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

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

Wanting profit is not greed

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

Pay yourself before the month spends it

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

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

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

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

Watch Here

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About Your Host, Daniela Woerner

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Babysitter to Employer

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

The Shift That Changes Everything

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

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

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

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

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

When Hustle Becomes a Ceiling

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

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

The CEO Role That Isn’t Getting Done

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

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

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

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

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

Watch Here

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About Your Host, Daniela Woerner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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About Your Host, Daniela Woerner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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EP 485: Freedom Isn’t Free: A Memorial Day Reflection on Why Building Your Business Is an Act of Gratitude
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  • 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?

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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 470: From Burnout to Balance: Why Your Spa Business Needs More Feminine Energy (with Dr. Neeta Bhushan)
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  • business, inspiration, leadership

The Leadership Shift Every Spa Owner Needs: From Hustle to Heart

If you’re in treatment rooms four days a week, checking Slack before your feet hit the floor, and leading team meetings with frantic energy, this episode is your permission slip to pause.

Dr. Neeta Bhushan joins me to talk about something most spa owners don’t realize is sabotaging their leadership: leading exclusively from masculine energy. And before you think this is about being “soft” or “less driven,” let me be clear. This conversation is about becoming a more effective leader, making better decisions, and building a team culture that actually thrives.

Why Masculine Energy Alone Isn’t Sustainable

Most of us started our businesses leading with pure hustle. Go mode. Do mode. Get it done mode. It’s the energy that helps you open the doors, book the clients, and push through the hard days.

But here’s what happens when you never shift out of that gear: you walk into your spa with chaotic energy, you react to problems instead of responding strategically, and your team feels the stress radiating from you before you even speak.

Neeta describes it perfectly when she talks about the frenetic energy of thinking, “If I don’t get everything done, I’m behind.” That constant state of urgency? It’s not leadership. It’s survival mode.

And your business can’t scale when you’re leading from survival.

The Five-Minute Ritual That Changes Everything

One of the most practical takeaways from this conversation is Neeta’s approach to nervous system regulation through ritual. Not hour-long meditations or complicated routines, but five minutes with intention.

For Neeta, it’s chai. For you, it might be something else. But the concept is universal: before you dive into the chaos, can you create a moment to ground yourself?

When you lead from a grounded place instead of a stressed place, everything shifts. Your tone with your team. Your ability to problem-solve. Your capacity to think strategically instead of reactively.

The feminine energy Neeta talks about isn’t about being less productive. It’s about being more present, more intentional, and more effective in everything you do.

What This Looks Like in Your Spa

Neeta shares practical examples that any spa owner can implement immediately. Dance parties before team meetings. Taking five minutes for yourself before opening the schedule. Creating rituals that signal to your nervous system: we’re okay, we can slow down, we can lead from clarity.

And here’s the thing—when you model this for your team, you give them permission to do the same. You create a culture where people aren’t just surviving their shifts but actually showing up grounded and ready to serve clients well.

Why This Matters for Women in Their 40s and Beyond

If you’re navigating perimenopause, dealing with hormone shifts, or noticing that your energy isn’t what it used to be, this conversation also addresses the reality of leading a spa business while managing your own health.

Neeta talks about the importance of being keenly aware of what you’re putting into your body, how you’re managing stress, and what rituals support your nervous system during this season. It’s not just woo-woo wellness talk. It’s strategic self-care that directly impacts your ability to lead, make decisions, and show up as the CEO your business needs.

The Invitation

This episode isn’t about adding more to your plate. It’s about giving yourself permission to pause, to lead from a grounded place, and to recognize that the most powerful thing you can do for your business is regulate your own nervous system first.

Because when you’re grounded, your team feels it. Your clients feel it. And your business benefits from it.

Tune in to hear the full conversation with Neeta, including her journey from cosmetic dentist to founder, the story behind Chai Tonics, and why rituals are the secret weapon of effective spa leaders.

Resources Mentioned in Episode #470: From Burnout to Balance: Why Your Spa Business Needs More Feminine Energy (with Dr. Neeta Bhushan)

  • Chai Tonics 
  • Dr. Neeta Bhushan on Instagram 
  • Neeta’s Podcast
  • That Sucked. Now What? (Neeta’s book)

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, and welcome to another episode of the Spa Marketing Made Easy Podcast. My name is Daniela, and if you’re new here, I want to welcome you to our community. We talk a lot about marketing systems, operations, leadership and entrepreneurship, but a big piece of success in all of these areas, the thread that ties everything together is personal development. It’s taking good care of yourself so that you can show up as the best version of yourself. You don’t want to operate your company from an overworked and overwhelmed space. If you’re doing that, you can’t think clearly. You react to situations rather than responding to them. Instead, you want to lead your company and your team towards the directions of the goals that you have set for yourself.

You don’t want to get stuck in this like hamster wheel cycle that happens when you don’t take good care of yourself when you don’t show up as the best version of what you are truly capable of. And that conversation how you do that, that’s exactly why I invited back one of my favorite humans, dr, Neeta Bhushan. Neeta and I were in a pure form to mastermind several years ago. We became close during that year, and we’ve stayed in touch since. And I invited her on to talk about self care, to talk about rituals, to talk about pausing, and how to do that when you’re a busy working mom and or entrepreneur wearing every single hat in the business. So I’m going to go ahead and read her bio, and then we will jump right into the interview. Dr Neeta Bhushan is a TEDx speaker, former cosmetic dentist and a world renowned emotional health advocate. She’s the author of multiple best selling books, including her five time award winning title that sucked now, what endorsed by Jay Shetty as the founder of the global grit institute dedicated to helping people reframe life’s toughest moments, and the Dharma coaching institute a leading organization training coaches and becoming the highest version of themselves. Neeta is a transformative force in personal development. Neeta has shared her thought leadership on grit, resilience and emotional well being on international stages and as the host of her top rated podcast, the brave table, her expertise has been featured in Forbes, ABC, NBC, CBS, Grazia, ok magazine, Verve magazine, and toddler after realizing how unfulfilled she felt running her multi million dollar dental practice, NIA embarked on a life changing journey across 45 countries, studying the intersection of human behavior, ancient wisdom, Eastern philosophy and therapeutic psychology. This deep exploration combined with her personal experiences of overcoming adversity, including being orphaned at a young age, surviving an abusive marriage and navigating profound loss, has shaped the powerful message of resilience that she shares with the world today. Neeta lives in Dubai with her husband and two children. She’s an incredible human. She’s one of my favorite humans, and I hope that you enjoy this interview with her. All right. Miss Neeta, welcome back to the spa marketing Made Easy Podcast. I’m so excited to see you. I’m so excited to have you here, and I just loved our pre show conversation, and I wish I would have recorded that. But this episode, I really wanted to bring you in, because for me, when I look at you, we’ve known each other. We’ve been in each other’s world for a couple years now, I don’t know, maybe five years now, yeah, today, the day that we’re recording, it marks three years of that suck. Now, what of my book? So really, yes, and when you came, you came to the launch. So it is so crazy three years.

There’s all these different chapters that we have in life as humans, as women, and you know, you like where I was going is you started with a as a cosmetic dentist. You were in the esthetic space you moved into coaching. You then became an author, as we talked about, that sucked. Now, what? Which, by the way, I gave my mom the book for Christmas, and she’s like, listening to it on Audible, like, on audio, and she’s like, Oh, this lady isn’t I was like, that’s one of my good friends. And she’s like, she is so good. So I was like, Oh, I’m gonna make sure that I tell her that. Thanks, Auntie.

But you have now moved into I was so proud of myself that I got the chai talk. Oh, my goodness, I have them here both. Of them, I’ve got my Chai here, and for me, this is my moon cup, yes, because it’s my reminder to stay focused on the feminine. But you created this company that it’s not just Chai. I mean, Chai is so much of who you are and what. Like, every time I would come to your house, we would make Chai. That was like, what we would do, we would have the rose petals. It was like this whole vibe that I loved so much. It was a whole ritual. It was a ritual, yeah, and I think it’s, it’s kind of, I mean, in the, you know, in the traditional Ayurvedic culture, Indian culture, anything that we do as a ritual, you know, and obviously, when you and the whole idea for rose petals, or any sort of intention behind what you’re doing is, you know, the adornment is the intention of, okay, how? What am I going to fill my cup with, literally? Is it going to be positive words or a mantra, or something that, really, you know, speaks to me in the in the way that I need it for it to land for me today, and it’s only for me, not for you, not for anybody else. But what does it mean to you, particularly for, you know, the time of the month that you’re doing this for, or just the seasonality of where life is. And I think that, you know, these types of things, rituals and times and moments in our life can be so sacred. And for me, this was a sacred homecoming for many, many years since, you know, obviously, as you know, I lost my parents when I was young, and the one thing that kept me really just coming back home to myself was a ritual of chai. And then, of course, in the throes of early motherhood, when I wrote my book, that sucked. Now, what the only thing that could keep me sane during all the craziness of, you know, motherhood, you know, serial entrepreneurship, writing a book, all of these things, moving, you know, cross country, to a different home, in a different city, in a different state, and then, of course, doing it, not even cross country, not moving across the world, subcontinent, continents. I think, because we just did that a year ago, and we’ll get into that a little bit, it has always come back to the ritual, you know. And I think so many people talk about their meditation rituals and, you know, going to the gym, all of these things.

But what if you don’t have that time because you are super busy and you have things going on. It’s not even super busy. It’s like there is something that you can only understand, the chaos of the mornings. Wonderful chaos, the best chaos, but the chaos of the mornings when you have small children like you, if there’s so many things, anything can happen. Anything can happen between six and 8am and so, and all of it can happen between six and eight. So you never know. And so the idea of, like, I’m going to meditate and I’m going to cold plunge and I’m going to exercise and I’m going to do all these things you could get pooped on or vomited on, or like, God knows what, and it’s all just totally normal, totally normal. And you’re just like, I’m gonna roll with the punches. But you know what? You know what they cannot take away from you.

You can not, yeah, and you can have your chai and, and here’s the thing, you know, the reason why I think I’ve always been a health nut as well as you know, I mean, obviously, you know, losing both of my parents to cancer, losing my brother to, you know, an asthma attack, I think that I was just primed from a young age to just say, Okay, what is going into my body? And I’ve, I’ve been so, I think, well, and being a doctor too, like that, well, and then adding on to the mix of just like, add on, add on, add on. You know, you can’t take the girl away from from her medical training. So, I mean, I wanted something that was going to feel good in our bodies, in our nervous systems and and that was kind of the place that I arrived at even writing the book, and, you know, getting burnt out from the book, doing 200 plus, you know, interviews for the book, doing a whole book tour in several different cities. I mean, it was a beautiful time. And of course, the book reached, you know, 10s of 1000s of people. And but you know, at the end of it, I was burnt out. And, you know, we can talk a little bit about just the the idea of burnout and how badly I needed ritual for myself. And while chai and the making of the chai, the sacred moment of the five to 10 minutes, you know, even if the kids are screaming in the background, I always had.

That was my meditation. And I know some people have their ritual of coffee, you know, the aroma, smelling it. And of course, in the ancient cultures, of the Japanese cultures, of the Chinese cultures, the Indian cultures, they all have this reverence to a tea ceremony, which is, you know, this metaphor of, you know you’re, you’re brewing the hot water, you’re steeping the tea. You’re, crushing the herbs, you’re pouring it in a cup. I know we don’t have that much time, obviously, because a lot of us do have so many things, but I wanted to make it sacred. Okay, how do we do this without getting all of these things? But this is a metaphor to take five minutes out of our day to have something, and I kind of call it an upgraded Chai, because it has all the adaptogens, and the one that you know you’re drinking has its focus flow. So it has lion’s mane. It has Brahmi for mental clarity. Lion’s Mane, obviously, is a neurotropic supports, you know, neuroplasticity, as well as saffron for mood, which obviously there’s so many studies for and then it actually tastes like Chai, and it’s vegan and it’s only one gram of sugar. So I’ve taken out all of you know, kind of the messiness and the grunt work, and I wanted to make it super easy for women to literally come back home to herself, so that she can carve out that five minutes or 10 minutes to just pause and reset her nervous system and pour back into her before she goes on with her day.

I think it’s such an important conversation to have for women who identify as kind of leading with the masculine when you’re that type A personality, when you are like, go getter, hustle like you want all the things, and you’re smart and focused and committed, and you have all of this.

But it’s so it wasn’t until, I think it was when I turned 40 that I really started to become aware of the feminine and the masculine, and like, how I had been leading up to my up to 40 with only masculine, so I was, like, severely out of balance. And it’s my natural state to be like, something needs done. Like, I’m gonna go, just do it. I’m not gonna, you know, like, I figure it out, and I like that about myself, but I also know that, like, everything needs to be in balance, and there’s beauty in being able to receive and there’s beauty in just knowing, like, I Think it impacts our leadership in our companies, how we engage with our team, and so for someone who leads with masculine creating, it’s not like you have to become a different person, but just like you’re saying, you create these times and spaces for you to actually pause and reset the nervous system, because if you do wake up, grab your phone, start checking, Slack, go.

