Sunday, July 14th- Tuesday, July 16th.

If you own, manage or plan to invest in a spa, this program is a must.

If you’re already involved in spa operations, the Spa Director’s Management Intensive will help you tackle your toughest management challenges. If you’re planning to open or acquire a spa, you’ll leave this program with a clear understanding of the potential risks and rewards. If you’re considering a career change or advancement into spa management, the Spa Director’s Management Program will put you miles ahead of the competition.

Unlike most management training courses, the Spa Director’s Management Intensive is rigorously updated and relevant to the current business climate. Hot button-topics like yield management and recession-era employee morale issues are part of the curriculum. Unlike most other consulting/education firms, we actually own and operate a successful 28 year old day spa in California with fifty employees. We’re in the trenches with you in this difficult business climate–we have to walk our talk. We share what’s working now.

Class size is limited for maximum interaction with the instructor. Registration closes July 11th.

Click to visit our registration site.

Details on location, schedule and what to bring follow this agenda, below:

THE AGENDA

Financial management skills for directors and managers

• Overcoming your “fear of financials”: financial literacy made easy

• Managing by the numbers: how to really use the information you get from your financial statements

• Budgeting basics: how to set financial goals that make sense

• Positive cash flow vs. profit: the critical difference

• Capture rate and its impact on the stay spa financial plan

• How to evaluate the effectiveness of your employee compensation plan

• Best practices in compensation design

• Performance incentives to motivate your team when you can’t give raises

• Plugging the profit “leaks” in your operation

• Understanding the impact of discounts and promotions

• Understanding the legal and accounting issues of gift card sales

Sales and Marketing

• The only three ways you can grow your sales

• Marketing modalities for spas: what works, what doesn’t

• Event marketing essentials

• Marketing trends: the good, the bad, the ugly

• Millenials vs. Boomers: understanding the next generation of spa goer

• Best practices in spa web presence

• Getting the most out of your printed marketing collateral

• The why and how of spa packages

• Social media: roles, responsibilities and ROI

• Advertising: where to spend your budget now

• Understanding yield management

• Crafting more compelling and less expensive marketing offers

• Understanding your real cost of customer acquisition

• What “retention” means in your spa (it’s different for day, stay and med spas)

• The role of the local market in hotel spas’ success

• Should your spa market with online coupons?

Successful Spa Programs

• Why the spa menu drives vendor selection–not the other way around

• The pros and cons of “branded” treatments

• Innovation vs. profit: keeping it simple

• Modular menu design

• Optimizing workflow while ensuring safety and customer satisfaction

• Best practices for managing back bar costs

Retail Management

• Ending the disconnect: making retail happen in a spa

• Creating a more profitable retail mix

• Best practices for optimizing your inventory turns

• Salesflow: redesigning internal processes to support sales success

• Effective recommendation tools that spa employees love to use

• Scripting that sells

• Best practices for partnering with vendors

Leadership

• Understanding social styles and their impact on interpersonal communication

• What your team needs from you and how to give it to them

• Recruitment: how to hire the best employees

• Why the customer actually comes “second” in a great spa

• Why you’re doing everything yourself and how to stop it

• Why you can’t motivate your staff and what to do about it

• How to produce great staff meetings

• Best practices in employee discipline

• Performance appraisals that improve performance

Quality Management

• Moments of Truth: why little things are a big deal to your guest

• The Experiential vs. Transactional spa

• How to manage quality in the “closed door” spa environment

• “We don’t need another hero”: how consistency creates great service

• The three essential ingredients of world class service

• How to instill a “quality” mindset in your entire team

• Spa Speak 101: helping your team communicate with quality

• Teaching your team to effectively resolve complaints and perform service recovery

• Comps, refunds and redos: how to use them wisely

• Inspection: the key to success

LOCATION:

TBA  in beautiful Saratoga, California.

CLASS SCHEDULE:

Sunday to Tuesday:

9:00 Continental Breakfast

9:30-5:30 Seminar

TUITION

$1599 per person

10% discount for more than one attendee (co workers, colleagues and friends are welcome to register, but one credit card will be required for the complete tuition payment)

10% discount for earlybird registration by June 7.

Combine these discounts and multiple attendee/earlybirds and get 20% off

Registration closes Thursday, July 11th.

INCLUDES:

• Continental breakfasts
• Lunches
• Coffee Breaks
• All course materials, including our famous Spa Director’s Text
• One hour complimentary telephone consultation after you return to your business

WHAT TO BRING:

• Business cards to share with classmates
• Your current spa menu, if existing (copies if you’d like to trade with classmates)
• Your financial statements, for your reference during class
• Your floorplan, for your reference during class (if available)
• Your top three “learning takeaways” wish list for the course

Click to visit our registration site.

