MEMBER PERSPECTIVES
CONTINUED
“ A service provider gets no more than seven hours of scheduled treatment time per day , so they ’ re not feeling exhausted .”
– CHRISTINA CABRERA hours and hired on a number of seasonal employees each year to meet the additional demand that arrives during their busy summer season . But this year , Bucher pared back after conducting a thorough examination of previous years ’ bookings and determining that the spa could meet its high demand with a lower number of therapists and a simultaneous reduction of the spa ’ s hours of operation .“ It didn ’ t make sense to oversaturate with therapists ,” she says .“ I looked at how many people we had last year , and we had too many .”
Bucher reached out to a number of formerly seasonal employees with the aim of converting them into year-round , full-time employees with benefits . Though making that change required the support of the lodge ’ s ownership , which has provided housing rentals to staff members to make working year-round in the remote area more feasible , it has given Bucher the staffing stability to keep the therapist ’ s workloads manageable while having the flexibility to maximize the spa ’ s earnings .
Though the spa does not have enough staff to operate at full capacity all the time , Bucher used her analysis of last summer ’ s books to identify the highest-demand periods and craft a schedule that allows the spa to meet demand at peak times and adjust the hours around those periods to accommodate upcoming bookings in a flexible way . Rather than keeping their typical expanded summer hours in place and potentially scheduling therapists at times when their services aren ’ t required ,“ what we ’ re doing is being flexible on when we need to be open earlier , and when we need to be open later ,” Bucher says .“ We ’ ve just kind of readjusted our business model from what it was to what it needs to be now .”
This kind of flexibility requires two things , according to Bucher : a thorough understanding of your business and a strong sense of trust among your team .“ The balance comes from knowing your business . You need to be on top of everything ; you need to continuously be looking ahead ,” says
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12 PULSE n AUGUST / SEPTEMBER 2022