When it comes to starting a beauty and health spa, it’s important to cater your services to your specific clientele. Some of the more popular spa offerings center on anti-aging, reversing the clock, and eliminating blemishes. Higher in demand among these aesthetic treatments is laser hair removal.
The modern woman, and a decent number of men, find that the cost and energy required of traditional hair removal methods far exceeds what they’d like to spend. These savvy clienteles turn to a more cost-effective, long-term solution in laser hair removal.
If you’re considering starting a beauty and health spa, here are just a few of many reasons why you should add laser hair removal to your service offerings.
1. Options for lasers are bountiful
Before jumping into the world of laser hair removal, you should understand the information behind its success. Each laser is catered to specific skin types and hair coarseness, and they work at different levels of efficiency. The key candidates for hair removal are those with coarse, dark, thick hair, though they typically take more sessions to find success. Put simply, laser hair removal works by emitting energy into hair follicles, destroying the root of its growth, thus ending hair production. You’ll find plenty of options for professional grade hair removal lasers, making them an easy choice to add to your business.
The diode laser is effective on all skin types by delivering high energy into the skin without affecting any of the tissue surrounding the hair follicle. The Nd: YAG, in contrast, is less effective for fine, light hair, and is often low on the list of choice lasers for these offerings. Most common is the Alexandrite laser for its ability to work on larger areas of the body from light to olive complexions. This particular laser is deemed fastest in comparison to its hair removal counterparts.
2. Increase in popularity
In the last decade, the number of laser hair removal procedures has grown more than 50%. In 2017 alone, more than 2.8 million laser hair removal procedures were performed in the US. While the majority of clientele for this service consists of females, about 18% were men seeking long-term hair removal by way of laser treatments.
The popularity of laser hair removal stands largely in part to its long-term solutions. Candidates for laser hair removal often have coarse, dark hair that grows in undesired areas of the body. When removed by traditional methods such as shaving, epilating, or waxing, hair is often regrown at a faster rate. These methods can also result in uncomfortable nuisances such as razor burn, ingrown hairs, and skin irritation. When deciding upon wax removal, clients are unable to shave between sessions. This can often lead to uncomfortable days with stubble or hair growth if they’re unable to schedule their next session in time. With laser removal, clients are encouraged to shave before sessions if they need to because it reduces the risk of hair being burned during the laser session.
3. Cost efficiency
The biggest perk of laser hair removal for your clientele is the ability to save on shaving products. An estimated $10,000 is spent in a woman’s lifetime on shaving supplies as opposed to the $3,000 spent on laser hair removal. With the rise in popularity and the ever-growing number of innovations in laser treatments, the industry of hair removal using this method is set to continue upward. As clientele base increases and innovations in laser technology develop, profits are sure to increase exponentially.
When considering which lasers are right for your spa, the long-term benefits of laser hair removal should set these tools high on your list of investments.
Finance and procurement are two of the most vital functions of any organization. They have the potential to add enormous value to business operations if handled well. All too often, however, companies fail to understand how to integrate activity across these departments effectively and opportunities for great performance are lost.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the best practices in this area.
How the procurement and finance functions coexist
Most modern organizations have at least several different departments, usually with separate and discrete areas of focus and responsibility but with inevitable crossover. This is certainly the case with the finance and procurement functions in practice. Although both play a key role in the procure-to-pay process, they generally undertake their operational activities separately from each other. The result is often costly inefficiencies. As work is duplicated, inconsistencies occur and breakdowns in communication lead to delays and high error rates.
Is hybrid transformation the “new black?” And what benefits can it bring?
So, what opportunities exist to better align these two key business functions to achieve greater business efficiencies? Many forward-thinking organizations are turning to hybrid transformation, a concept that utilizes a combination of on-premise, private cloud and third-party, public cloud services with thorough integration and alignment between these platforms. In practice, this means that the functions of finance and procurement are much more closely aligned, with shared data across linked platforms.
There is a wealth of benefits that this improved alignment can bring. Here are the most value-adding benefits for your organization:
1. Improved spending control
It is incredibly difficult for a business to gauge a real picture of operating costs when finance and procurement are operating separately. This is due to different reporting processes, and often an element of duplication or inefficiency. If the two functions work more closely, sharing cost and vendor information across a single platform, cost visibility is dramatically improved and opportunities to reduce costs become more apparent.
2. More harmonious relationships with suppliers
It is important to maintain professional relationships with suppliers, always giving consistent and unambiguous messages. However, this is jeopardized when both finance and procurement teams communicate separately with suppliers regarding different parts of the process. Hybrid transformation allows greater clarity in terms of communication via one dedicated point of reference.
3. More effective compliance
Hybrid transformation minimizes the risk of uncoordinated purchasing actions by different teams. This is the case since all buying processes are handled within integrated and linked platforms and access is controlled. This helps to control costs and also maintain positive relationships with vendors.
How to unleash the power of hybrid transformation
We can see some of the benefits of hybrid transformation within the finance and procurement functions, but how does an organization begin the process of incorporating it into their business operations? There are a few important factors to consider in this regard:
1. Decide on your target operating model
This is potentially one of the most critical areas to consider when embarking on hybrid transformation. A hybrid model can join up procurement operations, payables, and master data management teams to integrate their processes and workflows so that they are working in tandem.
Benefits include more streamlined invoicing and helpdesk services, as well as the sharing of talent and resources across teams. The exact features and functionalities of your target operating model will vary depending on your business requirements. It should be designed with the objective of creating more streamlined and efficient processes across all procurement activities, as well as improving compliance and spending control.
2. Join up your governance and reporting processes
Without hybrid transformation, one of the main difficulties in reporting lies in the differing areas of focus of the procurement and finance teams and the often separate key performance indicators (KPIs) that they are responsible for meeting.
As an example, it is often the case that the finance team’s key objective is efficiency, whereas the procurement function is predominantly concerned with cost control. Working with hybrid transformation to create joint governance and reporting platform encourages working towards the same objectives, as well as clearer accountabilities and measurables for both teams.
4. Focus on data integrity
A unified platform across finance and procurement is a vital step in ensuring that standards in relation to data and statistics are consistent, accurate, and correctly observed by all parties.
How hybrid transformation can deliver real value to your organization
There are a number of challenges involved in moving to a hybrid model, such as designing scalable business processes across connected systems and reorganizing the administrative functions to support such a change. However, real and demonstrable benefits exist to better align two of the most operationally important functions of your business — finance and procurement.
Start by undertaking a comprehensive evaluation of the current state of operations within these departments to ascertain a clear picture of how hybrid transformation has the potential to benefit your organization.
