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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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Join the free Spa Marketing Made Easy Podcast Community

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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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EP 486: Your Spa’s Financial Data Has Been Telling You a Story — AI Can Finally Show You What It Says
  • /
  • business, education, marketing

You have been keeping the records. Every month, you fill in the numbers. Revenue logged. Expenses tracked. KPIs updated. You have done everything right — and you still sit down at the end of the month and feel like you are not quite seeing your business clearly.

That is not a data problem. It is a presentation problem.

In Episode 486 of Spa Marketing Made Easy, Daniela Woerner tackles one of the most quietly frustrating realities facing spa owners who are doing the work: having clean financial data and still lacking the financial clarity to lead from it confidently. If you have been in the treatment room three or four days a week while also managing your team, responding to clients, and running your marketing, you already know there is simply no bandwidth left over to manually cross-reference spreadsheets and piece together trends. The data is there. The time to analyze it is not.

That is the problem AI just solved.

Daniela walks you through how she used Claude to build an interactive visual financial dashboard for Addo Aesthetics using data she already had. What came back was not a prettier version of a spreadsheet. It was a moving, visual picture of her business — a line graph tracking revenue over time, bar charts making comparisons obvious, projection features that showed what the business was on track to hit by year’s end based on its current growth rate. Things that had been hiding in rows and columns became visible immediately. Blind spots surfaced. Forward-looking questions that had previously required significant manual work became answerable in seconds.

The whole process took 15 minutes.

She then shares what happened when she walked a Growth Factor® client through the same process. This client had been tracking her finances using the Growth Factor® spreadsheets for years. Her records were clean. She was not avoiding her numbers; she was honoring them. But something shifted when they built the dashboard together. She started asking different questions — better questions, CEO-level questions. She stopped managing her data and started using it to lead. That is exactly the shift this episode is built to create for you.

Daniela also addresses something important: how to work with AI tools responsibly when financial data is involved. There is a meaningful difference between financial performance data (revenue figures, expense categories, payroll percentages, cost of goods, KPIs) and financial identity data (bank account numbers, routing numbers, credit card numbers, login credentials). The dashboard process requires the former and has no need for the latter. Protecting yourself means sharing what AI needs to do the job — nothing more.

What this episode ultimately makes clear is that the foundation is already there. The data you have been collecting for months or years is more valuable than you may realize. You are not missing information. You are missing the tool that makes it legible at the speed your schedule actually allows for. That tool exists, it is accessible, and it does not require a background in finance or technology to use.

This episode is part of the June focus on operational excellence here on Spa Marketing Made Easy. If you are ready to stop reading your numbers month by month and start seeing the arc of your business as the story it actually is, this one is for you.

Resources Mentioned in Episode 486: Your Spa’s Financial Data Has Been Telling You a Story — AI Can Finally Show You What It Says

  • Ready to try it yourself? Start with Claude

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

Subscribe on Spotify Subscribe on Apple Podcasts Subscribe on YouTube

Join the free Spa Marketing Made Easy Podcast Community

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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.

So picture this, you have kept meticulous financial records since the day you opened your doors. Every month, you fill in the spreadsheets, you track your revenue, you log your expenses, you document what came in and what went out. The data is there. You have done the work, and yet you still feel like you don’t fully see your business, you know what happened last month, but you’re not really sure what that means. You can read the numbers, but the story that they’re telling you isn’t clear. The pattern is there somewhere. The trend is hiding in that sea of cells, but you’re running a spa, leading a team, seeing clients. You don’t have the bandwidth to sit down with 14 spreadsheets and piece the picture together yourself. That’s not a data problem, it is a presentation problem, and AI just solved for it. Today, I’m going to show you what becomes possible when you take the financial data that you already have and let AI transform it into a visual dashboard that you can actually read, understand, and lead from. I’m going to share what happened when I did this with my own business, and what happened when one of our clients did too. So, stay with me. This one is going to shift how you see what’s already in your hands. Welcome back to Spa Marketing Made Easy. I’m your host, Daniela Woerner, founder and CEO of Adoesthetics, and the creator of the Growth Factor framework.

This is the podcast where we talk to esthetic professionals to show you real, practical business strategies, so that you can build the business that you actually want, not one that’s just keeping you busy. So, if you’re new here, welcome. I have been in the esthetic industry for two decades now, and for the past 12 years, I’ve been completely focused on one thing: helping spa CEOs build businesses that are profitable, predictable, and sustainable, not just booked solid, actually profitable, and there is a difference. We talk about that difference a lot on this show. Now, today’s episode is part of our June focus on operational excellence, and I want to start with something that might surprise you. Now, if you have been a part of our growth factor community for any length of time, you know that we take financial tracking very seriously. We’ve provided our members with spreadsheets over the years that track a whole number of KPIs and metrics that are relevant to your business, to running a profitable spa business, and our members use them, many of them have years of clean, consistent data sitting in Google Sheets or in Excel right now. That’s something to be so proud of, because most spa owners don’t. You do now. I want to be very clear about what I’m not saying today. I’m not saying that you’ve been ignoring your numbers, I’m not saying that the data isn’t there. For many of you, the data is excellent. What I’m saying is that there’s a significant gap between having your financial data and having financial clarity, and that gap is costing you the ability to read your business and lead your team from a clear, confident bird’s eye view, instead of trying to piece this story together month by month, when you’re in the treatment room four days a week, when you’re managing a team, when you’re responding to clients, when you’re leading your marketing, and just handling everything that lands on the desk of a spa CEO, you don’t have time to cross reference spreadsheets to manually identify trends, the data is there, the bandwidth is to analyze it, is not that’s the problem that AI just solved.

So let me show you what this looks like for me personally, because I think the context matters. So this year for us here at Ado Esthetics has been a remarkable year. We are on track to have our highest revenue, highest profit year in the entire history of our company. I’m so incredibly grateful for that, but even when the growth is happening, if you can’t see it clearly, it’s hard to lead from it with confidence. So, I had all the data, month by month, the numbers were there, but I wanted to understand in a deeper way our growth trajectory, and in a way that was beyond just knowing, like, okay, well, here’s what we did this month, and here’s what we did last month, and I knew that things were going up, but I wanted to understand in a deeper way, I wanted to know what we were actually on track to hit by the end of the year, I wanted to know if there were any blind spots that I might be missing. You don’t know what you don’t know, right? So I use Claude. We love, we’re a lover’s Claude over here, and I use Claude to build a financial dashboard from our existing data, and my mind was literally blown. So instead of rows and columns, and I. Was like looking at this interactive visual graph that showed our revenue trend over time. I could see the months that were accelerated, I could see the dips, I could.. I had levers that I could pull if we did this or did that. It was insane. It was so insane, and it helped me understand in such a clear way the impact of each individual KPI. Now the projection feature was amazing for me. So showing our data based on our growth rate, Claude was able to help me see what we were on track to hit if we maintain our current trajectory, and that kind of forward looking visibility changes how you plan, it changes what you prioritize, it changes the decisions that you make in May and June, because you can see where October is heading, blind spots, right? There were a couple of areas where the visual really made me clear about what the spreadsheet had kind of obscured, not problems necessary, but things that deserved more attention than I had been giving them, so the kinds of things that you catch when you’re looking at a graph and something just slightly looks off pattern, you notice it in a visual where you might scroll right past it in a table, and you guys, that dashboard took 15 minutes to build, the clarity it gave me is something that I am working with today, every single day. And what was so cool is that I then had the opportunity to walk through the same process with one of our clients, who she’s a spa owner, she’s been tracking her finances using our growth factor spreadsheets for years, she’s diligent, she’s detailed, her records are clean.

This is not someone who’s avoiding her numbers. She has been honoring them, she’s been really stepping into that role of CEO. But when we sat down together and did that and built the visual draft dashboard, I could see something shift in her, and I could see her understanding her business in a deeper way, and it was, it was like she just started asking the right questions, good questions, CEO questions, and she was understanding her business exactly as I had. She was going through the same experience that I had when I first did my dashboard, and it gave her the confidence, I think it gave her the confidence to, it’s like all of a sudden you’re speaking the same language, you and your business, that’s what I want for you, not more data, not more tracking, but a presentation of your existing data that makes that story visible, that makes the patterns clear, that makes you a more confident leader of your own business, I was thrilled to see that shift in her. She went from looking at her data as something that she managed into something that she could actually use to lead, and that is a different relationship with your own business. And it happened in about 15 minutes. Now let me talk about what a financial dashboard actually does, because I think there’s a version of this conversation that makes it sound more complicated than it is. A dashboard simply takes your existing financial data and it presents it in a much more visually appealing way, so instead of reading a number in a cell, you’re looking at a graph that shows movement over time. Instead of calculating your percentage by hand, you’re seeing a bar chart that makes that comparison. For a spa CEO, the power of that is very significant, especially if you’re a visual person. So, when your revenue is displayed as a line on a graph across 12 months, you stop seeing individual months, and you start seeing your business as a continuous story. You see the months you grew, you see the months you held steady, you see the impact of a team change, a service edition, a pricing adjustment. You see it visually, which means that you understand it completely in a way that Rosen sells and columns simply don’t allow trend identification becomes almost effortless. If you see your retail disservice revenue has been declining over six months, the graph shows you that before it becomes a crisis. If one service line is growing faster than the other, the visual makes that opportunity obvious. These patterns exist in your spreadsheets today, you just can’t see them now. The other piece that I want to name is projections, so when your historical data is organized and visualized, you can start to see forward, not just backward. So, what’s your current growth rate? What is, where does that put you by the end of the year, if nothing changes, where does it put you? If you wait, make one or two specific adjustments. These are questions that your data, when properly organized, can answer. Now, without the dashboard, answering them requires a significant amount of manual work. With it, you’re looking at the big picture.

Now I’m not going to walk you through every single step of building this yourself today. What I want you to walk away from this conversation is that it’s possible. It’s not as complex as it sounds, and the data that you need to make it work is almost certainly something that you already have. The data is there, the story is there, AI just makes it visual. Now important. important, you know, note when you are working with AI tools and financial data. So, when you are working with Claude or Chat GBT, or any AI platform to build something like this, you are working with your business information, that’s fine, that’s the purpose, but you want to be very careful, do not include your bank account numbers into an AI tool, do not enter routing numbers, credit card numbers, login credentials, any type of sensitive identifying financial information. That type of data has no place in this process and does not need to be a part of it. So, if you are uploading statements or anything like that, make sure that you’re removing the financial information that you don’t want the AI tool to have. Okay, so we are working with revenue figures, expense categories, payroll percentages, cost of goods, your cape, your different KPIs. That’s financial performance data, not financial identity data. There’s a difference, and staying on the right side of that line is going to keep you protected. So, treat AI the same way that you would treat any business tool. Share what it needs to do the job and protect what it doesn’t. Okay, that’s really important to protect your data. Now I want to zoom out for a second, and I want to talk about why this kind of financial clarity actually is so important. What it unlocks for you as a leader, because it’s more than just a prettier spreadsheet. In fact, it’s not even a spreadsheet, but when you can see your business visually, you stop reacting and start anticipating. You see a pattern emerging in April that tells you something about June, and then you make that decision in April. That’s not something that happened when you’re reading through individual monthly reports. That’s something that happens when you’re looking at the arc when you’re looking at longer term trends. You start having different conversations with your team, so instead of saying we need to do better this month, you can say here’s what our data is showing us, here’s the pattern that I see, and here’s why we’re going to focus on this particular result. That is a CEO leading with clarity, that is a completely different kind of authority, so you start trusting your own judgment more than you did before, and one of the things that I see consistently with spa owners is that the uncertainty around the financial data creates this kind of paralysis around decisions, but now decisions get easier, not always easy, but easier, because you’re working with the visibility instead of working around uncertainty. And when you start planning further ahead, when you know where you’re projected to finish the year, you can plan for it. You can decide now whether you want to accept that trajectory or change it. You can see the window before it closes, instead of realizing after the fact that it already did. This is what financial dashboards do. They do not add new information; they make the information that you already have worth something in real time. Okay, now you’ve been building your business for years. You are not a beginner. You are not someone who doesn’t care about her numbers.

You are someone who has been doing the work, tracking the data, and still feeling like there’s something between the data and the clarity that is missing. That gap is not a personal failing. It’s not a sign that you’re bad with numbers or not cut out to be a CEO, it’s simply the natural result of having more data than any one person has the time to manually analyze when they’re also running a business. Okay, it’s a systems problem, right? And when we have systems problems, they have solutions, and we are so blessed to live in the time where we have AI as a tool that AI can offer you a solution to this problem. It’s not a shortcut, it’s a presentation layer, because your work is already done, your data is already there. What’s been missing is the tool that makes it legible at the speed that your schedule actually allows for. Now, the most powerful thing about the financial dashboard conversation again is not the technology, but it’s what the technology reveals, that you already have what you need, you have the data, you have the history, you have the evidence of your own business right there in those spreadsheets and. AI simply gives you a way to see it now. If you are part of our growth factor community, and you’ve been keeping up with your financial tracking, you are so much closer to this kind of clarity than you might think. The foundation is already there, and if you’re curious about what it would look like to build not just a financial dashboard with the full operational infrastructure that lets you lead your business instead of operate inside of it is exactly what we do inside of our growth factor implementation program. We build the systems, the financial frameworks, and the AI tools together with one on one coaching every step of the way. If that sounds like where you are headed, then you can find out more at the link below this video by booking a call with our growth team. For now, just sit with this: the data that you’ve been collecting is more valuable than you know. You just need the right tool to make it visible, and that tool exists, and it exists in 15 minutes.

Now you deserve that same clarity. I hope that today’s episode got you a little bit closer to it. Thank you so much for spending this time with me. If this episode resonated with you, please share it with a spa owner in your network who you know is working hard and ready to work smarter. All right, friends, I will see you next week.

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EP 479: The Power of the Right Partnership: How to Build Local Collaborations That Bring in Consistent New Clients
  • /
  • business, education, marketing

There is a marketing strategy that has been around forever, costs far less than paid advertising, and is more powerful right now than it has ever been. It’s building real, relationship-first collaborations with other local businesses in your community. And in Episode 479 of Spa Marketing Made Easy, Daniela Woerner makes the case that if you aren’t treating this as a core part of your marketing strategy in 2026, you’re leaving one of your biggest competitive advantages on the table.

Here’s the context that makes this so timely. Your ideal client is savvier than ever about the content she consumes. She’s on platforms where everything looks polished, sounds professional, and increasingly feels like it could come from anyone. The more content that fills her feed, the more she relies on the people she already knows and trusts when she’s ready to make a decision about her skin. Her friend who always looks amazing. Her Pilates instructor. Her hairstylist. That is word of mouth, and it has always been powerful. What Daniela teaches in this episode is how to stop leaving it to chance.

Strategic partnerships are how you build the infrastructure that makes word-of-mouth referrals happen consistently. Instead of waiting and hoping, you’re cultivating a network of trusted local businesses whose clients are already your ideal clients, and who, when the moment comes, are ready to send them your way.

Daniela also addresses the financial case for this strategy. Ad costs across Facebook, Instagram, and Google continue to rise, and that trend isn’t reversing. If paid advertising is your primary or only client acquisition channel, you’re building on a foundation that requires constant reinvestment and gets more competitive over time. Strategic partnerships, by contrast, compound. A partner who genuinely believes in your work and refers her clients consistently is one of the most valuable marketing assets you can build, and she doesn’t cost more every time the algorithm changes.

There’s a mindset piece too, and Daniela doesn’t gloss over it. The belief that other local businesses are your competition is one of the most limiting things a spa owner can carry. Daniela shares a story from her own time in the treatment room, where multiple seven-figure spas thrived in the same local market simultaneously, because a rising tide really does float all boats. When you lead with abundance, when you show up for other businesses and give before you ever ask, you become someone that the right people genuinely want to recommend.

Daniela closes the episode with a homework assignment that is simple, specific, and actionable: think about who your ideal client already trusts in your community, write down three names, and start showing up for those businesses. Follow them, engage with their content, visit them, send clients their way. Little by little, those small acts of generosity build something no algorithm can replicate.

For the full tactical breakdown on how to identify potential partners, vet them, structure the collaboration, and make it work for both businesses, head back to Episode 397. Daniela references it throughout this episode and links it below.

Resources Mentioned in Episode 479:

EP 397: Strategic Partnerships for Spa – Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Basket

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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.

Hello my dear, Daniela here, and welcome ack to the Spa Marketing Made Easy Podcast. If you are new here, I am so glad that you found us. This podcast is all about helping esthetic professionals like you build a business that is profitable, sustainable and built around the life that you actually want to live.

Okay, so today I want to revisit a topic that I’ve covered before on this show, but I’m revisiting it with a very specific intention, because the landscape, if you haven’t noticed, the landscape, has shifted so significantly in the past couple of years that I believe that this strategy, which was already powerful when I first talked about it. It’s really in a space that it’s it’s essential, it’s a non negotiable, and I don’t say that lightly. Now I believe deeply in strategic partnerships. Specifically, I want to talk about why building real relationship first collaborations with other local businesses is one of the biggest competitive advantages that you have as a spa owner in 2026 now, if you’ve been listening to this show for a while, you might remember episode 397, 397, where I did a deep dive on the how behind strategic partnerships, so how to identify potential partners, how to vet them, how to reach out, how to structure something that actually works for both businesses. We’re going to link that up below this episode so you can still go back and listen to it or get a refresher if you’ve already listened to it before. It is still relevant. That framework still holds up. But what I want to do in today’s episode is really zoom out. I want to talk about why the world that we’re operating in right now, in 2026 makes this strategy more urgent and really more powerful than it’s ever been. Because the reasons I was excited about partnerships, you know, year and a half, two years ago, they’re still true, and yet, there are brand new reasons layered on top of them that I think are going to completely change how you think about where your marketing energy should be going. Okay, so let’s get into it.

So I want to start by talking about your ideal client, and specifically her experience of the Internet, what it looks like right now in 2026 because I think when we really sit with this, the case for relationship marketing becomes impossible to argue with. Now your ideal client, just like you as a human being, they and you are being marketed to constantly, every platform she’s on, every search she does, every app she’s opened. She is being served ads, content and recommendations at a volume that was not even possible three years ago, and a significant and growing percentage of that content is AI generated AI written captions, AI generated images. Ai produced emails. Ai optimized ads. Now, just to be clear, I am not anti AI. I am actually in the deep end of the pool. I’m using AI in every single aspect that I can but the difference is that using AI is a skill, and if you don’t know how to use AI properly, you are going to get extremely generic, boring content that you know we we’ve said for years, the brand that does everything is the brand that does nothing if you’re not giving the tool, the AI tool, the information to properly create content that sounds like you, the nuanced things you’re going to get junk and because it’s such a low barrier to entry, and there’s not very many People that are really skilled in understanding how to get quality content out there is just a onslaught of information that’s being put out there, the captions, the images, the emails, all of that. Now I am very pro AI. We are an AI first company.

However, we want to use it on all of the administrative tasks, on all the things that will save us time so that we can have more time for human connection. That is the really important piece of the sentence, the so that all right, so we use AI inside of our business. Every single day. We teach spa owners how to use it to dramatically improve their operations and their marketing output. It is a very powerful tool that I believe in deeply. But here’s the reality of what’s happening from the consumer side. Right? When I said the brand that does everything is the brand that does nothing.

Everything starts to look and sound the same, the content is. Is polished and optimized, but somehow it feels like it could come from anyone. When that happens, your trust erodes, and we actually, I’m just going to do like a little side note here, just to convey like how crazy this is. When we had our event in Texas, we had our spa CEO event in Texas, and that was, you know, there’s primarily, it’s our growth factor students that are coming to these events, but we do open them up to the public towards as the event gets closer.

And we had someone come to our Texas event that said, I didn’t know if Daniela was real or not, or if everything she was, like, if she was an AI generated being, and I wanted to see her in person. I was like, That is a first. I am real. You can, you can give me a hug when you see me in person. But it was just like, I was like, Wow, I’ve never heard that before, and that is probably something that we will continue to hear going forward. So anyway, the important piece, especially in an industry like ours, is that it is built on trust, right? We’re going to be in relationship with our patients, and we’re going to be touching her face and touching her skin and hearing what she’s insecure about. Trust is essential. It’s something that we absolutely need to take very seriously. So what does your ideal client do when she doesn’t know who to trust online? She’s going to ask someone she already trusts in real life. She’s going to ask her friend who has great skin. She’s going to ask the instructor at her Pilates studio. She’s going to ask her hairstylist. She might even go into a local Facebook group. This is word of mouth. Okay, word of mouth has always been powerful, but in a world saturated with AI generated content, with rising ad costs, with algorithm fatigue, it’s one of those things that we need to have it in a way that we can kind of control the output that was always the problem with word of mouth is like, you know, with ads, you can increase your ad spend and get more people in with word of mouth, you don’t have as much control over your own marketing strategy, and we have a little more control when we work with strategic partners. Okay, so strategic partnerships are how you systematically build the infrastructure that makes word of mouth happen consistently, not just when you get lucky, but is a real reliable, repeatable system. And you know, we love systems over here. So let’s get into paid ads. I was just talking about paid ads, but I think this is a really important concept for why partnerships also have become so strategically critical in 2026 now I shared before in that episode 397 about a lesson that I learned to the hard way around AD costs. So I’ve been running ads that were performing really well, and then in the lead up to a major election cycle, the cost spiked dramatically, and the return just completely collapsed, not because my ads were bad, but because or not because my offer was wrong, but because I was competing for limited ad space against campaigns with budgets that like made mine just completely insignificant, and so my cost per lead went through the roof. So that experience taught me something that I have never forgotten, and that is that I do not want all of my eggs in one basket ever. And that lesson applies even more powerfully today. So ad cost across Facebook, Instagram, Google, they are continuing to climb. The competition for attention is higher than it has ever been, and it’s not going to get lower. Friends and as AI, makes it easier and cheaper for every single business to produce more content and run more ads, the noise level is only going to increase, which means the cost of cutting through that noise with paid advertising is only going to go up. Now I’m not telling you to abandon paid ads. We are investing heavily in paid ads. We use them very strategically, but we are also extremely dialed in on who our ICA is, okay. So when you use ads strategically.

They absolutely still work, and they’re still a part of a well rounded marketing approach. But what I’m saying is that if paid advertising is your primary or your only strategy for new client acquisition, you’re building on a foundation that is getting more expensive and less reliable every single. Whole year. Now, strategic partnerships, on the other hand, have a very different cost structure. The primary investment is going to be time and genuine relationship building genuine is the key word here and in return. When the partnerships are right, they are going to compound over time, rather than requiring constant reinvestment, a partner who genuinely believes in your work and consistently refers her clients to you is worth more than almost any ad campaign you can run, and she does not cost more every time the algorithm changes. Now there’s something else happening in 2026 that I believe is worth naming, and it connects directly with why local relationship marketing is having such a moment right now. There is a growing trust deficit online. People are becoming increasingly skeptical of the content that they consume, of the reviews that they read, recommendations that they receive from sources they don’t personally know. And that’s normal, right? That’s completely normal when you think about, like, influencer partnerships, how they’re paid, and you know, oftentimes they’re disclosed in a very fine print that nobody reads when everybody’s brand captions and emails and ads sound polished and professional and vaguely the same, and when it’s genuinely hard to tell what is authentic and what is manufactured, people don’t know who to trust, right? So what they’re doing is really focusing on the people that they know, the humans that they can see and touch, that they interact with.

Every single day, they’re trusting their own networks more and more and outside sources less. Now for a local spa owner, this is an enormous opportunity, because you are not a faceless brand. You are a person in a community building real relationships with real people, and the trust that gets built through genuine community presence, through showing up, consistently being involved, through being known and vouched for, for other trusted people in your area, that kind of trust is exactly what your ideal client is hungry for right now, that’s what I’m talking about when I say go out there and be the mayor of your town. It is not just a cute phrase. It is a real competitive strategy. But when you’re a spa owner that you know, other businesses in your community know and trust and genuinely recommend, when you’ve become woven into the fabric of your local business ecosystem, you have something that no amount of ad spend can buy. You have social proof that is personal, specific and trusted, and here’s what makes this even better. Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me. Here’s what makes this even better. Your competitors are probably not doing this. Why? Because it takes time and it takes stepping out of your comfort zone. I’ve told you guys before I am not a fan of large groups of people, and so showing up at your Chamber of Commerce event or a women’s networking group or entrepreneur group or whatever it is, it’s hard, it’s scary, and it takes a lot of time, which I’m guessing most of you don’t feel like you’re swimming in time. So that makes it an even more powerful strategy, because again, so many people are not putting the effort in for this. They’re probably doing what everyone else is doing, which is trying to figure out the algorithm, trying to keep up with content trends, trying to optimize their ad spend, the relationship building that feels slower. It’s less measurable, so it’s going to get moved to the bottom of the to do list, which means that you, if you take up this strategy, if you commit to doing this right, you are going to just keep widening that competitive advantage in your local market. Imagine having your hair stylist and your yoga teacher recommending the same location to get a facial like these places that these businesses, that these individuals are frequenting, if they’re getting recommendations from multiple locations that you are the best spot in town. Imagine how powerful that is when they go and look you up and you’re like, Oh, this is the place to be, right? It’s really, really an incredible thing.

