Emma Darby, COO of Resense, talks about what’s exciting and what will be challenging in spa and wellness in 2020, and about what makes a great guest experience.
Emma Darby is the Chief Operating Officer of Resense and a leading expert in the wellness world. She has more than 20 years of experience in the sector, six of which were spent as a senior spa director with Ritz Carlton, managing spas in Tenerife, Dubai and Bahrain. Ms. Darby has also been the Director of the Rosewood Spa in Mayakoba, and prior to that, manager of a non-invasive laser clinic in the United Kingdom.
Resense specializes in spa and wellness creation, development and performance. With head offices in Geneva and Beijing, the company has been involved in the creation and/or management of more than 90 luxury spa and wellness facilities around the globe.
Emma Darby is the perfect person to share insight on what’s exciting and what will be challenging in spa and wellness in 2020. We asked her about that in this month’s spotlight interview, as well as about what makes the ultimate guest experience.
How did you come to be doing what you are today?
I started in a family business. When I was 17, my brother and I bought a gym in the town where I grew up. We were running that while I was in school, but I decided that I wanted to go off and do my own thing. I studied fitness, alternative therapy, holistic therapy and beauty therapy, after which I got a job in a city as a therapist, and then the manager, at a medi spa.
We offered things like laser hair removal and rejuvenation, tattoo removal, injectables and breast consultations. We were located near a gender reassignment clinic, so we were predominantly working with men going through gender reassignment. After that, I worked on cruise ships before joining the Ritz Carlton in Bahrain. From there I moved to Mexico with Rosewood, back to Ritz Carlton in Dubai, then to Egypt and Spain. I came to Resense in 2012.
Resense helps spas increase profitability, by an average of 112% in the first year, according to your website. Can you tell me where spas are missing out on revenue opportunities?
Many spas miss the mark on promotions or special offers and with their marketing. It’s common to offer something like 25% off a massage, but this is not always an effective way of doing things. Giving 25% off is just taking 25% off your top if you’re not using that promotion to fill your off-peak times, for example. It’s more effective to create something compelling and solve a problem than it is to just offer 25% off. If you’re always busy at the weekend, don’t offer 25% off at the weekend, do a Monday promotion. You have to maximize your utilization of your therapists through your targeted marketing and your scheduling. Marketing doesn’t have to be discounting.
Then there’s booking. Why are you asking a guest what time they want when taking a booking, instead of guiding them to suit your business needs?
People should ask themselves why they’re doing something and what they want to achieve from it. Are you marketing because you need to raise your profile on social media or because you’re never busy on Monday or Tuesday? Those are two different things that require different strategies. That’s where I feel that there’s a lot of money left on the table.
What makes a great guest experience?
A spa should be creating a genuine connection with the guest and be genuinely interested in the guest’s wellbeing throughout the full experience. There should not be a time during a guest’s spa journey that they don’t know where they should be, what they should be doing, or what they should be wearing. They should be comfortable from the moment of first contact all the way through the treatment and leaving experience.
There are few places in the world where you basically are naked with someone you don’t know, and I think that genuine care, comfort, and connection is the difference between a fantastic experience and what is not a fantastic experience.
I’ll give you an example: I went to a spa recently for an IV drip. They did my consultation in front of everybody, so now the whole reception knows about my hormones and my cycle. Then they put in the drip, and that’s fine. But afterwards, they came and took out the drip, and just shut the door on me and left me in this room, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. So, I got up and I found the toilet with the help of a cleaner, and then I just left and no one even knew I’d gone, because I paid at the beginning. That is not a good guest experience. If it was the first time I’d had an IV drip, I would have felt super uncomfortable.
Everything matters. Even if you have an amazing booking experience and treatment, if the person is rude or can’t be bothered with you at the desk on the way out, and your leaving experience is miserable, that ruins the entire experience. The treatment is not the entire experience, it’s the entire journey.
What is the biggest challenge the industry is facing right now?
Recruitmentpeople
You can’t expect a spa therapist to be a genius on Excel or to be able to do a budget when they’ve never done a budget before. You can’t make them a spa manager and then say, ‘okay, give me the budget for the next year.’ They can’t do it.
At Resense we have a lot of spa management training, and we focus on teaching certain skills. We also do a lot of succession planning and have partnered with Lobster Ink to create an innovative new spa training solution: Spa Professional. This is a role-specific training program for every role in a spa to bridge the knowledge gap between providing exceptional guest experiences and delivering commercial value.
What are you excited about in wellness right now?
Wellness is really having a moment. I see many fantastic projects coming from various consultants and companies. That’s exciting. And the whole shift in the type of travelling people are doing. The spa used to be an amenity in a hotel but now people are traveling for spas and wellness. Wellness travelers have always been there, but we’re seeing more and more of this now.
I am excited that therapies that were once a bit fringe, like sound therapy or reiki, are available in wellness centers within hotels. That whole shift towards wellness and wellbeing becoming part of people’s lives, that’s very exciting for 2020. I’m excited to be in the industry at this time.
And what are you excited about at Resense?
We have some very exciting projects in 2020 including openings in Europe, Asia and Africa and various design projects around the globe. We’re working with some new product partners and equipment partners, coming up with some crazy ideas. I’m in a great position and lucky enough to work for a company that is always open to new ideas.
We’ve released our spa and wellness trends to watch for 2020. Sign up for Spa Executive’s newsletter and download the free report! CLICK HERE >>
Spa Executive magazine is published by Book4Time, the world’s most innovative spa, salon, wellness, and activity management software. Learn more at Book4Time.com.
It’s time to invest some serious energy into training our new spa managers. This is a sentiment echoed repeatedly by the top industry experts we feature in our pages.
