I bought a spa.

By David Neddam

On January 3, 2014, I bought a small spa in Miami Beach: three treatment rooms, an existing team, loyal clients, an address people already knew. The next morning I was there at seven, coffee in hand, walking through the empty rooms the way I had opened my practice in Paris for almost twenty years.

For the next two years I split my time between the two countries, roughly two weeks on each side of the Atlantic, while I brought my work in France to a close.

The business looked fine from a distance

From Paris, I could see everything that a dashboard can show. Bookings came in. Clients came back. The numbers were reasonable. On paper, the spa worked.

Then, on my visits to Miami, small things did not fit. I found it hard to talk to the therapists. I put it down to my English. It took me months, and an outside eye, to understand that the picture I was receiving was incomplete: much of what I saw reached me through one person, and the team had never had the chance to speak to me freely.

The numbers were not wrong. They simply did not show how the work was being done.

Two clients, same price, same room

The moment that changed my view came on an ordinary morning. A therapist was stuck in traffic, a couple was already waiting for a duo massage, and there was no one else to call. So I took the treatment myself.

For an hour I worked three feet away from a colleague. I watched his phone come out of his pocket again and again. I watched him stay on the same area for most of the session, without rhythm or intention. Nothing he did broke a rule. Nothing he did looked like care either.

Afterwards, over a cup of tea at the front desk, the husband said I had found every place that hurt. His wife looked into her cup and said: “Was okay.”

Two people had walked into the same spa, paid the same price and spent the same hour in the same room, and left with two different experiences. The result depended less on what we sold than on who happened to be available that day.

That is when I understood what I had bought: a place, equipment, a client list and a team. What I had not bought was a shared way of working.

Rebuilding, one detail at a time

We started with the telephone, because it is where a client meets you first. Then the welcome, the questions asked before a treatment, the temperature of each room, the music, the products, the way a therapist presents a treatment, what a client sees on the way out.

None of these details mattered much on its own. The client never lives them on their own. They live one experience.

Over a year, the old spa slowly stopped telling its old story. One day, the colleague who ran the front desk with me came in with a word: heed, to pay attention to, to take into consideration. It described exactly what we had been doing. On January 1, 2016, the spa reopened as HEED Spa.

The name did not create anything. It gave a name to what already existed.

What this means if you are taking over a business

When you buy or take over a spa, a salon or any service business, the numbers tell you whether it works today. They rarely tell you how it works, or whether it will keep working without the people who hold it together.

Before you change anything, it is worth asking:

1. Do I see the business directly, or through one person?
2. Would two clients booking the same service get the same experience?
3. What does the team know that never reaches me?
4. Which decisions exist only in someone’s memory?
5. What works today, and must be protected while everything else changes?

Most of the answers will not appear in a report. They appear when you look, and when you listen.