All right, so let’s talk about the mindset piece, okay, that is going to make this all possible, because I think there’s a belief that holds a lot of you back from really committing to this strategy, and again, in 2026 that belief is going to be more costly than ever. And this is the belief that other businesses in your area are your competition. I understand where it comes from. I get it. We live in a culture that frames businesses. Zero sum game, if she gets the client I do not and in a local market, that scarcity mindset can feel very real, especially when things are slow. But listen, this is something that is untrue. I want you to shift your mindset. I want you to operate from a place of abundance. I want you to believe that they’re more than enough clients for everyone. I want you to believe that a rising tide floats all boats when we work together, when you’re competing with what makes you uniquely you, you have no competition. Okay, so support other women in business support other spas celebrate when you see other spas opening, because that indicates that there is more demand in your area. You know, when I was still practicing, there was a spa that I was working at that it just felt like there was a med spa on every single corner, and yet, all of them were thriving. All of them were doing well, like, and thriving. I mean, like, seven figure spas, okay, not just something that is, you know, trying to get to that space, like, really operating and having the capacity to serve at that level. Okay, so keep your energy focused on the positive, on what makes you different, on how you can serve your people above and beyond. When you have that authentic human connection which is so so important, and you have the abundance mindset, it’s not just a nice philosophy, it is a genuine competitive strategy. Now the other piece of the mindset shift is around patience, relationship. Marketing does not produce results overnight. It’s a long game, just like building a business is a marathon, not a sprint, right? And in a world that is increasingly optimized for instant feedback, likes, clicks, conversations and the patience that is required for relationship marketing, oh my gosh.

It feels like you’re walking through molasses, right? But the return on the patients is something that instant feedback loops cannot produce. It’s a network of people who genuinely are rooting for your success, who send you clients, not because of a transaction, but because they believe in you, who become, over time, one of the most valuable assets that your business has. And even better, some of these people are going to become genuine friends, genuine pillars in your life, both personally and professionally. Okay, so let’s bring this home with something practical, because I never want to leave you with just ideas. I want you to walk away with some action items, some things that you can actually do. So if you want the full tactical framework for how to build strategic partnerships, then make sure that you go back and listen to episode 397 again. We’re going to have that linked up. That episode is absolutely worth your time. But for today, I want you to do one thing. I want you to think about your ideal client and ask yourself one question, who else is she already trusting in my community, not who could theoretically be a good partner? Who does she already trust? Who does she already spend money with? Who would she listen to? If that person said you have to go see this spa owner, She’s incredible. Write down three names, three local business owners who serve your ideal client in a different way than you do, businesses whose values feel aligned with yours, businesses who genuinely you respect and admire. And then I want you to start showing up for them, follow them, engage with their content, genuinely visit them. Give them business. Always lead with giving before you think about what you might get in return. And here’s the thing, in a world where everyone is trying to optimize their way to connection, genuinely showing up as a differentiator, and little by little, those small acts of generosity build something that no algorithm can replicate.

That is your homework. Three names. That’s it. I want you to start there. All right, my dears, that is a wrap on today’s episode. If this conversation has shifted something in a way that you are thinking about where your marketing energy should be going right now, good. That is exactly what I hoped for. Go back and listen to episode 397, if you want the full tactical breakdown on how to build your partnership strategy, and then come back here and let me know in the spa marketing Made Easy community what partnerships you’re building. I love hearing what you guys are up to now, if today’s episode resonated with you, could you take 30 seconds? And leave us a review on Apple podcast or on Spotify, wherever you are listening, reviews are the lifeblood of this show. They are how other esthetic professionals find us, and they mean the world to me. Personally, I read every single one. And if you know a spa owner who needs to hear this today, please share this episode with her forward it.

Drop it in your Instagram Stories, send it in a group chat. Let’s get it into the hands of people who need it. Remember, a rising tide floats all boats. Thank you so much for being here, and I will catch you on the next episode.

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EP 478: Is Your Online Presence Losing Clients Before They Ever Call? How to Audit Your Digital First Impression
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  • business, education, marketing

Your prospective client is not waiting to meet you before she decides whether to book. She is already researching you online, scrolling your Instagram, Googling your business, and landing on your website, and in a matter of seconds per platform, she is making a gut decision: is this for me, or is it not?

If your online presence does not give her a clear, confident, immediate answer, she is not going to call and ask. She is going to leave and book somewhere else. And that is happening right now, while you are in the treatment room, while you are at school pickup, and yes, while you are listening to this episode.

In Episode 478 of Spa Marketing Made Easy, Daniela introduces the digital first impression trifecta: the three platforms that shape how prospective clients experience your business before they ever interact with you directly. Those platforms are your Instagram profile, your Google Business Profile, and your website. Each one has a specific job to do, and when any one of them is underperforming, you are quietly losing clients you never even knew you had.

The foundational reframe Daniela shares in this episode is this: your online presence is not just marketing. It is your first employee, on the clock 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The question is not whether you have these platforms. Most spa owners do. The question is whether they are doing their jobs.

Daniela walks through what that actually looks like for each platform. For Instagram, the focus is not the content; it is the profile. Your bio, your link, and your highlights are the storefront window that a stranger uses to decide whether she is staying or leaving. A beautiful feed cannot compensate for a generic bio that speaks to no one in particular. For your Google Business Profile, the mindset shift is significant: this is not a listing, it is a conversion tool. When someone searches for the best esthetician in her city, she is not in exploration mode. She is in decision mode, and your Google profile is the thing standing between her choosing you or choosing someone else.

Daniela also addresses the changing landscape of search, including the growing role of AI tools like ChatGPT in how clients discover local businesses. The fundamentals of strong, specific, client-focused language are no longer just good marketing practices. They are the infrastructure that determines whether your spa surfaces in an AI-powered search at all.

And for your website, Daniela makes a point that is worth sitting with: the difference between a website that converts and one that does not is almost never about design. It is about whether the words were written for the owner or for the client. A website is not a brochure. It is a conversation, and it should meet your ideal client where she is, acknowledge what she is struggling with, and walk her toward a decision.

This episode is a clarity-builder. Daniela connects all three platforms back to the foundational work of deeply knowing your ideal client, the exact reason that ICA clarity is the first thing built inside the Growth Factor® Implementation program. When you know who you are speaking to, every platform becomes easier to optimize. When those platforms work together as one cohesive story, your online presence stops being something you have to manage and starts being something that works for you around the clock.

Listen to the full episode above, or watch it on YouTube, and then open your homepage and ask yourself the one question Daniela leaves you with. The answer will tell you exactly where to start.

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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. If you are new here, welcome. I am so glad that you found us. And this podcast is all about helping esthetic professionals like you to build a business that is profitable, sustainable and built around the life that you want to live. Now, today’s episode, you’re definitely going to want to take notes, so if you’re listening in the car, make sure that you’re going to come back to this, because we have a lot of teaching that’s going to happen in the next 30 to 40 minutes or so. And this is an episode that, if you actually implement what we are sharing with you, it will completely change the way that you are operating your business. Now, before I jump in, I want to just highlight something. I want to say, something that I want you to hear, not as a tech tip, but as a business strategy, AI is not just a tool that’s going to help you write a carousel post. It’s not just a tool that’s going to help you create an email in five minutes. Yes, of course, it does those things. But if that is all that you are using AI for, you are leaving so much on the table. Now I want you to think about AI as the and specifically the gpts, the custom gpts, or what the projects that we’re building inside of Claude or chat GPT, whatever AI tool you’re using. These are think of them as employees in your business, not metaphorically, but literally. These are tools that can be trained on your systems, your voice, your protocols, your culture, and they can show up, answer questions, train your team, do the work without you having to stop doing what you’re doing to manage any of it, the shift in how you’re thinking about AI, how you’re incorporating it into your business, is going to change everything. And listen, I have been deep, deep in the world of AI for the past few years, like deep end of the pool, deep, trying to learn everything that I can. I’ve played with chatgpt, I’ve tested syndrome, explored Lindy, I’ve tinkered with tools I don’t even know how to pronounce. I’ve tried so many things. I’ve messed up so many times, but I’ve also made some really incredible wins, and I’ve drastically improved the productivity of my team, the output of our marketing, and we are seeing the difference in our profit margins, and that is what I want for you as well. Okay, now this is genuinely one of the most important shifts in our lifetime. It’s like, it’s like, I remember when I was gosh, I was probably in the eighth grade or ninth grade when the Internet became this big thing, nobody was using email addresses. Nobody had cell phones, right? We had beepers, painters, whatever we’re calling them. We are in that transition now that we’re going through, but it’s it’s so much more vast and drastic then we can even comprehend. So know that, acknowledge that, that you know things are changing, and I know that that’s hard. I know that like I’m not trying to undermine that, but when, when you’re struggling with I just got this figured out, and now I’m having to learn something new. We’re all going through that, and the difference is that, you know, some people are going through and just being adaptive as things change, and just comfortable with the fact that they’re going to change. Those are the people that are going to win, are they going to mess up at things? Sure, of course, but there’s going to be a lot of things that they are going to win at that’s going to help them dramatically in their business. Okay, so as I said, I’ve played with all these tools where I’ve kind of landed where I’m at right now is I pay for a chat GPT subscription, I pay $20 a month. There’s still things I find useful, and I think that they were kind of the the first ones to market. They’re coming out with a lot of different tools. The $20 a month is absolutely worth it for me, because you do get other features, like the ability to build a custom GPT that are very important, but when it comes to the day to day in business, we decided to go all in with Claude. Claude is the AI tool by anthropic and we actually invested in. In the teams version, and that made it so much easier for me, because in the teams version, I can share I can create projects and create custom gpts. I can share it. I can share this project with Lucy on my team. I can share this project with Christy on my team. And it really I can share one project with everybody on my team. I get to decide now the Claude version, that’s just the personal plan, is $20 a month. The team’s plan, it’s a minimum of five team members, and I believe it was around $1,200 for the year. Now here’s the reframe, because a lot of a lot of what I’ve heard from our students on our coaching calls is like, Oh, I don’t want another subscription. And again, I want you to think about these softwares as an employee in your business. So if you could say, I’m going to hire someone that’s going to write all of our social media posts, that’s going to streamline our marketing, that’s going to analyze my report, that’s going to help me with my email, that’s going to onboard my staff all of these things. Is that worth $1,200 a year? For me, it was like such a no brainer. And so that’s a shift. Is like we’re thinking about it as another subscription, but what we need to think about it as a salary, right, as a pay structure to really help us streamline our operations across the board. Okay? So that is a really, really important thing. Now, if you are not utilizing AI in your business, if you’re like, Oh, this is challenging, or it’s, I’m I’m still overwhelmed. I don’t have time to learn about this, you are putting yourself at a real disadvantage, and I don’t want to scare you. I don’t want you to feel like you have you know an additional thing on your plate that you’re trying to learn when you’re already overworked and overwhelmed. But what AI can do is it’s hard to even comprehend how fast this is moving. And if you are not using AI, you are not going to be able to compete on any level with with these other businesses that are using AI. Your payroll costs are going to be high. The amount of content that you’re able to be able to produce is going to be high. I know it feels like a lot, and I don’t think that you need to change everything all at once, but you do need to start paying attention to this. I want you to win. I want you to build a business around the life you want to live.

And this is one of the easiest ways. I mean easiest, right? Like it’s always challenging to learn a new technology or new way of doing things, but when we’re looking at the how inexpensive This is compared to the old way of doing business, it’s it’s not even comparable. So we’re going to see, in the next few years, payroll costs declining. We’re going to see sales expanding. I mean, I don’t think anyone in our growth factor programs are still using marketing companies. A lot of marketing companies were paying, you know, 15 to $2,500 a month to take photos, to write copy, to do your reels, all of those things. It’s not necessary anymore. I mean, just that alone, you’re saving, you know, 24,000 a year approximately. That’s huge. So I want to talk to you specifically today about a real life example of one GPT that you could create. Okay, so when we think about hiring, the onboarding process is so important, and oftentimes we hire from a stressed out place. It’s a band aid hire. We’ve got a problem. We just need somebody there to fix it, because we’re too busy and employee turnover is extremely expensive. It’s time consuming. It breaks trust. It breaks the cohesivity of your team. It’s exhausting on you to go back and reiterate and say over and over and over again, what are your values, what are the culture, what are the services, what are the policies, what are the product lines that you’re carrying, you know, all of the things that you’re doing in.

The initial onboarding and I look at the onboarding process. We for a provider, we typically do a two week it’s a 90 day probationary period, but the first two weeks are very heavy on training. So week one we’re going through Week One. Day one, we’re going through all of the policies and procedures and employee handbook and all of those types of things That’s all taken care of by this GPT that we’re talking about building today. Additionally, you can develop and train it more to give your employee your new hire that’s being onboarded. You can quiz them on product knowledge. You can role play with them. You the new hire, can ask numerous questions about different policies or procedures that you have. It walks them through a conversation, and then you are just going in to check on that individual in ask if they have any questions. But, I mean, this is freeing up such a massive amount of time. It’s do it once. Then, like the heavy lifting is once, you absolutely have to continue to tweak and train and edit this GPT to make sure that it’s accurate and on brand and consistent, and all the things that you need in there, but the amount of stress and stress that you get rid of, time that you Get back, it’s such an important piece for your business, okay, so let’s compare that to inconsistent onboarding. All right, so inconsistent onboarding is when you’re going to see that employee turnover more and more and more, because we are not setting our team up for success when we don’t put them through a systemized, consistent onboarding process. Now this is also like side note. This is one of the custom gpts that we are building together at our spa CEO intensive in Washington, DC. That’s on April 19 and 20th.

We’re doing a very intimate event. We’re actually shrinking it down to 30 rather than 50, so that we can have a higher coach to student ratio to help support with the tech in building this. If you have Claude, we can build it in Claude. If you have chat GPT, we can build it in chat GPT. And that’s actually an important note, because I’ve a lot of our growth factor students have started building custom gpts In chat GPT, and they’re like, it’s working, and now you’re talking about Claude. If chat GPT is working for you, stay there. If you’re happy with the results that you’re getting, stay there. You do not need to shift every time a new technology comes out or advances, okay, so don’t feel that you have to change everything. But we can help you whether that is whether you’re building in chat GPT, or whether you are building in Claude. So if you’re interested in that, if you’re focused on team at all, the whole focus is going to be team. And then we are going to be building this custom GPT together. Now, when you don’t onboard properly, and I’m not just talking about the paperwork, I mean the full picture, that hours that you explain your culture, walking them through the service menu, how you like things being done, answering the same questions for the 17th time you know like that is going to take you probably 10 to 20 hours of Direct time if you have a system, okay? Maybe more. And if you’re just winging it like you don’t have any of that documented, which, listen, there’s a lot of people out there doing that, and that’s like, no fault, no shame. If that’s where you’re at, that’s just an area of opportunity that we found in your business that needs to be cleaned up.

Okay? What we’re wanting to do is build a system around that, so that once that system is there, you no longer have that problem every single time you have turnover, because you will have turnover. It’s the nature of the business. You’re not going to have the same front desk for 10 years. You are likely not going to have the same providers for 10 years, right? There’s there’s kind of ebbs and flows in different seasons in your business, and that’s okay, but we want to make sure that you have a clear onboarding process, because every time that a team member doesn’t know the answer to a client question. One, your client experience is going to take a hit. Every time someone describes your signature facial in a way that doesn’t match your brand, you’re losing trust. Every time a new hire feels lost in week one, you increase your risk for turnover, and it is so incredibly expensive to replace a good employee. So inconsistent onboarding creates inconsistent teams, and inconsistent teams create inconsistent client experiences.

And in this industry, your client experience is your brand. That’s your differentiator, okay? So this is getting rid of the binder, right? The the employee handbook, the operations manager manual. Those are valuable. I’m not knocking them. We like we have, you know, like something like a 45 page employee handbook as one of the resources inside of growth factor. But they’re important. But we need to make sure that we have tools that are accessible, that are easy to use, that your team can get the answer right away. Okay, so I want to talk. I want to walk you through, like how we build this in Claude, and what we’re going to do is use a feature called projects, all right. So if you think about Claude by itself, like Claude as a tool, it’s a incredibly intelligent, thoughtful assistant who knows a little bit about everything. Okay, so it’s got it’s brilliant at reasoning, at nuance, at truly understanding your question. But a Claude project is where you take all of that intelligence and you aim it directly at your at a particular task in your business. You give it knowledge, your voice, your rules, your documents. And now, instead of general purpose AI, you have something that functions like a trained member of your team. Now, to make it even better, there’s something called Claude skills that can help with the structure, with the always using your brand voice with the formatting of things, and there’s actually apps that Claude can build within Claude to walk through that’s a whole other thing, but we’ll, we’ll talk about that more at the DC event. So for this podcast, I want to walk you through a project and what that is, okay.

So when you set up a project in Claude. You are essentially doing three things. You are first writing custom instructions. Okay, so this is like the orientation speech that you give every new hire, except it never changes. It never gets forgotten. It never gets it is getting delivered perfectly every single time. So you tell Claude who is in the context of your business, what the job is, how it should speak, what it should and shouldn’t do. Second you’re going to upload your documents. Now I recommend connecting Google Drive to Claude, and I recommend uploading connecting a single document inside of Claude, rather than copying and pasting or uploading a PDF. And the reason that I recommend that is because if you are making edits to a document or to a policy, let’s say you have a change to your cancelation policy, you still if you do it this way, then you are making the change on the Google Drive document, which is your living document, but it’s also then automatically updating your onboarding document. Does that make sense your project? So that can be a huge time saver in the long term of the way that you are kind of creating the system around your AI tools, all right. Third you set the guardrail. So you want to make sure you tell it to stay on brand. This is, I find the guardrails are best set with skills. But if you’re new to Claude, just start with the project. Start with the project and start testing that out there.

Now, to use Claude projects, you do have to have a pro subscription. It’s $20 a month, or like $200 a year, if you’re not ready to invest in teams. So you know, you get to decide on that. Claude projects lives in your account. So if you are going to have your team use that account, the cleanest setup is to create a dedicated Claude account for spa and just share that AI logon. But if they have that AI logon, they’re going to have access to every one of your projects.

Right now With Claude teams, you as the owner, you get to control who has access to which projects, right? And then your team is also using Claude, where you’ve set it up with the skills, you’ve set it up with your brand, voice, all of those things, so they’re not having to do that on their own. Okay, so just kind of throwing that out there. Now you’re going to log in, you’re going to upgrade to pro if you don’t have it already, or you’re going to upgrade to teams if you don’t have it already, and then you’re going to click new project, and ours is called coaches onboarding GPT. So we have, and I actually just built this myself a couple of days ago in quad to show you guys an example of how we are planning to use it, and we’ll be using it as we bring new coaches onto the team to really streamline and standardize the onboarding process, the training process, right? So I want you to give it a name, so you know your spa name, onboarding assistant, or something along those lines. Okay, now where this is you’ve got to make sure that you give Claude the tools to set it up for success. Okay, so we’re going to walk through six different categories, but when I say you’re going to hear this term a lot garbage in, garbage out, if you don’t give Claude the right information, or any GPT, if you’re using chat GPT, or whatever Gemini, whatever tool you’re using, if you don’t give it the right input, it’s not going to be able to give you the right output. Okay? So keep that in mind now, category one, your story, your culture, all right, this is your origin story. Why did you start this ball? What’s your mission? What do you believe? You know, who are your clients? What does your brand stand for? This is the stuff that’s going to it’s creating the culture right now, if you are in growth factor and you have your company bio, this is going to be a great document to upload into, into this GPT, and don’t just bullet point it, tell the story. And if you feel there’s a lot of tools out there, whisper flow, there’s granola, there’s different apps that can record what you’re saying and transcribe it so that you can then just copy and paste that transcription or put that into a Google Doc and upload it that way. It’s a really, really great way to be able to tell the story in your own words and tell it in a great detail, excuse me and tell it in great detail, so that you’re it’s adding the human component to it, those little nuanced details in the way that we speak, in the stories that we tell, and the things that are important to us, that is what’s going to really make it Your own and make it really connect with your team members. Okay, so category two is going to be your team expectations. So what is showing up at the spot actually look like dress code, communication standards, how you greet your clients, how you handle complaints, what you do and what you don’t do. Okay, so this is a lot of this is going to be in your employee handbook.

Category three is going to be your service menu and protocols. So not just a list of services, but a description of each one. What makes your signature facial different from anybody else in town? What’s the experience? What language do you use to describe it? How do you explain the benefits. This is going to be the foundation for every single team member, and this is where you can ultimately end up training the GPT to quiz you on the particular services and how your team member is describing them. Category four is your product lines, your skin care. This is huge. Okay, so you want to include key ingredients, skin, the concerns that they are addressing. You want to explain, like, how you explain them to clients without being salesy. So real talking points, real benefits, all right, we don’t need your your provider to become an expert overnight, but we want them to understand the philosophy and structure around the skin care products. Now the other GPT, this is going to make you guys so excited the other GPT that we’re going to be building at our DC. Event is a home care recommendation. And what this is is, you know, another big problem that I see in spas is if you have multiple providers, you don’t want Provider A to be recommending one home care regimen and then having Provider B recommending something totally different. We want to be able to promote that it’s a patient of the practice, not you know, Susie’s patient, it’s the patient of the practice. And if Susie goes to Provider A and buys all these products and then goes to Provider B and feels like, Oh, now Provider B is telling me something totally different. That breaks trust, right? So by having clear alignment in this Fitzpatrick type, this skin condition, this is what we recommend as a practice that is like consistency, clarity. It’s such a powerful tool to have for your providers to understand your philosophy around skincare, why you’re making certain recommendations, right? Really, really important piece policies and procedures. So this is going to be your cancelation policy, your social media policy, your confidentiality expectations, how to handle scheduling, how to handle unhappy clients or negative reviews, any situation that they may not be sure about, all the stuff that protects your business and your clients. We’re putting that in there. And then category six is frequently asked questions. Okay, so think about this specifically. What are the 10 questions that every single new hire asks you in the first two weeks. Write those down. Write down the answers. Put them in the project. Every time that someone asks you a question that you think you know what, we should put that into the onboarding. Update it, get it in there. Okay, so you don’t have to build this all at once. You can start with just the things that you have and continually add more to it. Add more to it.