The 20s are looking like an exciting decade for Spa & Wellness. Over the last decade we witnessed the incredible transformation of wellness into a global force of magnitude, and in 2017 the Global Wellness Institute reported that wellness had become a $4.2 trillion global industry, with 12.8% growth from 2015-2017.
But with that growth comes a number of changes our businesses will have to make to keep up, one of these being an investment into training the leaders of tomorrow. Several people have talked about this lately, even suggesting that, if we don’t do something, there may be no one to run things a few years down the road. One commonly expressed concern is that there is a gap in the industry, where managers come from either a therapy background or a business background – rarely both – and are therefore lacking acumen in one of two key areas. In our spotlight interview this month, Emma Darby, COO of Resense, discussed this exact issue. Resense, she said, is addressing the challenge with a role-specific training program to bridge the knowledge gap between providing exceptional guest experiences and delivering commercial value.
What are the rest of us doing?
Good managers are the difference between success and failure, the difference between whether your business is profitable or not (Seven ways you’re missing out on revenue opportunities), and whether your team performs optimally or not (One way spa managers sabotage their team’s performance).
As we move into the new year and the new decade, I expect we’ll see some amazing training initiatives, programs and ideas.
Roger Sholanki,
CEO, Book4Time Inc.
We’ve released our spa and wellness trends to watch for 2020. Sign up for Spa Executive’s newsletter and download the free report! CLICK HERE >>
Spa Executive magazine is published by Book4Time, the world’s most innovative spa, salon, wellness, and activity management software. Learn more at Book4Time.com.
It’s fairly well known that successful leaders, regardless of industry, tend to display common behaviors.
The best leaders are good listeners and communicators and they have the self awareness to monitor their responses and reactions. They think before they speak and they work to elevate their employees, rather than keep them down, because they know that’s what makes a business thrive. Let’s take a look at some of these specific behaviors and how they apply in spa and wellness. These are the habits and actions that will make or break a business.
We often have the pleasure of speaking with some of the top leaders in this sector, so we took an opportunity to look back at some of their past comments about the things that make successful leaders.
Here are five behaviors of successful leaders in spa and wellness:
Listening
All good leaders are good listeners. Great spa and wellness leaders listen to their team members and respond to needs and wants. They listen to their guests and do the same to improve the guest experience. They listen to hear about what’s happening in the sector, with trends, news and developments, to stay on top of these things.
Shangri La’s Todd Hewitt told us in his Spotlight interview, “When you listen to the guests and staff firsthand, you get a totally different perspective of the operation.”
If you don’t listen, you can’t learn, and if you can’t learn you can’t grow, and if you can’t grow you can’t manage.
Learning
Great leaders are lifelong learners. The world is always going to change and we have to keep up, and spa and wellness is an ever changing and growing industry. Developments in science, technology, and tourism mean that things are always shifting, and change can be daunting and terrifying for those who are not always learning. But for those with a lifelong passion for learning, change is exhilarating. Challenges become puzzles to be solved and hurdles to overcome.
Education comes from many sources and in many forms. It’s not just acquired through books and courses. We learn from our peers and mentors, and from our employees. Hewitt also told us, “You have to want to learn something new each day and be willing to have your staff teach you something new too.”
Thinking creatively
Creativity is an important key to success in spa and wellness. There are a lot of spas out there, so why should someone choose yours over another? Thinking creatively will help you stand out from the competition and elevate your guest experience – to create something special.
Jeremy McCarthy of Mandarin Oriental told us in his Spotlight interview that, early in his career, he met Peter Greenberg, a Travel Correspondent for Good Morning America at the time. McCarthy said, “I asked him how I could get my spa on television. ‘Getting your spa on TV is simple,’ he said. ‘All you have to do is do something no one else is doing or do something better than everyone else is doing.’
“I quickly realized that even though I was working at a very nice luxury spa, we were really doing all the same stuff that everyone else was doing. For the rest of my career, I have always taken that advice to heart and tried to do things better or differently than everyone else.”
Standing out requires creativity, and success in spa and wellness requires that you stand out.
Leading by example
A few times in the past, we have quoted Shane Bird, of Turning Stone, in his Spotlight interview, saying that the key to managing a successful team is “being willing as a manager or director to do everything, and to really get in the trenches.” Bird said a manager cannot stay in an office. “Your team has to see you engaging the guests in the way you want the guests engaged.”
He added, “It’s being a part of the everyday operations as much as you possibly can. I’ve always been very hands on. At times, I’ve actually been chided by my superiors that I’m a little too hands on.”
We quote this one a lot because it’s so important.
Leading by example is behaving in the way that you expect your team members to behave. People don’t respect a leader who wants them to give something that they, themselves are not willing to give.
Empowering others
Great leadersdecisions
Andrew Gibson, of the Wellness Tourism Association, told us in his recent Spotlight interview, “I’ve seen, and worked for, many different types of successful leaders. One thing they all have in common is the ability to motivate. You have to be able to motivate people.
“But perhaps the most difficult part of being a leader is learning to let go. You appoint people, give them a clear vision and achievable goals and support them towards those goals. Every member of the team should have goals or clear objectives. And then you have to trust them and let them lead. And you have to accept when doing that, that they will do things differently from you, and even make mistakes. If you want to build a great team that is successful and enjoys what they’re doing, you have to accept that some things are not going to go quite the way you want or expect them to go.”
Empowering others mean relinquishing some of your control, and allowing people to do what they will do without interfering.
We can all do our best to embody these five behaviors of successful leaders.
We’ve released our spa and wellness trends to watch for 2020. Sign up for Spa Executive’s newsletter and download the free report! CLICK HERE >>
Spa Executive magazine is published by Book4Time, the world’s most innovative spa, salon, wellness, and activity management software. Learn more at Book4Time.com.
