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EP 500: Same Show, New Name, Bigger Conversation
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  • business, inspiration

You have been told that the fix is always more marketing. More posts, more promotions, more clients through the door. So when the business still feels heavy, you assume you just have not marketed hard enough yet. Here is what 500 episodes made impossible to ignore. You cannot fix a broken business with better marketing. If your pricing does not work, more clients only multiply the problem. If your payroll model does not work, more revenue does not become more profit. The real question was never how do I market my spa. It was how do I build a business that works.

Marketing lives inside a much larger ecosystem

Client acquisition still matters. Retention still matters. Offers, content, and sales still matter. They just are not the whole picture, and treating them like they are is why so many booked-solid spas still feel broke and exhausted. Growing a business means understanding the numbers, the leadership, the systems, the hiring and compensation and accountability, and now the technology too. When one of those factors is off, the business feels it, no matter how good the marketing gets. This is the shift from working in the business to working on it, the same shift at the center of Growth Factor® Implementation (addoaesthetics.com/growth-factor).

AI is not the threat. The input is

Plenty of spa owners tried AI, got something that sounded like a robot, and quietly decided it was not for them. That is not the tool failing. That is garbage in, garbage out. Ask a blank AI tool to write five captions for your med spa and you get five generic captions, not because AI erased your voice, but because you never gave it one. You never taught it your philosophy, your values, or who your ideal client is. The opportunity was never to make AI pretend to be you. It was to teach it enough about your business that it can help, so the hours it hands back become time with your team, your clients, or your family, instead of four more hours of output.

The episode is where this gets personal. The moment Daniela names the new show out loud, the new kinds of episodes she has never done before, including live coaching with real spa businesses on the air, and the reason she is ending a 500-episode show at its peak instead of letting it fade. Reading the idea is one thing. Hearing her decide it is another.

This is the last episode under the name Spa Marketing Made Easy. If you already follow the show, you keep it, the feed stays the same and the new name arrives in October. If you do not, follow now so the rebrand does not lose you. Growth Factor® with Daniela Woerner, October. 👉 addoaesthetics.com/podcast

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.

Welcome to episode 500. 500 episodes-that feels a little surreal to say out loud. When I started Spa Marketing Made Easy, I wanted to create a place where spa owners could come and learn how to market their businesses more effectively. And over the years, we’ve talked about marketing a lot. We’ve talked about Instagram and email marketing and promotions and events and websites and funnels and client retention. But if you’ve listened to this podcast for any length of time, you already know that somewhere along the way, the conversation became about so much more than marketing. You can’t fix a broken business with better marketing. If your pricing doesn’t work, more clients don’t solve the problem. If your payroll model doesn’t work, more revenue doesn’t necessarily create more profit. If your team doesn’t know what they’re responsible for, marketing is not going to fix that. And if you are the bottleneck in every single decision, getting busier can actually make your life worse. And if the business you’re building requires you to sacrifice the life that you want to live, the reason you created the business in the first place, then we have to ask a different question-not how do I bark at my spa, but how do I build a business that actually works? And that is why this episode number 500 of Spa Marketing Made Easy is the last episode of this podcast. Now, last week I shared a lot about what went into that decision, and today I want to spend time talking about what is coming. And first things first, the name of the show is changing. It is going to be called Drumroll Please Growth Factor with Daniela Warner.

And the the thing is, it is so much bigger than a name change. Growth Factor is a a name we’ve been using for a long time. It represents the conversations that I want to have with you now. Now, marketing is still incredibly important. We’re still going to talk about client acquisition. We’re still going to talk about retention. We’re still going to talk about offers and content and sales and lead generation. But those things live inside a much larger ecosystem, because growing a business requires us to understand the numbers. It requires leadership and systems and operations. It requires hiring and compensation and accountability. It requires understanding technology, and increasingly, it requires understanding artificial intelligence, not because AI is trendy, and not because I believe that every business owner needs to chase every new piece of technology that comes along. I believe we need to understand AI because it is fundamentally changing the way that work gets done. This is not a trend, my friends, this is not something that’s going away. It is a technology that is changing the way we live and operate, and I think that business owners who learn how to use it thoughtfully are going to have an extraordinary opportunity over the next several years. Now, I am very aware that not everyone listening to this is excited about AI, some of you are very concerned about it, and those concerns are legitimate. I have heard people talk about their concerns around the environmental impact of AI. I’ve heard concerns about energy consumption and water usage associated with data centers. I’ve heard people say that they’re worried that AI is going to eliminate human connection and jobs, and I’ve even spent time wondering what kind of professional life my own children, who are six and nine right now, are going to have. I’ve heard people say that they don’t want everything to sound like a robot, or they don’t want businesses replacing people with machines, and I understand those concerns. I spend a lot of time thinking about them and educating myself further, so I can make my own thoughts and opinions on those issues. And I don’t think responsible AI adoption means dismissing them. There’s absolutely environmental cost associated with AI infrastructure, there are environmental costs associated with data centers and computing power and manufacturing and electricity consumption and cooling. Those are conversations we should be having. And if the environmental impact of AI is something you care deeply about, I would encourage you to take that concern beyond simply deciding whether or not you are personally going to use ChatGPT or Cloud, boycotting a product or a technology that you don’t agree with is 100% your right.

But some of the largest environmental questions surrounding AI aren’t going to be solved without policy changes, and the worst. Is still trying to understand what type of policies should even be in place. We have infrastructure decisions, energy policies, water use policies. We’ve got to understand the standards that we establish for data centers. We’ve got to understand renewable energy investment. We’ve got to understand what the regulation is going to be, and the choices that companies make about how and where these systems are being built, that means there’s an opportunity to be involved, to pay attention to what’s happening in your community, to pay attention to where data centers are being proposed, to ask questions about energy and water consumption, and talk about that with your local and state representatives, and support policies that encourage responsible development. Advocate for transparency because ethical adoption cannot be only the responsibility of individual consumers, but there has to be a responsible policy and responsible infrastructure behind the technology, but when you’re worried that you know AI is going to make everything less human, I want to bring that up as well, right? Because this is where I see something so differently, and this was a big part of why I absolutely stand behind the use of AI in my company and why I believe in it so much, I believe that AI has the potential to give us more time to be human. The question is what we choose to do with the time that it gives us back. If AI helps me do something in 45 minutes that previously took me four hours, I don’t have to fill those other three hours and 15 minutes with work. Maybe I go pick up my kids earlier. Maybe I sit at the dinner table without my laptop. Maybe I spend more time talking to my team and getting to know them instead of creating another spreadsheet. Maybe my receptionist spends less time manually copying information between systems and more time taking care of the person standing directly in front of her, maybe you finally take the vacation that you’ve been postponing for years, and maybe instead of spending Sunday night creating social media posts, you spend Sunday nights with your family.

That is the AI future I’m interested in building, one that handles the repetitive administrative work and gives us the freedom to connect more deeply and be more present with the clients in our businesses. One that allows you to leave work at 230 every day so that you can be present for school pickup. My husband and I are homeschooling this year. That was a big shift for us-a dream that we had been researching for a long time, but never felt like we had the bandwidth to do until now. Until I built a business that utilizes both human and AI employees, I don’t want technology that removes humanity from our business. I want technology that removes unnecessary work from humans, so that humans have more capacity to do the things that only humans can do: build relationships, lead, listen, create, think, care for someone, have a difficult conversation, coach an employee, comfort a child, sit across from another person, and actually be present. AI should not replace those things. It should create more room for them. Now, we obviously don’t want AI that sounds like a robot, right? So, what about AI content that sounds terrible? Because sometimes it absolutely does. That’s not the fault of the AI. It is an input problem, right? Garbage in, garbage out. If you open a AI tool, whether it’s Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever you’re using, and you say, “Write me five Instagram captions for my med spa, you’re going to get five very generic Instagram captions, and that’s not because AI has eliminated your voice. It’s because you haven’t given it your voice, you haven’t given it your philosophy, you haven’t given it your values, you haven’t taught it who your ideal client is. You haven’t explained how you communicate. You haven’t given it examples of what you believe, or just enough context in general. The opportunity isn’t to ask AI to be you. The opportunity is to teach AI enough about your business that it can help and support you.

There’s a very important difference between those two things, and that is exactly the type of thing that we are going to be talking about a lot on this show. The problem isn’t AI; it’s how we use it. Technology has always changed businesses. The internet changed businesses. Email changed businesses, social media changed businesses, online booking changed businesses, EMRs changed businesses, smartphones changed businesses. Every major technological shift creates an opportunity and a disruption at the same time, and I believe that AI will be no different. So I’m not interested. In teaching you to use AI simply because everyone is talking about AI, I’m interested in asking where does this actually make the business better? Where does it create leverage? Where does it eliminate repetitive work? How does it help improve decision making? How does it help support your team? Where does it improve the client experience, and where should we absolutely keep a human involved? What are the ethical and privacy and legal boundaries? Where do we need policies, and where is AI simply the wrong tool? These are very interesting conversations, and those are the exact conversations that I want to have on the Growth Factor podcast. So, what is Growth Factor going to look like as we move into this next chapter? You’re going to notice several different types of episodes, and I want you to know what they are because I think it’s going to make the show fun and more useful. And I, of course want your feedback on the types of things that you’re enjoying and the things that you want me to do more of. Now the build with me episodes are going to be just that. I’m going to bring you behind the scenes of what we are building here at Addo Esthetics. Not in six months, you know. Once everything is done and perfect, I’m going to show you the mess because getting good at AI is about getting messy, right? You you’re not going to be perfect at it. So I want to show you why we’re building it. I want to show you the things that break. I want to show you the things that we’re testing. What’s working? What’s not working? What we’re changing? Where we’re using AI? Where we’re building systems? Where we’re making mistakes? And what that is teaching us? Okay, I want to show you the types of things that I’m thinking about as a CEO, and I want you to gain inspiration alongside me as I’m doing this. There is no such thing as an AI expert. We are all still learning. We’re going to talk about education, right? So these are going to be you know familiar for longtime listeners. These are going to be episodes where we’re going to go deep into challenges that I see happening inside of spas. So marketing, sales, profitability, compensation, team leadership, just retention, business operations, and yes, AI and how we’re using AI in different types of technology with our systems and and how it’s woven into all of these different departments in our businesses. And sometimes we’re going to directly address the objections or beliefs that are keeping business owners stuck.

I want these episodes to help you to understand why something is happening in your business and what to do about it. We’re going to have case study episodes. These are going to be fun. I love sharing inspirational stories of growth, and so we’re going to be featuring Growth Factor students and other business owners who are doing the work, not just hey, look how successful this person is, and look at the highlight reel. I want to show you the journey. I want to show what was working. What did they change? What resistance came up? What did the actual numbers look like? What happened when they implemented the strategy? What worked, and also what didn’t work? You learn so much from understanding the mistakes that were made and what you would do differently if you were in that situation. Okay, when you can see that someone else was struggling with the same thing as you, that it just gives you the strength that to go on. It gives you the inspiration to know that you can solve that problem as well. And then we’ve got a really cool thing. I’m so excited about this. So we’re gonna do before and afters.

Okay, so we’re gonna bring spa businesses on the show, and it’s gonna be like live coaching, laser coaching on the show. They’re going to come on. We’re going to diagnose the problems in the business. We’re going to look at where they at, where they want to go, what’s standing in the way, and what I would change, because that is just going to be such a fun thing. We’ve gotten so much feedback from our live events about how people love laser coaching, and so we really wanted to bring that aspect into the podcast. Now, why growth factor? Okay, well, the name growth factor represents how I think about business. Growth doesn’t happen because of one thing. There isn’t one Instagram strategy or one employee or one promotion or one funnel or one AI tool. There’s so many different pieces. Okay, a healthy business is growing because of all of these multiple factors that are working together. We’re creating an ecosystem that’s balanced, that is created. You to build the life that you want to live. That includes marketing and sales and operations and team and leadership and the financials, the technology, the client experience. Gosh, I’ve been talking a lot about client experience lately, and really mapping out what a proper client journey looks like because retaining is such an important piece of the puzzle, and you know these are important pieces. These are your growth factors, right? And when one of those things isn’t working, the business feels it. That’s the work that I want to do with you. And what I want for you, if you’ve been listening since the early days of Spa Marketing Made Easy, first of all, thank you so much for going through this journey with me for 500 episodes. Right, that doesn’t happen without people on the other side listening, sharing episodes, sending them to friends, coming up to me at conferences, telling me that you are a diehard listener, telling me that you’ve heard, you know, that what you learned on the podcast changed the way that you run the business. I that is something that literally makes me want to cry. It it makes me so happy to know that I’m making that impact. But the businesses listening to this podcast are evolving. The industry is evolving. Technology is evolving. I’m evolving, so the show needs to evolve too. And the goal has always been bigger than helping you write a better Instagram post. I want you to build a profitable company. I want you to understand your numbers. I want you to become a strong leader. I want your employees to have great jobs. I want your clients and patients to receive extraordinary care. I want you to use technology intelligently. I want you to make money. I want lots of money in the hands of women, and I want you to have a life that’s balanced. Because I don’t believe success should require a business owner to work herself into the ground, I don’t believe being constantly overwhelmed is evidence that you’re important. I don’t think that our goal with technology should be figuring out how to squeeze another four hours out of of productivity out of every single human being. Sometimes the best use of technology is getting four hours of your life back. That is growth too, maybe one of the most important kinds. So, welcome to Growth Factor episode 500 marks the end of one chapter, but more importantly, it marks the beginning of another. Spa Marketing Made Easy helped us understand how to get people through the door. Growth Factor is about building the company that they walk into, the marketing, the systems, the team, the financial model, the technology, and the leadership, and the person sitting in the CEO seat. We’re going to experiment.

