part for you here, because I don’t want to give away the whole story, because she goes into it into the in the interview. But essentially, after 2015 she launched her business Candee Skin in 2016 had a whole rapid influx of clients.

She transitioned herself out of the room and into the CEO position where she was able to maintain over a million in sales and has grown her team to 20 employees, all while staying committed to her mission of empowering and elevating skincare experiences for all so her goal, as you’re gonna hear in this episode, the next stage for her, is franchising candy skin. So super excited about that, and I don’t wanna give away everything, so I’m gonna leave it just as there.

But incredible, right? I love sharing stories of incredible women that are doing big things, because it’s just even more proof that your dreams and your desires are possible. Okay, without further ado, let’s go ahead and play that interview.

All right. Candice, welcome to the Spa Marketing Made Easy Podcast. I’m so excited to share your story. I was so you know, when we get pitched, because you had reached out to us and said, I’d love to share my story. 99% of those pitches we turned down. We really do, and Christy, Christy handles all of them, and it’s, it’s because for me, it’s very, very important on this show that we spread positivity and that we spread education for aesthetic professionals in our industry. And those are two really, really important pieces. And when you sent your pitch over. It was so just normal. You were such a normal person in the good way, not like, here’s this like salesy thing of how I do X, Y, Z. It was just like a regular person. And I loved that. And your story, you know, is incredible and very valuable, I think, for people to see and be inspired. So why don’t you take us back and kind of let us know how your journey in esthetics started? Okay, you know what was your vision? And then we’ll kind of walk through to what you’ve created today.

Okay,well, thank you for having me number one. I started my journey as an Aesthetician 1516, years ago in Atlanta, Georgia. My first time hearing about aesthetics was when I lived in Florida and I was picked up by a modeling agency, and I was like, What is aesthetic. So I’ve never even heard of this before, and they explained it, and I was like, oh, you know what, I’m kind of interested in this. So once I got to Atlanta, I went to school, and immediately after graduation, I went to, want to, kind of wanted to be more the medical esthetics industry. I really didn’t get any great feedback from that, or any opportunities from that. So I was like, You know what? I really loved waxing, so let me kind of go down that avenue. So I worked in the waxing industry for some of the most major companies that are out there.

I did some skincare as well, too for a private company. And I was like, you know, one day I’m gonna have my own business, I decided to learn all the ins and outs. I was management, I was marketing coordinator, I was top in sales, and I was like, You know what? I’m going to use all these tools to and apply them to my own business one day. Fast forward. I moved back home to Dallas, and I was working for a major company, and I ended up getting let go. And I was like, Well, what am I going to do? I don’t know what I’m going to do. And I was like, You know what? I need to just follow through what my dream was and what I wanted to accomplish. And that was opening up my own business. It was like the universe’s plan to say, yeah, yeah, it’s your time exactly when you went to esthetic school.

This is something I always am really interested in, because I feel like one of the bits of feedback that I get is that, well, they don’t, they don’t prepare you for business, but it’s not their job to prepare us for business. It’s their job to teach us how to do a facial exactly just that so many providers go into starting their own business as a solo or whatever that may look like. Before you went to esthetic school, was there any part of you that felt like you were going to be an entrepreneur or start your own business. Did you have that entrepreneurial spark?

Yes, I did. My previous marriage, my he was into business. He was an entrepreneur, so I definitely worked with him in that aspect. And I was like, You know what? This is behind the scenes? Yeah. I was like, this is something I think I would definitely want to do in the future. I didn’t really know exactly what it was going to be, what industry it was going to be in, but I knew at some point I was going to be doing something for myself. Yes, and so then you go to esthetic school, you’re getting the experience. How long are you working for these bigger companies?

Actually, I worked for about five to six years, just so you really, I always recommend that new providers, just out of school, they work for about three years before they go on their own. Yes, there’s so much. I mean, when you go into entrepreneurship, you don’t know what. You don’t know. There’s so much that you’re like, Okay, this is a whole other thing. So really understanding your craft and being a master at your craft is going to be it’s going to just make your life so much easier than definitely trying to run the business and trying to figure out what it is that you’re actually doing to be able to get people results.

Yes, yes. I totally agree with that. And that’s exactly the mindset that I had. I was like, You know what? In order for me to learn and know how to run my business, I have to work all aspects of it in someone else’s business. So that’s where the management and the lead, the training and all that type of stuff came into play. I did all that intentionally just to make sure that I had some of the tools. Of course, it wasn’t going to be perfect, but some of the tools in order to be able to effectively run my business, that’s very strategic thinking. So okay, so you open your spa, tell me about that season. What was that like? What were, what did you think it was gonna be, compared to what it actually turned out to be?

Well, of course, in my mind, I am, I’m a positive thinker. So I was always like, you know what? I’m gonna, you know, make all this money. I’m gonna do so great, I’m gonna have all these clients, and essentially starting out that wasn’t the case, right? So I had a plan. And, you know, some days I did zero, and then some days I did only $200 and then eventually it just started to build over time, and it was like, Okay, I hit my first $500 in a day, that was a win. Oh, I hit my next I hit my first 1000 in a day. That’s a win. And then it just got higher and higher, and it just drove me even more to keep pushing. And eventually I had to, within six months, actually, I had to find another facility to be in. Be. Because I needed help at that point. So I went very hard with it. It’s, it is a skill to be able to stay positive when there’s $0 coming in for the day.

Yes, it’s, you know, we were talking about that right before we started recording. Is like you can either go in this downward spiral and think about all the things that are wrong, or you can stay positive, yes, and but it’s, it’s it’s hard, it’s hard to stay positive and not be fearful of, like, Hey, I’ve got money invested in this. I’ve got time invested in this. This this is how I’m going to put food on the table. You know, if you have kids that you’re trying to take care of, I mean, there’s, there’s a lot of aspects of just life that goes into that. So what do you do to stay positive? Even in were you in business during COVID? Yes. Okay. So during COVID, what were you doing? How were you staying positive during that time?

Well,by that time, I had a staff, so we tried to prepare, you know, by making sure that they were okay. First, we did understand that the government was going to be giving out, you know, money for them to sustain their life to a certain extent, but we kind of went that extra mile. We also provided things for the clients, you know, such as retail, to make sure that they kept up on their daily regime. For skin care, some of our clients actually, surprisingly, and I’m so blessed, they bought packages during that season because they felt like they wanted to contribute to our business. You know, some businesses didn’t survive during that time, but I’m a faith based person, so I definitely stayed positive by just praying and focusing and you know, I definitely took the time out to really find ways to improve so, you know, having better systems when we returned, you know, studying different things, you know, that we could implement into the business that made the customer experience better and also our team’s experience better with within the Candee Skin brand. And that’s what I did during COVID. I kept my focus on how to be better.

I love that I was I had a baby, my son with baby and COVID Baby, he was born April of 2020, and so I was like, very pregnant leading up to it, and then I was like, getting ready to go on maternity. And then every spa in the world shut down. But you know what it was, we made it work. And for us, we actually doubled that year. And a lot of, I know a lot of businesses doubled that year, and you look back and it’s like, wow, that was one of the most like, I don’t know how I did that. I don’t know what I was doing every single day, and how like, for anyone that has children and understands that, like, the first three months of insanity with a newborn of like, zero sleep. And if you’re a mom that chooses to nurse and goes through the nursing, and even if you’re doing formula, still feeding in the middle of the night. I mean, there’s so many demands based on, you know, it was just a crazy time period, but it was, I feel my kind of approach now is like, if we made it through COVID, we can make it through anything.

Yes,most definitely. Okay. So tell us about your business now, like, Who are you serving? Tell me about your team. What is your like, your brand that you have so candy skin is a waxing and skincare brand. We are known for our waxing. That is what we do. That’s what we provide. Our typical customer is your 35 to maybe 55 year old woman, working, woman in the workforce. And we have been a company. We’ve been open almost 10 years now, and we have grown so much. We have I have about 16 employees now. Over the course of the 10 years, we’ve become a million dollar store, and we’re just big on serving our community. We’re big on involving our team and serving the community as well and making sure that they’re good. I’ve been always, especially with working in the industry before, you know, I’ve really always been about making sure that my employees could actually make a pay that was reasonable, where they felt like they could be stable in their life. Mm. Mm hmm, because I didn’t really experience that, I felt like I had to work like above and beyond in order to receive a certain amount of pay when I was in the industry. So I wanted to actually, you know, turn that around for my group of employees that were coming through me. So we pay commission, and they do very, very well. They’re able to, you know, do the things that maybe a normal person, you know, with some of the other types of pay structures wouldn’t be able to do, and that makes me happy, that in that I just get overjoyed by seeing them being able to provide for their families and take vacations and all that type of stuff without having to overwork in a sense, you know, the hustle and bustle. I just wanted to make sure that they were comfortable. So that’s where we are.

Now, how do you when you’re looking at so zoom back to saying, Okay, you thought that you wanted to get into medical and then you decided, no, that’s not the path that I’m being taken on, like waxing. How much of the the really looking at the numbers and understanding the profitability that is present with waxing, versus focusing on skincare, which can also be very profitable, but if you can do a 15 minute Brazilian and yes, yes,yes, so to and to be able to pay your staff.

Now I, I am personally a believer that your payroll should never go over 40% to be able to operate a healthy business and be able to cover overhead and taxes, and for you to be able to compensate yourself and all of those things, but getting you know like you number one, have to be comfortable with numbers to be able to do that. So I want to hear about your relationship with numbers and like, Were you looking at profitability before you started your business?

No, I was be honest with you. I was horrible at numbers. Okay, but you’ve built a million dollar spa. Yes, I was horrible at numbers. How did you learn honestly my husband, who is now our CFO, he’s amazing with numbers. Okay, so he actually jumped in. And I’ll tell this quick story, because this, I believe this will help someone. I actually ended up one of my payrolls. I did. I did not have the money to pay, and I was freaking out, and I was like, What am I going to do? And he just jumped in. He saw that I was kind of drowning, in a sense, and it’s comes from me not knowing my numbers, not understanding numbers. He jumped in, and he started to kind of teach me, like, this is everything you just said. You know, 40% of your payroll. This is what you want to be doing. And, you know, making sure your inventory costs are down. What are you paying your people? All these things are important, you know, I just wanted to make sure that they were making money. So I was at the high end of what I was paying them, because I wanted them to stay and, you know, all that, all those things. And so, yeah, I had a horrible time with numbers to start off with, but over the years, I’ve learned, and we’re in a totally better place, as you stated, a million dollar store, and I’ve been able to make sure we, you know, stay each year, just climbing, climbing to a new number.

Yeah, and I there’s a couple of things there. I love talking about numbers, and I love women getting comfortable talking about numbers, because so often we go into, well, I love this treatment, or I love this thing, and it’s like, it’s we want you to love what you’re doing, but you’re also running a business that you need to be able to pay yourself and pay your staff. So understanding profitability is hugely important, and not being afraid. You know, I’ve worked with spa owners that it’s like October, and they’re just looking at their numbers for the year for the first time. And because it’s it’s fear, it’s fear, it’s shame, it’s a variety of different things. And so there’s that piece, and there’s also the people pleasing piece, where I don’t want to upset my staff, they’re going to leave me if I don’t pay them this amount of money, everything’s going to crumble if that one person goes I think these are all like normal feelings that entrepreneurs go through, but they don’t have the words to put to them, because it it when you say it out loud, it almost sounds silly, like it doesn’t sound rational, but that’s what’s actually going on if we start to talk about it more, you know? And and letting getting comfortable around understanding profit margin payroll.

Hey, I want to pay you as much as I possibly can, but here’s my limit, 40% payroll. I can get you a raise as long as our revenue goes up to that point, or I can get you or whatever. But here’s the limiting criteria, here’s the payroll band, and here’s what I need from you, you know, and really teaching them to get involved as well. And I, I’m curious. You know, in the past couple of years, we’ve had some inflation, and, you know, different issues like that, that our employees are feeling like they’re getting paid less and less because of inflation. Yet our business costs are going up and up, so the margins are, you know, far less there was, there was something I did a training last summer, and Bankrate had released this report that said, like it feels like, in terms of our dollars, that prices of everything have gone up 20% and so how do you work through that with your team? Sounds like you have a great leadership and great connection with your team. But there’s also these other pieces going on. So are you transparent with them about the numbers, like, how are you having that culture within your spa?

Yes, we have created a space where we are extremely transparent with our employees. A lot of sometimes we actually ask them for their, you know, opinion, you know, what they may think about. You know, some of the things that are going on, we do create a platform to where they can, you know, come to us about some of their concerns, especially when it comes to, you know, what’s going on in the economy, because some of them don’t fully understand how business works, so we don’t mind explaining that to them. And one of those things is, you know, that they feel like that they get paid less because of what’s happening on the back end with the economy and the rising prices. And so we have, we just continuously encourage them. Number one, we went up on our prices because, of course, if our back end has gone up on, you know, how much things cost for us to purchase, then we have to then raise our prices up, which helped our team as well, too, because now they can make, you know, more money off of that. It’s the same, you know, percentage, but they can make more money, in a sense, off of that particular those services and we’ve provided them with things like tippy. We’ve been on that for almost a year now.

I love tippy. Yes, it’s trying to trying to help them to feel like they’re getting the bulk of their money and that we are as a company, are trying to provide things for them that can help them in that area. Today, I actually just spoke with someone for the child care tax credit, just, you know, trying to provide child care for some of my staff at a lower cost, so they don’t have to pay out as much I did that call today, and those are the things that we try to do on a regular basis to kind of help shrink things for them, so they feel like we actually care, you know, and then we are listening to them, and then we do understand what’s going on here in the world. And this is how we can help help you with your concerns.

So what was the feeling for you when you crossed the million dollar mark? Did you feel exactly the same? Or did you, you know what? Um, yes, I felt great, but it literally, and I’m being totally honest, it lasted for a moment. Yeah, and I was ready to hit the next mark.

Was your next mark? 10 million or 2 million?

Honestly? Yeah, 2,000,002

okay. For some reason, after I crossed the $1 million mark, I was like, All right, 10.

Well, in my in my mind, of course, I would want to go there. But in my mind, I was like, okay, realistically, let’s to me. In my mind, I’m like, Okay, let’s get to 2 million next.

That’s that’s probably a better goal.

Yes, we want to be at 10 million. But okay, let’s get to the let’s get to the just the next mark. 2 million sounds great.

What do you visualize yourself? Where do you visualize yourself in the next five years, like, how, how are you feeling? What are you? You know, do you visualize that far out? And how are you? Yes, okay, you’re saying, Okay, here’s where I want to be, and here’s the steps that I’m going to take to get there. Again. Surprisingly, that we’re speaking about this, I had another call. Today, and it was with the women’s Franchise Association, I am trying to move into that realm of franchising. We know that our concept works, and you know it’s definitely franchisable our business, and we want to make sure that we’re able to expand so that those are the next steps for candy skin, I understand that it takes some time, and I’m learning everything the business structures and all the business structure for sure, learning everything I need to learn about it. I’m actually going to be a moderator at an upcoming event for the women’s Franchise Association so that I can learn more about it and get the connections that I need to have in order to, you know, get started with that process. And that’s definitely what I see myself doing in five years, as well as, you know, on a personal side, traveling and more investments and just, yeah, enjoying life and taking care of my family.

Where would you go? What’s on your list?

Oh, wow. I definitely want to go to, I know there’s, it’s very broad, but I would love to go to some part of Africa. That’s one of the things on my list. Greece is actually on my list for next year. Oh, good. And so those, yeah, those are two places that I’m looking forward to traveling to, and I just came from Dr. I’ve been there a few times, but just came from Dr on Sunday. So just putting more travel into my life and enjoying life and seeing things and seeing the world, experiencing, yeah, because I didn’t do that, you know, for my first, like, eight years of business, I didn’t go anywhere. And now I’m like, You know what? It’s time to start living.

Yes, yeah, time to start living. I love that. All right. So what advice do you have for the business owner, the esthetic professional right now that is feeling overwhelmed, that’s feeling mom guilt for working, that’s wondering if this is even going to work, because she’s a pen and paper kind of gal, and she doesn’t know her numbers, but She’s driven and she’s smart and she’s an action taker, but it’s hard spot like, what advice do you tell that person?

I would say to definitely be open to advice. Always seek advice from those who are doing you know in a better position than you are. Don’t be afraid that you know or feel inadequate that your numbers aren’t there. Take the advice, use it and apply it to your business so that you can start to see the changes that you want. That’s the main advice that I would see. Whether it’s a mentor or I haven’t even gotten advice from my bank, my bank that I bank with, you know what I mean, on how to, like, improve my credit at the time, it wasn’t great. I didn’t really know what to do. I was afraid. But, you know, once they gave me the information on how to keep moving forward, I applied it and it worked. And that’s that’s something that, that, that I would definitely give them advice on, is just to, don’t be afraid to talk to someone. Outsource information, Google, study everything you know, ChatGPT right now you know everything. Just learn what it is to help you prepare your business and just keep moving forward and stay positive as you’re doing it.

I think people are afraid to ask because of that feeling of inadequacy, and really like when you get asked a question, if someone’s coming to you, you’re not going to judge that person. You’re going to just help them in the best way that you can, you know? So it’s great advice. Where can people find you? Follow you, stay in touch with you.

All right. So you can follow candy skin at Candee Skin spells c a n d e e s k i n you can also follow me at Candice M Johnson, I’m on all platforms. The same thing with Candee Skin. We’re on all platforms, Tiktok, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, all the things. We’re on everything, and we’re right here in DeSoto and serving the DFW Metroplex. We have clients that come from everywhere. So all all are welcome, wonderful.I love that.

Well, thank you so much. We’re going to include those links below this episode. I appreciate you sharing your story and your positivity, and I can’t wait to see what comes next for you. Yes, I appreciate it. Thank you so much for your time, and I look forward to speaking with you again.

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EP 437: What If Failure Isn’t the End – But the Beginning?

📢 What if your last “failure” was actually your biggest growth opportunity?

In this solo episode of Spa Marketing Made Easy, Daniela shares a personal (and unexpectedly relatable) story from her birthday weekend—plus the mindset shift every spa CEO needs when things don’t go as planned.

Whether it’s a failed launch, a flaky client, or a team issue that caught you off guard—this episode will help you reframe how you think about “flops” and see them as stepping stones, not stop signs.

You’ll learn why we need to separate what happened from who we are—and how to keep moving forward with clarity, courage, and a little less drama.

Resources Mentioned in Episode #437:  What If Failure Isn’t the End—But the Beginning?

  • Worthy by Jamie Kern Lima
  • Sara Blakely’s “What did you fail at today?” practice

Subscribe on Spotify Subscribe on Apple Podcasts Subscribe on YouTube

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IG / @addoaesthetics

WEB / addoaesthetics.com

YOUTUBE / @addoaesthetics

LINKEDIN / @addoaesthetics

ABOUT THE SPA MARKETING MADE EASY HOST 

About Your Host, Daniela Woerner

Daniela Woerner is the founder and CEO of Addo Aesthetics, a leading community for aesthetic professionals, and the creator of the Growth Factor® Framework—a proven system that has helped 582 six- and seven-figure spa owners scale their businesses with strategy and systems.

With nearly two decades in the aesthetics industry, Daniela has trained alongside top physician-dispensed brands, consulted with leading dermatologists, and helped thousands of spa professionals streamline their operations and maximize profitability.

Her mission? To transform overworked aestheticians into Spa CEOs—building a business and life they love with the strategic systems needed for long-term financial growth.

As the host of the Spa Marketing Made Easy podcast, Daniela brings expert insights, real-world strategies, and in-depth conversations to help spa owners elevate their marketing, optimize their operations, and create sustainable success. With over 400 published episodes, 1 million+ downloads, and a ranking in the top 1% of all podcasts worldwide, Spa Marketing Made Easy is the go-to resource for spa and aesthetic professionals looking to level up.

Tune in each week for actionable strategies, expert interviews, and inspiration to help you build a thriving, systemized, and scalable spa business!

Welcome to Spa Marketing Made Easy. A podcast for spa owners who want to step up their leadership and business skills and step into the role as spa CEO. I’m your host. Daniela Woerner, CEO of Addo Aesthetics and Founder of the Growth Factor Framework Program, where we teach, coach and guide spa owners in scaling their spas to the next level of growth and unlocking freedom in their life and their business. I’m so glad you’re here now. Let’s dive into the show.

Hey Daniela here, and welcome back to the Spa Marketing Made Easy podcast. So I’ve got a story for you, and this is the story that you know, as I was researching and kind of reflecting on what I thought was going to be the best way to approach this episode, this story just kept coming up over and over and over again in my mind, and this is really going to resonate with you and be something that I believe that You need to hear if you are a type A action taker, you know, full of passion, pour your heart into everything, that type of person, if you have ever tried something and it fell flat, it is not fun. It is not a great experience.