You know you’re running downstairs, there’s, you know, kids running around everywhere. You’re going to lead into the start of your work day with like chaotic energy or stressed energy, instead of coming from a grounded place, your default is going to be, like, if a problem comes up, you’re going to be in, like, grumpy or angry, or, Why did this happen, instead of trying to understand the bigger picture and be able to solve that problem in a better way? Oh, 100% and I feel like you’ve just kind of, you know, hit the nail on the head when, when you’re sharing about the grounded energy. And I think it’s so easy for us to just kind of be in go mode, because the masculine energy is the Go mode, is the doing mode, is the let’s get it done mode. And it’s like, okay, let’s, let’s slay the day. Whereas the feminine energy is more so this, you know, it’s the soft power, it’s the it’s the being. It’s the, you know, kind of observing and just being present and seeing, okay, what? What else can I create? And, you know, it kind of is reflected in taking that pause. Well, if we’re leading with our masculine we forget to take that pause, because we think, okay, if I don’t get all of these things done, if I don’t do everything that’s on my to do list, then I’m going to be behind. I’m not going to, you know, be able to serve my team, etc, etc. And it’s this frenetic energy, you know, for lack of a better word, of this, like angst and anxiety, that’s like leading the day, versus Okay, I’m gonna have, you know, I know you love the rose ritual. I’m gonna have the rose ritual. And it is this feminine. I call it the nervous system reset in a cup, because it’s so beautiful. It’s pink, it’s floral, it’s, you know, it’s, obviously, it just reminds me when I’m leaning in. Masculine, especially in the middle of the day when I don’t want heavy caffeine.

This has, you know, green tea. It has all of the adaptogens in it that really supports calm and just taking a rest in our day. However, it’s also that kind of time where you’re like, Okay, I am going to pause and remember that I can actually be for five minutes and then I can go and slay the rest of my day. And to your point, can we remind ourselves to actually lead with our feminine and how much better our team members and our families can benefit because of that? So tell me about that journey with you of learning how to lead with your feminine when you know, from the like dental era to the coach era to the book era to now. I mean, like I feel like, as we age, we just get better and better. I love a woman in their 50s. They’re like, my muse right now. I love women in their 50s too. I’m like, Oh my gosh, you’re my spirit animal. You know? I think there is this, there is this idea of, you know, I I have so much more reverence for spaciousness and time. And, you know, I think there’s this discerning factor of, okay, what’s, what gets to be on my plate, and what, what doesn’t, I think, as someone for myself who’s always led in her masculine and, you know, it hasn’t been until having children and multiple to really say, okay, and that’s one of the reasons why I wrote the book. And of course, from that really birthed this idea of becoming a you know founder, again, in a full CPG, you know, consumer product, good business that’s completely different than, you know, starting a coaching enterprise, a coaching institute, you know, Coach Training, business, altogether, speaking, etc, writing. And, you know, I think, though, to challenge yourself and to try, you know what I mean, like if you just keep doing the same thing that you’re good at over and over, like your brain, you’re not like building those brain muscles. I think it’s amazing You’re so right. I, you know, I recently spoke to a VC, and he’s like, Neeta, with all the things you did.

And hopefully this adds value to, you know, whoever needs to hear this today. But, you know, sometimes being a multi hyphenate, it’s, it’s, he was saying that you’re actually a builder, and that’s just who you’ve always been. You’re, you’re a builder. And then you take it to a certain point. And because he’s a VC, and he invests in a lot of these, you know, startups, and early stage startups, that there are certain founders who they take it to a certain point, and then they hand it off to, you know, the team that manages it and runs it until they want to exit. And so it’s interesting, because for me, I get really excited about projects, and that really fuel me. And then, and I’m in this build mode, and this going mode. So it’s very much in the masculine. And so to your point, your question of, how have you been able to manage the feminine? Honestly, in my early we were talking about early, early, early back, way back when, you know, before kids, and when you’re in your 20s and early 30s. I was just, you know, in the Go, go, go. And I think it’s taken many iterations of being burnt out, you know, health scares or health situations, obviously, you know, and recognizing that you know what my my nervous system needs more prioritization, and so I think becoming smarter and more wise in my 40s, it’s a whole new game, because now I was just sharing with another group that I was speaking with today, I have my playlist of of the songs that really turn me up out on whether it’s my 90s Hip Hop playlist, whether it’s I have an amazing 90s Hip Hop playlist, whether it’s a Michael Jackson, whether it’s Whitney, Houston, I don’t care, you know, some EDM, whatever it is, I will just turn it on. And if I’m having a slump in the day, especially with my Chai, I will have it and I will sip it, and it will be the most loaded dance party.

It’s a kitchen dance party. It’s a kitchen dance party. And you dance parties are the ultimate mood lifter. Ultimately, they are the best. And you know, I’ve done it with my teams, and it’s great. And if we’re having a team meeting. And you know, I challenge this to whomever has not had a dance party on their team meeting. Just start the call with a song. I guarantee you everyone and play the song for the three minutes, the full three minutes, and dance it up and do what you got to do. But I guarantee you the mood of your team meetings will fully change. You will fully shift. The energy will fully shift. And because you are more in your feminine and, and because we’ve dropped into our heart, or because we’ve gotten, you know, we’ve got the energy shaken up in our bodies, oh, we’re coming more from a grounded place than more from this, like logical headspace and, and it just, it just shifts the energy. So I am such a big believer that if you can, I highly recommend carving out those spaces where you can add more of, you know, the feminine side. So it’s, it’s adding things like dance. I there was a time where I put a you know, pole in my in my garage.

I remember, because I wanted to, and this was not for anybody else but myself. This was for me to get more into my feminine. And then I realized that pole dancing is actually not feminine, because you have to, like, you have to be very strong, yeah.

I mean, it’s a huge workout. Masculine, I want to do belly dancing. Have you ever done belly dancing, right? Of course. Oh, yeah, oh, of course. It’s, that’s like, my next. That’s my next. You know, adventure is belly dancing. Oh yes, I think, I think that’s a okay, you and I both. That would be great. So tell me what your vision or your focus is as you’re building Chai tonics like, what is the, you know, when we’re looking at coaching or when we’re looking at, you know, business education, being an author, these different types of things, there’s a very clear focus or message or mission that you’re trying to accomplish. And this is a completely different business model. So going into this, how are you thinking about, like, the impact that you wanted to make for the end user?

Yeah, well, you know, first and foremost, this is, this is your chai, but upgraded, you know, I wanted to not necessarily compete with Starbucks, I feel like, but everybody knows, you know, Chai or Chai lattes, and there hasn’t been something that is, you know, not the sugary, syrupy that are sort of guys that are, yeah, it’s so sweet. It’s so sweet. And it’s funny, because we pulled in our pre launch, we pulled about 500 people on, you know, what kind, what kind of chai they like, and not just people from the diaspora, like everybody, like whoever drinks Chai, like why they like Chai or why they don’t. And there were a lot of people who said, I don’t like Chai because I’ve tried it and it’s so sweet, and I’m like, okay, that’s just not Chai. You have not tried Chai. If it’s like a cinnamon, sugary, syrupy bomb, it’s just that’s just not Chai. And so I wanted something where, of course, you have all the grounded spices, like the cinnamon, the cardamom, the ginger, the fennel, which is great for digestion, it’s great for, you know, Ayurveda has been around for 5000 years. It’s the oldest science, and it supports our nervous system, it supports our gut, it supports our glow. So I wanted to be able to use that. But also, you know, the main mission is to teach women in every season and stage an era of her to come back home to herself, to come back home to a ritual and a ritual that’s easy, a ritual that’s great for you, a ritual that reminds you that it’s a hug and a cup, a ritual that takes five minutes. So yes, to you know all of the things that’s really holistic, wholesome and great for not just you, your body and your nervous system. It’s vegan, you know, it’s powered by coconut milk. The focus flow has MCT oil, so it’s great for brain fuel. So not only did I want to make a really amazing, beautiful, holistic, clean, you know, product without any of the artificial ingredients and or any natural, quote, unquote, natural flavorings that has endocrine disruptors in it. But I wanted to make something where it is a ritual to come home to ourselves, because in this day and age where we are, we have so many things on our plate where there’s just all of the to do’s, can we actually give women permission to pause, and that is my mission. I feel like it’s always been that underlying mission with everything in the through line and all my work is to, you know, obviously I love bringing people together. I’ve been doing live events in every single aspect of my life in the last decade of doing, you know, coaching and. Writing and Speaking, and that’s the beauty. I mean, you, you’ve come you’ve stayed at our home, you’ve seen kind of just, you know, the gatherings. And I wanted to make this in a way, Chai as a way to have that circle with other women, you know, whether it’s in your own home, whether it’s with your team, but also as a way to connect with other people. Because, you know, that’s that’s the human element, right there.

One of my favorite things to do whenever I’m on a trip with another woman, and we’ve done this before, is the walk and talk, right? Like you go for your morning walk, and I feel like the best conversations happen during the walk and talk, and if you’re not in a like, the other time that the best conversations happen is when you’re having a chai or having a like, let’s have a coffee, or let’s and with we bought a farm. I don’t think I told or did I message you, yeah, we bought a farm.

You bought a farm. Oh my gosh, I’ll tell you about that after but Christy on my team, her family came down to the farm, and our kids are great friends, and I adore her and her husband, you know, on a personal level as well. And my favorite moment from that whole weekend was 20 minutes that she and I got to have some alone time. We sat on the porch, we were overlooking the water, and we just had the chai. And it was like such a deep, connective moment. It was the rose ritual. I put the rose things on the top. She loved it. That was the reason that I got the idea to get everybody the chai as a as a gift, to pause and have those moments, those because we don’t have them as much, you know, because women are working or we’re you know, a lot I know, I’m sure this is the case for you, but a lot of my deepest, closest friendships are not in close proximity, right? Yeah. And so I have women that I’m in in, you know, deep friendship with, but I only see them once or twice a year, right? And so when you get that 20 minutes to actually sit with them and have those conversations, and feel seen and see them. It’s such a connection point that is so so vital. And I know for me, coffee is my ritual in the morning, but I got rid of the afternoon coffee, and I’m drinking this. And for me it’s so important like again, turning 45 this year. I think anybody in their 40s, if you’re dealing with perimenopause, or any of those types of things like you really have to be aware of your sleep, your exercise, what you’re putting into your body. I feel the best I’ve ever felt and but I’m also, like, keenly aware of the foods that I’m eating, the exercise, the like, extremely limited alcohol, which are all like, that’s what works for me. And figuring that out, you know, no and actually, because you’re loving the rose ritual. I mean, Rose ritual has shit over in it, which is really supportive for postpartum. It’s great for pregnancy. It’s great for fertility, and it’s also great for perimenopause and menopause, because they the the Ayurvedic herb Shatavari is great for just women’s hormones in general, and so. And then it also has holy basil, which is like the anchor of if you go to anybody’s house in India, they will always have a Tulsi, or holy basil plant, just from a spiritual aspect. It literally grounds the energy of the home. And so we put that in the Rose ritual to help ground the energy of you. So it’s no wonder that you are going to have this grounded, sustained energy. Rhodiola is also great because it, while it’s activating, it gives you that you know kind of sustained energy. So you can have it in the middle of the day without having this like crazy crash. It’s not going to keep you up at night. So yeah, it’s a nice little it’s a nice little treat.

I have a question, as a non Indian person, isn’t Chai

just the Indian word for tea, or is there something that’s different, because there’s so many different types of teas. Yeah, like, but when I think of chai, I think of this like a particular drink. But isn’t it all tea? Please educate Yes.

So when you say chai tea, okay, so this is we’re gonna school. Everyone. We cannot say chai tea, because it’s just Titi in you would just be saying Titi. But for any, any, for anybody from the diaspora, traditional Chai, and there’s different names for Chai, you know, there’s karak chai, there’s, there’s all different kinds other Chai, which is Ginger Chai, elaichi Chai, which is cardamom Chai. And so you’re absolutely right, it just means tea. But when we’re thinking just the word Chai, of course, it’s always associated with a lot of the the herbs and spices. And you know, I like to call it the upgraded Chai, because it’s obviously with adaptogen superfoods that really support our nervous systems and, you know, our focus and our energy, but, but yeah, so I’m glad everybody is getting a masterclass on Chai. Thank you.

All right, so for our listeners that want to learn more about Chai tonics. Want to follow. You want to follow the brand. Where can we send them? Yes.

So if you are curious, definitely try tonics. You can follow our journey along. If you would like to carry it. At the spa, we have a wholesale deal at Fair, which is F, A, I, R, E out there we know all Yeah, on fair. A lot of spot people love our products on fair, and so you can get wholesale deals there, as well as try tonics.com we are on Shopify, and we are soon going to be on Amazon. So wow, that’s exciting.

Yes, thank you, Neeta. I love you. I’m so glad that for this next chapter for you in business, and it’s going to be incredible.

I’m super excited. I’m super excited. I mean, this is the whole the whole idea is to, you know, come back home to yourself in one way or another. So if I can leave anybody with, you know, whatever is going on in life, I hope you find that thing, whether it’s shy, whether it’s, you know, some sort of practice for you. I mean, it’d be great if it’s shy, but if it’s something else, just find something that you can come home to you at the end of the day.

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EP 463: From Military Leadership to Spa CEO: Ashley’s Journey to Building a Team That Actually Works
  • /
  • business, leadership

The Unconventional Path to Exceptional Spa Leadership

If someone told you that military and law enforcement experience could be the secret weapon to building an incredible spa team, would you believe them?

In this episode, Daniela introduces Ashley, Addo’s newest coaching team member, whose journey from putting mud on her skin as a child to leading a successful spa business is as unconventional as it is instructive. And if you’ve been struggling with hiring, team turnover, or feeling like you’re the only person who can do things right in your business, this conversation is going to shift your entire perspective.

Because here’s what Ashley understands that most spa owners don’t: building a great team isn’t about finding perfect people. It’s about knowing exactly who you’re looking for, communicating clear expectations, and having the courage to protect your team culture at all costs.

