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EP 497: AI for Med Spas: The Profit Move Most Owners Are Missing
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  • business, inspiration, marketing

When you think about growing profit, your mind goes to one place: more. More treatments booked, more retail sold, more provider hours filled. That instinct is not wrong, it’s just half the equation. Profit is also what you never have to spend, the hire you don’t make, the hours you stop paying a person to do work a system could hold instead. Most spa owners have never looked at AI through that lens, so it sits on a someday list behind everything more urgent. The consequence is quiet and expensive. And the reason it stays on that list is rarely the technology. It is the belief that building anything real with AI takes a technical skill you do not have, when the first build comes down to describing one task clearly enough to write it down.

AI is not a tech-company thing anymore

The speed here is the part that should get your attention. One AI tool reached 100 million users in two months. Instagram took two and a half years to hit that number. There has never been a technology adopted this fast, and it is not just people playing with a chatbot. The most recent research shows 88% of organizations now report regular AI use in at least one part of their business, up from 78% a year earlier. Inside aesthetics specifically, med spas that adopted AI booking tools grew sales 5%, while the ones that didn’t grew 1%, the largest technology-driven performance gap of any industry in the entire report. This is not early adopters pulling ahead. This is the majority, and your own clients are already there, 71% of med spa regulars are comfortable with AI handling scheduling and communication, and for your 45 to 60 year old clients, the highest lifetime value group you have, that number is 80%.

Think team member, not tool

The reason AI does so little for most owners is that they use it for the smallest possible thing, a caption here, a quick email there. Inside Growth Factor® Implementation, we build it differently, as an AI Spa Team. Not one tool doing one task, but a set of AI employees, each built around a specific job in the business, the same way you would hire and hand ownership to a person. The difference is that this team member works around the clock and never calls out sick. And building one does not require code. It requires being able to describe a task clearly enough that someone, or something, could follow it step by step. That is the entire skill. Learn more about how we build these inside Growth Factor® Implementation (addoaesthetics.com/growth-factor).

The show notes give you the argument. The episode gives you the proof. Daniela walks through the exact AI employee that changed how her leadership meetings run, the payroll math on what two simple use cases already save, and the direct way to talk to a nervous team member about what this means for her job. Hearing her work through it is what turns “I should look into AI” into a real line on your profit and loss.

Want to break past $25K–$35K months without adding more treatment hours?

Watch The Systems Shift and learn how 600+ spa owners are scaling into their Spa CEO role (without sacrificing family time or sanity).

Watch Here

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About Your Host, Daniela Woerner

Daniela Woerner is the founder of Addo Aesthetics and creator of the Growth Factor® Framework, a proven system that’s helped hundreds of spa owners build profitable, systemized businesses. With nearly 20 years in the aesthetics industry, she transforms overworked aesthetic professionals into confident Spa CEOs through strategy, systems, and soul led support. Daniela is also the host of Spa Marketing Made Easy, a top ranked podcast with over 1 million downloads, where she shares real world strategies to help spa professionals grow with clarity and confidence.

Well, hello, my dears. Daniela here, and welcome back to Spa Marketing Made Easy. We are still sitting inside of our Profit Mastery theme this month, and today’s episode is for you. It’s for the spa CEO who’s in a hustle season right now, growing fast, adding headcount every single quarter just to keep up with her own success. It’s for the spa CEO who feels stable, who looks at her P&L and thinks things are fine, but hasn’t yet asked herself what the next five years are going to cost if she keeps running things exactly the same way that she’s running them today, and it’s for the spa CEO who knows if she doesn’t tighten up her profit margin, she is at real risk of things going south very quickly. Now, when we talk about profit, most spa owners are thinking about it from one direction only: more revenue in the door, more treatments booked, more retail sold, more provider hours filled, and that’s real and that matters. But profit isn’t only what comes in. Profit is also what you don’t have to spend. Right? You can increase profit by cost reduction. It’s what you don’t have to hire for it’s what you get to keep because you built something that runs without a body attached to every single task inside of it.

So today I want to spend our time on the other side of profit mastery, the side almost nobody in our industry is talking about yet. What it means to invest in AI right now, this year, not someday, and what that investment is worth to you over the next five and 10 years. Now, most spa owners will tell me some version of the same thing when this topic comes up. AI is nice to have. It’s for tech companies. It’s for brands with a marketing department of 15 people. I’ll get to it when things slow down a little, and I understand exactly why that’s the instinct. You’re in the treatment room. You’re three steps behind your inbox, and go and learn new technology. Sounds like one more thing that’s on a to-do list that’s already way too long. But here is what waiting costs you. While you’re telling yourself that you’ll get to it later, the spa down the street from you already has a system quietly doing the admin work that used to eat up her Tuesday afternoons. It’s not that she’s smarter than you; she just started earlier, and the time she gets back this year compounds into next year and the year after that. The gap doesn’t stay the same size; it grows every quarter that you don’t close it, and that’s just to be able to compete on a level playing field. So I want to say this as clearly as I can: adopting AI in your business right now is not optional. It’s not a 2027 problem that you’ll deal with when you have more bandwidth. This is happening at a speed that we have never seen with any other technology in history, and I want to walk you through exactly why. Because the numbers changed how I think about this, and I think they’ll change the way that you think about it too. And I know for a lot of you, the resistance isn’t necessarily about the technology. It’s that you’re just so deep in the treatment room. You’re so buried in the day to day of running this thing that the idea of learning something new feels like it belongs to some version of you that has 10 times the amount of time that you currently have, and yes, it takes time to incorporate into your practice. And no, it is not a set it and forget it tool. It needs to be updated regularly, just like an employee. But unlike an employee, this tool can work 24/7 and will never call out sick. Now, don’t take that as me saying you should get rid of your people. It’s actually the opposite. What we are trying to do is empower your team to be more productive and take the administrative things off of their plate so that they can do things only humans can do. More on that later. All right, so let’s get into this speed, like how quickly we are adopting and integrating with AI. When ChatGPT first launched, it hit 100 million users in two months. Two months, guys.

Instagram took two and a half years to hit that same number. Netflix took over three years. There has never been a technology adopted this fast in recorded history. Not the internet, not the smartphone, not the personal computer. And this isn’t just people playing with a chatbot on their phone anymore. McKinsey’s most recent state of AI research found. That 88% of organizations now report regular AI use in at least one part of their business. This is up 78% from the year before. It’s not early adopters. That’s the majority, and it’s moved that fast in 12 months. Now, here’s where this gets specific to your PNL McKinsey also estimates that generative AI could add somewhere between 2.6 and $4.4 trillion a year to the global economy, trillion with a T. That number is like almost too big to even comprehend. So let’s break it down in our industry. Zenoti put out their 2026 beauty and wellness benchmark report for the med spa industry, and one finding really stood out for me. So, med spas that adopted AI booking tools saw 5% sales growth. Med spas that didn’t saw 1%-that’s the largest technology-driven performance gap of any vertical in their entire data set, not some related, unrelated sector, our sector. And before you tell me that your clients don’t want a robot answering their questions, that same research found 71% of med spa regulars are already comfortable with AI handling scheduling and communication. For clients between 45 and 60, your highest lifetime value client, that number climbs to 80% Your clients are ahead of you on this. They’ve been talking to an AI assistant at their bank, their airline, their pharmacy, for years now, they’re not waiting on you to catch up. If anything, they expect it. Okay, now one more number because I want this to land in your own operations, not just the industry at large. Bluevine’s research on small businesses found that close to half of the businesses using AI right now are at saving at least half a workday every single week. Half a workday every week. Not a vague productivity claim. Real hours back in your calendar or on your team’s calendar that used to go to something a computer can now do faster and more consistently than a person ever could. Now this is not a short-term bump either. McKinsey’s productivity research found that half of today’s work activities could be automated somewhere between 2030 and 2060, with researchers now landing on the middle of that range around 2045, a full decade earlier than what the same researchers were projecting just a few years ago. That timeline keeps moving up; it’s not moving out. So now I want to slow down, okay? Because when most spa owners here invest in AI, their brain goes to one place. Can you write me a caption for Instagram? And sure, that’s a use case, right? We use that constantly, but that is the smallest, least valuable way to think about what is available to you right now. I want you to think about AI the way that you’d think about hiring a virtual assistant or an executive assistant or someone on your leadership team, even not a tool that you can poke at when you remember it exists. A team member you can build a relationship with that you hand real ownership to that takes weight off of your plate the same way a great hire would. That’s what we mean when we talk about building an AI spa team inside of Growth Factor. Not one tool doing one task, a team of them, each one built around a specific job inside of your business, so let me give you an example of something that shifted my week, okay? Because I think it’s just a little bit easier to understand.

So Lucy, many of you know her. Lucy is our AI and systems lead. She was previously our marketing manager, but we’ve updated her role and title because what she does now goes just so far past marketing manager, so she still builds every system around our marketing. She also is building and running the AI employees that support our whole leadership team. Now here’s the one that I want you to picture. Okay, this is an AI employee, so every week Lucy and I have a marketing leadership meeting.

 

We record it with a tool called Granola, and the moment that the meeting ends, the transcript drops automatically into our leadership workspace that we built inside of Claude. Nobody uploads anything. Nobody copies and pastes a single line. It lands there on its own. From there, a skill we built runs on that transcript without either of us touching it. It reads through everything we covered. It pulls out every action item. It assigns each one to me or to Lucy, depending on who owns it. It gives a due date and it pushes the entire list into Monday.com. Which is our project management board. In a matter of minutes, the open loops from the meeting are already sitting there as tasks, assigned, dated, and ready. Now, this is the part that changed how our meetings run. So every open item still sitting there in the following week gets pulled straight into our next agenda on its own. Nobody has to remember to add it. So instead of me sitting there wondering, wait, did we ever close the loop on that vendor conversation from three weeks ago? No, it’s just there because the system held the thread so that neither one of us had to. Now, if you’ve ever left a leadership meeting with that nagging feeling, I know we talked about this before. Didn’t did anything happen with it? This is the exact gap that that closes, right? We’re human. We forget things. We have off weeks. Now Lucy and I aren’t spending time after every single meeting turning notes into tasks anymore. That work doesn’t exist for us in the way that it used to, and nothing falls through the cracks because the system remembers, not our memory of a conversation from three Tuesdays ago. Okay. Now here’s another one, and this one is you know mine specifically. Every single month, all of our content, our magazine, our podcast scripts, our blog post, our email-it gets built around one theme, right? We’re in profit mastery right now, so it’s not 14 themes, not a different idea for every channel. One theme, and everything spans off of it. That alone kills the blank space page problem before it starts. But then we batch by type instead of by day, right? We do the magazine first, and then we do every podcast script, and then we do every blog post, and then we do every email because the emails usually reference the podcast or the blog, and they need to go last, right? Claude does the majority of the execution once I’ve set the direction on the month’s theme. I review it. I approve it. I send it back if something’s off, and the whole thing-the magazine, the podcast, the blog, the email, including the filming-takes two, maybe three days a month.

All right, for a full month of content across four channels. Now I want you to sit with that a second because I know what building content used to feel like before this existed. It felt like a full time job. It felt like I was drowning at all times with the amount of content that we were creating. Now, if part of you just heard all of that and thought, “All right, great Lucy, great Daniela, but I’m not technical. I don’t know how any of this works. I want you to let that go right now. Neither of those examples required either one of us to write a line of code. What they required was being able to describe a task clearly enough that someone or something could follow it step by step. That’s it. That is the entire skill. That’s one AI employee doing one job inside of one part of our business, and I want you to see how far this goes because most of the spot owners I’ve talked to have only seen the smallest slice of what it’s actually capable of. Okay, there are AI employees built to run new provider onboarding from day one. There’s AI employees that sit in your inbox or your text and answer the routine questions before your front desk ever sees them. There are AI employees that walk your providers through your training standards step by step, and there are AI employees you can ask questions to about your own numbers, your retention rate, your average ticket, your provider utilization-the same way that you’d ask a bookkeeper to pull a report.

 

This is not the Jetsons. Okay, every one of those exists right now, and most of them take less time to build than you think. Once you can describe the task clearly enough to write it down. Now, since we’re talking about profit specifically, I want you to think about this in terms of hours. All right, because that’s the currency that matters here. So let’s say that you’re paying your spa manager $25 an hour, and you meet on a weekly basis. That’s 25 hours a year that she would spend on debriefing meetings if she spends 30 minutes after each meeting. Okay, that’s $625 in payroll that you would be saving just by having that AI employee that I described that transcribes the meeting and gets it put into place. 25 hours and $625 in payroll. Now, what about onboarding? Let’s say conservatively that you spend three full days training and onboarding a new provider. Realistically, it’s often much more than that, and maybe you make three new hires in a year. So that’s 24 hours of onboarding times three. That’s $1,800. Payroll saved, right? Conservative estimate. These are two very basic use cases with AI, and they’ve already shown that they can save 1000s of dollars for you. Now think of how many more 1000s you can save in payroll by making your entire company more efficient, more productive, and that’s not even adding in how you can impact your client experience, which increases sales, retention, and referrals by freeing up the time and space on your humans’ teams’ time, so that they can have those interactions with your clients and patients. So the question isn’t whether AI is a fit for your business; it’s which hours in your week you want your team to be spending on administrative work a system could hold, instead of which hours you want them spending on the work only a human can do. So let’s talk about jobs, right? If AI is doing all this, does that mean people lose their jobs? No, it does not. I think that’s the wrong question, and I want to tell you why. Because we are not building AI spa teams so that we can run our businesses with fewer humans. We are a service-based industry. We are building them so that the humans we already have can stop spending their week on the administrative work that was never the reason they got into this industry in the first place. Nobody became an esthetician because she dreamed of typing up meeting notes into a project board. Nobody became a spa manager because reconciling a schedule by hand felt like the highest use of her talent. What I believe is possible here is that our teams become 10 times more productive, 100 times more productive, maybe more once the administrative weight comes off, and when that happens, the humans on your team get their time back for the one thing that AI can’t do, which is sit across from a client and make her feel seen, and heard, and cared for in a way that earns her loyalty. That’s the whole game in this industry. Clinical excellence gets someone in the door, being remembered, being known, being cared for in a way that she can feel. That’s what brings her back for the next 15 years. AI can’t do that part. It was never going to be able to do that part. What it can do is clear enough space in your team’s week that the human part gets the attention that it deserves instead of being squeezed in around admin work at the end of a very long day. If you have a team member who’s nervous about this conversation, just be open. Have it with have that as a direct conversation with her, and tell her exactly what I just told you. This is not about her being replaced; it’s about her highest level of scope finally having room to breathe. And here’s the biggest reason that all of this matters to me past the PNL. We talk a lot on this show about building a business around the life you want to live, not the other way around. Every hour an AI employee holds for you is an hour you get to decide where it goes. Back into the treatment room if that’s where you want it. Back into your kids. Back to the farm.

Back to your own version of a Tuesday afternoon that isn’t eaten by admin work. That is what profit mastery is about, underneath the PNL Not just what your business keeps, what you get to keep too. So this week, I want you to do one thing: pick one task, a meeting you always have to debrief afterward, a question your front desk answers 10 times a day, a report you build by hand every single month, write down exactly what tasks look like from start to finish. The same way I just walk you through what happens inside of our leadership meeting. All right, this is not for your whole business. This is for one task, one week. Okay, because once you can see a task clearly enough to write it down step by step, you’re already halfway to building an AI employee for it, action creates clarity, and clarity is what turns I should probably look into AI at some point into a real line on your PNL, saving you real money for years.

Now, if you build this out this week, I want to hear about it. Send me a DM on Instagram or reply to our email list. Tell me which task you picked. Let me know. I read all of the responses, and I’m so grateful. All right, that’s it for this episode of Spa Marketing Made Easy. Thank you so much for spending your time with me, and I will catch you in the next episode.

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EP 496: The $68K Event: Why Half the Money Comes After Everyone Leaves
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  • business, inspiration, marketing

You’ve been told the event is the win. Fill the room, hit a big number on the day, celebrate with your team, and move on. So that’s what you do. You run the event, you do respectable numbers, and by the following Monday you’re already onto the next thing. Here is what that costs you. The day of the event is only half the revenue. The other half is sitting in the room you already filled, in the people who came, the ones who didn’t buy and the ones who did, waiting on a follow-up nobody makes. The event isn’t the strategy. The event is what brings your best patients into a room. What you do in the seven days after is where the real number lives.

Pick one goal, not three

Before anything else, decide what the event is for. A cash infusion. Filling a new provider’s calendar. Introducing a new product or service. Pick one, because an event trying to accomplish three goals at once accomplishes none of them well. Every time Daniela asks a student, the answer is “I want all three.” Of course you do. But the offer that produces a cash infusion is not the offer that fills a membership. A membership may collect less up front and pay off far more over time. When you name the one goal first, the offer builds itself. When you don’t, you build a vague event that asks the room to guess what you want from them.

Treat the week after as half the event

This is the phase almost everyone skips. For every person who walks through the door, capture their name, phone number, email, what they bought, and what they didn’t, in real time at the front desk. Not reconstructed from memory on Monday. That list is the entire engine behind the downsell. Then, within the week, every attendee gets a personal follow-up. Purchasers first, to thank them, book their series, and check in on their skin, not to sell again. Then the people who didn’t buy, with a warm, zero-pressure check-in that mentions the package is still open for a few days. A phone call does the one thing a retargeting ad cannot. It says the person’s name, references the exact event they came to, and asks a real question. That is what turns a maybe into a yes. This is the muscle Growth Factor® Implementation students build when they stop leaving money in the room. You can see the program at addoaesthetics.com/growth-factor.

The full episode has the part these notes can’t give you. The moment Daniela’s student texted her that she couldn’t pick up the phone, and the small workaround she found from her own couch that doubled her event. It’s the difference between knowing you should follow up and watching a scared solo owner actually do it, one person at a time.

Want to break past $25K–$35K months without adding more treatment hours?

Watch The Systems Shift and learn how 600+ spa owners are scaling into their Spa CEO role (without sacrificing family time or sanity).

Watch Here

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About Your Host, Daniela Woerner

Daniela Woerner is the founder of Addo Aesthetics and creator of the Growth Factor® Framework, a proven system that’s helped hundreds of spa owners build profitable, systemized businesses. With nearly 20 years in the aesthetics industry, she transforms overworked aesthetic professionals into confident Spa CEOs through strategy, systems, and soul led support. Daniela is also the host of Spa Marketing Made Easy, a top ranked podcast with over 1 million downloads, where she shares real world strategies to help spa professionals grow with clarity and confidence.