If you’ve tried something in your spa, you’re dedicated to your spa. You’re dedicated to growing it. You’re dedicated to building it and creating this incredible both and lifestyle. And if you ever tried something that didn’t work, you feel so defeated. You feel just like a failure, really? And today, I want to talk about how we really reframe that and shift kind of the way that we’re thinking about ourselves when things don’t work as we think they’re supposed to.

So my birthday this year fell over a long weekend, which meant for the first time in a very long time, my family was going to have four uninterrupted days with very little on the calendar all together. There were no birthday parties, there were no swim lessons, just time at home, which felt so glorious because we are in a season right now. My kids are five and eight, and so there’s, I mean, the amount of birthday parties that are happening on the weekends, the amount of after activities, whether it’s karate belt testing or, you know, whatever they’re doing at the time. I just feel like we’re in this wonderfully chaotic season, I’m trying to, you know, really take in every moment of it and enjoy every moment of it, because I love five and eight, but we were home.

We’re doing a lot of house projects as well. And so it just felt so abundant and so glorious to have four days with nothing on the calendar, so I’m outside, and I’m working on clearing some brush to make sure that our fruit trees are getting as much sunlight as possible. And I’m also prepping the area for our chicken coop, because we’ve got baby chickens, I’m so excited they’re coming here in July, and I want their home to be just perfect. So nothing glamorous, but it was like exactly what I wanted to be doing, and it’s also really grounding for me. So if you’re into astrology at all, I have seven signs in air in my chart. So in order to truly ground myself, I literally have to stick my hands in the dirt. So, yes, so that’s why I love gardening so much. My husband Kyle, he’s an incredible baker. He is, for sure, the baker in the house, the one that does all the birthday cakes and all of that. He decided to use the time to make sourdough. Now, he was not like a somebody that was during COVID making sourdough, like so many people were, he actually discovered this process later, actually, thanks to Christy, and like most things that he takes on, he is really, really good at it.

But today, this time, over this the long weekend, the loaf stuck in the pan. It did not rise the way that it usually does, it came out looking like this dense, flat pancake. So hours of attention, hours of care, hours of timing, if you guys are like sourdough people, you know, everything that goes into it. I mean, we had timers all over the house because he had to do things that, you know, different time intervals to make sure everything was was right.

There’s a lot of effort that goes into this process. So he was frustrated and he was disappointed. And when he came outside, I could see just in his energy, I could see the frustration and the disappointment that he was just carrying around with him, but I didn’t know what was wrong. Wow. And you know, I’m out there clearing the brush, so he comes out with this just totally different energy than the vibe of the weekend. So I asked him, and you know, he told me about the sourdough, and I just had this moment where I was like, okay, nothing is a coincidence.

Just yesterday, I had finished a chapter in the book worthy by Jamie Kern Lima. Check that book out if you have not already. It’s a really great mindset book. She is sharing this story about Sarah Blakely, who’s the founder of Spanx, and at the dinner table, Sarah’s dad would ask her and her siblings to go around and say, What did you fail at today? And so, you know, my family does like a gratitude table, right? We, we call it the thankful game. So it’s we go around and we say something that we’re thankful for. And at this table, they are talking about things that they failed at. And the perspective, the reasoning behind this was, if you weren’t failing, you weren’t trying hard enough. So I want to say that again, if you’re not failing at something, you’re not trying hard enough, you’re not living big enough, you’re not putting yourself in the arena, right? Because failure is such a normal part of the process. It’s really more of an evolution.

So Kyle wasn’t failing at his bread. He was mid process. He was, you know, he had done so well at something. He was testing a new recipe, he was testing different things, and what he discovered was those tests didn’t work. So failure hits all of us differently when we put our heart into something, whether it is baking sourdough, or we’re launching a new treatment, or we’re starting our business. When we care about something deeply, it stings so much more. And as spa owners and entrepreneurs, our businesses often feel like extensions of ourselves. So when something doesn’t go the way that we planned, maybe the new service isn’t booking or the promotion that we just poured so much energy into gets nobody purchasing it, we don’t feel just disappointment deep down. We can feel shame, we can feel embarrassment, we can feel self-doubt. But here’s something that I want you to consider, what if the emotional weight is not a sign that you’re off track, but it’s just a sign that you’re actually doing the work that matters.

Failure feels personal, but most of the time it’s not. The sourdough didn’t flop because Kyle’s bad at baking. He’s amazing. He’s amazing, amazing at baking. It flopped because something was off in a starter, or something was off with the timing, probably not with all those timers, but something in the process, things that can be adjusted were off, and that’s why that loaf flopped so in your spa, if a client doesn’t book or a team member doesn’t work out, it’s not a reflection of your worth, it’s data, okay? And the more data that you have, the better decisions you can make next time. We don’t grow from perfection, okay? We grow from recalibrating our path. Failing does not make you a failure. It makes you brave. Makes you someone who’s out there, putting themselves out there, working to be the best version of themselves. And there’s nobody on this entire planet who’s at the top of their game who has not failed over and over and over again. Now, every successful spa owner that I’ve coached, the ones with thriving teams with six figure months, the ones that you admire, they have all had failures. The difference is that they didn’t let the failure define them. They used it to refine the process. They learned right? Everything is a win or a learn. A win or a learn, you are not the failed mini event. You are not the no show clients. You are not the treatment that didn’t perform as expected. You are the person learning, adjusting, trying again.

This is where the magic happens. Okay, when you can view failure not as a stop sign, but just as a speed bump. Everything shifts. Your promotion didn’t work. It taught you something about your messaging a client didn’t rebook. Maybe it revealed a gap in your client journey. Every time something doesn’t go as a plan, ask yourself. What is this here to teach me? When we’re in growth factor, we’re talking about data over drama. That is your feedback, okay? And feedback is gold when you’re building a business that lasts so today, in this very short episode, but I hope an episode that helps you to reframe, helps you to be inspired, helps you to be positive. I want to leave you with this. Do not be afraid to fail. Be afraid of not trying, of not putting yourself out there. Okay, go all in, make the thing, take the risk, and if it flops good, you’re one step closer to the version that rises beautifully. Because around here, we don’t measure success by perfection. We measure it by progress. All right, my friends, until next time, keep growing, keep learning, and remember the real failure is staying stuck. I’ll see you over in the Spa Marketing Made Easy Facebook group, feel free to tag me if you want to keep this conversation going.

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EP 436: Getting Out of the Treatment Room: Your Path from Overbooked Provider to Thriving Spa CEO

Getting Out of the Room Isn’t Optional—It’s Strategic

Let’s face it—you didn’t start your business to work 12 hours a day, skip lunch, and check client messages from bed.

In this episode of Spa Marketing Made Easy, I’m guiding you through the mindset, milestones, and strategies to shift from provider to CEO. Whether you’re drowning in solo overwhelm, burned by bad hires, or stuck as the main revenue driver despite having a team, I break down what’s actually holding you back—and what to do about it.

This is your permission slip (and blueprint) to stop doing it all and start leading your spa like a CEO.

What you’ll learn during this episode:

  • The 3 most common spa owner struggles when it comes to getting out of the treatment room
  • How to structure your schedule for hiring—even if you’re fully booked
  • Why hiring slowly (and firing fast) is essential to team growth
  • The importance of trust transfer and visibility for your new team members
  • What milestones to track as you stair-step your way out of client care

Resources Mentioned in Episode #436 –  Getting Out of the Treatment Room: Your Path from Overbooked Provider to Thriving Spa CEO

Download the FREE Checklist: Your Step-by-Step Guide to Getting Out of the Treatment Room

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ABOUT THE SPA MARKETING MADE EASY HOST 

About Your Host, Daniela Woerner

Daniela Woerner is the founder and CEO of Addo Aesthetics, a leading community for aesthetic professionals, and the creator of the Growth Factor® Framework—a proven system that has helped 582 six- and seven-figure spa owners scale their businesses with strategy and systems.

With nearly two decades in the aesthetics industry, Daniela has trained alongside top physician-dispensed brands, consulted with leading dermatologists, and helped thousands of spa professionals streamline their operations and maximize profitability.

Her mission? To transform overworked aestheticians into Spa CEOs—building a business and life they love with the strategic systems needed for long-term financial growth.

As the host of the Spa Marketing Made Easy podcast, Daniela brings expert insights, real-world strategies, and in-depth conversations to help spa owners elevate their marketing, optimize their operations, and create sustainable success. With over 400 published episodes, 1 million+ downloads, and a ranking in the top 1% of all podcasts worldwide, Spa Marketing Made Easy is the go-to resource for spa and aesthetic professionals looking to level up.

Tune in each week for actionable strategies, expert interviews, and inspiration to help you build a thriving, systemized, and scalable spa business!

Welcome to Spa Marketing Made Easy, a podcast for spa owners who want to step up their leadership and business skills and step into the role as spa CEO. I’m your host. Daniela Woerner, CEO of Addo Aesthetics and Founder of the Growth Factor Framework Program, where we teach, coach and guide spa owners in scaling their spas to the next level of growth and unlocking freedom in their life and their business. I’m so glad you’re here now. Let’s dive into the show.

Hello beautiful,Daniela here, and welcome to the Spa Marketing Made Easy Podcast if you’re new here. This is a podcast created just for you the aesthetic professional looking to build a company, not just a really hard job for yourself. You’re not afraid of hard work, you just need the right tools, systems and community to make it sustainable. And today, I want to share one of those systems, a system for one of the most transformative shifts you can make in your business stepping out of the treatment room and into the role as spa CEO.

I know it sounds a little bit scary and maybe even impossible when you’re fully booked and barely have time for a lunch break, but if your goal is to build a business that pays you 100,000 plus annually without burning out or missing time with your family, then this shift is non negotiable. Now we have had over 1600 clients go through our various courses and programs, and getting out of the room is something that I’ve talked about extensively with all different types of providers, and what I’ve found is that there are three main categories that I see so many spa owners fall into when they’re stuck in the day to day grind of client care and really struggling to grow. So I want to go through each category with you, and then we’re going to talk about the step by step process to get yourself out of the room once you have a solid hire in place.

Okay, so let’s jump into category one, the solo drowning in overwhelm. You’re booked solid. You eat between clients, if you eat at all. Hiring feels like a pipe dream, because where on earth would you even find the time? Well, here’s the first step. You want to start with a time audit. I know you’re type A you thrive on structure, so for the next week, I want you to keep track of everything that you do, from the time you wake up to the time you go to bed. Why? Because I know that you’re checking social media messages before your feet hit the floor. I know you’re responding to client text after dinner and making sure that the email inbox is checked before you go to bed. That is exhausting and not sustainable.

 

You need to be balanced so that you can provide the best quality service to your clients. So will the time tracker feel like one more thing to do? Yes, but it’s going to give you so much information that we desperately need in order to clean up and structure your schedule. So then I want you to block off time on your calendar. Now, even if it’s three months out to begin the hiring process. So you’re going to look at when you start to have gaps on your schedule, and you’re going to block it just like it’s an appointment, but it’s an appointment for yourself to dedicate time to the hiring process. Okay? So you need time to write the job descriptions, to interview and to train the new role and listen. You don’t have to jump straight into hiring a provider. You can start with a virtual assistant so you can offload admin tasks like emails, scheduling social media. That’s going to free up your brain space and lay the groundwork for a successful hiring process later. Now, remember, you are in this for the long haul, so give yourself the time and space now that will save you time and money in the long run.

Okay, now let’s jump into Category Two, the burned by bad hire spa owner, so you’ve tried to hire maybe more than once, but they either quit within six months, maybe even six weeks, or they demanded a compensation package that was just so far out of alignment with what is even possible in your business or in our industry in general. And I get how frustrating that is. It’s devastating to pour your time and energy into training someone who doesn’t stick around. And unfortunately, I’ve had to coach numerous spa CEOs going through this process.

This is why refining your hiring process is essential. I want you to write this mantra down, put it on a post it, put it on your bathroom mirror. Grab a. Your erase marker on your mirror. Whatever you want to do. Hire. Slow, fire, fast. Okay, we want to set clear job descriptions, and this is something that you can even have. ChatGPT help you to do. If you’re not using ChatGPT in your business, you better jump on that train, because it is not going anywhere. You also want to have a very structured onboarding and training plan. Okay, so we recommend a two week training process before they ever see clients. Okay, week one, we’re going to have all of the processes the traditional ways of learning. So what are the opening and closing procedures? What is the software that you’re using on the front desk. What are the policies of your practice? What are the product lines that you carry? These types of things that you’re either having a rep come in to train you’re watching videos, you’re doing webinars, whatever that process is, the traditional way of learning that’s going to happen week one, week two for your provider is going to be actually performing the services that you offer on models to ensure that they’re in alignment with, number one, the quality of services and number two, the time standards of your spa Time is money. And if you have a provider that can do the service, great, but it takes her an extra 15 or even 30 minutes that is eating into your profit margin in a huge way.

Okay, so you’ve got to make sure that you are available and checking in with them regularly, meaning at least one to two times a week during their first 90 days, these new hires need a strong leader, and that means showing up consistently to support them and asking the right questions, where are you winning this week? Where are you struggling? What can I do to support you? Okay, it’s normal to see a spa owner go through three, four, even five, hires before they get it right for a particular role. Now the good news is, is once you go through that each subsequent role is much easier, right? So you’re gonna go through 2345, providers before you get it right. But then once you have that provider role dialed in, it’s much easier to get the right person after that. So you are still growing as a leader. You are still learning what you need and what your communication style is, and this takes time.

 

That’s a big part of the reason why we see leaders go through 2345, hires before they get it right. A lot of it is them understanding what they need and really getting clear on their core values and the culture of the company. Okay, now let’s move on to category number three. This is the spa owner with a great team, but they’re still the main earner. Okay, so you’ve hired and you actually like the provider. They’re skilled, they’re aligned, a good culture fit, but here’s the kicker, you’re still generating 80% of the revenue, and you have an additional payroll cost, not a great thing.

So what are you do? It is time to redirect client flow. All new clients need to go to the new provider. No exceptions, run monthly specials featuring their services, market them like crazy on your social media platforms, so that they become familiar to your audience. As a spa CEO, it is your job to get your providers busy. It is their job to retain those clients that you brought in the door. Okay, so what we’re essentially doing is a trust transfer. We’re building trust with your practice, rather than with an individual provider.

Okay, I’m going to say that again, because I think this is really important. When we are marketing and building our brand, we’re building the brand of our spa, and we are attracting clients or patients of a particular spa, not building a relationship that’s only with a specific provider that is going to be a really, really important piece of growing a long term sustainable brand. So we’ve got to build the trust online with the practice, rather than individual provider. Now here’s one kind of caveat that I see a lot with nurses in particular. So oftentimes a nurse will be in the room and she’s going to primarily focus on injection. She’ll do another a few other things kind of sprinkled in there, but her bread and butter is toxin filler, so when she hires, she’s like, Oh, well, I need an aesthetician, because we have all this area to support around facials and peels and micro needling. And when you do that like I get the concept. I get the idea.

Idea of really wanting to optimize the different services that you offer, but you’re kind of comparing apples to oranges here, because if you’re full and you cut down a day, we need somewhere for those injection patients to go. So we want to make sure that if your ultimate goal is to get out of the room, we need to hire a provider that can take the patients that you are seeing and carry them for you as you work to get out of the room. Okay, if instead, you’re just optimizing to build a team of estheticians that can support your patients in other services, great, but that’s not going to get you out of the room. Okay? So, I mean, yes, perhaps the nurse could pass off microneedling and could slow down and say the I’m working this many days and I’m only seeing injection patients.

All other services go to the aesthetician, either way, eventually she will need to hire a nurse who can absorb those injection patients. Okay, so make it your goal as the CEO to make your team better than you. It’s kind of a death of the ego, because it feels good when our patients are like, Oh, but you have such a deep relationship and they only want to see you. That feeds our ego, but we’ve got to focus on making our team better than us pour into them professionally and as humans, because a strong team makes for an unstoppable company. Okay? So now that we’ve identified the three categories that I see most and addressed kind of the direction that you go in depending on the category that you’re in, we’re going to shift into milestones and mindset. So when we’re talking about milestones and mindset, we’re going to be looking at all right, your provider now is generating income, and now we’ve got to calculate your spa CEO milestones. So what revenue needs to come in to cover your operational costs and to replace your own income?

This is where we’re going to map out your exit strategy from the room, which is, on average, going to take anywhere between six months to a year. Okay? We don’t want it to take longer than a year, unless there’s some really intentional reason that you are doing that, but it’s the goal is somewhere between six months to a year to get you out of the room. So to get clear on your milestones, if you work four days a week, how much does your provider need to generate for you to drop to three.

That is milestone one, then we’re gonna stair step our way down until you’re completely out or working just one day a week, if you still love being in the room. I did a post on Instagram not too long ago and was talking about getting out of the room, and some people were saying, but I love being in the room. I want you to do what you love. I think that that’s very important. But I also believe that it’s extremely important your company needs a CEO. So if you are in the room four days a week, who is actually driving the ship? Okay? So there will be a dip. I don’t want to sugar coat it.

There’s almost always a dip. When the owner gets out of the room, you may lose some regulars. This is normal. But here’s the question I want you to ask yourself, if you say yes to staying in the room, what are you saying no to? If you say yes to staying in the room, what are you saying no to? Because staying in the room often means saying no to building a scalable, sustainable business that you really want, one that allows you to go on vacation and not worry that there’s not cash coming in, one that allows you to slow down and spend time in the summer with your kids. One that allows you to earn a take home pay that you never even knew was possible for you.

So my challenge to you this week, I want you to identify what category you’re in, and I want you to commit to taking just one aligned action, whether it’s scheduling a time audit, rewriting your job descriptions or crafting a marketing push for your new provider, just one step forward is all it takes, little by little. Now we’ve got a checklist for you, because who doesn’t love a checklist? You can download it below this episode, and it’s going to help you move through this process. I believe in you. I know you can do this, and if you need. Additional support, I want to invite you to join us over in the spa marketing Made Easy Facebook group or just send us a DM on Instagram. Okay, my dear, until next time I am cheering you on, as always you.

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EP 435: From Blow Dry Bar to Beauty Empire: Fatima Rosa’s Journey of Grit, Grace, and Growth

From Franchisee to Founder: Fatima Rosa’s Inspiring Journey

In this episode of Spa Marketing Made Easy, Daniela welcomes Fatima Rosa, a dynamic entrepreneur who transformed her passion for beauty into a thriving multi-location spa business and a clean skincare line.

Fatima shares her evolution from opening Florida’s first blow dry bar to establishing Face Beauty Bar and co-founding 100 and 1 Cosmetics. She discusses the challenges of spa build-outs, the importance of mindset and grit, and the power of building genuine relationships in business.

What you’ll learn during this episode:

  • The entrepreneurial journey from franchise ownership to independent spa brand
  • Navigating the complexities of spa build-outs and regulatory compliance
  • The creation and mission of 100 and 1 Cosmetics
  • Embracing the CEO mindset and leading with vision
  • The role of persistence and authentic relationships in business success

Resources Mentioned in Episode 435 – https://www.addoaesthetics.com/podcast/ep435:

  • Connect with 100 and 1 Cosmetics on Instagram  → @100and1cosmetics
  • Connect with Face Beauty Bar on Instagram→ @facebeautybar
  • Connect with Fatima Rosa on Instagram → @fatima.rosa.beauty

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WANT MORE FROM ADDO AESTHETICS?

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Join the Growth Factor® Fundamentals, an association dedicated to empowering women and strengthening their community by helping aesthetic professionals build meaningful connections with one another and fostering support and guidance to create businesses that align with the lives they love → https://offer.addoaesthetics.com/growth-factor-fundamentals

 

ABOUT THE SPA MARKETING MADE EASY HOST 

About Your Host, Daniela Woerner

Daniela Woerner is the founder and CEO of Addo Aesthetics, a leading community for aesthetic professionals, and the creator of the Growth Factor® Framework—a proven system that has helped 582 six- and seven-figure spa owners scale their businesses with strategy and systems.

With nearly two decades in the aesthetics industry, Daniela has trained alongside top physician-dispensed brands, consulted with leading dermatologists, and helped thousands of spa professionals streamline their operations and maximize profitability.

Her mission? To transform overworked aestheticians into Spa CEOs—building a business and life they love with the strategic systems needed for long-term financial growth.