When Your Comfort Zone Becomes Your Prison

Ashley’s story starts in an unexpected place. As a child, she would sit in the mud, cover her body, let it dry, and then buff it off, telling her mom how soft it made her skin. Neither of them realized she was essentially exfoliating and experimenting with skincare treatments.

Fast forward through military deployment where she showed up with an entire bag of skincare products, then into law enforcement where she was constantly advising people on their skin, and you start to see a pattern. But it took her husband sitting her down during a particularly dark career period to say the words that changed everything: “You either need to go back into law enforcement, or you need to find something else. You should go into skincare.”

The idea had never occurred to her. Like so many of us, she was taught you go to college, get a degree, and then get a job. The concept that you could actually have a career in a spa, that this could be your profession, was completely foreign. But within weeks, she was enrolled in aesthetics school, determined to work for a doctor or med spa.

She had no intention of running her own business. And yet, here she is, having built a thriving spa with a team that’s been together for years, and now coaching other spa owners on how to do the same.

The Accidental Entrepreneur Who Wasn’t So Accidental

What Ashley discovered when she started working in med spas is something many of you have probably experienced: she wanted things done a certain way. She wanted every client to feel seen and heard. She had standards that weren’t being met in the places where she worked.

She was an accidental entrepreneur, except she really wasn’t. Because at her core, she’s a leader. She takes everything seriously, not in a rigid way, but in a “this matters and we’re going to do it right” kind of way. That’s who she is.

So she started as a solo aesthetician in a tiny room. Then moved to solo salon suites and kept growing. Eventually, she was maxed out at capacity with a waitlist that nobody would leave. And she faced the choice every successful solo faces: stay comfortable at this level, or take the risk of building a team.

The Team That Actually Stayed

Here’s where Ashley’s story diverges from what we typically hear. Her very first hire, her assistant who became her spa manager, is still with her today. Megan went through Addo’s Spa Manager Certification program and is now leading the team. This is her unicorn, her ride or die.

Now, that doesn’t mean every hire has been perfect. Ashley is quick to clarify that she’s had team members who weren’t the right fit. But here’s the critical difference: she learned early how to identify misalignment, communicate clearly, and protect her team culture.

And much of that comes from her background in military and law enforcement, where leadership principles are taught tangibly. Accountability is clear. Expectations are communicated directly. There’s no room for blaming others or making excuses. You know what’s expected, and you’re held to that standard.

The Ideal Employee Avatar You’ve Never Created

One of the most valuable concepts Ashley shares is something she calls the “ideal employee avatar.” Just like you have an ideal client avatar, you need to know exactly who your ideal team member is before you ever start interviewing.

Sit down with a notepad and brain dump everything. Who is this person? How do they show up for clients? How do they speak to leadership? Are they willing to be on social media? What are their communication styles? What are their values?

Think of it like dating. You have your musts and your absolutely nots. You need to get crystal clear on who you are as a business, your mission, everything you stand for. Then ask yourself: does this imaginary person fit?

When Ashley and her spa manager hire now, they know exactly who they’re looking for. They’ve defined this person in detail. And then during the interview process, they’re simply checking for alignment. Does this real person in front of them match the avatar they’ve created?

The Scarcity Hiring Trap

Ashley admits her biggest hiring mistake early on was hiring too quickly from a place of scarcity. And this is something Daniela sees constantly in the spa industry: owners making massive decisions from emotion instead of strategy.

You’re overwhelmed. You’re maxed out. You desperately need help. So you hire the first person who seems decent because you need the relief now.

But that’s how you end up with team members who disrupt your culture, don’t align with your values, and ultimately cause more problems than they solve.

The solution? Never make big decisions from scarcity. Take the time to get clear on who you need. Be willing to wait for the right person rather than settling for the available person. And recognize the difference between intuition and emotion when you’re making these choices.

Core Values: Not Just a Checkbox Exercise

Here’s something most spa owners do wrong: they write down their vision statement, mission statement, and core values in a notebook during some business exercise, and then they never look at them again.

But as Daniela points out, your core values aren’t a KPI you track. They’re who you are. They’re like asking what color eyes you have. You should just know.

And every time someone doesn’t work out in your company, it’s a misalignment of values. Not skills, not experience, not qualifications. Values.

So when you’re hiring, you’re not asking “Will they go on social media?” You’re asking “Are they fully committed to doing whatever it takes to provide exceptional service to the client?” And if the answer is yes, then going on social media becomes part of that commitment.

Delegation Without Losing Your Mind

One of the running jokes in Ashley’s spa is that she’s not allowed to touch the booking software. Her brain works differently, and when she gets in there, things get messy. Her spa manager handles it.

And Ashley is completely comfortable saying to her team: “That’s a Megan thing. You don’t want me in there.”

Think about that for a moment. The owner and CEO of the business openly admitting there are systems she doesn’t handle because someone else is better at them.

This is what true delegation looks like. It’s knowing your zone of genius and protecting it fiercely. It’s hiring people who are better than you at specific things and celebrating that fact instead of feeling threatened by it.

Ashley has one esthetician on her team who is their bookworm, their science girl. When they’re considering new product lines, Ashley does the initial research to make sure it aligns with their values and goals. Then she hands it to this team member and says, “Here’s what I’m thinking. Give me the green light.”

She’s empowering her team to excel in their zones of genius while she focuses on hers.

What This Means for Your Business

If you’re stuck in the treatment room as the primary revenue generator, if you’re afraid to hire because you’ve been burned before, if you’re exhausted from doing everything yourself because “it’s just easier,” this episode offers a different path forward.

Building a strong team isn’t about luck. It’s not about finding unicorns. It’s about knowing exactly who you’re looking for, communicating clear expectations, hiring from strategy instead of scarcity, and being willing to protect your team culture even when it’s uncomfortable.

Ashley’s journey from military leadership to spa CEO proves that the skills you need to build an exceptional team can be learned. And now, as part of Addo’s coaching staff, she’s helping spa owners develop those exact leadership capabilities.

Your business will only grow as much as you’re willing to grow as a leader. And that growth starts with getting honest about what you need, who you need, and what you’re willing to do 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

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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, Ashley, welcome to the Spa Marketing Made Easy podcast. This is the first Hey, we have tried to get you on this show before. Yes, and you said

No, because it was a little bit of nerves, little

bit of nerves. But now I’m so thrilled that we’re actually introducing you as a member of our team, and I feel like that was just in the cards. You know, we’ve worked together for years, and there’s always people that you just have, like, a connection with. And I feel like we always had that from the beginning. You the very first time I remember us working together. Was the RA day we did a revenue accelerator. It was like, online, four hours getting into it. And I still remember, I was like, Oh, I really like this girl. I was like, these are fun when, like, when you get amazing people, it’s like, that just feels so fast, like the time goes so fast, and so we have kind of worked together and grown together for several years, and now we’re in this, like next stage, or next phase of our relationship, where you worked yourself out of your spa, You know, you’ve got an incredible team doing great things, and you were ready to kind of take on a new opportunity and challenge, and so we invited you on to our coaching staff, and I really wanted to use this opportunity to just kind of share with the rest of our community your story, what You’re about, and let them get to know you as you know as I know you. So welcome. And, yeah, where do you want to start? Like, let’s start. Like, how did you get into this industry in the first place? Like, let’s start there. Because you have a really interesting path that I mean, you’re not the only one with military and law enforcement experience. Like, it’s surprising, but there are, like, a handful of them out there. But, like, how did you start with a path like that? That’s, you know, very kind of law enforcement and military are aligned, right? Oh, yeah. But then you went into spa

like, yeah, it’s a, it’s a very interesting story. So a part of my past and my story I didn’t even realize was in the making most of my life, until as I’ve become a little more in tune with myself that it was, it was always, it was always there. So we there’s this, there’s this time that where my mom used to say, what are you doing out in the yard? What are you doing out in the yard? And I would be sitting out in the mud, and I would be putting it all over my body and letting it dry, and then I would, like, buff it off. And I would tell her, I’m like, it makes my skin so soft. It makes my skin so soft. And neither one of us clicked, you know what I was doing? And so, you know, I laugh about it now, because I’m like, I was exfoliating. And I would tell everybody, like, put mud up. Put mud on your body. And then fast forward to the military. I’ve always been very patriotic. It was just part of something I really wanted to do, but I still definitely had that girly side to me. And I was randomly deployed, like unexpectedly turned into a very long deployment, and I had just gotten to my command, so I had no idea what I was doing, and I’m walking, I was in a squadron, but I’m walking up to this to my carrier to get on, and I had these massive bags.

This is like a core memory for me, and I could hear people in the background saying, Where does she think she’s going with all this stuff? And I had like an entire bag of skincare with me, again, like I’m not knowing the ship or the ship, and we have like, these really tiny little compartments, and, you know, there’s one in the middle that’s huge, and that was, like, all my skincare and makeup, and so it just the whole time there I was always, you know, that girl, I was very I did all my things, but I like to take care of myself. And then I went into law enforcement. Same thing. I was telling people what to do with their skin, all the things. Fast forward, we ended up moving to Washington State, and I was going to Laurel to be a police officer here, and I just decided we wanted to start a family. I wasn’t sure if that’s kind of what I wanted to do. And I tried another career path, and it was awful. People I knew were doing it, succeeding, doing amazing things. And I thought, like this cool, I want to do this. And it just became a really awful time in my life, a very dark time. And my husband sat me down, and he said, you either need to go back into law enforcement or you need to find something else, because I want my happy. Wife back, and so I was like, I don’t know what to do. And he said, You should go into skincare like, God knows, you spend all our money there, and you’re constantly telling people what to do with their skin. And I don’t think I realized at that moment that that was a fork in the road for me, but I

did, you even know about that? Because I felt like, for me, I was always taught, like, you go to college and then you get a job, like, that’s what you did. And I went to college, I graduated. I did, you know, the four years I took five years, but took five years and then, like, within months of graduating, I enrolled in esthetic school.

Yeah, I had no idea either that it was like a thing, yeah? I was like, you

can actually have a job that you’re in a spa all day, like, that’s your job?

Yeah, I got treatment. So I don’t know where the disconnect of like that is a job came from. But no, I went to the military. I was in law enforcement. I have my four year degree. I’m very type a very driven, and I just It never occurred to me until my husband, who knows me better than anyone, was like, This is what I think you should do, or go back into law enforcement, because I did enjoy it, and I searched out the best schools. I was enrolled a week or two later, and went, got my Master’s static license, and I told myself, I want to either work for a doctor or in a med spa. I did not want to run my own business, and I went and worked in the med spas, did all the things. And I realized that I think I actually wanted to do this. I think I was an accidental entrepreneur, but it was, it’s who I am at my core, because I take everything so serious, not seriously in a bad way. But I want it. I want it to go a certain way. I want everyone to feel very seen, very heard. And I just started as a solo esthetician and just a tiny little room, and grew, and then I did a solo salon suites and kept growing. And I was I was maxed out. I was at capacity. And it was either okay, this is where I am and this is who I’m going to do, or I’m going to grow a team. And I had my assistant at the time, and we we kept trying to get people off the waitlist, the wait list, and nobody would leave. And so I was like, Okay, I want to impact more people, and I love a team. I like being surrounded by other people. And so that’s what I did.

So what year was it that you started your spa?

So I my brick and mortar. We opened in 2021 so right after covid,

that was you as a solo, or that was your build out for your

build out. That was my build out, yep. And I was a solo in 2017

2018 Okay, and so you did the solo thing for quite a while before you really started getting into the build out. And when you did the build out is that when you hired your staff? Yes.

So I had my assistant, who’s now my spa manager, and she’s she’s been with me, my ride or die, my unicorn, for a very long time. She’s actually been through the spa manager training with Addo, and so now she’s a spa manager, but she was my very first hire.

Wow, that is not something that you hear every single day, because I will often teach, because I want to normalize it that, like building a team is hard, and that’s where, you know, I see a lot of solos will get up to that, like 25 to 35,000 mark, and they get stuck because they’re the primary revenue generator. They’re the one in the room doing everything. They’re not willing to hire a spa manager yet because they don’t feel that they’re ready. And they get stuck at that $30,000 mark. But it’s this like catch 22 because they don’t have the systems in place to slowly get them out of the room and slowly hire an onboard staff. They’re not going to hire other people. And so we see so many people get stuck. So when they do hire a lot of times, their team will turn over 234, times because they don’t know how to lead. They don’t know what they need. They don’t know, you know, women, the majority of us are people pleasers. The majority of us don’t know how to clearly communicate in a leadership position. You know what the expectations are in a role, and that’s something that is a skill to learn. So the fact that Megan’s been with you like. From the beginning, for so many years, you have obviously, like an internal leadership quality. But I, I would argue, and I think you would agree, that, like obviously military and law enforcement, there’s a lot of leadership.

That’s it. There is, and I was a supervisor and leader in the military, and then obviously led in certain aspects in law enforcement. I think it’s just, it’s just what we do and who we are.

I i will never forget when I first read Extreme Ownership, and I was like, Oh my gosh, this is the most amazing. You know? I’m like, they’re giving, like, tangible things that are, like, leadership principles, and it makes so much sense. And I like, I bought the tickets. I went to muster, which is the conference that Jocko and Leif put on. I brought Kyle with me. I’m like, Kyle, you’re gonna love this. This is gonna be so amazing. And we go to the conference and they’re going through essentially the principles. And he’s like, Yeah, I mean, this is what I’ve been taught for the past 21 years. And I was like, what

you’re holding out on secrets? I was like, Why? Why is this? And he’s like, Yeah, we hear this all day every day for the past

21 years. And I was like, Okay, great. Well, I haven’t, because I was never in the military, but it’s they do a good job of teaching tangible leadership principles, because leadership is kind of a squishy skill to teach, right?