We’re going to question things. We’re going to talk about AI. We’re going to talk about the uncomfortable parts of running a business. We’re going to show you what we’re building. We’re going to bring owners onto the show who are actually doing the work, and we’re going to keep asking one question: What are the factors that create sustainable growth, not just revenue, but in the business and the life of the person who is running that business. 500 episodes in, and I feel like we’re just getting started. Join me in October for episode one of Growth Factor. Thank you so so much.

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EP 499: Why Spa Marketing Made Easy Is Changing After 499 Episodes
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  • business, inspiration

You built something that looks successful from the outside, and part of you still feels like you are behind. Most spa owners read that feeling as evidence that they missed a step, that everyone else got a plan they never received. Here is the replacement belief, and it is the one this whole episode rests on: not knowing exactly what you are building yet is not a sign you are behind. It is the stage right before the part that works. Daniela has sat in that exact spot, at a card table in a rented apartment with one word and no plan, and 499 episodes later it is worth telling the whole story in order.

Consistency compounds

The most quietly radical thing in this episode is not the origin story, it is the receipt attached to it. Spa Marketing Made Easy launched in April 2018 with about two weeks of prep and no clear sense of what it would even cover. What carried it was not a content strategy. It was never missing a Monday, not once, not through COVID, for seven years straight. That is the same thing Daniela tells every spa owner inside Growth Factor® Implementation about her content, her team, and her numbers. Your first post does not need to be good. Your first team meeting does not need to run smoothly. Your first month of tracking your numbers is going to feel clumsy and slow. None of that is failure. It is the clumsy front end of something that compounds if you refuse to quit on it.

The gap has moved

In 2018, the thing spa owners needed most was visibility, how to get seen, how to book more appointments, how to stop relying on word of mouth. That gap is not the gap anymore. In 2026, the owners who win are the ones building a team that runs the place without them, human and AI together. Not a chatbot. A custom AI spa team trained on their own voice, their own systems, their own clients, an AI marketing manager, an AI onboarding assistant, an AI retail recommender that knows the product line well enough to suggest the right add-on to the right client, and a CEO dashboard that shows the numbers without opening five tabs. That is a different skill set and a different level of freedom than posting three times a week and running a Facebook ad. It is also why the show outgrew a name built around marketing alone. You can read more about what that build actually looks like inside Growth Factor® Implementation (addoaesthetics.com/growth-factor).

The show delivers something these notes cannot. It is the sound of Daniela describing the smell of her neighbors’ dinners drifting into that empty Virginia apartment, the exact moment she found the word Addo in a thesaurus, and the reason she is refusing to say the new name until episode 500. Reading this, you get the lesson. Listening, you get the version of her that lived it, and the reason it will make you look at your own episode one differently.

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.

Right now, my team and I are on the phone with about 40 spa owners a week. One-on-one calls. We’re looking at their P&Ls. We’re hearing what is actually keeping them up at night. Walking through the real numbers instead of the ones that just look good on Instagram. Now, doing that many calls each week, it teaches you so much. You actually stop seeing individual problems, and you start seeing patterns-the same five things showing up over and over again at the exact same revenue level. So, right around that 35 to 50k per month mark, where a spa looks successful from the outside, but the owner is exhausted on the inside. Welcome to Spa Marketing Made Easy. I’m Daniela, and on today’s episode, I’m going to walk you through those five things that my team and I are seeing over and over again, and I’m going to go through the list as I’m going through this. You might be able to identify with one. You might be able to identify with all of them, and if you do, great! You just found an area of opportunity in your business, a mess that can be cleaned up. Don’t let that get you discouraged. And for one of them, my guess is that every single person who listens to this episode is going to check that off as an area that they can improve upon. Whether you’re trying to get to 50,000 per month or 500,000 per month. Okay, so let’s dive into mistake number one. Most spawners at this level, they don’t actually know how to pay their team, and I don’t mean underpaying. I mean the opposite. I see owners overpaying so consistently, structured in a way that does not scale with revenue, and it’s actually threatening the survival of the business, so let’s talk about how we even got here in the first place, because I think this really helps it to click. Now, back in the ’70s, the IRS drew a clear line in the sand for our industry. So, if a business controlled the schedule, supplied the room and the products, collected the client’s money, and then handed a percentage to a person who was doing the service. That person was an employee. Full stop. The only version of just paying commission that actually held up was true booth rental. So someone renting a chair, paying a flat rent, keeping her own clients, her own money, running her own little business inside of your walls. And for a long time that was fine because most of the industry actually looked like booth rental. So independent stylists, independent estheticians, everyone running their own thing under one roof. And then the day spa happened.

We started building brands. We set the menu. We set the protocols. We ran the front desk. We handled the marketing. We told people what hours to be available and what training to show up for. Now, the second that you control that much of the experience, you have built an employment relationship, whether or not that’s what you call it on paper. The IRS had a name for that gap by 1987. There are 20 factors deep, but you don’t need all 20 factors. You just need one question: Who is actually running this person’s day? And if the answer is you, she’s not a contractor. She is your employee. So most of us inherited a pay structure built for a business model that we don’t actually run anymore. We are still paying like it’s booth rental, except now we’re paying payroll taxes and workman’s comp and buying all the supplies and investing in the marketing-the whole thing. So, on a commission-only structure, especially one that’s paying like 40% commission, that provider is getting all of the benefits of entrepreneurship without any of the risk, and here’s where it really starts to spiral. If you need to raise prices to cover operational expenses, you’re just giving your team a raise, but it’s not performance based. That is an unfun problem to resolve, and we have helped many spa owners through it. So I can tell you that it is so much better on the other side, and something that I want to make crystal clear: I am not trying to underpay estheticians. I’m an esthetician, and I’m all for paying your providers a fair and livable wage. I just want their performance tied to it.

 

I want to see that the better they perform for the business, the more money that they make, and the math just doesn’t work when the providers are making more money than the CEO, and that’s what we see time and time again when practices are paying straight commission. Now I know some of you are thinking, but Daniela, I can’t pay them hourly when I don’t have appointments on the books. I get that. I know that so. So many spas start out on commission only because it’s the only way that you can make it. But in my mind, they’re solving for the wrong problem. Now I believe that it is your job as the CEO to get your providers busy. It is your provider’s job to retain them. So if there’s not enough appointments on the books, then that’s a marketing issue that needs to be solved.

So tie it back to problem number one: not paying your team correctly. Spas that scale have a standardized pay structure that pays based off of performance and contributions to the practice. Okay, let’s move on to mistake number two. They don’t know how to hire or onboard correctly. Now, most spa owners, many spa owners, hire the way you treat a burn: fast, urgent, whatever stops the bleeding right now. Someone quits on Tuesday, and by Friday, you’ve hired the first warm body who could start on Monday. That is not hiring. That is triage, and what triage produces is turnover. You hire for a band aid. The band aid doesn’t hold, and six months later, you’re back where you started. Except now you’ve also spent the time and money training someone who’s gone. So let’s put an actual number on this because I think it really will change how you think about this band aid higher for hourly and service level roles? The typical cost of replacing someone runs 40 to 70% of that person’s annual salary once you account for anything, everything, not just the job posting. Right, so the interview, the background check, the training hours, where someone experienced on your team is standing right next to that new hire instead of doing her own job. So let’s say that you’ve got a provider making 45,000 a year. That band aid hire, the one you brought on fast because someone quit on a Tuesday, could cost you somewhere between 18 to $31,000 to replace once she doesn’t work out and you’re back at square one, that’s serious money. And just because you’re not tracking it doesn’t mean that it is not costing you. Now the good news is this can be fixed. Okay, a real job posting, a real job description, a defined training period with a rate yourself one to 10 checklist before anyone touches a client on their own. A standardized onboarding process. One of the AI employees that we build inside of Growth Factor implementation is an onboarding support, so it saves our spa owners a week of time and who knows how much money from decreasing that turnover process, it costs you more time up front, but it costs you far far less over a year. Mistake number three is that they stay in the treatment room because they’ve convinced themselves that there’s no way that they can find good people.

Okay, so here’s what I’ve noticed: It’s almost never actually about the talent pool. It’s trust. It’s control. It’s the fact that nobody ever properly trained the person that they hired. So of course, that person isn’t performing at the level that the owner would. You cannot build a business around the life you want to live if you are the bottleneck every single service has to pass through. The training system is the trust system. If you have not built one, that is the actual problem, not your team. And look, I’m not against the treatment room. I’m against building an owner-dependent business. If being in the treatment room brings you joy, that’s amazing. And I want your company to be able to hit its financial goals without the revenue that’s coming from you. Now, I totally get wanting to keep your skill set up. That is not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about those who stay stuck in the room because no one can do it as good as them. It’s a trap, and it’s one that I don’t want you to get stuck in.

All right, mistake number four. So many of you are brilliant in the treatment room, and you’ve never been taught the basic technical skills that would literally save you hours every single Week, okay. Truly brilliant clinicians, incredible hands, incredible outcomes, and you don’t know how to organize a Google Drive folder, okay. These individuals that I come across every day-they’ve never used a project management system like Monday.com to track what’s actually happening in their business. Now, I totally get that clinical training does not include an afternoon on tech, but it’s time to stop treating basic tech literacy as an option when you’re an entrepreneur. Now I can’t even imagine the things that my kids are going to be doing when I’m a grandma. It will probably be so. Far beyond my comprehension, but what I can tell you is that I will never stop learning. Okay, I’m not asking you to know how to code. I’m not asking you how to build apps or anything crazy like that. I’m asking you to know how or attempt to learn how to navigate the most basic digital tools to keep your business organized, so that you can save time and money, and look zero judgment on our end. I have all the patience in the world for someone who is genuinely trying to learn something. If I see that there is effort being put in, I will explain the same thing 700 times for someone to feel confident, and I will do that gladly. Okay, mistake number five. This is the one that I was alluding to in the beginning. That almost none of you will have is that using AI anywhere close to what it’s actually capable of doing in your business. Okay, not as a gimmick, as a real competitive advantage, the spas that are pulling ahead right now-they’re the ones that are using AI to handle marketing, the follow-up, the content, the parts of the business that used to eat their entire week-and the ones falling behind are the ones who tried ChatGPT once, got a generic answer, and decided it wasn’t for them. AI is moving fast, like insanely fast, like so fast that three weeks ago feels like the olden days. This is the thing, though, that can save you 1000s of dollars in so many different aspects of your business. Standardizing your onboarding process to lower turnover, handling your marketing so that you can let go of contractors that don’t actually know your business, supporting your team with retail recommendations for your patients, helping you to actually know what your financials are telling you, so that you can identify duplicate, incorrect, or off charges-all things that I’ve dealt with with clients over the past week. One client who’s doing a build out, she used Claude to uncover a $40,000 billing error with her contractor, where he had duplicate charges. Now the communication was spread across numerous emails and files that would have taken hours upon hours to sort through, if it would have ever got caught at all. 40,000, $40,000, friends. Now another client, she dove into her financial workspace. She uncovered duplicate charges along with charges for services that she was no longer using. I had another gal who found a $200,000 cost of goods section on her P and L in one month that she had no idea about, and you know, in finding that she was able to generate a list of questions for her CPA. Now, whether that categorization was right or wrong, I don’t know. I’m not a CPA. It could be very well part of a strategy that they were focusing on for her benefit, but still, the benefit, you know, knowing that is going to facilitate a deeper relationship, a deeper understanding, and more confidence for that business owner. And look, you know, Claude and and these AI employees and why and how we’re moving so fast. This is why we’ve been doing so much work behind the scenes here at Addo this year. Eight humans on our team right now, getting ready to hire again. By the time that this is out, we’ll probably have added more humans to our team. We’re at 30 AI employees working alongside of us. That’s going to probably be up to 40 by the time that you are listening to this episode.

We’re on track to cross 100 AI employees before the end of the year, and that’s part of why this show is starting to feel a little too small for where this conversation is heading. Something is shifting here at Spa Marketing Made Easy, and I am going to let you in on that shift very, very soon. Thank you for your patience. I’m so excited to tell you about what we’ve been working on behind the scenes. Now, for today, for today, I want you to pick just one thing that we’ve talked about. Okay, I want you to give it a week. I want you to look at it honestly. I want you to write down what you noticed. Send me a DM on Instagram and tell me which one it was. Action creates clarity. Okay, don’t just listen. Go and do something with this. Make a change in your business that is going to help support you in building a business around a life you want to live. All right, my dears, I will catch you on the next episode.