As the host of the Spa Marketing Made Easy podcast, Daniela brings expert insights, real-world strategies, and in-depth conversations to help spa owners elevate their marketing, optimize their operations, and create sustainable success. With over 400 published episodes, 1 million+ downloads, and a ranking in the top 1% of all podcasts worldwide, Spa Marketing Made Easy is the go-to resource for spa and aesthetic professionals looking to level up.

Tune in each week for actionable strategies, expert interviews, and inspiration to help you build a thriving, systemized, and scalable spa business!

Welcome to Spa Marketing Made Easy, a podcast for spa owners who want to step up their leadership and business skills and step into the role as spa CEO. I’m your host. Daniela Woerner, CEO of Addo Aesthetics and founder of the Growth Factor Framework Program, where we teach, coach and guide spa owners in scaling their spas to the next level ofgrowth and unlocking freedom in their life and their business. I’m so glad you’re here now. Let’s dive into the show. Hello and welcome to the Spa Marketing Made Easy podcast. I am Daniela Woerner, and my intention for every single episode that we share is to provide inspiration and education for aesthetic professionals. Here at Addo Aesthetics, we believe in lifting women up and helping them gain the confidence to see just how incredible they are. We believe in operating businesses with a family first approach, because yes, we love what we do, and we’re so blessed to get to do this incredible work, but family always comes first, and that’s why I’m so excited to share this episode with you, because the relationship that I have with our guest today, it’s actually evolved over the years. So she she’s came into our world through growth factor. She was a growth factor student. I was actually the one who did her sales call, which was not normal. So we had a sales team in place. I’m not actually sure how her call ended up on my calendar. It was kind of one of those serendipitous moments. But anyway, the first thing that I thought and I opened up that Zoom call, I saw her pop on, and I thought, Wow, this woman is so strikingly beautiful. And then after talking to her for a little bit, I was thinking, wow, she is smart and business savvy. She is the whole package, and proof that you can be smart and pretty. So take that anybody who doesn’t believe you’re smart enough just because you went to Beauty School, okay, I’m digressing anyway. Fatima was clearly an action taker inside of our program, and we even got to meet in person at a few different events, and our relationship really evolved into a friendship. So she’s someone who I greatly respect for many reasons, and someone who I’m proud to announce is our newest partner inside of APA with her line 101 so inside of APA, we have this black book of discounts from brands that we believe in, and the oils that she’s producing are absolutely phenomenal. We talk about this towards the end of the podcast, but the real reason that I wanted to have her on is for her to share her story, because I believe it’s going to inspire you to know what is possible in this industry, and maybe, just maybe, it’s going to make you dream a little bit bigger. Okay, so let me do a quick read of her bio, and then we can go ahead and play that interview with over 15 years in the beauty industry, Fatima Rosa has been a driving force in Miami’s beauty scene. In 2011 she played a pivotal role in launching Florida’s first blow dry bar. In 2014 she opened face brow and Beauty Bar, growing the brand into a premier beauty destination. Fatima has since exclusively focused on face brow and beauty bar and its continued expansion. Fatima is also a partner at 101 cosmetics, a sustainable, water free and clean skincare brand that aligns with her passion for innovation and eco conscious beauty solutions. Okay, this woman is a true powerhouse. She has a heart of gold. She’s a mama, she’s all the things. So I hope that you enjoy this interview with her, and again, I hope that you feel inspired to dream bigger. All right, Fatima, welcome to the Spa Marketing Made Easy Podcast. I’m so happy to have you here. I feel like this has been a long time coming. We’ve been in each other’s worlds for a while, and I’m so, so excited for you to share your story here on the podcast.

Thank you. Thanks for having me really excited. I’m I’m happy to have grown to know you sort of organically through this program and meet amazing people along the way.

So let’s talk about your journey in the aesthetics space. And I say aesthetics, I mean, how do we it is still you started with a blow dry bar that still is in the beauty space, in the spa industry. It’s just you’ve kind of evolved and grown and you take on these huge projects, which I love. Every time I talk to you like, I’m doing another build out, I’m starting a new whatever it’s like, there’s always something new and exciting. So, like, the entrepreneurial drive inside of you is so strong, and that is so fun, and so it’s exciting. So inspiring to be around. So tell us how you kind of started, right, and then how it evolved into where you’re at now.

Okay, so when I moved to Florida 15 years ago, it definitely started from a place of business, from that entrepreneurial point where I love the business model of a blow dry bar I wanted to move. This was, this was my move. This is combining something I thought I would enjoy, as well as getting to move to Miami and starting this concept. So it was a franchise, and it was the first one in Florida, so they didn’t know what a blow dry bar was. We had to kind of work with the regulators to to explain we don’t cut, we don’t color. Did you have them in Canada before you moved? Okay, so you were familiar.

So I was a client, and this is how I started looking into, oh, they franchise, okay, this is the model. This is, you know, the details we’re getting from the company. And then when I met with them, with them, I looked at Toronto, but then when the move was the possibility and using the business as the legal way of moving, everything was falling into place. Florida didn’t have any we were working on that with with regulatory bodies to differentiate that a blow dry bar is not a full salon. And then it was, it was a really cool and journey. In that moment of itself, I was a little scared. I’m in a new city. I have no friends, I have no idea if this is going to work. And we put on the the covers of the windows, and we, you know, started the build out, and then slowly, I’d get a few emails like, let me know when you open. Can you put me on your wait list, this and that? And so it was like building that momentum. And when we opened, it was, it was a hit. People were craving this, this type of fast casual beauty, as I was calling it. And we had, like, a thriving business district, so everyone, everything was falling into place. And it was fun. I really learned a lot through that business about beauty franchises and just, you know, a lot of things that you talk about, like the systems that they have in place, the formulas they use for for even if it’s just payment for different employees, ordering systems. And so learning those types of things that they had in place was probably the best thing for me at that time. I didn’t realize and then people started coming in. Hey, would love if you would add makeup on here. Who does your brows? How can I do this? Like, where’s a good place to get a facial? And every now and then I would say, hey, like, I can do your makeup. I love, I loved doing makeup. I would do makeup for friends and family back home, clean up their brows, do all the things that I liked to do, but never thought of as a career. And so a space became available, like 2014 and I decided, You know what, everyone keeps asking for these things. There’s obviously a need, and I really like to do those. I don’t really do hair. So I could be, you know, involved in a different way. So fast forward, new concept. I tried to model it in a way that looked like a franchise, and we started offering all the esthetic services. So was truly, you know, the brows, makeup, facials, everything, non medical.

Did you sell the blow dry bar? Or did you run two businesses for a while? For about four years, I had both, and it worked really well. The proximity was such that, like, door to door, I could just funnel clients and say they’re Hey, we’re also doing this. These are the things you’re asking for. And 2018 sold the blow dry bar. And, you know, had a little non compete for a while, and now today I get to bring them back, which is so nice, because with these new build outs, I’m incorporating that to complete what I did before, complete the look and the the feel of our all encompassing beauty. So that was 2014 and tell us about the build outs. Tell us about the build outs.

Oh my god, the amount of oil I’ve done. This is, like, my I’m we’re opening in a couple of weeks. This is going to be my fifth Wow in Miami. And it’s this build out in particular is different from the other ones, because this was a complete brand new space, like, when they say, like, an empty shell, like we’ve had, what they would call a vanilla shell when they deliver it. You, you may or may not have a bathroom, but you probably have plumbing. You have an HVAC installed, like the ACS there where this space we had nothing, so we’ve had to bring in the plumbing. We’ve had to bring in, oh, my God, I’ve never seen like a 10. An AC unit on the floor, like in real life, next to me, before they, like, put it up.

And it has been, this has been the toughest one, I will say, in terms of, I remember you talking to me and saying that your daughter said that you were like an architect or something, or that you’re like a builder. I don’t She’s got, she’s got a lot of jobs. For me, it’s really funny, you know, it’s just Mother’s Day, and you get the school thing built up. What? Built up. What my mommy does? This my mommy. So it’s like, my mommy’s job is and she was, she does eyebrows and paints nails, and it was like, Yeah, but she tells her dad different stories about what I might be doing when I’m not here. She’s been coming kind of with me every now and then. So she’s getting to experience. She’s like, How can I work here? I’m like, you can fold towels. But she’s always like, why are you building these things? Why? Like, why are you doing construction? And so she sees that side too. She’s been to the spaces when they’re in the process of being built out, which is kind of cool, as a mom, being able to share that experience with her, and she’s very proud of me. She’ll tell people like whoever we’re FaceTiming where we’re talking to do, you know, my mommy has all these salons now, and, you know, it’s like, very cute, how proud she is. But, but the process, it’s, it’s been, it’s been intense in terms of, I learned that you need to install low voltage, because how are they going to bring in, like, cameras, POS systems, all of the things you take for granted when you just lease a space, already done. So this is the most intense. But I will say, every time you you’re told that you get X amount of time for permits, and then this is how long the build out will take, and then this is how long inspections will take. Double it. Add like 3678, and 10 months like this. This one too, because we started from from such a raw space has been a year in the making and really ready for it to be open, but that’s a whole nother project now. But I have had some some heartache through the permit process. I’ve had some tough times, but it’s what do you think has been your biggest lesson? Because it’s also like going through any build out operating any business you’ve done this through COVID. You’ve done this through whatever is going on right now. And it’s I love seeing. You know, I was just at the DERM concepts event, and I was around so many women spa owners that were knocking it out of the park. They’re bursting at the seams. And I feel like that’s really important to continue to share, and you are doing really great, you know, thriving in business. I want to share those stories because for a lot of people, they’re in a shaky space, right? And they’re like, what’s happening right now? Things are uncertain, and there are business owners out there that are knocking it out of the park. So I want everybody to know that, and to know that it’s possible, and just because of the political or economic climate, or whatever it may be, that doesn’t mean that that squishes your dreams. You know, is it? Can it be hard? Yeah, of course, but that’s kind of what we signed up for when we said we’re going to be crazy entrepreneurs.

Yes, that. You know, I recently read something where I can’t complain when my plate is full because I asked to eat something along those lines, and it just hit me, I’m like, Yes, that is so true, because this is what I wanted, whether, whether I knew what I was signing up for. But the the opposite is what like having none of these things right, having none of that look forward to. And I think that for me, you know, you have your moments, your ups and downs, you’re like fears, and is this going to work? And am I doing the right thing? Is this the right location? All of that I’ve I feel like I’ve been through so many times, and it doesn’t change necessarily, like maybe that roller coaster you go through, or those inner talk tracks, but you can manage them better. I think that sort of, if you had this idea in the first place and you believed in it like there’s a lot of things that can kind of push you back and try to throw you off. I have to remind myself, like, I’ve done it before, so I will do it again, and I keep reminding that part of myself. And you know, as the landscape changes in terms of how we are finding clients, how we’re reaching people. It’s it’s not that it’s easier, but there’s so many people that you can bring in to help you with these things. So like, you don’t have to be the one worrying about it. Like, you know, you can start to delegate those things. That has been a game changer in itself. It’s just letting people do those things. I am not the Social Media Manager. I’m not. The PR agent. I am definitely not an architect, but relying on these good people having that good network of sort of, you’re the visionary, you’re the visionary, you’re the CEO of this is what I want to create.

How much itself, too, I think is when you keep telling yourself, right, I’m I’m not an Aesthetician, trying to build a business. Yeah?

That that’s such a huge identity piece to look at yourself as an entrepreneur and not, yeah, I’m an aesthetician, but I’m an I’m an entrepreneur. You know, that’s like this other secondary piece, right? How much of, how much grit and mindset Do you think contributes to your success versus strategy?

Was it 99 to one? I think some, some days it feels like that. I actually always think of that is like the grit and the grace and how you’re carrying yourself through the day, like, I don’t need necessarily to show like, look how much I’m hustling or I’m doing this, but I need to lead with that grace, because my staff are watching me, and my my family is watching me, and you know they they know the grind that happens, especially In these moments leading up to the build out, but kind of keeping that, that focus, as we just said, I am the CEO, you know, I’m building something. I’m building an empire, possible legacy, you know, wherever that takes me. But this is, this is me being in control of that. I have a good team. I have the right people in place. And if I see a gap like, I know that that person can be found, that that whole, even gratitude. And we talk about some things, like, when you’re believing those things changing your mindset, sometimes I have to say, I get to do this. And then it just wakes language piece, yeah, do this. Like, I get to do hard things. I am so lucky to be in a place where, yes, some things are going to cost financially and and time and a little bit of hardship along the way. But it’s, it’s such a, I don’t know, that amazing feeling, like the last salon opening and walking in there and going like, wow. Like, I did this. I did this. I had the people who I need to think that put me here along the way. But I I did this. I’ve built this. I’ve given more people jobs. I have given, you know, clients, a new place to come to. We’re building a beautiful space where people feel good, they relax, they enjoy themselves, they leave confident. I mean, even I tell my staff fairly often, whenever we meet, whenever we need that whole mindset together, it’s like we get to do this. And we’re in such a place where sometimes I think about this, actually think about the nails we’re painting today might be, might be getting proposed to tonight or tomorrow. You know that glowy facial she is getting ready for, like, a big moment in her life. Those brows are winning her next interview. She landed the job like, I think some of those pieces in the moments, like clients will show interconnected Yeah, and really thinking about it on a deeper level, yeah, because

I know how I feel when I have a fresh blowout. I know how I feel when my skin looks good. I know how I feel when I when I’m put together, and whether it had an impact or not, right? I think like, oh, I’m going to perform better, I’m going to feel better, I’m going to behave better, because I feel good. So we don’t see that other side sometimes, but we know that they’re going through it. They came to us for a reason. And so for me, like, I think about the weddings, we’ve got to, you know, be a part of whether it’s engagement shoots, wedding days, the pre wedding facials, those moments before, oh, it’s my baby shower. Hey, guess what? Like they whisper like I’m pregnant or I’m I’m, you know, I think he’s going to propose today. And you just like, wow. Like they trust me with this information. They’re opening up, they’re vulnerable because they’ve built that connection over just making them feel good. And that’s such a special thing about our industry that we get to experience. Yes, love that. So okay, franchise to doing your own thing now you are moving into product line owner, and tell me, I want to hear this story, and I love this story when you shared it on the call the other day, because it’s so like, I’m so focused on relationships I believe in that. So deeply, and especially in the way that the world is evolving. AI is a thing. It’s not going away. It is, you know, greatly going to impact already, is greatly impacting the way that we do business, the way that we live our lives. And I think that that human to human connection. Those real relationships are just even more instrumental than they have been. But if you think of like, what’s the guy do? You call him Carnegie or Carnegie? What is?

Oh, Carnegie. I call him Carnegie, but Carnegie.

Okay, so Warren Buffet always talks about him and how he went to, like, the Carnegie School of whatever. And it was all relationships. It was all about connecting, building relationships, all of those types of things. They opened doors and you were sharing, I know you’re very connected in your community, and this new opportunity that you’re clearly passionate about, I’m talking to you all the time. Every time I talk to you, we’re talking about 101 and this came about. Will you tell the story how it came about through this relationship?

So through meeting Gamal, through you. I met a lot of founders through his program that have product based businesses, and it was something where I thought, like, I like clean products. We use a lot of organic products in our salon and facials and like spa. So that would be a great next step for me. I started ordering and playing around with products, formulas, thinking maybe I can, like, private label something. And that had been some journey, I think, for over a year, year and a half, two years almost, and then, you know, we’re getting DMS in our business account. I think one may have been forwarded to me, and it was someone reaching out, Hey, I’d love for you to try my products. And I think that that happened a few times. And then finally, someone had dropped off products. I didn’t even touch them. It was persistent, persistent thing. So this founder, Layla, had kept reaching out to me and saying, like, I’d love for you to try them. I’d love to schedule a call, get some feedback, follow up. And at some point, I was in Canada, and I thought, let me, let me take her call. So we got on the phone. I told her, we can, we can chat for a few minutes. We ended up talking for an hour. Never met her. She just told me, like, about her, her background, how she got into this. She’s a chemist, and she’s been trying to formulate products that are clean, waterless, organic. I’m saying all the things and tell me more. She’s like, well, I’ve left you a bunch of samples to try.

Like, oh, sorry about that. I’m like, I promise as soon as I get back, I’m going to find them, I’m going to try them and give you feedback and what those products were at the time I tried the oils, is what I fell in love with. I mean, that was the hero product. This is everything that can be used in so many different ways, treatments. And I love multitasking products generally and and the way it was formulated. I’m like, how are you how are you getting into this place? And she’s like, Well, I’m a chemist. My mom’s a pharmacist. We source everything in Morocco, and she’s been trying to figure out this product line for for years. So we talked about it. She She wanted me to retail them in the salon. And I said, Let me think on this and and I think that’s when it just sat with me. I don’t want to just retail these products. And there was a few tweaks that needed to be made. There were a few products then that, you know, are completely different now, and kind of showing her like, here’s what we’ve noticed has sold well, here’s what we know that clients really like. And how can we make cleaner, nicer versions of these things and and how we do that is by me coming on board, and you know, she’s like, this is my baby this night. Like, but we haven’t done anything with it. Like, let me show you that we can elevate the brand. We can kind of work together, take it to another place, and have that opportunity for her work, to have that recognition, for us to fine tune the formulas and and really get the best products that are sort of the most impactful for clients. And through all the years that we’ve seen so many different faces and so through a lot of that back and forth, we we met a few times. We talked it through. We. Came to this place where what, what I could do for the brand, and how she can back to herself, focus on actually formulating these, these products and working on ingredients, whereas she was trying to get the word out there, trying to market, trying to to see what would happen. And we kind of agreed that that was something that I could take over so that she could do what she does best, and then, you know, kind of from there. But I would say, like, the amount of times she reached out and stayed persistent. It it’s not that I felt bad, but I felt like there’s, you know, she really wants to connect. And couldn’t believe that we spoke for an hour, and I almost felt like I knew something about her already, and we just connected so well. I think we have to meet when I get back, and even that I felt like already connected to her. So it was a good mission. Such an important lesson,

though, because so often you’ll reach out to someone one time and you don’t get a response or and we immediately. We take that personally. We think there’s something wrong with us. We think that. And in reality, I mean, you had no idea she even dropped off the samples, because you’re doing so many build outs, like people, you know? I mean, it’s not something that someone would have alerted me to, either. Yeah, you know so thing, but it’s one of those things that her persistence in something that she believed in deeply ultimately led to a beautiful relationship, a beautiful partnership, something that’s going to serve people on a bigger level, something that can generate revenue for both of you, something that can create jobs in your community. I mean, there’s so many wins that come out of clear conversation, relationship and genuine, genuine connection. I think because you can’t just do this with someone that’s a transactional relationship. It’s got to be a genuine connection there. But I love the products. Is there a story behind the name

I was going to share that you were saying that there, we’re helping so many people just with this partnership, with bringing this brand to life. Of course, there’s this local and then spread out impact, but so 101 specifically the name is the the vision for the amount of ingredients that will span across the line of clean, natural ingredients. You know, everything is waterless, fragrance free, but having that, that vision for the future of the line, because eventually we’d like to bring that same philosophy to hair care and other facial and body products. So, so that’s the name. The logo is of a woman of the Amazon tribe in Morocco, okay, so a unique, a unique situation for Layla, my partner, is that she is her family is like a descendant of this tribe. So they have a connection, and all of our products are sourced through them, where these women are the the they’re the controllers of the economy, like they’re responsible for for that in their tribe. And when we are buying these ingredients directly from them, you know, this group in the Atlas Mountains, we’re getting everything from the source and bringing those ingredients back in that like pure, raw sense. So we get to support this group of women, we being, you know, a women owned company, and then getting to help so many other women and men as we go through it’s really feels like the story in itself is full circle for me, because the trickle back effect is so nice, that’s beautiful. So you guys, the kind of the hero line are the oils. Yes, that you’re starting with. I did not know the 101 products that’s that’s a big vision, but you have the oils right now. You have a cleanser and an essence. Correct, correct.

Okay. Next step will be the exfoliator. So it’ll be similar to the herbal oil, because we have the herbal and the flower. So right now we have the rose cream cleanser, the rose essence that follow along, that flower scent and essential oils. The herbal will have an exfoliator, and then the next after that will be a Moroccan clay mask.

Very cool, very cool. Well, I am so excited to announce that we just partnered with your company 101 to be a new partner inside of APA. One of the great things inside of APA is having this big black book of discounts. So we do a lot of research with different. Companies that we believe in that align with core values, that impact women and communities in ways that we believe in, just like this brand that’s such an important thing. And so for our APA members, head in there. Go to the partner section. Scroll through there. We’ve got a new special discount for anybody that wants to get their hands on these oils. I’ve been using them for six or seven months now. I oil plane at home. I use them on my cuticles. I use them on my heels. So different, different areas, but it’s on a probably five times a week. I am doing it so and it’s lovely. Love the products. Love that they don’t get goopy. For anybody that has bought a facial oil or a body oil or anything like that. And you realize after opening it and closing it so many times, or however you’re using it, it just gets thicker and more goopy and not as elegant. This is just like the day that I first got it, seven months later.