It really is. And also, I will say too, it’s, it’s taught me how to hold people accountable and clearly communicate to people my expectations and how to make them the best version of themselves through my communication. And that was something that I did learn in the military, because we we knew what was expected, and in law enforcement, we had accountability in our role. We didn’t get to, you know, blame it on somebody else, or or anything like that. It was, there was clear expectations. And I think that’s really helped too, as we’ve as we’ve grown

So 2021 you do your build out brick and mortar, hire your staff, go through the kind of post covid Boom and all that fun stuff. What was your greatest like? What were you the most proud of between the you know, over the past four years, five years that you’ve gone through

that, I think what I honestly, what I’m most proud of is my team. A lot of things that I do here in our communities in Addo is, is there is that fear of hiring, or there is, I’ve hired the wrong person and now what, and it’s either the now what, or it’s the I’m never going to do that again. And I think to fully understand it’s okay to figure yourself out and to figure out your team, and it’s a small business, we’re allowed to have the team that we want to have. And I think through interviewing and setting those expectations out, from phone interviews to the in person interview to the practical really does allow us to find who our people are, and to say that I haven’t had employees that it wasn’t a good fit, is not true. But I think in the beginning, learning and being able to communicate what we want out of our team and how to fix those challenges that are brought up to us, really, right?

I mean, it would be strange if you didn’t have some, you know, in there and and it doesn’t like, just because someone’s not a good fit for your company doesn’t mean that they’re not a good candidate. They can write an incredible person. And there’s just, like, a cultural misalignment. And I think oftentimes that can be no matter how much vetting you do. I mean, that’s why we have the 90 day probationary period, right? Because you can learn so much based on the phone interview and the in person and, you know, even the practical but it it takes really spending time and being in the same presence as somebody, see how they operate, to see what happens when challenges come up, to be able to say, You know what, they’re maybe not aligned with us, and that’s okay, you know? That’s okay.

And taking some personal ownership too, as a leader for my spa manager for for myself, is really getting to know people, their learning skills, their communication skills, and knowing that not everybody’s the same, and that’s okay, and allowing them to shine with their zone of expertise. And I think that’s really where my my team right now, is incredible. People. Everybody has their zone of expertise. Everybody communicates slightly different. We have our standards that are non negotiables, so that we’re all on the same page, but but knowing that you know, Esthetician, a spa manager, everybody communicates slightly different. And being able to show up for them how they deserve to be shown up for as well, because it is a two way street. I truly believe that we are, we’re a unit.

So tell me what your team looks like now. How many providers do you have? Versus administrative? What is the kind of overall structure of it?

So there’s me. I’m no longer in the room. I was I still do hands on training with them and guidance. And then we have four estheticians, my spa manager, my front desk, who also, one of her collateral duties is social media, so she helps me a lot with that. And then I have a VA and a medical director. Both my VA and my medical director are contractors, so they’re like the core of my team. And then, of course, when you’re thinking of like your org chart, I have my finance people, all you know, attorneys, you know outside people that were also in marketing, those kind of things.

But I call them your internal, internal advisory team, the the attorneys, the CPAs, the financial advisors. Those are all really important people that you even if they are contracted outside services, they are a part of your company. I mean, they’ve got to know intimately, like your goals and your vision.

So they’re definitely a part of the team. I mean, I wouldn’t be where I am without those people you know you’re you’re dealing with marketing coaches, your tax your financial attorneys, all those people really do make you who you are, and they can catapult you to the next level. And that’s the role of the

CEO is like knowing, hey, where am I smart and where do I need to bring in people that are smarter than me. Absolutely. We had the the kickstart accounting call, and Daniela Hayden, who’s the founder, she was like, Look, I didn’t go to school to be an aesthetician. You didn’t go to school to be a bookkeeper. So like, Why do you think that just because QuickBooks puts it there that, you know, the like, big picture strategy and and so often that’s one of the things that people are trying to do themselves, right? But there’s like, entire majors that are dedicated to like, how do I how do I bookkeep appropriately? How do I make sure that I’m doing this appropriately? So it makes sense, I believe very much in our role as CEO is to facilitate and lead a team of people that we are pouring into to be exceptional in their particular role. You know, yeah,

And that makes me. It really does just make me so happy. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs, which I feel like our community, are type A and we are so used to having our hands in everything. We started out as practitioners, and now somehow we are running a business. And I think somehow this happened to us. It happened for us, but we have to take a step back. And I’m speaking from experience of we don’t have to know everything. You know. You say it so well. It’s like we just have to know enough to be dangerous and to make sure we’re hiring the right people. And I do think once I let go of so many things and started delegating. Is my personal life changed. My anxiety levels dropped, and now it just makes me so happy to delegate and to have people in in my back pocket who that is, Arizona genius, even my estheticians, like I have one girl on my team, and she is just our bookworm. She’s our science girl. We’re getting ready to start a little series called Science Sundays, and she gets into the nitty gritty. And so now, if we are bringing on a product line, I do all the initial, you know, looking in, making sure it aligns with us, but then I bring it to her, and I’m like, Hey, here’s what I’m thinking. These are the products. I give her, the stuff, and then she is going to give me that green light. And so I think being able to know, like some people on your team, it’s okay that they’re they know more than you, and they’re better than you, and encourage it, and we’re all functioning at a different level. And that’s that’s great. It’s where the magic happens.

It was a big milestone for me, because being the type A and going, you know, like I used to feel that I had to know the answer to everything. And I was like, if I’m coaching, they’re gonna ask me, and I need to, I need to know the answer. And now. One of my greatest things is like, I have no idea what that answer is, you know, and I’m very comfortable saying that. But that took, that was, like a big milestone, to be able to have a level of comfort in what is my zone of genius and what do I have no idea about, and just be very comfortable and at peace not knowing the answer because it doesn’t make sense. That’s not where I excel, you know, whatever that thing is. And so I’m going to focus all my time and energy on the things where I do Excel. And I think that we have to get comfortable with that, and it’s it’s very uncomfortable to not know the answer. We are taught that we’re supposed to well, if I don’t know, I can find out for you. And if I don’t, and to a certain degree, yes, but it’s more as a CEO, it’s well, if I don’t know, let me find a person who that is their zone of genius. Instead of let me find out and learn the answer. It’s like, Who can I talk to about this?

Right? One of, like, an ongoing joke in my spa, and everyone knows it is, you know, Ashley is not allowed to touch the booking software. Like, I make a mess of it, and I just because my brain is just different. I’m in there, like, and so my spa manager, that is what she does. And so now the team, because very long time I’m like, you guys know that’s a Megan thing. That’s, you know, our spa manager. And now they all just know to go straight to her. And it’s like, I might be the owner, the spa CEO, but you don’t want me in this trust. This is not where you want me unless you want things to go crazy. Like I can look at it and run the reports and make sure it’s all aligned, but when I start messing around in there, you don’t want it. And so I think telling people, letting people do what they are best at, is ideal for everyone. Last year

For Christmas, Sarah got me a shirt that said, I just work here. Yeah?

Because there were so many like, things would happen in the and I was like, because Christy really is, like, she runs a lot of the show, yeah? And I was like, that’s a Christie question. I just work here.

That’s what I say. I’m like, that’s a Megan thing. I’m not sure, like, what happened with this protocol? Um, let me check with the esthetician, because, you know, I just created it. Let’s make sure it’s going okay with them.

But I to, I feel that we are so blessed to be able to be in this position. There’s a lot of people that are going to be listening and saying, but like, but there’s just no good people, or there’s just no like, what? How do we help them to get to the place where they go from maybe those not correct hires. I don’t want to say bad hires, because I really believe that there are more good people out there than bad. I think it’s we don’t have the right people in the right positions, and we’re not attracting the right people. They’re all of us started as employees somewhere right and we have grown and built these incredible businesses. And so it’s like, how do we get self aware enough to understand what we need and then be able to communicate that so that we can go on this trajectory? You know, I had someone just message me on LinkedIn, and she’s like, Where do I even start? How do I create systems? How do I and I was like, Okay, I’m gonna send you some podcast episodes, because that’s like, a big that’s a big question. It’s a big it is, but, and it’s never ending, right? Because you get to, it’s new level, new devil, right? You solve one problem, you get to a new level of business. You might be stuck at the 30,000 but then you get stuck at 50, and then you get stuck at 80, and then you get stuck at 1.5 there’s these tiers that you’re solving different things, where at 30, maybe you need a spa manager, and you need, like, actual systems in place. Right at 50, you need a sales system in place that’s a clear, ongoing, consistent lead flow. At 80, it’s team issue. Yep, right. So we’ve got these different milestones that we’re hitting, but to even get to that next one. So much of it is personal development, so much of it is having tough conversations. So much of it is doing things that make you uncomfortable and falling flat on your face like almost everything that goes wrong in my company is my fault. I.

That Taylor Swift song. I I’ve sang it a few times through the Spa. I am the problem. But I think that’s the nice thing, is I definitely tell people like, oh, that, that was me, my I’m sorry. How are we going to fix it? I Yeah, so can you repeat the question real quick on that?

Yeah, I just, I guess, I just want to know, like, what were the

like you started, how to find the right person,

yeah, how do you get into, how do you get through those different levels? Like, when you’re going through, when you are taking those risks, when you have those moments that you fall on your face, because there’s people that are again in that beginning, and they’re like, I’m getting the wrong people, and I’m stuck in this catch 22 I’m in this cycle that I’m not going so, like, I don’t know if it’s a motivation question, I don’t know if it’s a self awareness question. I don’t know if it’s a like, strategic question.

I think it’s a little bit of strategy and internal work. I think one of the biggest things that I I’ve seen people do, and my biggest mistake in the very beginning, not with Megan, but with my next hire, was I hired almost too quickly, and it was coming from a place of scarcity. And I think you should never make these really big, ginormous decisions on emotion. Now I think we have intuition, and then we have emotion, and so that, I think not making these choices on on scarcity. And then the biggest thing that we do now, that I did not do in the beginning, was really sit down and think about, who is this person, who? What? What do they their emotions like, what? How do they show up for clients? How do they speak to leadership? Are they willing to be on social media? I mean, just brain dump it in on a notepad. This role, this is who they look like. So it’s kind of like our ideal client, right? Your avatar? I think having an ideal employee avatar is a thing. That’s a thing that just came to me right now. But and then it’s kind of like when you’re dating too. You have your your must and your absolutely nots. And I think really getting clear on who you are as a business, your mission, your just everything you stand for. And does this imaginary person right now fit in with that? And then now you have that, and while you’re doing the interview process, do they align with that? Because we can ease the skill we can’t always I I protect my team. They are my family. And if I bring someone in that disrupts that, I can’t do that. So now I’m I’m very protective, and my spa manager and I have really created who is this person, and how do they show up, and then that, and that’s what we’re portraying in our job posting, when in our check in emails that were when we’re reaching out, it’s when we’re doing the phone interview. These are the things that we’re trying to just really see if we align

so on a you’re getting a little more granular, but when I look at it at that. That’s your core values as a company. So you can have core values as an individual, like, what is your own belief system? But when you’re trying to hire, you’re finding someone whose values align. It’s not like, will they go on social media? It’s, are they going? Are they fully committed to doing whatever it takes to provide exceptional service to the client, right? Like, right? And that means this, this and this. And so

it’s results for us. So what are going to get the results? And these are the things that you need to do to get results.

Yeah. So absolutely, anytime you have someone that doesn’t work in your company, it’s a misalignment of values, absolutely. And so there’s this, you know, we we learn about this in business. 101, what’s your vision statement? What’s your mission statement, what are your core values? And most people write them down and never look at them. And it’s like, you know, we never

used it was a check in the box I wrote in a notebook. I’m gonna have to look it up. I’m like, This is not a KPI. This is like, who you are, yeah? Like, What color eyes Do you have, or what it’s like a, yeah,

you should just know piece of who you are. And everybody has them, even if you don’t have them defined. Like, that’s the thing.

So, I think just finding people that align with who you are and what you want, for your clients, for your business, and not doing it out of scarcity, that’s such a great lesson, and taking high advantage of the 90 day probationary period, yes, it is doing. Having, you know, weekly check ins, having those KPIs, but setting them up for success as well. Don’t just something really important is not just hiring somebody to mandate a problem, but we actually need to pour into them for them to be successful, because at the end of the day, they’re they are an employee, and they’re here, and they need your guidance. So we can’t just expect people to come in and create miracles like we really do have to pour into them and train them.

Yes, so true. Yeah, awesome. Well, I’m so happy to introduce you to the Addo community on a bigger scale. I know so many in our growth collector community know you very well, but now in the entire adult community, welcome to the family and so happy to so happy to have you and really help those that are struggling with hiring that are struggling with team. I mean, you obviously have a ton of experience in a variety of different ways, but this is really kind of your niche that you’re focusing on, is leadership, team, development, all of those things. So we are thrilled to have you, and

I’m so happy to be here. Gonna be an awesome year.

Yes! 

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EP 462: How to Do Social Media for Your Spa (Even When You Hate It)
  • /
  • business, leadership

What If Social Media Didn’t Have to Steal Your Time?

You know you need to be on social media. You also know you don’t have the time, and honestly? You hate it.

Here’s what most spa owners don’t realize: the spa owners who are winning at social media aren’t spending hours every day creating content. They’re not glued to their phones. They’re not filming videos constantly or scrambling for caption ideas at 9 PM.

