The Wellness in Hospitality Podcast Sonal Uberoi

Harsh truths: 
→ More than 90% of luxury hoteliers report never recouping their investment from the initial cost of build of their entire wellness-related offering. 
→ Less than 1% of wellness leaders become hotel GMs. 
 
It is no surprise then that most wellness offerings in hotels represent a meagre 1-3% of total hotel revenue. 


If less than 1% of wellness leaders occupy key decision-making positions in hotels, how can we expect wellness to be a strong revenue and value contributor? 


If those who truly understand the business of wellness don't have power of decision on how their business is positioned, marketed and managed, how can we expect owners to get their return on investment from the initial cost of build of these complex facilities? 


The only way we can get wellness to move from 1-3% to 30-40% of total hotel revenue (across the board), is to ensure we have wellness leaders who are qualified enough to take on the key positions in hotels. 


In today’s episode, I talk about my upcoming masterclasses on how wellness leaders can create profitable wellness assets, so they can elevate their income, impact and influence.

Have you ever found yourself say: “I know that!”?

Well, today I’d like to talk about the problem with supposedly “knowing it all”. 

Now, I’m sure we’ve all lived situations where we’ve been humbled. 

Where we thought we knew it all, and in the end we realized we really didn’t. 

There was something we didn’t know, or there was something we missed, and we would have probably picked on that thing had we not been so complacent.

Today I’d like to extrapolate this notion of “knowing it all” into the design and creation of wellness concepts, and how detrimental that way of thinking can be on the overall project.
Because it is one thing to know something, to have done it several times before.

It is quite another when you become so familiar with having done that thing that it becomes almost automatic.


It is here when you enter the danger zone – that zone when you overlook important details that can have a huge negative knock-on effect on the rest of the project.
 
In today’s episode I’d like to talk about the problem with “knowing it all”.

How useful are feasibility studies?


Today’s a controversial one.
Most consultants and business strategists will strongly advice to commission a feasibility study.
Why?
Because:
1.    It ensures you have a good feel of the business idea you have in mind and where the market is headed.
2.    Technically speaking, it saves you thousands, hundreds or even millions of dollars in costly mistakes
The reason today’s episode is controversial is because I’d like to throw a curveball out there and question: are feasibility studies really that useful as we think they are?
 
Today I’d like to deep dive into the subject of feasibility studies, and when it makes sense to get one done, and when it doesn’t make sense to get it done.

Why is the crystal ceiling placed so low for wellness leaders in hospitality? 

Today I’d like to address the elephant in the room. 
Less than 1% of wellness leaders make it to hotel general manager.
And over 90% of wellness leaders find that they hit this invisible but strong crystal ceiling that they’re unable to get past. 


Why? 
Here are two root causes that play a pivotal role:
1.    The image of the role of wellness leaders – that of a specialist role.
We’re supposed to be this soft, balanced and unambitious leader that deeply believes in wellness. Here, the underlying assumption is that you can’t be both wellness-oriented and business-oriented. So – it is either or, but not both. The problem with viewing wellness leaders in this limited lens is that we hinder our growth opportunities. And if we don’t have ambition, that will to progress and take ourselves and our wellness business to the next level, we are the ones that are automatically placing that crystal ceiling terribly low.


2.    The harsh truth that wellness leaders simply don’t have the skill to take on such a complex business as a hotel.
If we’re already struggling with our complex wellness business units, which in most cases represent 1-3% of total hotel revenue, then how can we equipped to lead a business that is 100 times bigger and has 20 times more staff to look after?
 
The result of these root causes (in other words the symptoms) is that wellness leaders feel that:
1.     Wellness is the most neglected department of the hotel, 
2.    They’re hospitality’s lowest paid specialist leader, and 
3.    They have a career that is very short-lived.
 
And what wellness leaders end up doing to change their situation is to change the symptoms. Sure, we can wish for a more wellness-oriented GM or owner, or increase our pay, or even get ourselves a seat at the big table. But that doesn’t solve our problem of having that crystal ceiling placed so low.
What will help up break past this ceiling is by tackling the root cause head on. By giving our wellness leaders the possibility to be GM (and I mean a genuine possibility), for them to go through that development plan.
Because the harsh truth is that if we don’t dream big, if we don’t occupy key decision-making positions within the hotel, it’ll be impossible to make the impact we want. It’ll be impossible to make any significant progress past 1-3%, perhaps we could get to 20%. But we’d never get to 50-60% of total hotel revenue if we don’t change the image we’ve given ourselves and if we don’t upskill ourselves.
In today's episode, I’d like to address the elephant in the room. 

What exactly does it mean to be a ‘good’ wellness leader?
Have you ever stopped and asked yourself how we, as an industry, define a ‘good’ wellness leader? What leadership skills and traits do they have?
Some words that come to mind from the image we’ve painted over the years are the following:
“wellness-oriented”“gentle”“connected to emotions”“sensitive”“not business-oriented”“not hard-wired for operational efficiencies or business strategies”… 
And what these words have done is build the image of this somewhat “woo woo” leader, who is so wellbeing-conscious, that they’re incapable of being strong business leaders.
It’s almost as if being wellbeing-conscious (however we might want to define that), is incompatible with being a strong BUSINESS leader.
We’re essentially saying that you can be great at your craft, but you can’t be great at business. And vice versa, if you’re great at business, you can’t possibly be great at your craft. 
I think we all know that that simply is not true.
You can be BOTH amazing at your craft, have amazing knowledge of the different wellness services and be a brilliant practitioner and therapist, AND a strong business leader.
You can help people enhance their overall wellbeing, and you can also be good at the business of enhancing overall wellbeing.
And I’d also like to go a step further and say that if you can’t be good at the business of enhancing overall wellbeing, you simply can’t be good at the craft of enhancing wellbeing. Because, if you do not have a successful and commercially sustainable business, you simply can’t reach the people who need your help, and in turn, you can’t have the impact you want to.
Today, I’d like to delve deeper into what exactly it means to be a ‘good’ wellness leader.

Today I'd like to talk about something I’ve noticed we wellness leaders do with our businesses, probably without realising, and that is complicating our businesses more than we need to.
 
As wellness leaders, we get stuck in the weeds of our business, where we think we’re the mini-GM of our area (we must lead our teams, carry out HR functions, look after the sales and marketing of our offering, cover reception and in others also jumping in and performing a treatment).
 
And on top of all the different hats we wear, we also have several different specialisations within our already niche business – and we have to manage them all.
 
Now, there is no doubt that wellness is a complex business. We’re diverse. We’re multi-faceted. We’re nuanced – we have our own pecularities.
 
That said, is it really necessary to make our wellness businesses so complicated?
 
Can we imagine our complex business also being simple?
 
Because when we make our business appear as complicated, the results we end up creating are very different from those we want to. We:
 
1.    Set ourselves and our team’s up for failure because we’re overwhelmed.
2.    We confuse our clients,
3.    And we further perpetuate the image of wellness being that complicated department that is better subcontracted to a third-party operator.
 
Join me in today's episode as I delve deeper into the subject of simplicity.