Zoe Salmon who recently visited Breathe Spa

Working as a TV presenter keeps me really busy and I don’t have much time off, so I was super excited to be making the most of a rare day to myself by spending a relaxing day being pampered at the beautiful Breathe Spa at Lingfield Park.  The spa was just a short train ride away from London, so nice and easy to get to.

When I arrived I was so impressed by the beautiful surroundings of Lingfield Park, I hadn’t realised they had so much on offer, a magnificent racecourse, golf course, hotel as well as the spa.

The moment I arrived the staff at Breathe Spa made me feel really welcome. I wasn’t quite sure what treatment I would fancy on the day so it was great that I didn’t have to decide until I got there. My therapist gave me some great advice and I decided to try out the Serail Mud treatment. I was presented with different varieties of moisturising mud, chalk, cleansing salts and mineral oils to apply to my body. Afterwards I entered a special warm Serail chamber to maximise the benefits of the ingredients on my skin. After a relaxing steam bath a warm tropical shower came down to wash everything off- it was very exotic and my skin felt so soft afterwards, I loved it!

After my treatment I spent some time chilling in the sauna, steam room and had a swim in their lovely pool. All this pampering was making me quite hungry so it was time for a delicious lunch. For dessert I had banana bread and ice cream, it looked so fabulous on the plate I had to send a twit pic to my twitter followers!!! Yum!

After lunch I opted for a mini manicure and pedicure. It’s such a nice treat to have your nails done and I always feel that it really polishes off your look. I had such a fantastic day at Breathe Spa, I left feeling completely relaxed, looking and feeling good. I certainly will be coming back again, and would highly recommend the spa to anyone looking for a spa with friendly warm and experienced therapists, it’s a spa experience that ticks all the boxes!

Thanks Zoe – we look forward to welcoming you back soon!

Over the last 20 years we have regularly tweaked and amended our customer service training and over the last few years have used some of the resources from Mark Sanborn’s excellent book called “The Fred Factor” which I would highly recommend to anyone who operates a customer service business. It’s simple and effective and tells the story of a postman in Colorado who took customer service to unprecedented levels.

The book fits neatly with our core values. Two of the four principles it is based upon; “everyone makes a difference” and “everything is built on relationships,” speak right into the heart of what we try to get our teams to focus on. Indeed for a while we ran a staff incentive scheme which we called “The Freddies” and which celebrated great customer service moments delivered by individual team members

Now, of course, we don’t always get things right every time but I just wanted to tell one recentstory when one of our team captured what outstanding customer service is about.

Becky is a one of the younger members of our fitness professional team at one of our East Anglian spa and health clubs. She has worked for us for just under a year and, in my opinion, is just a natural at making customers feel valued.

Last week whilst Becky was out shopping in the local town she bumped into a member she hadn’t seen in the Club for a while. They chatted and the member explained that she hadn’t been up to the Club as she felt awkward about working out. Becky explained that she was working a late shift the next day and invited the member to pop in to the Club and see Becky.

The lady duly arrived at the Club the next day and Becky chatted with her over a cup of coffee. From this conversation Becky realised that the lady lacked the confidence to work out on her own and so suggested that they both came back to the club the following evening, which was Becky’s night off, and work out together.

So the next night, we got a member back into exercising at our club and Becky gave up her night off to achieve this. I don’t know how for certain how much this lady values her club membership right now but I bet it’s as high as it’s ever been. And I know for certain just how much we value Becky as part of our team.

I love being able to share Becky’s story with you – it is a great example of outstanding customer service and we are so very proud of her.

Have you got a story to tell? Please do relay it to us by posting a comment below.

Every year I go I’m always sceptical of whether there is any suppliers that we are not already aware of and doubt whether there will be anything new that will be of value to Imagine Spa Management. But every year I always come away with a great new idea or product and this year was no different.