They’re using systems.

In this episode of Spa Marketing Made Easy, I’m pulling back the curtain on the exact process I use to create months of social media content in just a few hours. No overwhelm. No creative burnout. No daily scramble.

The Real Reason Social Media Feels Impossible

Let’s be honest. The algorithm demands daily posting. Your to do list is already maxed out. And coming up with fresh ideas every single day? That’s a recipe for decision fatigue and creative block.

But what if I told you there’s a way to create 48 pieces of content that cycle through your feed for months? Content that’s strategic, on brand, and specifically designed to attract your ideal clients while you focus on running your business?

That’s exactly what we’re covering in this episode.

The Four Content Categories That Change Everything

Most spa owners post randomly, hoping something sticks. But the spa owners getting real ROI from social media? They organize their content into strategic categories that work together to build trust, showcase expertise, and drive revenue.

I’m breaking down the exact four categories you need, why each one matters, and how to create 12 evergreen posts in each category that keep your brand visible without requiring you to be online every day.

The Tech Stack That Does the Heavy Lifting

Here’s where it gets interesting. The tools available right now, especially AI, have completely changed the game for busy spa owners.

In this episode, I’m sharing my complete tech stack: 

  • The scheduling platform that auto publishes your content and lets you respond to comments without ever opening Instagram 
  • The AI tools I use for copywriting that cost less than $200 per year (yes, really) 
  • The design software with AI features that create professional graphics in minutes 
  • The engagement strategy that takes 15 minutes, three times per week

Plus, I’m walking you through my exact batching process for creating content in 2 to 3 hour blocks instead of scrambling daily.

Why This Approach Actually Works

Research shows that businesses using structured content systems maintain consistent posting schedules with 73% less time spent on daily content creation. That’s not just efficiency. That’s freedom.

Freedom to focus on the CEO work that actually grows your business. Freedom to spend time with your family without your phone constantly interrupting. Freedom to take an actual vacation without your social media presence going dark.

When you have the right systems in place, social media shifts from being a daily chore to becoming a marketing asset that works for you, even when you’re with clients or taking well deserved time off.

Ready to Transform Your Social Media Strategy?

This episode is packed with actionable strategies you can implement immediately. Whether you’re starting from scratch or looking to streamline what you’re already doing, you’ll walk away with a clear roadmap for creating sustainable social media systems that don’t require you to love social media.

Tune in to discover exactly how to build an editorial calendar with evergreen content, which tools are worth investing in, and why consistency doesn’t mean you have to post manually every single day.

Your social media strategy is about to get a whole lot easier.

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

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

Watch Here

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About Your Host, Daniela Woerner

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

Well, hello and welcome back to Spa Marketing Made Easy. I am Daniela Woerner, and if you have been putting off social media because the thought of filming content, of coming up with captions, of staying consistent with this, like ever increasing amount of content that we feel like needs to be posted. This episode is for you. So we’re talking about something that I hear all the time. Spa owners will say to me, Daniela, I know I need to be on social media. I do not have the time, and honestly, I hate it. Listen, you do not have to love social media to make it work for your spa. You need to have the right systems, and that is exactly what we are diving into today, how to create social media content, how to create a plan, an editorial calendar, that is not going to drain your energy, steal your time, or require you to be in front of the camera, if that’s not your thing. So we’re going to talk about the tools that are the game changers for busy spot owners.

How to Leverage AI to do the heavy lifting, and my exact process for creating content cues, which are you’ll love these that keep your social media presence consistent without the daily scramble. So let’s go ahead and get into it. And this is coming from someone who has never been a big fan of social media. I don’t use social media personally myself, although I deeply, deeply believe in the importance of it for a business. A couple of years ago, I uninstalled the apps from my phone. I felt that it just wasn’t doing my mental health good to scroll through the feed it. It was a waste of my time. It was a waste of my energy, and I just didn’t feel good after scrolling through so I wanted to remove that from my life, even though I deeply, deeply believe in the importance of social media for brand awareness and communicating what you’re about. Okay, so let’s just go ahead and start by acknowledging why social media feels like such a burden for so many spa owners. And first, it’s the consistency problem. Okay, so the algorithm is going to reward regular posting. We’re talking about daily content across multiple platforms, and when you’re already managing team, handling client concerns, ordering product, trying to grow revenue, and you want to add, create engaging content to your daily to do list that feels impossible. You know, I was, I was just on a call with some of our growth factor members, and I was asking them what it was specifically that was keeping them from doing a particular task. So, was it time management? Was it, you know, what was the particular thing? And as we kind of broke down this problem, like broke down what was going on to understand what the true problem was. It’s that they’re not delegating. And that is a really, really important thing, especially when it comes to social content. And now with the tools that are available out there, we can lean on our teams. We can lean on AI to help us get these things done. And that’s, again, what we’re going to be talking about today.

So the second reason that social media feels so hard is because there’s a creative drain, right? We? We there is such a thing as decision fatigue, and coming up with fresh ideas every single day can be exhausting, so you might post a before and after on Monday, and then Tuesday rolls around and you’re staring at your phone thinking, What do I do now? You know, like, and this can lead to the time suck factor, whether you’re trying to figure out what to post, and then you’re like, Okay, well, I’m gonna scroll through and see if I get any inspiration. And then you start responding to a comment, and then 20 minutes later, you’re watching chicken videos. If you’re me right, I’m I whatever is going on. Like, if, when I was scrolling, it would always be like these homesteaders. And I was like, what just happened? I just lost an hour of my life, and I didn’t get anything done. I didn’t get what I had set out to accomplish done. And social media does not have to be that way, so the spa owners who are winning at social media, and by winning, I mean actually generating revenue, actually generating an ROI, because they’re creating content that aligns with their ICA, because they have the proper tools in there, like many chat that can that they’re using to collect emails and to get appointments booked.

These are the things that are so. So, so important. But these spa owners, they’re not spending hours every day creating content. They’re not glued to their phones. They are using systems. They’re batching their content. They’re leveraging tools to do the heavy lifting for them. Now, once you have these systems in place, social media shifts from a daily chore to being a marketing asset that works for you, even when you’re with clients, even when you’re spending time with your family, even when, I dare say it, taking an actual vacation. So the key to building what I call an editorial calendar with evergreen content, and we have this like booked and busy blueprint that we use that really focuses on your entire online presence, but a piece of that is creating this edit editorial calendar with evergreen content cues. Okay, so we’re going to break down how you do that today. So before we get into the actual tools, like the software that we’re using, let’s talk about strategy, right? We’ve got to understand what we’re trying to do in the first place, because even the best scheduling software will not help you if you don’t have a clear content plan. And to in order to create a clear content plan, you’ve got to know who your ICA is. When I say, I see, I’m talking about your ideal client avatar. I want you to get extremely granular with this process and understand who you are speaking to, who you are serving.

All right, the more focused, the more intentional that you can get on the person that you are serving, the more that messaging is going to hit, and the more like brands they want to attract and repel. Right? The brand that does everything is the brand that does nothing. So when we can speak directly to our editorial calendar, that messaging is going to hit a lot more. So when we are thinking about our content categories, there’s four kind of main ones, and you can have more, if it makes sense, with your ICA. And you’ll obviously adjust the messaging with your ICA, but your social media is going to accomplish different goals, right? So we’re going to organize the content into categories that’s going to make it easier to maintain a balance. So you want to have before and after pictures, and you want to have testimonials, these can kind of go in one category, so your before and afters are your credibility builders. They’re going to show real results from real clients. They perform incredibly well because it’s helping people to understand and see visual proof of your expertise. And don’t just do your like, slam dunks. You want to see what is a normal result, what is a great result, and what is an exceptional result. Okay? Because you’re going to have some that are just like, wow, this is next level. And then you’re going to have some just average, show them all. Right, that’s going to, in my opinion, build a level of trust of what to expect. Okay? The next category is going to be educational posts. So these are going to position you as the expert. So the educational posts can be things like skincare tips. They can be explaining particular treatments or services.

They can be ingredient breakdowns or product breakdowns. They can be myth busting. Educational content is going to help build brand awareness, build kind of your skincare philosophy. It’s going to keep your audience engaged even when they’re not ready to book, right they’re going to it is providing value to them things that they’re interested in. The next category is behind the scenes and overall brand awareness. So these are your trust builders, your team, your space, your process, the products that you use. It’s going to really humanize your content and your brand. It’s going to help potential clients and existing clients feel connected to you, okay? And it will provide that level of familiarity for the potential clients who have not yet booked to see faces, right? People connect with people. Okay? So if you don’t have any faces on your social media, they’re not going to it’s just not as much of a connection as if they have someone that they can see all right? And last but not least, in the kind of core four categories are promotional posts. These are your revenue drivers. So membership, promotion, limited time, offer events, announcement, announcements, new services or products. Okay, so don’t be shy about these. Your audience needs to know how to work with you, right? That you’re running a business, not a charity, okay? So we’ve got to put that out there and make the offer and allow them to book a service with us. Okay, so here is where the magic happens. So instead of scrambling to create content every single day.

Okay, you are going to create 12 evergreen posts in each category. Okay, so you’re going to go through, and if you want to do this over the course of a week, that’s great. Block off an hour. Find 12 before and after post. Find 12 or come up with 12 educational posts. Okay? And I would let me just zoom out here for a second, because what we want to do is make sure that we’re clear on our ICA, we are clear on the most profitable service that aligns with our philosophy and also is what our ideal client wants. Okay, so what is our ICA asking for? Of those things, which of those services has the higher profit margin or highest profit margin? And then we are going to do educational posts around those particular things. So let’s say that chemical peels is your thing. And so when I’m looking at educational post I might do, I might do 12 before and afters for chemical peels. I might do 12 educational posts about types of acids or or contraindications, or what to expect, or, you know, things like that that are specifically related to chemical peels. Behind the Scenes could be actual setup for the peel, or your staff getting appeal themselves, or like a day one, day two, day three, day four, day five, photo carousel that you can see what to expect after appeal, and then your promotional post, so you’re doing a membership. So these 12 promotional posts would only be if you had an ongoing offer, like a membership.

If you are doing you know, monthly promotions, those are going to be created each month, but for your ongoing promotions, or things that you would like to promote, if you have an eCom store or something like that. What are the things that can actually be evergreen? That’s what we want to look at. Okay, so you’re going to create 46 pieces of content. Pick 12 to do each day, right? To break it up into a small, smaller task. Those 48 pieces of content can cycle through your feed for months. Okay, that’s three months worth of content, posting once a day, right? Posting, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. So you essentially, you have a good mix already with that. Think about how you cut at least half of the work. If you’re going to post seven days a week, you know you’ll have three more additional posts that you need to create. But if you’re just going to do Monday through Friday, then you only have one more post that you need to create each month or each week.

Excuse me, so because they’re evergreen and they’re not tied to a specific date or event, they stay relevant. Okay. Now, research from social B shows that businesses using content categories and evergreen cues are able to maintain consistent posting schedules with 73% less time spent on daily content creation. So once you have these 48 posts created. You’re going to organize them with a scheduling tool, and that’s we’ll talk about that in just a minute, but then they are going to automatically publish according to the scheduler that you set. So one post per day means that’s nearly two posts of content, or two months worth of content ready to go. I would suggest that you push that out to three and you just spend time in that particular month creating 12 additional posts that are relevant to what is going on in that month, if it’s Black Friday, if you’re doing a particular event, or something along those lines. Okay, so you’re not starting from scratch every single time. All right, when you need to freshen up the content, you just add a new post to the appropriate category, and it’s going to build up that cue. Imagine starting with this initial 12 post, and then every time you’re creating something, whenever it’s actually something that can be evergreen, then you add it to the queue so that it will continually cycle through and listen. People are not going to remember what you posted three months ago, let alone they may not even see it. There’s such a small amount of people that follow you that actually see your content, the likelihood of them seeing a post that was posted three months ago is incredibly low. Okay, so this approach is going to give you the flexibility to add timely content like holiday promotions or last minute openings without. Adopting your entire strategy, the evergreen content keeps things running in the background while you layer in the timely stuff as needed. And according to asanas research on social media, media calendars, businesses that use this structured approach see 126% more lead growth than those who just post randomly. So create these four content categories, develop 12 evergreen posts in each category, and then load them into your scheduling system. That’s the foundation. Okay, so now let’s talk about the tools that are going to make your life so much easier, and I’m going to walk you through my exact tech stack of what we use and how we use it. So we use social bee for scheduling and socialbee for us. We actually invested in this product. We had a we got a black friday lifetime offer, which was incredible, years and years ago. And so we’ve had this tool that is working, you know, works incredibly well for us. It’s here’s why I love it, okay? So it has the ability to create different categories that you can do around, like you can do a before and after category. You can do a promotional category, you can do an educational category, and you can even get them more granular than that, but so you’re putting all of your educational posts, all of your before and afters, and if you schedule them, if I wanted to do before and afters on Monday and Friday, I can just, let’s say that you have a ton of them. Instead of 12, if you want to add 24 and you put, you put that content category on Monday, and you also put that content category on Friday. It’s going to scroll through and Monday and Friday will be two different posts, right? But it’s going to scroll through that entire category, so you just have a lot of opportunity when you’re going through and scheduling, okay, and here’s what I love. Remember how I said I am not someone who wants to go on the app and scroll. I do like to engage with our followers, though. I do like to engage with the people who message us or the people who comment.

