SMME EP437 What If Failure Isn’t the End - But the Beginning?

7:42AM Jun 6, 2025

Speakers:

Daniela Woerner

Keywords:

Spa Marketing

Leadership Skills

Business Growth

Failure Reframe

Mindset Shift

Sourdough Bread

Jamie Kern Lima

Sarah Blakely

Spanx

Gratitude Table

Data Over Drama

Client Feedback

Progress Over Perfection

Risk-Taking

Success Measurement

Welcome to Spa Marketing Made Easy. A podcast for spa owners who want to step up their leadership and business skills and step into the role as spa CEO. I'm your host. Daniela Woerner, CEO of Addo Aesthetics and Founder of the Growth Factor Framework Program, where we teach, coach and guide spa owners in scaling their spas to the next level of growth and unlocking freedom in their life and their business. I'm so glad you're here now. Let's dive into the show. Hey Daniela here, and welcome back to the Spa Marketing Made Easy podcast. So I've got a story for you, and this is the story that you know, as I was researching and kind of reflecting on what I thought was going to be the best way to approach this episode, this story just kept coming up over and over and over again in my mind, and this is really going to resonate with you and be something that I believe that You need to hear if you are a type A action taker, you know, full of passion, pour your heart into everything, that type of person, if you have ever tried something and it fell flat, it is not fun. It is not a great experience. If you've tried something in your spa, you're dedicated to your spa. You're dedicated to growing it. You're dedicated to building it and creating this incredible both and lifestyle. And if you ever tried something that didn't work, you feel so defeated. You feel just like a failure, really? And today, I want to talk about how we really reframe that and shift kind of the way that we're thinking about ourselves when things don't work as we think they're supposed to. So my birthday this year fell over a long weekend, which meant for the first time in a very long time, my family was going to have four uninterrupted days with very little on the calendar all together. There were no birthday parties, there were no swim lessons, just time at home, which felt so glorious because we are in a season right now. My kids are five and eight, and so there's, I mean, the amount of birthday parties that are happening on the weekends, the amount of after activities, whether it's karate belt testing or, you know, whatever they're doing at the time. I just feel like we're in this wonderfully chaotic season, I'm trying to, you know, really take in every moment of it and enjoy every moment of it, because I love five and eight, but we were home. We're doing a lot of house projects as well. And so it just felt so abundant and so glorious to have four days with nothing on the calendar, so I'm outside, and I'm working on clearing some brush to make sure that our fruit trees are getting as much sunlight as possible. And I'm also prepping the area for our chicken coop, because we've got baby chickens, I'm so excited they're coming here in July, and I want their home to be just perfect. So nothing glamorous, but it was like exactly what I wanted to be doing, and it's also really grounding for me. So if you're into astrology at all, I have seven signs in air in my chart. So in order to truly ground myself, I literally have to stick my hands in the dirt. So, yes, so that's why I love gardening so much. My husband Kyle, he's an incredible baker. He is, for sure, the baker in the house, the one that does all the birthday cakes and all of that. He decided to use the time to make sourdough. Now, he was not like a somebody that was during COVID making sourdough, like so many people were, he actually discovered this process later, actually, thanks to Christy, and like most things that he takes on, he is really, really good at it. But today, this time, over this the long weekend, the loaf stuck in the pan. It did not rise the way that it usually does, it came out looking like this dense, flat pancake. So hours of attention, hours of care, hours of timing, if you guys are like sourdough people, you know, everything that goes into it. I mean, we had timers all over the house because he had to do things that, you know, different time intervals to make sure everything was was right. There's a lot of effort that goes into this process. So he was frustrated and he was disappointed. And when he came outside, I could see just in his energy, I could see the frustration and the disappointment that he was just carrying around with him, but I didn't know what was wrong. Wow. And you know, I'm out there clearing the brush, so he comes out with this just totally different energy than the vibe of the weekend. So I asked him, and you know, he told me about the sourdough, and I just had this moment where I was like, okay, nothing is a coincidence. Just yesterday, I had finished a chapter in the book worthy by Jamie Kern Lima. Check that book out if you have not already. It's a really great mindset book. She is sharing this story about Sarah Blakely, who's the founder of Spanx, and at the dinner table, Sarah's dad would ask her and her siblings to go around and say, What did you fail at today? And so, you know, my family does like a gratitude table, right? We, we call it the thankful game. So it's we go around and we say something that we're thankful for. And at this table, they are talking about things that they failed at. And the perspective, the reasoning behind this was, if you weren't failing, you weren't trying hard enough. So I want to say that again, if you're not failing at something, you're not trying hard enough, you're not living big enough, you're not putting yourself in the arena, right? Because failure is such a normal part of the process. It's really more of an evolution. So Kyle wasn't failing at his bread. He was mid process. He was, you know, he had done so well at something. He was testing a new recipe, he was testing different things, and what he discovered was those tests didn't work. So failure hits all of us differently when we put our heart into something, whether it is baking sourdough, or we're launching a new treatment, or we're starting our business. When we care about something deeply, it stings so much more. And as spa owners and entrepreneurs, our businesses often feel like extensions of ourselves. So when something doesn't go the way that we planned, maybe the new service isn't booking or the promotion that we just poured so much energy into gets nobody purchasing it, we don't feel just disappointment deep down. We can feel shame, we can feel embarrassment, we can feel self-doubt. But here's something that I want you to consider, what if the emotional weight is not a sign that you're off track, but it's just a sign that you're actually doing the work that matters. Failure feels personal, but most of the time it's not. The sourdough didn't flop because Kyle's bad at baking. He's amazing. He's amazing, amazing at baking. It flopped because something was off in a starter, or something was off with the timing, probably not with all those timers, but something in the process, things that can be adjusted were off, and that's why that loaf flopped so in your spa, if a client doesn't book or a team member doesn't work out, it's not a reflection of your worth, it's data, okay? And the more data that you have, the better decisions you can make next time. We don't grow from perfection, okay? We grow from recalibrating our path. Failing does not make you a failure. It makes you brave. Makes you someone who's out there, putting themselves out there, working to be the best version of themselves. And there's nobody on this entire planet who's at the top of their game who has not failed over and over and over again. Now, every successful spa owner that I've coached, the ones with thriving teams with six figure months, the ones that you admire, they have all had failures. The difference is that they didn't let the failure define them. They used it to refine the process. They learned right? Everything is a win or a learn. A win or a learn, you are not the failed mini event. You are not the no show clients. You are not the treatment that didn't perform as expected. You are the person learning, adjusting, trying again.

This is where the magic happens. Okay, when you can view failure not as a stop sign, but just as a speed bump. Everything shifts. Your promotion didn't work. It taught you something about your messaging a client didn't rebook. Maybe it revealed a gap in your client journey. Every time something doesn't go as a plan, ask yourself. What is this here to teach me? When we're in growth factor, we're talking about data over drama. That is your feedback, okay? And feedback is gold when you're building a business that lasts so today, in this very short episode, but I hope an episode that helps you to reframe, helps you to be inspired, helps you to be positive. I want to leave you with this. Do not be afraid to fail. Be afraid of not trying, of not putting yourself out there. Okay, go all in, make the thing, take the risk, and if it flops good, you're one step closer to the version that rises beautifully. Because around here, we don't measure success by perfection. We measure it by progress. All right, my friends, until next time, keep growing, keep learning, and remember the real failure is staying stuck. I'll see you over in the Spa Marketing Made Easy Facebook group, feel free to tag me if you want to keep this conversation going.