By Dori Soukup, Founder and CEO of InSPAration Management

Recruiting, and hiring medical spa employees (including physician assistants, nurse practitioners, nurses, and aestheticians) and building them into a high-performing team can be difficult. Finding talented team members, training them, and keeping them is essential to success! In this article, you will discover five effective principles to help build your team and elevate your performance.

PRINCIPLE 1: Always Be Recruiting

You should always be on the lookout for talent. Avoid waiting until you need people to start interviewing. You want to hire people who have a position already. In sports, teams have recruiters who are always scouting and looking for talent. Your business should follow the same practice. You need to always be searching for "A Players". If you wait until you need someone, you end up hiring out of desperation and you will most likely hire the wrong person.

PRINCIPLE 2: In-Depth Interview Process

It all starts with the interview. Do you have a system for the interview process? If not, you must in order to avoid faux pas. The most common mistake spa and medi spa professionals make when hiring individuals is the lack of clarity in regard to expectations.

Often, a detailed position description and a commitment agreement are missing. Both are essential components of the CLARITI Hiring System where you write down all the expectations you want the employee to do.

For example, if recommending retail products is mandatory, it needs to be clarified in the interview process. Or if attending training and team meetings is something you do on a weekly and monthly basis. Or if doing laundry and maintaining inventory, etc. All expectations should be disclosed, clarified, agreed upon in the interview process, put in writing, and signed off by both you and the new employee. This will help you avoid making costly mistakes and assist you in hiring A and B players instead of C and D players.

The cost of team turnover and hiring mistakes is enormous. Always hire slow. Take your time and make sure everything is crystal clear prior to offering the position.

Find the keys to implementing CLARITI in your practice in the AmSpa Store.

PRINCIPLE 3: Orientation

Once you'e hired the new employee, your goal is to position them for success. Begin with a professional Orientation. Your orientation manual should contain your operating guidelines, your organizational structure, your culture, your policies, procedures, your systems along with your employee manual. This can be a mini seminar they attend or it can be a video they sit and watch. Post-orientation, they should be tested to ensure they understand everything. This will provide clarity on what it means to be part of your team.

PRINCIPLE 4: Spa & Medi Spa Training Manuals

No one is going to come to you completely trained. It's essential to have training manuals to help you train your team. One thing I learned long ago is that for a business to succeed, you need to have effective systems in place, then keep training those systems until they are perfected.

As a business consultant, I have the opportunity to speak to many medi spa owners and directors. The one thing I notice over and over is the lack of training structure within spas. Spa leaders must put on the trainer and coach hat more often if they want to build a dream team and reach new levels of success.

I like to use sports analogies because they have a lot in common with business. Sports teams spend a lot of time training and sharpening their skills. Coaches are always on the floor watching and coaching their teams. They take time-outs, watch videos, create plays and map-out game strategies. You have a TEAM and if you want to win, you need to spend time coaching and training.

A. Business Training

Business training is almost non-existent within the industry. BIG MISTAKE!

As leaders, it's essential to train the team. Having training manuals by department will make your life a lot easier. Your manuals should include systems, strategies, processes, tools, forms, scripts, an approach on how to perform and deliver a great guest experience.

Business training should include:

• Revenue generation – Training the team on how to increase service and retail revenue (Click for more information on recommending treatment upgrades, series sales, or retail products)
• Marketing – self and cross promoting to increase awareness (Click for more information on building a medi spa marketing plan)
• Guest experience – increasing retention rate
• Promoting spa and medi spa memberships (Click for more information on developing your membership program)
• Overall revenue generation – Increasing revenue per guest (Click for more information on compensation based on Volume Per Guest)

B. Technical Training

Delivering a great experience is essential to your success. Your team must wow your guests with their skills, techniques and knowledge.

Technical training should include:

• Treatment protocols
• Product knowledge – services and retail
• Contraindications
• Ingredients and their benefits
• The spa and medi spa menu
• Treatment room up keep
• Inventory management
• Monitoring product cost per treatment

C. Guest Relations Training – Reception Team

Your client relations department can make you or break you.

Training manual should include:

• Call management
• Check-In
• Check-Out
• Retail sales
• Future appointments
• Membership sales
• Scripts and strategies
• Targets and goals

Click here to learn how to transform your guest relations department.

To be successful, a big emphasis must be placed on initial training and continual training.

PRINCIPLE 5: Develop Healthy Training Habits

Training Schedule

Develop a training calendar and publish it. A training session can be as short as 30 minutes. Getting the team into a training habit is essential to your success. Schedule training sessions for the same day and time on a regular basis.

Training Agenda

Be prepared with an agenda and a purpose. Portray a professional image to your team and keep them engaged.

Evaluating Your Training

It is wise to evaluate your training to ensure productive sessions and obtain valuable feedback.

Assistant Coach

As in sports, the head coach has assistant coaches to assist them. Who are your assistant coaches? If you don't have them, it's time for you to develop some key players to assist you.

Setting Goals

Establish targets and goals for each department. Break them down into daily goals.

Measuring Results

Not measuring results is like getting on the playing field with a bunch of people running around and not keeping score of the game. Setting goals and measuring results is the only way to run a successful business.

Success requires planning, self-discipline, motivation, dedication and consistency. When you invest in your team's technical/business training and development, your spa business will thrive and produce great results.

Dori Soukup is the Founder and CEO of InSPAration Management, a firm specializing in medical spa and salon business development, advanced education, and business tools. Throughout the past 15 years, Soukup has contributed to the success of spa companies worldwide. Her passion is developing innovative, effective educational programs and business strategies leading to exponential growth and profits. She is the recipient of the American Spa Preferred Educator award and is a sought-after global speaker within the spa and medical spa industries.