So love that it’s a pure Argan base, so that will help it. And like you said, it’s very stable. We found a couple of other ways that people are using it to beyond like you can use it in your hair. Since it’s a dry oil, it feels really good without giving it weight. Um, couple of our husbands have stolen them, and they’re using it as beard oil.

Very good, I can see, especially with the herbal one, right?

Yeah, more, more. I guess masculine scent of a couple of people have said that they want to use in the body, so they’ve been doing a few drops into their moisturizer for legs, arms. So there’s, there’s so many ways, because it’s dry, even on the feet, right? It doesn’t, it doesn’t give you slip, so you can walk around without fear, yeah, yeah. No. It’s great. It’s great. Well, where can our listeners if they want to get in touch with you? I know you’ve got like, three different Instagrams. What are your Instagrams?

Sure? Well, for to follow 101 and excuse me, learn a little bit more about the product line and the journey and the ingredients behind it. It’s at 101 cosmetics on Instagram, and then for the salon, spas at face beauty bar. And then, if you want to follow me, and all the chaos behind all the brand at Fatima Rosa beauty, Fatima.rosa.beauty,

I think it’s such an important thing to know. Well, I love knowing the woman behind the brand right, because it’s we’re all out here building our businesses and seeing, you know, the story of, like, what does it take? Who is the person? What is the drive? What is the grit? What is the all of that stuff that goes into it that is so motivating for me, and so inspiring, and I just love being around community of entrepreneurs in that way. So thank you for sharing your life, thank you for sharing your story, and thank you for partnering with us, with for these incredible products.

My pleasure and an honor to partner. I’ve met so many amazing people through APA and now inner circle, building these these deeper connections, and even through the in person, I feel like I’ve connected with so many women. And as you said, being around these entrepreneurs, we’re like minded in that way. We understand each other. Most of us have families and kids and other things we’re juggling too. So it’s not just something we get to full, you know, full on focus. So So I will say I have found mentorship in this group. I have found inspiration. So it’s, it’s a nice full circle for me to be able to partner and get to surprise and delight a few of our members along the way.

Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, and I will catch you guys on the next episode.

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EP 434: Compliance + Scope of Practice: What Spa Owners Need to Know in 2025

Let’s talk about what’s really going on in spa industry compliance.

In this must-listen episode, I’m joined by Paulina from Spakinect to unpack the regulatory shifts, scope-of-practice pitfalls, and compliance issues that spa CEOs must be aware of to run safe, legal, and profitable businesses in 2025.

From the ripple effects of a tragic IV hydration case in Texas to the role of esthetic coalitions and why having a medical director is not enough, this conversation is full of practical takeaways to keep your business secure.

If you’ve ever wondered whether you’re doing everything “by the book,” this episode is your checklist.

What you’ll learn during this episode:

  • Why regulations are increasing—and how they impact your spa
  • How to avoid the most common compliance pitfalls (like missing good faith exams)
  • What to do if you’re unknowingly operating out of compliance
  • Who should actually be doing the prescribing in your spa
  • The difference between boards and legislative power—and how you can influence both

Resources Mentioned in Episode #434 – Compliance + Scope of Practice: What Spa Owners Need to Know in 2025

  • Learn more about Spakinect → https://www.spakinect.com/
  • Follow Spakinect on Instagram → @spakinect

 

Subscribe on Spotify Subscribe on Apple Podcasts

Subscribe on YouTube

Keep the conversation going inside the Spa Marketing Made Easy Community by clicking here.

join the free Spa Marketing Made Easy Podcast community

IG / @addoaesthetics

WEB / addoaesthetics.com

YOUTUBE / @addoaesthetics

LINKEDIN / @addoaesthetics

WANT MORE FROM ADDO AESTHETICS?

Take just 5 minutes and find out YOUR biggest area of opportunity by taking my FREE Spa Business Assessment here → scorecard.addoaesthetics.com/

Join the Growth Factor® Fundamentals, an association dedicated to empowering women and strengthening their community by helping aesthetic professionals build meaningful connections with one another and fostering support and guidance to create businesses that align with the lives they love → https://offer.addoaesthetics.com/growth-factor-fundamentals

ABOUT THE SPA MARKETING MADE EASY HOST 

About Your Host, Daniela Woerner

Daniela Woerner is the founder and CEO of Addo Aesthetics, a leading community for aesthetic professionals, and the creator of the Growth Factor® Framework—a proven system that has helped 582 six- and seven-figure spa owners scale their businesses with strategy and systems.

With nearly two decades in the aesthetics industry, Daniela has trained alongside top physician-dispensed brands, consulted with leading dermatologists, and helped thousands of spa professionals streamline their operations and maximize profitability.

Her mission? To transform overworked aestheticians into Spa CEOs—building a business and life they love with the strategic systems needed for long-term financial growth.

As the host of the Spa Marketing Made Easy podcast, Daniela brings expert insights, real-world strategies, and in-depth conversations to help spa owners elevate their marketing, optimize their operations, and create sustainable success. With over 400 published episodes, 1 million+ downloads, and a ranking in the top 1% of all podcasts worldwide, Spa Marketing Made Easy is the go-to resource for spa and aesthetic professionals looking to level up.

Tune in each week for actionable strategies, expert interviews, and inspiration to help you build a thriving, systemized, and scalable spa business!

 

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EP 433: Why LinkedIn Matters for Spa CEOs: Build Strategic Partnerships That Scale

If you’re still thinking LinkedIn is just for resumes and job hunting, think again.

In this quick, actionable episode, I’m walking you through exactly why every spa CEO should be on LinkedIn—and how to start using it today to build strategic local partnerships, increase your visibility, and position yourself as a true business leader in your area.

Whether you’re just getting started or you already have a profile collecting dust, this is your invitation to start using LinkedIn with purpose and power. It’s not about likes. It’s about leveraged relationships that grow your business with ease.

What you’ll learn during this episode:

  • Why LinkedIn should be your go-to platform for building business relationships
  • How to filter by location, industry, and company size to find ideal partners
  • Key demographic stats that prove LinkedIn users are your people
  • Why your personal profile is more important than your spa’s business page
  • How this one platform can fuel referral pipelines and cross-promotions

Resources Mentioned in Episode #433: Why LinkedIn Matters for Spa CEOs: Build Strategic Partnerships That Scale

  • Connect with Daniela on LinkedIn

Subscribe on Spotify Subscribe on Apple Podcasts

Subscribe on YouTube

Keep the conversation going inside the Spa Marketing Made Easy Community by clicking here.

join the free Spa Marketing Made Easy Podcast community

IG / @addoaesthetics

WEB / addoaesthetics.com

YOUTUBE / @addoaesthetics

LINKEDIN / @addoaesthetics

WANT MORE FROM ADDO AESTHETICS?

Take just 5 minutes and find out YOUR biggest area of opportunity by taking my FREE Spa Business Assessment here → scorecard.addoaesthetics.com/

Join the Addo Professional Alliance (APA), an association dedicated to empowering women and strengthening their community by helping aesthetic professionals build meaningful connections with one another and fostering support and guidance to create businesses that align with the lives they love → https://www.addoaesthetics.com/addo-professional-alliance/

ABOUT THE SPA MARKETING MADE EASY HOST 

About Your Host, Daniela Woerner

Daniela Woerner is the founder and CEO of Addo Aesthetics, a leading community for aesthetic professionals, and the creator of the Growth Factor Framework—a proven system that has helped 582 six- and seven-figure spa owners scale their businesses with strategy and systems.

With nearly two decades in the aesthetics industry, Daniela has trained alongside top physician-dispensed brands, consulted with leading dermatologists, and helped thousands of spa professionals streamline their operations and maximize profitability.

Her mission? To transform overworked aestheticians into Spa CEOs—building a business and life they love with the strategic systems needed for long-term financial growth.

As the host of the Spa Marketing Made Easy podcast, Daniela brings expert insights, real-world strategies, and in-depth conversations to help spa owners elevate their marketing, optimize their operations, and create sustainable success. With over 400 published episodes, 1 million+ downloads, and a ranking in the top 1% of all podcasts worldwide, Spa Marketing Made Easy is the go-to resource for spa and aesthetic professionals looking to level up.

Tune in each week for actionable strategies, expert interviews, and inspiration to help you build a thriving, systemized, and scalable spa business!

 

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

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EP 432: Replay: How to Build Rich Relationships with Selena Soo

Trust and authenticity are two attributes required for a successful partnership.

In business, today’s guest, Selena Soo, likes to refer to these as rich relationships. 

A rich relationship leaves a lasting impact on your life. It’s something that brings abundance to you.

These types of relationships are essential in business to connect and build deep, authentic partnerships with your community to help propel your business forward.

Selena is no stranger to the Spa Marketing Made Easy podcast family. Returning for a second time, she is a master connector and relationship builder.

She is a publicity and marketing expert for visionary entrepreneurs and thought leaders who want to impact millions with their message. 

Tune in to hear her expertise on attracting rich relationships, the importance of building your personal brand, and how to gain exposure and publicity for your business.

What you’ll learn during this episode:

  • How Selena got started in her line of work
  • What is a rich relationship and how can we attract them?
  • How can we add value to the people we care about?
  • The strategy behind building successful partnerships 
  • Story ideas to publicize your spa in the media

Resources Mentioned in Episode #432: Replay: How to Build Rich Relationships with Selena Soo

  • FREE download of the first four chapters of Selena’s new book Rich Relationships
  • Connect with Selena on Instagram

Subscribe on Spotify Subscribe on Apple Podcasts

Subscribe on YouTube

Keep the conversation going inside the Spa Marketing Made Easy Community by clicking here.

join the free Spa Marketing Made Easy Podcast community

IG / @addoaesthetics

WEB / addoaesthetics.com

YOUTUBE / @addoaesthetics

LINKEDIN / @addoaesthetics

WANT MORE FROM ADDO AESTHETICS?

Take just 5 minutes and find out YOUR biggest area of opportunity by taking my FREE Spa Business Assessment here → scorecard.addoaesthetics.com/

Join the Growth Factor® Fundamentals, an association dedicated to empowering women and strengthening their community by helping aesthetic professionals build meaningful connections with one another and fostering support and guidance to create businesses that align with the lives they love → https://offer.addoaesthetics.com/growth-factor-fundamentals

ABOUT THE SPA MARKETING MADE EASY HOST 

About Your Host, Daniela Woerner

Daniela Woerner is the founder and CEO of Addo Aesthetics, a leading community for aesthetic professionals, and the creator of the Growth Factor Framework—a proven system that has helped 582 six- and seven-figure spa owners scale their businesses with strategy and systems.

With nearly two decades in the aesthetics industry, Daniela has trained alongside top physician-dispensed brands, consulted with leading dermatologists, and helped thousands of spa professionals streamline their operations and maximize profitability.

Her mission? To transform overworked aestheticians into Spa CEOs—building a business and life they love with the strategic systems needed for long-term financial growth.

As the host of the Spa Marketing Made Easy podcast, Daniela brings expert insights, real-world strategies, and in-depth conversations to help spa owners elevate their marketing, optimize their operations, and create sustainable success. With over 400 published episodes, 1 million+ downloads, and a ranking in the top 1% of all podcasts worldwide, Spa Marketing Made Easy is the go-to resource for spa and aesthetic professionals looking to level up.

Tune in each week for actionable strategies, expert interviews, and inspiration to help you build a thriving, systemized, and scalable spa business!

Welcome to Spa Marketing Made Easy, a podcast for spa owners who want to step up their leadership and business skills and step into the role as spa CEO. I’m your host. Daniela Woerner, CEO of Addo Aesthetics and Founder of the Growth Factor Framework Program, where we teach, coach and guide spa owners in scaling their spas to the next level of growth and unlocking freedom in their life and their business. I’m so glad you’re here now. Let’s dive into the show.

Hey, welcome back to another episode of the Spa Marketing Made Easy Podcast. I am so excited to share something very special with you today. 

So a few years ago, I had an opportunity to sit down with my friend Selena Soo and have an amazing conversation about relationships, personal growth and building deeper connections, both personally and professionally. This was the second time that she was on our podcast. But this episode really stuck with me after we hit the stop recording button, number one, because relationships are first and foremost for me, but also because I really had started being intentional maybe a year or two before this was recorded around really putting the same level of energy and effort into nurturing the relationships, both personally and professionally around me, as I did, into growing my business. And I think for those of you that are entrepreneurs, that you have your own spas, you know that, like so much of our time and energy and just mental space goes into our business, and I asked myself the question like, What would change in our lives if we dedicated just like 10% of the time and money and energy into nurturing the relationships, both personally and professionally, with those around us? So of course, I was super excited, incredibly thrilled that Selena’s brand new book rich relationships is coming out. It is packed with the same heart wisdom and actionable insights that made our original conversation so wonderful. So in celebration of her upcoming launch, I’m going to replay that original interview today, and to make it even better, Selena so generously offered the first four chapters of rich relationships absolutely free. You’ll find the link to grab those chapters in the show notes. And even if you listen to this episode when it first aired, I encourage you to listen again with fresh ears. I am somebody who I will read a book more than once, I will listen to an episode more than once, because when you listen with fresh ears, when you listen at a different place in your entrepreneurial journey, you’re going to get different things out of it. You’re going to pick up more gems the second time around. 

So without further ado, let’s go ahead and dive into that conversation with my wonderful friend, Selena. 

All right, Selena, welcome to the Spa Marketing Made Easy Podcast. I’m so excited to have you for a second time on the show. You were on the show like years ago, back in the beginning, when we were first getting this thing going. So thank you for that. I’m so happy to have you on again. Yes, I’m thrilled to be back when I think of you, I think of someone who is just a master connector. You are so good at building rich relationships. What I also love is that you are an introvert, yes, and so to be able to have this superpower of connecting people and building really authentic, deep relationships with so many individuals, being able to have that capacity yet also still nurture yourself absolutely. Yes, it’s a talent. It is. Yeah, it is a bit of a juggling act. Yeah, I was thinking about you last night. We were at both at a party where there were over 100 people, which was overwhelming for me, yeah, but you, I think, had friendships with pretty much everybody in that room. It was so much fun. But I will say that after, you know, big parties, because that was like a four hour event. And then there was also the after party, I did have to like rest a little bit this morning, but, yeah, that was so fun. So having this skill set of building rich relationships has helped you build your own incredible company. Helped you build, helped you with. Help others build their companies. 

Tell me a little bit about what you do, and has this always been a through line for you, or was this something that youabsolutely yeah, I would love to tell you how I got started. So I’m a publicity and marketing expert, and I got into this world because when I was in my mid 20s, I. A quarter life crisis. I found myself clinically depressed, having trouble getting out of bed in the mornings, trouble eating. And things got so bad that my mom flew from Vancouver, Canada to New York to be by my side, and she would, you know, accompany me on the subway, like taking me to work, like I was this school girl. And it was just such a low point, and I remember, you know, talking to friends and saying, like, I just have to find a way to get better. Do you know anyone who can help me? And that’s when I learned about this female life coach, and, you know, joined her community, her group program, and got exposed to all these experts and authors and thought leaders. And I realized that, you know, when people are struggling and suffering as we all do, whether it is, you know, we’re struggling with our life purpose, or it could be a relationship issue, a money issue, a health issue that we don’t just need more information, what we’re really looking for is inspiration. 

And I think that there is nothing that is more powerful than a role model, so someone who embodies that message of hope and possibility, someone who has gone through hard times and come out the other side and has like a roadmap for people, right? And so I just became really passionate about promoting these or telling people, you know, my friends, have you heard about this person and that person? And they had no idea who I was talking about. So it just really dawned on me that sometimes the person with the most important message that someone really needs to hear can be that best kept secret. 

So I, you know, started doing this work in publicity because I wanted these people to get their messages out into the world. And so I think in terms of me being a connector, it’s not because I am super extroverted, but rather I’m really driven by a mission. I really want you know these amazing people who are helping people’s lives, whether it’s like looking better and feeling better, or, you know, healing their body to get their message out, to connect with the right people to make their biggest impact. So definitely driven, you know, by helping people get connected to the people who can really change their lives, but to create those connections, that’s beautiful, by the way, but to create those connections there, it’s like, how do you know who to connect with? How do you know, like, how do you form those relationships in the first place? Because as you get older, it’s hard to make friends, right? It is, yeah. So there’s a couple of things to keep in mind when you’re thinking about, Well, who do I connect with? So the first is, is you’ve got to get clear on what your goals and dreams are, because influencers, and those are people that I, you know, I call influencers, people who can help you reach your goals and dreams faster. They’re going to be connected to what’s most important to you. So is, you know, your dream to build, you know, a six figure or seven figure business? Is it to write a best selling book? Is it to make an impactness or a number of people’s lives? But getting really clear on what your top goals and dreams are is number one, and then number two is also getting really clear on what your values are in relationships, because there may be people who are successful and could potentially support you, but you might just not energetically resonate with them, just a different set of values. And so that doesn’t really work for a relationship. And then the third thing is understanding who are the types of people that can help you. Because I think people from all walks of life, and you know, all stages of business, can be helpful, from people who are mentors, who have kind of figured out, you know the journey that you’re on, and can help you get there faster. So people who are natural super connectors and have so much joy introducing people to one another, or people with reach that you could build partnerships with, and who could put you in front of more of your ideal clients, super fans, who could be your clients who can’t stop talking about you to your friends, family, colleagues who really believe in you. And so you want to get clear on who are all those different types of people who can contribute to getting to your goals faster, making sure that there’s shared values, and then starting to build those relationships.

Now, for spa owners, they’re, you know, brick and mortar, yes. How are they going out in their community? Like, I love the idea of the super fans. Like, Well, every spa is going to have some super fan. But what are you like knocking on doors and be like, Hey, we serve the same type of person, or let’s be friends. Let’s build a rich relationship. We were, you know, we were talking a little bit before about the difference between like, hey, let’s build a business partnership, which is great and valid, yes, but how much better that business partnership actually works and functions when you have a real rich relationship, yeah, with that individual

Yeah. No, I have so many thoughts coming up, because when it comes to building relationships, like, we don’t want to scare people by coming on too strong, like, can we build a partnership? Is not a level one conversation, right? There’s usually like steps in between to getting to know someone, but one way that you can really accelerate relationship building is actually by building your personal brand. So you know. Before was, what do you know? Now you know, and then it’s been like, Well, who do you know? And I would say that today, it’s who knows you right? So you want people to know who you are and be attracted and curious about your work, and so building your personal brand, and there’s so many ways to do it, you know, with your website, on social media. But really like expressing yourself in different ways, where even if someone hasn’t had like, a in depth conversation, they can get a sense of who you are, what you stand for, what’s unique about you. And that’s also why I really love publicity, because I think that publicity is the fastest way to elevate your brand. You know, you can share your your story, ideas, why you started your business, why you’re so passionate about this, what makes you unique, and so it’s like you’re raising your credibility and profile, but you’re also getting your message into all these places, and you can repurpose it on social media and newsletters and websites, but that would be, you know, a big part of attracting rich relationships is having a personal brand and putting yourself out there. 

I love that, and I actually, I have never heard anybody say that before, and it’s so brilliant. It makes so much sense of the power of the personal brand. I mean, we’re even seeing employees, like on LinkedIn, different places, really cultivating their own personal brand to, you know, get job offers and things like that. So to really tie it in as the spa owner, as someone who wants to be a pillar of their community and wants to connect with others by you showing up and putting yourself out there and saying, This is what I stand for. This is what I’m about. You’re saying that’s going to attract other people to you to want to start those relationships. 

And it also creates trust when someone is consistently showing up, you know, online, you’re being seen in multiple places, versus, okay, this is someone brand new who I don’t know. So, yeah, kind of like creating your brand, expressing yourself, right? Putting yourself out there. That’s one of the first steps. And then another step is really getting clear on how you can add value to others. Because the truth is, every single person is incredibly busy with a full life, with, you know, family duties and things happening in their career and for themselves, that if they’re going to make space for more people in their life, they have to be someone that you know adds value in some way. And there’s so many different ways to add value, like even being a person who is a good listener, who asks good questions, who’s present, like that’s the way to add value. Another really powerful way is giving someone a compliment and showing them that you really see them and their brilliance or appreciate something about them. And there’s countless ways to add value. You know, people will say, Well, how do I know what someone wants? You know, I’m not a mind reader. And you know, at the end of the day, like as humans, there’s only you know, a few things that we all tend to want. And if you’re connecting with other entrepreneurs, it’s even you know, a smaller number. But you know, everybody wants to grow their wealth, right? They want to have abundance in their life. So that means, you know, new clients and referrals and growing their business, right, creating new offers services. So that’s one thing that everyone wants. Another thing that people want is to make an impact, to be sharing their message and their ideas with more people, even if they’re not like their clients at their spa, but maybe they’re reading their beauty tips, and it’s transforming their lives. And as someone who’s making an impact, maybe you know you’re being recognized as the top of you know your industry and what you do. So there’s, like, also status. There another thing that people really want is peace.