Add more to it. I’m telling our growth factor students to just add 15 minutes at the end of every shift to train their gpts, to review their gpts, to add content to them, whatever they need to do inside of their gpts to make them better and better. Okay, so when you are going through in setting up the project, you’re going to log into Claude, you’re on the Pro Plan, you’re going to click new project, you’re going to name your project, then you’re going to write your custom instructions. Okay, and I’m going to read these custom instructions for you. So here is a starting point, an example of what custom instructions are. Now here is, like the crazy part. You can actually talk to Claude and say, here’s what I’m trying to build. Can you help me write custom instructions to ensure that I am getting the outcome desired? So here’s an example. So you are an official onboarding assistant for and you’re inserting your SPA’s name. Your role is to help new team members learn about our spa, our culture, our services, our products, our policies and our expectations. Always respond in a warm, professional tone that reflects our brand. When you don’t know the answer to something, let a team member know that they should check with the owner or the manager. Do not make up information if it’s not in the documents you’ve been given say. So the last line matters because you want the assistant to stay in its lane and only pull from the content that it’s been given. Okay, so if it’s not in the documents that you’ve been given say. So Now step three, you’re going to upload your documents. So inside of the project, you’re going to see an option that says, Add Files. You can use your PDFs. You can use text files. But as I said before, we recommend that you upload a Google Drive file into Claude so that you can always update that, then test it before you hand it to anyone. Sit down, ask the hard questions. Ask it for you know how to walk me through like I’m a new hire, walk me through the onboarding process and give it feedback. Okay? Give it feedback and say, No, we should, you know, put it through this way, or change this, or whatever it may be. Okay? So we have an example of like the way that we have our setup is it will say, enter your name and job title to get started with your onboarding process. So it will say, add esthetics, GPT, and then the little description under it that you have to say something to. Get it started, right? So you are then going to say, I’m Daniela. I’m a new coach at auto esthetics. And then it’s going to say, hey, welcome Daniela. And it’s going to take me through these different processes. Okay, now let me, let me tell you the difference between a reactive assistant, which is where I’m able to ask questions, and more of an assistant, or a proactive person, where, instead of waiting to be asked, it’s actually guiding you through each stage, right? It’s quizzing you. It’s it’s really guiding the conversation, rather than the new hire, guiding the conversation that you can do inside of Claude as you’re training it. Start here. Cover this ask this question. Don’t move forward until they confirm they’re ready. Follow this sequence every single time. So when it is well written, it’s going to stop functioning like a search engine, and it’s going to be a personal onboarding coach. Okay? So she asked a question and answers. She says she’s ready to move to the next step. It’s going to walk you through every single thing. Now, one important piece is that if you don’t have this built in, or you don’t have a little more advanced agent, you need to make sure that you are asking Claude like say you’re starting on day one, and you don’t finish the entire onboarding process, Claude doesn’t carry memory across separate chat sessions by default. So if your new hire only gets through half of the onboarding process and then comes back, Claude is automatically going to start at the beginning. If you don’t have it trained in skills, or you don’t have it trained to pick up where you left off, the simple answer is to say, where did we leave off? And it can go back and search from where you left off in the previous chat. Okay, so let’s talk about common pitfalls. So I want to talk about what goes wrong, garbage in, garbage out, all right? So you want to make sure that you are putting the right information in. If you don’t actually have culture protocols, policies written down anywhere, that’s going to be a problem, right? If it’s all in your head, then what you’re going to need to do is get it out of your head. And that might be doing a manual on board with somebody and recording everything and then putting that content in there. It may be just having a conversation with chat and getting that information in there, but you’ve got to start, and once it’s documented, you’re going to have it forever, and it’s going to help you with so many different aspects. But remember, think of these gpts as an employee. You can’t just tell the employee something once and never tell them again. You’ve got to continue to grow and develop what your desires are. Also, don’t become over reliant too soon, okay, so don’t just say, Oh, I built this, and then hand it to them, and then, you know, never check back in, right? You’ve got to, there’s always going to be places where you need human judgment, all right, so make sure that you’re still handling the relationship the the GPT is going to be giving the information to your new hire, but you still need to build a connection with them. You still need to have a human to human connection. Okay, this is especially important in the first two weeks, you just don’t have to spend your time repeating over and over and over and over again, all right. And what I like about this, you know, what we had taught previously, before we got so involved with AI, was actually filming videos and having your new hires watch the video, and then you going in and checking on them periodically with videos. People lose their attention span right there.

They won’t watch more than 12 minutes of a video. So by having a custom GPT that they’re actually engaging with, I believe that they’re going to be more present and more focused on what it is that they’re doing, because it’s interactive, instead of just sitting and watching a screen number three team resistance. So it might not be the new hire who pushes back. It’s your existing team. Team. They might feel threatened. They might feel like they’re being replaced. They might just be uncomfortable with AI in general. This is something that you’ve got to continue to consistently have open conversations about AI, about change, about transformation, about how and why you’re using things really, really important pitfall number four, conflicting information in your documents. If your handbook says that your cancelation policy is 24 hours, but your FAQ sheet says that it’s 48 hours, the GPT is going to just pick one, right? So you need to make sure that you have consistency in your documents. And if you’re not sure and you have a lot of documents, you might just ask the GPT to scan through and identify any inconsistencies in these documents. Okay. Number five, build it once and never update it. Okay, you launch it, your team loves it, and then eight months later, you change a service, you change a service, you update a policy, you bring in a new product line, and nobody touches the product or the project that is not good. You’ve got to build that into your system, that anytime you bring on a new product line, anytime you you add a new service or change a policy, you’ve got to make sure that it’s also being updated in this GPT and number six, uploading sensitive information. Okay, so your project is living inside of a third party platform, so we want to keep any type of client data out of it entirely. Keep staff compensation details out. Keep anything legally sensitive out. Stick to operational content, culture, services, products, policies, training. Sure, there’s all kinds of people that are putting their financials into gpts, but when it comes to your staff, that is their information, and I think it’s important to be able to honor their privacy request. So anything that’s legally sensitive, keep it out of there. When we’re focusing on training for we’re talking about skin conditions. We’re talking about Fitzpatrick types. We’re not talking about a particular patient with their, you know, personal identifying their health information, right? We’re just talking about a condition A Fitzpatrick type. How are we addressing that concern? Okay, all right. So I know that was a lot of information. Go and test and try and play with these projects. Remember that AI is just it’s not a shortcut for writing social it’s infrastructure for your business. When you figure that out as a spawner. You start thinking about these gpts as employees in your business, you are going to just move light years ahead, okay? And this onboarding assistant built inside of Claude or chat GPT, however you’re going to build it. This is something that is just one idea, right? You can have a social media one. You can have an onboarding one. You can have the home care recommendations that we talked about. You can have like, I have one that’s coached Daniela. So what would Daniela say about these types of things? There’s so many different aspects that you can do with this. So what I want you to do your homework is to write down the 10 questions that every single new hire asks you in the first two weeks. Just do that right. Figure that out, start to gather your information, capture the questions you know, and don’t be afraid to mess up. You don’t have to be a coder. You just have to be speaking clearly, asking questions, knowing the right questions to ask. Now if you want to do this together, I want to invite you to our spa CEO intensive. That is April 19 and 20th, right here in Washington, DC. It’s going to be a intimate event. It’s going to be very high touch, and we are going to be building these two gpts together. So I highly encourage you to check that out. If that’s something that you’re looking for additional support on.

Okay, that is it for today’s episode. If this resonated with you, please share it with a spa owner. We so much. Believe that a rising tide floats all boats, and we very much appreciate every share, every review that we get for this podcast. All right, my friends, thank you so much, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.

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EP 477: Stop Repeating Yourself: How to Build an AI Onboarding Assistant That Trains Your Team For You
  • /
  • business, education, marketing

Consistent onboarding is one of the most powerful things you can build in your spa business. This episode walks you through exactly how to make it happen — without it living and dying by your availability.

Because what Daniela shares in Episode 477 of Spa Marketing Made Easy isn’t a tech hack. It’s a fundamental shift in how you think about AI and what it’s actually capable of doing inside your business.

AI Isn’t Just for Content — It’s Infrastructure

Daniela opens the episode with a reframe that every spa owner needs to hear: AI is not just a tool for writing Instagram captions faster. When you start treating AI, and specifically, custom GPT projects inside Claude or ChatGPT, like a trained employee, everything changes.

These tools can be trained on your systems, your voice, your protocols, and your culture. They can answer questions, walk new hires through onboarding, quiz your team on product knowledge, and deliver a consistent experience every single time — without you having to stop what you’re doing to make it happen.

Why Inconsistent Onboarding Is Costing You More Than You Think

Employee turnover is one of the most expensive problems in the spa industry. And one of the biggest drivers of turnover? Inconsistent onboarding.

When a new hire doesn’t know how to describe your signature facial, doesn’t know how to handle an unhappy client, or doesn’t know the answer to a basic product question, your client experience takes the hit. And in this industry, your client experience is your brand.

Daniela walks through what a typical new hire onboarding process looks like in most spas — and how 10 to 20 hours of direct owner time gets poured into repetitive explanations, answered questions, and reiterations of policies that should already be documented. A custom onboarding GPT solves this. You build it once. It delivers consistently, every time.

How to Build Your Onboarding GPT: The Six Categories

Whether you’re building in Claude or ChatGPT, Daniela walks through the six categories of content your onboarding assistant needs to actually do its job:

  1. Your Story and Culture — Your origin story, your mission, your values, who your clients are, and what your brand stands for. Don’t just bullet-point it. Tell the story. Use a transcription tool like Whisperflow or Granola if it’s easier to speak it out loud, then drop it into a Google Doc.
  2. Team Expectations — What does showing up at your spa actually look like? Dress code, communication standards, how you greet clients, and how you handle complaints. Much of this will already live in your employee handbook.
  3. Your Service Menu and Protocols — Not just a list of services, but the experience. What makes your signature facial different from anyone else in town? What language do you use to describe it? How do you explain the benefits? This is also where you can train the GPT to quiz your new hire on services.
  4. Your Product Lines — Key ingredients, the skin concerns each product addresses, and how to explain them to clients without being salesy. You don’t need your providers to be experts overnight — you need them to understand your philosophy.
  5. Policies and Procedures — Cancellation policy, social media policy, confidentiality expectations, how to handle scheduling, unhappy clients, and negative reviews. The stuff that protects your business and your clients.
  6. Frequently Asked Questions — What are the 10 questions every single new hire asks you in the first two weeks? Write them down. Write the answers. Put them in the project. And keep adding to it every time a new question comes up.

Setting It Up in Claude

Daniela walks through the step-by-step setup for a Claude project, including how to write your custom instructions (she reads an example out loud in the episode), how to connect Google Drive so your documents update automatically, and how to test the GPT before handing it to anyone.

One important distinction she makes: a reactive assistant waits to be asked. A proactive onboarding coach, which is what you actually want, guides the new hire through each stage, asks questions, checks for understanding, and doesn’t move forward until they’re ready.

Six Pitfalls to Avoid

Daniela closes the episode with six common mistakes spa owners make when building their onboarding GPT — from garbage-in-garbage-out inputs, to conflicting information across documents, to building it once and never updating it, to over-relying on it too soon and losing the human connection.

The most important reminder: this tool doesn’t replace you. It frees you up to actually be present with your new hire, build the relationship, and handle the things that genuinely require human judgment.

If you’re ready to stop repeating yourself and start building the kind of systems that make growth sustainable, this episode is your starting point.

Watch the full episode above or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Resources Mentioned in Episode #477:

  • Claude by Anthropic
  • ChatGPT by OpenAI
  • Spa CEO Intensive – Washington, DC (April 19–20)

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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. If you are new here, welcome. I am so glad that you found us. And this podcast is all about helping esthetic professionals like you to build a business that is profitable, sustainable and built around the life that you want to live. Now, today’s episode, you’re definitely going to want to take notes, so if you’re listening in the car, make sure that you’re going to come back to this, because we have a lot of teaching that’s going to happen in the next 30 to 40 minutes or so. And this is an episode that, if you actually implement what we are sharing with you, it will completely change the way that you are operating your business. Now, before I jump in, I want to just highlight something. I want to say, something that I want you to hear, not as a tech tip, but as a business strategy, AI is not just a tool that’s going to help you write a carousel post. It’s not just a tool that’s going to help you create an email in five minutes. Yes, of course, it does those things. But if that is all that you are using AI for, you are leaving so much on the table. Now I want you to think about AI as the and specifically the gpts, the custom gpts, or what the projects that we’re building inside of Claude or chat GPT, whatever AI tool you’re using. These are think of them as employees in your business, not metaphorically, but literally. These are tools that can be trained on your systems, your voice, your protocols, your culture, and they can show up, answer questions, train your team, do the work without you having to stop doing what you’re doing to manage any of it, the shift in how you’re thinking about AI, how you’re incorporating it into your business, is going to change everything. And listen, I have been deep, deep in the world of AI for the past few years, like deep end of the pool, deep, trying to learn everything that I can. I’ve played with chatgpt, I’ve tested syndrome, explored Lindy, I’ve tinkered with tools I don’t even know how to pronounce. I’ve tried so many things. I’ve messed up so many times, but I’ve also made some really incredible wins, and I’ve drastically improved the productivity of my team, the output of our marketing, and we are seeing the difference in our profit margins, and that is what I want for you as well. Okay, now this is genuinely one of the most important shifts in our lifetime. It’s like, it’s like, I remember when I was gosh, I was probably in the eighth grade or ninth grade when the Internet became this big thing, nobody was using email addresses. Nobody had cell phones, right? We had beepers, painters, whatever we’re calling them. We are in that transition now that we’re going through, but it’s it’s so much more vast and drastic then we can even comprehend. So know that, acknowledge that, that you know things are changing, and I know that that’s hard. I know that like I’m not trying to undermine that, but when, when you’re struggling with I just got this figured out, and now I’m having to learn something new. We’re all going through that, and the difference is that, you know, some people are going through and just being adaptive as things change, and just comfortable with the fact that they’re going to change. Those are the people that are going to win, are they going to mess up at things? Sure, of course, but there’s going to be a lot of things that they are going to win at that’s going to help them dramatically in their business. Okay, so as I said, I’ve played with all these tools where I’ve kind of landed where I’m at right now is I pay for a chat GPT subscription, I pay $20 a month. There’s still things I find useful, and I think that they were kind of the the first ones to market. They’re coming out with a lot of different tools. The $20 a month is absolutely worth it for me, because you do get other features, like the ability to build a custom GPT that are very important, but when it comes to the day to day in business, we decided to go all in with Claude. Claude is the AI tool by anthropic and we actually invested in. In the teams version, and that made it so much easier for me, because in the teams version, I can share I can create projects and create custom gpts. I can share it. I can share this project with Lucy on my team. I can share this project with Christy on my team. And it really I can share one project with everybody on my team. I get to decide now the Claude version, that’s just the personal plan, is $20 a month. The team’s plan, it’s a minimum of five team members, and I believe it was around $1,200 for the year. Now here’s the reframe, because a lot of a lot of what I’ve heard from our students on our coaching calls is like, Oh, I don’t want another subscription. And again, I want you to think about these softwares as an employee in your business. So if you could say, I’m going to hire someone that’s going to write all of our social media posts, that’s going to streamline our marketing, that’s going to analyze my report, that’s going to help me with my email, that’s going to onboard my staff all of these things. Is that worth $1,200 a year? For me, it was like such a no brainer. And so that’s a shift. Is like we’re thinking about it as another subscription, but what we need to think about it as a salary, right, as a pay structure to really help us streamline our operations across the board. Okay? So that is a really, really important thing. Now, if you are not utilizing AI in your business, if you’re like, Oh, this is challenging, or it’s, I’m I’m still overwhelmed. I don’t have time to learn about this, you are putting yourself at a real disadvantage, and I don’t want to scare you. I don’t want you to feel like you have you know an additional thing on your plate that you’re trying to learn when you’re already overworked and overwhelmed. But what AI can do is it’s hard to even comprehend how fast this is moving. And if you are not using AI, you are not going to be able to compete on any level with with these other businesses that are using AI. Your payroll costs are going to be high. The amount of content that you’re able to be able to produce is going to be high. I know it feels like a lot, and I don’t think that you need to change everything all at once, but you do need to start paying attention to this. I want you to win. I want you to build a business around the life you want to live.

And this is one of the easiest ways. I mean easiest, right? Like it’s always challenging to learn a new technology or new way of doing things, but when we’re looking at the how inexpensive This is compared to the old way of doing business, it’s it’s not even comparable. So we’re going to see, in the next few years, payroll costs declining. We’re going to see sales expanding. I mean, I don’t think anyone in our growth factor programs are still using marketing companies. A lot of marketing companies were paying, you know, 15 to $2,500 a month to take photos, to write copy, to do your reels, all of those things. It’s not necessary anymore. I mean, just that alone, you’re saving, you know, 24,000 a year approximately. That’s huge. So I want to talk to you specifically today about a real life example of one GPT that you could create. Okay, so when we think about hiring, the onboarding process is so important, and oftentimes we hire from a stressed out place. It’s a band aid hire. We’ve got a problem. We just need somebody there to fix it, because we’re too busy and employee turnover is extremely expensive. It’s time consuming. It breaks trust. It breaks the cohesivity of your team. It’s exhausting on you to go back and reiterate and say over and over and over again, what are your values, what are the culture, what are the services, what are the policies, what are the product lines that you’re carrying, you know, all of the things that you’re doing in.

The initial onboarding and I look at the onboarding process. We for a provider, we typically do a two week it’s a 90 day probationary period, but the first two weeks are very heavy on training. So week one we’re going through Week One. Day one, we’re going through all of the policies and procedures and employee handbook and all of those types of things That’s all taken care of by this GPT that we’re talking about building today. Additionally, you can develop and train it more to give your employee your new hire that’s being onboarded. You can quiz them on product knowledge. You can role play with them. You the new hire, can ask numerous questions about different policies or procedures that you have. It walks them through a conversation, and then you are just going in to check on that individual in ask if they have any questions. But, I mean, this is freeing up such a massive amount of time. It’s do it once. Then, like the heavy lifting is once, you absolutely have to continue to tweak and train and edit this GPT to make sure that it’s accurate and on brand and consistent, and all the things that you need in there, but the amount of stress and stress that you get rid of, time that you Get back, it’s such an important piece for your business, okay, so let’s compare that to inconsistent onboarding. All right, so inconsistent onboarding is when you’re going to see that employee turnover more and more and more, because we are not setting our team up for success when we don’t put them through a systemized, consistent onboarding process. Now this is also like side note. This is one of the custom gpts that we are building together at our spa CEO intensive in Washington, DC. That’s on April 19 and 20th.

We’re doing a very intimate event. We’re actually shrinking it down to 30 rather than 50, so that we can have a higher coach to student ratio to help support with the tech in building this. If you have Claude, we can build it in Claude. If you have chat GPT, we can build it in chat GPT. And that’s actually an important note, because I’ve a lot of our growth factor students have started building custom gpts In chat GPT, and they’re like, it’s working, and now you’re talking about Claude. If chat GPT is working for you, stay there. If you’re happy with the results that you’re getting, stay there. You do not need to shift every time a new technology comes out or advances, okay, so don’t feel that you have to change everything. But we can help you whether that is whether you’re building in chat GPT, or whether you are building in Claude. So if you’re interested in that, if you’re focused on team at all, the whole focus is going to be team. And then we are going to be building this custom GPT together. Now, when you don’t onboard properly, and I’m not just talking about the paperwork, I mean the full picture, that hours that you explain your culture, walking them through the service menu, how you like things being done, answering the same questions for the 17th time you know like that is going to take you probably 10 to 20 hours of Direct time if you have a system, okay? Maybe more. And if you’re just winging it like you don’t have any of that documented, which, listen, there’s a lot of people out there doing that, and that’s like, no fault, no shame. If that’s where you’re at, that’s just an area of opportunity that we found in your business that needs to be cleaned up.

Okay? What we’re wanting to do is build a system around that, so that once that system is there, you no longer have that problem every single time you have turnover, because you will have turnover. It’s the nature of the business. You’re not going to have the same front desk for 10 years. You are likely not going to have the same providers for 10 years, right? There’s there’s kind of ebbs and flows in different seasons in your business, and that’s okay, but we want to make sure that you have a clear onboarding process, because every time that a team member doesn’t know the answer to a client question. One, your client experience is going to take a hit. Every time someone describes your signature facial in a way that doesn’t match your brand, you’re losing trust. Every time a new hire feels lost in week one, you increase your risk for turnover, and it is so incredibly expensive to replace a good employee. So inconsistent onboarding creates inconsistent teams, and inconsistent teams create inconsistent client experiences.

And in this industry, your client experience is your brand. That’s your differentiator, okay? So this is getting rid of the binder, right? The the employee handbook, the operations manager manual. Those are valuable. I’m not knocking them. We like we have, you know, like something like a 45 page employee handbook as one of the resources inside of growth factor. But they’re important. But we need to make sure that we have tools that are accessible, that are easy to use, that your team can get the answer right away. Okay, so I want to talk. I want to walk you through, like how we build this in Claude, and what we’re going to do is use a feature called projects, all right. So if you think about Claude by itself, like Claude as a tool, it’s a incredibly intelligent, thoughtful assistant who knows a little bit about everything. Okay, so it’s got it’s brilliant at reasoning, at nuance, at truly understanding your question. But a Claude project is where you take all of that intelligence and you aim it directly at your at a particular task in your business. You give it knowledge, your voice, your rules, your documents. And now, instead of general purpose AI, you have something that functions like a trained member of your team. Now, to make it even better, there’s something called Claude skills that can help with the structure, with the always using your brand voice with the formatting of things, and there’s actually apps that Claude can build within Claude to walk through that’s a whole other thing, but we’ll, we’ll talk about that more at the DC event. So for this podcast, I want to walk you through a project and what that is, okay.

So when you set up a project in Claude. You are essentially doing three things. You are first writing custom instructions. Okay, so this is like the orientation speech that you give every new hire, except it never changes. It never gets forgotten. It never gets it is getting delivered perfectly every single time. So you tell Claude who is in the context of your business, what the job is, how it should speak, what it should and shouldn’t do. Second you’re going to upload your documents. Now I recommend connecting Google Drive to Claude, and I recommend uploading connecting a single document inside of Claude, rather than copying and pasting or uploading a PDF. And the reason that I recommend that is because if you are making edits to a document or to a policy, let’s say you have a change to your cancelation policy, you still if you do it this way, then you are making the change on the Google Drive document, which is your living document, but it’s also then automatically updating your onboarding document. Does that make sense your project? So that can be a huge time saver in the long term of the way that you are kind of creating the system around your AI tools, all right. Third you set the guardrail. So you want to make sure you tell it to stay on brand. This is, I find the guardrails are best set with skills. But if you’re new to Claude, just start with the project. Start with the project and start testing that out there.

Now, to use Claude projects, you do have to have a pro subscription. It’s $20 a month, or like $200 a year, if you’re not ready to invest in teams. So you know, you get to decide on that. Claude projects lives in your account. So if you are going to have your team use that account, the cleanest setup is to create a dedicated Claude account for spa and just share that AI logon. But if they have that AI logon, they’re going to have access to every one of your projects.

Right now With Claude teams, you as the owner, you get to control who has access to which projects, right? And then your team is also using Claude, where you’ve set it up with the skills, you’ve set it up with your brand, voice, all of those things, so they’re not having to do that on their own. Okay, so just kind of throwing that out there. Now you’re going to log in, you’re going to upgrade to pro if you don’t have it already, or you’re going to upgrade to teams if you don’t have it already, and then you’re going to click new project, and ours is called coaches onboarding GPT. So we have, and I actually just built this myself a couple of days ago in quad to show you guys an example of how we are planning to use it, and we’ll be using it as we bring new coaches onto the team to really streamline and standardize the onboarding process, the training process, right? So I want you to give it a name, so you know your spa name, onboarding assistant, or something along those lines. Okay, now where this is you’ve got to make sure that you give Claude the tools to set it up for success. Okay, so we’re going to walk through six different categories, but when I say you’re going to hear this term a lot garbage in, garbage out, if you don’t give Claude the right information, or any GPT, if you’re using chat GPT, or whatever Gemini, whatever tool you’re using, if you don’t give it the right input, it’s not going to be able to give you the right output. Okay? So keep that in mind now, category one, your story, your culture, all right, this is your origin story. Why did you start this ball? What’s your mission? What do you believe? You know, who are your clients? What does your brand stand for? This is the stuff that’s going to it’s creating the culture right now, if you are in growth factor and you have your company bio, this is going to be a great document to upload into, into this GPT, and don’t just bullet point it, tell the story. And if you feel there’s a lot of tools out there, whisper flow, there’s granola, there’s different apps that can record what you’re saying and transcribe it so that you can then just copy and paste that transcription or put that into a Google Doc and upload it that way. It’s a really, really great way to be able to tell the story in your own words and tell it in a great detail, excuse me and tell it in great detail, so that you’re it’s adding the human component to it, those little nuanced details in the way that we speak, in the stories that we tell, and the things that are important to us, that is what’s going to really make it Your own and make it really connect with your team members. Okay, so category two is going to be your team expectations. So what is showing up at the spot actually look like dress code, communication standards, how you greet your clients, how you handle complaints, what you do and what you don’t do. Okay, so this is a lot of this is going to be in your employee handbook.