Our apologies,  the date published in our newsletter was for our South African program; our California seminar will actually take place on July 14th-16th. We apologize for the error.

Join Wynne Business’ Senior Consultant, Lisa Starr for this intensive one-day management training workshop, Wednesday September 4, from 9:30a- 5:00p at the Raffles Sanya, Hainan.

The rapid growth in China’s spa industry requires attention to detail and for managers to be at the top of their game.  This course will introduce you to the tools you need to ensure that your spa can attract customers, operate smoothly and be profitable.

This course is not to be missed.  We will share practical and proven methods for improving spa performance.  Lisa will cover:

• Advanced financial management skills

• Spa marketing strategies and tactics

• Selecting, training and retaining the top employees

• Building an efficient operating infrastructure

This outstanding professional education opportunity will be presented at the Raffles Sanya Hainan.  Admission includes lunch and tea breaks, as well as your course text.  Attendees will receive a certificate of completion.

The class will be conducted in English.

US$200 for the SpaChina Summit attendees, and VIP members of the China Spa Association.

US$220 for regular members of the China Spa Association.

US$280 for general admission.

To complete registration by purchasing a ticket through bank transfer payment, please contact us at seminars@wynnebusiness.com.

To complete registration online, please click here.

You could also book through info@spachina.com or call 86 21 5385 8951 ext 807

For more information, please contact us at seminars@wynnebusiness.com

Taught by Peggy Wynne Borgman, Wynne Business Executive Consultant and Lisa M. Starr, Wynne Business Senior Consultant

The Spa Director’s Management Intensive has always been the most progressive management education program in the industry–continuously updated and full of fresh content. For spa directors, owners, investors and startups, SDMI delivers answers to some of the most vexing challenges faced by spa businesses. Though attending a live seminar with colleagues has unique and powerful benefits, not everyone who needs this program can take the time away from their businesses or lives.

In The Spa Director’s Management Intensive Online, you’ll acquire the knowledge we pack into our three-day program in an expanded, self-paced format. We’ve designed the curriculum to be completed in about twelve weeks, but students can take longer if necessary. Each week, students watch a presentation, complete a reading assignment from the course text, and complete a quiz. Optional assignments deepen engagement with the topics. A final exam measures overall comprehension of the material.

SDMI Online has another benefit: it is structured as a graded program. To receive our certificate of completion, participants

Complete our online spa management course online, at your own pace.

must receive an overall grade of 75%. If you’re considering sending your team members to the program, you’ll be able to see exactly how well they’ve performed. (CEU’s are coming soon as well.) Our online course also offers a multiple registrant discount of just $899 per person.

Hot button-topics like yield management, online discounters, and recession-era employee morale issues are part of the curriculum. Unlike most other consulting/education firms, we actually own and operate a successful 28 year old day spa in California with fifty employees. We’re in the trenches with you in this difficult business climate–we have to walk our talk. We share what’s working now.

Just as with our live seminar, this program is led by Peggy Wynne Borgman and Lisa M. Starr.

THE AGENDA

The program is presented in a series of modules:

Financial management skills for directors and managers

• Overcoming your “fear of financials”: financial literacy made easy

• Managing by the numbers: how to really use the information you get from your financial statements

• Budgeting basics: how to set financial goals that make sense

• Positive cash flow vs. profit: the critical difference

• Capture rate and its impact on the stay spa financial plan

• How to evaluate the effectiveness of your employee compensation plan

• Best practices in compensation design

• Performance incentives to motivate your team when you can’t give raises

• Plugging the profit “leaks” in your operation

• Understanding the impact of discounts and promotions

• Understanding the legal and accounting issues of gift card sales

Sales and Marketing

• The only three ways you can grow your sales

• Marketing modalities for spas: what works, what doesn’t

• Event marketing essentials

• Marketing trends: the good, the bad, the ugly

• Millenials vs. Boomers: understanding the next generation of spa goer

• Best practices in spa web presence

• Getting the most out of your printed marketing collateral

• The why and how of spa packages

• Social media: roles, responsibilities and ROI

• Advertising: where to spend your budget now

• Understanding yield management

• Crafting more compelling and less expensive marketing offers

• Understanding your real cost of customer acquisition

• What “retention” means in your spa (it’s different for day, stay and med spas)

• The role of the local market in hotel spas’ success

• Should your spa market with online coupons?

