ETS Tanning Bed Blog

In the previous post we showed you how promotions can get turn the casual tanning bed user into a high-end profit machine.  The last step in building your revenue & profit blueprint is to balance out your bed usage and keep track of your numbers.

Part 6 - Optimize Tanning Bed Usage to Boost Revenue & Profits

We’ve spent a lot of time in this series talking about analytics, a technique that asks the business owner to visualize, analyze and evaluate their data to make smart decisions. In this, the last part of our series, we’re going to talk about how you can use analytics to optimize your tanning bed usage and really boost revenue and profits.

Using Software to Evaluate Tanning Bed Usage

When you sit down to look at your business data and evaluate your bed usage, you should be asking:

• Do I have tanning beds in the store that aren’t being used?

• What are the usage rate percentages for all of my tanning beds?

• Are there any tanning beds that are being under-utilized?

For example, let’s say you’re seeing a usage rate of 80 percent on your Level 1 beds, 30 percent on your Level 2 beds, 60 percent on your Level 3 beds and 70 percent on your Level 4 beds – where do you want to make a change? Obviously, you want to move customers out of your Level 1 beds and into your more profitable Level 2 beds.

You have a capital investment in your Level 2 beds and if you’re not using them, then you’re not getting a return on that investment. In that case, it may make sense to move your customers into a Level 2 bed by offering it to them at a lower cost. The gross margin percentages may be the same, but you could be seeing a higher dollar amount at the end of the day.

Strategies for Boosting Revenues and Profits

Ideally, you should be looking at your data every month, evaluating your usage and asking:

• What is my most profitable service or package?

• Why is it the most profitable?

• And what can I do to entice customers to buy that service or package?

Those answers won’t just apply to your tanning bed usage, but your entire business model. In fact, those questions and that commitment to analyzing your business data on a monthly basis are the cornerstones for building your own revenue and profit blueprint.

The Bottom Line

If you walk away from this series with one thing, it should be that commitment to staying on top of your sales data and really using it to push both your business and your profits forward is critical, but not as hard as you think.

If you’re reading this and have your own success stories to share or strategies you used to increase profits and revenue, I’d love to hear from you in the comments’ section.