10 HOT tips how to make your spa/salon profitable in a shortest periods of time

Here come my tips for starting a spa/salon business, which I recommend to study and follow carefully in order to avoid the mistakes, which has cost me thousands of dollars and a lot of time.

1.  Don’t compromise with the interior fixtures as once it is done, it will be very difficult – if not impossible – and expensive to change. Rather spend a few dollars more, so that you (and your clients) are happy for a long time.

2.  Select carefully your equipment and negotiate prices.  Especially in a weak economy, suppliers are keen for your order, a fact you can take advantage of and which will save you a lot of money  Look for well-maintained 2nd hand equipment, if you have a tight budget. It can be as good as new for half price or less.

3.  Don’t forget to implement the three basic, often neclected facilities: kitchenette for preparing drinks and snacks (often forgotten in salons), a staff rest room, and sufficient storage space (towels, products,….). It is very frustrating later if those are improvised last minute or unavailable.

4.  Select your skin care range less as per your personal liking but rather from an economic and clients point of view.  Look at issues like completeness including samples (!), retail affordability for the majority of your clients, and good customer service. Before deciding, ask other (local) users (spa/salon owners) about their satisfaction with the supplier.  Don’t forget, you may get a worldwide brand but with bad local management having a lousy service mentality!

5.  Starting a spa business means beginning your marketing well in advance of your planned opening date, otherwise you and your staff can play monopoly all day. The absolute minimum is 3 months, even better 6 months ahead.  Create a buzz, even if your place is or looks like a construction site at that moment.  Image is key nowadays!

6.  Select your most valuable asset, your staff, not last minute in a rush. How good the applicants CV may look, ask the people, who employed them before, for their opinion.  Some girls are masters in acting like Hollywood starlets! Just believe in hard, objective facts, not words and appearance.

7.  Try, if ever possible, to get all staff first on a probation contract for 3 months.  Make sure (or enforce) that you can dismiss them for all relevant reasons. A wrong selection and a permanent contract is bad news. Worse news I can see only in having no clients at all.

8.  Put in place a strict control mechanism for your staff right from the beginning.  Once you allow them privileges and are generous with punctuality, treatment time and product spending, it will be difficult, if not impossible to correct their habits later.  And even worse, staff will expand on those “luxuries” seeing that they do get away with it.Here you are risking the future of your business!

9.  Look early for someone (manager), whom you can trust to run the business for you for at least a week or two. There can always be a reason that you are unable to run the show (sickness, family matters, business travel etc).  If there is nobody with that quality, it can mean a substantial financial drop in that period and worse – significant image damage.

10.  Last but not least, have no illusions: you are in not for a 8 to 5 job and there will be no holidays for quite some time to come.  Make sure that you have the full support of your family and enough financial backing as the cash flow projections are nearly always much too optimistic. Yours will hardly be the exception to the rule!