Successful Spa Programs

• Why the spa menu drives vendor selection–not the other way around

• The pros and cons of “branded” treatments

• Innovation vs. profit: keeping it simple

• Modular menu design

• Optimizing workflow while ensuring safety and customer satisfaction

• Best practices for managing back bar costs

Retail Management

• Ending the disconnect: making retail happen in a spa

• Creating a more profitable retail mix

• Best practices for optimizing your inventory turns

• Salesflow: redesigning internal processes to support sales success

• Effective recommendation tools that spa employees love to use

• Scripting that sells

• Best practices for partnering with vendors

Leadership and Communication

• Understanding social styles and their impact on interpersonal communication

• What your team needs from you and how to give it to them

• Recruitment: how to hire the best employees

• Why the customer actually comes “second” in a great spa

• Why you’re doing everything yourself and how to stop it

• Why you can’t motivate your staff and what to do about it

• How to produce great staff meetings

• Best practices in employee discipline

• Performance appraisals that improve performance

Quality Management

• Moments of Truth: why little things are a big deal to your guest

• The Experiential vs. Transactional spa

• How to manage quality in the “closed door” spa environment

• “We don’t need another hero”: how consistency creates great service

• The three essential ingredients of world class service

• How to instill a “quality” mindset in your entire team

• Spa Speak 101: helping your team communicate with quality

• Teaching your team to effectively resolve complaints and perform service recovery

• Comps, refunds and redos: how to use them wisely

• Inspection: the key to success

INCLUDES:

• Our proprietary Spa Director’s e-Text
• Assignments, online discussions and tests
• One hour private business coaching session

TUITION

$1299 per person, $899 per person for two or more participants from the same organization

Register here

On Sunday, June 23, 2p-315p:  “Creating a Practice-Building Team.”

Want to set your medical spa apart from the competition?  The teamwork and patient care skills of your staff are a crucial component of patient satisfaction.  Are you attracting, hiring, orienting, and training the right people for your practice team?  We’ll cover guidelines for sound interviewing and hiring techniques, creating orientation and training programs, and the role of job descriptions, employee handbooks, and treatment protocols, all of which increase the likelihood of continued success for each new member of your team.  The result will be high productivity and increased patient and employee satisfaction.  Provide a structure for your human resource efforts and keep your business growing.

On Monday, June 24, 9a-12p:  “Spa Compensation Solutions.”

In spa operations, few issues are as challenging and diverse as staff compensation plans.  Is yours draining more than its share of your revenue?  Have you been looking for ways to boost your bottom line?  Profits are too narrow to just keep paying your staff the same way you always did; your compensation plan has to function as a tool that creates a fair income for your staff, while driving sales and enhancing team performance and client loyalty.  Staff compensation is your single biggest expense, and a probably designed plan can be all the difference between profits and losses.  We’ll discuss some of the many new concepts that can be incorporated into your compensation model, creating rewarding opportunities for your staff while providing enough of a margin to successfully market, operate, and grow you spa business.  This workshop will provide the opportunity to discuss:

• The wide array of concepts being used today in a variety of spa settings
• How to determine the true cost of your payroll
• Target ranges of payroll costs by department
• The most important elements of incentive or performance-based programs
• A master plan to make necessary changes and manage through transition

Creating memorable experiences requires coordination, knowledge, and superior skills. World Class Service requires world class training.

Meyer is the author of the best book on hospitality ever written, Setting The Table, The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business. It’s on the syllabus for our three day management seminar, The Spa Director’s Management Intensive. It shares a straightforward and easy-to-apply philosophy that is every bit as relevant to the spa world as the restaurant world. In fact, it’s relevant for any business with employees and customers.

I’m pretty sure I was the only person in that audience that morning at the Spanish Bay Resort who was there to pick up management tips, not pasta-cooking tips. (I got those, too–I’ve been over-stirring my pasta and using over-salted water!) At ten o’clock in the morning, the ladies sitting next to me were already happily quaffing glasses of chilled Chardonnay handed out by event staff.

The new cookbook they’ve collaborated on is called Family Table. It’s based on the type of recipes served for a restaurant’s “family meal,” the meal that a restaurant staff eats before service. Family Meal is a humble, hearty affair which utilizes ingredients that are still good but not ready for prime time in the dining room. Meyer believes that when his employees are nourished with a good meal (not fancy, but prepared with love and gratitude) they can, in turn, give good service to customers. Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group, which operates more than a dozen restaurants in New York, practices a form of hospitality management which puts employees first.

The concept of the Family Meal really struck me as I was listening to the affable give-and-take between Meyer and Quagliata during the cooking demo. There was something almost spiritual in the way they described this time-honored ritual of sharing food before work.

I wondered, what is the spa industry’s version of the Family Meal?

What do we do on a daily basis, prior to sending our team into the spa to help our guests feel great?