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EP 498: The 5 Mistakes Keeping Your Spa Stuck at $35K a Month
  • /
  • business, inspiration, marketing

The numbers look right. Last month brought in what it was supposed to, the schedule is booked, and from the outside anyone would call your spa a success. So why are you exhausted, and why does it feel like you’re running to stay in place. After spending time on the phone with roughly 40 spa owners every week, Daniela and her team stopped treating these as individual problems. The same five things surface at the same revenue level, over and over. Not because these owners are careless, but because the systems underneath the business were built for a version of it that no longer exists. Seeing the pattern is the first step to fixing it.

The pay structure you inherited

Most spa owners are running a pay model built for a business they don’t operate anymore. Straight commission made sense in the booth-rental era, when a provider rented a chair, kept her own clients, and ran her own small business inside your walls. The day spa changed all of that. You set the menu, the protocols, the hours, the marketing. The second you control that much of the experience, you’ve built an employment relationship, whether or not that’s what the paperwork says. You don’t need the full list of legal factors to know where you stand. You need one question: who is actually running this person’s day. If the answer is you, the pay structure has to reflect that, which means performance tied to compensation instead of a flat percentage that grows every time you raise prices to cover your own costs. Fixing this is the work inside Growth Factor® Implementation (addoaesthetics.com/growth-factor), and owners consistently say it feels far better on the other side.

The fast hire that costs you twice

The other pattern that shows up constantly is hiring under pressure. Someone quits on Tuesday, and by Friday you’ve brought on the first person who could start Monday. It feels like solving the problem. What it actually does is start a cycle. Replacing a team member runs 40 to 70 percent of their annual salary once you count the interviews, the background check, and the hours an experienced person on your team spends training instead of doing her own job. On a provider making $45,000 a year, that’s somewhere between $18,000 and $31,000 for a hire that doesn’t stick. The fix costs more time up front, a real job description, a defined training period, a standardized onboarding process, and far less over the course of a year.

The written version gives you the patterns. The episode gives you the moment Daniela draws the line between the business you built and the pay structure you never updated, the specific client who used AI to surface a $40,000 error already sitting in her inbox, and the fifth mistake she believes almost every listener is making right now. That last one is worth the listen on its own.

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.

Right now, my team and I are on the phone with about 40 spa owners a week. One-on-one calls. We’re looking at their P&Ls. We’re hearing what is actually keeping them up at night. Walking through the real numbers instead of the ones that just look good on Instagram. Now, doing that many calls each week, it teaches you so much. You actually stop seeing individual problems, and you start seeing patterns-the same five things showing up over and over again at the exact same revenue level. So, right around that 35 to 50k per month mark, where a spa looks successful from the outside, but the owner is exhausted on the inside. Welcome to Spa Marketing Made Easy. I’m Daniela, and on today’s episode, I’m going to walk you through those five things that my team and I are seeing over and over again, and I’m going to go through the list as I’m going through this. You might be able to identify with one. You might be able to identify with all of them, and if you do, great! You just found an area of opportunity in your business, a mess that can be cleaned up. Don’t let that get you discouraged. And for one of them, my guess is that every single person who listens to this episode is going to check that off as an area that they can improve upon. Whether you’re trying to get to 50,000 per month or 500,000 per month. Okay, so let’s dive into mistake number one. Most spawners at this level, they don’t actually know how to pay their team, and I don’t mean underpaying. I mean the opposite. I see owners overpaying so consistently, structured in a way that does not scale with revenue, and it’s actually threatening the survival of the business, so let’s talk about how we even got here in the first place, because I think this really helps it to click. Now, back in the ’70s, the IRS drew a clear line in the sand for our industry. So, if a business controlled the schedule, supplied the room and the products, collected the client’s money, and then handed a percentage to a person who was doing the service. That person was an employee. Full stop. The only version of just paying commission that actually held up was true booth rental. So someone renting a chair, paying a flat rent, keeping her own clients, her own money, running her own little business inside of your walls. And for a long time that was fine because most of the industry actually looked like booth rental. So independent stylists, independent estheticians, everyone running their own thing under one roof. And then the day spa happened.

We started building brands. We set the menu. We set the protocols. We ran the front desk. We handled the marketing. We told people what hours to be available and what training to show up for. Now, the second that you control that much of the experience, you have built an employment relationship, whether or not that’s what you call it on paper. The IRS had a name for that gap by 1987. There are 20 factors deep, but you don’t need all 20 factors. You just need one question: Who is actually running this person’s day? And if the answer is you, she’s not a contractor. She is your employee. So most of us inherited a pay structure built for a business model that we don’t actually run anymore. We are still paying like it’s booth rental, except now we’re paying payroll taxes and workman’s comp and buying all the supplies and investing in the marketing-the whole thing. So, on a commission-only structure, especially one that’s paying like 40% commission, that provider is getting all of the benefits of entrepreneurship without any of the risk, and here’s where it really starts to spiral. If you need to raise prices to cover operational expenses, you’re just giving your team a raise, but it’s not performance based. That is an unfun problem to resolve, and we have helped many spa owners through it. So I can tell you that it is so much better on the other side, and something that I want to make crystal clear: I am not trying to underpay estheticians. I’m an esthetician, and I’m all for paying your providers a fair and livable wage. I just want their performance tied to it.

 

I want to see that the better they perform for the business, the more money that they make, and the math just doesn’t work when the providers are making more money than the CEO, and that’s what we see time and time again when practices are paying straight commission. Now I know some of you are thinking, but Daniela, I can’t pay them hourly when I don’t have appointments on the books. I get that. I know that so. So many spas start out on commission only because it’s the only way that you can make it. But in my mind, they’re solving for the wrong problem. Now I believe that it is your job as the CEO to get your providers busy. It is your provider’s job to retain them. So if there’s not enough appointments on the books, then that’s a marketing issue that needs to be solved.

So tie it back to problem number one: not paying your team correctly. Spas that scale have a standardized pay structure that pays based off of performance and contributions to the practice. Okay, let’s move on to mistake number two. They don’t know how to hire or onboard correctly. Now, most spa owners, many spa owners, hire the way you treat a burn: fast, urgent, whatever stops the bleeding right now. Someone quits on Tuesday, and by Friday, you’ve hired the first warm body who could start on Monday. That is not hiring. That is triage, and what triage produces is turnover. You hire for a band aid. The band aid doesn’t hold, and six months later, you’re back where you started. Except now you’ve also spent the time and money training someone who’s gone. So let’s put an actual number on this because I think it really will change how you think about this band aid higher for hourly and service level roles? The typical cost of replacing someone runs 40 to 70% of that person’s annual salary once you account for anything, everything, not just the job posting. Right, so the interview, the background check, the training hours, where someone experienced on your team is standing right next to that new hire instead of doing her own job. So let’s say that you’ve got a provider making 45,000 a year. That band aid hire, the one you brought on fast because someone quit on a Tuesday, could cost you somewhere between 18 to $31,000 to replace once she doesn’t work out and you’re back at square one, that’s serious money. And just because you’re not tracking it doesn’t mean that it is not costing you. Now the good news is this can be fixed. Okay, a real job posting, a real job description, a defined training period with a rate yourself one to 10 checklist before anyone touches a client on their own. A standardized onboarding process. One of the AI employees that we build inside of Growth Factor implementation is an onboarding support, so it saves our spa owners a week of time and who knows how much money from decreasing that turnover process, it costs you more time up front, but it costs you far far less over a year. Mistake number three is that they stay in the treatment room because they’ve convinced themselves that there’s no way that they can find good people.

Okay, so here’s what I’ve noticed: It’s almost never actually about the talent pool. It’s trust. It’s control. It’s the fact that nobody ever properly trained the person that they hired. So of course, that person isn’t performing at the level that the owner would. You cannot build a business around the life you want to live if you are the bottleneck every single service has to pass through. The training system is the trust system. If you have not built one, that is the actual problem, not your team. And look, I’m not against the treatment room. I’m against building an owner-dependent business. If being in the treatment room brings you joy, that’s amazing. And I want your company to be able to hit its financial goals without the revenue that’s coming from you. Now, I totally get wanting to keep your skill set up. That is not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about those who stay stuck in the room because no one can do it as good as them. It’s a trap, and it’s one that I don’t want you to get stuck in.

All right, mistake number four. So many of you are brilliant in the treatment room, and you’ve never been taught the basic technical skills that would literally save you hours every single Week, okay. Truly brilliant clinicians, incredible hands, incredible outcomes, and you don’t know how to organize a Google Drive folder, okay. These individuals that I come across every day-they’ve never used a project management system like Monday.com to track what’s actually happening in their business. Now, I totally get that clinical training does not include an afternoon on tech, but it’s time to stop treating basic tech literacy as an option when you’re an entrepreneur. Now I can’t even imagine the things that my kids are going to be doing when I’m a grandma. It will probably be so. Far beyond my comprehension, but what I can tell you is that I will never stop learning. Okay, I’m not asking you to know how to code. I’m not asking you how to build apps or anything crazy like that. I’m asking you to know how or attempt to learn how to navigate the most basic digital tools to keep your business organized, so that you can save time and money, and look zero judgment on our end. I have all the patience in the world for someone who is genuinely trying to learn something. If I see that there is effort being put in, I will explain the same thing 700 times for someone to feel confident, and I will do that gladly. Okay, mistake number five. This is the one that I was alluding to in the beginning. That almost none of you will have is that using AI anywhere close to what it’s actually capable of doing in your business. Okay, not as a gimmick, as a real competitive advantage, the spas that are pulling ahead right now-they’re the ones that are using AI to handle marketing, the follow-up, the content, the parts of the business that used to eat their entire week-and the ones falling behind are the ones who tried ChatGPT once, got a generic answer, and decided it wasn’t for them. AI is moving fast, like insanely fast, like so fast that three weeks ago feels like the olden days. This is the thing, though, that can save you 1000s of dollars in so many different aspects of your business. Standardizing your onboarding process to lower turnover, handling your marketing so that you can let go of contractors that don’t actually know your business, supporting your team with retail recommendations for your patients, helping you to actually know what your financials are telling you, so that you can identify duplicate, incorrect, or off charges-all things that I’ve dealt with with clients over the past week. One client who’s doing a build out, she used Claude to uncover a $40,000 billing error with her contractor, where he had duplicate charges. Now the communication was spread across numerous emails and files that would have taken hours upon hours to sort through, if it would have ever got caught at all. 40,000, $40,000, friends. Now another client, she dove into her financial workspace. She uncovered duplicate charges along with charges for services that she was no longer using. I had another gal who found a $200,000 cost of goods section on her P and L in one month that she had no idea about, and you know, in finding that she was able to generate a list of questions for her CPA. Now, whether that categorization was right or wrong, I don’t know. I’m not a CPA. It could be very well part of a strategy that they were focusing on for her benefit, but still, the benefit, you know, knowing that is going to facilitate a deeper relationship, a deeper understanding, and more confidence for that business owner. And look, you know, Claude and and these AI employees and why and how we’re moving so fast. This is why we’ve been doing so much work behind the scenes here at Addo this year. Eight humans on our team right now, getting ready to hire again. By the time that this is out, we’ll probably have added more humans to our team. We’re at 30 AI employees working alongside of us. That’s going to probably be up to 40 by the time that you are listening to this episode.

We’re on track to cross 100 AI employees before the end of the year, and that’s part of why this show is starting to feel a little too small for where this conversation is heading. Something is shifting here at Spa Marketing Made Easy, and I am going to let you in on that shift very, very soon. Thank you for your patience. I’m so excited to tell you about what we’ve been working on behind the scenes. Now, for today, for today, I want you to pick just one thing that we’ve talked about. Okay, I want you to give it a week. I want you to look at it honestly. I want you to write down what you noticed. Send me a DM on Instagram and tell me which one it was. Action creates clarity. Okay, don’t just listen. Go and do something with this. Make a change in your business that is going to help support you in building a business around a life you want to live. All right, my dears, I will catch you on the next episode.

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

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

AI is not a tech-company thing anymore

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

Think team member, not tool

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

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

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

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

Watch Here

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.

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

Pick one goal, not three

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

Treat the week after as half the event

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

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

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About Your Host, Daniela Woerner

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wanting profit is not greed

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

Pay yourself before the month spends it

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

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

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

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

Watch Here

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About Your Host, Daniela Woerner

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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EP 487: Why She Said Yes: Amanda Loyd’s Path From the Treatment Room to the Coaching Chair
  • /
  • business, inspiration, marketing

There is a version of success that looks like doing everything — and it costs you everything else.

Amanda Loyd knows that version well. Before she joined the Addo Aesthetics coaching team, she was Director of Esthetics and Director of Marketing at a three-location plastic surgery practice — and still seeing patients in the treatment room two days a week. She wrote a 65-page SOP manual by hand. She did the phone screens, the clinical interviews, the social media, the email blasts, and the events. She built a team from two people to a practice large enough to need a second location.

And she did most of it while trying to figure out how to get out of the treatment room without everything falling apart.

The Transition Nobody Talks About Honestly

Most content about stepping back from the treatment room is aspirational. Here’s the revenue you’ll unlock. Here’s the freedom you’ll gain. What it doesn’t say is that it’s bittersweet. That you have clients you love seeing. That handing off the room isn’t just a business decision — it’s an identity one.