Category three is going to be your service menu and protocols. So not just a list of services, but a description of each one. What makes your signature facial different from anybody else in town? What’s the experience? What language do you use to describe it? How do you explain the benefits. This is going to be the foundation for every single team member, and this is where you can ultimately end up training the GPT to quiz you on the particular services and how your team member is describing them. Category four is your product lines, your skin care. This is huge. Okay, so you want to include key ingredients, skin, the concerns that they are addressing. You want to explain, like, how you explain them to clients without being salesy. So real talking points, real benefits, all right, we don’t need your your provider to become an expert overnight, but we want them to understand the philosophy and structure around the skin care products. Now the other GPT, this is going to make you guys so excited the other GPT that we’re going to be building at our DC. Event is a home care recommendation. And what this is is, you know, another big problem that I see in spas is if you have multiple providers, you don’t want Provider A to be recommending one home care regimen and then having Provider B recommending something totally different. We want to be able to promote that it’s a patient of the practice, not you know, Susie’s patient, it’s the patient of the practice. And if Susie goes to Provider A and buys all these products and then goes to Provider B and feels like, Oh, now Provider B is telling me something totally different. That breaks trust, right? So by having clear alignment in this Fitzpatrick type, this skin condition, this is what we recommend as a practice that is like consistency, clarity. It’s such a powerful tool to have for your providers to understand your philosophy around skincare, why you’re making certain recommendations, right? Really, really important piece policies and procedures. So this is going to be your cancelation policy, your social media policy, your confidentiality expectations, how to handle scheduling, how to handle unhappy clients or negative reviews, any situation that they may not be sure about, all the stuff that protects your business and your clients. We’re putting that in there. And then category six is frequently asked questions. Okay, so think about this specifically. What are the 10 questions that every single new hire asks you in the first two weeks. Write those down. Write down the answers. Put them in the project. Every time that someone asks you a question that you think you know what, we should put that into the onboarding. Update it, get it in there. Okay, so you don’t have to build this all at once. You can start with just the things that you have and continually add more to it. Add more to it.

Add more to it. I’m telling our growth factor students to just add 15 minutes at the end of every shift to train their gpts, to review their gpts, to add content to them, whatever they need to do inside of their gpts to make them better and better. Okay, so when you are going through in setting up the project, you’re going to log into Claude, you’re on the Pro Plan, you’re going to click new project, you’re going to name your project, then you’re going to write your custom instructions. Okay, and I’m going to read these custom instructions for you. So here is a starting point, an example of what custom instructions are. Now here is, like the crazy part. You can actually talk to Claude and say, here’s what I’m trying to build. Can you help me write custom instructions to ensure that I am getting the outcome desired? So here’s an example. So you are an official onboarding assistant for and you’re inserting your SPA’s name. Your role is to help new team members learn about our spa, our culture, our services, our products, our policies and our expectations. Always respond in a warm, professional tone that reflects our brand. When you don’t know the answer to something, let a team member know that they should check with the owner or the manager. Do not make up information if it’s not in the documents you’ve been given say. So the last line matters because you want the assistant to stay in its lane and only pull from the content that it’s been given. Okay, so if it’s not in the documents that you’ve been given say. So Now step three, you’re going to upload your documents. So inside of the project, you’re going to see an option that says, Add Files. You can use your PDFs. You can use text files. But as I said before, we recommend that you upload a Google Drive file into Claude so that you can always update that, then test it before you hand it to anyone. Sit down, ask the hard questions. Ask it for you know how to walk me through like I’m a new hire, walk me through the onboarding process and give it feedback. Okay? Give it feedback and say, No, we should, you know, put it through this way, or change this, or whatever it may be. Okay? So we have an example of like the way that we have our setup is it will say, enter your name and job title to get started with your onboarding process. So it will say, add esthetics, GPT, and then the little description under it that you have to say something to. Get it started, right? So you are then going to say, I’m Daniela. I’m a new coach at auto esthetics. And then it’s going to say, hey, welcome Daniela. And it’s going to take me through these different processes. Okay, now let me, let me tell you the difference between a reactive assistant, which is where I’m able to ask questions, and more of an assistant, or a proactive person, where, instead of waiting to be asked, it’s actually guiding you through each stage, right? It’s quizzing you. It’s it’s really guiding the conversation, rather than the new hire, guiding the conversation that you can do inside of Claude as you’re training it. Start here. Cover this ask this question. Don’t move forward until they confirm they’re ready. Follow this sequence every single time. So when it is well written, it’s going to stop functioning like a search engine, and it’s going to be a personal onboarding coach. Okay? So she asked a question and answers. She says she’s ready to move to the next step. It’s going to walk you through every single thing. Now, one important piece is that if you don’t have this built in, or you don’t have a little more advanced agent, you need to make sure that you are asking Claude like say you’re starting on day one, and you don’t finish the entire onboarding process, Claude doesn’t carry memory across separate chat sessions by default. So if your new hire only gets through half of the onboarding process and then comes back, Claude is automatically going to start at the beginning. If you don’t have it trained in skills, or you don’t have it trained to pick up where you left off, the simple answer is to say, where did we leave off? And it can go back and search from where you left off in the previous chat. Okay, so let’s talk about common pitfalls. So I want to talk about what goes wrong, garbage in, garbage out, all right? So you want to make sure that you are putting the right information in. If you don’t actually have culture protocols, policies written down anywhere, that’s going to be a problem, right? If it’s all in your head, then what you’re going to need to do is get it out of your head. And that might be doing a manual on board with somebody and recording everything and then putting that content in there. It may be just having a conversation with chat and getting that information in there, but you’ve got to start, and once it’s documented, you’re going to have it forever, and it’s going to help you with so many different aspects. But remember, think of these gpts as an employee. You can’t just tell the employee something once and never tell them again. You’ve got to continue to grow and develop what your desires are. Also, don’t become over reliant too soon, okay, so don’t just say, Oh, I built this, and then hand it to them, and then, you know, never check back in, right? You’ve got to, there’s always going to be places where you need human judgment, all right, so make sure that you’re still handling the relationship the the GPT is going to be giving the information to your new hire, but you still need to build a connection with them. You still need to have a human to human connection. Okay, this is especially important in the first two weeks, you just don’t have to spend your time repeating over and over and over and over again, all right. And what I like about this, you know, what we had taught previously, before we got so involved with AI, was actually filming videos and having your new hires watch the video, and then you going in and checking on them periodically with videos. People lose their attention span right there.

They won’t watch more than 12 minutes of a video. So by having a custom GPT that they’re actually engaging with, I believe that they’re going to be more present and more focused on what it is that they’re doing, because it’s interactive, instead of just sitting and watching a screen number three team resistance. So it might not be the new hire who pushes back. It’s your existing team. Team. They might feel threatened. They might feel like they’re being replaced. They might just be uncomfortable with AI in general. This is something that you’ve got to continue to consistently have open conversations about AI, about change, about transformation, about how and why you’re using things really, really important pitfall number four, conflicting information in your documents. If your handbook says that your cancelation policy is 24 hours, but your FAQ sheet says that it’s 48 hours, the GPT is going to just pick one, right? So you need to make sure that you have consistency in your documents. And if you’re not sure and you have a lot of documents, you might just ask the GPT to scan through and identify any inconsistencies in these documents. Okay. Number five, build it once and never update it. Okay, you launch it, your team loves it, and then eight months later, you change a service, you change a service, you update a policy, you bring in a new product line, and nobody touches the product or the project that is not good. You’ve got to build that into your system, that anytime you bring on a new product line, anytime you you add a new service or change a policy, you’ve got to make sure that it’s also being updated in this GPT and number six, uploading sensitive information. Okay, so your project is living inside of a third party platform, so we want to keep any type of client data out of it entirely. Keep staff compensation details out. Keep anything legally sensitive out. Stick to operational content, culture, services, products, policies, training. Sure, there’s all kinds of people that are putting their financials into gpts, but when it comes to your staff, that is their information, and I think it’s important to be able to honor their privacy request. So anything that’s legally sensitive, keep it out of there. When we’re focusing on training for we’re talking about skin conditions. We’re talking about Fitzpatrick types. We’re not talking about a particular patient with their, you know, personal identifying their health information, right? We’re just talking about a condition A Fitzpatrick type. How are we addressing that concern? Okay, all right. So I know that was a lot of information. Go and test and try and play with these projects. Remember that AI is just it’s not a shortcut for writing social it’s infrastructure for your business. When you figure that out as a spawner. You start thinking about these gpts as employees in your business, you are going to just move light years ahead, okay? And this onboarding assistant built inside of Claude or chat GPT, however you’re going to build it. This is something that is just one idea, right? You can have a social media one. You can have an onboarding one. You can have the home care recommendations that we talked about. You can have like, I have one that’s coached Daniela. So what would Daniela say about these types of things? There’s so many different aspects that you can do with this. So what I want you to do your homework is to write down the 10 questions that every single new hire asks you in the first two weeks. Just do that right. Figure that out, start to gather your information, capture the questions you know, and don’t be afraid to mess up. You don’t have to be a coder. You just have to be speaking clearly, asking questions, knowing the right questions to ask. Now if you want to do this together, I want to invite you to our spa CEO intensive. That is April 19 and 20th, right here in Washington, DC. It’s going to be a intimate event. It’s going to be very high touch, and we are going to be building these two gpts together. So I highly encourage you to check that out. If that’s something that you’re looking for additional support on.

Okay, that is it for today’s episode. If this resonated with you, please share it with a spa owner. We so much. Believe that a rising tide floats all boats, and we very much appreciate every share, every review that we get for this podcast. All right, my friends, thank you so much, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.

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EP 476: Why Your Spa Systems Aren’t Sticking (And the ADHD-Informed Fix That Changes Everything)
  • /
  • business, education, marketing

If you’ve invested in systems, taken the courses, and built out the SOPs, but you’re still not following through consistently, you are not broken. You might just need a different kind of support.

That’s exactly what this week’s episode of Spa Marketing Made Easy is all about.

Daniela sits down with Candace, the newest member of the Addo Aesthetics team, to talk about something most spa coaches won’t touch: the neuroscience of why smart, driven spa owners struggle to implement what they already know.

Candace holds a master’s degree in public health, has a foundation in social work and psychology, and has spent over six years working in clinical settings with high-achieving professionals, physicians, and entrepreneurs, helping them identify the root cause of their productivity challenges through an executive function lens.

What Are Executive Functions, Anyway?

According to leading ADHD researchers Dr. Thomas E. Brown (drthomasebrown.com) and Dr. Russell Barkley (russellbarkley.org), ADHD is best understood as an executive function deficit. But here’s what most people don’t realize: executive functions are your brain’s management system, and everyone can benefit from strengthening them, not just those with an ADHD diagnosis.

Executive functions include:

  • Task initiation (actually starting the things on your list)
  • Planning and organization
  • Emotional regulation
  • Working memory
  • The ability to follow through

Sound familiar? These are the exact skills required to run a thriving spa business.

Why High Achievers Hit a Wall

One of the most eye-opening parts of this conversation is Candace’s explanation of why high-functioning individuals often don’t recognize their challenges until they reach a breaking point. When you’re motivated, driven, and used to pushing through, your coping strategies work, until they don’t. For many spa owners, that wall shows up right when they’re on the edge of their biggest growth.

Without external accountability structures, like a boss, a deadline, or a structured program, executive function deficits become much harder to manage. Add in the chaos of running a spa, managing a team, and still being in the treatment room, and it’s no wonder so many spa owners feel like they’re running a Ferrari with no brakes.

It’s Not About Willpower

This is where Candace’s coaching philosophy really hits home: willpower is not a system. You can be the most determined person in the room and still struggle to implement consistently if the system isn’t built for your brain.

Candace uses strength-based assessments and learning modality assessments to help clients understand how they naturally process information and where their strengths lie. From there, she builds personalized systems that align with those strengths, rather than forcing a one-size-fits-all approach.

This isn’t just valuable for the spa owner. Understanding your team’s learning styles can also transform the way you communicate expectations, delegate tasks, and set your people up for success.

The Missing Link in Spa Business Coaching

At Addo Aesthetics, the Growth Factor® Framework gives spa owners the blueprint. What Candace brings is the bridge between knowing and doing. If you’ve ever thought, “I have all the tools, so why can’t I make this work?”, her work is the answer.

Whether you have an ADHD diagnosis, suspect you might, or simply feel like your brain doesn’t cooperate with traditional productivity advice, this episode will give you language, perspective, and hope.

Want to book a call with Candace? Email us at hello@addoaesthetics.com and we’ll get you connected.

Watch the full episode above or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Resources Mentioned in Episode #476:

  • Learn more about Dr. Thomas E. Brown
  • Learn more about Dr. Russell Barkley
  • Book a call with Candace — Email us at hello@addoaesthetics.com

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 and welcome to the Spa Marketing Made Easy Podcast. I’m Daniela, and boy do I have an interview for you today. So I have a group of friends. They’re all entrepreneurs, and we meet once a month to talk business. This is online, because these are people that are all over the world. Now I love this group. I’m so happy that we found each other. And a few calls ago, Amber was sharing an update. She was she’s the guest on today’s episode, and she was sharing a story with us about this email situation that happened to her company. And if I’m being real, you guys, if this happened to me, I would literally have no idea where to even start. And this is not just like a small email problem. This is something, this is a situation that could have potentially cost her 10s of 1000s of dollars, if not hundreds of 1000s of dollars.

Now she and her team handled it like the pros that they are, and it was such a great reminder going through not only the monthly call that we had with our group of entrepreneurs, but also here on the podcast interview, to know people, to have people in your circle that know more than you is such a valuable thing. You never want to be the biggest fish in the pond and Amber certainly knows so much more than me on this topic, which is why I was so grateful when she so graciously agreed to come on and share this experience. This is not a highlight reel. This is not anything like that. This is real business. These are real problems that come up, and she is being very open and sharing what happened and giving lots of great feedback of what you can do to fix it if something like this ever happens to you. Now, if you do any sort of email marketing at all, you’re going to want to listen in, because Amber is getting real All right. Now, let me just read her bio, and then we will jump right into that interview. Okay, so Amber went from single mom in college to multi business owner running freedom based companies from Ethiopia to Chicago and from Abidjan to Zagreb. With a background in corporate consulting and studies at Johns Hopkins organization develop development MBA program. She helps modern CEOs scale strategically without sacrificing time at Ambermccue.com in addition to consulting, her businesses are in the online children’s education and photography brand that grew from a side hustle to a multi million dollar operation in 26 cities, giving her first hand experience in creating systems that fuel growth and freedom. She’s incredible.

I know you guys are going to love her as much as I do, and let’s go ahead and play that interview. All right, Amber, welcome to the spa marketing Made Easy podcast. So happy to have you here. And I’m so I’m really hoping that we can explain what happened with your email, because I think this is such, such an important aspect of doing business, for business owners, for spa owners, any business owner that is using email to connect with their clients, if you’re trying to do the debrief and figure out, like, what, what’s happening, what’s working, what’s not working. I mean this you blew my mind when you shared with me this process, I was like, Oh, my God, I would not have known what to do. So let’s, let’s go back to and like, tell the story from the beginning, you have an online business. We were both doing a webinar like a launch, very similar timing, and you had done this webinar multiple times before. No issues, you understood what your show up rates, your you know, all your KPIs, and something was drastically off.

Yes, okay, so start there, yes, okay, we are hosting this event and big marketing campaign, and we typically have a certain number of people showing up, arriving throughout the week, number bigger number of people sign up, and lesser people show up to the webinar, the workshops. And we’re noticing it. We’re kind of watching it. But then at the end of the week, people are saying it’s over the events over I signed up for the event, I didn’t get any of the emails, so we already had, like, this intuitive hit, like, something is off, but then when people said we didn’t get the emails, like, So are they responding to you, or are they posting on your social like, how are you hearing this? What?

Yes, great question. A couple of people emailed like, I signed up for this event. I thought it was this week, what’s happening. And then they were also posting in our Facebook community and the thread after that, just kind of like me too, me too. I didn’t get anything either. I didn’t get anything in there, check here, check there, and it wasn’t even landing necessarily in their spam folder, right? Or in their promotions folder, I think we got, I think that’s what blew my mind, is that it wasn’t even in spam. I was like, yeah, yeah, and there’s a reason for that, which we will share.

So, I mean, I’m thinking about this like in spas. We do in person events, we’ll do mini events, we’ll do open houses, and email is a big part of that communication. We do call as well, but I mean the thought process of investing so much time and so much money to host an event, and if your people are not getting the communication, yeah, then they raise their hand and say, I want to come. But then you never you don’t remind them. You don’t tell them, Oh, it’s happening now. And that also, like doesn’t look good on you. From like, you obviously did what you were supposed to do, but from their perspective, like, what? What’s happening? Yeah, you know.

So, okay, so you’re seeing in the group, you’re seeing this thread that’s going through, like, I didn’t get any emails, you know what’s happening? Yeah? So where does your mind go? Well, it’s interesting. My team saw these messages coming in first, and they immediately started investigating, because I was delivering a workshop as like the big flurry starts, it’s happening. And they told me they investigated everything, and they told me, about an hour later, we have a problem. We know what’s happening. We checked all of these things, and we got to the root cause, and so they were on it.

But how does your team like? I feel very proud of my team. I feel like they’re very tech savvy. I feel like I feel like I am tech savvy, and I would not have known where to look with email, I would have thought, do you need to clear your cash? Do you need to turn off the computer and restart? Restart?

Maybe it’s in your trash. Did you set up a filter like the basics? But they we have my business partner and I worked for a an email marketing a marketing agency. So I had done a lot of consulting on email strategy, email marketing, and we partnered and collaborated on a lot of things around this as well. So this really the foundation of this came out of my corporate background, but running an online business, we kind of always had an eye on that and have been watching it ever since.

But for just the normal small business owner, yeah? Like, how do we do like, what are the steps? What were the things that you guys looked at? Let’s look okay, let’s get into that.

Yeah, I’m gonna break it down. I’m gonna try and keep this so simple. And honestly, there are a couple of things that I don’t even understand. So I’ll tell you what when I hit those points. But first up clean email list. So if you are emailing people who are responding, they haven’t opened an email in six months, a year, two years, three years,

I still, I see you, those people with the 20,000 emails on your red bubble, come on, and that is not helping you. So emailing people that are just letting their inbox fill up, you do not want to keep emailing them. And this, we knew this was not our problem, because we are our email. We do not send emails to people who do not open over time. Because what that does is that it tells it tells the email service providers, the gmails, the Yahoos, the hotmails of the world, hey, they’re not opening your email. They don’t want it, so they’re going to move it to that promotions that spam folder over time, if you’re sending the email to enough people that do not open so we do, we use a software called Zero bounce, and we do this once a year. Are you familiar with that software?

I’m not that one specifically, but I’m familiar with software that checks this for you. It helps clean your list, yeah, so it goes through once a year. It removes any of the bots. It removes any like emails that are bouncing, or anything like that. And it’s really inexpensive, yeah, to go through and. We do it once a year and and the first time that we did it, I think, I mean, it was like, 1000s of emails that we got rid of. So I like, your heart sinks a little bit so sad, yeah, but it’s like, you know, what, if those are not real people, or if they’re not, you know, wanting to hear or be in relationship with us, that’s fine. Bless and release.

Lesson, different season people move. Yeah, okay, so clean that clean, clean list. And how do we tell if someone is opening our emails or not? Is that some is that a feature that’s standard inside of a MailChimp kit, whatever type flow desk, whatever type of email service provider you’re choosing, absolutely, yeah, you can see your open rate. So I’ve got 10% 20% 30% 40% open rate, that other percentage that isn’t open some email, some CRMs have this built in so that you can, you can see, run a report, see everyone who hasn’t opened in 90 days.

But otherwise, to your point, there are external plugins you mentioned, zero bounce. Some will integrate right with your CRM where you’re sending emails from, and just quickly pull those people to a separate list, because you might not want to just delete them. You might want to download that list and do some other kind of marketing campaign to those people to say, hey, you haven’t opened our emails in so long. We miss you. Come back a special a promotion, and you can, you can sort of separate that audience before you say farewell in part.

Okay, so clean list. You’ve got that. What’s the next thing? Okay, this is

the one I don’t understand. Really. It’s called, it’s there are three sort of letter three abbreviations, jargon here. SPF, not the sunblock. D, Mark and D Kim, so these are D Mark is the one I hear referred to most often. But what you want to do most email providers that you are sending from the CRM now require you to register your D mark. Okay, so let’s and what this does is it’s a registration in the internets with the email service providers like Gmail, who are receiving emails to say you are legit, you are not inherently spam. You’re registered. This is okay, so, and is that something that your CRM does for you, or is that something that we have to manually do?

Yeah, and your CRM doesn’t do it for you, but it will. There’s usually a place in your CRM to do this, and you might have to pop out somewhere else to register. I told you, I’d be honest, this is the one we’re like, oh, this is one of those things. You do it once, and you’re going to be good for a while, and your CRM likely flagged if you didn’t have this registration, because it came became a requirement. So you should be good. But if you’re, if you’re wondering, and you don’t know, just go double check. And when we saw this email coming up, we went and double check like we fixed this. We fixed it, right? Yeah, we fixed it. And then we had to fix it again. So just if you don’t know, go look this up.

Okay, okay, so clean list. D Mark, what’s number three?

Segmentation. Okay, you do this.

We talk about segmentation all of the time inside of growth factors, so patients, non patients. And then, you know, from that’s like top line, and then below there, we’re breaking out by service that they’re doing by member, non member, if you have a membership base. So we’re really breaking it down in that way. So you’re sell, you’re sending more targeted, focused emails off of behavior, rather than like the the E blast. That is exactly a blast, blast, and this is good because of that first issue that we talked about. If you are sending email to people who don’t want this message and you’re not opening it’s not catching your attention, the gmails of the world are going to say they don’t want it, and that’s going to reduce your effectiveness in your email. So another example of this is i, everybody on my list is getting this email about a promotion, but the promotion only applies to 50% of people, so we only send it to the 50% of people, because that’s just going to help you keep your your list clean.

Now, in our case, we had 3000 people who signed up for this event, but our list is much bigger than that, so we were only sending these emails to the 3000 who. Said, Yes, I would like to receive that communication. I want to participate in this event. Now. We invited our bigger community to it, but they didn’t raise their hand.

They didn’t say yes, so we didn’t keep sending emails. And so we knew that is not our problem. It was not we’re not seeing less people attendance. So it’s just something to be mindful of if, if this group of people have said, No, I never want Botox. Okay, we’re not going to send you Botox specials. We’re going to send you the laser specials, right? So that sort of of alignment, we’re going to educate them on why Botox is your love language. I digress.

Then you already talked about this bounces opt outs. If people are opting out, if their email addresses are bouncing a soft bounce or a hard bounce, a hard bounce would mean the email address doesn’t even exist anymore, right? Soft bounce could be their inbox is full. So that’s coming back to you. Don’t send to those but your CRM that you are sending emails from, should take care of that one, but I share it just so you’re aware.

Okay, what’s next?

Okay, next is domain reputation, so you know what does that mean? Okay, so my email is whatever, whatever, at Amber mchugh.com Amber. It’s actually Amber at Amber mchugh.com and so your domain is the Amber mchugh.com it’s where you’re sending your email from.

And you have a reputation. So you have a reputation for being a good sender or a bad sender. You have a reputation for people opening or not opening, and each of the email service providers has gives you a different score. So Gmail may score you different from AOL. May score you different from Hotmail, etc. Do you? Does anyone? Do you use any of these other emails?

Email, I don’t understand people that don’t have anything.

I’m saying it as an example, but it feels so weird. So there are, I’m sure there are others that I don’t know about. Yes, so you have a reputation, and your reputation is different with each one of these, and that is tied to your Amber mchugh.com now, and so can we see what our reputation is for us?

Okay, you can type in, like, give me a website to check my domain reputation, and you can check that real quick some email CRMs will have that built in, like, we check, I mean random website, wherever, domain reputation checker, whatever, whatever. But your CRM may also have a place for you to check that, like we use go high level, and they have a place inside where they can see, oh, yeah, no, your domain reputation is okay. So green, we’re good. And it might be a green score, green, yellow, red kind of thing, okay? And our domain reputation was also fine. So, like, we’re getting clues, okay, it’s not that, it’s not that, it’s we’re still good on domain reputation. Sometimes, if you’re blasting a lot of emails at once, right? If we were sending to our whole list again, and I’d say, Whoa. This is a lot of emails. This isn’t what you usually send. It might flag. It might hit our domain reputation. We didn’t send to everyone, just a small group. So we were okay. We were still green.

Okay, all right, so your team is going through all of this while you’re on a call.

Yes, I am delivering a workshop to hundreds of people, and there, and there were hundreds. They’re looking at the D Mark your domain reputation. They’re going to town. Good for exactly. This doesn’t most of this doesn’t take long to check.

Well, they’re like, they knew what to check exactly.