Well, hello, my dears. Daniela here, and welcome to Spa Marketing Made Easy. Today we are talking about the four stages of adoption with AI that every single spa CEO needs to know. Okay, and when it comes to AI, I feel like we’ve kind of got two camps, right? So we’ve got on one side we’ve got the spa CEOs who are experimenting with AI. They know that it’s important. They’re putting in real time. They’re using it, but it really it still feels like, gosh, once they get something figured out, there’s already something new. And you know, I’m sorry to say that that’s just the way that it’s going to be for probably the next three to five years is is my guess because AI is it’s advancing so quickly. You may feel like learning AI is actually taking more of your time instead of saving you time. You may feel like the output doesn’t sound like you, like you’re going back and forth for hours, like you’re just babysitting the computer for every single task, and I want to give you a map of how to move past that stage. Now, you also on the other side, when I’m looking at like you know where people are at in their kind of what stage they’re in and their level of AI adoption. We’ve got those people, and then we’ve got like, oh yeah, I know ChatGPT. I use it to write an Instagram caption, but I’m so busy. I don’t really have any time to implement it in my business. You know, like it’s it’s something I’m aware of, but not using it in the day to day, something you’ll figure out when things slow down. Okay, this episode is for you as well because I want to talk about what is actually happening in the world right now and why waiting may cost you so much more than you realize. All right, so we’re going to walk through the four stages of AI adoption and what they look like inside of a spa business. I want you to know exactly where you’re at and what it takes to move to that next level. Because when you understand the gap, then you can have a plan to move there, and that is really, really important. Right, it’s one thing to be someone who’s, you know, dropping some, getting some Instagram captions versus someone who has AI employees running entire functions in her business. All right, so let’s walk through those stages. All right, but before we get into that, I want, I want to talk about some real numbers. I want to, I want to share some real data with you about AI and why I’m so passionate about this and why I talk about this on every single podcast episode. Because I believe deeply believe that it is so important for you to learn how to use this skill. Okay, most of what we hear about AI is either like wildly optimistic that AI is going to solve all of our human problems, and you know the world is going to be this kind of blissful place, or it’s like the whole other spectrum, genuinely alarming. AI is going to take all of our jobs.

The world is going to go into turmoil, right? Well, I want to give you kind of a middle of the ground, middle of the road approach. I want to give you a grounded, honest look at what is actually happening right now, because it is something that you need to take seriously, and nobody nobody knows what is actually going to happen or how this is going to lay out. We just have people speculating, but this is brand new. This is something that is brand new, so it is something that’s extremely important to take seriously as a business owner, though. All right. So McKinsey’s 2025 State of AI report surveyed nearly 2,000 organizations across 105 countries, and 88% of them now report using AI in at least one business function, okay. That is not experimental, right? This is in mainstream, right? And companies are getting real results, not using it, right? But getting integrating it so deeply into the way that work is actually Getting done, those companies they are pulling ahead at a pace that is hard to overstate.

Now Mo Godat, the former chief business officer at Google, he sat down with Stephen Bartlett on the Diary of a CEO, great podcast by the way. Some some of his guests are a little. Doom and gloom, but I do like listening to the interviews and hearing the wide variety of perspectives when it comes to AI. But on that episode, he plainly stated that upwards of 80% of the U.S. workforce could have at least 10% of their tasks automated, and the underlying technologies are doubling in capability every six to 12 months, compressing change that once took decades into a handful of years. Okay, so in the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report from 2025, put it this way: AI and information processing technologies will be the most disruptive force shaping the labor market over the next five years, outpacing everything else.

Now, here’s what that means for your spa: the businesses that are building AI into their operations now are not just writing captions, but building actual AI spa teams. Those businesses are going to operate at a speed and efficiency that non AI powered spas simply will not be able to match. Okay, I was talking about this in 2024. I believe it even more strongly today. By 2027, there is going to be a very visible divide between the spa CEOs who have adopted AI and the ones who kept waiting for a better time. Okay, and it’s it’s something that you know. What are we actually talking about? What is AI actually doing? It’s drastically lowering your operational cost. It’s drastically increasing your productivity. I’m going to tell you a little bit later in the episode about our team. We right now have eight humans on our team, and we have 27 AI employees, and we are on track by the end of this year to have over 100 AI employees. So it’s something that AI employees do not call out sick. You can give them tons and tons and tons and tons and tons of feedback without ever hurting their feelings. It’s they have expert level skills in a variety of different aspects. They can work 24 hours a day, right? So we’re talking about the the playing field will be no longer level, and so if you’re coming into business and you’re competing against someone who has an entire team of AI employees. It’s going to be extremely challenging to do so. Okay, so don’t just wait for a better time. The better time is now, and the way that you get there is by understanding where you’re actually at. Okay, so let me walk you through the framework, and I want you to listen to all four, and then just see which one kind of identifies with you. All right. So stage one is what I call the copy paster. Okay. So this is where everybody starts. Every single person. I started here. Everybody starts here, right? You find out about Claude or ChatGPT. You open it up. You type in a prompt. Something came out. Maybe it was a social media caption. Maybe it was a blog post. You thought, okay, this is cool. This is crazy that this all can work so fast. You copied the output. Output. Maybe you tweaked it a little bit, and then you pasted it somewhere. Right? Copy paste. It’s essentially like using a search engine, but with better grammar. Okay. So every single session starts from scratch. There is no context loaded, no understanding of the business, no memory of your voice. You’re essentially asking a new hire with zero training to do a skilled job, and then being surprised that the output doesn’t sound like you.

So you get results occasionally, but they’re inconsistent, and the time it takes to get something usable is often longer than just doing it yourself. Okay, so that is the stage one frustration. Stage two is the prompter, and this is where my guess is that most of you listening right now are. So you figured out the quality of your input determines the quality of your output. You’ve gotten better at giving AI context, at specifying your tone, at asking for the the things in the way that you want them, you’re getting more consistent results. And the prompter has started to feel the power of this. Right, she can get a good output. She can move faster on certain tasks.

 

But here’s the limitation. Right, you still have. Be there every single time. You are re-explaining who you are working with every single conversation. You’re rewriting the context. You’re resetting the tone. You’re re-specifying the task. You are not an AI user.

You are an AI babysitter. Now, this is a stage where most people spend most of the time, and this is where they feel so frustrated because they know enough to know how it works, but they’re losing their mind in these endless loops, wondering why it is taking so long. Now, I lived here for quite a while, like in 2024. I was playing with ChatGPT. I really started diving into blogs. I started taking courses. I started hiring consultants. By the way, side note: Claude has these really great free courses that you can have yourself or your team take. They’re going to give you the basic understanding of these things, so if you’re just wanting to even learn the language, that’s a great place to start. Now, this is the place also where you can be like, man, I’m spending so much time here, and I’m just like, I I don’t think this is working for me, right? I am the bottleneck for every single output, I actually have less time because I’m spending so much time trying to get AI to work. Well, once you move out of here, you move into stage three, the trainer. Okay, now this is the shift that changes everything. The trainer has moved from asking AI to do tasks and teaching AI how she thinks, she’s built quad projects. She’s loaded her company’s voice, her values, her frameworks, her context into the system. She’s created custom instructions that every time she opens a session, AI already knows who she is, who her clients are, who she, how she communicates, what her standards are. This is the difference between hiring a temp and hiring someone you spent six months training. All right, so the output from a trainer session is recognizable. It sounds like her. It reflects her methodology and the amount of back and forth, the prompting, the correcting, the no, try that again, drops dramatically. Right, so the trainer is still running tasks, but she’s running them in a fraction of the time, and the results are substantially better. Now, stage four is the AI employer okay? And the AI employer has stopped running tasks and started deploying employees. She has specific AI tools built for specific jobs. So not one AI that does everything, but a suite of AI employees, each one trained deeply for a specific function of the business. All right, so here at Addo Esthetics, I’m updating our org chart right now, but I feel like it’s like this constant progression because, as I said, by the end of the year we’ll have 100 plus AI employees.

Now we’re going through, and it’s not as complicated or expensive as it may sound. All right, so we have currently eight humans and 27 AI employees. 27 AI employees. Okay, and those AI employees are not just like sitting in a folder somewhere that nobody opens. They are active. They have jobs. My they’re being used on a daily basis. My team knows who they are and what they handle, which is the whole point of building an AI spa team, so that your humans know how to use those AI employees to support them in their role, or to offload the administrative tasks, so that the humans have more time to interact with the humans, right? So that’s really an important piece. Our AI employees are not replacing our humans; they are offloading the tasks so that we can have more human to human connection, so we can show up. We have the time availability to show up in a bigger way with our clients and support them in a different way. Okay, so my human team knows what these employees are, so they’re kind of designated for these are our marketing employees. These are our ops employees. These are our sales employees of our AI employees. They all go in different categories, and the appropriate humans have access to those AI employees. Okay. Now we started what one really cool thing with this. I.

Ask my team every so every week my with my human employees I do a what we call a scorecard right so we check in and we’re kind of going over their scorecard and I always ask them you know what feels heavy what’s your focus for next week and share a win that happened in the past week okay and the what feels heavy question is really important. That gives me the context of where I need to build next. So if there’s something that’s taking a lot of time or is frustrating, that gives me the direction of okay, I want to I want to lighten the load. I want to support this human employee, and you know, for Christy, a lot of times it was the inbox. She handles our customer support inbox, and you know now she has a AI employee that she can go and talk to. So if a question comes into the inbox and she’s not sure how to respond? She doesn’t have to track me down. She goes to the Coach Daniela project. She asks the question, and she gets an answer that reflects exactly how I think. Now we have AI employees for staff onboarding. We’ve recreated a lot of these. Actually, in Growth Factor implementation, we have an entire AI spa team that we build for our implementation members, and one of those AI employees is an onboarding employee. Okay, so we built this at an event. We had I think 15 people there going through and building, and what every single one of them said is this is going to save me a week of time, not days, but an actual week of time of what this interactive employee does. Now this is the coolest thing.

So if you if you have team members, right, you know that when you hire somebody, you’re going through the employee handbook, all the policies and procedures, the spa booking software, the protocols, like all of this administrative stuff that you’re going through, and it’s taking so much of your time. The AI employee, I can say, hi, I’m Daniela. I’m starting at the front desk today, and it’s going to walk me through a structured onboarding process. That’s going. It’s going to be interactive. It can quiz me. I can ask it questions, but it’s going to give me a very thorough onboarding that’s going to save the spa CEO a massive a week of their time. So think about how much lighter that is going to feel when you hire someone, and you don’t have to build in all of that time to set them up for success, right? It’s massive, and we know that employees leave when they don’t feel supported, when they don’t know what’s expected of them, right? So you’re building in these kind of guardrails to give them a more professional, a better overall experience working at your company. Okay. We also built an AI employee for spas that handles home care recommendations. So it’s think about if you have multiple providers, right? And you have a patient come in, and they go to provider A and they get this, you know, $1,200 home care regimen, and then they go to provider B and provider B recommends something totally different. That is going to break the trust of your patient, right? Because they’re going to say, “Man, I just spent $1,200. Was like doing the wrong thing, right? So what this AI home care employee recommender does is built to be customized off of your brain, off of your philosophy, right? This is not generic. This is custom trained for you, and then it’s going to recommend home care based off of the skin, like the Fitzpatrick type, the condition, the products that you’re carrying, your beliefs, all of those types of things. Incredible, right? It’s incredible. So that gives think about hiring a new person that doesn’t isn’t trained on the skincare lines that you have in your spa. Think about how much more supported that provider is going to feel by having these resources as a tool. Okay, so this is what I mean when I’m talking about an AI spa team. All right, so not AI that you use, AI that works in your business, whether you are there or not. Okay, and the thing about the AI employer stage, it’s not as complicated as it sounds.

You don’t have to have a tech background, right? It requires building systems. With intention. Now we and I will say there’s kind of like once you get to the employer stage, there’s kind of these additional layers where you can run things, you can schedule tasks, you can have these, you know, going automatically, right? So it’s you’re not having to be there. I mean, I get a report every single week on the performance of my coaching staff. I every single day, multiple times a day, I get a report for every single coaching call that my staff does. I’m not sitting there running that; it is running in the background automatically, and then I get the output. Right. So when you’re at the AI employer stage, then there’s all these additional levels that you can go to that are again going to free up more and more of your time. Okay, now let’s go back to stage two. Okay, let’s go back to stage two because this is a really frustrating stage, and this analogy really landed for me or helped me to understand it a little bit better. Okay, so imagine that you hired a team member, and this is a brilliant team member. And on their first day, you said, “Okay, here’s your task. Go do it. No onboarding. No context about the business, no explanation of how you communicate with clients, no standards to reference, no job description, just the task. Okay, if they’re an excellent candidate, right? They’re a good hire. The output they probably would be able to handle it, but they might be a little bit nervous. It wouldn’t be great, Right, so you would spend hours editing and correcting, and then the next day you do the exact same thing because nothing was documented, nothing was retrained. That’s stage two. All right, that’s the prompter, and the solution is not to get better at prompting. The solution is to onboard AI in the way that you would onboard a high-performing human employee. When you do that, you build the context, you load the voice, you create the instructions.

Everything changes. Okay, so AI stops feeling like a stranger that you have to manage and starts feeling like someone who actually knows your business. Okay, now I want to give you one question before we close. Spa owners who come to us, right? They’re using AI to do things faster, and that’s a fine goal. It’s a real improvement. But the owners who move into stage three and stage four, the AI employer, they’re asking a different question. Okay, they’re asking, does this task actually require me, or does it require someone who thinks like me? Those are not the same question. Okay, so the answer to the second one, that’s going to kind of expand your mind of what is possible, an AI employee who thinks like you can handle the first draft of a client email at 2p.m. while you’re in the treatment room. A trained AI project can review your social media content against your brand standards before it goes out. An onboarding AI employee can walk a new hire through your protocols, your culture, your standards, without you sitting in that room for a week. Right? You’re not being replaced. You’re being multiplied. That is a significant difference. Okay, how amazing would it be to have multiples of you in your business. Okay, so here’s where I land on all of this. The data is clear. The trajectory is clear. AI adoption is not optional for your business in 2026. Okay, I don’t know how to say that more clearly. I want to be extremely clear about this because I think that our industry has been slow to hear it. Right, the spa CEOs who are building AI spa teams right now-they’re going to run circles. Right, their cost, their operational costs will go so far down. Their standard of communication, their connection, their their time availability is going to go so up that it is going to make it so hard to compete. Okay, now don’t feel like you have to do this all at once. All right, you just need to know what stage you’re in right now and start to take baby steps to move into that next stage. Okay, if you’re in stage one, stop starting from scratch. Give AI full context every single time you open a session.

If you’re in stage two, your next move is to build a quad project. Your voice. We we use our eyes. Document we use our company bio. Our company bio encompasses so much of this. It’s a very robust document that we create. We want your standards, your frameworks, right? This is going to take one session for you to build, and then every other session after that is going to run so much faster. If you’re in stage three, I want you to ask what repetitive function of your business could you hand to a trained AI employee this quarter? And if you’re building towards stage four, you know where we are, right? The AI SPA team framework is what we build inside of Growth Factor implementation, one AI employee at a time, alongside you. Now, here’s your homework. All right, what stage are you in, and what’s the one thing that would move you forward to the next stage? That’s it. Right, action creates clarity. Don’t just listen. Do the thing, my friends. All right, so send me a DM on Instagram. Shoot us an email. Tell me what stage you’re at. Tell me. I want to know. I read everything. All right. Thank you so much, my dears. I will catch you in the next episode.

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EP 495: Why Your Spa Makes Money but You Don’t
  • /
  • business, inspiration, leadership

You know exactly what your business brought in last month. Ask what you actually kept and the number gets fuzzy, and asking what reached you personally can be harder still. Most spa owners read a tight bank account as a revenue problem and try to sell more. It is almost never a revenue problem. What comes in tells you the business is busy. What stays tells you whether it is working, and those two numbers can sit very far apart while everything on the surface looks successful.

Wanting profit is not greed

There is a belief sitting underneath a lot of spa businesses, that keeping more of what you make is somehow greedy, that focusing on profit means caring less about your clients or your team. It produces some of the most talented, hardest working women in this industry running businesses that make just enough to survive. Here is what replaces it. When a spa owner keeps more of what she makes, she reinvests it, in her team, her community, and the version of herself who gets to lead instead of doing every treatment in the building. Profit is not the thing that competes with your values. It is the thing that funds them.

Pay yourself before the month spends it

Payroll, operations, and taxes will always find a way to spend themselves. Profit only survives if you decide ahead of time that a piece of every dollar belongs to you before anything else touches it. That is the whole idea behind Profit First. Not a bigger revenue number, a smaller number protected on purpose, every time money comes in. And the buckets only work if you can see them, which is why watching them fill in real time replaces the tax-season surprise with knowing where you stand before you have crossed a line. This is the work that happens inside Growth Factor® Implementation, where you build a financial dashboard that shows exactly what each service costs you and what it would take to step out of the treatment room without feeling it.

The reading gives you the framework. The episode gives you the moment a real spa owner watched her money going down the drain on a coaching call, the exact belief Daniela had to unlearn about profit and guilt, and the permission piece that reading a bullet list will never do for you. Listen for the part where wanting profit stops feeling like greed and starts feeling like the job.

Want to break past $25K–$35K months without adding more treatment hours?

Watch The Systems Shift and learn how 600+ spa owners are scaling into their Spa CEO role (without sacrificing family time or sanity).

Watch Here

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About Your Host, Daniela Woerner

Daniela Woerner is the founder of Addo Aesthetics and creator of the Growth Factor® Framework, a proven system that’s helped hundreds of spa owners build profitable, systemized businesses. With nearly 20 years in the aesthetics industry, she transforms overworked aesthetic professionals into confident Spa CEOs through strategy, systems, and soul led support. Daniela is also the host of Spa Marketing Made Easy, a top ranked podcast with over 1 million downloads, where she shares real world strategies to help spa professionals grow with clarity and confidence.

Well, hello, my dears. Daniela here, and welcome to Spa Marketing Made Easy. Today we are talking about the four stages of adoption with AI that every single spa CEO needs to know. Okay, and when it comes to AI, I feel like we’ve kind of got two camps, right? So we’ve got on one side we’ve got the spa CEOs who are experimenting with AI. They know that it’s important. They’re putting in real time. They’re using it, but it really it still feels like, gosh, once they get something figured out, there’s already something new. And you know, I’m sorry to say that that’s just the way that it’s going to be for probably the next three to five years is is my guess because AI is it’s advancing so quickly. You may feel like learning AI is actually taking more of your time instead of saving you time. You may feel like the output doesn’t sound like you, like you’re going back and forth for hours, like you’re just babysitting the computer for every single task, and I want to give you a map of how to move past that stage. Now, you also on the other side, when I’m looking at like you know where people are at in their kind of what stage they’re in and their level of AI adoption. We’ve got those people, and then we’ve got like, oh yeah, I know ChatGPT. I use it to write an Instagram caption, but I’m so busy. I don’t really have any time to implement it in my business. You know, like it’s it’s something I’m aware of, but not using it in the day to day, something you’ll figure out when things slow down. Okay, this episode is for you as well because I want to talk about what is actually happening in the world right now and why waiting may cost you so much more than you realize. All right, so we’re going to walk through the four stages of AI adoption and what they look like inside of a spa business. I want you to know exactly where you’re at and what it takes to move to that next level. Because when you understand the gap, then you can have a plan to move there, and that is really, really important. Right, it’s one thing to be someone who’s, you know, dropping some, getting some Instagram captions versus someone who has AI employees running entire functions in her business. All right, so let’s walk through those stages. All right, but before we get into that, I want, I want to talk about some real numbers. I want to, I want to share some real data with you about AI and why I’m so passionate about this and why I talk about this on every single podcast episode. Because I believe deeply believe that it is so important for you to learn how to use this skill. Okay, most of what we hear about AI is either like wildly optimistic that AI is going to solve all of our human problems, and you know the world is going to be this kind of blissful place, or it’s like the whole other spectrum, genuinely alarming. AI is going to take all of our jobs.