Amanda names it plainly: when you’re muddled, when you’re in the treatment room five days a week, and you have two days left to run everything else, there’s no time for your family, yourself, anything. The math doesn’t work. And knowing the math doesn’t work isn’t enough to make the transition feel easy.

What makes it survivable — and worth it — is having someone in your corner who has lived the same transition. Not just read about it. Lived it.

What Changes When Your Coach Has Your Background

One of the reasons Daniela brought Amanda onto the Addo coaching team is the depth of her experience in physician-owned practices. The operational nuances between a traditional med spa and a surgical practice are real. How the aesthetic division integrates with surgical scheduling, how you build client trust differently when someone is considering a procedure that requires anesthesia, and how marketing strategies that work for injectables have to shift when the client journey is longer and more emotionally complex.

Inside Growth Factor® Implementation, that level of specificity matters. The framework is consistent. The coaching is customized to the business in front of you.

Amanda also brings something else: she built systems the hard way. The 65-page manual that needed updating before she’d finished writing it. The boot camp training she ran with providers every month. The clinical interview process she designed to feel a provider’s touch before an offer was made. She knows what it cost to build those things without a framework — and what it means to have one now.

The Call That Leaves Her Beaming

Ask Amanda what she loves most about coaching, and she’ll tell you about getting off a call and just beaming. A med spa owner who’s scaling into wellness services. A physician-practice director who finally has a real conversation with her surgeon about what the aesthetic division actually needs. A spa owner who hires her first aesthetician using a clinical interview she built herself.

These aren’t hypothetical outcomes. They’re what happens when someone who has done this work coaches someone else who is doing it now.

The full conversation — including how Amanda thinks about soft skills and sales training for clinical teams, why ‘no is a complete sentence’ has become a personal operating principle, and what she wishes she’d had access to when she was building SOPs by hand — is in the episode.

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.

Daniela Woerner  

All right, Amanda. Welcome to Spa Marketing Made Easy. I’m so excited to finally bring you on the show, introduce you to our community. It has been a long time coming, because we brought you.. when did we start having our conversations?

Amanda Loyd  

Ooh, a couple months ago, a

Daniela Woerner  

couple of months ago, yeah, so we, we were kind of getting to know one another, having some conversations. We ended up bringing you on the team, which I’m so grateful for, and we’ve been kind of having you behind the scenes, working with our implementation clients, with our fundamentals clients, doing some stuff in that arena, and now I’m like, so excited to introduce you to our entire adult family. So, welcome

Amanda Loyd  

to thank you. I’m happy to be here.

Daniela Woerner  

So, I want everyone to know kind of who you are as a human, what you’re about, what your background is, all that kind of fun stuff, because I think what really stood out to me in our like beginning conversations was like how similar our path was, and you know, like, like I started at the front desk when I, when I first got into, like, I started at a day spa, well, I started as a solo, right? So I, I got out of school, I started as a solo, and very quickly moved into medical esthetics, and that was just kind of my home, my, my place, but I feel like I’ve worked every single role, I’ve done front desk, I’ve been in the room, I’ve been the patient care coordinator, I’ve been the spa director, I’ve been, you know, the like person that they hire for people when you leave because you’re doing whatever needs to be done to get that practice going, and I know what you really connected on that as like fulfilling like you’re the coach, you’re the men, like the coach to the injectors and to the estheticians, and you’re like doing the marketing, and you’re just everything. It’s like there’s so many different aspects that it takes, wearing

Amanda Loyd  

a lot of hats, for sure. Yeah,

Daniela Woerner  

wearing a lot of hats. So, tell me about your journey. Like, let’s.. let’s.. did you always know that you were going to get into esthetics.

Amanda Loyd  

So, I remember being well, this is kind of funny. I remember being my daughter’s age, so 11, and I remember saving up my allowance and going to this day spa in Indianapolis to get a facial, and I remember my parents were like, “You want to get? And I was like, “Yeah, I want.. I want a facial, I want to like go to a spa and do this whole thing, and I literally remember giving them, like, I mean, like paying it out, and I think, like, the last $2 were in quarter, so like, I was like, I’ve always loved taking care of my skin, I’ve always loved makeup, and was actually in your

Daniela Woerner  

family, like, I didn’t even know spas were a thing, like,

Amanda Loyd  

yep, I know.

Daniela Woerner  

I was like, you can actually.. I always thought, you know, like, you.. you go.. everyone in my family is an engineer, a teacher, or in the military, that’s what everybody does, and.. or they’re an entrepreneur, right? We do have some sprinklings of those, but there’s like these very clear paths. I have no idea spa could be a path,

Amanda Loyd  

so I remember when my parents would travel a lot of times, the like the husbands would golf and the wives would go to a spa, so I think that’s why it kind of stood out to me.

Daniela Woerner  

Okay,

Amanda Loyd  

and so I remember doing that, and then I remember in high school kind of thinking maybe I want to be a makeup artist or do something, and feel like when you and I started, like the esthetic license was kind of a newer thing, right? So I went to college, I

Daniela Woerner  

was 2006 were you? So

Amanda Loyd  

I graduated high school in oh three, but I graduated esthetic school in 2006

Daniela Woerner  

Okay, exactly the same year.

Amanda Loyd  

Yep, and I went to, or I went to college, then I worked at a day spa there, and just started to fall in love with it, and so I ended up working there, moving into an esthetics role, and I worked at that day spa for a couple years, and then I just moved into, I really wanted to do some more aggressive treatments, so I took an admin role at a med spa and worked my way up. I would say more recently the thing that, like, thing I’m the most proud of is really my time at the plastic surgery practice that I was at. The surgeon that I worked for, we had worked together at another plastic surgery practice, and he told me, I don’t want to have a med spa, I don’t want to have 30 employees, like, I don’t want to, it to be a big thing, like, I just want to operate, so when we opened, it was him, me, we had a nurse, and then a front office, and little by little I was seeing patients. Since I got booked, so I helped them hire another esthetician. We expanded that location, and then in 2020 we started really talking about a second location, and then everything with Covid, there is like kind of that uncertainty. So they put the pause button on that, and then in 2021 just moved forward, and I ended up the director of esthetics and director of marketing there, so I was wearing a lot of hats, as far as doing all of, like, the social media, email blasts, events, all of that. Still

Daniela Woerner  

in the room, or did you transition out of the room?

Amanda Loyd  

That’s what I get so excited about on these calls, because I was still in the room and doing all of that, that’s how

Daniela Woerner  

I was at Bell Asante. So, Bellasante was three location day spa, med spa, and I was still, I was in the room three days a week, and then I was doing leadership, you know, like on just on the medical esthetics stuff. I wasn’t doing anything on the day spa, but I was just focused on the gals that had, you know, were given the title of, like, medical aesthetician, and so I really focused on, like, that division and kind of coaching and training between the three locations, but you ended up with three locations, ultimately.

Amanda Loyd  

Yep, so we ended up with three locations, and yeah, I mean, I did really from start to finish, so I did all of the staffing, so creating the job description, drop job listings, screening people, not only like the phone interviews, but like the clinical interview, because you want to be able to feel their touch and see how they would interact with a guest before you bring them on, and then creating protocols, I mean, I think about what we can do with Claude, and, and just this like framework that you have. If we had had that a couple years ago, I cannot tell you. I think I feel like there was a manual that I put together that was like 65 pages, just of like SOPs, you know, and it took so long, and it was like

Daniela Woerner  

by the time we’re done, it already needs to be updated again,

Amanda Loyd  

and then if someone had a question, I’d be like, have you checked the manual yet, or like, but yeah, so I just think about what we can do for business owners, and that’s been really fun, and it’s fun to be able to help people, spa CEOs that are, whether it’s like, you know, there’s one provider, or we have a lot of multi-location, a lot of med spas. It’s just fun to see what other people are doing, and kind of talk that out.

Daniela Woerner  

One thing I was really excited about with you is that, you know, my background – I kind of grew up in Durham, and you grew up in plastics, and while they’re very similar, there are like nuances that happen between these types of just like, you know, when we look at what I kind of call med spa light versus like a physician on site practice, whether that’s a derma plastic, there’s all these little nuances and how the practice operates, how they’re communicating with their patients, what the touch points are, what the follow-up are, follow-ups are, how the med spa is interacting into the practice.

Amanda Loyd  

Oh, that conversion is key. Absolutely,

Daniela Woerner  

yeah. And I worked for two plastic surgeons in 20 years, so I had like a handful of a little bit of experience, but I wouldn’t say I feel so much more comfortable in Durham, so because we have, you know, plastic surgeons that come in, it was there were certain pieces that I’m like, oh my gosh, I’m so glad that we have somebody that like speaks that language, because when you get so I realize it’s all spa, I realize it’s all like we are all, but like the nuances of each individual business model makes a difference when you understand those type of aspects.

Amanda Loyd  

Absolutely, well, I think about I think about the team, and I think I was thinking about this conversation today, and I wanted to say, what is it, long time, long time listener, first time caller type deal, so I’ve listened to your podcast for a couple years, and one of the things that stood out is everyone kind of has a little bit of a different skill set, so we’re still, we’re working off of this guide, this framework, but I think you do such a good job of taking, you know, people’s experiences, and really we’re going to customize everything. We’re going to see, did that work well? Maybe we implement that. Like, I think that’s important. I think with plastics, there it’s become a little bit easier in marketing, just from the standpoint of it’s definitely a little less taboo. People are talking a lot more about what they’re having done. Actually, just saw today a picture of Rosie O’Donnell. She had a facelift. Did you see that?

Daniela Woerner  

No,

Amanda Loyd  

I just thought that was interesting. It came across my thing, and I was like, “Oh, so I think it’s becoming more mainstream than it was before, but there’s definitely still a little bit of.. I don’t want everyone to know everything I’m doing. So trying to get creative with, like, your referrals, you know, of your word of mouth, the events that you are working with, and that you’re putting on all of that is a little different with plastics.

Daniela Woerner  

Yeah, I think I think definitely, like energy-based devices are much more accepted than, and I think there’s also a lot more hand holding in the sense of like surgery is obviously it’s an invasive,

Amanda Loyd  

oh yeah,

Daniela Woerner  

you’re going under anesthesia, you’re for most, you know, I mean there’s a lot of pieces there where it’s like am I doing the right thing, what are the risk and complications, which are very different than like getting a BBL, you know, it’s

Amanda Loyd  

yes, yes, there’s

Daniela Woerner  

there’s the emotional piece that needs to be kind of, I

Amanda Loyd  

think that’s that’s the thing, though, like just and thinking about the team, like all of us as estheticians and just providers getting into this, like, we, we have these wonderful tools, we have all of these things that we can do to, to help people with their confidence, and to sometimes even educate them that, hey, this is a concern you have, and, like, I actually can help you address that, and and then there’s this piece of, like, almost a wellness that’s kind of being married with esthetics too, that’s cool, so people can feel as good as they look. It’s just I don’t know. I think most estheticians are caregivers at heart, and so the fact that we can kind of help, you know, them gain that confidence is huge. Whether it’s a BBL or whether it’s a breast augmentation, I think people, you know, sometimes even need permission to know that it’s okay to do this for you, and it’s okay to do something that will help you with your confidence and help you feel better. It’s not vain, you know.

Daniela Woerner  

It’s such an important piece, like when I was doing consultations, it’s always like my approach was, if it doesn’t bother you, it doesn’t bother me, right. So we are in the business of building women up and men, right. We are building people up to look and feel their best, and I think that and feel is really coming to light, especially in the past three to five years, really post Covid. You know, there’s been a lot of the wellness, whether it’s with the GLPs, whether it’s with hormones, different aspects of what am I going to be doing for my long-term health to really, and like not having as much concern about what other people are going to think about what they’re, they’re doing for themselves. That’s still there, it’s still there, for sure. That kind of worry of, like, am I making the right choice, or should I, should I not be investing this amount of money, but I do see people being more and more open, but what did you notice at the plastic surgeon’s office? I feel like wellness is getting incorporated not as much as at plastics as it is in med spa light or more traditional med spas than we’re seeing at plastic surgery offices.

