Top Management Opportunities At Spas
Diane Trieste
In the article Spa-Management Opportunities for Massage Therapists, I discussed immediate career opportunities for therapists within the spa industry: lead therapist, menu-and-service developer, trainer, and staff manager. This time I’ll talk about the many paths from massage therapist to top management.

Do you want to help run the spa? If so, you’ll need to identify your goals and set a timeframe. Where do you want to be in six months? In a year? In five years? Realistically, what will you need to get there? Planning is the key to managing your career.

In many industries and professions, there’s one established way to become a decision-maker, and it usually involves a diploma. Our industry is beginning to move in that direction, but there’s still no such thing as a course of study that will get you hired as a spa executive. But by focusing on your long-term goals and capitalizing on opportunities as they come, you can begin educating yourself for the job you ultimately desire.

Just as there’s no universally recognized course of study, there’s not a single sequence of positions guaranteed to lead to the executive suite. In theory, the progression might look something like this: therapist to lead therapist to service developer to massage manager to spa director to corporate management. That exact route is probably the exception rather than the rule, though.

That’s good news. Our industry is full of possibilities for the ambitious individual, and there are many ways to acquire the skills and knowledge that you'll need. If you set goals, your present job can become a step in your career path. Here’s my advice on how to make that happen.

Spa management 101
Let’s first clarify what spa management really is. Many people think that it revolves around hiring and scheduling. In fact, those are administrative tasks, part of daily operations that can be delegated to other competent staff. Managing a spa involves much, much more.

Here’s one way to explain what spa management does: It takes space and turns it into revenue-generating components of a spa. The critical function of management is the creation of revenue, and that’s a concept any manager has to understand.

Imagine, as an example, a single, empty room. Nothing’s in it to begin with, but, as a manager, your job will be to make it part of the spa. First, you’ll have to know the square footage, the cost of real estate, and how that drives the overhead. Then you need to answer a whole series of questions: What services will be performed in the room? Who are the staff? How will this space generate profit for the organization? What equipment, products and supplies will be needed, and how do they affect costs? What support staff will be needed to perform the services? What are the costs and mechanisms for getting people in the door? What’s a competitive yet profitable price to charge for a service? How can you create ancillary income? Can you provide retail opportunities and promotion specials?

Obviously, this is a long, long way from the concerns of the hands-on healer who will work in the room. For the therapist, the room, the treatment, the schedule and the price already exist. They’re facts. It’s owners and management that typically create the environment. Therapists and customers contribute, of course, but managers turn ideas into actual, individual treatments.

Deciding what to do with space takes an intimate, thorough knowledge of the day-to-day, minute-to-minute realities of providing services. That’s the bottom line, and it’s something that you, as an experienced therapist, already have. Your knowledge potentially can make you a valuable member of the management team, if you demonstrate that you have management skills.

That’s an important “if.” Your employer needs managers with broad perspective. Management must know enough about what goes on outside the treatment room to make what happens in the room successful–and profitable enough to happen over and over again. Along with great communication, organization and people skills, that takes a sort of double vision: The primary focus–providing the service–stays the same, but as you move up in the organization you help make that service happen from farther and farther away, and with many more variables to consider. This can easily become like a game of Telephone, where a whispered word at one end gets transmitted with ever more distortion–unless the person in charge understands what can go wrong at every step along the way. This is something you cannot learn by just giving treatments, no matter how talented you are.

Basic spa structure
Here’s a basic look at spa structure. Most of these categories are parts of every business:

• Guest service
• Accounting
• Marketing/PR
• Sales
• Maintenance
• Human relations/resources
• Purchasing/receiving
• Data processing/information technology
• Retail
• Owners/executive

Depending on the size of the spa where you work, as a manager you may actually be fulfilling most of these functions, and you already know how each contributes to the spa.

If you work in a larger organization, you probably have the advantage of support by specific departments. In any size organization, though, to be a competent manager you’ll need to know why each of these components is important. Let me be clear: You don’t have to understand the specifics of what everyone in the company does, but you must have a grasp of the function of each area.

You also need to recognize the contribution of each area in the organization as a whole. If you’re promoted to spa-treatment manager at a destination spa and you learn that your department generates a substantial gross profit, you’ll also need to recognize that while some other areas do not provide revenue income, they’re still crucial to the business. You need to be able to see how your area supports the organization and furthers its mission - and its financial good health.

Sample career scenarios
Getting a wider perspective on the organization requires that you get out of the treatment room, at least part of the time. Schooling can help; another way is by capitalizing on your strengths and taking on a new role in the industry. Here are a few of the possible scenarios:

Situation: You’re knowledgeable about equipment and workplace functionality issues and want to get new experience.
Action: Become an expert on workplace ergonomics.
Advantage: You learn to think about both the detail of hands-on treatments and about the bigger picture. What does a given spa need? How can a therapist be safely and efficiently trained? How much will it cost the spa for benefits? When is the payoff for the initial investment? How much is a given decision likely to cost or save in Workers' Compensation?

Situation: You have a gift for teaching/working with others and hope to rise in the organization.
Action: Teach at the local school of massage or in other massage-related programs; train your colleagues; lecture to the public or guests.
Advantage: The best way to learn is to teach, or guest-lecture, at spa-related technical schools. In addition, interacting with other professionals and the public will keep you on top of what’s happening in your field. Good teaching requires knowledge, mastery of detail and ability to generalize and be abstract - and, of course, great communication skills.

Situation: You truly love a particular product or equipment line and are ready for a change.
Action: Work as a product or equipment representative.
Advantage: Working as a supplier to a spa, you see spa operations from a different perspective. You develop organizational and assessment skills, as well as expertise with budgeting, service outcome and expectation. The more quickly and accurately you can size up a spa scene, the more management skills you’ll acquire.

Any of these career moves (and there are others!) will allow you to see the spa environment from a new angle, which will be very different from the one inside the treatment room. That broader perspective is the most important single thing you will need in management.

Your skills, your career
The opportunities for therapists to move up in the spa industry are stronger than ever, because spa owners are eager to promote from within whenever possible. Therapists who want to move up, however, do need to acquire the skills and knowledge that will make them promotable.

The elements that you, as a hands-on healer, are most likely to lack right now are understanding of the basic principles and practices of business and of the spa industry as a whole, and a thorough understanding of the particular organization you work for. As I suggested above, the best way to get the experience you need is to get out into the wider world of spa.

It’s also helpful to pick up general business skills. For example, if you’re uneasy with computers - and I can definitely sympathize with you there - sign up for a course at your community college. Spreadsheets and scheduling programs are not that hard to master in a classroom setting. If you know nothing about how a business runs, I strongly suggest that you take a couple of beginning business or management classes - they’ll help you get a handle on it. As a caregiver, you may never have looked at a profit-and-loss (P&L) statement in your life - but if you want to help run a spa, you’ll need know what a P&L is, at least, and why it matters. Taking a few basic classes is easier than waiting for an offer.

Seems like a lot? Perhaps you think you’ll never find the time? It’s absolutely achievable if you plan accordingly. Promotion is not going to come overnight, or without effort. If you’re organized, ambitious, prepared and determined, the opportunity will present itself.