The world is going to go into turmoil, right? Well, I want to give you kind of a middle of the ground, middle of the road approach. I want to give you a grounded, honest look at what is actually happening right now, because it is something that you need to take seriously, and nobody nobody knows what is actually going to happen or how this is going to lay out. We just have people speculating, but this is brand new. This is something that is brand new, so it is something that’s extremely important to take seriously as a business owner, though. All right. So McKinsey’s 2025 State of AI report surveyed nearly 2,000 organizations across 105 countries, and 88% of them now report using AI in at least one business function, okay. That is not experimental, right? This is in mainstream, right? And companies are getting real results, not using it, right? But getting integrating it so deeply into the way that work is actually Getting done, those companies they are pulling ahead at a pace that is hard to overstate.

Now Mo Godat, the former chief business officer at Google, he sat down with Stephen Bartlett on the Diary of a CEO, great podcast by the way. Some some of his guests are a little. Doom and gloom, but I do like listening to the interviews and hearing the wide variety of perspectives when it comes to AI. But on that episode, he plainly stated that upwards of 80% of the U.S. workforce could have at least 10% of their tasks automated, and the underlying technologies are doubling in capability every six to 12 months, compressing change that once took decades into a handful of years. Okay, so in the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report from 2025, put it this way: AI and information processing technologies will be the most disruptive force shaping the labor market over the next five years, outpacing everything else.

Now, here’s what that means for your spa: the businesses that are building AI into their operations now are not just writing captions, but building actual AI spa teams. Those businesses are going to operate at a speed and efficiency that non AI powered spas simply will not be able to match. Okay, I was talking about this in 2024. I believe it even more strongly today. By 2027, there is going to be a very visible divide between the spa CEOs who have adopted AI and the ones who kept waiting for a better time. Okay, and it’s it’s something that you know. What are we actually talking about? What is AI actually doing? It’s drastically lowering your operational cost. It’s drastically increasing your productivity. I’m going to tell you a little bit later in the episode about our team. We right now have eight humans on our team, and we have 27 AI employees, and we are on track by the end of this year to have over 100 AI employees. So it’s something that AI employees do not call out sick. You can give them tons and tons and tons and tons and tons of feedback without ever hurting their feelings. It’s they have expert level skills in a variety of different aspects. They can work 24 hours a day, right? So we’re talking about the the playing field will be no longer level, and so if you’re coming into business and you’re competing against someone who has an entire team of AI employees. It’s going to be extremely challenging to do so. Okay, so don’t just wait for a better time. The better time is now, and the way that you get there is by understanding where you’re actually at. Okay, so let me walk you through the framework, and I want you to listen to all four, and then just see which one kind of identifies with you. All right. So stage one is what I call the copy paster. Okay. So this is where everybody starts. Every single person. I started here. Everybody starts here, right? You find out about Claude or ChatGPT. You open it up. You type in a prompt. Something came out. Maybe it was a social media caption. Maybe it was a blog post. You thought, okay, this is cool. This is crazy that this all can work so fast. You copied the output. Output. Maybe you tweaked it a little bit, and then you pasted it somewhere. Right? Copy paste. It’s essentially like using a search engine, but with better grammar. Okay. So every single session starts from scratch. There is no context loaded, no understanding of the business, no memory of your voice. You’re essentially asking a new hire with zero training to do a skilled job, and then being surprised that the output doesn’t sound like you.

So you get results occasionally, but they’re inconsistent, and the time it takes to get something usable is often longer than just doing it yourself. Okay, so that is the stage one frustration. Stage two is the prompter, and this is where my guess is that most of you listening right now are. So you figured out the quality of your input determines the quality of your output. You’ve gotten better at giving AI context, at specifying your tone, at asking for the the things in the way that you want them, you’re getting more consistent results. And the prompter has started to feel the power of this. Right, she can get a good output. She can move faster on certain tasks.

 

But here’s the limitation. Right, you still have. Be there every single time. You are re-explaining who you are working with every single conversation. You’re rewriting the context. You’re resetting the tone. You’re re-specifying the task. You are not an AI user.

You are an AI babysitter. Now, this is a stage where most people spend most of the time, and this is where they feel so frustrated because they know enough to know how it works, but they’re losing their mind in these endless loops, wondering why it is taking so long. Now, I lived here for quite a while, like in 2024. I was playing with ChatGPT. I really started diving into blogs. I started taking courses. I started hiring consultants. By the way, side note: Claude has these really great free courses that you can have yourself or your team take. They’re going to give you the basic understanding of these things, so if you’re just wanting to even learn the language, that’s a great place to start. Now, this is the place also where you can be like, man, I’m spending so much time here, and I’m just like, I I don’t think this is working for me, right? I am the bottleneck for every single output, I actually have less time because I’m spending so much time trying to get AI to work. Well, once you move out of here, you move into stage three, the trainer. Okay, now this is the shift that changes everything. The trainer has moved from asking AI to do tasks and teaching AI how she thinks, she’s built quad projects. She’s loaded her company’s voice, her values, her frameworks, her context into the system. She’s created custom instructions that every time she opens a session, AI already knows who she is, who her clients are, who she, how she communicates, what her standards are. This is the difference between hiring a temp and hiring someone you spent six months training. All right, so the output from a trainer session is recognizable. It sounds like her. It reflects her methodology and the amount of back and forth, the prompting, the correcting, the no, try that again, drops dramatically. Right, so the trainer is still running tasks, but she’s running them in a fraction of the time, and the results are substantially better. Now, stage four is the AI employer okay? And the AI employer has stopped running tasks and started deploying employees. She has specific AI tools built for specific jobs. So not one AI that does everything, but a suite of AI employees, each one trained deeply for a specific function of the business. All right, so here at Addo Esthetics, I’m updating our org chart right now, but I feel like it’s like this constant progression because, as I said, by the end of the year we’ll have 100 plus AI employees.

Now we’re going through, and it’s not as complicated or expensive as it may sound. All right, so we have currently eight humans and 27 AI employees. 27 AI employees. Okay, and those AI employees are not just like sitting in a folder somewhere that nobody opens. They are active. They have jobs. My they’re being used on a daily basis. My team knows who they are and what they handle, which is the whole point of building an AI spa team, so that your humans know how to use those AI employees to support them in their role, or to offload the administrative tasks, so that the humans have more time to interact with the humans, right? So that’s really an important piece. Our AI employees are not replacing our humans; they are offloading the tasks so that we can have more human to human connection, so we can show up. We have the time availability to show up in a bigger way with our clients and support them in a different way. Okay, so my human team knows what these employees are, so they’re kind of designated for these are our marketing employees. These are our ops employees. These are our sales employees of our AI employees. They all go in different categories, and the appropriate humans have access to those AI employees. Okay. Now we started what one really cool thing with this. I.

Ask my team every so every week my with my human employees I do a what we call a scorecard right so we check in and we’re kind of going over their scorecard and I always ask them you know what feels heavy what’s your focus for next week and share a win that happened in the past week okay and the what feels heavy question is really important. That gives me the context of where I need to build next. So if there’s something that’s taking a lot of time or is frustrating, that gives me the direction of okay, I want to I want to lighten the load. I want to support this human employee, and you know, for Christy, a lot of times it was the inbox. She handles our customer support inbox, and you know now she has a AI employee that she can go and talk to. So if a question comes into the inbox and she’s not sure how to respond? She doesn’t have to track me down. She goes to the Coach Daniela project. She asks the question, and she gets an answer that reflects exactly how I think. Now we have AI employees for staff onboarding. We’ve recreated a lot of these. Actually, in Growth Factor implementation, we have an entire AI spa team that we build for our implementation members, and one of those AI employees is an onboarding employee. Okay, so we built this at an event. We had I think 15 people there going through and building, and what every single one of them said is this is going to save me a week of time, not days, but an actual week of time of what this interactive employee does. Now this is the coolest thing.

So if you if you have team members, right, you know that when you hire somebody, you’re going through the employee handbook, all the policies and procedures, the spa booking software, the protocols, like all of this administrative stuff that you’re going through, and it’s taking so much of your time. The AI employee, I can say, hi, I’m Daniela. I’m starting at the front desk today, and it’s going to walk me through a structured onboarding process. That’s going. It’s going to be interactive. It can quiz me. I can ask it questions, but it’s going to give me a very thorough onboarding that’s going to save the spa CEO a massive a week of their time. So think about how much lighter that is going to feel when you hire someone, and you don’t have to build in all of that time to set them up for success, right? It’s massive, and we know that employees leave when they don’t feel supported, when they don’t know what’s expected of them, right? So you’re building in these kind of guardrails to give them a more professional, a better overall experience working at your company. Okay. We also built an AI employee for spas that handles home care recommendations. So it’s think about if you have multiple providers, right? And you have a patient come in, and they go to provider A and they get this, you know, $1,200 home care regimen, and then they go to provider B and provider B recommends something totally different. That is going to break the trust of your patient, right? Because they’re going to say, “Man, I just spent $1,200. Was like doing the wrong thing, right? So what this AI home care employee recommender does is built to be customized off of your brain, off of your philosophy, right? This is not generic. This is custom trained for you, and then it’s going to recommend home care based off of the skin, like the Fitzpatrick type, the condition, the products that you’re carrying, your beliefs, all of those types of things. Incredible, right? It’s incredible. So that gives think about hiring a new person that doesn’t isn’t trained on the skincare lines that you have in your spa. Think about how much more supported that provider is going to feel by having these resources as a tool. Okay, so this is what I mean when I’m talking about an AI spa team. All right, so not AI that you use, AI that works in your business, whether you are there or not. Okay, and the thing about the AI employer stage, it’s not as complicated as it sounds.

You don’t have to have a tech background, right? It requires building systems. With intention. Now we and I will say there’s kind of like once you get to the employer stage, there’s kind of these additional layers where you can run things, you can schedule tasks, you can have these, you know, going automatically, right? So it’s you’re not having to be there. I mean, I get a report every single week on the performance of my coaching staff. I every single day, multiple times a day, I get a report for every single coaching call that my staff does. I’m not sitting there running that; it is running in the background automatically, and then I get the output. Right. So when you’re at the AI employer stage, then there’s all these additional levels that you can go to that are again going to free up more and more of your time. Okay, now let’s go back to stage two. Okay, let’s go back to stage two because this is a really frustrating stage, and this analogy really landed for me or helped me to understand it a little bit better. Okay, so imagine that you hired a team member, and this is a brilliant team member. And on their first day, you said, “Okay, here’s your task. Go do it. No onboarding. No context about the business, no explanation of how you communicate with clients, no standards to reference, no job description, just the task. Okay, if they’re an excellent candidate, right? They’re a good hire. The output they probably would be able to handle it, but they might be a little bit nervous. It wouldn’t be great, Right, so you would spend hours editing and correcting, and then the next day you do the exact same thing because nothing was documented, nothing was retrained. That’s stage two. All right, that’s the prompter, and the solution is not to get better at prompting. The solution is to onboard AI in the way that you would onboard a high-performing human employee. When you do that, you build the context, you load the voice, you create the instructions.

Everything changes. Okay, so AI stops feeling like a stranger that you have to manage and starts feeling like someone who actually knows your business. Okay, now I want to give you one question before we close. Spa owners who come to us, right? They’re using AI to do things faster, and that’s a fine goal. It’s a real improvement. But the owners who move into stage three and stage four, the AI employer, they’re asking a different question. Okay, they’re asking, does this task actually require me, or does it require someone who thinks like me? Those are not the same question. Okay, so the answer to the second one, that’s going to kind of expand your mind of what is possible, an AI employee who thinks like you can handle the first draft of a client email at 2p.m. while you’re in the treatment room. A trained AI project can review your social media content against your brand standards before it goes out. An onboarding AI employee can walk a new hire through your protocols, your culture, your standards, without you sitting in that room for a week. Right? You’re not being replaced. You’re being multiplied. That is a significant difference. Okay, how amazing would it be to have multiples of you in your business. Okay, so here’s where I land on all of this. The data is clear. The trajectory is clear. AI adoption is not optional for your business in 2026. Okay, I don’t know how to say that more clearly. I want to be extremely clear about this because I think that our industry has been slow to hear it. Right, the spa CEOs who are building AI spa teams right now-they’re going to run circles. Right, their cost, their operational costs will go so far down. Their standard of communication, their connection, their their time availability is going to go so up that it is going to make it so hard to compete. Okay, now don’t feel like you have to do this all at once. All right, you just need to know what stage you’re in right now and start to take baby steps to move into that next stage. Okay, if you’re in stage one, stop starting from scratch. Give AI full context every single time you open a session.

If you’re in stage two, your next move is to build a quad project. Your voice. We we use our eyes. Document we use our company bio. Our company bio encompasses so much of this. It’s a very robust document that we create. We want your standards, your frameworks, right? This is going to take one session for you to build, and then every other session after that is going to run so much faster. If you’re in stage three, I want you to ask what repetitive function of your business could you hand to a trained AI employee this quarter? And if you’re building towards stage four, you know where we are, right? The AI SPA team framework is what we build inside of Growth Factor implementation, one AI employee at a time, alongside you. Now, here’s your homework. All right, what stage are you in, and what’s the one thing that would move you forward to the next stage? That’s it. Right, action creates clarity. Don’t just listen. Do the thing, my friends. All right, so send me a DM on Instagram. Shoot us an email. Tell me what stage you’re at. Tell me. I want to know. I read everything. All right. Thank you so much, my dears. I will catch you in the next episode.

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EP 494: The Four Stages of AI Adoption Every Spa CEO Needs to Know
  • /
  • business, education, leadership

Most spa owners who feel like AI isn’t working for them are not in the wrong tool. They are in the wrong stage, and nobody gave them the map. The frustration, spending hours prompting, correcting, and re-explaining who you are every single session, is not a sign that AI doesn’t work for service businesses. It is a sign that you have skipped the step that makes it work. And skipping that step is so common it has its own name: Stage 2.

From Babysitter to Employer

The four stages of AI adoption inside a spa business follow a predictable arc. Stage 1 is the Copy-Paster, you find a tool, you type something in, you paste what comes out. It works occasionally. It is inconsistent. Every session starts from scratch with zero context about your business, your voice, or your clients. Stage 2 is the Prompter, you have gotten better at giving AI context, and the output is more consistent, but you are still the bottleneck for every single deliverable. You are re-explaining who you are every time you open a session. The analogy Daniela uses in this episode lands hard: imagine hiring a brilliant new team member and sending them into their first task with zero onboarding, no context about how you communicate with clients, no standards, no job description. Then doing the exact same thing the next day because nothing was ever documented. That is Stage 2.

The Shift That Changes Everything

Stage 3, The Trainer, is the shift that makes AI feel like it is actually working. The Trainer stops asking AI to do tasks and starts teaching AI how she thinks, loading her voice, her frameworks, her client context, and her standards into a Claude Project so that every session that follows runs with full context already loaded. The amount of back-and-forth drops dramatically. The output sounds like her. Stage 4, The AI Employer, is where Addo Aesthetics operates right now: eight humans, twenty-seven active AI employees, each one trained for a specific function of the business. AI for new hire onboarding. AI for home care recommendations across multiple providers. AI that reviews coaching call performance and delivers a report automatically every day. Not AI you use. AI that works in your business whether you are there or not.

The Growth Factor® Implementation program builds an AI Spa Team for every member, one employee at a time, alongside the operational and systems work, so the AI layer goes in at the same time the business structure is being built, not as an afterthought.

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About Your Host, Daniela Woerner

Daniela Woerner is the founder of Addo Aesthetics and creator of the Growth Factor® Framework, a proven system that’s helped hundreds of spa owners build profitable, systemized businesses. With nearly 20 years in the aesthetics industry, she transforms overworked aesthetic professionals into confident Spa CEOs through strategy, systems, and soul led support. Daniela is also the host of Spa Marketing Made Easy, a top ranked podcast with over 1 million downloads, where she shares real world strategies to help spa professionals grow with clarity and confidence.

Well, hello, my dears. Daniela here, and welcome to Spa Marketing Made Easy. Today we are talking about the four stages of adoption with AI that every single spa CEO needs to know. Okay, and when it comes to AI, I feel like we’ve kind of got two camps, right? So we’ve got on one side we’ve got the spa CEOs who are experimenting with AI. They know that it’s important. They’re putting in real time. They’re using it, but it really it still feels like, gosh, once they get something figured out, there’s already something new. And you know, I’m sorry to say that that’s just the way that it’s going to be for probably the next three to five years is is my guess because AI is it’s advancing so quickly. You may feel like learning AI is actually taking more of your time instead of saving you time. You may feel like the output doesn’t sound like you, like you’re going back and forth for hours, like you’re just babysitting the computer for every single task, and I want to give you a map of how to move past that stage. Now, you also on the other side, when I’m looking at like you know where people are at in their kind of what stage they’re in and their level of AI adoption. We’ve got those people, and then we’ve got like, oh yeah, I know ChatGPT. I use it to write an Instagram caption, but I’m so busy. I don’t really have any time to implement it in my business. You know, like it’s it’s something I’m aware of, but not using it in the day to day, something you’ll figure out when things slow down. Okay, this episode is for you as well because I want to talk about what is actually happening in the world right now and why waiting may cost you so much more than you realize. All right, so we’re going to walk through the four stages of AI adoption and what they look like inside of a spa business. I want you to know exactly where you’re at and what it takes to move to that next level. Because when you understand the gap, then you can have a plan to move there, and that is really, really important. Right, it’s one thing to be someone who’s, you know, dropping some, getting some Instagram captions versus someone who has AI employees running entire functions in her business. All right, so let’s walk through those stages. All right, but before we get into that, I want, I want to talk about some real numbers. I want to, I want to share some real data with you about AI and why I’m so passionate about this and why I talk about this on every single podcast episode. Because I believe deeply believe that it is so important for you to learn how to use this skill. Okay, most of what we hear about AI is either like wildly optimistic that AI is going to solve all of our human problems, and you know the world is going to be this kind of blissful place, or it’s like the whole other spectrum, genuinely alarming. AI is going to take all of our jobs.

The world is going to go into turmoil, right? Well, I want to give you kind of a middle of the ground, middle of the road approach. I want to give you a grounded, honest look at what is actually happening right now, because it is something that you need to take seriously, and nobody nobody knows what is actually going to happen or how this is going to lay out. We just have people speculating, but this is brand new. This is something that is brand new, so it is something that’s extremely important to take seriously as a business owner, though. All right. So McKinsey’s 2025 State of AI report surveyed nearly 2,000 organizations across 105 countries, and 88% of them now report using AI in at least one business function, okay. That is not experimental, right? This is in mainstream, right? And companies are getting real results, not using it, right? But getting integrating it so deeply into the way that work is actually Getting done, those companies they are pulling ahead at a pace that is hard to overstate.

Now Mo Godat, the former chief business officer at Google, he sat down with Stephen Bartlett on the Diary of a CEO, great podcast by the way. Some some of his guests are a little. Doom and gloom, but I do like listening to the interviews and hearing the wide variety of perspectives when it comes to AI. But on that episode, he plainly stated that upwards of 80% of the U.S. workforce could have at least 10% of their tasks automated, and the underlying technologies are doubling in capability every six to 12 months, compressing change that once took decades into a handful of years. Okay, so in the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report from 2025, put it this way: AI and information processing technologies will be the most disruptive force shaping the labor market over the next five years, outpacing everything else.