Amanda Loyd  

It’s interesting you say that. So, the the office that I was at there was definitely kind of the plastic surgery focus med spa added in, and then for a while we were really focusing on weight loss, and this was kind of pre GLP one. It was more, more like that consultation time, you know, with a with a physician to really look at like your habits, help with just making like long-term changes, and then eventually kind of started into some of like the wellness, as far as like the B 12, and things like that. I will say, I have there a lot of offices that I’ve worked with that are doing like the IV therapy and wellness, and you’re right, it’s not as often in plastics. It’s definitely more in feel like we’re in like med spas that are doing a lot of laser and a lot of injectables, typically seem to be doing that, and it’s amazing what some of these peptides can do, and I mean, there’s there’s some really cool internal things that we can make happen, so

Daniela Woerner  

yeah, I feel like a lot of the NPS, because it is something that you definitely have to have knowledge, you know, and, and experiences, it is certainly like a booming industry, but I feel like the NPS kind of have the background, yes, to be, you know, very good with whether it’s GLPs or peptides, hormones, like whatever they’re doing on the wellness. The arena,

Amanda Loyd  

and even the some of the hormone replacement, I feel like that’s definitely, and I don’t know if it’s a little bit of it, is I’m in my early 40s, so I feel like a lot of my peers, my friends are like, hey, like, are you doing HRT, like, what do you know about this, so, and I think a lot of times people feel safe asking their friends, but also their esthetician, or asking their nurse injector. Those are conversations that it feels safe to have, and yeah, it’s pretty amazing what we could do. It all kind of marries well together, which is fun, and that’s that’s why we got into this, is that it evolves into something else. It’s always, it’s never the same thing. There’s always kind of something new. I remember when I first started, like really what I could do was microderm, and I still love a good microderm, but like I, you know, there are so many other tools that I can use at this point, um, you know, to get great results for whatever their skin concern is. So

Daniela Woerner  

you are now kind of in this new season, this new season is the best word of your career, of your life, of your kind of experience in the esthetics space as you’ve moved into coaching. What are your favorite, like everybody on the team? I always, I’m always asking, like, what do you enjoy the most, because I feel like if you’re happy, if you’re passionate, if you’re like really obsessed with a certain topic, you know, I obviously want to make sure everybody has the experience and background, but I also want everyone to really become experts in a niche, because we talk about the brand that does everything is the brand that does nothing, it’s also like you want to get so into a particular area, so what is the area that you just absolutely love that lights you up, that you’re like this is my happy place when I see a call talking about this, this is what I love.

Amanda Loyd  

So I just had a call with a med spa owner, and I would say she’s doing a lot of, she’s doing a lot of what we were just talking about, as far as wellness, she’s doing fighting, body contouring, she has some facial memberships, and just some really innovative ideas, and then just some tried and true things that she’s doing, but she’s wanting to scale, and so that was a really fun conversation, I feel like that’s kind of my, like, plays into my skill set. I would say I love talking to, honestly, I mean, I think it’s always interesting to have, like, your office manager or your spa director with your physician. Like, those calls are really interesting, because it’s they kind of work off of each other, and I think sometimes I enjoy those calls. I think just hearing from both sides, and again, kind of helping them scale. I mean, I did coaching at as the director of esthetics, like I said, I was doing all of like the hiring and all of that, but I mean we had standard operating procedures in place, so we would do like an initial training boot camp, and then I would meet with them a couple times a month, just to kind of go through, you know, here’s, you know, here are these treatments, this is something newer. How are you feeling about it? Or we would sometimes even look at like feedback from reviews, hey, like we got this great feedback. Or, hey, this guest had a question about this. Can we talk through it? So, I think just helping develop people developing their, like, not only their, like, hard skills, but also their soft skills and sales. We

Daniela Woerner  

always go back to, like, what we know so well. Also, and for you, being a part of a practice that grew very rapidly, being in a leadership role dealt with you were the director, but then also, you know, in communication with the physician, and kind of building the plan, it’s like when you’ve been in those in that space, then you understand it on such a deep level, which is, you know, allows you to be able to coach in a better way, and having the rapid growth, you know, to three locations in a surgical practice, expanding team, all of that. I think it just speaks very, very much to your skill set, of like, of course, I love doing this, this is what I just went through, and you know, and learn well.

Amanda Loyd  

Yes, and I think, like, these are the things that worked really well, or maybe these are the things I would do differently. I think, especially like even initially, when I, when I thought of systems, because I’m also kind of a creative, I think a lot of estheticians are. When you think of systems, you’re like, yeah, but there’s that one, you know, there’s that one patient, and I need to do it this way for them. It’s okay to do that if you have to, but you have that system in place, so that’s the standard most of the time, 99% of the time. And then, if you’ve got this one one offset, like it’s okay to have that, and I think that for me really kind of opened up. My eyes to just systems in general. The other thing I wanted to mention to you, and I, I, this was our one of our initial calls was just talking about, and I know Christy mentioned this on the in the community the other day, but no is a complete sentence. So, where I’m at right now in my life is really setting like a boundary, but in a way of like this matters to me, and when I make time to do this, I can show up so much better in all of these other things, and so being able to help spa owners do that is really cool. It’s so important,

Daniela Woerner  

it’s so

Amanda Loyd  

important,

Daniela Woerner  

because we feel like we have to have, you know, it’s like this is urgent, and this, and I’m like, people, we are not curing cancer here. We are so blessed to be able to do the work that we’re doing, but like it’s very rare that we’re dealing with something that is so urgent, right? And so I regularly will say that, like, you are your business’s greatest asset, and the better you care for yourself, the better you’re going to show up for your team, for your clients, for everybody, and it’s so hard, I think, for women in general, and, like, I’m sure there’s guys out there too, but we just deal with so many women, but and I see it as a pattern over and over, is that we put everybody else before ourselves, but then we’re like, how do I get out of this cycle, and it’s like, well, the cycle is to care for yourself, because then it’s like your cup is full, right. There’s the Instagram of all, whatever, all the quote you can’t pour from an empty cup, right. But

Amanda Loyd  

yeah,

Daniela Woerner  

when we are full, then we can help so many others, we can really show up as our full potential, but that takes the ability to say no, and the ability to to allow yourself to rest,

Amanda Loyd  

and I think sometimes, as I don’t know if you can relate to this, but just as a working mom, I think that’s the other piece of it, is sometimes it’s like, oh, I’m working x amount of hours, and so I do feel bad if I’m not working, doing this for myself, and I was the same as you. I was in the treatment room two days a week, and then I moved completely out, and that was a hard transition. And so, I think I can relate to the spa CEOs as they do that, because it’s bittersweet. You have your, your favorites, and you want to have your hand in that, but you also know that you can’t do everything to the like to the quality that you want to, or as well as you’d like to, if you’re muddled and you know you’re in the treatment room five days a week and then you have two days left to do everything else and then there’s no time for your family yourself anything, so I think that’s been really rewarding so far, and the calls that we have are fun. I mean, I’ll get off the call, and I’m just beaming, because I’m like, she was so cute, I love that, or I’ll learn about, like, new skincare product, or, you know, it’s just fun to sit and chat. Too

Daniela Woerner  

wonderful. Well, I’m so glad that we got the opportunity to introduce you. I’m so happy and honored and excited to have you on to our team. It’s been such, like, a nice easy transition. And to all of our listeners out there, I’m so excited for you to meet Amanda. Amanda,

Amanda Loyd  

can’t wait to meet you guys. Thank you.

Bye.

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EP 485: Freedom Isn’t Free: A Memorial Day Reflection on Why Building Your Business Is an Act of Gratitude
  • /
  • business, inspiration, leadership

Some episodes are about strategy. Some are about systems. And some, like this one, are about something harder to put into a framework but just as important to your long-term success as a Spa CEO.

Episode 485 of Spa Marketing Made Easy is a Memorial Day reflection, and it might be the episode you didn’t know you needed right now.

Daniela shows up differently in this one. No tactical content, no AI implementation breakdowns, no milestone planning. Just Daniela, a microphone, and something she felt genuinely compelled to say before we all head back into another week of building our businesses.

She starts with Memorial Day itself: what it actually means, why it is distinct from Veterans Day, and why sitting with the weight of it matters. This isn’t a political episode. It is a deeply human one. Daniela draws a direct line between the sacrifice of those who served and did not come home, and the freedom we exercise every single morning when we choose to build something of our own.

That freedom, she argues, is not a given. It is not guaranteed by geography or circumstance. It was fought for, protected, and handed forward by people whose names most of us will never know.

And one of the most vivid expressions of that freedom? Entrepreneurship.

If you have ever caught yourself in a hard week, staring at a growing inbox, a team conflict that won’t resolve, cash flow that feels tighter than it should, wondering silently why you even started — this episode is for you. Daniela doesn’t dismiss those feelings. She names them. She’s had them too. But she offers a reframe that goes much deeper than a motivational quote: the question isn’t “why is this so hard?” The question is “what am I grateful to be building?”

That shift doesn’t erase the hard parts. It gives them meaning.

She closes with a word for the families who are marking this day with grief, and for every spa owner, aesthetician, nurse, injector, and provider who is somewhere in the middle of building something and occasionally forgetting what a gift that is.

This episode is short. It’s personal. It’s exactly what it needs to be.

Press play, let it land, and then go enjoy your weekend. You’ve earned it.

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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IG / @addoaesthetics

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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 today is Memorial Day, and for many of us that is the unofficial start of the summer. It’s a long weekend, a cookout, a beach, and in our case, my family is going to be at the farm. It’s a chance to exhale a little, and there’s nothing wrong with any of that. Rest is so good and so important, and time with the people that you love is essential for your success, but I did not want to let this day pass without saying something that I think needs to be said, not as a business lesson, not as a framework, not as a strategy, just simply as a human who is genuinely aware, at least on days like today of how much I have been given.

Now this episode is a little bit different, because we’re not teaching anything tactical. There’s no AI implementation, there’s no profitability analysis, no milestone planning. It’s just a conversation, a reminder, and an invitation to sit with something that I think we need again, including myself in this something that we need to sit with a little more often than we do. Welcome to Spa Marketing Made Easy. I’m Daniela, and today I am not here as a business strategist, I’m here as someone who woke up this morning thinking about what this day actually means, and someone who wanted to share with you before we head into another week of building our businesses. Now, if you’re listening from the United States, today is Memorial Day. This is the day that we set aside to honor the men and women who gave their lives in service to this country. If you’re listening from Canada or elsewhere, the specific holiday may not be the same, but the thread that I want to pull on is universal, because what I really want to talk about is freedom and what freedom makes possible, and how rarely we stop to feel the weight of that. So this is a short episode, but I do hope that it’s meaningful.

Memorial Day is not Veterans Day. It’s not a day to thank those who served and who came home. It’s a day to remember those who did not, the men and women who gave their lives fully, finally, completely, so that the rest of us could keep living the way that we live. I think about what that means sometimes, and I don’t think I sit with it long enough. Someone’s son or daughter went to war and did not come back, so that I could start a business. Someone’s daughter, someone’s husband, someone’s best friend made the ultimate sacrifice, so that the country that they believed in could keep going, so that the freedoms built into this nation could survive and extend to the next generation, and the one after that. I don’t want to be heavy on a holiday weekend, but I do think that heaviness is the point.

The weight of what was given is what gives the gratitude its meaning, and I think most of us, including me, live at a comfortable distance from that weight for most of the year. And today I just want to close that distance a little bit. So, thank you to every person who served and who did not return, to every family who gave someone they loved to something larger than themselves, we are living in the freedom that you chose to protect. Part of what those men and women protected, part of what has always been woven into the foundation of this country is the freedom to pursue your own vision, the freedom to decide what your life looks like, and then go and make it real. That is not a small thing. It is not available everywhere, and it is not guaranteed by geography or history or time. It exists because people fought for it, died for it, and handed it forward, and one of the most vivid expressions of that freedom, one of the most distinctly human things that you can do with the liberty that you have just been given, is to start a business, to say, I have a skill, I have a vision, I have something to offer the world, and I’m going to build something around that, that’s entrepreneurship, and it is at its core an act of freedom. So, let’s not look at entrepreneurship as a burden, let’s look at it as a gift. On the hard days, we treat it like a burden.

I do too. The overwhelm, the stress, the never-ending list of problems that need solving, the team conflict, the cash flow anxiety, the marketing that’s building up and needs to go out, the client that needs a response, the numbers that need to be reviewed. There is weight to all of that, and that weight. Is real. I’m not here to tell you that running a business is easy, or that the hard parts are not hard. They are, you know, they are right. I’m here with my people, but underneath all of it, underneath the stress and the chaos, and the days when you’re wondering, why did I ever even start to do this? There’s something extraordinary that is sitting quietly, and that is that you get to try. You get to try. You get to wake up every morning and pursue a dream that is yours. You get to build something that reflects your vision, your values, your expertise, your care for your clients. You get to fail. You get to fail and adjust and try again without asking anyone’s permission. You get to hire people and shape a culture and create a place where something meaningful happens every single day, that is a gift, and we take it for granted over and over and over again. I take it for granted. There are weeks where I am so deep in the problems of running a business that I forget, genuinely forget that the ability for me to run it at all is something that I was given something that was protected for me by people that I will never meet, whose names I do not know, who made a choice that cost them everything. So, on a day like today, I think that’s worth remembering.

Now I’m not going to give you homework, right? I’m not going to send you into the week with a checklist or a framework, but I do want to offer you something the next time that you are in the middle of a business problem or a hard week or even a hard season, and there will be hard weeks and hard seasons, because entrepreneurship is hard. I want you to try on a different question before you go and reach for the stress, not why is this so difficult, but what am I grateful to be building, not as a forced reframe, not as toxic positivity that pretends that the hard parts are not real, but as a genuine return to the reason that you started the thing that you wanted to create, the freedom you exercised when you said yes to building something of your own. You don’t have to do this. Nobody made you, you chose it, you get to, because something inside of you believed it was possible, believed it was worth it, believed that your vision deserved to be built. That belief is still there underneath the hard weeks, and today is a good day to find it again.