Yeah. Okay, you definitely want to know proactive ideal. Are we getting closer to the actual problem? We’re getting closer. We got two more things, okay, spammy subject lines. That’ll move you out.

What determines a spammy subject line? Yeah, sounds salesy. Free, Free. Free. Something can even also get you flagged and moved over to spam or promotions as a first location likely. And there are also so many checkers for this too. So is my subject line spammy? Google it, search it up, chat it up, and you’ll find something to check that also. And we didn’t have that problem. We checked those before.

I guess that would also be for a lot of our people are using custom gpts to create their emails on the first draft, and so they’re putting in, like the you know, all of you could put in the prompt of make sure that the site. Subject line is not spammy according to, yeah, yeah, according to guidelines, and sometimes Claude, Chachi P will come out, will come up with something that’s kind of spammy. And then you ask them, and they’re like, oh, yeah, you’re right. Maybe we should change that so you can just pressure test it and pressure test it in an external tool.

Okay, okay, so spamming headlines, and then are we like, drum roll at the pig roll and this one? Ah. So the big issue is it’s an issue for all of us, really, or for most of us. And when we are sending emails through a CRM, you are likely sending an email from a shared IP address. So let’s say you live at in the IP address structure is a little bit weird. It’s like one, nine, 9.77, 7.832.

I live in Silver Spring Maryland. You live in Silver Spring Maryland, and you’re sending mail from Silver Spring Maryland, but so are other people. So if Silver Spring Maryland became known for sending all sorts of spam, or email service providers were like, Hey, that that email that comes from Silver Spring Maryland, it always looks a little fishy. You might be sending emails that are not fishy at all, but your neighbor is and your other neighbor, and then the person across the street and like you’re making me look bad everybody, what you’re saying is this is all your neighbor’s fault. Yeah, I’m blaming the neighbor. But you know, when we look at all those other things, we’re okay, we’re okay, we’re okay, we’re not okay when it falls down to that, if your neighbor is not checking this whole list that we just looked at, you’re all sending email from Silver Spring, Maryland. You’re all sending email from the same IP address. And if one person is like blasting spam, if one person, even if they get hacked, they might not even do it intentionally. They might get hacked. Or if one person doesn’t maintain their domain reputation, it can bring, it’s going to bring the whole IP address down.

So what about so are you using, like, what if you use a VPN or something like, that doesn’t matter. Matter because, because it you can put a VPN on, but you are still in Silver Spring Maryland. You cannot hide this fact in this scenario. And what happens is, it’s not tied to your computer and your physical location. It is coming from your CRM. You’re not so our house scenario doesn’t quite work, because you’re not sending email from your house, you’re sending email through your CRM who actually kicks it out for you. So our CRMs have us on these shared email addresses or shared IP addresses, and what they what should be happening is they should be regularly monitoring them. And here’s what happened. We got down to the IP address, and we’re like, Oh, check this. Our IP address was blacklisted.

So how do you what does that mean? And how do you even find that out? And then, how do you fix it? You put it in a checker, another checker online, all sorts of free checkers on this, and then there’ll be options to get it fixed and upgrade, etc. But there, I think it’s like white list checker.com because you want to make sure you are not blacklisted. So check my IP address and make sure I am not blacklisted, or check the health of my IP address. And so you pop that in there, and you find out, Oh, you’re good again. It might be a green, red, yellow, green. It might be, if you’re blacklisted for us, it was like a big, sad red X and like, oh, well, that’s not good what we do. And I only knew this and know this because when I was working in corporate, on big accounts, we would monitor the health of all of these things. And so we got to this point, we’re like, okay, that is not us. We’re on a shared IP address. We’ve got to go back to our CRM, and they should be monitoring and if something gets blacklisted, they should change the IP address. Or if there’s someone on the block who is sending a lot of spam, hey, you’re making us all look bad on this IP address. You got to stop that. So they should be reviewing it and checking this regularly. So you can probably ask your CRM about this, your MailChimp, your flow desk, etc, and they should have a protocol in place for this. And maybe we just got caught in this window of, oh shoot like black, and they were in the process of catching it and changing it.

After we came after we discovered this, we, of course, reached out like you missed this. We need to get this updated. And of course they did. And is there the How else can you protect against this? Do I have to share my IP address? So I’m already thinking. Like, how would I build this into so in our we have systems that we do for like spa CEOs, and there’s the things that you do daily, the things that you do weekly, the things you do monthly, quarterly, biannually and annually. And I feel like the there’s a couple things that would maybe be biannual and a couple things that would be annual of just even like reviewing, is this correct?

Is this so for those of you in growth factor, if you have your CEO routines boards, I would be adding this right now, of clicking on that and adding, you know, checking the the the zero bounce, like, I don’t know exactly what all of these things are are called, but we’ll, we’ll do a recap of of them, and I would get them added in there in a regular basis, because I would so much rather be, like, proactive in a situation like this, then be forced into a situation where you have to, like, be reactive and solve the problem exactly right? Because percent, you know, I mean, I know you had, like, hundreds of people that didn’t get the email, and then, yes, you did another webinar to accommodate. But like, how many people did you lose from that you know? Like, yeah, you never know, you never know. And that was not something that was your fault. It was not something that you know, like you were not spent sending spammy messages. It was just thankfully you knew how to fix it, and didn’t just continue down that path and be like, What in the world is happening?

I know because we beat ourselves up like, oh, it’s not working. What did I do? What did we know? It was pretty clear, especially when people said, I’m not even getting these emails. I checked my spam. I checked my, you know, everywhere promotions, I checked my trash. Because what happens when you’re blacklisted is that Gmail isn’t even letting that go through. It’s not there’s no you cannot pass this threshold at all if your IP address is blacklisted. So it’s one of those things that most people were getting our emails, and then all of the sudden they weren’t.

And yeah, it’s this whole conversation. What it’s bringing up for me is like, so I talk with so many spa owners who are upset or nervous when someone unsubscribes, and I’m like, No, that’s like, the best thing that can happen if it’s someone who does not want your service or does not want to be in relationship with you, the Most Gracious thing they can do is unsubscribe. It’s like bless and release, move on, because it sounds like if they’re just staying on and not opening the emails and letting them clutter up, it’s actually hurting your business longer term.

Yep, absolutely. I mean, there’s, there’s a reframe right there, yeah. And, I mean, there are so many reasons why people unsubscribe. I, you know, we move so much that all the time, like, Oh, that was great. I still tell some accounts on Instagram, like, I really could let you go. I can’t yet. I’m just hanging out. I’m not necessarily helping, but I’m just hanging on.

So what did you learn from this like, in this process of going through like, how did you update your pre launch systems? Did you put any like? What were the like when you went through the debrief of this whole situation with your team. Obviously, you’re praising them for like, I mean, shout out to the team.

We figured it out. Oh, okay, still don’t like it. Yes, we all felt it together.

Yeah, that’s, that’s entrepreneurship though. I mean, like, there’s your job as an entrepreneur is to put out fire after fire after fire. That’s, that’s what it is. And so by doing that, like, but I’m just curious, like, how you I always find I’m like, Yeah, we put out a fire and then we figure out how to not make it repeatable, yeah. And that’s where the systems aspect comes in, yeah.

So we had checks on all of these things in place, and really the IP address was sort of the lingering one, so all those other things, yeah, we know we’re checking we’re good, we’re good, we’re good. We’re watching it all the time. And so we’ve been looking into the IP address situation, and there is an option, and this is not the best option for everyone, and it’s actually possibly not an option for us right now to move to a dedicated IP where you’re not sharing where Silver Spring Maryland is yours, all yours. So if you muck it up, you mocked it up all in your own right. You’re not mixed in with anyone. And the recommendation on Deaf. Indicated IP addresses is that you’re sending over 100,000 emails a month, and there are some other things with that you have, and some other responsibilities that come with that. You’ve got to warm it up. You can’t, you know, got to make sure you’re not sending the spam and the cold and all those other things that we talked through. So we’re looking out. Do we qualify? Does that work for us? Does it not work for us? Does it make sense? Does it not because if you’re not giving enough information to the ESP, the gmails of the world, your dedicated IP address might not work either. So they need enough information to sort of score you and assess you. And so that is our next step, and if we can’t move to a dedicated IP address, or it doesn’t make sense to we are also going back to be like, how are we going to fix this yellow because this week, we looked again. We checked our IP address because of client, wrote in and said, Hey, your email went funny again, like, oh no. And honestly, there are you can send emails right, send emails to another email account that you have, right, a separate Gmail account, not the one where you’re always watching and opening your own email, but a separate one where you can kind of test where did that go, and check it. But a client caught it before us, and we’re like, Oh, man. So we opened it back up. We are yellow again. We’re not red, we’re not green, we’re yellow, which means, okay, you’re just a little bit more on alert. And we don’t want to be on alert, right?

I mean, that’s when you’re doing an online business, or any, I mean, any business, for that matter, there’s so many digital components to it. I’m thinking of spas that have E comm stores. I’m thinking of Spa you know, like online booking confirmation for those things. I mean, your email is the link, yeah, down.

Someone doesn’t get their confirmation that they just booked. So it’s not on their calendar. They don’t show up.

Yeah, my goodness. Okay. Well, I am so grateful to you this as as I said before, when you shared that in our mastermind call, I was like, Oh, my God. It was like. I was like, man, I’ve been doing this for 12 years, I thought I knew something, and I had, I had no idea that was like a brand new world for me. So I knew, I mean, I was like, Okay, I’ve got to share this with our listeners. I’ve got to get that like that was something that just blew my mind. So I appreciate you being so open and sharing with such generosity. Can you share where our listeners can find you and follow you if they want to keep in touch?

Absolutely, I would love to connect. I’m on Instagram at Amber McHugh, same place on YouTube, and my website’s Amber mchugh.com so easy.

Love it. Thank you so so much, and we will catch you all in the next episode.

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EP 475: Should You Exhibit at a Spa Trade Show? Behind the Scenes at Be + Well
  • /
  • business, education, marketing

If you’ve ever Googled “is exhibiting at a trade show worth it,” this episode is the answer you’ve been looking for – straight from someone who just did it for the very first time.

In Episode 475 of Spa Marketing Made Easy, Daniela pulls back the curtain on Addo Aesthetics’ debut booth at Be + Well, one of the largest wellness and aesthetics trade shows in the country. With over 35,000 attendees, the show floor is packed with spa professionals, aestheticians, spa owners, and the brands that serve them. And this year, Addo was in the mix.

But this episode isn’t just a recap. It’s a masterclass in what intentional visibility actually looks like for a coaching and consulting brand in a room full of skincare lines and device companies.

Daniela opens up about the morning that sparked this decision; sitting on the farm porch, watching the sunrise over the water, asking herself where she had been playing it safe. Her word for 2026 is “open,” and showing up at Be + Well was one of the first big expressions of that commitment. She also shares why 2025 was an intentional slow-down year — a season of restructuring, revenue adjustments, and strategic decisions that feel like they’re now paying off in a big way.

On the show floor, Daniela highlights some standout brand moments: Circadia’s packed booth and the strong relationships Addo has built with their team, Mangomint (an Addo strategic partner) pulling foot traffic with mango mimosas and live demos, Arca Aesthetics showcasing their RF microneedling technology, and a new acne makeup startup called Delicate Matter that Daniela loved so much she became a customer on the spot.

But the highlight of the episode (and honestly, the heart of it) is the section on human moments. Running into past clients. Alumni from different iterations of Growth Factor. People who went through the Spa Manager Certification. The kind of face-to-face reconnection that reminds you why you do this work in the first place.

Daniela also breaks down four honest lessons from the experience that every spa owner or service provider considering a trade show needs to hear:

  1. Bring more than you think you need. They ran out of magazines. Don’t be caught empty-handed mid-day two.
  2. Build a pre-show strategy. Know who you want to meet, what relationships you want to build, and what success looks like before you walk in the door.
  3. Create your post-show follow-up sequence before you go. The ROI doesn’t live at the show; it lives in what happens after. Have your emails, DM templates, and onboarding flow ready to go before you leave.
  4. Think about the booth experience, not just the booth. If you’re selling a service or a framework rather than a product, you have to work harder to draw people in. What can someone feel, experience, or take home that gives them a taste of your world?

Whether you’re a solo esthetician dreaming of your first industry event, or a spa owner considering a bigger investment in in-person visibility, this episode gives you the honest roadmap and the Spa CEO mindset to approach it strategically.

Listen to the full episode above, or watch on YouTube below.

Resources Mentioned in Episode #475: Should You Exhibit at a Spa Trade Show? Behind the Scenes at Be + Well

  • Check out the Be + Well Trade Show website 
  • Check out Mangomint Spa Management Software (Addo Strategic Partner)
  • Check out Circadia Skincare
  • Check out Arca Aesthetics (RF Microneedling)
  • Check out Delicate Matter Acne Makeup’s Instagram and website
  • Claim your FREE copy of Growth Factor Magazine (US only): 

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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 and welcome to the Spa Marketing Made Easy Podcast. I’m Daniela, and boy do I have an interview for you today. So I have a group of friends. They’re all entrepreneurs, and we meet once a month to talk business. This is online, because these are people that are all over the world. Now I love this group. I’m so happy that we found each other. And a few calls ago, Amber was sharing an update. She was she’s the guest on today’s episode, and she was sharing a story with us about this email situation that happened to her company. And if I’m being real, you guys, if this happened to me, I would literally have no idea where to even start. And this is not just like a small email problem. This is something, this is a situation that could have potentially cost her 10s of 1000s of dollars, if not hundreds of 1000s of dollars.

Now she and her team handled it like the pros that they are, and it was such a great reminder going through not only the monthly call that we had with our group of entrepreneurs, but also here on the podcast interview, to know people, to have people in your circle that know more than you is such a valuable thing. You never want to be the biggest fish in the pond and Amber certainly knows so much more than me on this topic, which is why I was so grateful when she so graciously agreed to come on and share this experience. This is not a highlight reel. This is not anything like that. This is real business. These are real problems that come up, and she is being very open and sharing what happened and giving lots of great feedback of what you can do to fix it if something like this ever happens to you. Now, if you do any sort of email marketing at all, you’re going to want to listen in, because Amber is getting real All right. Now, let me just read her bio, and then we will jump right into that interview. Okay, so Amber went from single mom in college to multi business owner running freedom based companies from Ethiopia to Chicago and from Abidjan to Zagreb. With a background in corporate consulting and studies at Johns Hopkins organization develop development MBA program. She helps modern CEOs scale strategically without sacrificing time at Ambermccue.com in addition to consulting, her businesses are in the online children’s education and photography brand that grew from a side hustle to a multi million dollar operation in 26 cities, giving her first hand experience in creating systems that fuel growth and freedom. She’s incredible.

I know you guys are going to love her as much as I do, and let’s go ahead and play that interview. All right, Amber, welcome to the spa marketing Made Easy podcast. So happy to have you here. And I’m so I’m really hoping that we can explain what happened with your email, because I think this is such, such an important aspect of doing business, for business owners, for spa owners, any business owner that is using email to connect with their clients, if you’re trying to do the debrief and figure out, like, what, what’s happening, what’s working, what’s not working. I mean this you blew my mind when you shared with me this process, I was like, Oh, my God, I would not have known what to do. So let’s, let’s go back to and like, tell the story from the beginning, you have an online business. We were both doing a webinar like a launch, very similar timing, and you had done this webinar multiple times before. No issues, you understood what your show up rates, your you know, all your KPIs, and something was drastically off.

Yes, okay, so start there, yes, okay, we are hosting this event and big marketing campaign, and we typically have a certain number of people showing up, arriving throughout the week, number bigger number of people sign up, and lesser people show up to the webinar, the workshops. And we’re noticing it. We’re kind of watching it. But then at the end of the week, people are saying it’s over the events over I signed up for the event, I didn’t get any of the emails, so we already had, like, this intuitive hit, like, something is off, but then when people said we didn’t get the emails, like, So are they responding to you, or are they posting on your social like, how are you hearing this? What?

Yes, great question. A couple of people emailed like, I signed up for this event. I thought it was this week, what’s happening. And then they were also posting in our Facebook community and the thread after that, just kind of like me too, me too. I didn’t get anything either. I didn’t get anything in there, check here, check there, and it wasn’t even landing necessarily in their spam folder, right? Or in their promotions folder, I think we got, I think that’s what blew my mind, is that it wasn’t even in spam. I was like, yeah, yeah, and there’s a reason for that, which we will share.

So, I mean, I’m thinking about this like in spas. We do in person events, we’ll do mini events, we’ll do open houses, and email is a big part of that communication. We do call as well, but I mean the thought process of investing so much time and so much money to host an event, and if your people are not getting the communication, yeah, then they raise their hand and say, I want to come. But then you never you don’t remind them. You don’t tell them, Oh, it’s happening now. And that also, like doesn’t look good on you. From like, you obviously did what you were supposed to do, but from their perspective, like, what? What’s happening? Yeah, you know.

So, okay, so you’re seeing in the group, you’re seeing this thread that’s going through, like, I didn’t get any emails, you know what’s happening? Yeah? So where does your mind go? Well, it’s interesting. My team saw these messages coming in first, and they immediately started investigating, because I was delivering a workshop as like the big flurry starts, it’s happening. And they told me they investigated everything, and they told me, about an hour later, we have a problem. We know what’s happening. We checked all of these things, and we got to the root cause, and so they were on it.

But how does your team like? I feel very proud of my team. I feel like they’re very tech savvy. I feel like I feel like I am tech savvy, and I would not have known where to look with email, I would have thought, do you need to clear your cash? Do you need to turn off the computer and restart? Restart?

Maybe it’s in your trash. Did you set up a filter like the basics? But they we have my business partner and I worked for a an email marketing a marketing agency. So I had done a lot of consulting on email strategy, email marketing, and we partnered and collaborated on a lot of things around this as well. So this really the foundation of this came out of my corporate background, but running an online business, we kind of always had an eye on that and have been watching it ever since.

But for just the normal small business owner, yeah? Like, how do we do like, what are the steps? What were the things that you guys looked at? Let’s look okay, let’s get into that.

Yeah, I’m gonna break it down. I’m gonna try and keep this so simple. And honestly, there are a couple of things that I don’t even understand. So I’ll tell you what when I hit those points. But first up clean email list. So if you are emailing people who are responding, they haven’t opened an email in six months, a year, two years, three years,

I still, I see you, those people with the 20,000 emails on your red bubble, come on, and that is not helping you. So emailing people that are just letting their inbox fill up, you do not want to keep emailing them. And this, we knew this was not our problem, because we are our email. We do not send emails to people who do not open over time. Because what that does is that it tells it tells the email service providers, the gmails, the Yahoos, the hotmails of the world, hey, they’re not opening your email. They don’t want it, so they’re going to move it to that promotions that spam folder over time, if you’re sending the email to enough people that do not open so we do, we use a software called Zero bounce, and we do this once a year. Are you familiar with that software?

I’m not that one specifically, but I’m familiar with software that checks this for you. It helps clean your list, yeah, so it goes through once a year. It removes any of the bots. It removes any like emails that are bouncing, or anything like that. And it’s really inexpensive, yeah, to go through and. We do it once a year and and the first time that we did it, I think, I mean, it was like, 1000s of emails that we got rid of. So I like, your heart sinks a little bit so sad, yeah, but it’s like, you know, what, if those are not real people, or if they’re not, you know, wanting to hear or be in relationship with us, that’s fine. Bless and release.

Lesson, different season people move. Yeah, okay, so clean that clean, clean list. And how do we tell if someone is opening our emails or not? Is that some is that a feature that’s standard inside of a MailChimp kit, whatever type flow desk, whatever type of email service provider you’re choosing, absolutely, yeah, you can see your open rate. So I’ve got 10% 20% 30% 40% open rate, that other percentage that isn’t open some email, some CRMs have this built in so that you can, you can see, run a report, see everyone who hasn’t opened in 90 days.

But otherwise, to your point, there are external plugins you mentioned, zero bounce. Some will integrate right with your CRM where you’re sending emails from, and just quickly pull those people to a separate list, because you might not want to just delete them. You might want to download that list and do some other kind of marketing campaign to those people to say, hey, you haven’t opened our emails in so long. We miss you. Come back a special a promotion, and you can, you can sort of separate that audience before you say farewell in part.

Okay, so clean list. You’ve got that. What’s the next thing? Okay, this is

the one I don’t understand. Really. It’s called, it’s there are three sort of letter three abbreviations, jargon here. SPF, not the sunblock. D, Mark and D Kim, so these are D Mark is the one I hear referred to most often. But what you want to do most email providers that you are sending from the CRM now require you to register your D mark. Okay, so let’s and what this does is it’s a registration in the internets with the email service providers like Gmail, who are receiving emails to say you are legit, you are not inherently spam. You’re registered. This is okay, so, and is that something that your CRM does for you, or is that something that we have to manually do?

Yeah, and your CRM doesn’t do it for you, but it will. There’s usually a place in your CRM to do this, and you might have to pop out somewhere else to register. I told you, I’d be honest, this is the one we’re like, oh, this is one of those things. You do it once, and you’re going to be good for a while, and your CRM likely flagged if you didn’t have this registration, because it came became a requirement. So you should be good. But if you’re, if you’re wondering, and you don’t know, just go double check. And when we saw this email coming up, we went and double check like we fixed this. We fixed it, right? Yeah, we fixed it. And then we had to fix it again. So just if you don’t know, go look this up.

Okay, okay, so clean list. D Mark, what’s number three?

Segmentation. Okay, you do this.

We talk about segmentation all of the time inside of growth factors, so patients, non patients. And then, you know, from that’s like top line, and then below there, we’re breaking out by service that they’re doing by member, non member, if you have a membership base. So we’re really breaking it down in that way. So you’re sell, you’re sending more targeted, focused emails off of behavior, rather than like the the E blast. That is exactly a blast, blast, and this is good because of that first issue that we talked about. If you are sending email to people who don’t want this message and you’re not opening it’s not catching your attention, the gmails of the world are going to say they don’t want it, and that’s going to reduce your effectiveness in your email. So another example of this is i, everybody on my list is getting this email about a promotion, but the promotion only applies to 50% of people, so we only send it to the 50% of people, because that’s just going to help you keep your your list clean.

Now, in our case, we had 3000 people who signed up for this event, but our list is much bigger than that, so we were only sending these emails to the 3000 who. Said, Yes, I would like to receive that communication. I want to participate in this event. Now. We invited our bigger community to it, but they didn’t raise their hand.

They didn’t say yes, so we didn’t keep sending emails. And so we knew that is not our problem. It was not we’re not seeing less people attendance. So it’s just something to be mindful of if, if this group of people have said, No, I never want Botox. Okay, we’re not going to send you Botox specials. We’re going to send you the laser specials, right? So that sort of of alignment, we’re going to educate them on why Botox is your love language. I digress.

Then you already talked about this bounces opt outs. If people are opting out, if their email addresses are bouncing a soft bounce or a hard bounce, a hard bounce would mean the email address doesn’t even exist anymore, right? Soft bounce could be their inbox is full. So that’s coming back to you. Don’t send to those but your CRM that you are sending emails from, should take care of that one, but I share it just so you’re aware.

Okay, what’s next?

Okay, next is domain reputation, so you know what does that mean? Okay, so my email is whatever, whatever, at Amber mchugh.com Amber. It’s actually Amber at Amber mchugh.com and so your domain is the Amber mchugh.com it’s where you’re sending your email from.

And you have a reputation. So you have a reputation for being a good sender or a bad sender. You have a reputation for people opening or not opening, and each of the email service providers has gives you a different score. So Gmail may score you different from AOL. May score you different from Hotmail, etc. Do you? Does anyone? Do you use any of these other emails?

Email, I don’t understand people that don’t have anything.

I’m saying it as an example, but it feels so weird. So there are, I’m sure there are others that I don’t know about. Yes, so you have a reputation, and your reputation is different with each one of these, and that is tied to your Amber mchugh.com now, and so can we see what our reputation is for us?

Okay, you can type in, like, give me a website to check my domain reputation, and you can check that real quick some email CRMs will have that built in, like, we check, I mean random website, wherever, domain reputation checker, whatever, whatever. But your CRM may also have a place for you to check that, like we use go high level, and they have a place inside where they can see, oh, yeah, no, your domain reputation is okay. So green, we’re good. And it might be a green score, green, yellow, red kind of thing, okay? And our domain reputation was also fine. So, like, we’re getting clues, okay, it’s not that, it’s not that, it’s we’re still good on domain reputation. Sometimes, if you’re blasting a lot of emails at once, right? If we were sending to our whole list again, and I’d say, Whoa. This is a lot of emails. This isn’t what you usually send. It might flag. It might hit our domain reputation. We didn’t send to everyone, just a small group. So we were okay. We were still green.