So this year I think we’ve found a great supplier of a high quality wax for our South Kensington Imagine Spa. The Thalgo Group have always impressed me as a product house that supply a number of different product ranges. We’ve had their Thalgo range in one of our spas and it proved to be hugely popular and they supported us well so we are looking forward to the prospect of working with Marian and her team with their Perron Rigot waxing brand.

We’ve worked really hard at our online marketing too and I had a great meeting with Wahanda which is one of the biggest online wellness sites and we are definitely going to work with them on our spa promotions and marketing. We will be launching three spas over the next month so I’ve already pencilled in a meeting with Lopo, one of the Wahanda founders, when I return. I know our Digital Media team will love meeting with him.

Finally I had a great meeting with Amanda Barlow who has created her own range of organic spa products called Spiezia. Now her products are so organic and so natural she actually can eat them – whihc did in front of me in our meeting. Now that’s different. I think we could be working with Amanda when we develop our organic day spa retreat in North Norfolk.

Of course it’s good to also catch up with our core suppliers, Babor, Jessica, Comfort Zone and St Tropez. It’s amazing how much easier it is to sort out a number of plans and issues when you are out of the work environment and away from distractions!

So I’m back from another worthwhile SPATEC and ready to get cracking on opening our 3 new spas in May – check out the news section of the website for more detail.

It’s a simple strategy but one that has worked pretty well for us over the past twenty odd years. So when we started to develop spas we started from the premise that the marketing would work in a similar manner. How wrong we were! The reality of course with our spas is that people travel to use our spas from a far greater distance – we’ve tracked that over 30% of our spa guests will travel over 60 minutes to get to us. That’s a lot of banners and leaflets to cover that kind of geographic spread! And of course a relatively small percentage of guests will have visited our spa before they visit so we rely upon the staff and how they handle the phone enquiry and to a certain extent the spa’s website to secure the booking.

We’re learning all the time but our online marketing strategy is responsible for over 90% of our bookings. It’s a totally different route to our marketplace than that we employ for the health club business. So we’re experimenting with Twitter, Facebook, You Tube and blogs, as you can see(!), creating a whole new marketing strategy and learning a whole new set of skills along the way. We cherish people’s email addresses in the same way we love to get the telephone number of potetial health club members.

And it’s exciting and it’s really starting to work. Over the last 12 months we have increased our spa turnover at our three main spas by a factor of 3. That’s some growth when we are supposed to have been in the depths of a recession. Over the next few months we’ll share some of the things we have learnt with our marketing but, of course, if you’d like to hear about them first hand and how you might increase your spa business through online marketing then please do give me a call on 01603 812727

The “Fat Face” slogan is that “life is out there”! Its about playing hard, taking risks, living life to the full, having an adventure – “better a bad day on the water than a good day in the office” was another of their favourite merchandising slogans. It’s what their core culture is, and it’s what makes them what they are.

So back to my story. I’m in Fat Face with my two daughters and my youngest is in a pushchair. The childrens and female section (we were looking for my wife’s birthday present!) are downstairs and so I carefully bounce the pushchair down the stairs, which were fairly steep and, unsurprisingly my daughter’s not overly impressed. I’m not overly impressed that two assistants just stand and watch me.

Anyway purchases are made, I gave in to my eldest daughter’s plea for a new top too, and we need to go back to the first floor to pay. The lip of each stair makes it impossible to drag the pushchair up the stair without virtually tipping my daughter out. After a bad trip down the stairs she’s now crying at the thought of going back up. Eventually a friendly shopper takes pity on my struggles and takes one end of the pushchair and helps me lift it up the stairs.

As I go to pay the sales guy who has witnessed all this says something to the effect that he’s sorry he couldn’t help but it contravenes health and safety. Now of course, I know, he doesn’t mean health and safety at all he means insurance. Health and safety is all about minimising risk and clearly to get a pushchair safely up stairs is a two person job not a one person job, so health and safety would actually require them to help – or to provide a lift, or anything rather than stand and watch to be honest! No, he’s worried that if he helps us lift the pushchair up the stairs and something goes wrong we might sue him. It’s a damning indictment on the legal and claim culture that exists in the UK right now.

