New Day Spa in your Area? Welcome the competition!
Scottsdale AZ Day Spas / Phoenix AZ Day Spas / Arizona Spas
New day spas are opening on just about every corner in Arizona. Some have a singular focus like massage and charge incredible low prices, and others are just individuals bored with their current job and who feel that a day spa is an easy business to own. Spa owners find themselves analyzing the threat that each new operation may present, looking for their flaws or any way to discredit the legitimacy of a claim to being a good day spa. Or, worse yet, you discover that the new competitor is a few of your formerly loyal employees! Yes, your service provides, and a few of the desk staff have left to take your clients with them.
As with any competition, if you spend time worrying about what they are doing, you are taking valuable time from operating the best business you can. The bottom line is that if you take care of your employees and your clients, they will take care of you. Here are a few pointers to assist you.
Stay calm:
The rumors about new locations are generally inaccurate. At first you may hear that: they’ll have more treatment rooms, more locker facilities, a juice bar, offer wine service, will have a higher pay scale and automatic gratuities. Their facilities will be better and offera meditation lounge, more wet rooms, Jacuzzis, steam room and even a day care facility. Customers and employees will be knocking on the door of this new spa even before they begin construction. Thoughts of change start to fill your head. How many clients will you lose? Should you remodel? Expand? Change your compensation to keep employees?
If you have been operating a great operation, you will have nothing to worry about. If you haven’t then maybe it is time to take stock. First, like attracts like. If you treat your employees and clients with respect, they will respect you. Employees value recognition, education, growth, and appreciation far more than their income potential. They want an ethical boss with integrity and values. And while most spa owners and managers think their performance in these areas are excellent, interviews with employees and a look at the latest trainings indicate otherwise.
How can you improve?
How would you rate your spa’s service and hospitality quality compared to the spas around you?
Have you mystery shopped yourself? Is your telephone answered by the 3rd ring? Is your spa clean, how well do you handle guest concerns? How else can you know if the reception staff is following the proper procedures or if therapists are short-cutting on services without it coming from a client complaint first? Are your employees thoroughly and uniformly trained on all spa service and sales procedures, or customer service techniques? Does your staff function as a team or is their jealousy and rumors?
In order to be #1 in these critical quality areas you will need to put the following key steps into place:
• A spa is suppose to be a relaxing stress free zone. A place where customers are treated to a temporary escape from the real world, and where they are willing to pay for experience. Nothing else should be included. Begin by knowing exactly what this experience is supposed to be at your spa.
• Train and retrain: Practice doesn’t make Perfect, Perfect Practice makes Perfect. So catch your staff doing things right. The effects of training are diminished by the day and must be repeated routinely in order to produce the results you want. Remember, after a training a person only retains 80% of what they learned and then this can diminish if it is not used on a regular basis.
• The best way to create change is to reward the positive behaviors and correct the bad ones. Keep in mind that recognition may be done in public, reprimands are always in private.
Be head and shoulders over your Competition DO NOT get into a cheap pricing war. It will destroy you both.
The best spa must also be the most expensive—how else do you afford all that quality? If you plan to be different, hopefully meaning different in a better way than everyone else, you must also demonstrate that difference in your prices. Market realities dictate that quality isn’t free and that you cannot and should not desire to be both the quality and low-cost leader. However, if you do elect to be in the upper end of the spa market you must be in the upper end of quality, period. It’s quite useless to seek the business distinction of being the same as but different than everyone else. It just won’t sell.
Love your staff & Clients and let them know it.
If you want your loyal following to stick around then you must give them what they value most: recognition, caring, attention, appreciation, and inspiration. Professional relationships based on ethics and values is one thing your competitors can’t duplicate regardless of their startup budgets is the unique and rewarding relationships you forge between yourself, your customers, and your team. Business managers who truly take care of their people will find them firmly disinclined to leave for the prospect of finding it elsewhere.
Like attracts like, so if you are a person of integrity, loyalty and honor, then you will attract the same. Those that do not resonate with you will need to move on anyway, for having them on board will only hold you back.
Leave vengeance to God.
Nothing gives more power to your competitor than outright hostility from you. Don’t feed it, just step aside and they will self destruct, you do not have to do a thing. The fear of something is always stronger than the reality. Be fearless. . Retain all of your ethical fortitude. Don’t denigrate the new spa. Don’t raid their employees or pay too much to keep your own in place. Avoid lowering your prices to undercut the new spa or throwing in more expensive customer perks when you don’t need to. In other words stick to what has worked well for you and then do it even better. Stay true to who your spa is.
Following this formula you’ll probably find that not only will your business continue to grow and prosper but you’ll save yourself a lot counter-productive worry and expense. New spas are risky ventures at best that come without any guarantees of success. You, on the other hand, have already passed the initial test of business survival.
You have experience and operating wisdom that the new spa will have to struggle hard to gain in an even more competitive market than you did. Just be glad it isn’t you, and get some sleep!
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OWNERS SHOWCASE YOUR SPA WITH SPAVELOUS!
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