Okay, all right, so your team is going through all of this while you’re on a call.

Yes, I am delivering a workshop to hundreds of people, and there, and there were hundreds. They’re looking at the D Mark your domain reputation. They’re going to town. Good for exactly. This doesn’t most of this doesn’t take long to check.

Well, they’re like, they knew what to check exactly.

Yeah. Okay, you definitely want to know proactive ideal. Are we getting closer to the actual problem? We’re getting closer. We got two more things, okay, spammy subject lines. That’ll move you out.

What determines a spammy subject line? Yeah, sounds salesy. Free, Free. Free. Something can even also get you flagged and moved over to spam or promotions as a first location likely. And there are also so many checkers for this too. So is my subject line spammy? Google it, search it up, chat it up, and you’ll find something to check that also. And we didn’t have that problem. We checked those before.

I guess that would also be for a lot of our people are using custom gpts to create their emails on the first draft, and so they’re putting in, like the you know, all of you could put in the prompt of make sure that the site. Subject line is not spammy according to, yeah, yeah, according to guidelines, and sometimes Claude, Chachi P will come out, will come up with something that’s kind of spammy. And then you ask them, and they’re like, oh, yeah, you’re right. Maybe we should change that so you can just pressure test it and pressure test it in an external tool.

Okay, okay, so spamming headlines, and then are we like, drum roll at the pig roll and this one? Ah. So the big issue is it’s an issue for all of us, really, or for most of us. And when we are sending emails through a CRM, you are likely sending an email from a shared IP address. So let’s say you live at in the IP address structure is a little bit weird. It’s like one, nine, 9.77, 7.832.

I live in Silver Spring Maryland. You live in Silver Spring Maryland, and you’re sending mail from Silver Spring Maryland, but so are other people. So if Silver Spring Maryland became known for sending all sorts of spam, or email service providers were like, Hey, that that email that comes from Silver Spring Maryland, it always looks a little fishy. You might be sending emails that are not fishy at all, but your neighbor is and your other neighbor, and then the person across the street and like you’re making me look bad everybody, what you’re saying is this is all your neighbor’s fault. Yeah, I’m blaming the neighbor. But you know, when we look at all those other things, we’re okay, we’re okay, we’re okay, we’re not okay when it falls down to that, if your neighbor is not checking this whole list that we just looked at, you’re all sending email from Silver Spring, Maryland. You’re all sending email from the same IP address. And if one person is like blasting spam, if one person, even if they get hacked, they might not even do it intentionally. They might get hacked. Or if one person doesn’t maintain their domain reputation, it can bring, it’s going to bring the whole IP address down.

So what about so are you using, like, what if you use a VPN or something like, that doesn’t matter. Matter because, because it you can put a VPN on, but you are still in Silver Spring Maryland. You cannot hide this fact in this scenario. And what happens is, it’s not tied to your computer and your physical location. It is coming from your CRM. You’re not so our house scenario doesn’t quite work, because you’re not sending email from your house, you’re sending email through your CRM who actually kicks it out for you. So our CRMs have us on these shared email addresses or shared IP addresses, and what they what should be happening is they should be regularly monitoring them. And here’s what happened. We got down to the IP address, and we’re like, Oh, check this. Our IP address was blacklisted.

So how do you what does that mean? And how do you even find that out? And then, how do you fix it? You put it in a checker, another checker online, all sorts of free checkers on this, and then there’ll be options to get it fixed and upgrade, etc. But there, I think it’s like white list checker.com because you want to make sure you are not blacklisted. So check my IP address and make sure I am not blacklisted, or check the health of my IP address. And so you pop that in there, and you find out, Oh, you’re good again. It might be a green, red, yellow, green. It might be, if you’re blacklisted for us, it was like a big, sad red X and like, oh, well, that’s not good what we do. And I only knew this and know this because when I was working in corporate, on big accounts, we would monitor the health of all of these things. And so we got to this point, we’re like, okay, that is not us. We’re on a shared IP address. We’ve got to go back to our CRM, and they should be monitoring and if something gets blacklisted, they should change the IP address. Or if there’s someone on the block who is sending a lot of spam, hey, you’re making us all look bad on this IP address. You got to stop that. So they should be reviewing it and checking this regularly. So you can probably ask your CRM about this, your MailChimp, your flow desk, etc, and they should have a protocol in place for this. And maybe we just got caught in this window of, oh shoot like black, and they were in the process of catching it and changing it.

After we came after we discovered this, we, of course, reached out like you missed this. We need to get this updated. And of course they did. And is there the How else can you protect against this? Do I have to share my IP address? So I’m already thinking. Like, how would I build this into so in our we have systems that we do for like spa CEOs, and there’s the things that you do daily, the things that you do weekly, the things you do monthly, quarterly, biannually and annually. And I feel like the there’s a couple things that would maybe be biannual and a couple things that would be annual of just even like reviewing, is this correct?

Is this so for those of you in growth factor, if you have your CEO routines boards, I would be adding this right now, of clicking on that and adding, you know, checking the the the zero bounce, like, I don’t know exactly what all of these things are are called, but we’ll, we’ll do a recap of of them, and I would get them added in there in a regular basis, because I would so much rather be, like, proactive in a situation like this, then be forced into a situation where you have to, like, be reactive and solve the problem exactly right? Because percent, you know, I mean, I know you had, like, hundreds of people that didn’t get the email, and then, yes, you did another webinar to accommodate. But like, how many people did you lose from that you know? Like, yeah, you never know, you never know. And that was not something that was your fault. It was not something that you know, like you were not spent sending spammy messages. It was just thankfully you knew how to fix it, and didn’t just continue down that path and be like, What in the world is happening?

I know because we beat ourselves up like, oh, it’s not working. What did I do? What did we know? It was pretty clear, especially when people said, I’m not even getting these emails. I checked my spam. I checked my, you know, everywhere promotions, I checked my trash. Because what happens when you’re blacklisted is that Gmail isn’t even letting that go through. It’s not there’s no you cannot pass this threshold at all if your IP address is blacklisted. So it’s one of those things that most people were getting our emails, and then all of the sudden they weren’t.

And yeah, it’s this whole conversation. What it’s bringing up for me is like, so I talk with so many spa owners who are upset or nervous when someone unsubscribes, and I’m like, No, that’s like, the best thing that can happen if it’s someone who does not want your service or does not want to be in relationship with you, the Most Gracious thing they can do is unsubscribe. It’s like bless and release, move on, because it sounds like if they’re just staying on and not opening the emails and letting them clutter up, it’s actually hurting your business longer term.

Yep, absolutely. I mean, there’s, there’s a reframe right there, yeah. And, I mean, there are so many reasons why people unsubscribe. I, you know, we move so much that all the time, like, Oh, that was great. I still tell some accounts on Instagram, like, I really could let you go. I can’t yet. I’m just hanging out. I’m not necessarily helping, but I’m just hanging on.

So what did you learn from this like, in this process of going through like, how did you update your pre launch systems? Did you put any like? What were the like when you went through the debrief of this whole situation with your team. Obviously, you’re praising them for like, I mean, shout out to the team.

We figured it out. Oh, okay, still don’t like it. Yes, we all felt it together.

Yeah, that’s, that’s entrepreneurship though. I mean, like, there’s your job as an entrepreneur is to put out fire after fire after fire. That’s, that’s what it is. And so by doing that, like, but I’m just curious, like, how you I always find I’m like, Yeah, we put out a fire and then we figure out how to not make it repeatable, yeah. And that’s where the systems aspect comes in, yeah.

So we had checks on all of these things in place, and really the IP address was sort of the lingering one, so all those other things, yeah, we know we’re checking we’re good, we’re good, we’re good. We’re watching it all the time. And so we’ve been looking into the IP address situation, and there is an option, and this is not the best option for everyone, and it’s actually possibly not an option for us right now to move to a dedicated IP where you’re not sharing where Silver Spring Maryland is yours, all yours. So if you muck it up, you mocked it up all in your own right. You’re not mixed in with anyone. And the recommendation on Deaf. Indicated IP addresses is that you’re sending over 100,000 emails a month, and there are some other things with that you have, and some other responsibilities that come with that. You’ve got to warm it up. You can’t, you know, got to make sure you’re not sending the spam and the cold and all those other things that we talked through. So we’re looking out. Do we qualify? Does that work for us? Does it not work for us? Does it make sense? Does it not because if you’re not giving enough information to the ESP, the gmails of the world, your dedicated IP address might not work either. So they need enough information to sort of score you and assess you. And so that is our next step, and if we can’t move to a dedicated IP address, or it doesn’t make sense to we are also going back to be like, how are we going to fix this yellow because this week, we looked again. We checked our IP address because of client, wrote in and said, Hey, your email went funny again, like, oh no. And honestly, there are you can send emails right, send emails to another email account that you have, right, a separate Gmail account, not the one where you’re always watching and opening your own email, but a separate one where you can kind of test where did that go, and check it. But a client caught it before us, and we’re like, Oh, man. So we opened it back up. We are yellow again. We’re not red, we’re not green, we’re yellow, which means, okay, you’re just a little bit more on alert. And we don’t want to be on alert, right?

I mean, that’s when you’re doing an online business, or any, I mean, any business, for that matter, there’s so many digital components to it. I’m thinking of spas that have E comm stores. I’m thinking of Spa you know, like online booking confirmation for those things. I mean, your email is the link, yeah, down.

Someone doesn’t get their confirmation that they just booked. So it’s not on their calendar. They don’t show up.

Yeah, my goodness. Okay. Well, I am so grateful to you this as as I said before, when you shared that in our mastermind call, I was like, Oh, my God. It was like. I was like, man, I’ve been doing this for 12 years, I thought I knew something, and I had, I had no idea that was like a brand new world for me. So I knew, I mean, I was like, Okay, I’ve got to share this with our listeners. I’ve got to get that like that was something that just blew my mind. So I appreciate you being so open and sharing with such generosity. Can you share where our listeners can find you and follow you if they want to keep in touch?

Absolutely, I would love to connect. I’m on Instagram at Amber McHugh, same place on YouTube, and my website’s Amber mchugh.com so easy.

Love it. Thank you so so much, and we will catch you all in the next episode.

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EP 474: The Real Reason Your Spa Strategy Isn’t Working (It’s Not What You Think)
  • /
  • business, education, marketing

You’re not failing. You’re just building on the wrong foundation.

That’s the message at the heart of this episode and it’s one of the most honest, personal conversations Daniela has ever brought to the Spa Marketing Made Easy podcast. If you’ve ever poured everything into your business, invested in coaching, implemented the strategies, and still found yourself hitting an invisible wall, this episode will give you a new way to look at exactly why that happens, and what to do about it first.

Daniela opens by sharing a season most people in her audience have never heard her talk about. While her husband was traveling for his military career, roughly 80% of the year, she was running a seven-figure business, leading a team of 15, raising two young children, and managing an entire household on her own. By every external measure, she had it together. Privately, she was in a spiral she couldn’t slow down.

The turning point wasn’t a better productivity system. It was a framework she credits to Tony Robbins: State, Story, Strategy — three words that completely reordered the way she approaches every challenge in business and in life.

State is where everything begins. It’s your physical and emotional condition — your sleep, your nutrition, your nervous system, the energy you bring to every decision you make. Daniela gets into the neuroscience here: when you’re depleted and running on stress hormones, your brain literally cannot access the prefrontal cortex — the region responsible for strategic thinking, creativity, and emotional regulation. You’re operating in survival mode. And from survival mode, every business challenge looks like a threat. This is why the smartest strategies can bounce right off you when your state is compromised.

Story is the layer most high-achievers never slow down long enough to examine. It’s the collection of beliefs you carry about yourself and what’s possible — beliefs so deeply embedded they feel like facts. “I’m not a numbers person.” “I should be able to figure this out alone.” “Paid ads don’t work for businesses like mine.” Daniela walks through how these stories quietly become self-fulfilling, and how the only real way to shift them isn’t to think differently, it’s to build evidence by doing the thing you don’t believe you’re capable of — repeatedly — until the old story simply can’t hold.

Strategy is where most spa owners start — and why so many get stuck. The strategies aren’t usually the problem. The foundation they’re sitting on is. When state is managed and story has begun to shift, the same strategies that bounced off you months ago suddenly land. The same course clicks. The same systems get implemented all the way through. Not because anything external changed, but because you did.

Daniela closes with a concrete three-step action plan: audit your state honestly, identify the specific limiting story underneath your biggest stuck point, and choose one area to build competence on purpose. Then — and only then — go deep on strategy.

This episode is personal, practical, and the kind of conversation that tends to stay with you. Press play, and then share it with the spa owner in your life who needed to hear it.

Resources Mentioned in Episode #474: The Real Reason Your Spa Strategy Isn’t Working (It’s Not What You Think)

  • Tony Robbins’ State, Story, Strategy Framework: https://www.tonyrobbins.com
  • I Am Not Your Guru (Netflix, 2016) — Tony Robbins documentary: https://www.netflix.com/title/80102204
  • Read the Stress Signalling Pathways that Impair Prefrontal Cortex Structure and Function Study.
  • Read the Stress Effects on the Body Study.

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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.

Hello, my dears, and welcome back to the Spa Marketing Made Easy Podcast. I’m your host, Daniela. And if this is your first time tuning in, I am so glad that you are here. This podcast is all about helping esthetic professionals build a systems based business, although today this is, this is quite the episode to pick for your first one, because we are going to get much more personal than we typically get. I’m actually going to be sharing about a really challenging time in my life, and I’m sharing because I have been through it, and I want to be able to share with you how I was able to get out of that really challenging, really dark time that I went through. And look, I am super comfortable talking about systems and strategies and numbers and all of that kind of fun stuff, but the personal stuff, it’s it’s much harder for me. So please have a little bit of grace with me as we go into this episode. Now, I wanted to do this because I hear from so many of you who are doing the work. You’re not sitting on the sidelines. You’ve got real businesses, a growing team, clients that Love You by every external measure, you are succeeding, and yet you feel stuck, not like stuck stuck, not like you’re not moving at all, but stuck in that frustrating kind of in between place where you know there’s a next level, and you can see it, but you just can’t seem to get there no matter how hard you try. You buy the course, you hire the coach, you implement the strategy, and it works for a while, and then it stalls, and you’re back to wondering what you’re missing.

So today, I want to share with you a framework that I believe will genuinely change the way that you approach every single business challenge that you face from this moment forward.

This is the framework that really helped to pull myself out of one of the most challenging times in my life. So many of you know my husband was active duty for 21 years. I am so proud of him for serving our country, and I know that being a military spouse has taught me an incredible amount of resiliency. It’s taught me adaptability. I’ve met some incredible human beings. It’s a part of my life that I am very proud of and love, supporting the military in any way that I can. But a couple of years ago, my husband’s job required him to travel a lot, like 80% of the year, a lot, and I was running a seven figure business with a team of, I think we had 15 people at that time. I had two kids at home. They were four and seven, and I was managing, like our entire household. The weight of everything was on my shoulders or felt that way. Now I want to be clear, I have the most incredibly supportive husband, even from the road. Whenever he was able to or had access to his phone, he was there.

He was emotionally as present as he could possibly be. Sometimes from the other side of the world, he would leave video messages for the kids, and in this small amount of time that he was home, he was exhausted from the time change and getting ready to hop on a plane again, but he did his absolute best to ensure that he was making life at home as easy as possible for Me, so he was doing as much as he could to ease the stress of that year, but the reality of daily life when he was gone that fell on me, the kids activities, dinner, bedtime, all the business decisions, every team issue, all Me and I was struggling, and so were the kids. And I was just filled with guilt, because I thought there are so many military families out there that have a spouse that’s deployed. I knew so many of them, and they seemed to just have it together. They they had some level of order in their home that I did not and I kept thinking, we’re a military family. This is no big deal. We are strong, and we’re teaching the kids resiliency and doing so in a safe environment. But the kids and I did not have it together. Well, I should say that I did not have it together, which meant that the kids did not have it together.

I was not exercising. Dinner was whatever required the least amount of cleanup, and honestly, more times than I would like to admit, that meant Chick fil A was for dinner. I felt like I was just in this spiral that I couldn’t slow down. And then came even more.

Guilt, because I knew that there were single mothers out there doing this every single day as their permanent reality, not as a season. And somehow they found a rhythm, they found a flow. And I could not and listen. I have a massive amount of privilege. I have a incredible housekeeper. I have an au pair. I am financially stable, so the fact that I was spiraling without my husband was layering on guilt and making me question my identity, like, what did that say about me? And at the time, I believed that there was something fundamentally wrong with me. I had always identified as this independent, hard worker, person that gets things done, but what I was feeling was just that I just wasn’t built for this, that other women could handle it, and I couldn’t, and I just had to figure out a way to live with it, and that was really hard for me. That was a deep look into who I was, a deep question into who I was as a person. But what I didn’t understand yet was that I was trying to solve the wrong problem. I kept looking for a better system, a smarter schedule, a more efficient way to delegate a better strategy. None of it was touching what was actually broken.

If you guys are like, type a lead with the masculine, you’re identifying with me there, right? Because when things go wrong, you’re like, what’s the system, what’s the schedule, what’s the WHO CAN I delegate to what’s the strategy, right? You go to those places. But what was broken wasn’t my business or the way that I was managing my household. It was my state. It was my energy. And around that time, I came across a framework from Tony Robbins. And look, I know not everyone is a Tony Robbins person, and that’s completely fine. He seems to be everywhere right now. I’ve heard him on like 10 million podcast. He had that Netflix special called not your guru. And I had watched that, and I had heard him on someone’s podcast, and he shared this framework that I’m going to share with you. This is his framework that he was teaching, and it resonated with me so incredibly deeply.

And I to this day, believe it’s one of the most important things that I’ve learned, because it has pulled me. I’m in such a different place than I was a year ago or year and a half ago, and it all started with this framework, three words, state, story, strategy. Now that’s the order, and most of us, again, especially the Type A’s, the high achievers in this industry, the ones who built these businesses, because we refused to quit, we skip directly to step three. We see a problem, and we go straight to strategy. It’s not a character flaw, it’s literally how problem solvers are wired, wired, but that can cost us. So let me break down what each of these steps actually means and why the order matters more than almost anything else. So state.

Think of state as your physical and emotional condition. I think of it kind of as my energy, like, how am I showing up? It’s the energy that you’re bringing to business every single day. Okay? So you can feel if someone is in a low energy or a high energy, and your state is affected by how you’re sleeping, how you’re exercising. Are you moving your body? Are you eating in a way that actually fuels you? Is your nervous system in a constant state of fight or flight, or do you actually have moments of genuine calm and clarity? And what I didn’t know at the time, and this is actually scientifically backed, is that when you are depleted, when you’re running on stress hormones and caffeine, with four hours of sleep, your brain literally cannot access the prefrontal prefrontal cortex, and that is the part that’s responsible for complex problem solving, strategic thinking, emotional regulation and creativity.

Guys, complex problem solving, strategic thinking, emotional regulation and creativity, if we don’t sleep and eat correctly, if we’re not moving our body, we cannot access that part of our brain.

Okay, we are operating literally from survival mode and from survival mode. Every business challenge looks like a threat, every decision feels impossible, every team issue feels.

Feels like a major crisis. No wonder the strategies aren’t working. You’re trying to run sophisticated plays with a system that’s just trying to get through the day. That was me, that was the whole problem, and I didn’t see it because I was so deep in my deep, dark spiral, and when I finally started addressing my state little by little, not perfectly, not all at once, just one teeny, tiny thing at a time, little by little, things began to shift. I committed to moving my body in the morning so not a full weight workout, not weights, all those things, I was literally starting with even 15 minutes on the treadmill. Okay?

I started prioritizing meal prepping so that we and I would do this on the weekend, so that we actually had food in the house. I started going to sleep on time instead of staying up and watching Netflix, because I needed something mindless, to just unwind. Okay, sleep is so important, and little by little, when I made those small choices, when I started creating those small habits, something changed, not my circumstances. My husband was still traveling, the business was still complex. The kids still needed me, but something changed in me. I had capacity again. I could think. I could respond instead of react, and that is when I could finally see my story.

So story is the collection of beliefs that you carry about yourself, your capabilities, what is possible for you. And here’s the thing about your story, it is so deeply embedded that it doesn’t even feel like a belief anymore. It just feels like a fact. It’s just the way that it is. And during that hard season, I was living inside of a story I didn’t even know I was in. I told myself that I wasn’t good enough. I told myself that I should be able to manage everything because other people did. I told myself that needing support meant that I was weak, that being overwhelmed was evidence that I was failing. None of those things are facts. Every single one was a story a belief that I had quietly assembled over the years trying to prove that I could do it all.

And here’s what makes stories so powerful and so dangerous at the same time, they become self fulfilling. If you believe that you have to do everything yourself, you’re not going to ask for help, which means that you stay overwhelmed, which reinforces your belief that you’re just not capable enough. The story creates the reality, and then the reality confirms the story. It is a loop.

Now I work with some incredible esthetic professionals who are building incredible businesses, million dollar businesses, big teams, and almost every single one of them is carrying some version of a limiting belief or a limiting story. They might believe that they’re not a numbers person, or that they’re terrible at leading a team, or paid ads don’t work for businesses like mine, or maybe it’s something that’s quieter than that, and maybe internally, you’re just saying I should be able to figure this out on my own. What’s yours? Think about that right now. Where in your business do you keep avoiding action, even when you know that that thing is important? Where do you spin instead of move forward? That is where your limiting story lives.

Now. This is the place where most personal development advice gives you bad direction. So people will say, just change your mindset. Choose a belief and choose something different. I understand that. I’ve done that, I have been through that, right? I’ve done the gratitude journals, I’ve said the affirmations, I’ve like all of the things I have been in that space, right? But you can’t just think your way into a new belief. You have to build evidence. And I saw this, you know, one of the things that I used to do.

I still do, actually, but I used to do it a lot more when I was really building this belief, I was worried about that one negative comment, or that one negative review, or whatever it is, and I’m sure that you’ve experienced that as well. And so I have a folder on my desktop, where I would screenshot hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of positive reviews and positive comments in ways that we’ve impacted people’s lives and ways that we’ve we have, we have clients who are now homeschooling their children, are able to have time to be present with their children or.

Present with their spouse and or care for parents, because we’ve taught them how to build a system to space business. And so there’s all this good in the world of you know, people that we’ve been able to help. And then there’s one negative comment that, you know, just sends you to your knees. You’re like, oh my gosh, I’m a horrible person.

I just shut down everything. And you feel that for like 30 seconds, or at least I would, and then I to get over that and to realize, like, Hey, I have one person that wasn’t happy, and I have 100 people that I changed their lives. And so it was going back every time we got that one comment, that one off comment, which wasn’t, you know, we’ve had a handful in the past 12 years, but they happen right? If you’re in business long enough you’re going to have that, and I would go back to that folder and I needed to have that evidence to show me that, you know, we are doing good, and that was the evidence that what we’re doing works. I needed that. I needed that evidence to help me make the shift in the belief I couldn’t just write out in my gratitude journal.

Okay, so what is it for you? What’s yours? I want you to think about that right now. Okay, think about that now. If your belief is your numbers. Maybe you need to run your numbers every single week and to until the fear dissolves and you realize, oh, this PNL actually makes sense, or if it’s for you, having a hard conversation with a team member and watching yourself navigate it with more skill than expected, or doing it calmly without getting super defensive, right, trying to listen to the feedback and trying to understand how you got into that place in the first place, learn from the situation, right? Or maybe you’re launching a marketing campaign and you’re discovering that you understand a heck of a lot more about your audience than you gave yourself credit for.

You’re building the evidence. When you build the evidence that story changes, not in a flash, it’s gradual, but little by little, that changes your story, and when you get to that point, that is when strategy becomes exponentially more powerful. Now here’s what is important to understand the strategies that you’ve been trying many of them are probably good strategies, okay? And the strategies are most likely not the problem. The problem the problem is the foundation that they were sitting on, strategy without state and story is like building on sand. It’s not going to hold no matter how good the blueprint is. But when your state is managed, when you’ve got some capacity, some groundedness, some actual rest in your body, and when your story has started to shift, when you’ve accumulated enough evidence that you’re capable of more than you thought, the strategy works.