I know you might be exhausted right now. Maybe you’re heading into this long weekend rested, but not depleted. Maybe the stress has been particularly heavy lately. Maybe you’ve been wondering quietly in the middle of the night whether it’s even worth it. The fact that you are tired does not mean that you are failing. It means that you’re building something real, and real things take energy. The fact that it’s hard does not mean that you made the wrong choice. It means you chose something that matters enough to keep you going, even when it’s hard, and the freedom to keep going, to not quit, to adjust, to try something different, to hire better, to raise your prices to build the systems that make it easier. That freedom is yours. Nobody can take it from you. It was protected for you. It belongs to you, and that is worth something today. So, I want you to rest this weekend, if you can. I want you to recharge and be with the people you love, with the people that matter to you. Let the business be quiet for a day or two, if that’s possible, and come back next week with at least a little more of the gratitude that makes the hard part feel purposeful rather than just hard. Now I want to close today with the way that I started, and that is the day itself. Memorial Day exists because freedom is not free, because the life we get to live, the businesses we get to build, the dreams we get to pursue, the mornings we get to choose what to do with, was purchased at a cost we cannot fully comprehend, so today let’s remember those and carry a little of that remembering into the rest of the year to the families who are marking this day with grief instead of celebration. Who have an empty chair at the cookout, a name on the wall somewhere, a person that you’re still missing. I am holding you in my heart today, and to every one of you listening, every spa owner, every esthetician, every nurse, every injector, and every provider who is building something, and sometimes forgetting what a gift it is to be able to build it. Thank you for being here.

Thank you for building, and thank you for letting me be a part of your journey. Now go and enjoy your weekend, because you have earned it.

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EP 472: AI Agents for Your Spa: How to Automate Revenue, Retention, and Operations with Maeve Ferguson, Khairy Varre, and Ajit Nawalkha
  • /
  • business, inspiration

You Do Not Need to Learn to Code. You Need to Know What You Want Your Business to Do.

That is the reframe that sits at the heart of this episode, and it is one that every spa owner who has ever felt overwhelmed by technology needs to hear.

AI agents are not a trend reserved for tech companies and Silicon Valley startups. They are practical, affordable tools that are already being built for businesses like yours — to fill appointment gaps, follow up on inquiries, re-engage clients who have gone quiet, and onboard new providers using your exact protocols and service philosophy.

In this special mashup episode, Daniela sits down with three powerhouse guests — Maeve Ferguson, Khairy Varre, and Ajit Nawalkha — to give you the most complete and actionable picture of what AI can do for your spa right now.

Start With Retention Before You Build a Lead System

The most important piece of advice in this episode is also the most counterintuitive. Before you invest in any AI tool designed to attract new clients, focus on keeping the ones you already have.

When your retention rate is at 80% or higher, every new lead you bring in actually compounds. When it is not, you are pouring new clients into a leaky bucket. AI agents can run your retention reports, identify who has not returned within a set window of time, and automatically reach out with a personalized message or offer based on their history with your spa. No manual reporting. No hoping someone on your team remembered to follow up.

Build your retention foundation first. Then build your lead flow system on top of it.

What AI Agents Can Actually Do for Your Spa

A re-engagement agent monitors client visit history and sends automated outreach to anyone who has not returned within a timeframe you define. It knows the last service they received and when it is time to invite them back.

An upsell agent analyzes behavioral patterns across your entire client database to identify which clients are most likely to add a second service, then surfaces those recommendations at exactly the right moment in the client journey.

A booking follow-up agent catches the people who filled out an inquiry form or clicked your booking link but never completed the appointment, and follows up on your behalf to get them scheduled.

A schedule gap agent identifies recurring patterns in your booking data — for example, a consistent 90-minute window every Thursday afternoon that goes unfilled — and activates targeted outreach or promotional pricing to fill that slot before it becomes lost revenue.

All of these agents run autonomously. You define the rules. They execute while your team stays fully present with the client standing in front of them.

Your Front Desk Does Not Disappear. It Levels Up.

AI agents are not replacing your providers. They are not replacing the human connection that makes a great spa experience irreplaceable. What they are doing is eliminating the pile of repetitive administrative tasks that keep your front desk from being fully present, responsive, and excellent at the parts of their role that genuinely require a human being.

When AI is handling the pattern-based, time-sensitive, repeatable work, your people can do what your people do best.

You Do Not Have to Learn This Yourself

The role of the Spa CEO is not to become a developer. It is to know what you want your business to accomplish, and then direct the right people to build it for you.

Skilled AI developers who specialize in practical, lightweight automation appropriate for businesses at your stage are available on platforms like Upwork for around $40 an hour. You do not need to hire them full time. You need to be clear about the specific problem you want solved, articulate your process, and let them build it.

The single most valuable thing you can do right now to prepare is document your client journey. What does the experience look like from first inquiry to loyal returning client? Where are the gaps? Where are you losing the sale? Where is revenue sitting uncollected? That clarity is the foundation everything else is built on.

This episode gives you the language, the framework, and the confidence to start that conversation today. Tune in and then open your CEO Routines board, because there are things in this episode worth adding to it right now.

Resources Mentioned in Episode 472:

Visit Maeve Ferguson’s website to learn more. 

Visit Khairy Varre’s website to learn more. 

Visit Ajit Nawalkha’s website to learn more.

Tools mentioned: 

  • Zero Bounce
  • Audio Pen
  • Granola
  • Upwork
  • Lovable
  • Cursor
  • Active Campaign
  • Funnel Gorgeous

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.

All right, hello, my dears, Daniela here and welcome back to another episode of Spa Marketing Made easy. We are doing something fun today, something that I am really, really excited, something different. We are actually live streaming this recording of this episode right now into the spa marketing made it easy Facebook group. So if you’re in there, let us know. Let us know your thoughts. Do you like it when we are live streaming in, we always are looking way for new ways to support you, to provide additional value. So we’re testing this out. Let us know what you think. All right, so today’s episode is something that I know is I’ve heard from many of you keeps you up at night, and that is delegation. So my guess is that many of you know that you should be delegating, but you’re actually not doing it and not delegating is costing you so much more than you realize. It is costing you time with your family. It is costing you your mental health, your sanity, and it’s absolutely costing you revenue. So today I want to talk about delegating without fear, and how you can actually let go without losing control. That’s a really important distinction, okay, how can you let go without losing control? So when you think about handing off tasks, especially ones that are client facing around, client, communication, follow ups, the relationship, touch points. It can feel like you’re choosing between staying overwhelmed or just completely losing control of your business. But here’s the deal, you cannot scale past where you’re at right now. If you’re holding on to everything, you you just can’t there’s only so much capacity that you have as a human being. And I’m not saying that to be harsh. I’m saying that because I care about you. I care about your business. I don’t want to see you spinning your wheels. I don’t want to see you operating your business from a place of overwork and overwhelm, and the solution to that problem is delegation. Okay? So by the end of this episode, I hope that I have shifted your perspective. I hope that I have reframed some of your fears, that you will be able to take just one action to get you to start moving forward little by little, all right, and we’re going to dive into, we’re going to talk about why delegation feels scary. We’re going to look at like dismantling those biggest fears, and we’re going to talk about the mindset shifts that need to happen if you are serious about building a company, not a really hard job for yourself. And when I say a really hard job for yourself, I mean a position that you are in when you’re wearing 17 hats, you’re working at all hours.

You never have a time to unplug, unwind, recharge, all right, you can only go at that pace for so long before you just question, is this really what I want to do with my life, with my time? Okay, so let’s, let’s start that conversation. So why is delegation so hard, and specifically for providers, for spa owners, right? And I personally think it’s because so many of us, and not all of us, but the majority of us who are starting spas, we started as providers. We started as aestheticians or as nurses, and that became a part of our identity. We love helping people. We love transformations. We love seeing our clients light up when they look in the mirror. We love the connection, the relationship. It’s not just part of the job, it is the job. It’s part of our identity. And then when we decided to kind of take that next step and open our own business, and we’re wearing all of the hats. We are exhausted. We’re the aesthetician, the front desk, the marketer, the bookkeeper, the Social Media Manager, the cleaning crew. We are all of it. We get really, really good at figuring things out ourselves. Okay? We figure it out. We make it work. It becomes our identity. And listen that up to about 250,000 you can do it’s it’s normal. Most of us in that phase. From starting point up to 250,000 we are in full blown hustle mode. I. Yes, but if you want to get past that revenue plateau, you’ve got to delegate, right? You’ve got to change the way that you’re running things to be able to get to that next level. Okay? And that requires delegation and a mindset shift of knowing that you are not the only person that can do everything well, all right, I don’t want you to hit a ceiling. I don’t want you to be maxed out. I don’t want you to be working 50 or 60 hours a week or answering text at 9pm I don’t want you to be doing client follow ups on Sunday morning. I don’t want you to not be able to take a vacation because your business won’t run without you. I want the opposite. I want you to feel. What I believe is that entrepreneurship is such a blessing. It is such a gift, and it is so it can impact our lives positively in so many ways, not just from the financial aspects, also from the personal development aspects that we’re forced, we’re forced to face our own stuff when we become entrepreneurs and and work through it and grow as humans and grow into our potential, in our capacity. Okay, now my guess is that somewhere in the back of your mind, you know that you need help, you know that you need to delegate. But every time that you think about handing something off, especially something that is deeply important to you, like the communication or relationship or touch points with your clients and patients, it makes you kind of feel like you’re going to throw up, right? Like, oh, I’ve worked so hard I can’t lose this client.

All of those things we what if they don’t do it as good as me? What if a client get upset? Gets upset? What if the standard slip, what if people start saying is just not the same anymore? What if people leave, okay, that is a technician mindset, that is a provider mindset, and that mindset served you when you were starting out right? It helped you get to where you are today. But it is also the same thing that’s keeping you stuck right. We’ve got to continue to grow and evolve as we move to new levels in our business. So the technician is believing that they are the only ones that can do a particular thing. It feels good when our patients or clients say, I don’t want to see anybody else. That’s our ego that’s being stroked. And the thing that I say to our growth factor students, when I get this kind of pushback is if you say yes to this, what are you saying no to? If you say yes to staying in the room, to doing everything yourself, you’re saying no to picking your kids up from school every day. You’re saying no to being able to take a vacation. You’re saying no to insert whatever thing is a part of the reason that you created the business for in the first place. Okay, but when we look at the CEO, and we like to identify her as this boss, CEO, this boss. CEO, knows the value of the business is in systems. How do I create a process that is so good, that is so detailed, that my team can deliver the same incredible results, or even better than me every single time? That’s the mindset shift. Okay, so let’s dive into some of these fears, because I know that that is the the thing that’s paralyzing us right now, no one can do it as well as I can, all right? That’s probably one of the biggest, biggest fears, and you might be right. You might be right at this point in time, no one can do it as good as you, but your job is to pour into your team and develop your team with the intention of making them better than you. And that’s, you know, side note. That’s where the personal development comes in. Because we like to be the best. It feels good to be the best, right? You’re You’re always taught to be the best version of yourself. And now, if we’re trying to make other people better than us, that feels weird or off, but what we’re trying to do is make the best business right, make the best experience for our clients, and that means that we can’t do everything all ourself. So when we move into systems and how we’re going to create that we have to look at, we have to look at how we’re actually going to break down the details. And if you have not done that before, then start to think about that now.

That’s going to be part of your homework this week, when you’re going through. And I want you to ask yourself, like, yeah, you might be doing everything, and you might have the capability to do everything really well, but when you are overworked and overwhelmed, you are tired, are you actually giving every single patient 100% or are they getting 70% it answer that yourself, right? You don’t have to share that with anybody, but really look in and say, Did I give every single piece of myself to that patient? Was I fully present with them, or was I thinking about what I was going to make for dinner? Was I fully present with them, or was I thinking about the inventory that I needed to order. Was I fully present with them, or was I worried about the phone that was ringing at the front desk while I was in here with the room and thinking about that potential client or patient that I missed? Okay, now, if we hire a provider and train them. Maybe at your best you’re at 100% and at their best they’re at 85% because there is, you know, value in time and experience in our space. You’ve got to get your hands on people to be able to get that actual experience, and many of you have been in the industry 10 plus years, it’s a lot of time. That’s a lot of value, that’s a lot that you can’t learn from a book. But if we can get that new provider up to even 75% if your overworked and overwhelmed self was only doing 70% you’re still doing you’re still doing better, right? So think about it in that way.