Now, here’s what that means for your spa: the businesses that are building AI into their operations now are not just writing captions, but building actual AI spa teams. Those businesses are going to operate at a speed and efficiency that non AI powered spas simply will not be able to match. Okay, I was talking about this in 2024. I believe it even more strongly today. By 2027, there is going to be a very visible divide between the spa CEOs who have adopted AI and the ones who kept waiting for a better time. Okay, and it’s it’s something that you know. What are we actually talking about? What is AI actually doing? It’s drastically lowering your operational cost. It’s drastically increasing your productivity. I’m going to tell you a little bit later in the episode about our team. We right now have eight humans on our team, and we have 27 AI employees, and we are on track by the end of this year to have over 100 AI employees. So it’s something that AI employees do not call out sick. You can give them tons and tons and tons and tons and tons of feedback without ever hurting their feelings. It’s they have expert level skills in a variety of different aspects. They can work 24 hours a day, right? So we’re talking about the the playing field will be no longer level, and so if you’re coming into business and you’re competing against someone who has an entire team of AI employees. It’s going to be extremely challenging to do so. Okay, so don’t just wait for a better time. The better time is now, and the way that you get there is by understanding where you’re actually at. Okay, so let me walk you through the framework, and I want you to listen to all four, and then just see which one kind of identifies with you. All right. So stage one is what I call the copy paster. Okay. So this is where everybody starts. Every single person. I started here. Everybody starts here, right? You find out about Claude or ChatGPT. You open it up. You type in a prompt. Something came out. Maybe it was a social media caption. Maybe it was a blog post. You thought, okay, this is cool. This is crazy that this all can work so fast. You copied the output. Output. Maybe you tweaked it a little bit, and then you pasted it somewhere. Right? Copy paste. It’s essentially like using a search engine, but with better grammar. Okay. So every single session starts from scratch. There is no context loaded, no understanding of the business, no memory of your voice. You’re essentially asking a new hire with zero training to do a skilled job, and then being surprised that the output doesn’t sound like you.

So you get results occasionally, but they’re inconsistent, and the time it takes to get something usable is often longer than just doing it yourself. Okay, so that is the stage one frustration. Stage two is the prompter, and this is where my guess is that most of you listening right now are. So you figured out the quality of your input determines the quality of your output. You’ve gotten better at giving AI context, at specifying your tone, at asking for the the things in the way that you want them, you’re getting more consistent results. And the prompter has started to feel the power of this. Right, she can get a good output. She can move faster on certain tasks.

 

But here’s the limitation. Right, you still have. Be there every single time. You are re-explaining who you are working with every single conversation. You’re rewriting the context. You’re resetting the tone. You’re re-specifying the task. You are not an AI user.

You are an AI babysitter. Now, this is a stage where most people spend most of the time, and this is where they feel so frustrated because they know enough to know how it works, but they’re losing their mind in these endless loops, wondering why it is taking so long. Now, I lived here for quite a while, like in 2024. I was playing with ChatGPT. I really started diving into blogs. I started taking courses. I started hiring consultants. By the way, side note: Claude has these really great free courses that you can have yourself or your team take. They’re going to give you the basic understanding of these things, so if you’re just wanting to even learn the language, that’s a great place to start. Now, this is the place also where you can be like, man, I’m spending so much time here, and I’m just like, I I don’t think this is working for me, right? I am the bottleneck for every single output, I actually have less time because I’m spending so much time trying to get AI to work. Well, once you move out of here, you move into stage three, the trainer. Okay, now this is the shift that changes everything. The trainer has moved from asking AI to do tasks and teaching AI how she thinks, she’s built quad projects. She’s loaded her company’s voice, her values, her frameworks, her context into the system. She’s created custom instructions that every time she opens a session, AI already knows who she is, who her clients are, who she, how she communicates, what her standards are. This is the difference between hiring a temp and hiring someone you spent six months training. All right, so the output from a trainer session is recognizable. It sounds like her. It reflects her methodology and the amount of back and forth, the prompting, the correcting, the no, try that again, drops dramatically. Right, so the trainer is still running tasks, but she’s running them in a fraction of the time, and the results are substantially better. Now, stage four is the AI employer okay? And the AI employer has stopped running tasks and started deploying employees. She has specific AI tools built for specific jobs. So not one AI that does everything, but a suite of AI employees, each one trained deeply for a specific function of the business. All right, so here at Addo Esthetics, I’m updating our org chart right now, but I feel like it’s like this constant progression because, as I said, by the end of the year we’ll have 100 plus AI employees.

Now we’re going through, and it’s not as complicated or expensive as it may sound. All right, so we have currently eight humans and 27 AI employees. 27 AI employees. Okay, and those AI employees are not just like sitting in a folder somewhere that nobody opens. They are active. They have jobs. My they’re being used on a daily basis. My team knows who they are and what they handle, which is the whole point of building an AI spa team, so that your humans know how to use those AI employees to support them in their role, or to offload the administrative tasks, so that the humans have more time to interact with the humans, right? So that’s really an important piece. Our AI employees are not replacing our humans; they are offloading the tasks so that we can have more human to human connection, so we can show up. We have the time availability to show up in a bigger way with our clients and support them in a different way. Okay, so my human team knows what these employees are, so they’re kind of designated for these are our marketing employees. These are our ops employees. These are our sales employees of our AI employees. They all go in different categories, and the appropriate humans have access to those AI employees. Okay. Now we started what one really cool thing with this. I.

Ask my team every so every week my with my human employees I do a what we call a scorecard right so we check in and we’re kind of going over their scorecard and I always ask them you know what feels heavy what’s your focus for next week and share a win that happened in the past week okay and the what feels heavy question is really important. That gives me the context of where I need to build next. So if there’s something that’s taking a lot of time or is frustrating, that gives me the direction of okay, I want to I want to lighten the load. I want to support this human employee, and you know, for Christy, a lot of times it was the inbox. She handles our customer support inbox, and you know now she has a AI employee that she can go and talk to. So if a question comes into the inbox and she’s not sure how to respond? She doesn’t have to track me down. She goes to the Coach Daniela project. She asks the question, and she gets an answer that reflects exactly how I think. Now we have AI employees for staff onboarding. We’ve recreated a lot of these. Actually, in Growth Factor implementation, we have an entire AI spa team that we build for our implementation members, and one of those AI employees is an onboarding employee. Okay, so we built this at an event. We had I think 15 people there going through and building, and what every single one of them said is this is going to save me a week of time, not days, but an actual week of time of what this interactive employee does. Now this is the coolest thing.

So if you if you have team members, right, you know that when you hire somebody, you’re going through the employee handbook, all the policies and procedures, the spa booking software, the protocols, like all of this administrative stuff that you’re going through, and it’s taking so much of your time. The AI employee, I can say, hi, I’m Daniela. I’m starting at the front desk today, and it’s going to walk me through a structured onboarding process. That’s going. It’s going to be interactive. It can quiz me. I can ask it questions, but it’s going to give me a very thorough onboarding that’s going to save the spa CEO a massive a week of their time. So think about how much lighter that is going to feel when you hire someone, and you don’t have to build in all of that time to set them up for success, right? It’s massive, and we know that employees leave when they don’t feel supported, when they don’t know what’s expected of them, right? So you’re building in these kind of guardrails to give them a more professional, a better overall experience working at your company. Okay. We also built an AI employee for spas that handles home care recommendations. So it’s think about if you have multiple providers, right? And you have a patient come in, and they go to provider A and they get this, you know, $1,200 home care regimen, and then they go to provider B and provider B recommends something totally different. That is going to break the trust of your patient, right? Because they’re going to say, “Man, I just spent $1,200. Was like doing the wrong thing, right? So what this AI home care employee recommender does is built to be customized off of your brain, off of your philosophy, right? This is not generic. This is custom trained for you, and then it’s going to recommend home care based off of the skin, like the Fitzpatrick type, the condition, the products that you’re carrying, your beliefs, all of those types of things. Incredible, right? It’s incredible. So that gives think about hiring a new person that doesn’t isn’t trained on the skincare lines that you have in your spa. Think about how much more supported that provider is going to feel by having these resources as a tool. Okay, so this is what I mean when I’m talking about an AI spa team. All right, so not AI that you use, AI that works in your business, whether you are there or not. Okay, and the thing about the AI employer stage, it’s not as complicated as it sounds.

You don’t have to have a tech background, right? It requires building systems. With intention. Now we and I will say there’s kind of like once you get to the employer stage, there’s kind of these additional layers where you can run things, you can schedule tasks, you can have these, you know, going automatically, right? So it’s you’re not having to be there. I mean, I get a report every single week on the performance of my coaching staff. I every single day, multiple times a day, I get a report for every single coaching call that my staff does. I’m not sitting there running that; it is running in the background automatically, and then I get the output. Right. So when you’re at the AI employer stage, then there’s all these additional levels that you can go to that are again going to free up more and more of your time. Okay, now let’s go back to stage two. Okay, let’s go back to stage two because this is a really frustrating stage, and this analogy really landed for me or helped me to understand it a little bit better. Okay, so imagine that you hired a team member, and this is a brilliant team member. And on their first day, you said, “Okay, here’s your task. Go do it. No onboarding. No context about the business, no explanation of how you communicate with clients, no standards to reference, no job description, just the task. Okay, if they’re an excellent candidate, right? They’re a good hire. The output they probably would be able to handle it, but they might be a little bit nervous. It wouldn’t be great, Right, so you would spend hours editing and correcting, and then the next day you do the exact same thing because nothing was documented, nothing was retrained. That’s stage two. All right, that’s the prompter, and the solution is not to get better at prompting. The solution is to onboard AI in the way that you would onboard a high-performing human employee. When you do that, you build the context, you load the voice, you create the instructions.

Everything changes. Okay, so AI stops feeling like a stranger that you have to manage and starts feeling like someone who actually knows your business. Okay, now I want to give you one question before we close. Spa owners who come to us, right? They’re using AI to do things faster, and that’s a fine goal. It’s a real improvement. But the owners who move into stage three and stage four, the AI employer, they’re asking a different question. Okay, they’re asking, does this task actually require me, or does it require someone who thinks like me? Those are not the same question. Okay, so the answer to the second one, that’s going to kind of expand your mind of what is possible, an AI employee who thinks like you can handle the first draft of a client email at 2p.m. while you’re in the treatment room. A trained AI project can review your social media content against your brand standards before it goes out. An onboarding AI employee can walk a new hire through your protocols, your culture, your standards, without you sitting in that room for a week. Right? You’re not being replaced. You’re being multiplied. That is a significant difference. Okay, how amazing would it be to have multiples of you in your business. Okay, so here’s where I land on all of this. The data is clear. The trajectory is clear. AI adoption is not optional for your business in 2026. Okay, I don’t know how to say that more clearly. I want to be extremely clear about this because I think that our industry has been slow to hear it. Right, the spa CEOs who are building AI spa teams right now-they’re going to run circles. Right, their cost, their operational costs will go so far down. Their standard of communication, their connection, their their time availability is going to go so up that it is going to make it so hard to compete. Okay, now don’t feel like you have to do this all at once. All right, you just need to know what stage you’re in right now and start to take baby steps to move into that next stage. Okay, if you’re in stage one, stop starting from scratch. Give AI full context every single time you open a session.

If you’re in stage two, your next move is to build a quad project. Your voice. We we use our eyes. Document we use our company bio. Our company bio encompasses so much of this. It’s a very robust document that we create. We want your standards, your frameworks, right? This is going to take one session for you to build, and then every other session after that is going to run so much faster. If you’re in stage three, I want you to ask what repetitive function of your business could you hand to a trained AI employee this quarter? And if you’re building towards stage four, you know where we are, right? The AI SPA team framework is what we build inside of Growth Factor implementation, one AI employee at a time, alongside you. Now, here’s your homework. All right, what stage are you in, and what’s the one thing that would move you forward to the next stage? That’s it. Right, action creates clarity. Don’t just listen. Do the thing, my friends. All right, so send me a DM on Instagram. Shoot us an email. Tell me what stage you’re at. Tell me. I want to know. I read everything. All right. Thank you so much, my dears. I will catch you in the next episode.

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EP 493: You Can’t Be the CEO and Stay in the Treatment Room
  • /
  • business, leadership, marketing

You keep telling yourself that once you get through this next stretch, things will settle down. Once you find a front desk person. Once your new provider is fully booked. Once you finish paying off the device. And you believe it every time, because you are not a lazy person, you are someone who follows through, and you have done hard things before.

The problem is not your discipline. The problem is that your business was built to need you as the structure. And a business that requires you to be everywhere, all the time, cannot grow beyond what you can personally hold.

When Hustle Becomes a Ceiling

There is nothing wrong with a hustle season. Daniela has been in several, when she started in aesthetics, when she built Addo, and again in 2025 when the team restructured the entire business. Hustle seasons are part of entrepreneurship. But they must be seasons. When the season becomes permanent, the owner stops being an asset and starts being the bottleneck, and this is where businesses stall out even when the owner is talented, motivated, and genuinely working as hard as she can.

In EP493 of Spa Marketing Made Easy, Daniela draws the line between the two: a temporary hustle season that is building toward something, and a permanent structure that makes the next hustle season feel inevitable. The distinction matters because the fix is completely different in each case.

The CEO Role That Isn’t Getting Done

When a spa owner is in the treatment room four days a week, something real is missing from her business. Not marketing attention, not better systems (though those matter too), but the CEO work: analyzing the financials, developing the team, forecasting revenue, building community relationships, holding the vision for where the business is going. One of Daniela’s clients got down to two days in the room, started doing that work, and called three months later saying she didn’t know how she’d ever go back to four days, because she finally saw everything that had gone undone.

That is what stepping into the Growth Factor® Implementation process looks like in practice. The work is not adding more to what you’re already carrying. It is identifying, at a structural level, what genuinely requires you, what can be delegated, and what can now be handled by AI (addoaesthetics.com/growth-factor). And Daniela gives you the first step in this episode: one week of time tracking, every 15 minutes, to see exactly what is actually on your plate.

The time-tracking assignment sounds simple. But Daniela walks through why most spa owners who do it are surprised by what they find, the exact moments in her own week where she had to reckon with whether she was using herself in the highest possible way, and what she changed when she wasn’t.

Want to break past $25K–$35K months without adding more treatment hours?

Watch The Systems Shift and learn how 600+ spa owners are scaling into their Spa CEO role (without sacrificing family time or sanity).

Watch Here

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About Your Host, Daniela Woerner

Daniela Woerner is the founder of Addo Aesthetics and creator of the Growth Factor® Framework, a proven system that’s helped hundreds of spa owners build profitable, systemized businesses. With nearly 20 years in the aesthetics industry, she transforms overworked aesthetic professionals into confident Spa CEOs through strategy, systems, and soul led support. Daniela is also the host of Spa Marketing Made Easy, a top ranked podcast with over 1 million downloads, where she shares real world strategies to help spa professionals grow with clarity and confidence.

Well, hello, my dears. Daniela here, and welcome to Spa Marketing Made Easy. I have a great episode for you today, and I’m going to talk to kind of two different groups of people, right? So, if you are someone who is in the middle of what feels like this never-ending hustle season right now, right? And when I say hustle season, I’m saying if you’re telling yourself that once you get through this particular stretch, once you find someone for front desk, once you hire your next provider, once you finish paying your device off, once you get your your build out. You can move into your new location. Things are going to settle down, and you’re finally going to be able to breathe. Okay, we’ve got a hustle season, but what’s really interesting? I’m also going to be talking to our businesses that are operationally mature, that have been in business for you know, 2530 years, there’s something that’s going on right now in our industry, in in the world, with AI that is changing the way that we are handling our operations.

So whether it’s that like hustle season as you’re kind of building your business, I really kind of identify that as years one through five, or if you’re operationally mature and you’re now having to go back and rebuild and rethink the way that you do things, even if you have built this kind of boring business model. Which I mean, I say that in the best way, like we’re all working towards the boring business to be able to get to that place. I want you to pay attention, right? I want you to pay attention to this episode because there’s a lot that we can learn from one another, and there’s a lot that’s happening for you know whatever end of the scale you are on with the day to day of how business is is working in 2026 Okay, so I was on a call with a CRNA. She’s a anesthesia nurse, and she had not had a day off in two months. Okay, now I want you to picture her day because this may you may may or may not be able to relate to this, but I unfortunately have heard this more often than I would care to hear this. But she wakes up before her kids are awake, right? She’s already on her laptop. She’s doing email. She’s doing administrative tasks. She’s paying her quarterly taxes. She’s doing payroll. All this before her kids get up, right? Then, you know, depending on the day it is, she’s either going to go to the hospital and do her anesthesia shift, or she’s going to go into the med spa and see her patients. She’s going to do that, right? Because she’s still working anesthesia to be able to support the med spa as she’s building it. Then she’s going to come home. She’s going to have a little bit of time with her kids.

She’s going to put them to bed, and once they’re in bed, she’s going to hop back on the computer until 10 or 11 at night, right? Every day, every single day, and the thing is, she is her business’s greatest asset, and she is exhausted. She is drained. She is pouring from an empty cup right now. Okay, now this level of exhaustion. This is not just tired, right? This is exhausted. This gets into your bones, right? And this is something that is not sustainable. But here’s the thing: like she’s not failing. She is a very educated, very clinically competent person, she’s building a fast-growing spa. She’s got a vision for what she wants to build. She’s doing everything that she believes she’s supposed to be doing for this season, and yet she has not had a day off in two months. Right? This is what burnout looks like in our industry doesn’t always look like a breakdown, right? It often looks like a woman who’s showing up, who’s performing at a high level, who’s at the hospital, who’s in the med spa, who’s still being a present mother, who’s still running completely empty behind the scenes. Okay, competence and exhaustion living in the same body. So, what I want to talk about today, what I want to get into a little bit more, is is not whether you’re burned out. I want to get into something a little more specific.

Is is the structure of your business built in a way that. Can sustain you, or is it built in a way that requires you to be the structure? Okay, now I do not attract lazy people. I do not attract undisciplined people. Right, we actually attract a lot of Type A individuals, high achievers, very clinically excellent, big vision, incredible humans, but they are stuck in this pattern, right? It’s the once I finish this thing, once I get this particular piece in place, but the once never arrives, right? Because the business is constantly, as it’s growing and evolving, it’s creating new demands, right? And at the same rate or faster, then she’s solving the demands. So it can feel like, gosh, I’m this once. There’s always a new once. There’s always a new thing that just keeps keeps coming and keeps coming and keeps coming, and yet she is exhausted. She needs a day off. She’s running on nothing. Okay, now there is an order of operations here, and there are things that you can pass off that will free up. Like we have a whole process to go through and identify. Like what is going to get off of your plate? How can we free up? You know, five to 10 hours right away. Whether that’s through AI, whether that’s through you know delegation, whatever it is, right? But figuring out those things, what those things are, is not one size fits all. It’s different for every person. It’s different for every business model. But the actual analysis itself, actually sitting down and and getting real on like what genuinely requires me and what could be handled by someone or something else? That’s CEO work, right? That’s how you break the cycle.

And the thing is, most spa owners are in this like fight or flight hustle type of mode that they’re so deep in the doing to even be able to see that there’s a way out, right? And and there’s hustle seasons for sure, right? Like I I have been in hustle seasons multiple times. You know, when I started at esthetics, when I started at a wellness institute. There’s there’s even in 2025, right? When we completely restructured our entire business. There’s been moments where I felt very much like a hustle season, but it was just that a season, right? So it’s not like it’s bad to have those. It’s kind of a part of entrepreneurship, but it must be a season. There is a point. There has to be a point where that season evolves into something that is more sustainable. Otherwise, you become the biggest ceiling in your own business. You become the bottleneck, and I think this is why so many businesses fail: is because owners are not able to get out of that season. Now I want to kind of shift and go to our business owners who have reached operational maturity, right? And what I mean by that when I say operational maturity, I’m just talking about a business that, for a lack of a better term, is like a boring, you know, business. Things are working just fine.