That same advice that bounced off you six months ago suddenly lands. The same course you started but never finished, suddenly clicks. The same systems you implemented halfway suddenly get implemented all the way, not because anything externally changed, but because you did.

After I had done the state work and I started to shift my stories, I was finally ready to think strategically about what I actually needed, both in home and at business, I restructured my schedule. I had an honest conversation about my husband, about what needed to change when he was home, what needed to change in his next job. I adjusted my business operations to reflect my real capacity. I made a lot of changes in my business, and I was just really honest with myself about what I could handle during that time.

All of those were strategy moves, and they worked not because they were genius strategies, they they were not genius strategies, but it was because I was bringing a completely different version of myself to them. Your business cannot grow beyond your personal development. I know that’s hard to understand, but when we’re saying you’ve got to show up as the best version of yourself, it’s so vitally important the ceiling on your business is the ceiling on you.

Ooh, which sounds limiting, until you realize that it means the single most leverage investment that you can make in your growth is the investment in yourself. State, first story, second strategy, third in that order, every single time, and we got to give a shout out to Tony Robbins for simplifying that in a way, creating that framework in a way that we can really understand.

Okay, so I never want to leave you with just ideas. I want you to walk away with something that you can actually do. So here’s where to start. First, audit your state. Take an honest look at the last two weeks. How’s your sleep, how’s your nutrition, how’s your movement, what are you consuming mentally, right? What is the information that’s coming at you? Is it building you up or is it tearing you down?

This is a really important piece of social media. I have not been on social media for years because it affected me mentally. When I go on to Instagram, I am at my profile or in my messages, I am not scrolling, and that is really an important thing for me to manage my state. Okay, you need to be brutally honest with yourself, this assessment is for you, not anybody else.

Okay, then, once you identify, you need to pick one thing. It might be your sleep, it might be your nutrition, it might be movement, it might be kind of what you’re consuming. Pick one thing, not five, not a whole, wellness overhaul, one state habit that if you committed to for the next 30 days would make a big difference in how you show up. It might be protecting eight hours of sleep. Maybe it’s 20 minutes of movement before the day pulls you in. Maybe it’s getting off your phone an hour before bed. It doesn’t matter, whatever it is, choose it, protect it, and treat it like a business critical decision. Now second, I want you to identify your limiting story. You might not even know what this is, but just try, right, if you were like me, that was so deep in the story that you couldn’t even see it, maybe go and grab the big leap by Gay Hendricks, it’s a wonderful book about, you know, limiting beliefs.

But if you can see a story that you have, think about the area in your business where you feel consistently stuck, where you keep knowing that you need to do something, but you don’t write down the belief underneath that I’m not the type of person who, or I’ve never been good at, get it out of your head and onto paper, then ask yourself one question, Is this actually a fact, or is this a story that I’ve been telling myself for so long that it started to feel like one and third I want you to choose an area where you’re going to build competence. On purpose. You don’t have to become an expert. That’s not the goal. We just want a CEO level of understanding enough to have an informed conversation, make a real decision, provide strategic direction. All right, start small, take one step, and let that step become evidence that your old story is wrong.

Okay, then and only then go deep on strategy, because from that foundation, everything changes.

Now. I want to close by saying this the season that I shared with you today was genuinely one of the hardest of my life. And looking back, I can see that it was such a great gift.

It made me stronger. It gave me this framework which permeates through so many different parts of my business and the way that I show up. Okay? So if you are in a season that feels impossible right now, if you’ve got all the strategy in the world, but something just still isn’t clicking. I want you to start here, not with a new tactic, not with a new tool. Start with your state and then your story, and let the strategy come after you’ve built something real. You are capable of so much more than the stories you are currently living in, and I believe that with every bit of my heart and soul. So if today’s episode hit home for you, I would be so grateful if you took 30 Seconds to leave us a review on Apple podcast. Reviews are genuinely the lifeblood of this show. It is how other esthetic professionals find us, and they made the world to me, personally, and if you’ve been meaning to do it and just haven’t got around to it, today’s the day I read every single one, and I just told you I screenshot them and save them in.

My Folder, so I so deeply would appreciate it. And if you know another spa professional, another esthetic professional who needs to hear this conversation today, just forward this episode to them. Share it in a group chat or in your team slack or your Instagram Stories.

Let’s get this in the hands of people who need it. Thank you so much for being here, and I will see you in the next episode.

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EP 473: Why Your Spa Emails Are Disappearing (And How to Fix It) with Amber McCue
  • /
  • business, education, marketing

Your Emails Are Not Failing Because of Your Content. They May Not Be Arriving at All.

Imagine running a full promotional campaign for your next spa event. You build the landing page, write the email sequence, and watch registrations come in. Then the day of the event arrives and clients are posting in your community asking why they never heard from you.

That is exactly what happened to this week’s guest, Amber McCue, and it was not because of bad content or poor strategy. Her emails were being completely blocked at the server level, not even landing in spam folders. And if it happened to her, it can happen to you.

In this episode of Spa Marketing Made Easy, Amber breaks down the investigation her team ran in real time and the seven email deliverability factors every spa business owner needs to understand.

The Seven Things That Determine Whether Your Emails Actually Arrive

  1. List Cleanliness

Sending emails to contacts who have not opened anything from you in six months or more signals to Gmail, Yahoo, and other providers that your content is unwanted. Over time, this tanks your sender reputation. Tools like Zero Bounce allow you to audit and clean your list annually, removing bots, invalid addresses, and long-term non-openers. If someone unsubscribes, that is actually a good thing. They are protecting your deliverability.

  1. Authentication: DMARC, SPF, and DKIM

These technical registrations tell email service providers that you are a legitimate sender. Most CRMs now require you to set this up, and many will flag it if it is missing. It is a one-time setup that protects your domain permanently. If you are unsure whether yours is configured correctly, log in to your CRM and check now.

  1. Segmentation

Sending the same email to your entire list, even when the offer only applies to a portion of your clients, trains email providers to deprioritize your messages. Segmenting by service interest, membership status, or behavior keeps your messages targeted and your open rates healthy.

  1. Bounces and Opt-Outs

Hard bounces mean the email address no longer exists. Soft bounces mean the inbox is full. Your CRM should handle these automatically, but it is worth confirming that bounced addresses are being removed and not repeatedly contacted.

  1. Domain Reputation

Your sending domain (the part of your email address after the @ symbol) has a reputation score that varies by email provider. Free tools online allow you to check your domain health in minutes. A green score means you are clear. Yellow means you are being flagged. Red means emails are being blocked.

  1. Subject Line Quality

Words like “free,” excessive capitalization, and high-pressure language can trigger spam filters before your email ever reaches a client. You can test subject lines using free online checkers or by asking an AI tool to flag anything that reads as spammy.

  1. Shared IP Address

This is the one most spa owners never think about. When you send email through a CRM, you are typically sharing an IP address with thousands of other businesses. If another sender on that shared IP gets flagged for spam, your deliverability suffers too, even if your own practices are spotless.

This was the root cause of Amber’s problem. Her IP address had been blacklisted. You can check the health of your IP address using free online tools by searching “IP address blacklist checker.” If your IP is blacklisted, contact your CRM immediately. It is their responsibility to monitor and manage shared IP health.

Building This Into Your CEO Routine

The best time to discover an email deliverability issue is before it costs you an event, a promotion, or a month of client communication. Amber recommends adding email health checks to your biannual and annual CEO routine. At minimum, check your list cleanliness, DMARC authentication, domain reputation, and IP health twice a year.

If you have a CEO Routines board inside Growth Factor, this is the episode that should prompt you to open it and start adding these checkpoints today.

Email is not just another marketing channel. It is how your clients receive booking confirmations, event reminders, product recommendations, and membership communications. When it breaks quietly, the impact is felt everywhere.

Tune in to get the full breakdown from Amber, including exactly what her team investigated, in what order, and how they resolved the issue in real time.

Resources Mentioned in Episode 473:

Sign up for Zero Bounce

Amber McCue on Instagram

Amber McCue on YouTube

Amber McCue Website

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).

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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 and welcome to the Spa Marketing Made Easy Podcast. I’m Daniela, and boy do I have an interview for you today. So I have a group of friends. They’re all entrepreneurs, and we meet once a month to talk business. This is online, because these are people that are all over the world. Now I love this group. I’m so happy that we found each other. And a few calls ago, Amber was sharing an update. She was she’s the guest on today’s episode, and she was sharing a story with us about this email situation that happened to her company. And if I’m being real, you guys, if this happened to me, I would literally have no idea where to even start. And this is not just like a small email problem. This is something, this is a situation that could have potentially cost her 10s of 1000s of dollars, if not hundreds of 1000s of dollars.

Now she and her team handled it like the pros that they are, and it was such a great reminder going through not only the monthly call that we had with our group of entrepreneurs, but also here on the podcast interview, to know people, to have people in your circle that know more than you is such a valuable thing. You never want to be the biggest fish in the pond and Amber certainly knows so much more than me on this topic, which is why I was so grateful when she so graciously agreed to come on and share this experience. This is not a highlight reel. This is not anything like that. This is real business. These are real problems that come up, and she is being very open and sharing what happened and giving lots of great feedback of what you can do to fix it if something like this ever happens to you. Now, if you do any sort of email marketing at all, you’re going to want to listen in, because Amber is getting real All right. Now, let me just read her bio, and then we will jump right into that interview. Okay, so Amber went from single mom in college to multi business owner running freedom based companies from Ethiopia to Chicago and from Abidjan to Zagreb. With a background in corporate consulting and studies at Johns Hopkins organization develop development MBA program. She helps modern CEOs scale strategically without sacrificing time at Ambermccue.com in addition to consulting, her businesses are in the online children’s education and photography brand that grew from a side hustle to a multi million dollar operation in 26 cities, giving her first hand experience in creating systems that fuel growth and freedom. She’s incredible.

I know you guys are going to love her as much as I do, and let’s go ahead and play that interview. All right, Amber, welcome to the spa marketing Made Easy podcast. So happy to have you here. And I’m so I’m really hoping that we can explain what happened with your email, because I think this is such, such an important aspect of doing business, for business owners, for spa owners, any business owner that is using email to connect with their clients, if you’re trying to do the debrief and figure out, like, what, what’s happening, what’s working, what’s not working. I mean this you blew my mind when you shared with me this process, I was like, Oh, my God, I would not have known what to do. So let’s, let’s go back to and like, tell the story from the beginning, you have an online business. We were both doing a webinar like a launch, very similar timing, and you had done this webinar multiple times before. No issues, you understood what your show up rates, your you know, all your KPIs, and something was drastically off.

Yes, okay, so start there, yes, okay, we are hosting this event and big marketing campaign, and we typically have a certain number of people showing up, arriving throughout the week, number bigger number of people sign up, and lesser people show up to the webinar, the workshops. And we’re noticing it. We’re kind of watching it. But then at the end of the week, people are saying it’s over the events over I signed up for the event, I didn’t get any of the emails, so we already had, like, this intuitive hit, like, something is off, but then when people said we didn’t get the emails, like, So are they responding to you, or are they posting on your social like, how are you hearing this? What?

Yes, great question. A couple of people emailed like, I signed up for this event. I thought it was this week, what’s happening. And then they were also posting in our Facebook community and the thread after that, just kind of like me too, me too. I didn’t get anything either. I didn’t get anything in there, check here, check there, and it wasn’t even landing necessarily in their spam folder, right? Or in their promotions folder, I think we got, I think that’s what blew my mind, is that it wasn’t even in spam. I was like, yeah, yeah, and there’s a reason for that, which we will share.

So, I mean, I’m thinking about this like in spas. We do in person events, we’ll do mini events, we’ll do open houses, and email is a big part of that communication. We do call as well, but I mean the thought process of investing so much time and so much money to host an event, and if your people are not getting the communication, yeah, then they raise their hand and say, I want to come. But then you never you don’t remind them. You don’t tell them, Oh, it’s happening now. And that also, like doesn’t look good on you. From like, you obviously did what you were supposed to do, but from their perspective, like, what? What’s happening? Yeah, you know.

So, okay, so you’re seeing in the group, you’re seeing this thread that’s going through, like, I didn’t get any emails, you know what’s happening? Yeah? So where does your mind go? Well, it’s interesting. My team saw these messages coming in first, and they immediately started investigating, because I was delivering a workshop as like the big flurry starts, it’s happening. And they told me they investigated everything, and they told me, about an hour later, we have a problem. We know what’s happening. We checked all of these things, and we got to the root cause, and so they were on it.

But how does your team like? I feel very proud of my team. I feel like they’re very tech savvy. I feel like I feel like I am tech savvy, and I would not have known where to look with email, I would have thought, do you need to clear your cash? Do you need to turn off the computer and restart? Restart?

Maybe it’s in your trash. Did you set up a filter like the basics? But they we have my business partner and I worked for a an email marketing a marketing agency. So I had done a lot of consulting on email strategy, email marketing, and we partnered and collaborated on a lot of things around this as well. So this really the foundation of this came out of my corporate background, but running an online business, we kind of always had an eye on that and have been watching it ever since.

But for just the normal small business owner, yeah? Like, how do we do like, what are the steps? What were the things that you guys looked at? Let’s look okay, let’s get into that.

Yeah, I’m gonna break it down. I’m gonna try and keep this so simple. And honestly, there are a couple of things that I don’t even understand. So I’ll tell you what when I hit those points. But first up clean email list. So if you are emailing people who are responding, they haven’t opened an email in six months, a year, two years, three years,

I still, I see you, those people with the 20,000 emails on your red bubble, come on, and that is not helping you. So emailing people that are just letting their inbox fill up, you do not want to keep emailing them. And this, we knew this was not our problem, because we are our email. We do not send emails to people who do not open over time. Because what that does is that it tells it tells the email service providers, the gmails, the Yahoos, the hotmails of the world, hey, they’re not opening your email. They don’t want it, so they’re going to move it to that promotions that spam folder over time, if you’re sending the email to enough people that do not open so we do, we use a software called Zero bounce, and we do this once a year. Are you familiar with that software?

I’m not that one specifically, but I’m familiar with software that checks this for you. It helps clean your list, yeah, so it goes through once a year. It removes any of the bots. It removes any like emails that are bouncing, or anything like that. And it’s really inexpensive, yeah, to go through and. We do it once a year and and the first time that we did it, I think, I mean, it was like, 1000s of emails that we got rid of. So I like, your heart sinks a little bit so sad, yeah, but it’s like, you know, what, if those are not real people, or if they’re not, you know, wanting to hear or be in relationship with us, that’s fine. Bless and release.

Lesson, different season people move. Yeah, okay, so clean that clean, clean list. And how do we tell if someone is opening our emails or not? Is that some is that a feature that’s standard inside of a MailChimp kit, whatever type flow desk, whatever type of email service provider you’re choosing, absolutely, yeah, you can see your open rate. So I’ve got 10% 20% 30% 40% open rate, that other percentage that isn’t open some email, some CRMs have this built in so that you can, you can see, run a report, see everyone who hasn’t opened in 90 days.

But otherwise, to your point, there are external plugins you mentioned, zero bounce. Some will integrate right with your CRM where you’re sending emails from, and just quickly pull those people to a separate list, because you might not want to just delete them. You might want to download that list and do some other kind of marketing campaign to those people to say, hey, you haven’t opened our emails in so long. We miss you. Come back a special a promotion, and you can, you can sort of separate that audience before you say farewell in part.

Okay, so clean list. You’ve got that. What’s the next thing? Okay, this is

the one I don’t understand. Really. It’s called, it’s there are three sort of letter three abbreviations, jargon here. SPF, not the sunblock. D, Mark and D Kim, so these are D Mark is the one I hear referred to most often. But what you want to do most email providers that you are sending from the CRM now require you to register your D mark. Okay, so let’s and what this does is it’s a registration in the internets with the email service providers like Gmail, who are receiving emails to say you are legit, you are not inherently spam. You’re registered. This is okay, so, and is that something that your CRM does for you, or is that something that we have to manually do?

Yeah, and your CRM doesn’t do it for you, but it will. There’s usually a place in your CRM to do this, and you might have to pop out somewhere else to register. I told you, I’d be honest, this is the one we’re like, oh, this is one of those things. You do it once, and you’re going to be good for a while, and your CRM likely flagged if you didn’t have this registration, because it came became a requirement. So you should be good. But if you’re, if you’re wondering, and you don’t know, just go double check. And when we saw this email coming up, we went and double check like we fixed this. We fixed it, right? Yeah, we fixed it. And then we had to fix it again. So just if you don’t know, go look this up.

Okay, okay, so clean list. D Mark, what’s number three?

Segmentation. Okay, you do this.

We talk about segmentation all of the time inside of growth factors, so patients, non patients. And then, you know, from that’s like top line, and then below there, we’re breaking out by service that they’re doing by member, non member, if you have a membership base. So we’re really breaking it down in that way. So you’re sell, you’re sending more targeted, focused emails off of behavior, rather than like the the E blast. That is exactly a blast, blast, and this is good because of that first issue that we talked about. If you are sending email to people who don’t want this message and you’re not opening it’s not catching your attention, the gmails of the world are going to say they don’t want it, and that’s going to reduce your effectiveness in your email. So another example of this is i, everybody on my list is getting this email about a promotion, but the promotion only applies to 50% of people, so we only send it to the 50% of people, because that’s just going to help you keep your your list clean.

Now, in our case, we had 3000 people who signed up for this event, but our list is much bigger than that, so we were only sending these emails to the 3000 who. Said, Yes, I would like to receive that communication. I want to participate in this event. Now. We invited our bigger community to it, but they didn’t raise their hand.

They didn’t say yes, so we didn’t keep sending emails. And so we knew that is not our problem. It was not we’re not seeing less people attendance. So it’s just something to be mindful of if, if this group of people have said, No, I never want Botox. Okay, we’re not going to send you Botox specials. We’re going to send you the laser specials, right? So that sort of of alignment, we’re going to educate them on why Botox is your love language. I digress.

Then you already talked about this bounces opt outs. If people are opting out, if their email addresses are bouncing a soft bounce or a hard bounce, a hard bounce would mean the email address doesn’t even exist anymore, right? Soft bounce could be their inbox is full. So that’s coming back to you. Don’t send to those but your CRM that you are sending emails from, should take care of that one, but I share it just so you’re aware.

Okay, what’s next?

Okay, next is domain reputation, so you know what does that mean? Okay, so my email is whatever, whatever, at Amber mchugh.com Amber. It’s actually Amber at Amber mchugh.com and so your domain is the Amber mchugh.com it’s where you’re sending your email from.

And you have a reputation. So you have a reputation for being a good sender or a bad sender. You have a reputation for people opening or not opening, and each of the email service providers has gives you a different score. So Gmail may score you different from AOL. May score you different from Hotmail, etc. Do you? Does anyone? Do you use any of these other emails?

Email, I don’t understand people that don’t have anything.

I’m saying it as an example, but it feels so weird. So there are, I’m sure there are others that I don’t know about. Yes, so you have a reputation, and your reputation is different with each one of these, and that is tied to your Amber mchugh.com now, and so can we see what our reputation is for us?

Okay, you can type in, like, give me a website to check my domain reputation, and you can check that real quick some email CRMs will have that built in, like, we check, I mean random website, wherever, domain reputation checker, whatever, whatever. But your CRM may also have a place for you to check that, like we use go high level, and they have a place inside where they can see, oh, yeah, no, your domain reputation is okay. So green, we’re good. And it might be a green score, green, yellow, red kind of thing, okay? And our domain reputation was also fine. So, like, we’re getting clues, okay, it’s not that, it’s not that, it’s we’re still good on domain reputation. Sometimes, if you’re blasting a lot of emails at once, right? If we were sending to our whole list again, and I’d say, Whoa. This is a lot of emails. This isn’t what you usually send. It might flag. It might hit our domain reputation. We didn’t send to everyone, just a small group. So we were okay. We were still green.

Okay, all right, so your team is going through all of this while you’re on a call.

Yes, I am delivering a workshop to hundreds of people, and there, and there were hundreds. They’re looking at the D Mark your domain reputation. They’re going to town. Good for exactly. This doesn’t most of this doesn’t take long to check.

Well, they’re like, they knew what to check exactly.

Yeah. Okay, you definitely want to know proactive ideal. Are we getting closer to the actual problem? We’re getting closer. We got two more things, okay, spammy subject lines. That’ll move you out.

What determines a spammy subject line? Yeah, sounds salesy. Free, Free. Free. Something can even also get you flagged and moved over to spam or promotions as a first location likely. And there are also so many checkers for this too. So is my subject line spammy? Google it, search it up, chat it up, and you’ll find something to check that also. And we didn’t have that problem. We checked those before.

I guess that would also be for a lot of our people are using custom gpts to create their emails on the first draft, and so they’re putting in, like the you know, all of you could put in the prompt of make sure that the site. Subject line is not spammy according to, yeah, yeah, according to guidelines, and sometimes Claude, Chachi P will come out, will come up with something that’s kind of spammy. And then you ask them, and they’re like, oh, yeah, you’re right. Maybe we should change that so you can just pressure test it and pressure test it in an external tool.

Okay, okay, so spamming headlines, and then are we like, drum roll at the pig roll and this one? Ah. So the big issue is it’s an issue for all of us, really, or for most of us. And when we are sending emails through a CRM, you are likely sending an email from a shared IP address. So let’s say you live at in the IP address structure is a little bit weird. It’s like one, nine, 9.77, 7.832.

I live in Silver Spring Maryland. You live in Silver Spring Maryland, and you’re sending mail from Silver Spring Maryland, but so are other people. So if Silver Spring Maryland became known for sending all sorts of spam, or email service providers were like, Hey, that that email that comes from Silver Spring Maryland, it always looks a little fishy. You might be sending emails that are not fishy at all, but your neighbor is and your other neighbor, and then the person across the street and like you’re making me look bad everybody, what you’re saying is this is all your neighbor’s fault. Yeah, I’m blaming the neighbor. But you know, when we look at all those other things, we’re okay, we’re okay, we’re okay, we’re not okay when it falls down to that, if your neighbor is not checking this whole list that we just looked at, you’re all sending email from Silver Spring, Maryland. You’re all sending email from the same IP address. And if one person is like blasting spam, if one person, even if they get hacked, they might not even do it intentionally. They might get hacked. Or if one person doesn’t maintain their domain reputation, it can bring, it’s going to bring the whole IP address down.

So what about so are you using, like, what if you use a VPN or something like, that doesn’t matter. Matter because, because it you can put a VPN on, but you are still in Silver Spring Maryland. You cannot hide this fact in this scenario. And what happens is, it’s not tied to your computer and your physical location. It is coming from your CRM. You’re not so our house scenario doesn’t quite work, because you’re not sending email from your house, you’re sending email through your CRM who actually kicks it out for you. So our CRMs have us on these shared email addresses or shared IP addresses, and what they what should be happening is they should be regularly monitoring them. And here’s what happened. We got down to the IP address, and we’re like, Oh, check this. Our IP address was blacklisted.

So how do you what does that mean? And how do you even find that out? And then, how do you fix it? You put it in a checker, another checker online, all sorts of free checkers on this, and then there’ll be options to get it fixed and upgrade, etc. But there, I think it’s like white list checker.com because you want to make sure you are not blacklisted. So check my IP address and make sure I am not blacklisted, or check the health of my IP address. And so you pop that in there, and you find out, Oh, you’re good again. It might be a green, red, yellow, green. It might be, if you’re blacklisted for us, it was like a big, sad red X and like, oh, well, that’s not good what we do. And I only knew this and know this because when I was working in corporate, on big accounts, we would monitor the health of all of these things. And so we got to this point, we’re like, okay, that is not us. We’re on a shared IP address. We’ve got to go back to our CRM, and they should be monitoring and if something gets blacklisted, they should change the IP address. Or if there’s someone on the block who is sending a lot of spam, hey, you’re making us all look bad on this IP address. You got to stop that. So they should be reviewing it and checking this regularly. So you can probably ask your CRM about this, your MailChimp, your flow desk, etc, and they should have a protocol in place for this. And maybe we just got caught in this window of, oh shoot like black, and they were in the process of catching it and changing it.

After we came after we discovered this, we, of course, reached out like you missed this. We need to get this updated. And of course they did. And is there the How else can you protect against this? Do I have to share my IP address? So I’m already thinking. Like, how would I build this into so in our we have systems that we do for like spa CEOs, and there’s the things that you do daily, the things that you do weekly, the things you do monthly, quarterly, biannually and annually. And I feel like the there’s a couple things that would maybe be biannual and a couple things that would be annual of just even like reviewing, is this correct?