But it struck me how sad it was that a business that grew out of two guys going on an adventure and which wants it’s customers to believe they are buying a brand with a culture of risk and adventure has become so weighed down with corporate governance and rules that it won’t help customers with pushchairs. It won’t take risks – it’s sold out on it’s culture.

If ever our organisation gets so big that we forget the vision and the culture we started out with – please do tell me. It will be time to turn off the lights and go home.

The Walton family have developed the seaweed bath concept to include a whole range of products and treatments for the spa market which are 100% organic and approved by the Soil Association. Best of all – they still hand harvest the seaweed themselves. You just can’t get a more personalised service than that!

How can I be so sure? Well last autumn I took a team from Imagine over to Ireland to experience a few spas and to visit the Voya centre at Strandhill. We met the team who harvest the seaweed and we experienced for ourselves a seaweed bath. It was wonderful!

So we are working with the Voya team to add some seaweed experiences to our spas. We think VOYA’s is a great story and if you’d like to check them out for yourself then try their website at www.voya.ie

And if you’d like to experience a seaweed bath then book one at our Imagine Spa. With spas so close to the sea – this was an opportunity we just couldn’t turn down!

Very quickly operators came to realise that the way to choose your equipment supplier partner is to find one who is great at servicing and maintaining equipment, has good first time fix rates and call out times below 48 hours. The rest was pretty irrelevant to be honest.

So it’s been interesting as we have begun opening spas to meet with the product houses, many of whom, talk about the fact that the consumer will choose a spa depending upon what product house they use. It’s five years now since we opened our first one and I can honestly say that in all the enquiries that we’ve had, no-one has ever asked about the products we use prior to making a booking. What our spa guests want is the sense that they are really being looked after, made to feel special for the day and a friendly therapist who gives a great treatment irrespective of what products she uses in the treatment.

Furthermore some product houses even go so far as to demand how much, and which products, you buy from them in your opening order, what treatments you put on the menu, and even what you call those treatments! I think they have lost sight of who is the customer in the relationship!

So just in case any product houses out there are wondering what it is that us operators are looking for then here are a few personal pointers:

• Work with us to produce a simple menu that suits our target market and then support that with a few retail products that our therapists can understand and work with. A 100 retail lines will just not get sold and we’ll both be disappointed
• Let us start with a really low order when we open the spa. Our cash flow is tightest at this point so we need all the help we can get and holding a massive stock, much of which we will never shift, is not helpful
• Let us be creative and unique with our treatments – it’s what will make our spa memorable and different for the guests. We need to develop our brand and not yours thanks! But we need your help to achieve this
• Don’t just give us a load of therapist training up front and then make it difficult to get more training after we’ve opened. It’s regular training that will ensure our therapists deliver a consistent and high quality treatment and it’s in both our interests for this to happen. Better still, help us to develop our own in house trainers rather than make us send every therapist to your training school with all the associated travel and accommodation costs
• Marketing – accept that we might have our own ideas and campaigns that we want to run with. We might like to tie into some that you organise for all your spa clients but if we want to be different then support us with our campaigns – if what we do works well then again we both win.
• Understand that retail is not everything to us! Our profit margins are greater on treatments than they are on retail – we know it’s the other way around for you - but if you help us grow our treatment business first and foremost, and you ensure our therapists understand your products then your retail sales will increase as the volume of treatments goes up and we’ll both win
• Please remember it is our spa and not yours – so don’t get too precious about what we do with our treatment names, website and brochures. If we decide not to use your logo or name - so be it. What you should be focussing on is how much business we generate and therefore how much of your product we keep buying.

Thanks for listening!