And here’s the thing that’s really cool is you can actually respond directly in social beat, so I don’t have to go on to Instagram. I can comment directly in the app. I can see on any one of my platforms if someone commented on LinkedIn or if someone commented on Facebook or on Instagram, it all shows up there. So I don’t have to scroll through different platforms to understand who’s commenting. Where I go directly in social beep and can comment there, all right, which is amazing. There’s also this feature called RE cue, and so that is what we’re talking about, where if I want something to repost, I can do that. I can also, if I have something that’s very specific, if it’s peel season, or if it’s Black Friday, or if you’re running a holiday promotion and you want something to post at a specific time and not requeue, you can still use it in the scheduler, you just don’t hit that requeue button. You put schedule at a particular time and what that is, and then it’ll post once and not requeue. Okay. You also have the ability to have it requeue and then end at a particular time. So there’s a lot that you can do with this. The pricing is very reasonable. I believe their plans start around $29 a month.

I also believe they have a 14 day free trial. We are not an affiliate with them. We have no connection with them any way, shape or form, except for the fact that we use it. So tool number two, I want to talk about AI. So the AI tools that we are currently using in terms of copy, we use chat, GPT, we use Claude, and we use Cintra, and they’re all slightly different. Okay, so you can decide, I think for social, I really enjoy Claude the most. I feel like Claude is able to get our brand voice the most. And Claude has chats and also has projects. So if you think of projects as being sort of like a custom GPT that you would do in in chat, GBT, the chats are just kind of random questions. But when you’re training a custom project or creating custom project. It can be, you know, copy for Instagram.

And what I love about that, and it’s I have done, I like to create content that will be for Instagram. Take that, and how do I refine it for LinkedIn? You know, take that and how do I refine it for Facebook? I’ve done it all in the same project inside of Claude. It’s really easy to be able to do it. So it doesn’t have to just be a project for Instagram, although you could create everything in Instagram, copy that and put it in your LinkedIn project and say, put all of this in LinkedIn. Okay. But the thing is, it’s very, very easy to customize. Sintra is all these, they, they kind of look like these little Teletubbies. I don’t know what. There’s like 12 or 16 little dudes, and they essentially will have different areas of focus. So you have someone for social you have someone for business development, virtual assistants. There’s a lot of things that they can do, and I have tended to use them more for like SEO optimization or understanding like a structure within prompts that I want to use. So there’s a lot of there’s little things I would say I probably use intra the least between chat, GPT and Claude, but I still find it valuable enough to keep all right, so if I’m doing a larger project, or if I’m doing SOPs, I prefer chat GPT. So I think about, you know, depending on what you’re using it for, for the sake of this episode, we’re talking about social media, Claude is where I would dial in on okay, and Claude is still really inexpensive. I think the paid version is about $200 a year. So if you think about what would it cost you to have a copywriter, not $200 a year? And so that’s really, really helpful. We also use Canva, and Canva has a lot of AI tools in the paid version. Okay, so they have magic design, and that’s going to generate complete social media graphics just from a text prompt. So you type in what you want, and Canva creates several layouts for you to choose from. Magic edit allows you to modify photos with text prompts.

So if you want to change the background of a treatment room photo, you can just say. You can just select the Background type that you want instead and canvas. AI will replace it while keeping everything else intact, if that makes sense. Magic grab allows you to move subjects in a photo. So if you took a great shot of a client, but they’re positioned awkwardly in a frame, you can click on them, drag them to a better spot, and AI will fill in the background naturally, background remover. This is probably what I use the most. So one click, Canva removes the entire background from any image. So if you’ve seen those images where it just is, like me standing against a you know our rose color background, that’s magic or background remover magic, right? Is going to generate text for your designs, like headlines, taglines or social captions, right in the editor. And this is really cool. I have not used this feature yet because I am so used to doing it a certain way, but Canva integrates directly with socialbee, so you can design your graphics inside of Canva and schedule them in socialbee without ever leaving one platform to jump to the other. Okay, so Canva has a free version, but I highly recommend the Pro Plan. It’s 1299 a month that is going to unlock all of the AI features, and it is worth every single penny. Nano banana is another software that’s really good with stock images. This is AI derived. You basically can upload a photo and just say, you know, change the background or create a generic image of a spa treatment room, and you can say, Add warm, glowing candles to the counter, or make the lighting softer, more relaxing, right? So nano banana is going to do all of that for you. So you can remove unwanted objects from photos, you can remove backgrounds, you can change colors, you can change styles. It’s going to maintain the character and consistency across images, which is perfect if you’re creating, like, a series of photos that you want to have a cohesive look. So especially like if you’re going to create those 12 before and after photos, and you want something, well, not the specifically before and after, but the 12 in each category, if you want them to be all consistent, it’s cool to use a software like that.

All right, hey, Jen, this is for AI avatars. I have not taken this leap. This still is a little bit spooky Wookie for me. I’m still a bit concerned with some private. See things around these and in terms of like, if I create an AI avatar, does who has ownership of that? Can other people generate an AI avatar of me, if I have uploaded up there and then make me say different things online, those are things that I am not yet totally comfortable with however, plenty of people are, and if you are camera shy, I know M, Coach M, she created a, she created an avatar for herself, and she, you know, was very clear and very upfront that this is her AI avatar, and it’s her, her likeness, her image, and she’s creating the content that her avatar is saying. She’s trained it on her voice, but it’s something that she can just type in the video that she wants created, and she can have hundreds of videos in minutes, right? It’s unbelievable. Okay, so if you are a spa owner who you’re like, hey, I need to film video content, but I just don’t want to film it myself, or I don’t have the time. You can create educational videos. You can film promotional videos. You can make FAQ videos. You can do behind the behind the scenes videos. I mean, there’s so many different things. And hey, Jen supports 175 languages and dialects. So if you have, you know, a large Spanish speaking population or any other type of language that you wanted to create videos in both languages, you can absolutely do that. Okay, so again, most of these softwares, there’s a free plan, there’s a paid plan. Video obviously performs very well on social media. It gets more engagement than static post, but it’s also the type of content that is like takes the most time to create, and the type that most of us avoid creating. So hey, Jen, solves that problem by removing the air the the barriers of filming, editing and being on camera. Okay, but just be sure if you’re going to get into any of these AI, a lot of the social media platforms will require you to disclose that this is AI generated content, and also ensure that you know the appropriate privacy and what you’re giving permission for when you are going ahead and creating these avatars. Okay, okay, so and then many chat is our last tool. I believe, as I said earlier, that social media should be giving you an ROI on everything that you are creating, the time and dollar amount that you’re investing in social media, you should be getting an ROI on that and many chat is a incredible tool that if you’ve seen Those LIKE, COMMENT me and I’ll send you this that’s an automated piece of software that you can use to get people different tools. So you can give them a blog post, you can give them you can invite them in to get a consultation. You can use it to collect emails.

There’s a lot of things that you can do with these different pieces of software, all right. So now that you know the tools that we are using specifically, I want to walk you through the exact process for creating social media content in just a few hours. Okay, so before you touch any of the tools, ask yourself, what do I want my social media to accomplish. What does my ideal client need to see before they book? What objections or questions do I need to address? And then you’ve got to decide on your categories. So we had mentioned before, the before and afters, which are going to be your social proof. We talked about educational posts which are going to be kind of your expertise and your trust. We’ve talked about behind the scenes, so brand connection, brand awareness, and we talked about promotional posts, which are going to be revenue and list building, right? So again, you can adjust these based on your business. You might have client testimonials, you might have product spotlight. I kind of think that those client testimonials would go into before and after, or product spotlight would go into educational. But whatever makes sense for you, you just keep that simple and sustainable. Okay, so now it’s time to create your content, and the biggest heavy lifting is the initial time when you’re creating those groups of 12. Okay, so give yourself a couple hours, put it on the calendar like you would any other business task, and then really identify, like, what do I need to do to hold this commitment to myself? Because I know that if I do this now, this is going to save me so much time in the long run. Okay? So really commitment. Admit to getting this done. All right, then we’re going to batch create your captions. And I am not a great context switcher, so when I am going through and doing captions, I will do all of my before and afters. I will do all of my educational posts. I will do all of my promotional posts. I’m just kind of getting in a flow. Okay, so you will put in your prompt. We have a very specific prompting strategy where we’re including our ICA, we’re including our company bio. We want to create content. We want to get really honed in on our messaging. So you’re going to give direction in the prompt. Say, you know, here’s who I am and here’s who we’re serving. And I want the post to be 150 words. I want to hook in the sentence. I want it to end with a question. I want it to encourage engagement. So you’re putting all these different things in there. You could say topics could include retinol, vitamin C, hyaluronic acid, sunscreen, chemical peels, microneeding, led hydration, exfoliation, anti like, whatever it is that are things that are going to make sense for your practice and Claude, you know, chatGPT, Claude, whatever you’re using, can do that in like a minute. I mean, it is incredible how quickly those things can happen. Okay, so you want to never go with the first answer. I always have it refine. I always, you know, I’m giving it feedback of how to make it sound more like me. I hate dashes, and so I, you know, I put in the rules don’t use dashes. These are the emojis that I like to use. Sometimes I write in all capitals. I’m like giving it these directions to make it really sound like the way that I would speak and engage authentically. Okay, so once you have the captions all done, then you go over to Canva, I open up one new document. So if it’s Instagram, you know, I’ll open up an Instagram post, and then I just create, I’ll do, add a new page, add a new page, add a new page. So I’m creating 12 image graphics on one piece of, you know, one open Canva and how you can label them. I’ll put, like, Evergreen post one, Evergreen post two, Evergreen post three, something like that. Okay, the thing with many chat is that it has to be associated with a particular post. And so if you are, if you’re putting it in social be and you know when it’s going to come up which you have to make sure that you’re scheduling to go into many chat and add that post to that particular funnel. So for this reason, I never put many chat posts in the queue. I always schedule them at a specific time, and then I add a little note on my calendar to make sure that I go in and connect that particular many chat funnel with that particular post, and we’re just duplicating it so that the previous post will still work right. We’re not going to change the other ones, if that makes if you’re using many chat that makes sense. Okay, then you’re going to load everything into into social be so you’re going to schedule it. You’re going to decide if you are going to put this in the queue, or if it’s going to be a one time scheduler. You can decide how frequently you know, am I going to do before and afters twice a week? Am I going to do educational twice a week? Am I going to do behind the scenes twice a week? However, I want to do that right. It’s going to give you’re going to decide what makes the most sense for your business. And once you set the schedule, social B is automatically going to pull from your content categories, publish the post according to the schedule that you defined. And again, if you hit that re cue feature, the Evergreen is evergreen cycle is going to continue back through.

So even if you have a crazy week and something comes up, it’s just going to repost, right? So it’s going to give you that kind of cushion, or that, that ease of mind, that you are still good all right. Now I also batch my engagement time. I actually have a line on my calendar that’s 15 minutes that says social engagement. And so because. Because you can go directly into the social bee app. I can be commenting on Facebook, on Instagram, on LinkedIn, all at the same time without, you know, switching windows or anything like that. And that is going to save you from going down some crazy rabbit hole. Okay, it’s going to save your time. You can have 15 minutes that you can go in, you can respond, it can actually be you, right, which I think is really important. And again, you’re not getting sucked into some Vortex where you’re going to end up watching chicken videos. All right, so consistency is going to win. But again, consistency doesn’t mean that you have to be online every single day. The system that we’ve talked about today, the editorial calendars, the evergreen content cues, the scheduling tools, obviously, AI is huge. These are going to allow you to show up consistently without the daily grind. Okay, so research shows that if you are post the businesses that post daily see a significantly higher engagement than those who post sporadically. But that doesn’t mean that you physically have to be the one going in and posting every single day. Okay, that is what automation is for, that is working smarter, not harder. So once your content is scheduled in social be it publishes automatically. You don’t have to remember, you don’t have to scramble. It just happens.

Okay? So this is such a powerful, powerful thing to get this off of your plate. Think about how that would feel, right? You’re going to have time and time to do the real CEO work, time to whatever has been piling up, whatever’s been on that shelf that you’ve been wanting to get through. The power of systems will give you the freedom to live the life you want to live. Okay? Now this approach is also going to give you flexibility, right? So if you have a last minute promotion, or a client cancels, or you have an opening, you can still create that one off post and schedule it immediately. Your evergreen content keeps running in the background, but you have the freedom to add timely content as needed. So remember that Perfection is the enemy of progress. Your first batch doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to exist, okay? And as you get more and more comfortable with this system, you’ll refine your process, you’ll improve your captions, you’ll develop a stronger sense of what is actually resonating with your ICA, but you can’t optimize what doesn’t exist, so you’ve got to just start create those 48 posts, load them into social bee and let the system work. Okay, so social media does not have to be the thing you dread. This is how you do social media as a spawner, even when you hate social media. All right, so I want you to choose your scheduling tool. We recommend social bee, but find one that works for you. There’s a whole bunch out there, and they are life changing. Start with a free trial. Test it out, see if it makes sense. Define your content categories. I would definitely recommend before and afters educational, behind the scenes and promotional. But, you know, adjust those in the way that you want. Set aside a block of time, two, three hours. See how fast you’re able to move. Use, use chat, GBT, use Claude. Refine your post. Make sure that you’re not just taking the immediate first thing that AI pumps out. Refine it and get those posts created and scheduled. Okay? And then batch your engagement time. Maybe do 15 minutes three times a week. But you can also, if you have a team, you can delegate some of this engagement as well. And when you have it all in social, be that they’re logging in to communicate it is all coming from you, right from your company, from your spa.