Is this so for those of you in growth factor, if you have your CEO routines boards, I would be adding this right now, of clicking on that and adding, you know, checking the the the zero bounce, like, I don’t know exactly what all of these things are are called, but we’ll, we’ll do a recap of of them, and I would get them added in there in a regular basis, because I would so much rather be, like, proactive in a situation like this, then be forced into a situation where you have to, like, be reactive and solve the problem exactly right? Because percent, you know, I mean, I know you had, like, hundreds of people that didn’t get the email, and then, yes, you did another webinar to accommodate. But like, how many people did you lose from that you know? Like, yeah, you never know, you never know. And that was not something that was your fault. It was not something that you know, like you were not spent sending spammy messages. It was just thankfully you knew how to fix it, and didn’t just continue down that path and be like, What in the world is happening?

I know because we beat ourselves up like, oh, it’s not working. What did I do? What did we know? It was pretty clear, especially when people said, I’m not even getting these emails. I checked my spam. I checked my, you know, everywhere promotions, I checked my trash. Because what happens when you’re blacklisted is that Gmail isn’t even letting that go through. It’s not there’s no you cannot pass this threshold at all if your IP address is blacklisted. So it’s one of those things that most people were getting our emails, and then all of the sudden they weren’t.

And yeah, it’s this whole conversation. What it’s bringing up for me is like, so I talk with so many spa owners who are upset or nervous when someone unsubscribes, and I’m like, No, that’s like, the best thing that can happen if it’s someone who does not want your service or does not want to be in relationship with you, the Most Gracious thing they can do is unsubscribe. It’s like bless and release, move on, because it sounds like if they’re just staying on and not opening the emails and letting them clutter up, it’s actually hurting your business longer term.

Yep, absolutely. I mean, there’s, there’s a reframe right there, yeah. And, I mean, there are so many reasons why people unsubscribe. I, you know, we move so much that all the time, like, Oh, that was great. I still tell some accounts on Instagram, like, I really could let you go. I can’t yet. I’m just hanging out. I’m not necessarily helping, but I’m just hanging on.

So what did you learn from this like, in this process of going through like, how did you update your pre launch systems? Did you put any like? What were the like when you went through the debrief of this whole situation with your team. Obviously, you’re praising them for like, I mean, shout out to the team.

We figured it out. Oh, okay, still don’t like it. Yes, we all felt it together.

Yeah, that’s, that’s entrepreneurship though. I mean, like, there’s your job as an entrepreneur is to put out fire after fire after fire. That’s, that’s what it is. And so by doing that, like, but I’m just curious, like, how you I always find I’m like, Yeah, we put out a fire and then we figure out how to not make it repeatable, yeah. And that’s where the systems aspect comes in, yeah.

So we had checks on all of these things in place, and really the IP address was sort of the lingering one, so all those other things, yeah, we know we’re checking we’re good, we’re good, we’re good. We’re watching it all the time. And so we’ve been looking into the IP address situation, and there is an option, and this is not the best option for everyone, and it’s actually possibly not an option for us right now to move to a dedicated IP where you’re not sharing where Silver Spring Maryland is yours, all yours. So if you muck it up, you mocked it up all in your own right. You’re not mixed in with anyone. And the recommendation on Deaf. Indicated IP addresses is that you’re sending over 100,000 emails a month, and there are some other things with that you have, and some other responsibilities that come with that. You’ve got to warm it up. You can’t, you know, got to make sure you’re not sending the spam and the cold and all those other things that we talked through. So we’re looking out. Do we qualify? Does that work for us? Does it not work for us? Does it make sense? Does it not because if you’re not giving enough information to the ESP, the gmails of the world, your dedicated IP address might not work either. So they need enough information to sort of score you and assess you. And so that is our next step, and if we can’t move to a dedicated IP address, or it doesn’t make sense to we are also going back to be like, how are we going to fix this yellow because this week, we looked again. We checked our IP address because of client, wrote in and said, Hey, your email went funny again, like, oh no. And honestly, there are you can send emails right, send emails to another email account that you have, right, a separate Gmail account, not the one where you’re always watching and opening your own email, but a separate one where you can kind of test where did that go, and check it. But a client caught it before us, and we’re like, Oh, man. So we opened it back up. We are yellow again. We’re not red, we’re not green, we’re yellow, which means, okay, you’re just a little bit more on alert. And we don’t want to be on alert, right?

I mean, that’s when you’re doing an online business, or any, I mean, any business, for that matter, there’s so many digital components to it. I’m thinking of spas that have E comm stores. I’m thinking of Spa you know, like online booking confirmation for those things. I mean, your email is the link, yeah, down.

Someone doesn’t get their confirmation that they just booked. So it’s not on their calendar. They don’t show up.

Yeah, my goodness. Okay. Well, I am so grateful to you this as as I said before, when you shared that in our mastermind call, I was like, Oh, my God. It was like. I was like, man, I’ve been doing this for 12 years, I thought I knew something, and I had, I had no idea that was like a brand new world for me. So I knew, I mean, I was like, Okay, I’ve got to share this with our listeners. I’ve got to get that like that was something that just blew my mind. So I appreciate you being so open and sharing with such generosity. Can you share where our listeners can find you and follow you if they want to keep in touch?

Absolutely, I would love to connect. I’m on Instagram at Amber McHugh, same place on YouTube, and my website’s Amber mchugh.com so easy.

Love it. Thank you so so much, and we will catch you all in the next episode.

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EP 447: When and How to Pay Retail Commission in Your Spa
  • /
  • business, education

Retail Isn’t Just Revenue – It’s Client Results, Team Buy-In, and Business Growth

If you’ve ever struggled with how to structure retail commissions in your spa, you’re not alone. The truth is, too many spa owners either avoid it altogether or implement policies that cause internal confusion, resentment, or worse – lost revenue.

In this episode of Spa Marketing Made Easy, I’m sharing everything I’ve learned over nearly two decades in the aesthetic industry about crafting a smart, sustainable retail commission structure that benefits your team, your clients, and your business.

Whether you’re running a solo practice with plans to grow or managing a multi-provider spa, you need a clear system that defines who earns commission, how much, and under what circumstances.

Let’s start by debunking the myth that retail is just “extra.” When your clients are sent home with high-quality skincare products that align with their treatments, they get better results. They’re more likely to rebook. They’re more loyal. And, according to a study by Millennium spa software, clients who purchase three or more products have a 90% chance of returning. That’s the kind of data we can’t ignore.

But here’s the deal: retail doesn’t sell itself, and it certainly doesn’t work without structure.

So, what’s the right way to do retail commission in your spa?

We begin by differentiating between front desk staff and providers. Front desk teams can absolutely earn a commission—but only on impulse purchases (think lip balms, sunscreen, travel sizes). A flat 10% is a good baseline. However, they should never recommend full skincare regimens unless they are trained providers who have evaluated the client’s skin.

Your estheticians, nurses, or injectors—the ones building full home care plans—are the ones who should earn commission on those more complex recommendations. But instead of offering a flat rate across the board, I recommend a tiered structure based on their retail-to-service ratio.

For example:

  • Under 30% = 0% commission
  • 30–39% = 10% commission
  • 40–49% = 12% commission
  • 50% or more = 15% commission

This incentivizes consistent performance, not just one-off wins. It also allows you to hold the line on profitability, even as you reward top-performing providers.

If you’re wondering how to define those retail-to-service benchmarks, look at the highest performer in your practice right now. Let their numbers set the top tier and work backwards. Or, if your team is new to retail culture, start with attainable targets and increment them by 5% every quarter to build momentum.

Another best practice? Delay commission for the first 90 days of employment. This “probation period” gives your new hires time to align with your culture, understand your protocols, and focus on learning – before earnings kick in. It’s also a great way to recoup some of the investment you make in onboarding and training.

But none of this works if you don’t have documentation. Who gets credit for a sale six months down the line? What if a client repurchases online? Who earns commission during a retail-heavy event?

If these questions aren’t clearly answered in your operations manual, employee handbook, or team training, you’re at risk of confusion and conflict.

That’s why this episode also includes a breakdown of common retail commission mistakes – like paying blindly, failing to create a standardized flow chart of product recommendations, or not assigning repurchase credit to the original provider within a reasonable timeframe.

When you get this right, retail becomes a triple win: your clients win with better results, your team wins with increased income potential, and your business wins with higher revenue and improved retention.

This is one of the most practical, powerful systems you can build into your spa today. Tune in, take notes, and then head into your next team meeting ready to lead with clarity and confidence.

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ABOUT THE SPA MARKETING MADE EASY HOST 

About Your Host, Daniela Woerner

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

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

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

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

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

Hello, my dears, and welcome back to another episode of Spa Marketing Made Easy. I am your host, Daniela. And gosh, I can’t even believe that I’m saying this. I’ve been in the industry for almost 20 years now, which feels like such a long time, and it feels like a flash in in the same way, sort of like parenting. You know, I feel like my daughter, it’s like, she’s eight already, and I’m like, how did that happen? But when I first started out of aesthetics, 11 years ago, I focused a lot on retail, and I actually started my first four years of the business consulting, and I worked a lot with the physician to spend skincare brands. I was doing trainings for aestheticians on increasing retail sales. I was speaking at the Lunch and Learn events all across the country. And then I was being hired by medical spas to come into their practices and do trainings specifically for their staff on how to increase retail. So retail is something that is near and dear to my heart. 

I believe that it’s such an important part of having a spa and of your revenue streams for having a spa, not just to have the additional revenue coming in, but for the actual benefit of the patient, because they are going to have better results if they’re using high quality skincare at home, but not having a retail policy around commission for your staff can cause So many bumps in the road, and so what I want to do with this episode is really dive into retail commission in general. Okay, so who gets paid? How much should they earn? When do they earn it? What are the guidelines around this? This is something that I get asked all of the time. 

So if you have a team, if you have a front desk in place, but you’re just really unsure how to structure your retail commission policy, this is going to be a great episode for you. Now, retail isn’t just cash, it is client transformation. Okay, when your patients or clients go home with the right products, they’re going to get better results. They’re going to recommend more people to you, they’re going to leave you reviews. They’re going to have more trust with you. They’ll be more loyal to you, right? And obviously, with all of that comes more revenue now millennium, which is a spa booking software, they did a study, and they said that if a client purchases three or more products from you, they have a 90% likelihood of coming back. That’s huge. That is so huge. So when you’re estheticians, when we’re looking at you know, how am I going to make sure that my books are full sell retail? We’ve got, we have data from Spa booking softwares that are showing this. 

And I think there’s just a disconnect there, but it is such an important piece. You know, we get hung up as providers. And I’ve seen this over and over again. We have such close relationships with our patients and our clients. We don’t want to feel salesy. We don’t want to be pushy. But your clients and patients are using skincare. 

They are they if they’re not purchasing it from you, they are purchasing it somewhere else. And we want to make sure that we are recommending what we believe is going to be the right home care regimen for them, the best home care regimen for them. It’s their choice if they purchase it or not, but it is your job to be able to make that recommendation. Okay. Now to give a little incentive to help our providers really see how important retail is. We want to make sure, as spa CEOs that we are incentivizing that. Okay, so I’m going to break this into different sections, so I want to talk about the front desk first, because, yes, I do believe that front desk should earn commission on products, but it should be a very specific set of products. Okay, so think impulse purchase like lip glosses or lip scrubs. You know those like silicone eye patches, travel sizes. If they want to add on some sunscreens, maybe grab a sunscreen for the kids, things like this. These are products that the front desk can recommend while checking a client out. And I would just have an across the board 10% commission rate, okay, but here’s where we need a front. Boundary your front desk, they’re not estheticians, and if they are estheticians, they’re not estheticians. Who have seen that patient’s skin in the room, looked at it under a light, and really have an understanding of what that particular patient’s goals are. 

Okay. So the front desk is not responsible for recommending entire home care regimens that is going to belong to your providers, your aestheticians, your nurses, your injectors, okay? And one of the ways that we have our providers making recommendations that are aligned with your practice is to have a flow chart of standardized product recommendations. Okay? So we want to have the vitamin C that our practice believes in, the cleanser for oily skin, that our practice believes in, the cleanser for dry skin that our practice believes in. 

So what we don’t want to have is four different vitamin C’s, right? That is cash on your shelves, and that is just waiting for confusion down the line. Okay? So when you have boundaries around what the front desk can offer and what your providers can offer, and then we have a standardization of what those offerings are. Your patient or client is going to get consistent recommendations. This is going to build trust with the brand. It’s going to reduce confusion, and it’s going to support retail growth across the board. One clear message coming out of your spa. Okay. Now this is actually something that’s really easy to create with chatGPT, and what I love about chatGPT is that you can dictate in there. So if you are a speak to think person like me, you just hit that microphone button and you talk to chat and say, here’s what I would recommend for this type of patient, here’s what I would recommend for this type of patient, here’s what I would recommend for this type of patient. And you’re going through based off of skin conditions, based off of the patient concerns. 

Chat can organize all of that and create a really clear flow chart for you to use in your practice. Okay, so really, really great asset for you to have in your business. Now, again, our goal here is to have clear messaging across the board, so that a patient doesn’t get one recommendation from one provider and then a completely different recommendation from another that is going to break down trust real fast. Now, I’ve got a section in this episode that is common mistakes that spa owners make around retail. I’m going to get into that a little bit more down there. Okay, so let’s move into your providers. All right. So estheticians, nurses, we want to look at how we are going to structure the commissions that they’re going to be earning specifically on retail Okay, so side note here, the pay structure that we recommend here at auto esthetics is zero commission. 

We actually recommend hourly pay on services, but for retail products, we do have a tiered commission structure, so there’s two there’s a separation between services and retail Okay, so what I’m talking about today is retail commission. Now your providers are responsible for creating the entire home care regimen for that patient, the plan, the recommendations, what the regimen is that needs to be documented in their chart, and it needs to be very clear so that the front desk should never deviate from that. Okay, so let’s say that you make an entire home care regimen recommendation. So you’ve got your AM, you’ve got your Pm, you’ve got all of your products, your cleanser, your toner, your antioxidant, your specialty product, your sunscreen, whatever it is that you’re recommended, you’re recommending, even if that patient only buys two or three products, we have the entire recommendation in there so that it’s easy to go back and see it’s documented that we talked about it, and if a patient calls to purchase something not on the same day that you had that service, it’s very easy for the front desk. It’s. Be able to understand what product it is that they need to purchase that was recommended by the provider that saw them. Okay, so let’s get into the actual commission structure. Now, we believe that commission should be paid. The level of commission should be paid based off of their retail to service ratio. So we’re looking at how much retail they sell compared to how many services they perform. Now, if you here’s the structure, and this is the this is the framework, there’s going to be some ups and downs based on your business model, but this is what we suggest. So if your retail to service is under 30% then you get zero commission. You don’t earn commission on products, because 30% is the the baseline. 

This is the absolute minimum retail to service percentage that a provider should have in our practice, if you are between 30 to 39% retail to service, you get a 10% commission. If you are 40 to 49% commission or retail to service, you get a 12% commission. And if you are 50% or higher, you get 15% commission. Now that extra 5% commission is going to be made up for the people that are performing lower at the under 30% All right, now this model is rewarding consistency. It’s rewarding excellence. You’re not just handing out bonuses. You’re incentivizing behavior that drives results both for the client and the business. Now I had mentioned that these rates are just benchmarks. Okay, your spa might be higher and it might be lower. Now, if you’re a device heavy practice where you’re primarily doing light and laser services, your price point is probably going to be higher. So if you’re selling an entire home care regimen that may be $1,200 your ratio might be a lot lower than someone who’s doing a $300 facial and sells a $1,200 regimen. 

So we’ve got to use these as benchmarks and align them for what works best for your practice. Now, if you are a traditional Med Spa, like that device, heavy Med Spa, DERM office, plastic office, I would aim for 30% if you are Med Spa, light, which, you know, we see a lot of med spas that maybe are not even carrying energy based devices, but they’re doing other services classified as medical and or you’re a day spa, you want 50% retail to service to be your top tier goal. So when I was saying for 30% if you’re a device heavy Med Spa, your 30% is going to be the top tier goal. 

Okay, now let’s say that you the spa CEO. You’re still in the room and you’re looking to get out, but you want to set kind of a benchmark. 99% of the time you the spa CEO, are going to have the highest retail to service. There’s absolutely exceptions. I have a lot of nurses who are practice owners, and they’re focusing primarily on weight loss or hormones, and so their retail to service is very low, right? Even though they’re the owner. So you want to look at what provider in your practice has the highest retail to service percentage, and that’s where we’re going to start, as the top tier commission rate. This is what we expect, or maybe increase it by 5% okay, so if you see that your top provider is 40% then 40% or 45% is going to be kind of your goal. Okay? If you’re higher than that, let’s say you’re a retail focused practice, and your highest provider is at 60% or 70% then that becomes your highest tier goal. You’re holding the standard for what you know is possible in your practice. Okay? And it’s also like if you’re much lower, I’ve worked with practices before that. 

They haven’t put a huge emphasis on retail, but it’s an area that they really want to develop further. Let’s say that you’re at 10% retail to service, and that’s your top percentage. We want to move in increments of 5% every one to two quarters, and get that up and get that up and get that up, you’re going to have to develop this culture in your practice. You’re going to have to be talking about it and working towards it every single day to get it there. 

So make it, you know, go in increments that you can celebrate every time you hit that next tier. Okay? Yeah. Okay, so now I want to move into the probationary period policy, and this is something that we do a little bit different in our pay structure as well. So at out of esthetics, we recommend zero retail commission during a team member’s first 90 days. Okay, this is providers. This is front desk staff. We consider the first 90 days of onboarding after we’ve hired someone. We consider that a probationary time period. And we’re also really wanting to categorize what their performance is okay. So that 90 days is for alignment. It’s for training. It’s for getting them up to speed. You’re watching for consistency, for attitude, for their ability to follow protocols. And we’re not immediately measuring performance with pay. We’re making sure that they are onboarded properly. And it also helps you to cover the cost of training, because that’s a lot of time and energy that you’re putting into developing that person. Okay? Now after that, they’re meeting expectations, they’re going to earn commission, okay, okay, so let’s jump into common mistakes to avoid all right now, mistake number one is not defining the sales credit window. So who gets credit for a product or sale months later?

Now I recommend, we recommend, here at auto esthetics that if a client repurchases within six months, the Commission goes to the original provider. So that means, if the client purchases online, or if they see another provider, but repurchases the product sold to them by the original provider, the original provider will receive the credit. 

So if I go back to that example in the very beginning, when I was talking about charting and making sure that, you know, if I see a patient then and I make the entire home care regimen I chart it, they purchase three products, and they come in for another service, or they Call and they want to get a different product, I’m still going to get credit for that, even if I don’t see them again, because I made the original recommendation and I charted it okay. 

Now after six months, it’s going to go to whoever resold the product, because it would be, if that were me, it would be my responsibility to be checking in when in with the patient, even if they’re not coming in for services. It’s my job to follow up with them and know when their products are going to be running out, and offer to ship them to them. Offer to you know, have them ready for them to pick up if they want to stop by the spa, but if I’m not following up with my patients purchasing product, then I am not going to earn that additional commission. 

And this is the way, guys, that you can make sure that you are always at that 15% commission. Because the reality is, you’re going to have patients who come in quarterly. You’re going to have patients who come in twice a year, but if we can keep them on skincare and be following up with them and shipping them their products, making it as convenient and easy for them, your retail to service percentage is going to go up and up and up. Okay? 

This was kind of my trick for myself when I was practicing and I was earning crazy amounts of commission on retail sales. Yes, I’m good at sales, but I’m better at following up, and so because I was keeping in touch with all of my patients and making those sales my retail commissions were huge. Now it’s also important, great idea to have a policy in place around event commissions. So if you’re having an open house or a mini event where you know you’re going to be selling a large amount of retail products, being clear on who gets the commission for those products beforehand is very important, and what I’ve seen work well is having a flat rate bonus based on overall sales for the event, rather than one person getting commission based on sales to their clients. Okay? So that’s going to be different per practice, but you definitely want something established before you move into events, and what the commission rate is going to be for those Okay, you’ve got to define. 

This, or you’re going to have internal confusion, you’re going to have disputes, you’re going to have resentment. You want to get ahead of it before this ever becomes a problem. Okay, so mistake number two is standardized product recommendations. Now this is what I was talking about earlier, having that flow chart based on the condition, based on the concern, whatever your skincare philosophy is. You may not you may not believe in aggressive exfoliation. You may not use Hydroquinone. You may think that every single person needs to be on vitamin C, whatever your philosophy is, you want to make sure that you have that mapped out, that you are educating your staff on it, on your beliefs and why, and that you have a very easy to follow flow chart for your providers to make recommendations. And again, this ties into your inventory management as well. So this system in place based on concerns, this is how you’re going to build client trust, because there is nothing worse than having two providers contradict one another. We’re wanting to build patients of the practice, so making it normal to come in and see Provider A, and then coming in and seeing Provider B, that’s going to really help create a patient of the practice, rather than someone that’s incredibly loyal to one provider. 

Now you’re still always going to have that, but we want to be able to create a culture of cross promotion, especially if you have aestheticians and injectors. We want the flow to go back and forth. Okay? And so just put yourself in the shoes of the patient. If they go and see Provider A and they invest $1,200 in a home care regimen, and then they see Provider B, and they’re like, Oh no, no, no. That’s not what I would do. It’s like, Well, man, I just spent $1,200 and took six weeks of time getting started on this, and now I’ve been doing it wrong. 

That is absolutely what we want to avoid. We want the clear, consistent recommendation of what our practice believes in for this particular concern. Okay, so really, really important that we are creating this clear, unified message coming from your spa, and then mistake number three is paying commission blindly if you are just handing out 10 to 15% on every product, regardless of service performance, you’re losing money. You’re leaving money on the table. Okay? We’ve got to tie it to performance. We’ve got to tie it to retail, to service, use it as a growth driver, not as a reward. All right, we’re already having tight margins on retail. We’ve got to pay shipping. In many cases, we’ve got, obviously, the cost of the retail product. Then we’re going on commission, you know, that’s going to the provider. We want to make sure that they are incentivized to earn that additional commission. Okay, so this is going to help your team to understand how important it is to your practice. 

It’s going to help your patients get better results, and it’s going to help the business overall, with more revenues, more reviews and more referrals. Okay, revenues, reviews and referrals, all wonderful things. So what do you do from here? Well, number one, I want you to audit your retail commission policy. Does it match your business goals? Is it clear to your team? Do you have policies in place on who earns Commission where? Really look at it. Really get into all the possibilities of you know, are we doing events and what’s the policy there? How long do we believe that someone should get credit for a particular product? 

Get clear on all of those. Then I want you to set up your retail tiers. So based on your top provider’s performance, what are your tiers? So we had recommended 30 40, and 50% retail to service is yours. 20, 30 40, is yours. 40, 50 60, look at what makes sense for you and assign a commission based on those different tiers. Next, I want you to standardize your product recommendations. This is the flow chart. What does your practice believe based on condition and concern? And remember, this is something that you can just dictate to chatGPT, to really help you create this fast Okay, next, I want you to communicate the 90 day probation policy clearly during onboarding. So does if you’re not hiring right now, put this in your onboarding doc, put this in your employee handbook, put this in your growth plan. Make sure that you are very clear that there is zero commission during this initial time period, and here’s why, then I want you to set expectations for who gets credit when. Document it. Share it in the team meeting, share it in the daily huddle, put it in your operations manual. Make sure that everybody’s clear on who gets what, when and why. 

Okay, so retail does not have to be confusing. It does not have to cause conflict or disruption in your practice. It needs structure, okay? And when it’s done, right? It is such a win, win win scenario, your clients are going to win with better results. Your team is going to win with the ability to earn increased revenue, and your business is going to win with higher revenue and increased consistency of visit for your patients. 

All right, I hope you like this episode. Thank you so much for listening. If you have any questions at all, if you have any follow up questions to this episode, just post inside of the Spa Marketing Made Easy Facebook group. You can tag me in there, but that is where we keep the conversation going. So if you hear something on this episode, or any of our episodes, and you’re like, Wait, what did she mean by that? That’s the place that Facebook group is the place where we can keep talking. Okay, so thank you so much for listening. I hope to see you in the group, and I will catch you on the next episode.

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