They’ve got consistent operations. They’ve got clear systems. They have a team who knows what to do without the owner running every single play, right? And this is the goal, right? We want a business that can generate money. You can walk into your spa on a Monday. Things are running. Your team knows their priorities. The client experience is consistent. The numbers are being tracked. Someone’s paying attention to them, and your presence there is about leadership and vision rather than execution and triage. Okay, that quiet, consistent hum. That’s a win. That’s what we are all building towards. But here’s the deal, right? We are what’s happening right now in 2026. What’s been happening for the past couple of years is we are in this like AI age, right? And we have spa owners who have been in business for 30 years. They are operationally mature. They have incredible systems. They have strong teams. They have brand recognition and community trust that took decades to build. So they’re doing great. But right now, AI is moving into the way that we run data. Operations.

We are bringing on AI employees, so even those owners are having to rethink everything: the roles in their business, the systems that they built years ago, the cost structure that they’ve been running on. All of it is being reevaluated because staying competitive in this environment absolutely requires it. Okay, so every single spa business, regardless of how long you’ve been operating, we’re in a build phase right now, friends. All right, not starting from zero, not throwing away what you build, but you are building, rebuilding the infrastructure of how your business runs, and you’re doing it from a place of so much more knowledge than you had at year one. And if you’re just starting your practice, if you’re just starting your spa, you get to do this, you know, from the beginning. Now, for those of you that are at have have achieved this great level of success with this operational maturity that might trigger something in you. You might feel like you’re going backwards. You might feel like you should be past this, but I want you to let that feeling go because it is not going backwards. It is a CEO looking at her business and deciding what needs to be rebuilt to stay relevant, efficient, and sustainable. All right. So, when a spa owner is trying to grow or when they’re feeling stuck, the first instinct almost always is to look outward. Right? We maybe we want to get a new machine. Right? Maybe that’s how we’re going to compete. Maybe we want to bring in a new skincare line. Maybe there’s some marketing trend. Maybe there’s a new social media strategy. They’re looking for the thing that’s going to change the trajectory, right? And sometimes a new treatment, a new machine. Sometimes that is the right move, right? I’m not saying that it isn’t, but your business does not need another trend. It needs a model that can support the trend.

All right. So when you’re clear on who you’re here to serve, the trends actually get more simple. Right. Because the question is no longer what is everyone doing? It becomes. Does this matter to her? Right. Think about this with like head spa. If you are someone who like like for certain businesses, a head spa is the most incredible thing, and for other businesses it is such a trend that is going to eventually like pull them off track and not make them any money, and we can see that with so many different types of devices, right? So, if it belongs in your business or if it doesn’t belong in your business, should be determined by who your ICA is, your ideal client avatar doesn’t matter how popular it is, you know, on Instagram it matters is it popular for your ICA? Okay, so a business that has clear systems and has a specific sense of where your revenue comes from. Great, you can take a new trend, you can scale it, but a business that is built around the owner’s capacity to keep doing more things cannot. Okay, so it’s going to take the trend and it’s going to add one more thing to everything else that she is carrying. That’s why sometimes no is the most powerful word that will come out of your mouth, right? No is a complete sentence. You do not have to say yes to every trend to everything. You gotta sometimes put your blinders on and go full speed ahead with what you know is right for you. Now, when I have a client, I’m going to shift a little bit here. When I have a client that steps out of the treatment room, and this is again a thing that I hear a lot because when they either get out of the treatment room, they’re like, “What am I supposed to be doing? or “I don’t feel needed.

There’s all kinds of emotions that come up, right? And I had one client early in our work together, and I said, “Listen, I want your main focus this year to be getting out of the room. And she thought I was out of my mind. Okay, she was like, “Okay, I’ll get down to two days a week. That was our compromise. That was what felt manageable to her, mostly because she just couldn’t imagine what she was going to do with herself.

You know, what would she need all that time? She liked what she was doing, so she’s like, “What on earth am I going to be filling my time with if I’m not seeing patients? Well, a few months later, she called me. She’d gotten down to two days a week. She started doing the actual CEO work. She’s in. Analyzing her financials, she’s developing her team. She’s forecasting revenue. She’s building relationships in the community. She’s creating the vision of what she wants her business to look like. And she said, “I don’t know how I can handle two days in the room. I got to get fully out. Like there is so much to do. And it was so. It was so funny. There’s so much more that she didn’t even see. Right? She was like, I felt like I had blinders on because my mind couldn’t even comprehend the things that weren’t getting done in my business because I was so focused on the patient in front of me. Right? This is normal, guys. This is a normal thing, and this is just your maximum when you are kind of at capacity in the room. You’re excellent at your clinical work.

You’re fully present for your patient, and you have nothing left to see what is happening on the other side of the door. Okay, so here’s the question that I want you to sit with: If you are being the provider, who is being the CEO? If you are the provider, who is the CEO? Not could someone else do it? Not could my clients be okay with me? But that question, who is being the CEO? Because those two roles are not the same job, and your business needs both. Now, again, when you are in the beginning, so the CRNA that I was talking about-that’s in the the beginning kind of hustle mode. It’s normal to have that. Like it’s normal for her to start out in the room, and it’s actually good for her to start in the room because then, as she works her way out, she’s going to be able to build her systems in such a better way. But when you get to a certain point in your business, stepping out and stepping into that role of CEO is absolutely essential. Okay, you are your business’s greatest asset-not your equipment, not your location, not your social media presence, not your email list. You, okay. Your vision, your relationships, your expertise, your ability to make decisions, your ability to lead a team, and see where your business needs to go. Okay, are you treating yourself as such? Are you treating yourself as if you are the greatest asset of your business. If you are in the treatment room four days a week, are you using your greatest asset in the highest possible way? Maybe you are in this season, but for many, the answer is no. And I want you to really look at that. I want you to think deeply about that. Okay. Now, if there is a version of you that is not visible right now-a CEO version, a leader who has the capacity to analyze what’s working and what isn’t-your business is operating without that greatest asset. That is low-hanging fruit, my dears. That is something you can change. So really think about the way that you’re building your business, the structure of it. Don’t chase trends. Build something sustainable. Build something that you can lead and step into that role of CEO. Okay. Now, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to do an honest week of time tracking. Write down what you’re actually doing with your time, hour by hour. When we do this with our clients, we actually have them do every 15 minutes, and we break down. Hey, what are we going to get off of the list right now? We’re going to delegate. We’re going to delete. You know what are what are the things that actually need to be there to help you move out of this season, right? I don’t want you to follow a trend or add a new piece of equipment.

 

I want you to build something that will be long term sustainable, and it’s especially important in the season that we are in right now, where every business on every end of the spectrum, whether you’re starting out or whether you’re in operational maturity, we are rebuilding. We are changing the way that we run our operations. Okay, so this is an opportunity to build something that supports you in the way, the life that you want to build for yourself. Okay. All right. So I hope that this episode helps. I hope that you do the time tracker. I hope you can free up, you know, five hours of your time every single week. Create those boundaries for yourself. It is so incredibly important.

Okay, so let me know how this episode landed for you. Send me a DM. Send us an email. We want to create. Keep creating content that serves you. So let us. Know what you need more of right now. All right, I’ll catch you on the next episode.

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EP 492: Your Midyear Spa Business Audit
  • /
  • business, education, marketing

You have been measuring the wrong thing. Not because you don’t care about the numbers, but because the number everyone talks about, revenue, is the one that tells you the least about the health of your business. A spa doing $600,000 a year with $590,000 in expenses is not a thriving business. It is an expensive hobby. Profit is what pays you, what funds your reserves, and what lets you grow without white-knuckling every slow week. If you have been chasing revenue and wondering why it doesn’t feel like enough, that is the reframe this episode is built on.

The numbers that actually matter at the midyear mark

Most spa owners pull their total revenue and compare it to their annual goal. That number tells you almost nothing useful on its own. What matters is how your revenue is tracking against your actual seasonality, where Q4 and Q1 carry a disproportionate share of the year. It also matters whether your retail sales are keeping pace: day spas should be hitting a 50% retail-to-service ratio, and true med spas around 30%. These are not aspirational benchmarks. They are operational standards, and if you are below them, you are leaving money on the table from clients who are already purchasing those products, just not from you. Research shows that a client who buys three or more retail products has a 90% likelihood of returning for a service. That statistic is sitting in your current client base right now.

The audit most spa owners skip: cost of treatment

Daniela has worked with spa owners whose menus included services that were actively losing money on every booking. Not because the practice was struggling overall, the lights were on and payroll was covered, but because the higher-margin services were silently carrying the low-margin ones. Two services priced at $299 can have completely different profitability profiles depending on consumables and payroll cost, and if you don’t know which one is which, you may be promoting the wrong one. Growth Factor® Implementation includes a full client acquisition cost tracker and cost-of-treatment analysis that surfaces exactly this, the overlap between your most profitable services and the ones that actually serve your clients well (internal link: addoaesthetics.com/growth-factor). That intersection is where your Q4 strategy should be focused.

This episode also covers the operations questions you need to answer before Q4 arrives: whether your team has genuine ownership of their domains, whether your onboarding is documented or still living in your head, and whether your marketing is set up to run consistently even when you’re slammed. If the answer to any of those is no, the episode walks you through where to start.

What you will not get from reading this is the moment Daniela describes making one of the hardest decisions of her career, shutting down a comfortable seven-figure business and rebuilding from the ground up because she knew something had to change. That part requires listening. It’s the one that will make this audit feel worth doing.

Want to break past $25K–$35K months without adding more treatment hours?

Watch The Systems Shift and learn how 600+ spa owners are scaling into their Spa CEO role (without sacrificing family time or sanity).

Watch Here

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About Your Host, Daniela Woerner

Daniela Woerner is the founder of Addo Aesthetics and creator of the Growth Factor® Framework, a proven system that’s helped hundreds of spa owners build profitable, systemized businesses. With nearly 20 years in the aesthetics industry, she transforms overworked aesthetic professionals into confident Spa CEOs through strategy, systems, and soul led support. Daniela is also the host of Spa Marketing Made Easy, a top ranked podcast with over 1 million downloads, where she shares real world strategies to help spa professionals grow with clarity and confidence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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EP 491: Why Delegation Fails: Handoff, Ownership, and the Fix
  • /
  • business, education, leadership

You’ve handed it off. You’ve explained it. You’ve even created a checklist. And two weeks later, it’s back on your desk. If this pattern is playing on repeat inside your spa, the instinct is to blame execution. The real problem is almost always upstream from that — either the handoff was unclear, or the system wasn’t maintained after the handoff. Those are two different problems with two different fixes, and mixing them up is why the same delegation failure happens over and over.

The Handoff Isn’t Just Instructions — It’s the Full System

Most spa owners hand their team the leak: the task, the deadline, the checklist. What they don’t hand them is the plumbing. When a team member doesn’t understand what’s upstream and downstream of their piece — what breaks if their one task doesn’t happen correctly — they’ll execute exactly what they were told and still produce the wrong outcome. The execution is fine. The system context was missing.

The fix isn’t a better checklist. It’s showing your team the full system first. Why does this task exist? What does it connect to? What does the client experience look like if this one piece goes wrong? When people understand the ecosystem they’re working inside, they stop completing tasks and start protecting outcomes. That shift is the difference between a handoff that holds and one that unravels by week two.

Daniela’s team ran into this directly when they rebuilt their entire production workflow around AI. Processes they had run for a decade were suddenly new again. The team was still operating on the old mental model while the actual system had changed. The fix wasn’t a performance conversation. It was recommitting to Monday.com as the single source of truth — where the new order of operations lived, where every task had a named owner, and where nothing was assumed to be running without being checked.

Assigning Tasks vs. Delegating Ownership — They Are Not the Same

There is a meaningful difference between handing someone a task and handing them a domain. A task keeps you in the loop on every decision. A domain gives your team member both the responsibility and the authority to handle what comes up — without running it back to you every time something wasn’t in the original instructions.

Most spa owners want their team to take ownership, but have never explicitly handed it over. The team member didn’t realize they had the authority. The owner assumed they knew. That’s a communication gap — and it shows up constantly in Growth Factor® Implementation when Spa CEOs and their managers are finally in the room together mapping out what ownership actually looks like. When someone owns a domain, they show up completely differently than when they’re completing a task. That distinction is worth getting specific about with every person on your team.

The full episode walks through both failure modes with real examples from Daniela’s own team — including the moment she realized she couldn’t answer a single logistics question about her own event, and why that’s exactly what success looks like. The exact framework she uses to diagnose which delegation failure you’re dealing with, and the specific fix for each, is in EP491 of Spa Marketing Made Easy.

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About Your Host, Daniela Woerner

Daniela Woerner is the founder of Addo Aesthetics and creator of the Growth Factor® Framework, a proven system that’s helped hundreds of spa owners build profitable, systemized businesses. With nearly 20 years in the aesthetics industry, she transforms overworked aesthetic professionals into confident Spa CEOs through strategy, systems, and soul led support. Daniela is also the host of Spa Marketing Made Easy, a top ranked podcast with over 1 million downloads, where she shares real world strategies to help spa professionals grow with clarity and confidence.

Well, hello, my dears. Daniela here, and welcome to Spa Marketing Made Easy. Today, we are talking about something that every single spa owner has experienced at least once, and most of us have experienced more times than we would like to admit. We’re talking about why delegation fails, not why your team fails, not why you fail, but why delegation as a system fails, and what you can do about it the next time you hand something off, so that it actually stays handed off. Now this episode is a part of our July theme of freedom and delegation, and I want to start with something that I think is really important to understand. Okay, so delegation, similar to leadership, is a skill. It’s something that you can learn, it’s something that you can improve upon. Okay, it’s not something that you like, have a gift for, or you don’t. It’s a skill, it’s a system, and every skill and system you have in your business can be improved upon and can get better and better and better when you understand it in a deeper way. If you understand what’s actually breaking it, right, you can fix that thing. So, let’s talk about what breaks delegation. Now, there’s two specific places where I consistently see delegation breaking down. The first is the handoff itself, all right, so actually giving something to your spa manager, giving something to your staff, whatever that looks like for you, that’s one place where we see a lot of things breaking. The second is in the ongoing management of that item or task that was handed off. Right, we’re going to walk through both. They both have very different fixes, but in order for either of those fixes to work, the one kind of universal thing is that your team has to understand the big picture, not just that the task or the deadline, but they’ve got to understand the why behind the task. What does it connect to? What breaks, what breaks downstream if this one particular thing doesn’t happen. Okay, so it’s got to be like the entire ecosystem. Now I have a story I want to share with you. This was such a crazy, crazy moment. It was Christmas Eve, Eve. I don’t even know if that’s the day, but the day before Christmas Eve, okay, in 2025 and you know it’s always like such a busy time. It’s end of year, school’s getting out, you’re getting ready for, you know, Christmas, if that’s a holiday that you celebrate.

And Tay and I were like, okay, we are ready, we’re gonna have a mama date. We, she had just taken a relaxing bubble bath. We got in our jammies, we’re getting all settled in on the couch for just like a mom and daughter date night. Taa is like obsessed with baking, and so we were gonna watch the junior baking show. I don’t know if you guys have ever watched that, but it’s awesome. And we sat down on the couch, we were kind of snuggling, and all of a sudden there was literally this stream of water coming down from the ceiling. It was, it was dripping onto my coffee table, and I was like, “Oh my god, we gotta call Daddy right now. So I call Kyle. He obviously he came right home, and the moment he walked in, Kyle just started like ripping apart the ceiling, right? He had to find where the leak was coming from, and the thing is, with plumbing, it’s you think you found the problem, but then it like connects to something else, and that connects to something else, and then suddenly you’re looking at this whole like cascading system of issues that you didn’t even know existed. We ended up, like, thank God my neighbor is a plumber, but we ended up having to get an entire new water heater, and we had something wrong with our actual bathtub, like shower sprayer thing, so two totally separate problems, and Christmas Eve Eve, right, but what became very clear is that you cannot fix a plumbing problem if you only understand the one spot that the water was coming out, right. You have to understand the entire system, how everything connects, where the pressure lives, what feeds what. Because fixing one thing without understanding the whole thing means you’re going to be ripping the ceiling out again in six months, delegate.

Shin works in exactly the same way. Now, most spa owners are just gonna hand their team the leak. Here’s the task, right? Here’s the deadline. Go, and the team member doesn’t understand how everything connects. All right, they, they do exactly what they’re told to do, right, because that’s what they were given, but they don’t know what’s upstream, they don’t know what’s downstream, they don’t know what breaks if this one piece doesn’t happen correctly, and so when something goes sideways, when a client doesn’t get the follow-up they need, or a post goes out wrong, or a document isn’t gathered before a call, the instinct is to blame the execution, but the execution was fine. The problem was the person executing didn’t understand the full system that they were working inside. So, when your team understands the big picture, the individual task, they start to make sense in a way that they just simply couldn’t have if you didn’t have the checklist, okay? So, before we get into the mechanics of a good handoff, I want you to ask yourself, does my team actually understand what we’re trying to build? Have I shown them the full system, or have I just, like, pointed to the leak? Right, do I just show them the water coming down from the ceiling without understanding how everything connects. Okay, so now let’s get into the handoff itself, because even if your team understands the very big picture, the handoffs can still break down, and it usually breaks down in a very specific way, so if, if you have been a longtime listener, you know that 2025 was a, like, the year of the phoenix for us, it was this year of reinvention, this year of transformation, and it’s funny, 2025 because five is a number of transformation, if you’re into numerology, but for us, we had completely shut down the previous version of Growth Factor to rebuild it around AI to make the AI integration the core of what we deliver, which is what we’re doing now, so often is building AI employees for spa owners to help them streamline their operations to help them build more profitable spas, so AI is not just an add on or not just an afterthought, but the central one of the central features of the program.

Okay, well, because of that, and because we are using so much AI in our day to day operation, that meant every day everybody is doing a new SOP, and it, you know, now we’re in 2026 and still every day everybody is doing a new SOP, because AI transitions and changes so fast, especially in the past like three months, guys, it is like light speed out there at how fast things are advancing, so we’re talking about new SOPs, new processes, new workflows, new ways of doing things that we had been already doing for a decade, right. We completely changed the way that we produce this podcast, and we’re now almost on our 500th episode. You know, I mean, like we were running this thing like a well-oiled machine, and now we completely changed the way that we were doing things, so all of a sudden we started making silly mistakes, we started missing things, and the thing was it wasn’t just one department, it was in marketing, it was in operations, it was in fulfillment, but they all could be traced back to the same root cause, and that was we were not living and breathing in monday.com which is our operational hub. Okay, and here’s the deal, guys. It’s not that we were like just trying to be sloppy and not following the rules. It was that our processes, because we had been doing this for so long, they were so embedded, so automatic over the years, that it was sort of like riding a bike for us. We knew what we were doing, but then we changed everything. We changed, and we added these steps that were actually really important to the process, and because the process was kind of shifting underneath us, we were still operating as if the old system is was in place, and so we were missing things, and the solution was making sure that we were going back to the board. We had to go back to the board and understand the new order of operations.