Okay, so I hope that you enjoyed this episode. I do have a quick favor to ask. We are really focusing on our reviews, so if you have been enjoying the spa, marketing Made Easy podcast, if you’re getting value from these episodes. Could you please take 30 seconds and leave us a review? It makes a massive difference, because when you when you leave a review, it helps other spa owners discover the show, and a rising tide floats all boats every time someone finds this new podcast and gets the strategies that they know that they need to grow their business. It is a win for our entire industry. So whether you’re listening on Apple or on Spotify, scroll down. Tap that five star rating. Give us give us a quick review. Tell us what you loved about the episode, what’s been most helpful for you. I do read every single. Little review. I’m so appreciative of you taking the time, and it means the world Okay. As always, we keep this conversation going over in the spa marketing Made Easy Facebook group. Head over there if you are not in there already. We’ve got a link below this episode, and that is it for today. So just remember that social media does not have to steal your time, drain your energy with the right systems, with a solid editorial calendar, with evergreen content cues, AI tools, scheduling platforms, right you can show up consistently without the daily scramble. So take action this week batch that content, set up the schedule and let your social media work for you instead of demanding your constant attention. Thank you so much for listening, and I’ll catch you on the next episode.

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EP 459: Your Q4 CEO Checklist: 7 Must-Do Tasks Before December 31
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  • business, leadership

Don’t Start the New Year in Chaos: Your Q4 CEO Checklist

Q4 is typically the most profitable quarter for spas, and yes, revenue generation should absolutely be your number one priority right now. But here’s what most spa owners miss: if you don’t handle these seven critical CEO tasks before December 31, you’ll pay for it with time, money, and momentum in the coming year.

You don’t want to start January in complete chaos, spending your days putting out fires instead of preventing them, or losing precious momentum that could propel you toward your goals. That’s why this episode gives you a deep dive tactical checklist for the work you need to do before the new year begins.

  1. Team Performance Reviews (Do Them All in October)

Instead of conducting reviews on each team member’s anniversary, consolidate all performance reviews into October. This strategic timing allows you to identify trends across your entire team, calculate your payroll budget accurately for the coming year, and make strategic planning significantly easier.

These aren’t casual “you’re doing great, here’s a raise” conversations. These are strategic discussions about performance, growth alignment, and your business goals. Remember what Brene Brown says: clear is kind. When giving critical feedback, frame it with belief in your team member’s potential and capabilities.

Use objective data: retention rates, rebooking percentages, average ticket, retail to service ratios, and customer satisfaction metrics. Have growth plans with clear pay bands so your team knows exactly what’s required to move up (and yes, you should also have the ability to move team members down if they’re not performing to their metrics).

If you have team members who aren’t performing at the level you need, you cannot afford to carry dead weight. Your team is only as strong as your weakest link. You need A players in every position, which means giving honest feedback for growth and requiring commitment to improvement.

Document everything. Every conversation, good and bad, needs to be in writing for future reference and legal protection. 

And if you haven’t done them yet, or are not prepared to by the end of the year, block the time out in 2026 now. 

  1. Financial Planning and Tax Strategy

Sit down with your CPA in October or November for a tax liability estimate. This is critical because you may have had significant profit changes, household income changes, or reached thresholds where you need to consider an S corp election or introduce new tax strategies like a 401k plan or bringing your children on as employees.

Your CPA should provide your projected tax liability and your estimated tax percentage for the coming year. Using Profit First methodology, the general guidelines are 40% payroll, 30% operations, 15% tax, 15% profit. These are guidelines that shift based on your niche, location, and personal household income, but never exceed 40% on payroll.

If your operational expenses seem out of control, audit your profit and loss statement. Look at nice to haves versus need to haves. One software audit saved Addo Aesthetics $10,000 per year. Yes, switching software is painful, but the time and money savings make it worthwhile.

Consider bringing together your internal advisory team (CPA, financial advisor, and attorney) for a conversation about both personal and business goals. Set your business goals based on what you need to pay yourself, which should be based on your household financial goals.

  1. Product Pricing and Profitability Review

Use a cost of treatment and profitability tracker to understand the profitability of each service so you can make data-based decisions about pricing and which services to promote throughout the year. This isn’t a set it and forget it document. Your vendors increase prices every year (sometimes multiple times), so you need to adjust your consumable costs, payroll costs (if you gave raises), and account for inflation.

A general rule of thumb: increase prices 2 to 5% every single year once your margins are set appropriately, just to keep up with inflation. Do this once per year in January. It’s easy, predictable, and when it’s just a minimal increase, you don’t need a huge announcement.

If you’re making a significant price increase, give advance notice via email, social media, front desk announcements, and signage. Be clear about your messaging. Did you move locations? Invest in new equipment? What’s the purpose for the increase? Honor appointments already booked at existing prices and grandfather in package holders. Consider doing a price increase promotion in December so clients can purchase at the lower price before January.

  1. Decide: Growth Year or Sustain Year?

A growth year means you’re actively scaling through heavy marketing investment, hiring new team members, expanding your space, or increasing service offerings. You’re pushing hard on revenue growth, which means profit margins may be tighter because you’re investing in expansion. Growth years require more of everything: cash, energy, risk tolerance, systems, and capacity.

A sustain year focuses on optimizing what you’ve already built. You’re improving profit margins, tightening operations, developing your team, and strengthening your foundation. You might be catching your breath after a big growth year. Sustain years are not failures. They are strategic, and sometimes they’re the smartest move to solidify your foundation before the next push.

How do you decide? Look at your operational systems (can they handle 20% more volume?), financial capacity (do you have cash reserves for upfront growth investment?), team and location capacity (can your current setup handle more clients?), and your personal capacity (do you have the mental and emotional energy for a growth year?).

Once you make this decision, everything else falls into place: your marketing budget, hiring plans, and infrastructure investments all flow from whether this is a growth year or sustain year. There is no right or wrong answer. You can have five sustain years in a row and that’s perfectly fine when you’re building a business around the life you want to live.

  1. Annual Marketing Calendar

Map out your marketing with an annual calendar. Plan monthly promotional themes, members only events, mini events (like peel parties or “shed the dead” in October), email list building strategies, social media channel focus, and paid advertising plans.

Businesses plan in 18 month cycles and execute in quarters. You may not know exactly what will happen in 18 months, but have the vision and direction. Give yourself permission to change your mind, but when you’re in execution mode during a quarter, focus intently on that plan. Create everything in advance so you’re not rushing around on last minute deadlines, which is terrible for your nervous system and anxiety levels.

  1. Systems and Software Review

With AI, new software options emerge every two months. Review your tech stack: Are you using AI to its full potential? Is there a better or more efficient tool than what you’re currently using? Look at what saves you money and time.

A $200 per year Claude subscription that completely replaces your copywriter is far worth it if your copywriter was costing thousands. But you’ll need to invest time learning how to train custom GPTs and create projects that capture your brand voice.

Review all your systems: data analysis, schedule optimization, inventory management, marketing processes, opening and closing procedures, client intake, service protocols, retail sales processes, and emergency procedures. What can you shift, adapt, or change to be more efficient and aligned with your goals?

  1. Block CEO Time for 2026 Now

Before your calendar gets full, block off time in 2026 for these essential CEO tasks. Schedule a week in October for employee review prep and execution. Block time for your CPA meeting. Schedule your annual planning sessions, P&L reviews, and software audits. This proactive approach sets you up for success.

Get the Help You Need

If you need support, reach out to your CPA, attorney, or a fellow spa owner. Consider bringing on a coach or consultant. There are experts around you who can help you reach your goals.

Q4 revenue is the priority, but completing these CEO tasks will make a massive difference in your business success in the coming year. Don’t let the busy season distract you from the strategic work that truly moves the needle

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About Your Host, Daniela Woerner

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

Hello my dears and welcome back to Spa Marketing Made Easy. I am Daniela Woerner, and if you are new here, welcome. We love to talk about all of the things related to running a systems based spa that supports the life that you want to live. And today we’re talking about what you need to do as the CEO in q4 so think of it as a checklist of sorts, because who doesn’t love a good checklist, right? Okay, so I know that q4 is a very busy time. You’re running promotions, you’re focusing your attention on revenue, and that you should q4 revenue should be priority number one. This is typically the most profitable quarter for spas, and you need to have your foot on the gas pedal when it comes to revenue generation. But here’s the deal, if you don’t do these things in q4 there can be serious consequences in the coming year, consequences that can cost you a lot of time and money. So don’t start the new year in complete chaos. Don’t be reactive instead of proactive. Don’t spend your time putting out fires instead of preventing them, and don’t lose precious momentum that could propel you towards your goals. So today, I want to give you a deep dive tactical checklist for the work that you need to do before December 31 Okay, I’m going to call it your November checklist, because it’s November. But the reality is is this is really what you should be looking at between October and December. Okay, just get all of this done before the new year begins. So first up is your team performance reviews. Okay, I typically recommend doing these in October, and I actually recommend that you do all of your reviews at once. 

So when we’re teaching the hiring and onboarding and development process in growth factor we look at bringing somebody on so they have their during their probationary period, which is the first 90 days. We’re doing a 30 day review, a 60 day review, and a 90 day review that’s going to place them into whatever pay band is appropriate for that year, and then at the review time in October, that’s when you’ll determine if they’ll be moving up, or, as I recommend, also have the ability to move down if they’re not performing in their role, if they’re not hitting their metrics. Okay, so why do it all at once instead of on their anniversary? A lot of practices will say, Well, we’re going to review everybody on their one year anniversary. If you do that and think about it, even if you have a team of just five, the productivity of having to go in and do a review five times a year. It’s going to affect your budget. It’s going to affect your timing. So there’s a lot of benefits to be doing this all at once. You’re going to be able to identify trends that you’re seeing among providers. You’re going to be able to be very clear with your payroll numbers and calculating your budget for the coming year. Okay? It makes strategic planning so much easier when you understand what pay band everybody is going to be at for the coming year. Now, when I talk about doing a review, it’s not just, Hey, you’re doing great. Here’s a raise, right? No, these are strategic discussions about performance, growth alignment and your business goals. And so what we need to do as CEOs, as leaders, as founders of our companies, we’ve got to give the feedback to our team to help them get better. And I know a lot of times we don’t like to give critical feedback. It feels uncomfortable. It feels just not good. I was talking with a growth factor member, and she said, You know, I have someone on my team that cries a lot, and it makes me hesitant to give her feedback because I don’t want to make her cry. And it was super relatable, right? Because we become really close with our employees. We become really close with our team, if you’re building a positive company culture, and so when we’re giving critical feedback to people that we deeply care about and love and consider family in a lot of situations, it’s hard, right? So I am going to quote Renee Brown, who says clear is kind think that’s a really, really important statement to remember. Clear is. Kind. So whenever you’re giving any type of critical feedback to your team, there’s a few things that I like to keep in mind. So when I’m giving the feedback, it’s Hey, I believe in you so much, and I believe in your capabilities and your potential, and that’s why we brought you on the team, and I’m going to be giving you some feedback from my perspective of things that I see that number one, you’re doing incredibly well. I’m gonna also share where I see some areas of opportunity for your growth, of what you can grow into to reach your full potential. 

And please know that everything that I’m saying, I’m saying with love, to help make you better, to help you grow and to help reach your goals. So we’re wanting to really set the tone so that they’re not, you know, taking it in that personal way. Now I also just kind of side note here. I think it’s also very important for the staff to be able to have the opportunity to provide feedback for leadership if there’s blind spots that you may have or ways that you’re communicating. Now, it doesn’t mean that you always have to act on that feedback, but it’s really important to create a culture where feedback is welcome and encourage in the proper channels, right? And when done with the desire to move the business and the team into a growth state, right? So super, super important there. So when we are doing our reviews, we also want to make sure that we have objective data, okay? So we want to understand their retention rates. We want to understand rebooking, average ticket retail to service. If you are doing any kind of customer satisfaction or, like, counting the number of reviews that mention that provider by name, you want to have that in there as well. If you’re doing front desk, like, what are the KPIs for the front desk? Is it booking efficiency? Is it customer service, feedback? Is it administrative accuracy? Is it answering the phone by the third ring? What are the things that we’re looking at and for the managers, what do they have ownership of? 

Okay, so is it team performance, metrics? Is it operational efficiency? Is it resourcefulness? We’re looking at these particular things. And again, you want to have these outlined on your growth plan for your providers. I was talking a little bit about pay bands earlier. And when we set these up, when we set up how we’re structuring how to pay your staff, we have different categories, like our esthetician growth plan is a junior esthetician and esthetician and a lead. And there’s requirements under each of those categories of what the KPIs are and the other requirements for that particular role. And it’s going to give you a pay range that falls into that category. Okay, so it’s making it very structured and objective. Okay, so really important thing that your staff knows what’s expected from them in advance. And yes, I recommend doing reviews, like formalized reviews in October, but I also recommend meeting with your team in short, one on ones on a quarterly basis. So you can give them feedback of where they are. You can give them insight as to, hey, if you’re wanting to get into this next band, then here’s the things that you want to focus on, and how can I support you to reach your specific goals? Okay, so really, really important there that we’re creating a continuous culture and environment of support and growth. Okay, so again, what should they continue doing? What should they start doing? What should they stop doing? What are the goals for them? What’s going on in their in their life. We want to understand all of those things, and then you’re going to take that and you’re going to choose if it makes sense to give them a raise. Now, one thing that’s really important is that there are set bands, right? Like, I’m not going to become a millionaire being a barista at Starbucks, right? So we have to look at like, what is the role and what is expected, and here is the set band for the hourly rate. And if you’re wanting to generate additional revenue, here’s the ways that you can do that, by contributing to the company’s growth in this way. Okay, so we want to make sure that compensation and how to get to those compensation levels are clearly communicated, from the hiring to the onboarding to the quarterly check ins to the actual reviews. Okay, that is going to make your life so much easier. Okay?