Think about it in the experience of the patient, and so your team can absolutely learn your standards, but only if you are creating the system for them to follow. All right, so fear number two, I’m going to lose the relationships with my clients. And this can be really important. This can be the fulfillment aspect of our job. When we build those deep relationships, you have the patients that are bringing you holiday gifts, you’re having very deeply connected, emotional conversations, because the just because the nature of our relationship, we are supporting them. They’re telling us the thing very vulnerable conversations, there’s a deep level of trust, and we realize that you know not every single person that’s on your table, but there are a good number of people that you form genuine, deep relationships with. And if you get out of the room, and if you start delegating things, you’re going to fear that you’re going to lose those relationships, relationships of people that have been with you since you started. They know you. They ask for you. And the thought of someone else being their point of contact feels like you’re handing off something precious. But I want you to reframe that process again. Your focus is pouring into how do you make your team better than you. You can still check in with that patient, you can still send them an email or a text. You can still talk with them when you see them on the schedule. It’s a shifting relationship. And you know, I have, I have a lot of friends right now that are in different stages of parenting, and my kids are young. They’re five and eight, and a lot of I have another girlfriend who her kids are teenagers, and she’s getting really worried about the transition their own I think next year is the year that they graduate. One of them graduates, and that whole identity that she has had around being a mother, and what does it look like when my kids graduate and and I think a lot of parents go through this of like that transition of, is the relationship going to be different, and are we mourning the loss of like this season of life with our children? And I mean, I even talked to my therapist for a long time about this, this topic of, you know, the their childhood seems to be fleeting and going so quickly, and how do I make sure that I’m staying present with all of it. It’s very similar to the same fear that we’re talking about here in the practice. It’s like the relation. The relationship doesn’t mean that it has to be over. It’s just shifting. It’s taking a different shape. It’s taking. Different focus, and that might, it might end up being better. It might end up being different, but it’s it’s just shifting the way that it is, but the relationship is still there, and if you put the work into it, because we cannot take relationships for granted, whether it’s with our family, whether it’s with our friends, whether it’s with colleagues and team members or whether it’s with strategic partners. Relationships need to be nurtured. They require work, and so if you are just aware of that, and you put attention and focus into ensuring that the relationships with your patients and clients are still there and are nurtured, and they know how much you value them and want to make sure that they have a great experience. It just changes shape. It just changes shape. Okay? So it’s a really, really important aspect to remember, all right, fear number three, it takes more time to train than to just do it myself and listen this. This might be true for a month, okay, but what we are looking at when we look at our business, is that a business is a marathon, not a sprint.

And so yes, for one month, it might be faster for you to do it yourself, but if you are stuck doing it yourself every single month, think about the hours upon hours that you are losing by doing this task that could be passed off to someone else. Now, in our growth factor program, we we typically start it off with a time tracker, and it’s kind of a tedious exercise. We track everything that we’re doing every 15 minutes for an entire week, and we break it into what is actual work time. What is fun? Do we have any fun in our life? What is administrative work at home, like laundry, cleaning, you know, things like that. What is quality family time, and what is self care. And so we break down these different categories, and we’re identifying what we’re doing, and we’re the spreadsheet that we have takes the percentage of all of these and really breaks it into like, wow, you spent this amount of time on household items, or you spent this amount of time, this percentage of your week was on this particular thing. And so it really glaringly shows you where you’re spending your time. And we go through and then we highlight and we look at like what can be passed off. And if we can free up 10 hours a week from your schedule, and you could dedicate 10 hours a week towards systemizing your business, or 10 hours a week towards learning a new skill, or 10 hours a week towards leadership development or training your team. Think about how things like that would compound. So there is an opportunity cost for every single thing that you do, meaning, if I stay handling these tasks that someone else actually could do instead of little by little. And I don’t want you to rip the band aid off, right? I don’t want you to delegate everything all at once. I want you to understand how something works. I want you to create the system, and then I want you to delegate it to ensure that it goes smoothly, so that we are not, you know, causing additional problems down the line. All right, so that’s a really important thing. And side note here, a lot of times people will see that there’s problems. They don’t know how to do it, and they think that just hiring is the problem. Is the problem, and they hire, and then it turns out badly, and it reinforces their beliefs that it’s just better if I do it myself. But instead, the problem is that there was no system there for that person in the first place they came into a new business, something that you intimately know and you just expected them to thrive? No, you’ve got to set them up for success. You’ve got to develop them, you’ve got to train them. You’ve got to give them the step by step system that you want them to follow. That’s how they’re going to thrive. Okay, systems equal freedom. I’m going to say that over and over and over again.

All right, let’s dive into fear number four, and that is that my team will mess it up and hurt my my reputation. Yeah, your team’s gonna mess up. They will, and so will you. You are human. You are human. Mistakes happen. In and the best thing that we can do is acknowledge forgive and find a solution that it doesn’t happen again. Okay, so acknowledge forgive and find a solution that doesn’t happen again. And most importantly, forgive yourself. Give yourself some grace, because you will mess up, you absolutely will mess up on something. And the point is not that you mess up, it’s how you handle it and how you prevent that particular misstep from happening again in the future. I like to call them areas of opportunity. So if there’s a mistake, I always found a new area of opportunity in my business that I can clean up, that I can fix right so most mistakes, most mistakes, are not going to be a huge deal. They are something that can be fixed with clear communication, with a genuine apology if you do something incorrectly, right? But if you are able to have clear and direct communication, then you can solve that problem and then and put a system in place to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. Okay, so if you’re in business long enough, you’re gonna get a negative review you’re going to do, you’re going to have a mistake. It happens. It’s not a question of if, but when. The real skill is, how do I handle that, and how do I ensure that I’m learning from every single thing and making it better so that it doesn’t happen again? Okay, so we’ve talked about the fears. Now I want to talk about the mindset shift, and this is why personal development is such a huge part of entrepreneurship.

Oops, sorry. There was a little notification that scared me there. That’s what happens when we record things live. Okay, so let’s talk about the mindset shift. The limiting factor is not tactical. It’s not, I don’t know how to delegate. It’s, it’s the story that you’re telling yourself about what delegation means. So instead of saying, if I’m not doing everything myself, I’m not really running my business. And this is this may sound silly to some of you, but we, you know, a lot of what we do is help CEOs get out of the room so that they can step into the spa CEO role. So we help them get out of the room. And once they’re out of the room, and once they have their manager delegating everything, they don’t know what to do. What am I supposed to do? I don’t feel useful. My team doesn’t need me. I have no idea what to do as the CEO. There’s a whole job description of what you should be doing as the CEO. But if you’ve been in that operator role, you only know task base. You don’t know the higher level, visionary relationship, building aspects, team, development, aspects that you should be doing as the CEO. But this is a common thing that happens when we get a provider out of the room. If I’m not doing everything myself, I’m not really running my business. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t have control. My team doesn’t need me. All of these things are normal fears, and it’s all about switching that story that the business has been created, the culture of the business is there because you created it. All right. So you’ve really got to be be able to identify that. If you’re telling yourself, I should be able to handle this myself. Start to tell yourself, building a team is not a weakness. It is the only way to scale.

All right, so whatever your belief is, reframe it into something positive with Team, this is non negotiable. So if you want to grow past 2530, 40k, months and beyond, you’ve got to shift your mindset. You’ve got to add a team, okay? Because there’s a certain point you’re going to hit a ceiling, and there’s only going to be so many hours that you can work. That is how we scale and grow little by little. Again, we are not ripping the band aid all off at once, but step by step, milestone by milestone, all right, systems equal freedom. I want you to remember that when you have a documented process, when you have templates, when you have scripts, when you have clear expectations, when you have clear training, it’s not restricting your creativity. It’s not. Restricting your client relationships. It’s creating the foundation that allows you to focus on what actually matters, pouring into your team, deepening the relationship with your clients. So think about Starbucks, right? Starbucks can hire a high school kid that maybe it’s their first job, and because they are so systemized that high school kid all they have to do is be good at following instructions. All right, that’s because clear systems and SOPs exist. So you don’t need to have the same level of systemization as Starbucks does, but you do need enough processes that someone other than you can do different tasks within your business.

Okay? And we’re going to Little by little, increase those. So what I want you to do is take one action this week, commit to one thing, not 10, just one, one thing that you’re going to focus on, something that you are not delegating yet. I want you to decide what it is, and I want you to create the system and start delegating it to your team, perhaps your front desk, if you have a virtual assistant, if you have estheticians that have open spots on their schedule, take that thing clearly communicate it. Create the step by step system and delegate little by little. All right, I want you to document. I want you to adjust based on the needs, and I want you to celebrate, because if you can do that, then you just have to build on that, little by little by little to build a systems based business. Okay, so thank you for being here with me today. Live. I hope you guys liked it live. We’ll see how it goes. I think it was fun, except for my little notification.

But other than that, it’s been really good. I appreciate you. I’m grateful for you, and I hope so much that you do this delegation, that you start to systemize for yourself, it is the key to building a systems based business that gives you the freedom that you desire, the benefit from entrepreneurship. All right, my dears, thank you so much. I appreciate you, and I’ll catch you on next week’s episode.

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EP 471: Delegation Without Fear: How to Let Go Without Losing Control
  • /
  • business, inspiration

The One Thing Keeping You Stuck (And How to Fix It)

You know you need help. You know you can’t keep doing everything yourself. But every time you think about handing something off to your team, especially the client facing tasks, the communication, the relationship touchpoints, your stomach drops.

What if they don’t do it as well as you? What if clients get upset? What if your reputation takes a hit?

In this episode of Spa Marketing Made Easy, Daniela tackles the fear that’s costing you more than you realize. Not delegating isn’t just stealing your time, it’s stealing your revenue, your family moments, and your sanity. And the longer you wait, the more expensive that decision becomes.

Here’s what most spa owners don’t realize: you can’t scale past your current revenue level if you’re holding onto everything. There’s only so much capacity you have as a human being. You might be capable of doing it all, but when you’re overworked and overwhelmed, are you actually giving every client 100%? Or are they getting 70% of you while you’re mentally running through your to do list, worrying about the phone ringing at the front desk, or thinking about what’s for dinner?

Daniela breaks down the four biggest fears that keep spa owners stuck in the treatment room and walks you through the mindset shifts that separate technicians from true Spa CEOs. You’ll hear why the belief that “no one can do it as well as me” is actually a limiting identity, not a badge of honor. You’ll discover how client relationships shift (but don’t disappear) when you delegate. And you’ll learn why spending time training your team now creates exponential freedom later.

Daniela challenges you to stop saying yes to overwhelm and start saying yes to building a business that doesn’t require you to be the glue holding everything together.

Delegation isn’t about losing control. It’s about creating systems so strong that your business runs beautifully without you micromanaging every detail. It’s about pouring into your team with the intention of making them better than you. And it’s about finally stepping into your role as CEO instead of staying stuck as the highest paid technician in your business.

If you’ve been telling yourself you’ll delegate “when things slow down” or “when you have more time,” this episode will make it crystal clear: you don’t have time NOT to delegate. Tune in, take notes, and commit to one thing you’ll systemize and hand off this week. Your future self will thank you.

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.

All right, hello, my dears, Daniela here and welcome back to another episode of Spa Marketing Made easy. We are doing something fun today, something that I am really, really excited, something different. We are actually live streaming this recording of this episode right now into the spa marketing made it easy Facebook group. So if you’re in there, let us know. Let us know your thoughts. Do you like it when we are live streaming in, we always are looking way for new ways to support you, to provide additional value. So we’re testing this out. Let us know what you think. All right, so today’s episode is something that I know is I’ve heard from many of you keeps you up at night, and that is delegation. So my guess is that many of you know that you should be delegating, but you’re actually not doing it and not delegating is costing you so much more than you realize. It is costing you time with your family. It is costing you your mental health, your sanity, and it’s absolutely costing you revenue. So today I want to talk about delegating without fear, and how you can actually let go without losing control. That’s a really important distinction, okay, how can you let go without losing control? So when you think about handing off tasks, especially ones that are client facing around, client, communication, follow ups, the relationship, touch points. It can feel like you’re choosing between staying overwhelmed or just completely losing control of your business. But here’s the deal, you cannot scale past where you’re at right now. If you’re holding on to everything, you you just can’t there’s only so much capacity that you have as a human being. And I’m not saying that to be harsh. I’m saying that because I care about you. I care about your business. I don’t want to see you spinning your wheels. I don’t want to see you operating your business from a place of overwork and overwhelm, and the solution to that problem is delegation. Okay? So by the end of this episode, I hope that I have shifted your perspective. I hope that I have reframed some of your fears, that you will be able to take just one action to get you to start moving forward little by little, all right, and we’re going to dive into, we’re going to talk about why delegation feels scary. We’re going to look at like dismantling those biggest fears, and we’re going to talk about the mindset shifts that need to happen if you are serious about building a company, not a really hard job for yourself. And when I say a really hard job for yourself, I mean a position that you are in when you’re wearing 17 hats, you’re working at all hours.

