The Biggest Mistakes to Avoid When Running Retreats

Any successful business journey is filled with mistakes and failures along the way, its how we learn and grow. But if we can learn to avoid some of the typical mistakes that most people make when they set out to start a new retreat business then we are already ahead of the game.

Mistake 1 - Paying for Ads

I would highly recommend not to waste money on social media or google ads to try and sell your retreats. If your objective is to increase brand awareness and to create a community then this can be a great strategy, for example if you want to promote a video library of free online classes which will bring people to your website then this is a good idea. These people may become followers of yours and then somewhere down the road they might book a retreat with you. But marketing is a long process often described as a funnel, the first step being brand awareness, then consideration, then a sale and after that maintaining customer loyalty and finally advocacy.

I you have a retreat next month and you are trying to sell it through social media ads though I would advise that you are wasting your money. Its very rare that someone scrolling social media will click through an ad and make such an impulsive decision for a purchase as big as a holiday. Likewise with google ads if you pay to for advertising and come up as a sponsored link you are competing with the booking sites which give customers the benefit of comparing options and booking through a site they feel that they can trust.

I would recommend to start with your marketing that you get an SEO expert to optimise your website for search engines. This costs about £120 - £200 and will massively increase the amount of traffic that you get to your website organically. Get your business listed on google business listings and build your credibility with reviews on there. Offer something for free on your website whether its yoga advice, free video lessons or recipes to promote on your social media channels and build a community of followers and lastly and most importantly to get listed on the main booking sites and build your reputation and reviews on there.

Mistake 2 - Not setting boundaries or expectations

When I first started running retreats I wanted to do everything possible to make the guests happy, if they needed a lift somewhere I would drive them there, if they needed something from the shop I would go and pick it up and if they were having a treatment I would make their lunch box for them.

The problem was that this then just came to be expected and by trying to do too much I would burn myself out. Since then we have made a section in the welcome information about being a Karma Yogi. We explain that in a retreat environment we value and appreciate small acts of help around the retreat as we want our staff to have time to enjoy the retreat and spend time with the guests as well. Once people know that this is expected of them they are more than happy to chip in and help out and if everyone does small things like brining their plate to the kitchen then it makes everything run much more easily and smoothly.

Furthermore when you do go out of your way to something extra nice like picking something up from the shop for them they realise that you have done this as an extra favour and its not something that is just included as part of the service.

One of my clients Ella told me about her offering to make the guests smoothies while they were sat around the pool on the first day. She said that for the rest of the week they were all ordering smoothies from her. What she had done the first time as a favour had then turned into an obligation and expectation and she hadn't set her boundaries clearly enough at the beginning for them to know that this wasn't something which was included.

Mistake 3 - Thinking of Costs in Relative Terms

When we think about money we often think about it in relative terms. For example if you ask someone if they went into a shop to buy a pair of trainers for £40 and the shop assistant told them 'if you walk 20 minutes down the road you can get the same trainers for £20' would you do it? Most people would say yes. If you asked the same people if you went into a shop to buy a computer for £1000 and they told you 'if you walk 20 minutes down the road you can get the same computer for £980' would you do it? Most people said no. From a rational point of view this makes no sense. Either you are be prepared to walk 20 minutes to save £20 or you aren't. But we don't think about money in this way, we think about it relatively and as the second question is a much smaller amount relative to the purchase price we decide its not worth it.

How can this relate to retreats? When you are charging £1000 per guest and you have 12 guests its easy to think of any small purchases as relatively insignificant. But each of these small purchases can cumulatively add up quite quickly.

One of our clients Anne was buying lots of parting gifts for her guests and getting a chef to come in one of the nights to cook dinner for them at a cost of £30 per guest. Each of these purchases seemed relatively small amounts individually but when we added up all of the gifts they came to about £20 in total, this together with the chef was costing her £50 per guests. Multiplied by 12 she was spending £600 a retreat on extras, this multiplied by the 6 retreats she ran this summer meant she was spending £3600 out of her profit perhaps unnecessarily. I am not saying that buying gifts for guests isn't worthwhile but its worth taking the time to think about what you are spending money on, what this comes to in total and whether the impact those things are having is worth the expenditure.

Mistake 4 - Underestimating the Importance of a Strong Team

My first ever retreat I ran with 3 people. Myself, one volunteer and the yoga teacher who was only teaching. When I finished the retreat it was the hardest I had ever worked and the most exhausted I have ever been. We were making breakfast, lunch and dinner, cleaning, taking them on excursions, entertaining and holding space for guests. I quickly realised that I was going to need a bigger team.

But its not just about having the right people you also need to decide ahead of time what are people's specific responsibilities going to be, give volunteers a written agreement before they arrive so there is no misalignment of expectations, draw up a rota and put systems in place so that people will know what to do without having to be shown every time. We use Trello for workflow management where we have detailed instructions and checklists as well as short videos for each task at the retreat. People can check this whenever they don't know what to do and we can see what tasks have been completed and by who. This makes the whole process run much more smoothly and allows the team more time to rest and socialise with guests.

Mistake 5 - Forgetting people's names

This may seem like a minor mistake to make, but we all like and appreciate when people use our name and there is nothing worse than getting someone's name wrong after spending the last 5 days with them and its more easily done than you would expect. When all the guests arrive at the same time and you are nervous and excited about the retreat its easy to forget to commit the name to memory when they introduce themselves. After the initial introduction its then too late to ask for their name again and you can go the whole week being too embarrassed to ask them what their name is.

We now have a system in place that before the guests arrival we make a welcome board with a welcome message and a list of everyone's names on the retreat. We ask everyone on the team to remember the list of names, so they already have the names memorised and just have to assign them to the right person. Then when guests arrive we give them name badges for the first afternoon so its easy to commit each persons name to memory. People will appreciate and respect that you have taken the time to remember and use their name.

Not seeing the value of failure

Whenever you pursue any project or business idea there will be inevitable failures along the way. We can either see these failures as valuable learning experiences which we use to improve and grow or we can see them as negative events and berate ourselves for making the wrong decision. Many businesses knowing the huge value in experimentation and subsequent failures actually try and foster a work environment where failure is commended rather than scorned. Amazon famously has a mission statement to fail more often because they know if they aren't failing then they aren't experimenting and they aren't learning.

When I first moved to do retreats from Ibiza to Tenerife I was told by a local business owner that there was all year round tourism in Tenerife. So I planned retreats for 10 months of the year. The winter retreats were all fully booked and then the summer arrived and the demand dropped like a stone. We lost money on our May retreats and June and July were generating almost no interest at all, there were so few enquiries that we were luckily able to cancel those dates.

What did we learn? We had neglected to do enough market research into the seasonality of the Canary Islands and had just trusted the word of one persons personal experience with their own business, which had a completely different demographic and target market to our own. It was a costly mistake and I won't underestimate again the importance and value in doing your market research thoroughly before committing to something.

You have to accept and embrace the business journey that you are on. There will be mistakes and failures big and small and you need to adopt the mindset that each one is a learning opportunity and not a personal failing or a reflection on your competency or ability.

If you enjoyed this blog and would like more general advice about running retreats check out our other blog articles below.