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MANAGEMENT WORKSHOP $731 per employee. That same training budget as a percentage of revenues equals 1.5%, which is in the 1% to 2% range sometimes used by spa businesses that do budget for training. Obviously, not all of this money would be devoted to management training; it would include technical training, communication skills, and customer service and retail training for the whole staff. Yet, these equations can be helpful in knowing where to begin creating a training budget. These are still difficult times, and finding available cash to dedicate to management training can be a challenge, but multiple studies show that a properly planned education investment yields measurable results. Businesses with above-average train- ing investments posted a cumulative five-year return more than double that of companies with average or below-average training budgets. Firms investing in staff education experience an average of 24% higher gross profit margins. And, job satisfaction and employee retention rates are better in companies with effective management education. Once your spa's training budget has been established, you can break it down by department, staff segment or even head count. A report by the Society for Human Resource Management outlines some of the different components of training budgets: • Seminars and conferences • Wages for on-staff trainers • Outside trainers and facilitators, and customized training materials • Books, manuals and off-theshelf training materials • Equipment such as computers and other audio-visuals • Costs of renting training space Keep in mind that training initiatives should be linked to company goals, and management staff should be involved in some sort of accountability equation. Your investment in employee education should be measurable in higher performance benchmarks and increased employee and client retention, as well as the intangible asset that a culture of learning provides. LEARNING IN ACTION To help solidify what should be included in management training programs, delegates at the GSWS put together a list of core competencies and merged it with the ISPA Body of Knowledge to come up with a detailed list of recommended topics to cover in spa management education, be it a four-year degree program or a three-day course. (This list can be accessed at the GSWS website under Research, Spa Management Education.) It's believed that consistency in dayspamagazine.com/freeinfo • Use FreeInfo #47 96 DAYSPA | APRIL 2013