I went to buy a med spa. What I found in the supply closet changed my mind
So that day in New York, I went back to the family office and told them I didn’t want to help them buy med spas—I wanted to fix them.
Key points
- I went back on the road, knocking on doors across New York and persuading med spas to let me take over their purchasing: I visited 40 or 50 outlets and came away with seven yeses.
- When I first described the company to her, everything ordered automatically, no phone calls, no fuss, she said: “I would never use you.” She said that her sales reps weren’t a nuisance that could be automated away, they were how she learned what was new, what worked and what to watch for.
- Today we work with the largest med spa groups in the U.S., serving more than 1,500 locations in all.
Back in the summer of 2023, I was in New York on behalf of a family office scouting a med spa that it was looking to buy.
Three years in, I am convinced that the messy supply closet is a microcosm of a much bigger story: wellness businesses are two decades behind the technological curve and it is the simplest problems that are holding them back.
Additional details
- Later, in the corner of a supply room, I found a box of expired filler worth $50,000 retail.
- In a med spa, inventory is the single largest expense, even bigger than payroll.
- It would have been easy for me to walk out of any one of those med spas with three vials—worth $2,000—with very little effort.
- I come from four generations of doctors: My great-grandfather ran a hospital, my grandfather ran a radiology department, and both my parents are physicians—I am the first in the line not to go to medical school.
- In 2023, we started looking at rolling up med spas, buying small practices and building them into something bigger.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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