We had to verify that these steps were being completed, and it was. Hard for me, because I was like, when I was still trying to figure out what was going on, I was like, this is like something that happens in year one or two, not like year 12, you know, but again, what I learned through that process is that the system only works when everyone is actively using the system. Okay, I want to say that again, because one of the issues that I have seen with our spa owners is, yeah, I’ve got the system for it, I’ve got the policy for it, I’ve got the Monday board for it, but nobody’s using it, nobody’s enforcing the policy, nobody’s checking the SOPs, nobody’s using the Monday board, and so if you’re not doing those things, of course, the system’s going to break. Okay, so it’s really important that you don’t assume the system is running without checking the system, right, you’ve got to have these checks and balances for a reason. Now, since we’ve recommitted, and I say recommitted, right, to Monday as the non-negotiable central hub of operations, the level of friction across our team has dropped dramatically, so every task lives there, every deadline lives there, every single person knows where to look, and when something isn’t happening, I can see it without having to chase everybody down. Okay, so if you have a project management system, I highly recommend monday.com There’s a whole bunch that are out there, but make sure that your team is actually using it in the day to day. Okay, that is super important. Now, let’s talk about something that oftentimes gets overlooked, and when we’re kind of going through or implementing the system or changing things, and that’s actually how your team communicates and how your team processes information.

So, something that I learned about myself after years and years of coaching, and it became pretty apparent when I started doing group coaching calls, was that I am very much a verbal processor. I need to hear things, so oftentimes when we’re doing a group coaching call, people are typing these really long comments into the chat, and I just have, can you please unmute? Can you please unmute and tell me, because I’m going to understand in such a better way. I learned that about myself that I am a verbal processor, but some people need to hear things, some people need to see things written, some people need to actually do them, do the things themselves, right? So it’s really important when, like, communicating something new to my team, I’ve had to build my style or build the style in all of the manners, right, because we all communicate and understand differently. So we typically will have a video, we will have written instructions, we’ll have, depending on the complex complexity of what we’re doing, we’ll have like an SOP of the overview of the entire system, we just, you know, got through doing this with our marketing processes, because we, I mean, look, guys, we do a magazine every month, we do a podcast episode every Monday, we do a blog post every Tuesday, we’re sending out emails to our entire list to our clients, there’s a lot of communication, a lot of content that’s not even talking about social media content that’s going out on a variety of platforms, so when we completely changed the system that we had become very well versed in doing, we had to make sure that everybody understood the bigger picture, and then we had those written and verbal instructions, and had the opportunity to discuss it at a meeting. Okay, now understanding for your own business how each person on your team processes information is the difference between delegation that’s actually going to hold and actually going to stick versus you passing something off and then it’s back on your desk in two weeks because 100 things have gone wrong, so when I am doing something new. I always have a video. I always have written instructions.

Okay, so not just one, but both. The Loom is really helpful for the verbal processors, super, super important. And then the written instructions and. Now I’m just going to throw in there with AI, my team has a Coach Daniela GPT that has a ton of information on how I would be asking things.

There’s also a an onboarding GPT that has information around our company that can be asked, so there’s lots of ways that we can, you know, incorporate, incorporate the information in a way that your team is going to understand it. Now, another thing that I do, and I learned this from Annie. Annie is a dear friend of mine. She used to run our company, and then she had a baby, and went fully into mom mode, but one thing that she used to do all the time was the repeat back, so if I would give her instructions, she would always repeat them back to me, so that it was clear that she understood exactly what I needed. I do this with my kids all the time. I’ll say, Luca, do you understand what Mama tell me what I just asked you to do? If I’m giving him like multi steps, and then he will repeat it back. It’s really an effective like communication tool, and just make sure that we both kind of heard and understood the same thing. Okay, so when delegation fails, I know that sounds like a lot, but when delegation fails, it’s almost always because we gave instructions in a really hurried way without fully communicating and without confirming that the other person fully understood the scope of what we were asking, we assumed. Okay, and assumptions like my dad used to have this saying. I’m not going to say it on here, but it’s when you assume you make an A S S out of U M E, that was like his little saying, and so it was that stuck with me. That’s something that I remember for a long time, but it’s like, okay, well, let’s not, let’s not do that. Okay, so let’s talk about when we are kind of moving the distinctions between building a business that runs without you, that’s the goal, right. We want to remove the owner dependency in a business. This is why, by the way, I talk so much about, like, getting out of the room. It’s not because I like an anti being in the treatment room. I think being in the treatment room is amazing. That’s what got us into this in the first place, but I very much am against owner dependency, and I think that every business should be built as if you were going to sell it, and in order to sell it, you have to remove the owner dependency, so that means that the company should be able to hit its financial goals without you as the primary revenue generator. Okay, so we build the company, we systemize the company, we clean up the operations, so that you can hit those financial goals. And then, if being in the room gives you joy, if it makes you happy, then go for it, and that can just be the icing on the cake, but there’s so much work to be done around operations. What the CEO is actually doing, and I feel like that kind of level of awareness doesn’t happen until you’re actually out of the room, and then you can see it, right? Like, you can’t see the forest through the trees when you’re in the treatment room and doing the day to day, you’re in that like employee mode, you’re in that provider mode, and it’s hard to understand the bigger picture. Well, what is going to help you to move to get into that place where you can step out of the treatment room, where you can step into the role of CEO is understanding how to delegate effectively. All right, so when you assign a task, you’re still responsible for the outcome, right? If you are delegating that task, you still have ownership, you’re handing someone the work, but you’re holding the accountability, okay? So every time something goes slightly wrong, or a decision needs to be made, or a circumstance comes up that wasn’t in the original instructions, it comes back to you. You’re still the last in line. Now, here’s the next step: when you delegate ownership, then your team member is responsible for the outcome, and this might come in stages, right?

Like, you first might delegate something, and you still have ownership, but if you’re getting to a point where you have a spa manager, you have someone that is in leadership, you delegate that ownership, and that person is responsible. Responsible for the outcome, they have the authority to make decisions within that scope. They don’t need to check in with you every time something comes up, because you’ve given them both the responsibility and the authority to handle it. Okay, so let’s say you have a lead esthetician on your team, you could assign her a task like schedule a training this month, check the sanitation of the treatment rooms every Friday, or you could give her ownership, and ownership sounds like this: you are responsible for identifying the training gaps in our clinical team and coordinating quarterly trainings with our reps, you decide who needs what, you organize the reps coming in, you run the training. I want to know what’s happening, and I want to know your team is growing. The rest is yours. The second version doesn’t just hand her work, it hands her domain, right? When and when someone owns a domain, they’re going to show up in a completely different way than when they’re completing the task. When we would go through our spa manager certification, one of the most interesting things is that there was this disconnect between the CEOs and the spa managers, and the CEOs wanted their spa managers to take ownership to step up to do more, but the spa managers didn’t realize that they even had the authority. They didn’t feel that they had the authority, and so this is primarily like a communication gap in what is expected. This is something that can be solved with proper delegation and letting them know, do I have ownership of this, or is this tasks that I’m still bringing back to you?

Okay, so Christy, in our business, Christy owns events, okay, and like, fully delegated ownership of every logistical detail of our events, decor, vendors, venue. I mean, we talk about it. It’s not like I’m not like communicating with her about it. I’m involved in it, but they like, there is so much ownership that she has over what we’re doing, where we’re doing it, and it makes my life infinitely easier, because these events, they have anywhere between like 30 to 70 people, depending on the venue, and she is so good at that. She is so good with details. She’s a super phenomenal organizer. She does it a billion times better than I ever could on my best day. So, you know, I’ll always check in with her. Actually, a few years ago I was asking everybody on the team actually kind of like what their bucket list items were, and Christy wanted to travel more. That was one of the things, so I asked her to make a list of all the different places she wanted to travel to, and that, like, very quickly became our event list of like the cities that we were going to have events in, because we wanted to like combine work and play, right, so it was really, really fun, but this year we had an event in DC, and my mom was in town, and she, she actually was here for like two months, she attended the event with us, and my mom got here, and she was like asking me a million questions about the event. When does it start? What are we doing for dinner? Where is this happening? What I was like, I literally have no idea. I, my funny saying is, I just work here, and that is one of the most freeing feelings, like, yes, of course, I know that I’m showing up, and I am, you know, creating the content of what we’re teaching. I do all of that, but the logistics of who, what, when, where, why, how. Christy fully, fully owns that, and I saw it so clearly when my mom was asking me all these questions, and I was like, look, you just have to ask Christy, because I literally have no idea, so I just show up and speak, and it was such a good feeling, and that only works because Christy doesn’t just have the task, she has the domain, she has the authority, and she has my full trust to make decisions without running every single thing by me first. Okay, so I want you to think about one area in your business, just one where you could stop assigning and start delegating ownership. Pick a person who’s ready for it, define that domain. Clearly give them the authority and get out of the way. Okay, now I had talked about AI a little bit. I want to talk about AI a little bit more, because I think everything I just described about human delegation also applies directly to your AI tools, and the failure mode is also identical, so when content doesn’t sound like you, or when you get output from a GPT, it’s a little off, a little generic, a little like it could have come from any spa in the entire country. The instinct is to edit it, post it, and move on, right? I get that you get an output in out of quad or Chat GPT, you get it in a Google Doc, you edit it, and then you post it, right? You’re busy, the edit was quick, it’s good enough. Here’s the thing that you’re missing: the edit that you just made is training data, and if you don’t feed that back to the GPT, you’re going to make the same edit next month, and the month after that, and the month after that, until you get so frustrated and so annoyed that AI just doesn’t work for your voice, right? So, the GPTs that we build inside of Growth Factor implementation, they’re not set it and forget it, right? None of them are. They are living tools. They are employees in your business. We call them AI employees. In your business, they get smarter every time that you use them, but only if you close the loop. When you edit the output, you put that back in, and you say, “Here’s what I changed, here’s why. Please take note and store this to your memory. This is how the tool learns your voice. This is how the tool learns what you like and what you don’t like, right. That’s how that the output gets more accurate every single time, so that you’re barely editing them at all. Now, most people at this stage of AI integration, they’re building the GPT and then treating it like a vending machine, right? Put in a prompt, take out a post, walk away, and that is what produces the output that stays generic, because the tool never had a chance to learn, right, the tool caught or chat GPT, whatever you’re using, it’s not broken, it’s just waiting for feedback that never came, so it’s going to keep doing what it’s doing without that feedback. So, think about it this way: when you hire a new team member, you don’t onboard them once and then never give them feedback again. You’re developing them, okay? You are developing them over time. You’re giving a debrief after client interactions. You course correct when something is off, and over time they get better because you invested in their development consistently. Our AI employees work the same way, they require feedback, the same commitment to iteration after iteration after iteration. The only difference is the AI employees never get tired, they never have a bad day, they never need a difficult performance review conversation, but they do need you to close the loop every single time. So, if you have a content GPT or marketing tool or any AI system that’s producing an output that you are editing before it goes out, start feeding those edits back, start treating the refinement as part of the process, not as evidence that the tool isn’t working. The tool is working, it’s just learning, and it will keep learning faster than any human you could train, as long as you give it what it needs to grow.

All right, so let’s bring this all together, because I want you to leave this episode with a framework that you can actually use. Delegation fails for two reasons: the handoff was unclear, or the system was not maintained after the handoff. Every delegation failure I have ever seen, whether it’s in my own company, across decade of working with spa owners, with human members, with AI employees, it traces back to one of those two things, and underneath both of them is the same route. We move too fast, we assume too much, we stop checking in. So I want you to do one thing this month, pick one thing that you’ve tried to delegate and take it back, just one, and ask yourself honestly, why did it fail? What was the handoff unclear? Did you give instructions in a hurried way without confirming that they were understood? Did your team member know the task, but not the why, the picture of what you were building right, and why their piece mattered. Did you skip the repeat back and assume that alignment wasn’t actually there, or did the system break down after the handoff? Did you build it, hand it off, and then stop maintaining? Did you stop checking monday.com like we did? Did you stop giving feedback on the outfit? Did you or. To on the output, did you stop developing the person, human or your AI tool, your AI employee? Did you stop giving them feedback? Okay, once you know which failure you’re dealing with, then the fix becomes clear. So, for an unclear handoff, go back to the big picture first. Show your team the tool, the outcome, the client experience. Then communicate with Loom and written documents. Okay, then use the repeat back. Make sure that every task lives in monday.com where everyone can see it. Now, by the way, your AI employees can create a very detailed SOP from a Loom video. It can also create your Monday boards in general. So much of what we’re revamping, we’re using Claude to recreate our Monday boards in the process that makes the most sense, that saves so much time. Okay, now for a system that wasn’t maintained, schedule the maintenance, put the feedback loop on the calendar, develop your team members, or again your AI employees with the same consistency that you’d want them to bring in their work, and for those of you who are ready to stop assigning tasks and start to get delegating ownership, this is like the level above, right? Pick one domain, pick one person, give them the full scope and authority, and practice getting out of the way. It’s going to feel uncomfortable, right? They’re going to mess up at something, right, but is it a little mess up that they can learn and grow from? That discomfort you’re feeling is the feeling of your business growing, of your business expanding. Okay, freedom is not built in a single delegation, it’s built in a series of delegations that are set up correctly, handed off clearly, owned fully, and maintained over time until the system runs without you. That is the work, and I promise you it is worth doing. Okay, my dears, that is it. This is your episode for today.

I am so excited for you to please take this, do something with it, don’t just listen, take action, apply these concepts to your business. It will make such a big difference. And if today’s episode resonated with you, please take 30 seconds, leave us a review on Apple Podcast. The more spa owners that find this show, the more that we can help, and that means everything to me and my team, all right. Thank you so much, and I will catch you in the next episode. Bye.

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EP 490: You May Have Already Made a HIPAA Mistake With AI — Here’s How to Know
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  • business, education, marketing

Please note: Addo Aesthetics is not a law firm and nothing in this post or episode constitutes legal advice. This is a starting framework, not a legal opinion. For guidance specific to your practice and your state, please consult a qualified healthcare attorney.

Last month I sat down for a routine annual physical and my doctor paused before we even started talking. There was a small recorder on her computer screen. She explained what it was, told me how it worked, and asked if she could use it.

That exchange took 30 seconds. And it told me everything about what responsible AI use looks like in a clinical setting.

Most spa and medspa owners I talk to haven’t had that 30-second conversation with their clients. Not because they don’t care, but because nobody handed them a framework for what it should look like, and the landscape is moving faster than anyone expected. AI compliance is not a solved problem. The law is behind the technology. Your insurance carrier may be behind the technology. And if you’re somewhere in the middle of all of that, trying to run your business, this episode is the conversation you didn’t know you needed to have.

The HIPAA Piece Most Spa Owners Get Wrong

If you run a medspa, injectable practice, or any practice where clinical care is happening, HIPAA already governs your world. But the question I keep hearing is: does that mean I can’t use AI at all?

It doesn’t. What it means is that you need to understand what actually counts as protected health information before you involve AI in any task that touches client data.

HIPAA’s 18 protected identifiers include the obvious ones: names, phone numbers, addresses. But they also include appointment dates, geographic data, and photographs. That last one matters in our industry, because a before-and-after photo where your patient’s face is visible is protected health information.

The practical test: before involving AI in any task, ask yourself two questions. Does this include information that could identify a specific patient? And does it connect to their health or their care? If both answers are yes, you are in protected territory and standard consumer AI tools are not the right tool for that task.

The misconception I see most often is spa owners assuming that because they didn’t mention a patient’s diagnosis, they’re fine. That is not how HIPAA works. Typing your patient’s name alongside an appointment date at your medspa, even in a routine workflow prompt, may have just created PHI.

The safer approach is simple: remove the identifier entirely. “Help me write a follow-up message for a patient coming in for a neurotoxin touch-up” creates no protected health information. The prompt does the same job. The risk disappears.

What Every Spa Needs (Not Just Medspas)

Even if your practice doesn’t touch clinical data, AI governance still matters. Your clients’ trust, your intellectual property, and whether your insurance will cover you if something goes wrong are all in play.

Three things worth knowing before you assume you’re covered: your current liability policy may not extend to AI-related incidents. A Business Associate Agreement does not transfer your compliance responsibility away from you. And AI governance documentation is now something some insurance carriers are starting to ask about at underwriting.

The simplest version of governance is four written documents: a client-facing AI disclosure, an internal privacy and IP policy, an approved tools list for your team, and an output review policy that keeps a human in the loop before anything AI-generated reaches a client.

If that feels like a lot, start with one paragraph. Define what your team cannot enter into AI prompts, share it at your next staff meeting, and build from there. That paragraph is your starting point, and Daniela gives you the exact language in the episode.

The spas and medspas using AI most effectively in the years ahead are not the ones waiting for perfect regulatory clarity before they start. They are the ones building responsible habits now, with a clear understanding of what they’re accountable for and why. That is exactly what Growth Factor® Implementation helps our clients build — the systems and disciplines that make a practice run correctly, not just fast.

Listen to EP 490 to hear the 30-second physician story that started this conversation, the exact prompt language that creates PHI without meaning to, and the four documents Daniela built inside Addo Aesthetics last month that you can model for your own practice.

Resources Mentioned

Blog post: “Your Patients’ Data, Your Business Information, and AI: What Every Spa and Medspa Owner Needs to Know About Governing AI in 2026” 

Frier Levitt AI, EMRs and Liability Webinar 

Want to break past $25K–$35K months without adding more treatment hours?

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About Your Host, Daniela Woerner

Daniela Woerner is the founder of Addo Aesthetics and creator of the Growth Factor® Framework, a proven system that’s helped hundreds of spa owners build profitable, systemized businesses. With nearly 20 years in the aesthetics industry, she transforms overworked aesthetic professionals into confident Spa CEOs through strategy, systems, and soul led support. Daniela is also the host of Spa Marketing Made Easy, a top ranked podcast with over 1 million downloads, where she shares real world strategies to help spa professionals grow with clarity and confidence.

You built this business from the ground up. You are the reason that the clients come back. You’re the one who trained the team, who held the standard, who showed up on the days when they were hard and when they were easy. You’re excellent at what you do clinically, relationally, professionally, and that excellence is real. It’s earned, and yet you can’t leave, not really, not in the way that you imagined when you first decided to go out on your own. The idea was freedom, the freedom to work when you wanted, to earn what you desired, and to build something that was genuinely yours, but you actually built in many cases is a business that needs you in the room to survive, and that is a very different thing. There’s a term for this in the business world: owner dependency, and it means that the financial performance of a business is directly tied to the owner’s active participation, so in a spa context it often looks like this: you’re in the treatment room three, four days a week, generating a significant portion of your practice’s revenue yourself, because if you step back, the numbers don’t hold. You are, in the most literal sense, the most expensive employee in your own business. Today we’re going to talk about how that happens, why it’s a more serious structural problem than most spa owners realize, and what it actually looks like to build your way out of it with a real plan, real milestones, and a realistic timeline that’s not about an overnight transformation. This is one of the most important conversations that I have with Spa CEOs. Welcome back to Spa Marketing Made Easy. I’m Daniela, founder and CEO of Addo Aesthetics and creator of the Growth Factor framework. Now, whether you’ve been here for years or this is your first episode, I am so glad that you are here for this particular conversation.