I think what I love about Starbucks is the way the business is based on a few core values that it lives out wherever possible. It started out as a small shop in Seattle that sold fresh coffee and was on a mission to educate Americans on how to enjoy real coffee. The idea of actually serving coffee in the shop came later but proved to be the turning point for the business that is now a worldwide global brand with awareness not far behind such giants as Coca-Cola and McDonalds.

The man behind the business is Howard Schultz (check out his book – “Pour Your Heart Into It – One Cup at a Time” – one of my favourite business books). It’s his passion that has made Starbucks what it is today.

All the way through its exponential growth Starbucks has been great at communicating its story. But Starbucks has a problem – how can that passion still be delivered, by a Polish student working in an Ipswich store for example, when the head office is in Seattle? The answer seems to be that it can’t. Not always. Not consistently. Along the way the passion and the core values get diluted and you find an experience that is far removed from the original concept.

You see, if you really pushed me, my favourite place for a coffee isn’t actually Starbucks at all – it’s Byfords in Holt. Byfords is just a fantastic coffee shop, bistro and delicatessen in the North Norfolk market town of Holt. It’s run by Iain and Clair Wilson who have built it up over the past few years. They have just the best flapjack and chocolate shortbread you will find anywhere and their breakfasts are legendary!

Of course, Byfords doesn’t have the worldwide profile of Starbucks but you’d struggle to find many people from Norfolk who don’t know of it, such is its great reputation. Apart from the great food, its success is largely due to the great staff team who work there and the really friendly service they provide. And they tell their story really well through the menus and posters in the place – it oozes friendliness. The Wilson’s business empire is growing – they’re now also involved with two pubs, another restaurant and they’ve taken on the management of the catering at the Assembly House in Norwich.

But here’s the thing – if you go into Byfords you’re still likely to see Iain around the place helping out the staff and leading by example. That impresses me so much and it’s leading from the front that keeps the Byfords experience ahead of any of its competitors and certainly why I’d choose it over Starbucks anyday. I’m pretty sure the key to successful growth for the Wilsons will be how they manage to maintain the great service when the business becomes too big for them to be involved on the shop floor.

At Imagine we’ve tried so hard to instil our values into our teams. We have five key values that we want everyone in the organisation to live out:

• Value of people matter – making every guest feel so special, important and pampered
• Value of outcome – ensuring that the way we deliver the spa day leaves the spa guest relaxed, revitalised or restored, whichever is their desired outcome
• Value of education – recognising that a lot of our guests may be visiting spas for the first time and need us to help them get the most from their visit in a friendly and empathetic way
• Value of entertainment – we want to create a “sense of theatre and magic” in the way we deliver our spa days
• Value of irresistibility – we want our spa days to be so wonderful that our guests leave already planning their next visit

The scary thing for me is that with eight sites dotted around the country I can’t be like Iain Wilson and I don’t want to be like Starbucks. At Imagine our long term success will be determined by the abilities, enthusiasm and commitment of our Spa Managers and Head Therapists to deliver our values and motivate our spa teams.

It is something that as a head office team we have to stay so focussed on. One of the most telling quotes, in my opinion, from Schulz’s aforementioned book is this:

“Ultimately, Starbucks can’t flourish and win customers’ hearts without the passionate devotion of our employees.  In business, that passion comes from ownership, trust and loyalty.  If you undermine any of those, employees will view their work as just another job.

Sometimes we lose sight of that at Starbucks, especially as we get larger and a distance develops between me and the newest hire in the newest store.  But I know, in my heart, if we treat people as a line item under expenses, we are not living up to our goals and our values.

Their passion and devotion is our number 1 competitive advantage.  Lose it, and we’ve lost the game.”

We can all draw our own conclusions as to whether Starbucks have “lost the game” – I, for one, am still a regular customer – but what we will be challenged on every day at Imagine is to ensure that we never lose sight of our values, instill the passion in our teams and never, ever lose the game.

Of course, it won’t be us who decides whether we’ve achieved this or not – it will be our customers.