Yes, right? Peace? Because, as I feel like, yeah, align that with time. Also that connects, yeah, so there’s time, right? So everybody wants to save time, and so when you’re building relationships, you also don’t want to, you know, come up with ways to, like, you’re thinking you’re building the relationship, but you’re like, you know, I don’t wanna say wasting, but it’s like, three or four hours of someone’s time that might not be like, the first kind of way that you connect, right? It’s like you should be connecting in a way where you’re actually helping them save time, whether it’s helping them find people that can support them with their business or get results faster, and then the peace thing. Because, you know, a lot of people are stressed, whether they’re stressed in their business or there’s a family stressor or health or relationships, and so you know, by being a sounding board, by connecting people to the right resources, by sharing our expertise, we can create more peace in other people’s lives. 

So would you? Would you all those kind of step by step that you just shared? Would you identify those as pieces of a rich relationship, like, as you’re going out and building, like, how do you define? Yeah,

yeah. I mean, you don’t have to do all those things, but you want to be a rich. Relationship is a relationship that contributes to your life, right? It enhances your life. It fulfills you. It’s something that brings abundance to you, versus a relationship that is just like purely transactional short term. Thinking or just doesn’t feel good. It’s like a relationship that’s like meant to last and really bring joy and fulfillment.

I love that, so I want to pivot just a little bit and talk about a little more on the business side of building partnerships. So yes, we know that relationships are deeply important, and building those rich relationships, it can take time, yes, and you know, it does take time and energy and effort to be able to make sure that that person feels seen, heard, valued, that you’re both providing value to the relationship, that it’s not one sided, etc. But as you’re building a business, creating partnerships with other businesses, creating relationships with other businesses can be a very, very valuable tool to help you grow especially for brick and mortar, we’re seeing that so much with spas right now that are, you know, like going to the pure bar, the orange series, or wherever that are these franchises where they’re building relationships with those owners, they serve The same audience, but you are a master in that. That was one of the strategies that you use to grow your company to be so wildly successful. Talk to me about and you had like, 400 partners, yeah, over the years, over the years, yeah. So tell me about that strategy and kind of suggestions that you would give to a brick and mortar

 spa. Yeah. So the great thing about partnerships is you’re not just promoting to your existing audience. You’re leveraging other people’s audiences, people that have customers that know, like and trust them. So that’s really powerful, because instead of just marketing to one audience, you could be marketing to 10 audiences, 100 audiences simultaneously. But when you’re getting started, you know you want to keep it simple. 

You only need, like a few key partnerships to make a big impact. And so with partnerships, you always want them to be win, win, and you want to be putting yourself into the other person’s shoes. Because, you know, every business owner, they are busy, they are overwhelmed, and so they want to say yes to something that feels easy and that is going to give them a meaningful return on their time and investment. And so really putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, I think that when you’re building a partnership, you have to really prioritize, like, what’s going to be important to the other person. And so with our impacting millions launch, which is our publicity program. You know, we make it because, basically, it’s an additional revenue stream for people, but they have their own products and services to promote, right? Every business does. And so thinking about, you know, how can you make it so easy for them to say, yes, how can you offer like the best possible commissions or incentives, you know, marketing materials. So it’s just very, very easy for them to win in Spa. I mean, we have such an advantage in Spa, because who doesn’t want to spa treatment? I know you can offer that as like, either earning like for influencers that are posting about having a treatment at the spa or coming in. And, you know, there’s so many different ways that we can do that. We usually call that a brand ambassador program, but it’s very similar. And building relationships to get people to post and share and refer. I love that because, I mean, that’s one of the keys to building a partnership. No one’s going to promote you unless they feel like they can really vouch for your work, right? And so in order to vouch for, you know, your work, they need to have an experience of it. 

So, you know, giving away something for free, you know, in exchange for them to consider sharing it in some way, if it’s like an exceptional service. So yeah, I mean, you definitely want to be leading with generosity in the beginning, and people being just like so delighted by the experience. It just feels like natural and organic for them to want to tell others about it. Yeah. So what is your strategy, or any tips on finding potential partners in a local area? Yeah, absolutely so with your existing customers asking them, you know, who are the other service providers that they work it with when it comes to, you know, beauty and health and lifestyle. So that could be part of a questionnaire. It could be a conversation that you have with people you know, I’ve sent an email, you know, out to my list before asking things like, you know, when it comes to growing your business and your visibility online, who are some of your some of the top experts that you follow, what are the podcasts that you listen to? And so people are supplying you with all these names, and all these people are potential partners. Oh, that’s so. Have you ever heard of sparktoro? 

Have you heard of No, I heard of it recently, but I’m not familiar with it. It’s such a cool website, we’ll link it up below. They have a free trial, and then there’s a paid version as well, okay, but you can essentially put in estheticians, okay, put in and it will go through and do all of this research. Of these are the podcasts. These are the mag. Magazines. These are, I mean, oh, my goodness. We paid for a 30 day, okay, block, and we were able to get hundreds of magazines, websites, podcasts, so you get to see where people who have that job title, and there’s all different. You can put in working moms, you can put in, like, whatever you want. And I just found that to be so insanely valuable, because it’s cutting down the time of like, well, if I am doing publicity, yes, then maybe these are the the publications that I actually want to target and try and get into.

I love that. Yeah, who doesn’t want a shortcut? I know. I know. So talk to me about your thoughts on what publicity can do for a spa.

 Absolutely. So you know, when it comes to your business, it’s one thing if you’re telling everyone I’m the best at what I do, but it’s a whole other thing if someone else is saying that, and especially a media outlet that is endorsing you, that is saying like, this is one of the top five spas, or the spa has the best, you know, XYZ treatment. So it’s really that, you know, stamp of approval and credibility. And a lot of people, you know, they need like this expert source to filter like, what is the best of the best like? That’s how people make their decisions. And the cool thing with media is you get like that media hit, and you can use that, you know, media logo, that name for the entire lifetime of your business, that you’ve been featured in this place. So I would say, you know, ideally, as business owners, you want to have at least, you know, three strong media wins that we can use as a part of our branding to attract our ideal clients.

Very good. All right, anything else that I am not asking that would be valuable around publicity or relationships for spa owners, yeah. So I think what also would be really helpful for people is just, you know, story ideas, thinking about, you know, how do I talk about my business? But not just have it seem like I’m wanting someone to, like, you know, produce an advertisement, yeah? Like, right? And so, you know, you want to come up with story ideas are going to appeal to the media, and the story ideas that they’re most interested in are ones that are service driven, that add value to their audiences, so even if maybe someone can’t go to the spa. But what are some, you know, top beauty tips, right from top estheticians and things like that. You know how to mistakes to avoid. Those are really popular. And they’re also really interested in story ideas that have, like, emotional resonance, right, like big transformations or breakthroughs, or, you know, big things to avoid. And then they are also really interested in timely story ideas, and so, you know, during different times of the year, whether it’s, you know, Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day or different seasons, you know, winter, summer. You know, you can put different angles on your stories to make them feel really relevant for right now. So I actually have this amazing resource, and it’s a 1212, month publicity calendar. So it’s just 40 pages full of store ideas, dates and hooks to really get the media’s attention. And we have it, you know, just different ideas for all kinds of industries, including, you know, health and wellness and beauty. Oh, that’s amazing. Okay, so we’ll be sure to link that up. Yeah, impacting wonderful. 

All right, we’ll link that up. Well, Selena, thank you so much. There’s you just like, packed so much information you do. Yeah, it was like, boom, you know your stuff. Thank you so much. I appreciate your time. I appreciate your friendship. I’m so happy to share you with our audience. And for those of you that want to keep this conversation going, make sure that you head on over to the Spa Marketing Made Easy Facebook Group, and make sure that you get that resource that is super, super valuable, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.

 

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EP 431: The Untapped Superpower in Community-Driven Growth

If you’ve ever felt like networking was awkward or transactional, this episode will completely shift your perspective.

Kim Pezzetti joins me on the podcast to share how intentional community-building—not just passing out business cards—can become one of the most powerful, sustainable growth strategies for spa owners.

We talk about how to identify “micro-influencers” in your town, how to nurture reciprocal relationships with low cost and high return, and how to evaluate your community-building efforts like the smart CEO you are.

If you’re ready to move past the surface-level tactics and start truly embedding your spa into the heart of your community, this episode is for you.

What you’ll learn during this episode:

  • The “Give Something, Get Something” strategy that builds trust and drives referrals
  • Why spa partnerships should start with generosity (and a free treatment!)
  • How to allocate marketing dollars for max community ROI
  • What it means to be the mayor of your town as a spa CEO
  • Real-world examples of low-cost, high-impact local marketing
  • How to track community-based marketing like a pro

Resources Mentioned in Episode #431:  The Untapped Superpower in Community-Driven Growth

  • Download the FREE Exclusive Referral Guide
  • Learn more about Cartessa Aesthetics

Subscribe on Spotify Subscribe on Apple Podcasts

Subscribe on YouTube

Keep the conversation going inside the Spa Marketing Made Easy Community by clicking here.

join the free Spa Marketing Made Easy Podcast community

IG / @addoaesthetics

WEB / addoaesthetics.com

YOUTUBE / @addoaesthetics

LINKEDIN / @addoaesthetics

WANT MORE FROM ADDO AESTHETICS?

Take just 5 minutes and find out YOUR biggest area of opportunity by taking my FREE Spa Business Assessment here → scorecard.addoaesthetics.com/

Join the Growth Factor® Fundamentals, an association dedicated to empowering women and strengthening their community by helping aesthetic professionals build meaningful connections with one another and fostering support and guidance to create businesses that align with the lives they love → https://offer.addoaesthetics.com/growth-factor-fundamentals

ABOUT THE SPA MARKETING MADE EASY HOST 

About Your Host, Daniela Woerner

Daniela Woerner is the founder and CEO of Addo Aesthetics, a leading community for aesthetic professionals, and the creator of the Growth Factor Framework—a proven system that has helped 582 six- and seven-figure spa owners scale their businesses with strategy and systems.

With nearly two decades in the aesthetics industry, Daniela has trained alongside top physician-dispensed brands, consulted with leading dermatologists, and helped thousands of spa professionals streamline their operations and maximize profitability.

Her mission? To transform overworked aestheticians into Spa CEOs—building a business and life they love with the strategic systems needed for long-term financial growth.

As the host of the Spa Marketing Made Easy podcast, Daniela brings expert insights, real-world strategies, and in-depth conversations to help spa owners elevate their marketing, optimize their operations, and create sustainable success. With over 400 published episodes, 1 million+ downloads, and a ranking in the top 1% of all podcasts worldwide, Spa Marketing Made Easy is the go-to resource for spa and aesthetic professionals looking to level up.

Tune in each week for actionable strategies, expert interviews, and inspiration to help you build a thriving, systemized, and scalable spa business!

Welcome to Spa Marketing Made Easy, a podcast for spa owners who want to step up their leadership and business skills and step into the role as spa CEO. I’m your host. Daniela Woerner, CEO of Addo Aesthetics and Founder of the Growth Factor Framework® Program, where we teach, coach and guide spa owners in scaling their spas to the next level of growth and unlocking freedom in their life and their business. I’m so glad you’re here now let’s dive into the show. Hey, Daniela, here and welcome to spa marketing made easy the podcast where we share actionable strategies for esthetic professionals to grow their businesses without stress and hustle, we like to work smarter, not harder, around here, and that’s why you’ve been hearing me talk a lot about AI and how we can use it to tighten up our operations. 

Today, we’re diving into the untapped superpower and spa growth, and that is community, my dears, because let’s be honest, community isn’t just a feel good concept. It’s one of the smartest growth strategies that you can implement in your business. So many spa CEOs miss this opportunity because they are buried under a list of to do’s, and plain and simple, they’re exhausted and overwhelmed by the end of the day. I want to change that for you. So my guest today believes in the power of community, and she has a pretty incredible story around how community and relationships helped her take the next right step and then the next right step in her very successful journey into esthetics. I’m joined by Kim Pezzetti, the director of practice development and Cartessa Aesthetics, to explore why authentic relationships are the real currency of business success. Kim sharing. Her give something, get the something. Philosophy on how you can start building powerful local partnerships that drive referrals without breaking the bank. 

So if you’re ready to be the mayor of your town, as you guys have heard me say so many times before, and position your spa as the go to into your community. Keep listening. Let’s go ahead and play that interview. 

All right, Kim, welcome to the Spa Marketing Made Easy Podcast. I am so excited to have this conversation with you today, because over the past few months, as we’ve been getting to know one another, as we’ve been having our own conversations and building our own relationship, one of the things that we have discovered is that we both deeply believe in the importance of community. That has been something that really helped both of us get to where we are in our careers, it’s affected our success in the different roles that we’ve played, and I think it’s just such an unspoken thing that we really need to start to normalize and get out there of just How important it is to have this skill of relationship and community and connection, because it truly does open so many doors, and even the relationships that it’s not opening doors for, it just makes you happier. It makes you, I mean, like, plain and simple, right? Like, it makes your life more pleasurable to know incredible people, to know people, to laugh with people, to connect with people. I feel like it’s part of the human experience. So thank you for coming on and and getting into this today.

Yeah, well, I can’t tell you how excited I am to be here number one and number two, yeah, it’s just, it’s been fun to just grow the relationship with you. And again, as like, it kind of goes back to community. Like, how did we get here? Daniela, right? And you just, you just said something that, I guess I didn’t think of it that way. And I think it’s so powerful to say it just makes you happy. And I think that’s key in how you just approach life in general, whether it’s business or professionally. And I guess you even think about it like when you walk into an establishment, and if you just simply say, have a great day to somebody who’s not expecting it, you spark something that you don’t know where it could potentially go, right? And so I think, if you think about that, and that’s, I think that’s the power in all of this, is just having these great conversations. And it might go somewhere and it might not, and that’s okay. But I love that you just said, but it makes you happy, because I know I always feel better when I say something to somebody and they smile and they walk away, like, oh, gosh, I wasn’t expecting that. That was great. It’s so and I think it’s like the, I mean, there have been, you know, the the study that Harvard did that’s like the longest going study of all time, Happiness Project. Happiness Project, yeah, so there, and it’s like, the answer is, people that have community are happier. And you can look at all these people that have made millions and millions and. Billions of dollars, and if they don’t have community, if they don’t have family, if they don’t feel connected and like they belong, they’re not happy. And so when we spend so much of our time in the workplace, so much of our time doing something that we ultimately are wanting to help make people’s lives better. We’re wanting to help them solve a problem. And in Spa, in the esthetic space, you know, I mean, what a joy. What a what an incredible industry to work on. Work in um, one of the first physicians that I worked for, Dr Stalley, he would always be like, we’re not hearing cancer here, and it’s such a like to make it so light and to make it like we get to help others build their own confidence and feel better about themselves. 

What a joy of an industry to be in and and I wanted to kind of go back there, because it was at Dr Sally’s office that I met one of my best friends in the whole world, NIA Naya, has opened so many different doors and been a friend since 2009 so I mean a really, really long time, and she was the one who introduced me to you, and she she had so many positive things to say about you and and cartessa, the company that you are working for right now, that that really it built the trust. It built the the ability for me to come to our conversations you and I open and and just ready to connect so I want to know about you. Like, tell me kind of your origin story in esthetics. Like, you didn’t always start out in the esthetic space, but you got into the esthetic space and, like, tell me that journey, but also, like, add the connection piece. Like, how did these doors get opened for you? Yeah, I love that. So it’s funny, right? If you go, like, way, way back, the way back machine, right? Because I’m now dating myself, start to go to school. I thought I wanted to be an accountant, and I was like, yeah, no, this is not for me, you know. So I steered left, and I got into marketing. And then, you know, fast forward. I’ve been, I’ve always been in business development of some sort and or marketing, but back in my goodness. So What year was this? It was 22,009 when you met Naya. 2009 like, there’s this common thread here. I went to a work, went to work for a company called doc web, which, believe it or not, was a digital marketing agency. We were owned by a physician who was also an esthetic Med Spa owner, and his whole thing was his talk about being ahead of your time. So crazy. I mean, I was like twisting arms, like, can we please have a social media page,

right? 

Not a digital agency, yeah. So it was digital marketing. And it was funny, because he was a core just GP, but he had his Med Spa, and I think, through the process of building a website for his Med Spa, he got so agitated by the fact that these people were trying to build websites and then own them, and then, you know, kind of like, kind of take people for a ride in that space. And his brother in law at the time, John, who was who hired me, he was a digital guru, knew how to build websites, had a connection, and he’s like, Well, we can build this company, and we can provide physicians that are looking to get into the Med Spa space. These websites. At the time, we were calling them micro sites, right? Because they still had their core website for everything health care based, you know, to be able to do all of the HIPAA compliant, all of that fun stuff. But now they’re in a world of esthetics, so we’ve got to build these micro sites. So we were, you know, literally working the basement of his practice, which I find funny. Like, I think at one point my desk was an exam table because we were in between. I was like, this is kind of weird, but it worked. And then they so, because he had the Med Spa space, there was a connection to at the time it was sinusore. And so what happened was,just up in New England too, right up in there, they’re based out of Westford mass. so literally, 35 minutes from me, met Chris aaronson, and as we were working through this, he’s like, Hey, look, we would love to kind of bring you in and speak at our conferences across the country, to teach these doctors how to market themselves, right? Because they were of this mindset, I’m a doctor, if I build it, they will come well, we knew that wasn’t the case when it came to the cash. Side, right? So now they had to learn how to market themselves. So I traveled for sign of shore as part of Doc web, and we would go in very educational Right? Like, here’s what you have to do. Here are the basics. 

And then they would include our services. When they would sell a device. Kept those relationships, but helped build stock web from basically, I think I remember when we were starting, you know, maybe $150,000 a year to over $2 million in about 12 months. And I attribute that directly to the relationships that I nurtured, that I, you know, fed that I again, it was like trying to just make sure that I kept in line. And then fast forward from there, we grew too fast. It was what it was. I went on. I started my own consulting company in this Med Spa space as well, and but I always kept my relationships intact. And then I saw Gabe Lubin, who’s now our, he’s our CEO and founder here at Cartessa, and I could see he was starting this thing called Cartessa Aesthetics. 

Nobody really knew what it was, but I reached out one day, and I was like, hey, what’s happening over there? Like, it looks like you’ve got some really exciting things happening. And he’s like, Kimberly, when you come into work for me,I was like, Well, how did you How’d you meet Gabe? Though, was it when you were he was with sinasure at the time as well. So sinusore acquired Palomar. Yep,I remember that because I was Palomar trained, and it was so hard for me to like, wait, what’s happening? Yeah,yeah. So I met him briefly at a couple of shows, but my connection was mostly Chris. Met him at a couple of shows, but just always kept that, you know, relationship, and felt as though, because I built that relationship, I could reach out, which was like, lovely, right? Like, you know that you have that ability to do so and not like, Hey, I’m only reaching out because I want something. I was just really curious and, like, excited for what you could see that he was building. So then I I’ve been here for six and a half years. 

And what’s interesting is, I think three years ago, Chris ended up coming over to cartessa as our CCO, so that I ended up reporting to him again. So it’s kind of like this full circle loop that came back together, which is,I think what’s interesting about that is when you have that established relationship, like, Sure, there’s always you’ve got to remember what hat you’re wearing. Like, is this my friend hat, or is this my employee hat, or, like, what hat is going on here? 

