ETS Tanning Bed Blog

I do a lot of sailing and I race competitively. One of the great things about sailing is how so many of our race strategies can be applied to running a successful business – like tuning your boat against the best to achieve the best.

No matter how fast you think your boat is, you have to go out there and tune it against a top competitor before the race to really achieve ultimate speed. As you adjust your riggings, sails and hull, you’re tuning to one another, always checking to see who’s going faster and how you can achieve that same speed. It’s about realizing your potential and the boat’s potential and then maximizing it.

Once you’ve both achieved that optimal speed, you’ve just eliminated everyone else from the race.

Now, it’s down to strategy.

You can apply that same success tactic of tuning to your tanning salon.

Tuning Your Business Against Other Salons and Setting Benchmarks

Basically, you want to develop relationships with super-successful tanning salon owners and fine tune your own business against them. By using their standards to set benchmarks for your own business, you’re setting yourself up to go faster and earn more.

Obviously, you don’t want to share your financials or strategies with the competition down the street, but you can easily find other well-run and successful tanning salons through trade shows, conventions or trade magazines like Looking Fit or Tanning Trends.

Really, it’s a simple, two-step process:

• Get in touch with other successful tanning salon operators

• Develop a relationship with them

Look at it this way, you may think you’re doing great and making fantastic profits, but once you start comparing with other tanning businesses you may realize there’s an opportunity to make an additional 10-15 percent in an area you never thought about. Maybe they have super-profitable tanning bed packages you've not considered or carry a line of lotions that have profit margins you've never seen.  Trust me, it’s worth the time.

How to Fine Tune Internally

Before Olympic races, a sailing team will work together to tune its boats because they all have that shared goal for gold. You want your sales team to have that same attitude.

Start by matching your sales people up with partners; have them work together towards that goal of better sales. You might take your “fastest” sales person and team him up with your “slowest” sales person or maybe you want to match him with your second-fastest sales person, so you can get them both working better and selling more.

The idea is to get your sales team working together, talking, sharing ideas, tuning their sales skills and inevitably boosting your bottom line. Of course, competition is always good and can boost sales, but sometimes you don’t always see the improvement that teamwork, fine-tuning and internal training can bring.