Starting your own business can be one of the most rewarding ways to make a living. The hard work and dedication you put in directly impacts the success you have financially and personally. Starting a spa business can compound that feeling. Each day you’re helping others to look and feel their best. But along with that experience comes the day-to-day tasks and stresses of running being your own boss. In addition to making sure your spa services are running smoothly, you also have to deal with things like payroll, bills, and taxes.
Below we’re going to walk you through some simple steps you can take to help manage your finances to make more profit from your spa business and save you time. Hopefully the advice can add a bit of wellness to your own life, like you’ve done for so many customers.
Pay Yourself First
When running a small business, expenses can quickly add up. There are basic things to take care of like rent, utilities, and inventory expenses. It is easy enough to plan and budget for those. But inevitably there are also going to be expenses that you didn’t budget for. That unexpected sink repair or broken telephone can eat into your monthly profits and cost you money.
One of the best ways to make sure you’re actually making money each month is to pay yourself first. That idea might seem counterintuitive: how am I supposed to save money by putting even less money towards my expenses? But in practice the profit first method has helped millions of people across the globe. If you’re looking to apply the tactics from Profit First into your own business, NorthOne can help. Envelopes, is a feature designed to automatically allocate a certain amount of deposits to things like payroll, rent, or taxes. Envelopes also make putting profit first easy. Find out more here.
Set recurring expenses to be paid automatically
Part of maximizing your profits is also making sure you can make the best use of your time. And the best use of your time isn’t going to be manually paying off all of your bills one by one. If you know you have recurring expenses -- something that happens each month like rent or hydro -- it is best to set up automatic payment of those bills. This is something you can easily do when opening up a NorthOne account.
Make sure you’re not paying unnecessary bank fees
Are fees from your bank account -- especially hidden fees -- costing you money? If you’re not using a financial account designed for small businesses, it could mean you’re paying more than you need to. A lot of the time no fee bank accounts can come with all sorts of fine print that costs you money. Big banks also make huge profits from things like fees for overdraft and insufficient funds. Don’t pay more than you need to. NorthOne costs 10 dollars a month. No hidden fees. No minimum balance.
Figure out which service are giving you the most profit, and focus on those
The 80-20 rule -- also known as the Pareto Principle -- says that 80% of outcomes result from 20% of all causes. That means that 80% of your profits are likely coming from 20% of your services. Looking through the offerings at your spa, are there a few services that bring in most of your customers? Could you make more money if you focused on those services and dropped the rest? Would it save you more time and energy? Take a look at your business and figure out if that kind of optimization is useful for you.
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