Boost staff reputations—and your spa’s bottom line—with in-house professional development courses.

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Your staff works hard all year round to please clients and stay up-to-date on the latest techniques and services. Isn’t it time you helped them raise their visibility—and your spa’s revenue—by turning them into star mentors?
“We believe that if you’re currently practicing your craft, then teaching it will be natural and informational,” says Miriam Jones, owner of Los Angeles–based Refuge Salon and Spa, which has offered professional programs in makeup, cosmetology and skin care since 2009.
“Many esthetics and cosmetology school grads are looking to gain additional knowledge that goes beyond the basics and sets them apart.”
Savvy spa owners like Jones are upping profits in this down economy by channeling employees’ collective expertise and experience to create professional education courses for practicing and aspiring massage therapists, makeup artists and estheticians.
“Many esthetics and cosmetology school grads are looking to gain additional knowledge that goes beyond the basics and sets them apart,” adds Tamara Friedman, owner of Tamara Spa + Wellness in Farmington Hills, Michigan, who opened her doors to students 25 years ago, and currently offers popular evening enrichment courses in permanent makeup and various spa treatment modalities.
“Our classes are profitable, so I’m happy to pay my employees overtime to stay and teach,” Friedman says. Plus, clients stand to benefit. Friedman offers guests a 50% discount for allowing a student, with strict supervision, to perform treatments.
Is your spa ready to moonlight as a school? Read on to learn more about three spas’ different educational programming styles.
Lesson Planning 101
Wondering what kind of courses you could offer? Look around your spa. If you have a technician who performs a service with oft-lauded expertise, then with some proper training, you’ve already got an ideal teacher.
Friedman’s employees instruct newbies (typically two to five students per class) in applying permanent makeup and performing a range of facial, massage and detox wrap services. The team also meets monthly to discuss students’ needs and to brainstorm improved methods of relaying material.
“We adjust the curriculum to match the student’s experience. And we give an exam at the end of the session to make sure we did our job.”
“We regularly go to conferences, and read all the industry magazines,” she says. “We highlight, discuss and then implement the ideas we like.” Friedman takes special measures to ensure student-teacher expectations are clear before beginning a course. Each student signs a contract that lays out approximately how many hours it will take to learn the skill and what it will cost, as well as what they expect to get out of the class.
“We adjust the curriculum to match the student’s experience,” Friedman says. “And we give an exam at the end of the session to make sure we did our job. Students have three months to come back and refresh information as needed.” During their course, students are welcome to observe Friedman’s staff performing the treatments they’re studying on clients, for free.
The length and cost of Tamara Spa + Wellness courses vary depending on students’ levels of experience and material costs. Permanent makeup courses are the highest in demand and the most profitable. “It generally takes about 40 hours for someone with some artistic ability to complete the course, and we charge $2,500; more if it takes them a little longer to catch on,” Friedman says. Other classes are typically $50 per hour.
After completing a session at Tamara Spa + Wellness, students receive a certificate documenting the hours they spent mastering a skill and the specifics of what they learned. “My spa is known to be the best in Michigan,” Friedman says, “and people in the industry know that if someone was trained here they got a good education.”
Crunching Numbers
In November 2009, three years after opening Refuge Salon & Spa, Miriam Jones launched the Form Academy to supplement her revenue stream. “I hired some accredited teachers and gave them a modest space in the back for instruction,” she says. “My staff would sit in and help students too.”
Form Academy took off. And last spring, to accommodate swelling classloads, Jones relocated 15 full-time employees and 104 students to a new location, a former warehouse 10 blocks away, offering twice the square footage of Refuge’s original space. Jones says that while staff and students appreciate the added space and new aesthetic (“We’re aiming to become an Andy Warhol–style art space!”), the relocation certainly came at a cost.
“With permit and license fees, advertising, general construction and equipment costs, we expect the new location’s total investment to be approximately $95,000,” she says. “This is a pretty significant hurdle, and recovery could take up to a year.”
“The idea is to provide experience and knowledge to new practitioners—valuable tips I had to learn the hard way.”
A typical, 1,600-hour esthetics program at Refuge runs students $5,500; cosmetology, $7,500; and the makeup program, $3,000. “Our makeup program is still too new to report financials, but our skincare program costs $5,000 to run and earns approximately $16,000 per month, and the cosmetology program costs $15,000 and makes us $52,000,” Jones says.
Start-Up Schoolhouse
At Seattle-based Spa Scotta, owner Jessica Campbell relies on niche programming to drive The Finishing School, a workshop program serving students and professionals that she introduced last year.
“The idea is to provide experience and knowledge to new practitioners—valuable tips I had to learn the hard way,” Campbell says.
Campbell (Allure magazine’s 2010 pick for one of the country’s top waxers) spearheads courses in speed waxing, as well as traditional and male Brazilian. Other Scotta employees, many of whom received training as educators before being hired, lead specialized classes in lash extensions and showerless body treatments.
A two- to three-hour clinic on waxing or showerless treatments runs students about $100, and a full-day lash extension boot camp costs $750 and also includes an application kit.
“Our profits hover around the 30% mark,” Campbell says of the workshops, held on-site during nonpeak hours. “And I try to keep overhead pretty light. We have fun soliciting volunteer wax and eyelash models through our Facebook page.”
Paging Potential Pupils!
You’ve created the class, now how to fill the seats?
Refuge’s Jones relies on the Internet to attract students. “We advertise and use Yelp, Facebook, Google, Craigslist and our website to get the word out,” she says. “Plus we recently received some local magazine write-ups that have really put us on the map.”
Although Spa Scotta’s program has been profitable, enrolling finishing school students initially presented a challenge.
“Our biggest difficulty was getting the word out,” Campbell says. “I network wherever I can, maintain a pretty substantial contact list of local schools’ students and make regular career fair visits to speak about our continuing education opportunities.”
Friedman purchases current student and alumni email information from local esthetic, cosmetology and massage schools, and blasts two or three missives a year to alert the community about her continuing education offerings. In addition, she regularly attends schools’ open houses and lists her classes in the calendar sections of local papers and magazines.
When Jones introduced educational offerings at Refuge, she had no idea doing so would lead her to seek additional space so quickly. Now, she’s excited about the possibilities for further expansion. “We didn’t know we’d get so big, although we hoped our programs would be in high demand,” Jones says. “All of this has exceeded our expectations.” •
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