In our spa, we have a pre-shift “huddle.” It focuses on sharing information about the day’s schedule, including anomalies, updates. It’s operational.  In fact, it’s transactional. Huddle is when we distribute the cash tips collected by our front desk team. A lot of restaurants do a huddle too: it’s called the “lineup.” (Kind of scary-sounding, isn’t it?)

Inspired by this session, I’m brainstorming ways to upgrade our huddles:

Ideas I’m considering:

• Family Snack: something healthy, changing daily, at the break table.
• Mini chair massage before shift. 3-5 minutes per person.
• An employee-led routine of stretching, warmups and grounding

Studies tell us that guests are not loyal until they’ve been “emotionally satisfied” by their experience with your business. Emotional satisfaction is much easier to create when you’re experiencing it yourself.

Let’s say you’re a massage therapist at a spa. You drive (or bike, or walk) to work, probably not thinking about what you’re about to do, but about all the other things you have to do, and can’t. You come into the spa, most likely through an entrance not used by guests, and prepare for your shift: gather linens, restock supplies, set up your table. You’re probably hustling to get it done in time to greet your first guest.

When do you get into the spa mindset? Probably about the time your hands first touch your client.

If the “family meal” is about nourishing a restaurant staff, the equivalent would be “practicing what we preach” with our team. How better to get our staff members into the spa mindset than by sharing a little bit of it with them?

Demonstrating and sharing self-care just may be the “family meal” of the spa industry.

Ever since WWII, Americans have been in love with the idea of discounts. For many people the thrill of getting something for less than the advertised price overshadows the actual acquisition (or at least for people who are focused on price, rather than quality). Our recent economic situation created a new iteration of discount strategy: the membership program. No finer example of this exists in the spa industry than Massage Envy, and with over 700 locations, each reputedly grossing over a million dollars a year, it’s still growing. Volume like that inspires a lot of wannabe businesses hoping to cash in on this concept, but I think the Massage Envy ship has already sailed. Not that you can’t have a discount membership program at your spa, but building an entire business around this concept has already been done, and done well.

Peggy Wynne comments: The other major consideration about establishing a membership model: if it doesn’t work well for you, “stopping” it is next to impossible without angering a lot of customers. Think about it carefully and look at a variety of models.

One of the simplest we’ve seen was a membership whose sole perk was a discount. The spa sold a 20% discount privilege on services for $20 per month. While on the face of it that seems much too generous, how many of your guests diligently come once a month and spend an average of $100? That’s the minimum spend if a client is going to break even on their membership. Depending on your price point, that might not be a workable model, but when you look at average monthly spending, you may be surprised at how much this has slipped in the last ten years. Your membership might need to be $30 a month, which still sounds like a deal to a power user. And yes, some clients will overuse it. That’s the whole idea…the health club model. A handful overuse it, but most people underutilize it.

Certain industries have ingrained the discount message into consumers; just look at what is happening at department store JCPenney. JCPenney hired the innovative executive Ron Johnson, the former Sr. V.P. of Retailing for Apple, to be the CEO last fall. Johnson created one of the highest sales-per-square-foot environments in the retail world at Apple, and JCPenney felt like it needed some innovation. Johnson’s plan for JCPenney upended its standard discount and coupon-driven mantle, and focuses on providing everyday low prices and value, and staying away from the “sale” word. Turns out, folks that shop at JCPenney like prowling the aisles for deals, and they’ve been staying away from the store in droves. Whether this experiment to transform the company and its reputation will be successful or not is yet to be determined, but I give Johnson credit for bravery. I’m guessing it’s going to take more than just a few months to retrain the consumer on JCPenney’s new value proposition. Why? Humans are creatures of habit.

So what does this mean for spas? It means we need to be very careful about the message and image we convey to our target audience. If we start training guests that our prices are as malleable as they are at department stores, we risk beginning a dangerous downward spiral. Consider this interesting article, “Customers Will Pay More For Less,” by Alexander Chernev, in Harvard Business Review, in which two researchers discovered that consumers were willing to pay more for two separate items than they were willing to pay when the items were bundled together. For instance, people were willing to spend $225 and $54, respectively, on two pieces of luggage when purchased separately, but when they were bundled together, consumers were only willing to pay $165! The reason is attributed to a thought process called categorical reasoning, and can be seen particularly when an expensive item is bundled with a less-expensive one. If you create special offers that pair higher-priced spa services with less expensive ones, you may be devaluing both of them in the eyes of the consumer. Be strategic and consistent with your pricing, and you won’t run the risk of thoroughly confusing the consumer about your true value proposition.

SELVICE Presentation (WMV)

SELVICE DVD

Social Styles Quiz

Financial Savvy (PPT)