But I think it creates a much more open dialog for real conversations when the when you’re in that, like CEO employee role, you can have in it, you’re part of the leadership team there, but you still can have like, real conversations rather than, and that’s probably what they’re looking for from you, rather than someone that’s just going to be like, sure, whatever you think. I’m a, I’m a, like, you want to be a team player, but you need that like challenge as a leader, to be able to see where your blind spots and where the where are the opportunities that I’m not seeing? And I think you get that when there’s that established relationship and trust, no,absolutely, and that’s, that’s the interesting thing. I think it was, maybe I want to say, three years ago, when we had our leadership meeting and gave, you know, always kicks off our leadership meetings, which is fabulous, he says. But you know what I’m going to do today is I’m going to actually go around the room with all of my leaders and tell my story about how we’re connected. And he had a story for every single one of us in that room that went back years, not months, like years, and in many cases, decades, right? So it was kind of a testament to the connections that you make and that you continue to nurture, and how it’s really helped him. I mean, we are $150 million company now, right? That’s crazy to think when we’re like, eight and a half years young, but he will attribute, I mean, obviously he is a mastermind, but I think it’s what you know, it’s all of those relationships that he kept in place too, to help build this company. So it’s pretty interesting. So it’s been a fun ride, but I love the fact that I’ve been able to continue to build relationships and partnerships as well. 

Because as part of my role here at cartessa, not only do I run the practice development program, but I also kind of keep tabs on our third party vendors. And it’s really got to be to your point, like we have this conversation all the time, right? Daniela is like, there has to be a culture fit, because not everybody fits our mold and what we’re. Trying to deliver to our customers. So it’s something that we take very seriously, or, I should say, like not light hearted, because we want to make sure that, you know, it’s that culture that we’re delivering to our practices, no matter what and as wonderful as a service might be, if the culture isn’t perfect for what we’re looking for, you have to move on and find the next one.Yeah, I so agree. So you guys, you have this theory that we were kind of talking about, that that I love the title. It’s called the give something, get something, theory. So talk to me about that in like, because you, you know when you think about networking, and for somebody, I don’t know about you, but like, I don’t do great in like, huge rooms of people, I feel nervous. I like,

 I can stand on stage and talk in front of 1000 people, no problem. It’s the like, the small talk that happens after that gives me the most incredible anxiety. Like, it’s so hard for me, and I’ve worked at it and all those things. But when I used to think about networking, it’s like, you think about those like crazy LinkedIn messages that people are just sending, like that you’ve never met this person before, and they’re like, here’s all the things like, it feels transactional, right? So how are you the give something, get something? It sort of feels like leading with generosity, leading with how you can help and support, if I’m if I’m guessing that, right? But I would love to hear kind of your approach.No, I love that. And it’s funny, because as I was writing this to you, I was like, this is just something that I always speak to when we’re talking with some of our clients, that we’re like, coaching, right? So we always get into this. We call it like, sometimes we call it grassroots. It’s community. What does that look like? And I just, I kind of it just dawned on me with one of our customers in particular, who’s based out of Colorado, and we were kind of walking through, like, look, we need to have some sort of community ambassador, like within the practice that goes out and builds these relationships. So we kind of put them on task. 

Like, here’s what we want you to do. And I guess maybe we didn’t put enough parameters around it. So when we met the next week and she came back and she said, Oh yeah. I went out to, you know, 50 different locations. I dropped off these little baskets of goodies. I put my business card in there. I put a, like, a page in there. She’s a type A action taker. She just needed a little more.And I was like, Wait a minute. We need to go in, and we need to offer them something like the owner, the manager, somebody like, maybe, hey, I’d like to invite you into my practice for free treatment, whatever that might be. It could be this treatment, that treatment, or maybe, like, maybe we have just, like, three treatments that we select from because we don’t know what their skin type is yet, or all of that fun well, and also, like, highest perceived value, lowest consumable cost. Like, let’s exactly you know. So you can’t just go in dumping and expecting them to now promote your practice to their members because you gave them a basket. Like, in my mind, that’s not really truly giving them something, that’s giving them homework like so you need to invite them in for something and take care of them first. And it is. It’s building that trust, build that relationship, and then once you get past that, then you’re in, and you might even find out, too that they’re not my culture. Their base isn’t my culture, I’m not I’m maybe going to have unhappy customers. So maybe this isn’t what I want. So you use it as kind of this testing ground of sorts. So I feel like when we you do it that way, that kind of leads us into like that more intentional, right? It’s that more intentional side of the the business.

So two things are coming up for me. First, what’s the quickest way to get rid of a laser salesman by a laser Okay, so. But how cool is it that you guys as a company have an entire division dedicated to educating your internal clients, to helping to support them to grow. I don’t know any other companies that have such a developed program for their internal staff that’s not only teaching tactical but also relationships. So kudos to you guys for that. That’s incredible. But the to go back to what you were teaching around the relationship piece is someone can’t recommend you authentically if they’ve never had a service from you. And so it’s there. Think about the difference in the testimonial or the the refer. All that they’re going to be able to give us. I walked in and it smelled like this, and they were right on time, and my skin felt amazing, and they followed up with me, and they did, you know, it’s like, and they had the water with the cucumbers and strawberries in it, and, you know, you get the little details that’s actually painting a picture, rather than they came in and brought me some bagels and gave me these cards that I’m supposed to give out, but I have no idea. How can I recommend my people if I don’t know what the experience is going to be like, that’s going to look bad on me if I am sending someone there, and I’ve never been there before, right? Because when we’re asking someone to refer that’s a huge that goes on them too. Whether it’s a good experience or a bad experience, it goes back to that person. So we want to make sure that we are doing things to make them look good in the eyes of their friends, colleagues, clients, whomever they are referring to. So it’s such an important piece. And I like to look at like, you know, we I want to get into this budgeting piece, because you have listed out here, like, how much should you spend on this relationship building aspect of marketing in your business, and the consumable cost, especially if you’re doing an energy based device, is going to be pretty low if you take that consumable cost out of your marketing budget. Like, what a better way? What a higher conversion can you get than to just really looking at, like, hey, if we can get somebody on our table, and then we can sell them into a series, and then they can refer people, I mean, that’s a way higher return than some of these other marketing strategies.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and when we talk about the reason why I throw budget in there, like, and you’re gonna laugh at me for this is, I don’t think you need to have a budget to your point, it might be the cost of a consumable, if that’s the treatment that you so choose to highlight with them, because maybe that’s like, the latest greatest, you know, and most popular treatment that you have. But, I mean, I would say less than $500 a month, like, and that’s really just kind of looking at your time, and maybe you are creating a few things. But that’s the beauty of the community side of this, or the relationship building side of this is I always like, it’s funny when I hear my team start to repeat me, they’re like, low cost, no cost, right? Kim, like, Yes, but what can because this is truly something that is next to nothing for you to do, aside from, like, some elbow grease and getting out there and just putting the time in, right? And then I think when you have a practice that maybe has a little you know, maybe you’re beyond a solopreneur, because I know solopreneurs might be become a little bit overwhelmed, but that’s why you do it in digestible chunks, right? Like identify one, just identify one within the next two weeks that you want to go and start to try to build a relationship with. But if you’ve got a bigger practice, then maybe there’s somebody within your practice that you know, you know, kind of oozes your culture, and maybe they’ve got some really deep ties in the community. Tap them to be your ambassador of sorts, right? And one of the practices we worked with in the Carolinas actually had didn’t realize it. 

As we went around the room, there were so many of their team members that were involved in some form of community group or like charity, like they they just they had this pile of gold that they had no idea until they started asking the questions, right? So I think it’s also, it’s key to also understand who your team members are and what they do in their spare time, because you can potentially use that to your advantage as well. So I want to go back to this budgeting thing. We do believe in having a budget, but I agree. I agree quite a bit with what you’re saying around the strategy with it and what i So, according to the SBA, you want to have anywhere between eight to 10% of top line revenue for your budget. So if you just say, like an easy just to maintain what you’re doing, if you want to have a 10% marketing budget. 

How many practices do you know? And I know on our end, the dollars are going towards fulfillment. They’re putting all of their dollars on back end, on services, on all of this stuff. When I ask somebody, how much do they spend on marketing and advertising? It’s it’s very rare that I’m finding a practice that spends more than $500 a month on paid ads, if they are and maybe they’re doing like an ad in a newspaper or like a local magazine or something. Like that. But if you want to build a sustainable business that’s growing, you do have to have some sort of advertising budget. And I think that if you start out with this strategy, Kim that you were suggesting, which I think is brilliant, you start out with that and you say, Okay, if we’re doing 50,000 a month, then maybe we’re going to give five that we have $5,000 to play with. In terms of budgeting, if you break up your consumables, you can say we have however many treatments that we’re capable of giving away, which then, to your point, would almost be unlimited, if you’re like, if something cost, you know, with with payroll, maybe the consumable is 40 bucks. 50 bucks you divide that, there’s going to be more treatments that you have capable of giving away than you can fit on your schedule. 

If you’re looking at what your actual budget is, and that should really put the CEO at ease. And saying, like, if we’re looking at our marketing dollars, of what we’re going to be doing, of what the SBA or other, you know, says, and we’re can, and we’re looking at it like this, we truly can. We have so much possibility if we’re not yet ready or not, don’t have the desire to do paid ads or to invest in SEO, this is one of the the best ways that you can really start to market in such a meaningful way, where you’re building those relationships and getting word of mouth and getting reviews and all of those things, and then you can go into ADS and then show them all the case studies, all the testimonials, all the reviews of people in your local community. 

So it’s really brilliant to start out with a strategy that you just recommended Kim, and then move into the other spaces, but you’ve got to start thinking. And I do want to call it a budget, because I want them to start realizing you do have to put investment into growing. And there’s different like, are you just wanting to maintain? Are you wanting to grow? Are you wanting, like, hyper growth? If you’re kind of in your first five years of practice and all of those are going to have different budgetary amounts of your top line revenue that you would allocate towards, but it really doesn’t have this is one of the easiest ways to get started with marketing your practice yet so many are just like holding so tight, Like, I don’t want to give things away for free, right?Yeah, and I think you’re so spot on with all of that, so, so I use this as kind of a stepping stone, right? Like, this is your stepping stone for those practices. But I also feel like the bigger practices could invest more time in this avenue, because they might be misappropriating some of that budget, because they might say, Yeah, I’m spending 10% but I’m not getting the return. So let’s look at like so let’s flip the script and say, what’s our return on the investment that we’re getting? So if we got say, it’s $5,000 a month, maybe it is more in those free treatments versus Google AdWords, because we’re not seeing the leads come through like we thought. So yes, I think you’re spot on, right? So it’s you have to spend money to make money, we all know that, and you just have to basically figure out what your percentage is based on where you’re at in your growth process, right? So we’re actually getting ready to work with the new new practice here this week, actually. And like her, it’s like, it’s a little scary to me, like her number one goal is, like, she’s like, I want to get from 1.5 million to 3.1 million in about 12 months. But she recognizes too, that I’ve got to spend money to make money. So she’s investing in coaching. She’s investing in, you know, marketing dollars. So it is you have to recognize, like, what are your biggest return on investments? And I think the bigger piece is, like, even when you look at the community side of things, Daniela, like, You’re the queen of this, right? We have to track it. We have to track how those spreadsheet,

Honey, give me a spreadsheet I got you,but it’s so true, and then it’s just like, all of these aha moments pop up, right? 

You’re like, oh, that partnership actually, although I think in my heart, it’s doing well, it’s actually not, because the numbers are telling me differently. So it’s just taking a few extra minutes to use one of your wonderful spreadsheets and say, what does this look like for us? So yeah, I think that that’s yeah, you have to have a budget. But I do think if you think about how you invest it in your community, the dollars go further. Potentially. So yeah,and I’m just going to throw out another little tip here in this like community building piece, something that we see so much around September, October, when every spa is inundated with donating things to charities and donate like, can you donate a gift basket? Can you donate what you know? Like, it’s always like, they want free services. I tell our people to say, Sure, we’d love to donate if you send this email out to your entire list. And so we want proof of the email. We want proof of getting in front of those people. And then you just got free advertising. So one, you get one client out of that, then what is your lifetime customer value? And so, and you’re getting exposure to their entire list, track that, and then you can give bigger to less organizations in the following years, because you can see the ones that actually come in and redeem the gift certificate. You can see the ones that are serving your people. You can also ask your existing patient base, what are the charities that they support?

 And similar to what you were saying, Kim, if you have staff that is involved in community, what are the ones that they support, that you have a direct connection with, that is going to really understand, like, there’s so many ways that you can go about this and really make it a win, win situation. But your local community, if you are the CEO, I want you out there being the mayor of your town, I want you out there, being visible, building relationships, going to charitable events, going to your local BNI or rotary club or chamber, whatever organizations you decide to visit, which is what this gal that you have this practice that wants to go from one point Whatever to 3.1 she’s got to get in the community. She’s got to be she’s got to be out there building the relationships. And that seems counterintuitive, because it’s like get out of the practice. 

That’s what you need to do, right? But that’s what she needs to do. She said, those partnerships, Yep, absolutely okay. What am I missing? Let me look at this list, this golden list here. Okay, so you said, in the world of esthetics and med spas, what is community? So specifically, I want to talk about that internally from a professional network as well, because I think that what we see, if you’re in the industry long enough, it just gets smaller and smaller, and there are really great individuals that are with company A, and then they move to Company B, you know, and it’s like that can also be a really beneficial thing for you as a practice owner, to maintain relationships with your vendors. To you were just saying, I was I met them when they were sign ashore. It brought me to you know, it’s like those relationships opened up so many doors. So I think really being aware of these people that are trying to build relationships, and yes, ultimately do business, but sometimes it doesn’t work, and just because you’re not doing business with a particular company doesn’t mean that you still can’t support or provide value or build relationships with those so what’s your kind of take on building your professional network in the esthetic space,yeah. So when we say professional, like internally with your vendors, yes, I 100% agree with that, right? 

Because this world is small. It’s It’s kind of crazy to me every every time I think that it couldn’t be any smaller, it ends up being smaller, right? So there’s that piece. And then when we think about, like, your professional network as a business owner within a community, right? Because you’re in your community, community, I think some people kind of start to shut doors when they think about, oh, well, it’s got to be wellness related. It has to be, you know, maybe it’s like, we always kind of go back to this, like, orange theory, fitness, the pure bars, the hot works, like everything that is kind of like tying back to somebody’s overall wellness. But I think you can take it further than that, right? So when you get into community, you, I mean, yes, charities, yes, that’s a whole nother piece, but I attribute this to a conversation I had with actually one of my local esthetic practices that I worked with, and it was funny, because they’re like, we are having a hard time literally pulling from the other side of town like we’re we don’t know why we’ve like, we’ve advertised in their local like, greet that town. Greet Bedford. And we’re not getting any traction. And I was like, Well, what about like the coffee shop that is, like, it’s like the hub of the community over here, like all the moms go there, like all the business professionals go there in the morning and have meetings. I said, What if you just bought, like, Coffee Sleeves and threw them on their coffee cups until they were out of them. It cost them $48 right? And said, enjoy this, you know, coffee and call us for a consult. 

And it was one of their best marketing campaigns that they’d had to pull like this new market. But again, it was going in and meeting that owner. We all know who Hillary is, because Hillary is out in the community. So if everybody knows who Hillary is, and now all of a sudden, Hillary is talking about our Med Spa, then Hillary must know something that we need to know, right? So I think it’s understanding that there are different avenues of different business types that you might not always just think of so and it could go to, you know, maybe it’s a fence company that you just see, like they’re all over, like everybody knows who they are. So it’s like understanding who the people in your community that have some, I guess, some. So I’ll call it celebrity status, right? Like, it’s one of those things when I run into people, like, What do you mean? You don’t know, so and so they, you know,they’re, they’re micro influencers. Is what they are. They are, who are the micro influencers in your community, who are the Hillary’s in your community that you can locate and build relationships with. And sometimes it takes, you know, six months to a year to really build a true relationship. And it’s, it’s finding the points of connection. You don’t want to just go in and lead with the transaction. It’s like, Do your kids go to the same school? Do they play the same sports? Do you have any hobbies in common? Do you work out at the same gym? Do you like what are the things that you can do, and how can you help their business support the things that they care about without like expectation of what is going to happen after, right? No, and I think so there’s a sorry for interrupting, but there’s a practice that did this really well, actually, in Dover New Hampshire. And you do, you think about the reciprocal, where they actually highlight another small business in the community, within their practice. So when you check in, like, they’ll have, they would have, like, a whole coffee station set up, and it would be compliments of the inside scoop. And sometimes they do that just to kind of build that knowledge. 

And maybe they don’t even know Hillary yet, but they’re like, hey, but I recognize everybody loves your coffee, so I’m going to highlight you as a small business that I like am proud to support and everybody else is proud to support. And then there’s this like you, you create this reciprocal before you then get to their practice, their business, to be able to make that connection, right?

So there’s a lot of different ways to go about it, but I always thought that that was cool. I’m like, that’s lovely that you’re just, you’re a small business owner, and you’re just, you know, celebrating the other small businesses in your community that you might not even really truly know, but you enjoy what they bring to the table. So I think there’s a lot of different ways you can do it. That’s really cool. I love that. That’s a great idea. All right, anything else that you want to add to make this episode feel complete?Oh my goodness,what am I not asking? I don’t know. I feel like you’ve asked it all. I don’t in this with this topic. I think we’ve touched on the biggest points that there are. And I think it is, it’s just consistency. Like, yeah, like, like, we were just talking as we got to start. We got started. Lori harder, like this, the cop, the title of her podcast, is, earn your happy. And I think you you hit it the nail on the head as we got into this, like, earn your happy, because you’re gonna, when you start to showcase other people’s successes. It makes you feel good, and then it’s going to make your life so much easier as you build your own small business within your community. So, I mean, I think we’ve touched on all of it. Daniela wonderful,all right, so I want you guys to take action. I want you to really put community at the forefront of your marketing strategy. Reach out to your network. Understand like First, understand who your network even is. You know, like the story that you were telling about, all the connections that you already have in your location. It’s such an important thing. Kim, where can all of our listeners find you, follow you, get in touch with you if they want to learn more.

If they want to learn more, they can shoot me an email, which we can put that in the open all the mouth full. Kim Pezzetti at cartessaaesthetics.com but I’m with cartesian esthetics. Like I said, we are eight and a half years young. I. Or you can follow me on LinkedIn, Kim Pezzetti, and I’d be happy to connect with anybody and everybody that wants to connect. Wonderful. Thank you so so much love this love community aspect. It’s such an important piece to have as your foundation of marketing and career growth. Thanks again for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode. 

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EP 430: New Clients Are Not Always the Answer: How to Grow with Retention + Relationships

In this episode, I’m turning the tables!

I had the joy of joining John and Kayle on the Marketing 100 podcast powered by Mangomint to unpack one of the biggest myths in the spa industry: that new clients are the golden ticket to growth.

Spoiler: They’re not. 🚫

Before you pour more money into ads or hustle for fresh leads, you need to know whether you actually have a lead flow problem—or if retention is what’s holding you back.

This conversation is full of actionable tips on tracking where your best clients are coming from, improving retention with smart automations and human touchpoints, and having clear, constructive conversations with your team that boost performance without creating defensiveness.

It’s a game-changer, friend. And you’ll love hearing how we use real-world strategies to grow sustainably—without the overwhelm.

What you’ll learn during this episode:

  • Simple, effective ways to identify if your problem is lead flow or retention
  • Why it’s crucial to know your new client retention rate (and where you want it to be!)
  • Old-school methods for tracking new client sources that work beautifully today
  • How to use your spa software (like Mangomint) to automate the right touchpoints
  • Building meaningful relationships with clients in an AI-dominated world
  • And why 2025 is set to be an incredible year for our industry

Resources Mentioned in Episode #430: New Clients Are Not Always the Answer: How to Grow with Retention + Relationships

  • Learn more about Mangomint and get your first two months free!
  • Listen to the Marketing 100 podcast 

Subscribe on Spotify Subscribe on Apple Podcasts

Subscribe on YouTube

Keep the conversation going inside the Spa Marketing Made Easy Community by clicking here.

join the free Spa Marketing Made Easy Podcast community

IG / @addoaesthetics

WEB / addoaesthetics.com

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LINKEDIN / @addoaesthetics

WANT MORE FROM ADDO AESTHETICS?

Take just 5 minutes and find out YOUR biggest area of opportunity by taking my FREE Spa Business Assessment here → scorecard.addoaesthetics.com/

Join theGrowth Factor® Fundamentals, an association dedicated to empowering women and strengthening their community by helping aesthetic professionals build meaningful connections with one another and fostering support and guidance to create businesses that align with the lives they love → https://offer.addoaesthetics.com/growth-factor-fundamentals

ABOUT THE SPA MARKETING MADE EASY HOST 

About Your Host, Daniela Woerner

Daniela Woerner is the founder and CEO of Addo Aesthetics, a leading community for aesthetic professionals, and the creator of the Growth Factor® Framework—a proven system that has helped 582 six- and seven-figure spa owners scale their businesses with strategy and systems.

