Planning Your Spa’s Future

The New Year has snuck up on us once again and the time has come to evaluate our business. We all know that the market is currently on a downward slide, but it is during this time that we as business owners must work even harder to persevere. While the end of the year has typically shown a peak in business, unfortunately the beginning of the year has traditionally been a valley. However, just because business may be slower during this time of year doesn’t mean that there aren’t things we can do to stay competitive. The economy, market, customer and competition are constantly changing and evolving. If we don’t change and evolve our planning for business, we get left behind in the dust.

Writing a competitive strategic plan

When starting to write your strategic plan, whether it’s for the first time, or an evolution of a previous one, It’s always a good idea to take a step back and figure out what your are looking to accomplish. Are you looking to lower costs? Increase sales? Improve customer service? Enter a new market? Or all of the above? In any one of those cases, a strategic plan must begin with a goal in mind. Once that goal is established, it’s time to look within for change and growth. Running an internal audit will allow you to find things that may have run passed you during the year. As a business owner, your many responsibilities will deter you from catching smaller details that can be caught during your evaluation process. Below is a list of questions that you may ask yourself when you are in the process of a self audit:

- Do your revenues justify your costs?
- Have your marketing efforts brought you the results you wanted to see?
- Did you quantify your marketing efforts based on the revenues they generated?
- What worked well for you the previous year? Leverage it!
- What did not bring in the results you expected? Eliminate it!

Once you have taken a bird’s eye view of your business and evaluated your efforts, it’s time to start planning and implementing. Writing a strategic plan not only gives you a roadmap and direction for where you want to go and how you want to get there, it also allows you to budget accordingly. A good budget allows you to put your money to good use with more rewarding results.
Strategically planning for your business allows you to be prepared. It allows you to spend money accordingly and get the most out of what you invest. Additionally, a well designed strategic plan sets the foundation of how your year will turn out.