You never have a time to unplug, unwind, recharge, all right, you can only go at that pace for so long before you just question, is this really what I want to do with my life, with my time? Okay, so let’s, let’s start that conversation. So why is delegation so hard, and specifically for providers, for spa owners, right? And I personally think it’s because so many of us, and not all of us, but the majority of us who are starting spas, we started as providers. We started as aestheticians or as nurses, and that became a part of our identity. We love helping people. We love transformations. We love seeing our clients light up when they look in the mirror. We love the connection, the relationship. It’s not just part of the job, it is the job. It’s part of our identity. And then when we decided to kind of take that next step and open our own business, and we’re wearing all of the hats. We are exhausted. We’re the aesthetician, the front desk, the marketer, the bookkeeper, the Social Media Manager, the cleaning crew. We are all of it. We get really, really good at figuring things out ourselves. Okay? We figure it out. We make it work. It becomes our identity. And listen that up to about 250,000 you can do it’s it’s normal. Most of us in that phase. From starting point up to 250,000 we are in full blown hustle mode. I. Yes, but if you want to get past that revenue plateau, you’ve got to delegate, right? You’ve got to change the way that you’re running things to be able to get to that next level. Okay? And that requires delegation and a mindset shift of knowing that you are not the only person that can do everything well, all right, I don’t want you to hit a ceiling. I don’t want you to be maxed out. I don’t want you to be working 50 or 60 hours a week or answering text at 9pm I don’t want you to be doing client follow ups on Sunday morning. I don’t want you to not be able to take a vacation because your business won’t run without you. I want the opposite. I want you to feel. What I believe is that entrepreneurship is such a blessing. It is such a gift, and it is so it can impact our lives positively in so many ways, not just from the financial aspects, also from the personal development aspects that we’re forced, we’re forced to face our own stuff when we become entrepreneurs and and work through it and grow as humans and grow into our potential, in our capacity. Okay, now my guess is that somewhere in the back of your mind, you know that you need help, you know that you need to delegate. But every time that you think about handing something off, especially something that is deeply important to you, like the communication or relationship or touch points with your clients and patients, it makes you kind of feel like you’re going to throw up, right? Like, oh, I’ve worked so hard I can’t lose this client.

All of those things we what if they don’t do it as good as me? What if a client get upset? Gets upset? What if the standard slip, what if people start saying is just not the same anymore? What if people leave, okay, that is a technician mindset, that is a provider mindset, and that mindset served you when you were starting out right? It helped you get to where you are today. But it is also the same thing that’s keeping you stuck right. We’ve got to continue to grow and evolve as we move to new levels in our business. So the technician is believing that they are the only ones that can do a particular thing. It feels good when our patients or clients say, I don’t want to see anybody else. That’s our ego that’s being stroked. And the thing that I say to our growth factor students, when I get this kind of pushback is if you say yes to this, what are you saying no to? If you say yes to staying in the room, to doing everything yourself, you’re saying no to picking your kids up from school every day. You’re saying no to being able to take a vacation. You’re saying no to insert whatever thing is a part of the reason that you created the business for in the first place. Okay, but when we look at the CEO, and we like to identify her as this boss, CEO, this boss. CEO, knows the value of the business is in systems. How do I create a process that is so good, that is so detailed, that my team can deliver the same incredible results, or even better than me every single time? That’s the mindset shift. Okay, so let’s dive into some of these fears, because I know that that is the the thing that’s paralyzing us right now, no one can do it as well as I can, all right? That’s probably one of the biggest, biggest fears, and you might be right. You might be right at this point in time, no one can do it as good as you, but your job is to pour into your team and develop your team with the intention of making them better than you. And that’s, you know, side note. That’s where the personal development comes in. Because we like to be the best. It feels good to be the best, right? You’re You’re always taught to be the best version of yourself. And now, if we’re trying to make other people better than us, that feels weird or off, but what we’re trying to do is make the best business right, make the best experience for our clients, and that means that we can’t do everything all ourself. So when we move into systems and how we’re going to create that we have to look at, we have to look at how we’re actually going to break down the details. And if you have not done that before, then start to think about that now.

That’s going to be part of your homework this week, when you’re going through. And I want you to ask yourself, like, yeah, you might be doing everything, and you might have the capability to do everything really well, but when you are overworked and overwhelmed, you are tired, are you actually giving every single patient 100% or are they getting 70% it answer that yourself, right? You don’t have to share that with anybody, but really look in and say, Did I give every single piece of myself to that patient? Was I fully present with them, or was I thinking about what I was going to make for dinner? Was I fully present with them, or was I thinking about the inventory that I needed to order. Was I fully present with them, or was I worried about the phone that was ringing at the front desk while I was in here with the room and thinking about that potential client or patient that I missed? Okay, now, if we hire a provider and train them. Maybe at your best you’re at 100% and at their best they’re at 85% because there is, you know, value in time and experience in our space. You’ve got to get your hands on people to be able to get that actual experience, and many of you have been in the industry 10 plus years, it’s a lot of time. That’s a lot of value, that’s a lot that you can’t learn from a book. But if we can get that new provider up to even 75% if your overworked and overwhelmed self was only doing 70% you’re still doing you’re still doing better, right? So think about it in that way.

Think about it in the experience of the patient, and so your team can absolutely learn your standards, but only if you are creating the system for them to follow. All right, so fear number two, I’m going to lose the relationships with my clients. And this can be really important. This can be the fulfillment aspect of our job. When we build those deep relationships, you have the patients that are bringing you holiday gifts, you’re having very deeply connected, emotional conversations, because the just because the nature of our relationship, we are supporting them. They’re telling us the thing very vulnerable conversations, there’s a deep level of trust, and we realize that you know not every single person that’s on your table, but there are a good number of people that you form genuine, deep relationships with. And if you get out of the room, and if you start delegating things, you’re going to fear that you’re going to lose those relationships, relationships of people that have been with you since you started. They know you. They ask for you. And the thought of someone else being their point of contact feels like you’re handing off something precious. But I want you to reframe that process again. Your focus is pouring into how do you make your team better than you. You can still check in with that patient, you can still send them an email or a text. You can still talk with them when you see them on the schedule. It’s a shifting relationship. And you know, I have, I have a lot of friends right now that are in different stages of parenting, and my kids are young. They’re five and eight, and a lot of I have another girlfriend who her kids are teenagers, and she’s getting really worried about the transition their own I think next year is the year that they graduate. One of them graduates, and that whole identity that she has had around being a mother, and what does it look like when my kids graduate and and I think a lot of parents go through this of like that transition of, is the relationship going to be different, and are we mourning the loss of like this season of life with our children? And I mean, I even talked to my therapist for a long time about this, this topic of, you know, the their childhood seems to be fleeting and going so quickly, and how do I make sure that I’m staying present with all of it. It’s very similar to the same fear that we’re talking about here in the practice. It’s like the relation. The relationship doesn’t mean that it has to be over. It’s just shifting. It’s taking a different shape. It’s taking. Different focus, and that might, it might end up being better. It might end up being different, but it’s it’s just shifting the way that it is, but the relationship is still there, and if you put the work into it, because we cannot take relationships for granted, whether it’s with our family, whether it’s with our friends, whether it’s with colleagues and team members or whether it’s with strategic partners. Relationships need to be nurtured. They require work, and so if you are just aware of that, and you put attention and focus into ensuring that the relationships with your patients and clients are still there and are nurtured, and they know how much you value them and want to make sure that they have a great experience. It just changes shape. It just changes shape. Okay? So it’s a really, really important aspect to remember, all right, fear number three, it takes more time to train than to just do it myself and listen this. This might be true for a month, okay, but what we are looking at when we look at our business, is that a business is a marathon, not a sprint.

And so yes, for one month, it might be faster for you to do it yourself, but if you are stuck doing it yourself every single month, think about the hours upon hours that you are losing by doing this task that could be passed off to someone else. Now, in our growth factor program, we we typically start it off with a time tracker, and it’s kind of a tedious exercise. We track everything that we’re doing every 15 minutes for an entire week, and we break it into what is actual work time. What is fun? Do we have any fun in our life? What is administrative work at home, like laundry, cleaning, you know, things like that. What is quality family time, and what is self care. And so we break down these different categories, and we’re identifying what we’re doing, and we’re the spreadsheet that we have takes the percentage of all of these and really breaks it into like, wow, you spent this amount of time on household items, or you spent this amount of time, this percentage of your week was on this particular thing. And so it really glaringly shows you where you’re spending your time. And we go through and then we highlight and we look at like what can be passed off. And if we can free up 10 hours a week from your schedule, and you could dedicate 10 hours a week towards systemizing your business, or 10 hours a week towards learning a new skill, or 10 hours a week towards leadership development or training your team. Think about how things like that would compound. So there is an opportunity cost for every single thing that you do, meaning, if I stay handling these tasks that someone else actually could do instead of little by little. And I don’t want you to rip the band aid off, right? I don’t want you to delegate everything all at once. I want you to understand how something works. I want you to create the system, and then I want you to delegate it to ensure that it goes smoothly, so that we are not, you know, causing additional problems down the line. All right, so that’s a really important thing. And side note here, a lot of times people will see that there’s problems. They don’t know how to do it, and they think that just hiring is the problem. Is the problem, and they hire, and then it turns out badly, and it reinforces their beliefs that it’s just better if I do it myself. But instead, the problem is that there was no system there for that person in the first place they came into a new business, something that you intimately know and you just expected them to thrive? No, you’ve got to set them up for success. You’ve got to develop them, you’ve got to train them. You’ve got to give them the step by step system that you want them to follow. That’s how they’re going to thrive. Okay, systems equal freedom. I’m going to say that over and over and over again.

All right, let’s dive into fear number four, and that is that my team will mess it up and hurt my my reputation. Yeah, your team’s gonna mess up. They will, and so will you. You are human. You are human. Mistakes happen. In and the best thing that we can do is acknowledge forgive and find a solution that it doesn’t happen again. Okay, so acknowledge forgive and find a solution that doesn’t happen again. And most importantly, forgive yourself. Give yourself some grace, because you will mess up, you absolutely will mess up on something. And the point is not that you mess up, it’s how you handle it and how you prevent that particular misstep from happening again in the future. I like to call them areas of opportunity. So if there’s a mistake, I always found a new area of opportunity in my business that I can clean up, that I can fix right so most mistakes, most mistakes, are not going to be a huge deal. They are something that can be fixed with clear communication, with a genuine apology if you do something incorrectly, right? But if you are able to have clear and direct communication, then you can solve that problem and then and put a system in place to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. Okay, so if you’re in business long enough, you’re gonna get a negative review you’re going to do, you’re going to have a mistake. It happens. It’s not a question of if, but when. The real skill is, how do I handle that, and how do I ensure that I’m learning from every single thing and making it better so that it doesn’t happen again? Okay, so we’ve talked about the fears. Now I want to talk about the mindset shift, and this is why personal development is such a huge part of entrepreneurship.

Oops, sorry. There was a little notification that scared me there. That’s what happens when we record things live. Okay, so let’s talk about the mindset shift. The limiting factor is not tactical. It’s not, I don’t know how to delegate. It’s, it’s the story that you’re telling yourself about what delegation means. So instead of saying, if I’m not doing everything myself, I’m not really running my business. And this is this may sound silly to some of you, but we, you know, a lot of what we do is help CEOs get out of the room so that they can step into the spa CEO role. So we help them get out of the room. And once they’re out of the room, and once they have their manager delegating everything, they don’t know what to do. What am I supposed to do? I don’t feel useful. My team doesn’t need me. I have no idea what to do as the CEO. There’s a whole job description of what you should be doing as the CEO. But if you’ve been in that operator role, you only know task base. You don’t know the higher level, visionary relationship, building aspects, team, development, aspects that you should be doing as the CEO. But this is a common thing that happens when we get a provider out of the room. If I’m not doing everything myself, I’m not really running my business. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t have control. My team doesn’t need me. All of these things are normal fears, and it’s all about switching that story that the business has been created, the culture of the business is there because you created it. All right. So you’ve really got to be be able to identify that. If you’re telling yourself, I should be able to handle this myself. Start to tell yourself, building a team is not a weakness. It is the only way to scale.

All right, so whatever your belief is, reframe it into something positive with Team, this is non negotiable. So if you want to grow past 2530, 40k, months and beyond, you’ve got to shift your mindset. You’ve got to add a team, okay? Because there’s a certain point you’re going to hit a ceiling, and there’s only going to be so many hours that you can work. That is how we scale and grow little by little. Again, we are not ripping the band aid all off at once, but step by step, milestone by milestone, all right, systems equal freedom. I want you to remember that when you have a documented process, when you have templates, when you have scripts, when you have clear expectations, when you have clear training, it’s not restricting your creativity. It’s not. Restricting your client relationships. It’s creating the foundation that allows you to focus on what actually matters, pouring into your team, deepening the relationship with your clients. So think about Starbucks, right? Starbucks can hire a high school kid that maybe it’s their first job, and because they are so systemized that high school kid all they have to do is be good at following instructions. All right, that’s because clear systems and SOPs exist. So you don’t need to have the same level of systemization as Starbucks does, but you do need enough processes that someone other than you can do different tasks within your business.

Okay? And we’re going to Little by little, increase those. So what I want you to do is take one action this week, commit to one thing, not 10, just one, one thing that you’re going to focus on, something that you are not delegating yet. I want you to decide what it is, and I want you to create the system and start delegating it to your team, perhaps your front desk, if you have a virtual assistant, if you have estheticians that have open spots on their schedule, take that thing clearly communicate it. Create the step by step system and delegate little by little. All right, I want you to document. I want you to adjust based on the needs, and I want you to celebrate, because if you can do that, then you just have to build on that, little by little by little to build a systems based business. Okay, so thank you for being here with me today. Live. I hope you guys liked it live. We’ll see how it goes. I think it was fun, except for my little notification.

But other than that, it’s been really good. I appreciate you. I’m grateful for you, and I hope so much that you do this delegation, that you start to systemize for yourself, it is the key to building a systems based business that gives you the freedom that you desire, the benefit from entrepreneurship. All right, my dears, thank you so much. I appreciate you, and I’ll catch you on next week’s episode.

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