With nearly two decades in the aesthetics industry, Daniela has trained alongside top physician-dispensed brands, consulted with leading dermatologists, and helped thousands of spa professionals streamline their operations and maximize profitability.

Her mission? To transform overworked aestheticians into Spa CEOs—building a business and life they love with the strategic systems needed for long-term financial growth.

As the host of the Spa Marketing Made Easy podcast, Daniela brings expert insights, real-world strategies, and in-depth conversations to help spa owners elevate their marketing, optimize their operations, and create sustainable success. With over 400 published episodes, 1 million+ downloads, and a ranking in the top 1% of all podcasts worldwide, Spa Marketing Made Easy is the go-to resource for spa and aesthetic professionals looking to level up.

Tune in each week for actionable strategies, expert interviews, and inspiration to help you build a thriving, systemized, and scalable spa business!

 

Welcome to Spa Marketing Made Easy. A podcast for spa owners who want to step up their leadership and business skills and step into the role as spa CEO. I’m your host. Daniela Woerner, CEO of Addo Aesthetics and Founder of the Growth Factor Framework® Program, where we teach, coach and guide spa owners in scaling their spas to the next level of growth and unlocking freedom in their life and their business. I’m so glad you’re here now. Let’s dive into the show. 

Hey, Daniela here, and thank you for listening to the Spa Marketing Made Easy podcast. If this is your first time hanging out with me, welcome. I’m an aesthetician turned spa director turned entrepreneur, and today our company Addo Aesthetics is in its 11th year of operation. 

Yes, I love that. It’s a magical number. I’m going to receive all of that magical energy for the incredible year that is ahead of us. 

Now, if you are an esthetic professional that wants to create a company, not a really hard job for yourself. If you’re an action taker, if you’re someone who does not have the time for those with a victim mentality, if you’re someone who has big dreams to create a seven figure spa without overwhelm, without stress, and with the time to pick up your kids from school and still make it to karate, you are in the right place, my friend, you have found your home, and I am so glad that you are here. So I just wrapped up a two day event in Indianapolis with our spa Manager Certification students. This was our 2025 class. 

It’s something that we offer once a year, and this program, it’s a four month program, and right in the middle, we meet in person, and we really get to work. And so the the instructions so each of these spas that are in the program, they are told, come to this event with the biggest problem happening in your spa right now, which really makes it fun, because I have an idea of what they’re going to say. We’ve run this program a few times now, and you know it’s it’s really interesting because we have some CEOs and we have some spa managers, and I love the dynamic of teaching a course with both of those roles. In fact, at this event, I brought to everybody’s attention. I said, Did you see that all of the spa managers are sitting on this side of the table, and all of the CEOs are sitting on the other side of the table. It’s, it was just a really kind of cool thing to witness. Don’t know what it means, but it was just like, Okay, interesting. Anyway. I love the workshop style of these events, and I also just love being in person. When you get to connect in person, the you have shared experiences, the friendships are created or deepened. And so when you get on Zoom, you get a heck of a lot more done. So anyway, at this event, we spent a lot of time talking about sales and marketing, and when those topics come up at some point you’re going to be talking about your spa booking software, because that’s such an important piece of the puzzle. 

Now for years, I have been talking about Mangomint, and I, hands down, believe that they are the absolute best spa booking software on the market. Now let me preface this that it is my job to ensure that your spa holds a healthy profit margin. That is my pure focus, the profit of your spa. Now, are there better softwares when it comes to EMR, perhaps, but Mangomint is HIPAA compliant, and when it comes to the sales and marketing aspects of what you can do with this software, aka the automations and touch points that will be your support system and going deep with your patients, rather than wide. There is no other software that comes close. Now, you couple that with incredible customer support, and you have a winning combination. So you can see why I am like, hands down. This is the best software out there. Now, anyway, a few months back, I was a guest on marketing 100 which is a podcast powered by Mangomint. It’s hosted by two guys, John and kale, incredible guys in the aesthetic space. And we created this really great piece of content around why new clients are not always the answer. And I thought it would be a fun episode to share a piece of content where I was actually getting interviewed rather than being the interviewer. And I think that this information, especially in the economic climate that we’re in right now, where it is going to be even easier to go deep with your patient base, rather than going wide, really focusing on that retention and all those really important things, I thought it would be a really valuable piece of content for you anyway. I hope that you enjoy this. I hope that it provides you value. I hope it helps with any type of. Of perspective shift that you’re needing right now. And if you’re interested in learning more about manga min, we’re going to have a link right below this video in the show notes. It’s going to get you your first month free. So be sure to click on that link. Use that link let them know you’re one of our Addo people. We send a lot of people their way, and they take extra good care of all of their people, but I like to think they take extra good care of our adult people because we have such a strong and established relationship with them. So click that link, and without further ado, let’s go ahead and play that interview. 

Hey,Everyone, welcome back to Marketing 100 I’m Kayle, your salon and spa business, bestie, and I’m joined today, as always, by my good friend and the founder of the salon business, John Halberg, but today is a very special episode. John is excited. I can tell already I’m excited, super excited. We’ve got a very special guest today, Daniela Woerner, founder of Addo esthetics and the host of the spa marketing Made Easy podcast. Daniela, thank you so much for joining us today. We’re so happy to have you.

Thank you for having me. I’m super excited to be here. Daniela, you operate in the spa world, and maybe some of our salon owners may not be super familiar with your work. So would you mind telling us a little bit more about yourself and what you do? 

I am the founder and CEO of Addo Aesthetics, host of the Spa Marketing Made Easy podcast, and really our company’s mission or what we do, what we actually do is help spa businesses with their internal operations, so that they can be more profitable on the Marketing 100 podcast, our goal is to bring 100 snackable, tactical marketing tips to salon and spa owners out there in the world. But today, I’m super excited because you’re bringing us a marketing tip. What are we talking about today? Daniela, why new clients are not always the answer to your problems when a spa owner feels their numbers going down, or they’re seeing their books not full. The solution that comes to their mind is, I need new clients, and today I want to talk about why that is not always the right answer. We’ve got to take a step back and first analyze, are we having a lead flow issue? Are we having a retention issue? Yeah, I guess it just like, comes automatically, right? If you see you have gaps in the book, the reaction is, I need clients, and you just default to thinking that that must be new clients, right? Or, like, more clients coming in. It is the default. And I think that we’re either in action mode or reflection mode. As entrepreneurs, we tend to live in action mode a lot more than we spend time in reflection mode, and sometimes that’s great. It helps us to move forward. It helps us to be innovative, but it would do everybody a service to actually reflect on what has worked if you see that you have a consistent number of new clients coming in, but your new client retention is very low. We have a different problem to solve. We don’t want you to spend time and money and energy getting new people in the door, if they’re just going to drop right off. 

You have to consider the expense when you’re trying to court new clients no matter what it’s going to cost you money. And in fact, typically, it’s far more expensive to acquire new clients than it is to retain clients that you already have. And in that case, if you are spending all that time, effort and money on bringing in new clients, but you’re not retaining them, then you’re just wasting money. You’ve got a leaky bucket there, right in Spa. When we have a new client come in, that new client retention, we want that to be at no lower than 70% then when we look at total client retention of those clients that we’ve actually acquired that are coming to us more than that initial visit, we want that up around 80% if you are below either one of those numbers, then that is an area of opportunity that you found in your business. 

And it’s also a great idea to look per provider, because we want to understand, as an overall spa what we’re doing, but we also want to understand per individual providers, because you may have, you know, the weakest link as one person, and that’s going to help you isolate even more. How do I solve this problem? Does this person need help with, you know, rebooking their clients or whatnot. It can be as simple as two or three conversations with that employee rather than starting an entire new marketing strategy. It can be like a difficult discussion sometimes with team members right in these type of topics or like, why are you underperforming? But when you have the data, it makes it like it’s not about you, it’s not about me, it’s not about us, and it’s easier to have. These conversations with your team as well, you can also lead into it and say, Hey, I’m going through these numbers, and it’s it’s my job to keep your books full. And so if I were having a tough conversation with a provider, I would say, How can I support you with this? What do you need from me to make sure that we can get your total client retention up to this that makes it a little bit easier to actually get results and not put that employee into, like, a defensive mode, curious,like, on the 70% number, which to me sounds a little bit high, because, like, coming from the silent world. 

For those watching this who are, like, looking at their numbers now following this conversation, and I’m like, at 50% or so, like, what would you say? Because, I mean, you meet so many students, you have so many people coming through your programs. I’m going to give you a lawyer answer. It depends. It really depends. And it has to do with looking at each individual spa. You have to make sure that you’re marketing to your right person, the spas that are in alignment with their core values, their messaging, all of that. It’s pretty easy to get to 70% because they’re targeting the correct person, if my primary service is micro needling, but I am talking about things other than micro needling or spray tanning or something that really has nothing to do. Then again, I’m going back to the piece of what is the problem that I’m trying to solve, and so am I speaking to the person that I’m trying to attract? Am I on the right platform? You know? I I’m going to be 44 this year. I am in that perfect demographic, right? The 40 to 55 year old woman with a certain amount of discretionary income that cares about how she looks. I am, like every sponsor, ideal client. I am also rarely on social media, if ever. How are they going to target me? How are they going to find me? These are the types of things that we talk about with our clients, of like, really, if you want to get these KPIs, numbers are information. Their knowledge, and so we’re looking at that, and it’s if you’re you know, who are you targeting? How are you targeting them? How are we aligning your message to make sure that you’re getting those numbers? 

Your target clientele is going to be in a specific place, and you have to meet them where they are to actually be able to reach them in a way that’s going to make sense and come across as authentic and genuine. And I think that a lot of business owners default to this is true in the salon world, and I’m sure in the spa world as well as people default to, okay, well, social is where I need to be. I need to be on Facebook. I need to be on Instagram. You know, maybe they’re making tiktoks, whatever it is, but how much of your clientele is spending in enough time in their day on one of those platforms to actually have a chance to where your impact there is going to make an impact on them, right? Like, how much of that is going to convert to people actually coming into your business? We talked to Brett Foreman recently from pony studios, who had something similar to say, where, you know, they spend a ton of time creating content for Instagram and Tiktok, but the amount of clientele that actually comes through their doors, that they get from being on social is not necessarily, you know, a lot bigger than what it was six months ago, a year ago, for the amount of time they spend on there. It doesn’t convert in the same way that word of mouth marketing or really, taking control of their review scores and review collection and administration through through like automation and things like that. So social is is definitely a takes a lot of time and effort, but does it really equate to being a valuable part of your business? 

Two simple exercises that a spa owner can do, or a salon owner can do number one, grab a notebook, pen and paper. Old school, keep it by the front desk, have your receptionist have a column for the name, and then have a check mark for Instagram, Google or referral. And every single new client that comes through your practice over the course of the month, you’re going to write their name down, and you’re going to check where they came from. I’m sure your guys software tells has this capability. You’re going to use that data in Mangomint for bigger picture things that we’re looking at. This is just I need to know visually. Is this coming from Instagram, Google or referral? If it’s from Google, let’s spend more of our time and energy on SEO, on pay per click, on those types of things. And if it’s referral, who are the people that are referring them? Do we have a referral program in place? Exercise number two, go through your top 25 clients of your all time history that are still active clients. Ask them how they found you. That is a gold mine of information that helps direct your marketing strategy, that will, in turn affect your bottom line.

I just love the practicality of that. This channel is powered by mangamint, and we talk a lot about tech and software and all of that, but at the end of the day, just like the notebook to just write that down, just like regular. Conversations, it’s so easy to like, forget that that is actually like, where the magic happens. If we’re looking at it in terms of, let’s be reflective, let’s, let’s analyze the data we’ve collected it for analyzing it, and we determine, you know, okay, do we have a lead flow problem? Do we have a retention problem? What’s our the practical way that we go about approaching that from that point, if it is a lead flow problem, then we’re going to figure out where we get our leads from, Instagram, Google or referral, because those are the three places that most leads are coming from. And we’re going to formulate a strategy. 

Right now, we’re seeing a lot of success with many chat on Instagram and creating, you know, some automation there to get people to actually book Google, really getting into your Google business profile, getting people to find you through search, understanding what people are searching for. A big problem that spas do often is they’ll write their type of business as skincare and what Google thinks skincare is is like a Sephora or an Ulta, you’re a day spa or you’re a med spa. And so really understanding that is going to help you get up there and search, building out your entire profile, including the map section, and then having a strategy around reviews. Okay, so there’s always going to be a short term plan and a long term plan to get those leads coming in consistently. If we have a retention problem, then we need to look at client journey. Are we calling them to see how their service went? Are new clients getting a handwritten thank you note? Do we have touch points if they haven’t been in for a specific amount of time, flows is the answer to the client journey. How can I create a specific flow that really makes sure that that patient knows that I want their business, I care about them, and I’m going to be consistently checking in with them in the world we’re in today where AI is incorporated into everything we need to understand where the human touch points should be, and the more specific that we can get to that individual patient, the more real, the more authentic it becomes, and the deeper the relationship and loyalty of that patient to your practice,John, we were Just talking about this recently, just personalizing your messaging, making, you know, those touch points you have with your clientele feel real and not just feel like a, you know, an email blast that’s generic or a sales pitch, the communication you have with your clients within such a personal business and such a personalized business should feel personal. It should feel like getting a message from a friend. It shouldn’t feel like somebody’s trying to sell you something all the time. This is a relationship that we’re building here with clientele, and it needs to feel that way. 

I know in Spa, they’re coming to us with all their insecurities and vulnerabilities, and I don’t like this about myself. I don’t like that about myself. I know in salon, the stereotype is that your hair stylist is your therapist, right? So these are people that are opening up and telling you so much about themselves, and they don’t want to be met with kind of canned communication a lot of businesses are doing as well when sending communication is also like sending it from like, no reply address, or like, you get a text message and you cannot respond to it, and it’s, you know, it’s like we talk to you, kind of thing. But just was allowing, actually, for, allow for like, one to one interaction. Sounds simple, but, I mean, it seems like, yeah, it does, but it’s what tech does to us. Makes us, like, think about scale and simplifying and saving costs, and like automating, but in that whole journey with where there is a lot of like, logical reasons for why that makes sense, tech, AI, etc, but also, like the human element, and like where it makes sense, married it to where it doesn’t make sense, don’t right, knowing the right pieces to do that with and, yeah, we are somewhat AI resistant. I know a lot of people are very worried about AI taking over their jobs. And, you know, all of these things, there is a robot that does lashes, but I’ve not, I don’t see that as, like, you know, taking over our provider industry.Is this for real? That’s so scary? Yeah, I would never, I would never.

But yes, there is a robot that does lashes. There’s the creativity of the human mind that’s needed to solve problems, whether it’s with skin or hair or whatever the services that we’re doing, and they refer to our services as self care. It’s a part of our overall health to come in, and we saw that after COVID, when so many people missed the human connection and the interaction and they they looked at Spa and Salon services as a part of their overall health and wellness routine. Humanize it and the way that you can do with flows, where you can create your own custom messages, you can have them from your. Specific provider. So it’s not just like response C, you customize it text Y for yes, it’s important to understand how and when to incorporate the human touch point. 

You mentioned COVID. And I think we really saw that come full circle at least a year and a half or so, where salons were just they were in trouble. They were, you know, they were down on services. If you were performing services, you had to sort of do it low key. And I think a lot of people felt like they were left in the lurch on the service provider side. And I think a lot of you know clients and and patients, you know of salons and of practices, kind of felt like I really just want to be I need this part of my life, right? Like we talk about how important grooming and like self care is here on the show a lot, and I think that a lot of people really felt that during that time. And when we finally got out to the other side of that, we saw this boom in in this, you know, these service industries again. But there was something that was sort of like that forever changed, I think, during that time period in terms of, like, how we talk to people, how we communicate, or the ways in which that we interact. And I think that a lot of businesses, maybe as well, had trouble sort of getting on track with, how do we grow our business quickly? Because we need to get back to get back to where we were. We need to pay bills. We need to be able to to, you know, pay for our space and our employees and everything else, and still be able to maintain that personal touch point. So we’re like, we’re embarking on this new part of our business journey. We have these new, you know, needs that we had to get keep our business going. And then on top of that, we’ve got this sort of like crater, this dent that was left by the impact of COVID, where now our communication skills are sort of altered, and the tools that we use communicate are different and less personal, and that sort of makes it more complicated, I think, to really put all those elements together and have a cohesive Marketing Strategy that feels genuine and feels honest and personal, sort of brings it full circle, back to that action or reflection that we were talking about earlier, where COVID was it was a challenging time and and people were in such action mode, there wasn’t the time to reflect on how meaningful those relationships were for the spa owners and salon owners that were like, Let’s have a coffee chat on Zoom. Let’s let me teach you how to do a facial at home. Let me teach you. Know, Like the connections with those in our community were really, really meaningful and really impactful. And then we just went straight into action mode before reflecting and saying, Wow, what if I incorporated this relationship aspect and not just be behind the screen, you know, all the time, expecting my business to grow in that way? How could I be more fulfilled, be more impactful, and also get more referrals by showing up and connecting with community in a meaningful way? 2024, was a tough year. Election Year causes uncertainty, inflation. We saw a big drop in the summer. It was a lot slower than usual. And I think that that, like, sent panic waves to a lot of people. And I really do believe that this is going to be an incredible year for our industry. 

Fingers crossed everybody. I genuinely do hope so I think that, you know, there’s always a need for service. There’s always going to be a need for salons and spas and self care businesses. And I think that people are going to need self care more than ever in 2025 so do genuinely hope that that, you know, service industries continue to run strong, and salons and spas are in a good place in 2025 so much gold and value that you’ve shared today. 

Daniela, I’m so appreciative of that. I’ve learned many things here. New clients are not always the answers. Where does your problem really lie? Do you have a few takeaways for people watching this who will not remember everything we talked about, but like a few key points, the action item that I want you to do is first evaluate, do you actually have a lead flow problem, or do you have a retention problem? So look at those two things. Use the notebook strategy. Use the asking your top 25 client strategy to really understand you can go through and use flows if you’re a Mangomint customer, highly recommend. And if you need lead flow help, there’s first figure out where your leads are actually coming from and formulate a strategy around that isolated channel so that you can get the most efficient results, simple, easy to action. That’s what we always try to do here on marketing 100 Daniela, thank you so much for joining us for joining us. 

For marketing 100 we had a ton of fun with you today. A lot of great takeaways as well. Where can our audience, our listeners, our viewers, learn more about you? Thank you so much for having me. I had a blast as well. You can listen to the Spa Marketing Made Easy Podcast on Apple, podcast on Spotify, or any of your podcast listening apps. And you can learn more about our company, Addo Aesthetics at addoaesthetics.com, and we’ll make sure to include links to those down in the description below. 

If you want to try the tools that Daniela mentioned today on the show, we have a link where you can try Mangomint for free for 30 days, 60 days, whatever. You get a little bit of extra time on us. Don’t tell anybody. Thanks so much for joining us on another episode of Market 100 I’m kale, your salon and spa business bestie, and we’ll see you in the next one.

 

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EP 429: Using Your Numbers to Make Better Business Decisions with Danielle Hayden

Finances feeling fuzzy? This episode will clear things up in a big way.

On this week’s episode of Spa Marketing Made Easy, I’m talking with Danielle Hayden—CEO of Kickstart Accounting, CPA, and former hairstylist—about the real numbers that matter in your spa business.

From bookkeeping basics to big-picture strategy, Danielle explains how to build your “money team,” make smart financial decisions, and set goals that actually align with the life you want to live.

What you’ll learn during this episode:

  • The difference between bookkeeping, tax prep, and CFO support
  • Why looking at your numbers monthly is a non-negotiable
  • How to determine when it’s time to switch to an S Corp (and the three benchmarks to look for)
  • What your financial advisor’s role should be in your spa business
  • Why every spa owner needs to build a strategic “money team”

Resources Mentioned in Episode #429: Using Your Numbers to Make Better Business Decisions with Danielle Hayden

  • Visit Danielle’s business website, Kickstart Accounting
  • Follow Danielle on Instagram: @kickstartaccounting
  • Tune into Danielle’s podcast Business by the Books

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ABOUT THE SPA MARKETING MADE EASY HOST 

About Your Host, Daniela Woerner

Daniela Woerner is the founder and CEO of Addo Aesthetics, a leading community for aesthetic professionals, and the creator of the Growth Factor® Framework—a proven system that has helped 582 six- and seven-figure spa owners scale their businesses with strategy and systems.

With nearly two decades in the aesthetics industry, Daniela has trained alongside top physician-dispensed brands, consulted with leading dermatologists, and helped thousands of spa professionals streamline their operations and maximize profitability.