We’re in our June series on operational excellence, and today’s episode is the one I want you to hear before you make your next hire before you sign your next lease, before you make any significant investment in growing your business, because you can do everything right, marketing team systems, client experience, and still build a business that quietly traps you inside it, not because you made a mistake, but because you never had a framework for building it any other way, that framework is what we’re talking about today. Now, let me explain what I mean when I say that the owner is often the most expensive employee in her own business, because I want to be like very clear and precise about this. When you’re in the treatment room, you are performing a provider function. You’re generating revenue through your hands, your skill, your time. It’s a valuable function. I am not disputing that in any way, shape, or form. But you are also the CEO of your practice. You are responsible for the strategy, the team culture, the financial decisions, the vision, the systems, the marketing direction, it’s a completely different role, and it requires your attention, your cognitive capacity, and your focused time. When one person is doing both of those things, something is always getting compromised, and most often it’s the CEO function, because the treatment room is where you feel the most competent, and it’s where you’re the most confident, and it’s where clients are waiting, it’s where the revenue is visible and immediate. So, your treatment room gets your body, and the business gets whatever energy is left. Now, the math problem underneath this is significant, because when you’re generating revenue in the treatment room, that revenue is counted as business revenue, but it’s not really business revenue in the way that matters the most, it’s provider revenue, revenue that exists because of your personal skill and your personal time, and that disappears the moment that you step back now? A business is supposed to be an asset. An asset generates value independent of the owner’s daily participation. Now, what most spa owners have built, again, this is how most of us do it, but you’re building a successful practice that requires your hands to run those are two different things, and knowing the difference changes how you built.

So, I want to give you a framework that has completely changed the way that I think about business building, and how I now guide every single one of our clients in the Growth Factor program, Bill. Your business as if you were going to sell, even if you never planned to, and I know that might sound like a little bit of an odd thing to say. If selling your practice has never been on your radar, stay with me here. When you build with a potential sale in mind, you’re forced to answer the question that most spa owners never ask: Would someone pay me full price for a business, or would someone even pay anything for this business if I were not in it? That question is clarifying in a way that almost nothing else is. Now, a buyer does not just buy your client list and your equipment; a buyer buys the revenue generating capacity of the business, the systems that produce results, the team that delivers the service, the processes that do not require the previous owner to be present. If the answer to could this business run without the owner is no, the valuation reflects that, and sometimes very drastically. But the reason I bring this up is not about selling. I bring it up because the discipline of building a sellable business is the same discipline that gives you your life back. A business with no owner dependency is a business that runs when you’re on vacation. It’s a business that doesn’t collapse when you take a health leave or have a family emergency. It’s a business that grew up, it became a real entity with real infrastructure, and not just a talented individual with overhead. Building as if you are going to sell is not about exits, it’s about building something that allows you to live the life that you want to live so many spa owners, solo injectors, maybe you, you genuinely love being in the room. The clinical work is not a burden, it’s a part of the business that you feel most alive in, the relationships with the clients, the craft of the treatment, the results you create. That’s why you got into esthetics in the first place. And so the idea of stepping away from it is not appealing. It might even feel like a loss now. Staying in the treatment room, that’s a valid choice, right? This is your business, and if delivering treatments is one of your deepest sources of joy and meaning in your work, I’m not here to tell you to stop. What I’m here to tell you is that the goal is not to get you out of the treatment room fully. The goal is to build a business that does not require you to be there. I want you to build your business to hit the revenue goals that you desire, and then if you want to bring in the treatment room a couple days a week, because it brings you joy, go for it. That’s amazing. I just don’t want you to be the primary revenue generator, two very different things. Okay, so when your business is built with the systems, the team, the financial structure to hit goals without your hands in the room, everything changes. The revenue that you generate as a provider becomes something separate from the business’s financial performance. It’s a bonus. It becomes extra. It becomes something you do because you love it, not because the business depends on it for survival. And that shift from I have to be in the room goes to I get to be in the room, I choose to be in the room. That is so significant, and it starts with building the business correctly underneath you. So, let’s talk about what this actually looks like in practice. Okay, because I think the conversation stops at the concept and never gets into the plan level, and without a plan, this is just going to stay aspirational instead of becoming real. So, inside of growth factor implementation, one of the things that we build with every single client is what I call a milestone plan to get the owner out of the room, not a vague goal. We have specific numbers bait in a roadmap that connects your team capacity to what the actual owner needs to get out of the room.

Okay, so we start with the profitability of each service. We know which treatments are going to generate what margins. We know what a fully productive provider day looks like at all the different revenues, that data is the foundation. Okay, we make database decisions. Then we look at the team, current capacity, current revenue generation, current trajectory. Where are they now? And realistically, where can they go? What does the team need to be generating, and at what margin, and what expense level for the business to hit its financial targets without the owner in the room, that number becomes the first milestone. So, when the team hits x in monthly revenue with expenses held at their target percentages, the owner can drop a day out of the treatment room without. Meaningful financial impact to the business, not someday, not eventually. When X happens, that is a completely different conversation than you should try and work less. That’s a plan, right? It has a number, as a condition, it has a trigger point that the owner and her team can actually work towards. Then, from there we build the next milestone. What does it take to actually drop a second day, a third? What is a full extraction look like, and what does the business need to look like for that to be financially neutral? This is not a short-term process. Okay, I’m not trying to make this this super simple thing. It takes work for sure, for some of our clients. This milestone plan comes together in six months. For others, it takes two years or more. It depends on the current size of your team, the current capacity of your space, the margin structure for your services, and how aggressively you want to grow.

There’s not a single right timeline, but here is what every client has in common, on the other side of building this plan, they know where they are going, they have a number to work towards, they are no longer moving in the direction of someday, they are moving towards a specific achievable milestone, and that changes the energy of everything, now here’s where AI enters this, and I don’t think I am any more capable of recording an episode than or doing a training without talking about AI. It’s such a powerful tool, but the milestone plan that I just described, it involves layering multiple data sets: service profitability, team capacity, revenue trajectories, expense percentages, owner salary goals. Doing that analysis manually. Oh my gosh, that is.. I don’t even know where I would start. Right, that’s going to take people with a whole different level of expertise than me and a large amount of time and a large amount of money, but AI has changed that considerably. So, inside of our growth factor implementation program, we use AI to run the scenario modeling that underlies the milestone plan, so we can ask it to look at current numbers and show us what happens if team revenue increases by 20% why expenses hold at their current percentages. We can ask it to model the point which the owner’s treatment day revenue becomes genuinely optional rather than structurally necessary. We can ask it to identify the gap between where the team is now and where they need to be for the first milestone to be reachable. What used to take hours or even days or weeks now takes one focused 50 minute session, and more importantly, we can run multiple scenarios, different growth rates, different expense assumptions, different team configurations quickly enough that the owner can actually see her options rather than committing to one plan without understanding the alternatives. The other piece AI helps us with is building the monitoring structure that tells the owner where she’s approaching her milestone, because a plan without accountability and visibility is a wish. The AI-supported tools that we build inside of the program help owners to track the metrics that matter, see the progress in real time, and know when the trigger point is genuinely within reach, you don’t have to guess when you can afford to step back, you can see it now. I want to paint a picture of what the other side of this looks like, because I think it’s important to hold the destination clearly when you’re doing this kind of foundational work.

 

When you build a business without owner dependency, something fundamental shifts in your relationship with the business itself. You stop being the ceiling right now. Your business can only grow as fast as you can grow, because your capacity is the limiting factor. When your team is the engine and you are the architect, the ceiling lifts. Growth becomes a team project, not a personal endurance test. You start making different decisions when you’re not attached to the treatment room as the financial necessity.

You start asking different questions. Where do I want to put my energy? What does this business need from me as the CEO right now? Those are leadership questions, and they produce leadership decisions. You have something real to leave behind or keep. Whether you ever intend to sell your practice or not, you’ve built something with genuine value. A business that runs independently, it hits financial targets, and has the infrastructure to sustain performance, that’s an asset. It’s also, frankly, a business that’s far more enjoyable to own. And if you do love the treatment room, if you choose to be there because it brings you joy, that choice is finally free. You’re there because you want to be, not because the business requires. Wires you to be every client who gets there will tell you it changes everything. Now, listen, you did not build your business wrong. You built your business the way that most providers build it, by leading with your clinical skill, building client loyalty, and growing as fast as the demand allowed the fact that you’re essential to your business right now is not a failure, it’s the natural outcome of a certain type of growth. So, what you’re hearing today is an invitation to build the next layer, the layer that turns a practice into a business, the layer that turns revenue into an asset, the layer that turns your presence in the treatment room, from an obligation into a choice. This is not about working less, it’s about building more, more infrastructure, more team capacity, more systems, more independence. It takes time, it takes attention, but it produces something that grinding through another year of full books, simply cannot a business that is genuinely yours. So, I’ve got a question for you. If your business had to run without you in the treatment room, starting 90 days from now, what would break? What systems are not in place? What team capacity is not there? What financial structure is missing those gaps, are your build list. You don’t have to fix all of them at once. You don’t have to have a perfect plan tomorrow, but I want you to know that building towards them is possible, and it’s more concrete and more achievable than it might feel right now. The milestone-based approach to stepping out of the treatment room is exactly what we build inside of growth factor implementation. We look at your numbers, your team, your capacity, your financial goals, and we build a real plan with real milestones that tells you specifically what needs to happen before you can step back, how long it might take, and what we’re watching to know that you’re getting there, the plan exists, the path is real, and you don’t have to figure it out alone. So, if that sounds like a conversation that you’ve been needing to have, I would love for you to learn more about growth factor implementation by clicking the link below this episode. For everyone who listened today, thank you so much. This is the work that matters, not more bookings, not another service on the menu, not investing in another super expensive machine. This right here is how you build a business that supports the life you want to live. Share this episode with another spa owner who is excellent at what she does, and exhausted by what her business requires of her. She needs to hear that there’s a way through, and that it starts with a plan. Thank you again for being here. And I’ll see you next week.

Read More
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EP 489: Stop Being the Most Expensive Employee in Your Business
  • /
  • business, education, marketing

You built this business from the ground up. You trained the team, held the standard, showed up on the hard days and the easy ones. And somewhere along the way, the business started needing you there to survive — not just to lead, but physically present, hands in the room, generating the revenue that keeps everything running.

That is owner dependency. And in this episode of Spa Marketing Made Easy, we’re talking about why it happens, why it’s a more serious structural problem than most spa owners realize, and what it actually looks like to build your way out of it.

The Math Problem Most Spa Owners Are Missing

Here’s a distinction that changes everything once you hear it. The revenue you generate in the treatment room is provider revenue. It exists because of your personal skill and your personal time, and it disappears the moment you step back. That is not business revenue in the way that matters most. A business is supposed to be an asset — something that generates value independent of the owner’s daily participation. What most aestheticians and injectors have built is a practice. A successful one. A respected one. And one that requires your hands to run.

Those are two different things, and knowing the difference is where the build starts.

What the Milestone Plan Actually Looks Like

Inside Growth Factor® Implementation, one of the first things we build with every client is a milestone plan for stepping out of the room. Not a vague goal. A real number — a specific monthly revenue threshold the team needs to hit, with expenses held at their target percentages, before the owner can drop a treatment day without meaningful financial impact to the business.

That number becomes the first milestone. When the team hits X, the owner can step back one day. Not someday. That is a plan.

From there, we build the next milestone. What does it take to drop a second day? A third? What does full extraction look like, and what does the business need to look like for that to be financially neutral?

For some clients, that milestone plan comes together in six months. For others, it takes two years. What every client has in common on the other side of building it: they know where they’re going. They have a number to work toward. They are no longer moving in the direction of someday.

The Permission You Might Need to Hear

You did not build your business wrong. You built it the way most providers build it — by leading with your clinical skill, building client loyalty, and growing as fast as the demand allowed. The fact that you’re essential to your business right now is not a failure. It’s the natural outcome of a certain kind of growth.

What this episode is offering is the next layer. The layer that turns a practice into a business. The layer that turns your presence in the treatment room from an obligation into a choice.

If your business had to run without you starting 90 days from now, what would break? That list is your build list. You don’t have to fix all of it at once. But knowing what’s on it is where every real plan begins.

Listen to Episode 489 for the full framework, including how AI scenario modeling inside Growth Factor® Implementation has collapsed what used to take weeks of financial analysis into one focused 50-minute session, and the exact question Daniela asks every client before they make their next major investment.

Want to break past $25K–$35K months without adding more treatment hours?

Watch The Systems Shift and learn how 600+ spa owners are scaling into their Spa CEO role (without sacrificing family time or sanity).

Watch Here

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About Your Host, Daniela Woerner

Daniela Woerner is the founder of Addo Aesthetics and creator of the Growth Factor® Framework, a proven system that’s helped hundreds of spa owners build profitable, systemized businesses. With nearly 20 years in the aesthetics industry, she transforms overworked aesthetic professionals into confident Spa CEOs through strategy, systems, and soul led support. Daniela is also the host of Spa Marketing Made Easy, a top ranked podcast with over 1 million downloads, where she shares real world strategies to help spa professionals grow with clarity and confidence.

You built this business from the ground up. You are the reason that the clients come back. You’re the one who trained the team, who held the standard, who showed up on the days when they were hard and when they were easy. You’re excellent at what you do clinically, relationally, professionally, and that excellence is real. It’s earned, and yet you can’t leave, not really, not in the way that you imagined when you first decided to go out on your own. The idea was freedom, the freedom to work when you wanted, to earn what you desired, and to build something that was genuinely yours, but you actually built in many cases is a business that needs you in the room to survive, and that is a very different thing. There’s a term for this in the business world: owner dependency, and it means that the financial performance of a business is directly tied to the owner’s active participation, so in a spa context it often looks like this: you’re in the treatment room three, four days a week, generating a significant portion of your practice’s revenue yourself, because if you step back, the numbers don’t hold. You are, in the most literal sense, the most expensive employee in your own business. Today we’re going to talk about how that happens, why it’s a more serious structural problem than most spa owners realize, and what it actually looks like to build your way out of it with a real plan, real milestones, and a realistic timeline that’s not about an overnight transformation. This is one of the most important conversations that I have with Spa CEOs. Welcome back to Spa Marketing Made Easy. I’m Daniela, founder and CEO of Addo Aesthetics and creator of the Growth Factor framework. Now, whether you’ve been here for years or this is your first episode, I am so glad that you are here for this particular conversation.

We’re in our June series on operational excellence, and today’s episode is the one I want you to hear before you make your next hire before you sign your next lease, before you make any significant investment in growing your business, because you can do everything right, marketing team systems, client experience, and still build a business that quietly traps you inside it, not because you made a mistake, but because you never had a framework for building it any other way, that framework is what we’re talking about today. Now, let me explain what I mean when I say that the owner is often the most expensive employee in her own business, because I want to be like very clear and precise about this. When you’re in the treatment room, you are performing a provider function. You’re generating revenue through your hands, your skill, your time. It’s a valuable function. I am not disputing that in any way, shape, or form. But you are also the CEO of your practice. You are responsible for the strategy, the team culture, the financial decisions, the vision, the systems, the marketing direction, it’s a completely different role, and it requires your attention, your cognitive capacity, and your focused time. When one person is doing both of those things, something is always getting compromised, and most often it’s the CEO function, because the treatment room is where you feel the most competent, and it’s where you’re the most confident, and it’s where clients are waiting, it’s where the revenue is visible and immediate. So, your treatment room gets your body, and the business gets whatever energy is left. Now, the math problem underneath this is significant, because when you’re generating revenue in the treatment room, that revenue is counted as business revenue, but it’s not really business revenue in the way that matters the most, it’s provider revenue, revenue that exists because of your personal skill and your personal time, and that disappears the moment that you step back now? A business is supposed to be an asset. An asset generates value independent of the owner’s daily participation. Now, what most spa owners have built, again, this is how most of us do it, but you’re building a successful practice that requires your hands to run those are two different things, and knowing the difference changes how you built.

So, I want to give you a framework that has completely changed the way that I think about business building, and how I now guide every single one of our clients in the Growth Factor program, Bill. Your business as if you were going to sell, even if you never planned to, and I know that might sound like a little bit of an odd thing to say. If selling your practice has never been on your radar, stay with me here. When you build with a potential sale in mind, you’re forced to answer the question that most spa owners never ask: Would someone pay me full price for a business, or would someone even pay anything for this business if I were not in it? That question is clarifying in a way that almost nothing else is. Now, a buyer does not just buy your client list and your equipment; a buyer buys the revenue generating capacity of the business, the systems that produce results, the team that delivers the service, the processes that do not require the previous owner to be present. If the answer to could this business run without the owner is no, the valuation reflects that, and sometimes very drastically. But the reason I bring this up is not about selling. I bring it up because the discipline of building a sellable business is the same discipline that gives you your life back. A business with no owner dependency is a business that runs when you’re on vacation. It’s a business that doesn’t collapse when you take a health leave or have a family emergency. It’s a business that grew up, it became a real entity with real infrastructure, and not just a talented individual with overhead. Building as if you are going to sell is not about exits, it’s about building something that allows you to live the life that you want to live so many spa owners, solo injectors, maybe you, you genuinely love being in the room. The clinical work is not a burden, it’s a part of the business that you feel most alive in, the relationships with the clients, the craft of the treatment, the results you create. That’s why you got into esthetics in the first place. And so the idea of stepping away from it is not appealing. It might even feel like a loss now. Staying in the treatment room, that’s a valid choice, right? This is your business, and if delivering treatments is one of your deepest sources of joy and meaning in your work, I’m not here to tell you to stop. What I’m here to tell you is that the goal is not to get you out of the treatment room fully. The goal is to build a business that does not require you to be there. I want you to build your business to hit the revenue goals that you desire, and then if you want to bring in the treatment room a couple days a week, because it brings you joy, go for it. That’s amazing. I just don’t want you to be the primary revenue generator, two very different things. Okay, so when your business is built with the systems, the team, the financial structure to hit goals without your hands in the room, everything changes. The revenue that you generate as a provider becomes something separate from the business’s financial performance. It’s a bonus. It becomes extra. It becomes something you do because you love it, not because the business depends on it for survival. And that shift from I have to be in the room goes to I get to be in the room, I choose to be in the room. That is so significant, and it starts with building the business correctly underneath you. So, let’s talk about what this actually looks like in practice. Okay, because I think the conversation stops at the concept and never gets into the plan level, and without a plan, this is just going to stay aspirational instead of becoming real. So, inside of growth factor implementation, one of the things that we build with every single client is what I call a milestone plan to get the owner out of the room, not a vague goal. We have specific numbers bait in a roadmap that connects your team capacity to what the actual owner needs to get out of the room.

Okay, so we start with the profitability of each service. We know which treatments are going to generate what margins. We know what a fully productive provider day looks like at all the different revenues, that data is the foundation. Okay, we make database decisions. Then we look at the team, current capacity, current revenue generation, current trajectory. Where are they now? And realistically, where can they go? What does the team need to be generating, and at what margin, and what expense level for the business to hit its financial targets without the owner in the room, that number becomes the first milestone. So, when the team hits x in monthly revenue with expenses held at their target percentages, the owner can drop a day out of the treatment room without. Meaningful financial impact to the business, not someday, not eventually. When X happens, that is a completely different conversation than you should try and work less. That’s a plan, right? It has a number, as a condition, it has a trigger point that the owner and her team can actually work towards. Then, from there we build the next milestone. What does it take to actually drop a second day, a third? What is a full extraction look like, and what does the business need to look like for that to be financially neutral? This is not a short-term process. Okay, I’m not trying to make this this super simple thing. It takes work for sure, for some of our clients. This milestone plan comes together in six months. For others, it takes two years or more. It depends on the current size of your team, the current capacity of your space, the margin structure for your services, and how aggressively you want to grow.