So what do you do? If a team member is not doing great, what if you realize that what got you here won’t get you there, and you have a team member who is maybe not performing as they should, maybe they’re pretty good, but they’re not great. Maybe they show up, but they don’t go above and beyond. Maybe they require constant management instead of taking ownership, you cannot afford to carry dead weight, and you’ve got to have a players in every position. Okay, so your team and I, this is something my husband always says. I know it’s a lot of people say this, but you’re only as strong as strong as your weakest link, right? So we’ve got to make sure that we are developing our people into their full potential, and we’ve got to make sure that we are giving that feedback for growth. Now this doesn’t mean that everybody has to be perfect. We all have room for improvement and growth, but we’ve got to be committed to that. 

We can’t be apathetic. Okay, so I know this is really hard, especially if you have, like, a personal relationship and genuinely care about this person, but you’ve got to have that boundary where you can say, right now I’m wearing my friend hat, and right now I’m wearing my CEO hat, and these are my expectations as a CEO. And this is, you know, we’re always going to be friends, and I’m going to, you know, keep that friendship over here. But when I’m wearing this hat, this is the feedback that I have to give. Okay, now, super important to document everything. All right, you want to make sure that all of the conversations that you’re having, good and bad, are documented. This is really important for future conversations that you’re going to have with that team member, or in case anything unfortunate comes up and there is some sort of conflict, okay, all right, so let’s kind of transition from the team reviews and the budgetary advantages that it gives you, from understanding what your payroll is going to be to financial planning and tax strategy, and this is something that you should be sitting down with your CPA. I talk to my CPA every October, November, we do an estimate of tax liability. Now this is important that your CE, your CPA, is involved in this, so you may have had a really incredible year and increased profit significantly. You may have had a down year and decreased profit significantly. You may have had changes in your household income. You may have crossed a threshold where it’s now time to transition and take an S corp election rather than staying a single member LLC, you may need to take some sort of tax strategy, like introducing a 401 k plan, or bringing your children on as employees and paying them. So there’s a lot of different things that your CPA should be connecting with you sharing this is what your projected tax liability is going to be, and I also like to understand what your tax percentage is estimated to be for the coming year. So we always teach Profit First when it comes to your cash flow management and the benchmarks that we talk about are 40% payroll, 30% operations, 15% tax, 15% profit. These are very different. These are guidelines, right? So, if you are a wax studio, and you are an anti aging studio, you’re going to have very different operational expenses, right? So keep in keep that in mind, but the kind of hard rule of thumb is, never go above 40% payroll, your operations, your profit and your tax liability are going to shift based on your niche, based on the location that you’re in, and based on your personal household income, but those percentages should be given to you every single year by your CPA. And if you’re wondering, like, okay, my operational expenses are out of hand, go through your PNL.

Look at what are nice to haves and what are need to haves. We did a big audit last year with everything happening with AI and really taking a good look at the softwares that we were using, we switched over our email software and saved 10,000 Dollars a year. I mean, that was an incredible that was worth my time to be able to look at that and go through the P and L and make the shift in the software, which, yes, it’s a pain anytime that you have to shift software, you go and cry for a little bit, and you’re like, oh my gosh, this is such a bigger project than I anticipated, but once you get through it and get it done, saves you money and saves you time, ultimately, I mean, it did for us, like the software we’re using now is a million times easier than what we were using before, and less expensive. Okay. Then we’re going to, when you’re doing that financial planning, doing the projections, the percentages, all of that with your CPA, then you’re using that to kind of set your goals. Are you going to shift your profit margin goals a little bit like, what are your goals for the year? I also, if you really want to get into this, you look at your kind of internal advisory team, which I consider to be your CPA, your financial advisor and your attorney, and if you can get them all in a zoom call together and talk about your personal goals, talk about the goals of the business. 

I always set the goals of the business based off of what I need to pay myself for the year, and that is based off of the financial goals that I have for my household, right? So getting everybody in the room and getting people that are smarter than me in these areas can really help you to make sure that you’re making the right choices for your business. That brings us to your product, your pricing strategy and profitability. Okay, so we have this document called the cost of treatment and profitability tracker. It’s an incredible document. A lot of our growth factor members are like this spreadsheet changed my life, and what it does is just really help you to get an understanding of the profitability of each service so that you can make database decisions around how you should be pricing your services and which ones you should be focusing on promoting throughout the year. Now here’s the thing. You can’t just do this once and set it and forget it. You get increases in your prices every single year. We’re seeing that a lot this year, right? Some vendors have even increased multiple times throughout the year. So if you are not taking a look at that and increasing, you know, adjusting What is your consumable cost, and then adjusting payroll, right? If you do choose to give some of your providers raises, you’re going to have to adjust that and your cost of treatment and profitability tracker. And just a general rule of thumb is that we want to be increasing two to 5% every single year in our prices once your prices are set appropriately with the appropriate margins, just to be able to keep up with inflation. So we want to ensure that we’re adjusting consumable cost, that we’re adjusting payroll cost, and that we’re also adjusting for inflation. I think it’s great to do this once a year, right? It’s easy, it’s predictable. People don’t like uncertainty, and so when you have the ability to say, Okay, it’s January, here’s our updated menu of services and prices, you know, it’s and when it’s just a minimal price increase, the two to 5% we don’t have to make this huge announcement about it. I mean, I don’t think that Starbucks or target will send you an email and let you know about their price increase when it’s, you know, not this significant amount, okay, if you are increasing a significant amount, then you don’t. I just prefer the rip the band aid off. Do it all at once, right? Instead of, like, increase, increase, increase, just do it all at once. Give your clients advance notice right, send an email. Do a post on social media? Have your front desk announce it. Have a signage up there. You know, get clear on your messaging on how you want to position that increase. Did you move to a new location? Have you invested in new equipment?

What are you doing? What is the purpose for increasing the pricing? I believe, in honoring the appointments that are already booked at the existing price, which is why we want to give notice, right? So if somebody’s already booked and already on the calendar, you don’t you want to give notice that like, hey, the price. Is going to be going up, but if they’re there for that month, then honor the price that it was. You know, before package holders, you want to grandfather those in, right? If they purchase the package already, you’re going to honor the price of that. And a cool thing that you can do is do a price increase promotion. So if you’re going to be increasing the prices in January, you can be talking about it, but then do like a package promotion or something along those lines, to get people to purchase at the lower price. All right, next up on our q4 checklist is deciding if this is a growth year or a sustain year for you, okay, a growth here is when you’re actively scaling. You’re you’re heavily investing in marketing. You’re hiring new team members. You might be expanding your space. You might be increasing you know, your service offerings. You are pushing hard on revenue growth. Okay, your profit margins may be a little tighter because you’re investing into expansion. Growth years require more of everything, cash, energy, risk tolerance, more systems capacity, right? If you’re planning a growth year, you’ve got to be prepared for the intensity that comes with it. Now a sustain here is when you’re optimizing what you’ve already built. You’re not necessarily pushing hard for like, huge revenue increases, but you’re focused on improving profit margins, tightening operations, developing your team, strengthening your foundation. You might be catching your breath after a big growth year, and you need to really make sure that you didn’t grow too fast. Okay, it’s a very common problem. As entrepreneurs, we have this like hustle mentality, and we want to grow, grow, grow, because it’s exciting. It’s a high right. Feels good to have that level of growth, and it doesn’t feel normal to kind of go inside and streamline things and clean things up and tighten things up. But sustain years are not failures and they’re not boring. They are very strategic, and sometimes they are the smartest thing that you can do to solidify your foundation before the next year. Okay, so how do you decide, well, operationally, you look at like, Are my systems solid? Can they handle more volume if I added 20% new clients tomorrow, would my operations hold up, or would they fall apart financially? Do you have the cash reserves to invest in growth? Growth requires a lot of upfront investment, right? You’ve got to invest in ads, which can take a couple of months before you really figure out what is working for you. So if you’re cash strapped, pushing for growth might create a crisis. Your team capacity. Can your current team handle more clients, or your location capacity as well? Right? If you need to hire, do you have the infrastructure to onboard and train new employees effectively, personal capacity. What’s going on with you, right? And your personal life as well. Do you have the mental and emotional energy for a growth here are you in a season where you’re burned out, you’re tired, you’re caring for a parent, you have small children at home, right? And so pushing for an aggressive growth here could just be a recipe for disaster. Care for yourself. You are your business’s greatest asset, okay? You also want to understand what’s happening in the market, right? So, is there an opportunity for expansion, or is the market saturated? Are there economic factors that you need to consider. Now, once you make this decision, then everything else falls into place, your marketing budget, your hiring plans, your infrastructure investments, they all flow from whether this is a growth year or a sustained year, okay? And there is not a right or wrong answer. You can have sustained years for five years in a row. Nothing wrong with that. Okay, are you going to grow as fast? No, but you are building a business around the life that you want to live. 

Okay? So really ensure that you are building something that allows you to be the best version of yourself, to be the best leader for that business. Now, once you have decided if you are having a growth year or a sustained year, then we want to map out our marketing. Okay, so get an annual marketing calendar. Are you doing monthly promotional themes? If your membership, you know, are you going to be doing members only events? Are you doing any type of mini events? We had a lot of our growth factor members doing peel parties and shed the deads in October, which was really fun. Are you going to really invest in building your email list? Are you focusing on a particular social media channel? Are you going to figure out paid ads, all of these types of things you want to get? Really clear, and remember that businesses, corporations, will plan in 18 month cycles and execute in quarters. So know that, like, Hey, you may not know exactly what’s going to happen in 18 months. There’s a lot of things that can change, as we’ve seen in the past five years in business, but we want to have the vision, the direction of what we’re working towards and where we’re going, and also give ourselves permission and grace that if we change our mind, we can change our mind, but when we’re in execution mode in that quarter, we want to be really focusing on that, because I like to create all of that in advance so that I don’t feel like I’m, you know, rushing around and just constantly on these last minute deadlines, which is not good for your nervous system, right? It’s not good for anxiety. You need to have time to really feel that you’re prepared, that you’re organized, right? Okay? And next up is systems and software review. So we talked about this a little bit when we were looking through the P and L, and I was talking about, you know, the software switch that we made. 

But right now, with AI, there’s so many bits of software that every two months there’s something new, right? So this is an and until we really reach market saturation, until we really get to the point that everybody has adopted AI and it just becomes a part of how we are living our day to day lives, then there’s going to continue to be changes that happen every single month. So when we’re looking at the AI tools that we’re using, and I’ve heard some feedback from some of our students that say, gosh, I just don’t want to add all these subscriptions. And yes, it’s true that they’re, you know, 20 bucks a month or 25 bucks a month. They’re not expensive however we can feel like we’re, you know, those little things really add up. What I want you to look at is, where does that save you? If you are able to with a, you know, $200 a year, Claude subscription, able to completely replace your copywriter. That was far more than $200 a year right then that subscription is far worth it. And so it’s going to be lowering your payroll, because you may not need a copywriter, but you are then going to have to figure out, how do I train how do I create a custom GPT? How do I create a project that’s really trained on my voice, my brand voice that anybody on my team can plug content into, and it comes out sounding perfect, right? So these are the things that we’re focusing on and looking on right now, but really going through and understanding, you know, do we have the right tech stack in place? Do we are we using AI to its full potential? Is there a better or more efficient tool than something that we’re already using? You guys know, we’re huge fans of mango mint, right? So mango Mint is the spa booking software that we highly recommend. So consider all of the things, look at your goals, look at your budget, and then decide, like, what could this do? Could this software change affect or help me to reach the goals that I have for the business, right? So you want to look at all of your systems as well. So your data analysis, are you optimizing your schedule? Do you have inventory management, marketing, all of these things like, what is the system or process that you can shift or adapt or change to make more efficient, to make more aligned with the goals that you have for yourself, all right? This includes opening and closing procedures, client intake, consultations, service protocols, retail sale processes, emergency procedures, right? So, really looking at all of these things together. So I know this feels like a lot, right? 

We talked about some really big topics, but when you take each section and you just put it to your business, focus on a little bit each month, right in q4 if you are already running a pretty systems based business. These things are just tasks that you’re going to add to your Monday board. You’re going to add them on your CEO tasks and block off the time in 2026 do that now go into October block. Block off a week of time that you’re going to be prepping for your employee reviews and performing your employee reviews. Block off the time that you’re going to be meeting with your CPA. Block off the time that you’re going to be doing your annual planning and reviewing PNLs and softwares and all of those things. This will set you up for success. Do this now before the calendar gets super full, right? So that you know that you are making time for the things that will move the needle in your business, and if you need help, then get help. Right? Reach out to your CPA, reach out to your attorney, reach out to an Estee bestie, bring on a coach or a consultant. There are experts around you that can help you to reach your goals. Okay, so remember, q4 revenue is the priority. We want to really bring that revenue in. But these tasks that we’re talking about in as completing as the CEO tasks, this can make a massive difference in the success of your business in the coming year. Okay, so thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for hanging out with me. I am so appreciative and so grateful for your time and your presence and your listening, and I’m wishing you all the best in your own business that you are building to support the life you want to live. All right, I will catch you on the next episode

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

What happens when you blend hustle with heart?

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

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

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

What you’ll learn during this episode:

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

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

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

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

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ABOUT THE SPA MARKETING MADE EASY HOST 

About Your Host, Daniela Woerner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Was your next mark? 10 million or 2 million?

Honestly? Yeah, 2,000,002

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

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

That’s that’s probably a better goal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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