Her mission? To transform overworked aestheticians into Spa CEOs—building a business and life they love with the strategic systems needed for long-term financial growth.

As the host of the Spa Marketing Made Easy podcast, Daniela brings expert insights, real-world strategies, and in-depth conversations to help spa owners elevate their marketing, optimize their operations, and create sustainable success. With over 400 published episodes, 1 million+ downloads, and a ranking in the top 1% of all podcasts worldwide, Spa Marketing Made Easy is the go-to resource for spa and aesthetic professionals looking to level up.

Tune in each week for actionable strategies, expert interviews, and inspiration to help you build a thriving, systemized, and scalable spa business!

 

Welcome to Spa Marketing Made Easy, a podcast for spa owners who want to step up their leadership and business skills and step into the role as spa CEO. I’m your host. Daniela Woerner, CEO of Addo Aesthetics and Founder of the Growth Factor Framework® Program, where we teach, coach and guide spa owners in scaling their spas to the next level of growth and unlocking freedom in their life and their business. I’m so glad you’re here now. Let’s dive into the show. 

Important question for you friends, how are you feeling about your money and your taxes today, if you’re listening to this on the day that it’s released, April 14, the day before tax day, my wish is that you feel calm and prepared and like it doesn’t even matter that your taxes and quarterlies are due tomorrow, hopefully you already have them paid. 

But that feeling of calm is not something that I have always had. I had years that just felt like complete chaos, and I decided, You know what, I do not want this energy in my life. But how do we get rid of it? Because we all pay taxes, right? That’s not going away, but you can get rid of the stress when you’re surrounded by the right money team, and that is why I am so excited to introduce Danielle Hayden, our guest on today’s show. She has the most incredible background. Get this. She is a hair stylist turned CPA, and she’s the CEO of Kickstart Accounting. Her accounting firm has been around for the past 10 years. We had so many synergies over the the times that we were talking over zoom and kick start, accounting is the newest partner in APA. Now, if you’re not familiar with APA, it’s a place for aesthetic professionals to build a thriving business and community, and one of the perks in there is that we have a big black book of recommended vendors, many of whom offer sizable discounts to APA members, including kickstart accounting. 

Anyway, Danielle gives tons of information, tons of value in this episode. I hope that you enjoy. It definitely worth a listen. So let’s go ahead and play that interview. All right, Danielle, welcome to the spa marketing Made Easy podcast. I I love talking about money. I love talking about numbers. I love normalizing these conversations with women. So I’m so excited. You’re such an open book. I think there’s some really important things that we can get out there today around money and finance and accounting. So thank you so much for being here. 

I’m really looking forward to it. I promise we’re gonna make this topic really exciting. I know most people shy away from this conversation, but my mission is really to make money and numbers approachable and fun to talk about.

Well, I love that because it is like it’s kind of this weird thing that when we start a business, or even if we’re on, like, a specific career path, if we’re an employee and trying to move up, we’re uncomfortable asking for raises. We’re uncomfortable saying how much money we want to make. It’s one of those. It’s like, what is it death, taxes and politics,or what, like my mom used to say before any any dinner that I went to, remember Danielle, don’t talk about religion, politics or money. And now I’m like, Ma, I go on on live screen to talk about money on a regular basis.

I was so last night I was at karate. My kids do karate twice a week, or actually, taekwondo. But I don’t know why, in my mind, it is, like, infused, that is karate, but it’s actually taekwondo. And I was talking to this other mom. She was so like, I just clicked with her right away. And she was, she’s a preschool teacher, and I was like, you know, there’s people that put their lesson plans online and then you sell them and you can do and I’m like, telling her this whole thing, and I’m in like, Daniela coach mode, you know, even though I’m at a mom event, I had like, a different hat on. I was like, so how much money do you want to make every month? And I was like, didn’t realize that in the coaching space, like, when I’m talking to somebody, I can so easily just be like, tell me how much money you want to make, you know, and talk about it and talk about it. And at karate, it was, like, the most inappropriate thing. And I was like, Okay, let me put my phone away. Like, because I have my calculator out, I was like, I can calculate your profit margin and what you would need to do. So I was like, Okay, stop. Like, get back in mom mode. Like, let’s be focused on the roundhouse kicks and go from that great, great self awareness to bring it back in check.

Sometimes you need that, like transition moment, you know, but it is something that I do think should be so normalized, and I think there’s so many because we’re we grow up with those beliefs. Of don’t talk about this, or it’s not appropriate, or people are clearly uncomfortable to talk about it. 

We need to do it even more as business owners, to make sure that we’re comfortable looking at the numbers and understanding understanding the overall health of our business and understanding what we need to be able to live the life that we want to live. So before we really like start going down the rabbit hole here, why don’t you tell us a little bit just the summary version, the nutshell version of like you, how you went down this path, how you started your company, all of those types of things.Yeah. So I actually started my career as a hairdresser, I was working behind the chair as a creative and while I was working, I got really good at understanding the numbers of what I needed to bring in to hit these different goals, and I started to teach the girls who I worked with How to read their paycheck, how to reach their goals, how we as a salon could hit our like, our retail metrics. We became Salon of the year and really helped them.

Basically, I always say, like, spa and salon are like peasants. So yes,yeah, they really are. So I realized I had this knack for helping people understand the numbers and to use it as a game, right? Like I mean in that context, yes, it’s our paycheck, but to use the numbers as a game of, how do we hit our personal and our business goals? Then took a hard right into corporate accounting, and my job there was to help the CEO, the investors, the management team, understand our numbers so that we can make better business decisions. So did youjust go from hairstylist to corporate, or was there, like, any schooling or training, like how I was going to school, I had my master’s degree, my CPA. So while I was working in the salon, I was going to school, working that is a hard right? Yeah,yeah. I was doing both at the same time. So while I was doing hair, I was always in school, worked at Ernst and Young while I was still behind the chair, finally left the salon to go into into working in the accounting field full time, and at that same time I was I realized I was doing a lot of the same thing, helping people understand their numbers so that we can hit our goals. 

So the board, the investors, the management team, the CEO, we had to look at that information and decide what’s working, what’s not working, what are we going to stop doing? Where are we going to go the next quarter? How are we going to do better so that we hit our goals? I remember this moment in the boardroom where I was sitting there watching this conversation unfold, and I said, I am doing this to help the rich get richer, right? Like I’m helping these people, these investors in this room, and I truly believe that every business owner, right, small business owners deserve access to that same information so every single person can make that same decision. I was doing some volunteer work at a a local entrepreneurship hub here, and I realized that small business owners didn’t even have bookkeeping in place. Oh, no. I mean, it’s amazing. I was working with a spa that was doing well, 800,000 a year, 800,000 and she literally had no idea where her net I was like, well, doesn’t your CPA or does? Don’t they send you your report? She’s like, No, I just look at it when I do my taxes at the end of the year. Oh,

 

yeah. 

We can talk more about that. We can talk more about that. But so I realized that ever you know, we can’t set a budget or a business plan or or raise money like we can’t do any of that unless we have bookkeeping in place. And so I went on a mission 10 years ago. Kickstart just celebrated 10 years this year. Thank you. We went on a mission 10 years ago to help every single business owner with bookkeeping, which then helps them understand their numbers make better business decisions. We do taxes as well, but taxes are like a bonus, like we can just show up to tax season super prepared, because we’re business owners who use our numbers to make business decisions every single month.And that’s such a for me, we have this kind of process that we’ve been doing for the past, I would say probably six years. We’re also 10. We’re in our 11th year now. So we were on a very similar path. And probably around six years ago, I started meeting with my financial advisor, my CPA and my husband. Yeah, and at the end of the year, and really saying, what are my what are our goals as a family? And so how much money do I want to pay myself? And so how do I take that number with my CPA and my financial advisor to understand what the goals of the business are? 

Because it’s, it seems kind of backwards. Most people are like looking at their business and setting the goals, but for me, you you should be building a business around the life that you want to live and using that as the Well, here’s how much money I want to be able to hit my goals, and here’s the profit margin that we’re hitting, and so here’s the goals that we need to set. And that has worked tremendously in helping me live the life that I want. That changes season by season too. It does no idea, right? I mean, I have, I have two small kids. You know, I started this business before kids, I birthed two kids. My husband was active duty for 21 years, so we were moving all the time. So there’s different seasons where you need different things, and without the relationship that I had with our CPA and like, like, understanding those important pieces, I have no idea how I would have been able to make some of those business decisions. You know? I mean, it’s vital.

You feel like it’s never enough. So if you’re not meeting with your money team, so I call that your money team. If you’re not meeting with your money team, and you’re not having that strategic level conversation with them, you end up in this cycle where nothing ever feels like enough, no matter how much money you bring in, no matter how much revenue you have, no matter how much you pay yourself, no matter how much draws you take never feels like enough because you never took the moment to set the budget, to set the goal and to coordinate that conversation with your money team.

But that’s the hardest thing to answer, right? Is when is enough enough? I mean, that’s the I can have someone come in and tell me everything that they don’t want, and then you ask them what they want, and it’s like, I don’t know. I want a million dollar spa. 

Well, why do you want a million dollar spa? You know, like, Do you want a million dollar spa? Do you want a ten million spa, or do you want a half million dollar spa? Like, what is, what are the things that you want? And I think that even just by getting to a place where you’re setting goals, you have to answer those questions for yourself. It forces you to think about the life that you want to live, and what you desire, and all of those pieces, yeah. So tell me more about you had mentioned there’s like four money people. Who are these people? Tell me about your money team,yeah. So we want four, four people on the on the Money Team. And I know four sounds like a lot, so, but I don’t really, don’t care how big or small you are, so you might just be starting out. You might be celebrating 10 years like we are. I always want you to have four, four people. The primary person is your bookkeeper. Now most people go into business and they hear you need to get a CPA, right? 

You need to somebody to file your taxes, but your CPA can’t file an accurate tax return, and they can’t give you the information and the support you need without bookkeeping. So really, our most important person that’s going to organize and coordinate everything for you is a bookkeeper, and that’s why at Kickstarter accounting, we start with bookkeeping, because it is really difficult as a business owner to do all the things. 

And I know that as a business owner, you want to stay in your zone of genius, to do only the things that you can do. And I want you to stay there. You don’t need to know how to do bookkeeping. I went to school for a really long time to do bookkeeping. Our job is to help you while you’re out, making money, spending money, to organize the income and the expenses. 

And we do that every single week at kickstart, and then your bookkeeper should be sending you the financial statements every single month. Now, our clients receive what we call snapshots, where we walk you through a high level overview of of your numbers, no matter who you are working with, you should be looking at your financial statements every single month. Bookkeeping is show you, showing you where you just went, right, like, what just happened. And we need to be looking at that monthly so that we’re doing that in real time. Does that make sense? Yeah, all right. 

The second person is our tax account. So they are our tax account, CPA, their only job is to file the tax return and to help you with tax planning. So a lot of times, what happens is that we because our tax accounts, the first person we hire, we’re calling our tax accountant for business advice. We’re saying, Well, you didn’t send me the financial statements. I don’t care about the bookkeeping. I multi bookkeeping so I can file your tax return right like they’re not thinking about it in that way your bookkeeper is thinking about I need to organize the financials so that you understand your numbers, so that you can make better business decisions your tax accounts. Job is to make sure that you can file the tax return again, the bookkeeper is. Giving the tax account accurate financials. They need to know what they’re looking at. They need to have that information so that the tax accountant can then file the return and help you with tax planning. 

Those two people should be able to talk together. So here at kickstart when, when somebody gets on the phone with our team of CPAs, we’ve already coordinated hours behind the scenes with our bookkeepers. So the bookkeepers and the tax accountants, they’ve already coordinated behind the scenes. So by the time our client gets on the call, things are done. And so you want a team who can talk to each other, so that you’re not having to play that middleman. So the second person is the tax account, the third person is your financial advisor. So you had mentioned, you know, your husband’s a financial advisor, helping you look at, what do I need personally, our business can’t be our retirement fund. We need to have outside investments like it creates a whole person, a whole unit, and so we need to have retirement options, investment options, savings that sit outside of our business, and our financial advisor helps us navigate that. And then we have our CFO. Our CFO is the fourth person on the Money Team. Now I said bookkeeping helps us look backwards, so what just happened, and our CFO helps us to start navigate the future. So our CFO is going to help us look at what are our goals in the future. And let’s set a strategic budget. Let’s pay down debt, let’s look at cash planning. Let’s start to plan for the for the future. But we can’t do that until we have a really clear vision of what just happened in the past.  And so you said you want all four people, no matter what size you were, how the CFO is the one that I’m questioning. So at what point I know a lot of businesses will say, hire a fractional CFO, or have just like a once a year sit down with a CFO. Are you even doing that. Say I’m a nurse, and I just left anesthesia. I’m starting my med spa, and it’s just me right now, like I am a solo nurse injector, and that’s what I’m doing. Would you still have a CFO? So just like you said, we we offer like fractional CFO services for our clients and one off budgets. So for somebody in that situation, I would say, get your bookkeeping done first, right? 

We need to know bookkeeping is organized. You’ll have your CPA team, and then you can do a once a year budget with a CFO team. So our CFO team comes in for our bookkeeping clients. Does that once a year, your your budget, talks about the goals where the business is is going, and then they’re there when they’re ready to initiate that on ongoing process. 

But I do believe that every business should be setting a budget, but when you’re ready, the bookkeeper and the tax account are the my non negotiables. The financial advisor I actually want you to have pretty early on in in business. Yeah. And then I agree with you, the CFO, something you can add on as a one time budget, or as you are ready to start looking at the future. Not every business owner is ready to look at the future. So we were talking a bit before we hit record here about S corps versus single member LLCs, and when is the right time to do that is, who is that person that’s giving you that advice is that the CFO is that the CPA is that your bookkeeper, like, where are you? That’s been one of my biggest complaints that I’ve heard from our account, from our students that are saying my my CPA doesn’t tell me anything. They don’t tell me that I should be doing a backdoor Roth, or they don’t tell me that I should be bringing on a 401, K account for my staff, or that I should be switching over to an S corp. These things that can save you 10s of 1000s of dollars in taxes. So who’s whose role is that?

So I disagree with my industry, so I’m going to say, start there, that what I’m going to say is not standard across the board, not all CPAs do this. 

The CPA Tax world has become very transactional and and in part, I blame our government for this, because you have to get in a lot of tax returns in this small window of time. We’re working under a very tight deadline. And CPAs were taught how to file a tax return not run a business. They’re no more of an entrepreneur. You know, they went to school to file that tax return. So they’re not entrepreneurs. So we have turned this, this thing, into a very transactional experience for entrepreneurs. 

So. Yeah, and it leaves people very frustrated. And so what we’ve created at Kickstart accounting, through we have, we call it our sister company case, a tax partners, we’ve created this experience where we can work together both the bookkeeping and the tax team to be able to answer questions like this. We go out of our way to make sure that our clients have this answer. Every single year, your CPA should, at least annually, be looking at your entity structure to let you know if you are working within the right entity structure. So during our mid year tax check ins, every single one of our clients receives a mid year tax check in and like, August, September, October, time frame. And during their tax snapshot, we’re walking them through, are you in the right entity structure? And that’s where we’re looking at, you know, should you become an S corp or or should you stay where you’re at? Is an LLC the right? Right for You? However, at any time, if you start to think, like, if you listen to the show and you’re like, Oh, I actually do hit those milestones, you should be able to go and ask your CPA and your bookkeeper at any time if you should become a S Corp. 

Unfortunately, the answer in the tax world is gray, because not everybody agrees on when is the right time to become an S corp. Your CPA should be able to run some forecasts for you, to show you what how much you would save. But if it’s okay with you, I’d love to give you kind of like my three things that I want to see before somebody becomes an S corp. Yeah, absolutely okay. So if you are hitting these three milestones, go have the conversation with your your CPA. If they don’t want to have a conversation with you, we will have that conversation with you. So if you are making net income of $100,000 a year or more for more than two years, so not your gross revenue, I want you to look at your net income, because after all of your expenses, you need to have enough money to pay yourself. The IRS says this is not Danielle’s role. It’s not kickstarter’s role. The IRS says that once you become an S corp, you have to be on payroll. You have to pay yourself through payroll, and you have to pay yourself what’s called a reasonable compensation. And reasonable compensation is how much would you have to pay somebody else to do your job in your area? So this is location based, and we find that around $100,000 of profit is enough to pay you, plus the payroll taxes and possibly take out any owner straws as well. Okay, so that’s rule number one. That’s rule number one. Rule number two is that you are consistently taking out owners draws today. 

So just like we’re not going to go on a diet on Monday, we’re not gonna start routine on Monday, you are not suddenly gonna become an S corp and have enough cash to pay yourself. So as an LLC, if you are not consistently taking owner’s draws, then we need to get you taking owners draws first, so that we know that your business has enough cash to pay yourself once you become an S corp. If you can’t pay yourself and you need to dissolve your S corp status, you can’t become an S corp again for five years. So it is a it is a decision that we need to take take seriously. Number three is that you are not comingling business and personal expenses. So if you are currently, you know, paying for your mortgage through your business or your kids, daycare,housers, that happens.

It happens more than I wanted, but so if you’re doing that type of commingling, you need to stop the commingling first, just like the day on a Monday. You know, I like to use that as a as an example, because just because you become an S corp, and you think that, Oh, now it’ll be really serious, I’m going to really stick to it, you’re not separate your business and personal expenses. Start paying yourself on a regular basis, moving money from your business account to your personal account, taking those draws. Once we have that established and we’re bringing home an income of over 100,000 it’s a no brainer to become an S corp. It is a great tax savings. You can pay yourself through payroll. You can enjoy the reimbursements through an accountable plan, you now have a paycheck stub to go buy a car or apply for a mortgage, like there’s some serious benefits of becoming an S corp and having those three things in place. 

Make that decision really easy. What about your if, if you’re in partnership, if you’re your household income, obviously is going to have an impact on that too. So would you be like say that you have a spouse that earns a high income, or if you have a spouse that does not earn a high income, you know if whatever the role is, would your advice? On switching over to an S corp change in any way. You know, for our family situation, my my opinion, actually doesn’t change. 

So when we work with our clients, we do work independently between the business and then the family. So when we look at the bookkeeping and our stance on S corp status, tax reserves, saving for taxes, we really want to look at the business as an entity by itself. Here’s why. Today you might not be thinking about selling your business, but maybe in three years, somebody comes along with a really attractive offer, or your health changes. Your family’s health changes. 

Something changes, and you decide that you want to sell your business or you need to take on investment dollars are alone. By having your business completely separate from your from your personal we’re able to look at the business as its own entity, as its own individual, almost. And I want you to make that decision to become an S corp, because your business can afford to pay you that there’s going to be tax savings for for the the business. Your tax accountant can then look at the whole picture as a personal situation. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen where becoming an S corp actually affected, negatively impacted, that your personal tax return.

Good to know. Well I know, like I kind of teased in our in our APA group, that we have finally found an accounting firm, a bookkeeping firm that we are excited to partner with. This has been a long time coming, and we when I and I didn’t even know that you used to be a hair stylist, which, like is the cherry on the cake, it makes it even better. But I think that, you know, there’s a lot of things about the way that you operate your company, about the relationship piece. I also, you know, I love men. I think men are great and very intelligent. But I think in a business, in an industry where we’re over 90% women, and it’s such a taboo subject. Sometimes it’s really nice to be able to talk to another woman about these types of things. You know, it’s your guard is let down a little bit. And so I’m really, really excited to officially bring you guys on as a partner of Addo Aesthetics, and we’ve got some really awesome partner discounts available inside of APA. So Danielle, do you want to share just a little bit more about where our listeners can find you and follow you if they want to get more information from you? 

Yeah. kickstartaccountinginc.com/gift, there is some beautiful downloads in that that link, kickstartaccountinginc.com is our website. You can come book a discovery call. We love relationships. We have long term relationships with our clients, and we can have an open conversation. So wherever you’re at in in your business, come both the discovery call. My team is even nicer than than I am. They are this amazing welcoming team. We have a team chat, and as we were recording, I’m watching them celebrate clients wins. Every Friday that that chat gets really active just celebrating our clients, because oftentimes we don’t have anybody else to celebrate with. So our team likes to celebrate with our clients and loves to be there for them when things aren’t going well. So come book The discovery. Call the amazing team that’s excited to be of service to you. Kickstart accounting on on Instagram is where we hang out, and then business by the books is our podcast where we talk about how to use your numbers to make business to make better business decisions every single week. Love it. 

Thank you so so much. Be sure to follow Danielle and kickstart accounting, and you’re welcome. This was a lot of work to find. It’s a lot of work, but we’re really excited. So thank you guys for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode. 

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