There’s not a single right timeline, but here is what every client has in common, on the other side of building this plan, they know where they are going, they have a number to work towards, they are no longer moving in the direction of someday, they are moving towards a specific achievable milestone, and that changes the energy of everything, now here’s where AI enters this, and I don’t think I am any more capable of recording an episode than or doing a training without talking about AI. It’s such a powerful tool, but the milestone plan that I just described, it involves layering multiple data sets: service profitability, team capacity, revenue trajectories, expense percentages, owner salary goals. Doing that analysis manually. Oh my gosh, that is.. I don’t even know where I would start. Right, that’s going to take people with a whole different level of expertise than me and a large amount of time and a large amount of money, but AI has changed that considerably. So, inside of our growth factor implementation program, we use AI to run the scenario modeling that underlies the milestone plan, so we can ask it to look at current numbers and show us what happens if team revenue increases by 20% why expenses hold at their current percentages. We can ask it to model the point which the owner’s treatment day revenue becomes genuinely optional rather than structurally necessary. We can ask it to identify the gap between where the team is now and where they need to be for the first milestone to be reachable. What used to take hours or even days or weeks now takes one focused 50 minute session, and more importantly, we can run multiple scenarios, different growth rates, different expense assumptions, different team configurations quickly enough that the owner can actually see her options rather than committing to one plan without understanding the alternatives. The other piece AI helps us with is building the monitoring structure that tells the owner where she’s approaching her milestone, because a plan without accountability and visibility is a wish. The AI-supported tools that we build inside of the program help owners to track the metrics that matter, see the progress in real time, and know when the trigger point is genuinely within reach, you don’t have to guess when you can afford to step back, you can see it now. I want to paint a picture of what the other side of this looks like, because I think it’s important to hold the destination clearly when you’re doing this kind of foundational work.

 

When you build a business without owner dependency, something fundamental shifts in your relationship with the business itself. You stop being the ceiling right now. Your business can only grow as fast as you can grow, because your capacity is the limiting factor. When your team is the engine and you are the architect, the ceiling lifts. Growth becomes a team project, not a personal endurance test. You start making different decisions when you’re not attached to the treatment room as the financial necessity.

You start asking different questions. Where do I want to put my energy? What does this business need from me as the CEO right now? Those are leadership questions, and they produce leadership decisions. You have something real to leave behind or keep. Whether you ever intend to sell your practice or not, you’ve built something with genuine value. A business that runs independently, it hits financial targets, and has the infrastructure to sustain performance, that’s an asset. It’s also, frankly, a business that’s far more enjoyable to own. And if you do love the treatment room, if you choose to be there because it brings you joy, that choice is finally free. You’re there because you want to be, not because the business requires. Wires you to be every client who gets there will tell you it changes everything. Now, listen, you did not build your business wrong. You built your business the way that most providers build it, by leading with your clinical skill, building client loyalty, and growing as fast as the demand allowed the fact that you’re essential to your business right now is not a failure, it’s the natural outcome of a certain type of growth. So, what you’re hearing today is an invitation to build the next layer, the layer that turns a practice into a business, the layer that turns revenue into an asset, the layer that turns your presence in the treatment room, from an obligation into a choice. This is not about working less, it’s about building more, more infrastructure, more team capacity, more systems, more independence. It takes time, it takes attention, but it produces something that grinding through another year of full books, simply cannot a business that is genuinely yours. So, I’ve got a question for you. If your business had to run without you in the treatment room, starting 90 days from now, what would break? What systems are not in place? What team capacity is not there? What financial structure is missing those gaps, are your build list. You don’t have to fix all of them at once. You don’t have to have a perfect plan tomorrow, but I want you to know that building towards them is possible, and it’s more concrete and more achievable than it might feel right now. The milestone-based approach to stepping out of the treatment room is exactly what we build inside of growth factor implementation. We look at your numbers, your team, your capacity, your financial goals, and we build a real plan with real milestones that tells you specifically what needs to happen before you can step back, how long it might take, and what we’re watching to know that you’re getting there, the plan exists, the path is real, and you don’t have to figure it out alone. So, if that sounds like a conversation that you’ve been needing to have, I would love for you to learn more about growth factor implementation by clicking the link below this episode. For everyone who listened today, thank you so much. This is the work that matters, not more bookings, not another service on the menu, not investing in another super expensive machine. This right here is how you build a business that supports the life you want to live. Share this episode with another spa owner who is excellent at what she does, and exhausted by what her business requires of her. She needs to hear that there’s a way through, and that it starts with a plan. Thank you again for being here. And I’ll see you next week.

Read More
Read More
EP 488: Fully Booked Is Not a Business Strategy
  • /
  • business, education, marketing

You’re running as hard as you can, and it feels like the finish line just keeps moving.

The schedule is full. The clients are coming back. By every measure the industry uses to say ‘you’ve made it,’ you’ve made it. And yet at the end of the month, the number doesn’t match the effort — and you cannot figure out why.

This is one of the most common and most painful gaps in spa businesses at every level, and it has nothing to do with how hard you’re working. It has everything to do with one calculation most spa owners have never run.

The scoreboard our industry uses is working against you

The aesthetic industry has one primary metric: are you booked? It’s what we celebrate, what we post about, what signals to the community that you’ve built something worth talking about. And for a season, that scoreboard is right. Full books mean clients trust you. Full books mean your marketing is working.

But at some point a full book stops being the goal and starts becoming the ceiling.

If you never shift your focus from booking to profitability, you can spend years running at full capacity and still not hit your financial goals. Not because you’re doing anything wrong, but because a full schedule and a profitable schedule are not the same thing — and without the underlying data, you cannot tell which one you actually have.

The calculation that changes everything

Most spa owners arrive at their pricing the same way: look at what competitors charge, factor in roughly what things cost, and land on a number that feels right. That process is not wrong. But feels right is not the same as profitable, and the gap between those two things is where the hamster wheel lives.

What’s missing is the cost of treatment analysis — the actual cost to deliver each service on your menu to one client on one day. Not your overhead. The specific direct cost of that one service. It has two components: consumable cost (every product, supply, and disposable) and payroll cost (your provider’s time at their actual rate of pay).

When you add those two numbers together for every service on your menu, you get the actual floor beneath your pricing — the number below which you are losing money on every single service you deliver.

What happens when you have this analysis

Inside Growth Factor® Implementation, the cost of treatment and profitability analysis is one of the first things we do together — because everything else, the marketing, the team building, the scaling, has to be built on a foundation that actually supports your goals. We use AI to deepen that analysis in ways that would take weeks to produce manually.

Either way, you’re no longer guessing. You’re working from a real picture of your business.

What the episode gives you that this post doesn’t

In Episode 488, Daniela walks through the exact conversation she had with a physician who nearly launched a treatment package at barely profitable — and what changed when they ran the actual numbers together before the launch date. That conversation is worth the listen.

Want to break past $25K–$35K months without adding more treatment hours?

Watch The Systems Shift and learn how 600+ spa owners are scaling into their Spa CEO role (without sacrificing family time or sanity).

Watch Here

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About Your Host, Daniela Woerner

Daniela Woerner is the founder of Addo Aesthetics and creator of the Growth Factor® Framework, a proven system that’s helped hundreds of spa owners build profitable, systemized businesses. With nearly 20 years in the aesthetics industry, she transforms overworked aesthetic professionals into confident Spa CEOs through strategy, systems, and soul led support. Daniela is also the host of Spa Marketing Made Easy, a top ranked podcast with over 1 million downloads, where she shares real world strategies to help spa professionals grow with clarity and confidence.

You’re fully booked, your schedule is packed weeks out, your providers are busy, your front desk is fielding calls, and from the outside everything looks exactly the way that you imagined it would when you very first opened your doors, and yet at the end of the month when you sit down to look at what’s left, and the number doesn’t match the effort. You did everything right. You saw the clients, your team showed up, you marketed, you sold, you delivered, and still the cash in your account doesn’t reflect the pace of your business. You’re running as hard as you can, and it feels like the finish line just keeps moving. This is a pricing and profitability problem, and it’s essential to understand the profitability of each service in your practice, because if your services are not priced correctly, it doesn’t matter how booked you are, the money won’t be there at the end of the month. So today we’re going to talk about why being fully booked is not a business strategy, and what is actually happening inside the numbers of a busy spa that isn’t hitting its financial goals, and how AI is helping us look at this in a way that changes everything

So Welcome back to Spa Marketing Made Easy. I’m your host, Daniela Woerner, founder and CEO of Addo Aesthetics, and the creator of the Growth Factor framework. If you are an esthetic professional who is serious about building a business that is not just busy, but genuinely profitable and built to last. You are in the right place. Now we are in the middle of our June series on operational excellence, and this episode might be the most important conversation in that series, because the thing I want to talk about today is one of the most common and one of the most painful gaps I see in spa businesses at every level, the gap between a full schedule and a profitable one. And I know this topic can be hard for people who have just worked so hard to build their businesses, because being fully booked, it’s an achievement building a practice that clients want to return to, that has a wait list, that has demand, that takes real skill, real relationship building, real clinical excellence. So I’m not here to diminish that, not for one second, but what I am here to say is that a full book and a profitable business are two different things, and conflating them, which our entire industry has a tendency to do, is quietly keeping a lot of incredibly talented spa owners stuck on a hamster wheel that they cannot seem to get off of, no matter how hard they run. So, let’s talk about why the esthetic industry has one primary scoreboard. Are you booked right? What’s your productivity rate? It’s the thing that we celebrate on social media. It’s the metric that signals success in our community, the proof that you’ve done something right. And I get it. I understand why. When you’re building from nothing, you’re getting booked.

That is a win, that feels like a win, because for a long time it is right. Full books mean client trusts you. Full books mean your marketing is working. Full books mean you’ve built something people want to come back to. But here’s the problem: at some point a full book stops being the goal and starts becoming the ceiling, and if you never shift your focus from booking to profitability, you can spend years running at full capacity and still not hitting your financial goals. Now, the reason that this happens is pricing, not pricing in the sense that you just charge too little across the board, even though you know sometimes that’s part of it, but pricing in the sense that most spa owners have never sat down and looked with real numbers at what each individual service in their menu actually costs to deliver, and without that information, your pricing is based on instinct and market comparison, which is a reasonable place to start, but it is a dangerous place to stay.

Now, I want to talk about how most spa owners arrive at their pricing, because I’ve seen it so many times, I could describe it in my sleep, so you look at what your competitors are charging, you look at what feels appropriate in your market, and with your positioning right, you factor in roughly what you think things cost, and you land on a number that feels right. So the process is not wrong. Market awareness matters, positioning matters, your intuition about your. My Intel matters, but feels right is not the same as profitable, and the gap between those two things is where that hamster wheel lives. So, what’s missing from the feels right pricing model is a calculation that most spa owners have never done, the actual cost to deliver each service on your menu, not your overhead as a business, not your rent and your software and your marketing budget. The specific direct cost of delivering that one service to that one client on that one day. That calculation has two main components. So, the first is your consumable cost every product, every supply, every disposable that goes into delivering that treatment. The second is your payroll cost, the time your provider spends in the room at their rate of pay, including any applicable employer cost. So, when you add those two numbers together for every service on your menu, you get something that most spa owners have never seen, the actual floor beneath your pricing, the number below which you cannot drop without losing money on every single service you deliver. And when our spa owners see that number for the first time, the hamster wheel finally makes sense. So I was working with a physician recently, a plastic surgeon who was building a package offering for her practice, and she is excellent at what she does. She’s got a strong patient base, and she was genuinely excited about this package because she knew it was going to deliver real results for her patients.

She’s combining multiple services into a comprehensive treatment experience, and when it came to time to price it, she did what most of us do. She thought about her market, she thought about what felt premium but accessible, and she landed on a number that felt right for what she was offering and for who she was serving. And then when we sat down together and actually ran the numbers, we went through every single service in that package. For each one, we calculated the consumable cost, every product, every supply, everything that went into delivering that treatment. Then we layered in the payroll cost, her time, her team’s time, priced at their actual rates, and when we added it all up, we realized, hey, this, this is big. If she was going to move forward with the price that she had in mind, she was going to be barely profitable on that package, not unprofitable, not losing money, but she could not price it any amount lower, to just, she was barely breaking even. Now that’s after delivering an incredible clinical outcome after the time the product expertise she was going to keep a margin that did not reflect the value that she was providing or the goals that she had for her business.

Guys, this is a physician, she’s smart, she’s experienced, she’s been running a successful practice. She was not being careless. She was doing what we all do when we price without the underlying data. She was working from instinct and market awareness, because she did not have the actual numbers in front of her. So we adjusted the pricing on that package before it launched, and when she launched it, she did so with confidence, because she knew, not hoped, not estimated, but knew that it was actually priced to support her business. Now that is the difference the cost of treatment analysis makes, not just knowing you should charge more, but knowing exactly where your floor is, and why. So, let me bring this back to the fully booked spot owner who can’t figure out where the money goes. Here is what is happening often.

You built your menu based on what you thought you could sell, what your clients would respond to, what your market seemed to support, and some of those services are profitable, some of them, and this is the part that’s hard to hear, is that some of them are not. Some of them are covering their cost, but barely contributing to the business, and some of them you might even be losing money. They might be priced in a way that makes more volume a bigger problem, not a better one. When every service on your menu has a different margin, and you don’t know what those margins are, your full book is actually a mixed bag. Some of those appointments are genuinely building your business, and some of them are keeping you busy, and you can’t tell the difference without the data. So, this is why so many spot owners feel like they’re running so hard, running as fast as they can, and they just can’t get ahead. It’s not that they’re not working hard enough, it’s not that all of their work is yielding the same return.

It’s without the cost of treatment analysis, you have no way to know which services to. Protect which to reprice, which to promote, and which to reconsider entirely. The goal is not to be fully booked. The goal is to be fully booked with the right services at the right prices to actually hit your financial goals. These are not the same. And then this is where AI enters the conversation, and it’s really, really cool here, because we’re not just running the math right inside of our growth factor implementation program, we have a cost of treatment and profitability analysis, it’s on call to that we do with every single client, we’re having this tracker that you know captures the data for every service that gets calculated manually, that’s the easy part, but what’s really cool about what we do is we bring in AI and we do a full analysis that goes from informative to truly strategic. So we’re first looking at the margin comparison across your service menu, all right, so AI can take all of that cost and revenue data, and it can quickly show us not just which services are profitable, but how they compare to each other, where the gaps are, and what the overall picture of your menu looks like from a margin standpoint. So patterns emerge quickly, and that would take significant, significant amount of time to identify manually. The second layer is what I think is really cool. All right, so we’re going to compare your most profitable services to your ICA. Your ideal client has specific treatments that she wants, she has specific goals that bring her through your door. The question AI helps us answer is whether the cert, the services that she is most drawn to are also the services with the margins that support your business. If your most profitable services are also the ones which your ideal client wants, you’re in a strong position. If there’s a mismatch, if the services filling your books are the lower margin ones, that is critical information, because now you know where to shift your focus, your marketing, and your menu strategy. Now, the third layer is the one that tends to hit the hardest: goal feasibility.

So, every spa owner has a number that she wants to pay herself. She has a vision for what financial success actually looks like for her personally. AI helps us take that number, look at the capacity of the business, the treatment rooms, the providers, the available hours, and look at the current margin structure. And then answer the question with everything as it currently stands, is it actually possible to that goal? Sometimes the answer is yes, and we get to show her exactly why. Sometimes the answer is not yet, and we get to show her precisely what needs to change and why the hamster wheel has been spinning. Either way, she’s no longer guessing, she’s working with a real picture of her business. That clarity is worth more than any amount of additional bookings, so here’s what actually changes when a spa owner has this analysis in her hands, because it’s not what most people expect. She does not panic, she does not immediately overhaul her entire menu, she does not raise every price overnight.

What she does is start making decisions with confidence, more confidence than she’s ever had as a business owner and as a business leader. She knows which services to prioritize in her marketing. If her highest margin services are the ones her ideal client already wants, she leans into promoting those. She builds packages around them. She trains her front desk to recommend them. She stops spending equal energy on services that are filling time without meaningfully building her business. She reprices with evidence, instead of looking at a competitor’s menu and wondering if she should just adjust. She looks at her own numbers and knows exactly what she needs to charge to hit her margins targets. The conversation changes from does this feel right to what does the math support, what is the data telling me. She starts thinking about her books differently. A full schedule stops being the goal. A profitable schedule becomes the goal. Those might look similar from the outside, but they feel completely different from the inside, and they produce a completely different financial result at the end of the month. And she finally understands the hamster wheel, not as a personal failure, not as a sign that she’s doing something wrong, but as a predictable result of not having the right information, and once she has it, that wheel stops, because she can see exactly where to get off. So, if you feel like I’m speaking directly to you right now, I want you to know. You’ve built something real. You have clients who trust you, a team who shows up, a schedule that proves that there’s genuine demand for what you do.

You’re not failing, you’re not bad at business, you’re just operating without one of the most essential pieces of financial intelligence that a service business can have, the actual cost of delivering what you sell, it’s not a character flaw, it’s a gap, and gaps can be filled. The cost of treatment and profitability analysis is not a complicated concept, it’s straightforward math applied to real numbers from your real business. What makes it hard to do on your own is not the math itself, it’s having the right framework, the right prompts, and someone alongside you who knows what to look for when the numbers come back, because sometimes what the numbers reveal is good news, you’re already in strong shape and just needed the confirmation, and sometimes what they reveal is the exact reason things have felt harder for you than they should, and now you have a clear, actionable path forward. Either way, you deserve to know. Now, I want to leave you with a reframe that I hope that you carry into how you think about how you think about your business from here forward. A full book is evidence. It is evidence that you have built something that people want. It’s evidence that your clinical skills are strong, your reputation is real, and your marketing is working. That evidence matters, and it deserves to be honored. But evidence of demand is not the same as evidence of profit, and a business strategy built on filling your schedule without the profitability foundation underneath will keep producing the same result. A busy owner who cannot figure out where the money went. The shift from fully booked to the goal of profitably booked is one of the most significant mindset moves that a spa CEO can make, and it starts with one analysis. So, if you’re curious, what that analysis looks like in practice, and what it looks like to have someone walk through it with you using real numbers from your actual business, that’s exactly where we begin inside of our growth factor implementation program. The cost of treatment and profitability analysis is one of the first things that we do together, because everything else – the marketing, the team building, the scaling – has to be built on a foundation that actually supports your goals. Now we use AI to deepen that analysis in ways that would take weeks to produce manually, and our clients consistently tell us it’s one of the most clarifying experiences they’ve had in their business. You can learn more about growth factor implementation by clicking the link below this episode. Now, for now, I want you to sit with this one question, not to answer right now, but to hold.

If you ran the real cost of treatment on your numbers every service on your menu, what do you think you’d find? If the honest answer is I’m not sure, that uncertainty is information, and you don’t have to keep operating inside of that. Thank you so much for spending this time with me today. If this episode resonated with you, if it named something that you’ve been feeling but have not quite put into words, please share it. Send it to a spa owner in your network who’s been running hard and wondering why the numbers are not catching up. This conversation might be the one that shifts something for her. I’ll see you next week.

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