While clients are thinking green and red as the holidays approach, your spa or massage practice might be “going for the gold.” The holiday season can be particularly profitable as clients seek pampering and relief from stress whether it be from holiday preparations, travel or checking off items on their gift-giving list.
But even while your appointment book may be fast filling up and retail items start to fly off shelves, you need to find time to think about the coming year. Here is where strategic planning comes in. Annual business strategic planning helps you focus and prioritize activities so that you have a clear direction and goals for the New Year. It also provides an opportunity to review your mission and vision, which can change over time due to market conditions, developments in the spa and massage industries and your interests and priorities.
Your annual plan does not need to be long, but it should set goals and benchmarks for performance, and they need to be realistic. Unrealistic goals about revenue, new client acquisition, or additional services you want to offer can lead to increased overhead followed by damaging cash flow. Think of businesses that have tried to expand too quickly or without careful planning that end up losing money and closing their doors.
Get your team involved
Your team is on the front line with clients. Their interaction with clients can help identify areas that could be improved to provide better customer service and ensure long-term client relationships. For example, your receptionist may be the first one to hear client concerns. Your professional staff may have input on new treatments and take-home retail offers based on client comments.
Set aside an uninterrupted block of time for the strategic planning process. This may involve time before or after business. Kick off the strategic planning by reviewing the following questions. Input from these questions will help shape next year’s plan, which should be actionable and impactful and not merely a handful of ideas that sound good but miss the mark and/or are unachievable at this stage of your growth.
1. What do you think contributed the most to your success this year?
2. What is the one thing your business did best during the year? What would it take to repeat this success?
3. What is the area where your spa or massage practice underperformed this year? What would fix it?
4. What strategic initiatives did you launch?
5. What part of the business demonstrated the most opportunity for growth? What steps should be taken to accelerate this growth?
6. What tools helped in managing the business?
7. If a formidable competitor opened in your market, what would it look like?
8. What are the challenges to continued success?
9. What contributed the most to advancing long term business goals?
10. What metrics would you use to measure success over the coming year
Key strategic planning components
Assess the market
Business strategic planning starts with a review of the competitive landscape. It will help you understand how you stack up against the competition, including both established players and new market entrants, and what areas you need to change/improve over the new year. Conduct online research through social media and review sites to find out what the marketplace is saying about the competition. Check in with clients to get their input. You may even want to send out questions via text or email to get feedback. Also ask your vendors and business associates what they know about the competition. Based on your research, identify your advantages and disadvantages against the competition so that you know your opportunities and challenges in the coming year.
Analyze your service offering
As part of strategic planning for the new year, make sure your services and your target customers align. You may choose to expand into new areas, such as sports massage, or focus on massage for the elderly or expectant moms based on your research into the requirements of current clients and prospects. As you identify new areas, consider what team training or equipment is necessary for your spa or massage practice to expand into these areas.
Conduct a marketing review
Do not limit your online research to the competition. Find out what clients and prospects are saying about your spa or massage practice. Also determine if the marketing messages about your business resonate with your clients and prospects. You may find that your business has a perception problem that needs addressing. Is the perception that your business is too high end in pricing or not full service enough?
Evaluate your marketing activities both on and offline. If you have been conducting direct mail or email marketing, you should have reports on response rates to know what has been most successful. Determine what have been the most effective promotions throughout the year.
Look at your web traffic to assess how much it has grown and where visitors are coming from – email marketing, online ads, social media channels, or blog posts. Also analyze where most of your visitors are spending time on your site to determine if you need to make any changes.
Marketing activities also can include community involvement through volunteer work or sponsorship and participation in local business events. Gauge what activities have helped raise your visibility and attract new clients.
Based on your research and your goals, determine what activities you want to continue or launch next year, and set a budget for each.
Assess operational efficiency and productivity
Analyze your operations from your lease, if you rent space, to equipment to your information technology. Identify what changes you need to make to improve efficiency and productivity and to enable you to meet growth goals.
With innovative technology coming onto the market all the time, you may want to think about automating processes – such appointment setting – and taking advantage of new customer relationship management platforms that help you better customize the client experience.
And then there is the impact of AI, which is touching most industries, even massage. AI, for example, can analyze a vast amount of research and clinical data to suggest optimal massage techniques, sequences, and durations to treat specific conditions or injuries. Factoring in client preferences, medical history, and desired outcomes, AI systems can provide therapists with evidence-based recommendations to help make treatment decisions.
Determine hiring needs
You will need to decide not only who you need to hire to meet projected goals but what areas of expertise new team members must have to serve new client targets.
Finish with financial performance
Review financial information for your spa or massage practice over the past three to five years, if applicable. Break down total sales into different service areas and retail products and determine gross profit margin for each. Include figures on capital expenditures and make sure balance sheets and profit and loss statements are up to date. Using this information, forecast your financials for the next three years.
Strategic business planning for the New Year will take some time and even when you think you have it all nailed down, things change and you need to make revision along the way. But challenges as well as opportunities are easier to navigate when you know where you want to take your business an