Added a second treatment room last year — build out and kit came to about 9k, plus around 300 a month in extra rent and utilities. Six months later it is used maybe eight hours a week out of a possible forty. The main room is fully booked and I turn people away for the times they actually want, which are evenings and Saturdays. Is six months just too early, or have I built something in the wrong place?
For the arithmetic: 300 a month plus 9k over, say, five years is roughly 450 a month of cost. At a typical hourly rate you probably need somewhere around six to ten billed hours a week just to break even on it, and you are at eight. So the room is not losing money dramatically, it is simply not earning yet. That is a different problem from a mistake.
Also check that clients know it exists. It sounds obvious, but if your booking page still shows one column of availability and your regulars have a mental model of one room, they will not ask for the times you have opened up.
Six months is genuinely early for a capacity investment. The thing I would want to know is whether bookings in the second room are trending up month on month or flat. Flat at eight hours for six months means something structural. Two, four, six, eight over six months means it is filling and you need patience.
It has crept up from about three to eight, so it is climbing, just slowly. That is more encouraging than the raw number felt.
@resole_ruth · last yr. · 3 replies
Six months is not too early to know, but the number you have is telling you something more specific than "it is not working". You are turning people away at exactly the hours the second room is empty, which means the constraint is not the room, it is having a second pair of hands at evenings and weekends.
A room only pays for itself when someone is in it. 8 hours a week against 300 a month plus the build cost is a slow road; 20 hours a week changes the arithmetic completely. I would put the effort into staffing or renting the room to a self-employed practitioner for the evening and Saturday slots rather than into marketing the room itself.
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@quiet_promotion · last yr.
Do write a proper agreement about hours, keys, insurance and who owns the client relationship before anyone moves in. Two people I know did this on a handshake and both regretted it.
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@lowell_frame · last yr.
Renting it out for evenings had not occurred to me at all. That covers the 300 immediately even at a modest rate.
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