One might have guessed from age five, while helping my mother choose cosmetics from a sales lady and criticizing the way she arranged our household furniture, I was destined for a life in aesthetics. With virtually no interest in sports, guns, or mechanics my days were, and still are, filled with discovering and appreciating sources of beauty, whether expressed in music, art, literature, or, of course, the extent to which people go to present themselves appealingly.
Exactly where this characteristic came from mystifies me, and it certainly mystified my parents. But I’m grateful to have been selected by nature for such a role, even though it can sometimes be a kind of curse. Allow me into your home and I will immediately begin to redecorate it in my mind, straightening off-balance pictures, discarding tragic colonial dining chairs, and turning unsightly lamp shade seams away from view. It’s a big job and never completed.
CHOOSING THE RIGHT PATH
My original career plan was to practice in behavioral psychology, spending my years helping clients figure out what their mothers did to spawn a dim outlook on life. But, as university graduation approached, I couldn’t ignore the fact that I spent far more time reading Vogue, Town and Country, and Elle than Psychology Today. If one of the goals of therapy is to achieve self-realization, then I needed to admit I would be far happier working in the beauty and fashion industry. Besides, it would probably have taken me a couple of years to decorate the perfect counseling office. Thus, a career was born, and that was 40 years ago.
Self-taught in makeup techniques and needing an income, I worked through a talent agency as a guest artist that did not even audition their artists. I was farmed out on assignments to large department stores representing Chanel, Shiseido, and many other well-established color houses. Meanwhile, I made a small purchase of private-label cosmetics and began scheduling and performing home-based makeup parties with a partner during evening hours. Unknown as a brand, we quickly discovered that the relationship between the customer and seller was much more important in productive selling than a brand’s reputation overall. This is a tremendous advantage for small upstart companies demonstrating their wares in close, intimate settings. This is the same strategy multilevel marketing (MLM) uses. It was a discovery that would prove to be a cornerstone for future business success.
PUTTING IN THE WORK
In 1983, seeking a more stable professional life than the never-quite-certain freelance makeup world, I took over a tiny but fully equipped skin care spa. Since it lost all of its former clientele by shutting down and I had no marketing money to help with that, the home-party strategy was not only a reliable income stream but a rich promotional platform from which I found many new and soon to be loyal facial clients. The days were long, but that little business gradually sprang into a brisk operation, morphing into a day spa, growing steadily and eventually generating millions of dollars a year in service and retail sales before I sold my partnership share in 2001.
In those early years of practice, men in the aesthetics profession were rare, though a few had risen to prominence. Among them were Robert Deimer, an inspiration of mine, and former employer, Ron Bigham of Fabulous Faces in San Francisco, California. Both are now deceased. At the time, there was little in the way of business guidance for those operating skin care salons and day spas. Being the self-motivated and determined person I am and drawing from my social psychology training, I began to study the behavior of spa and aesthetics clients – particularly what they valued in a service setting beyond the beauty treatments themselves.
ENSURING SUCCESS
Aesthetics education was, and still is, largely centered on technical modalities and product ingredients, almost regarding the end user – the client as an incidental feature of such programs. Through client surveys, interviews, and reviewing spa feedback forms, I developed specialized customer service protocols and service training that emphasized satisfying preferences expressed in the data gathering. It was also immediately evident that a spa business was not necessarily a high-profit venture, at least if operated by the current conventional standards of the time.
Given that my spa was my sole source of income and I needed it to be one I could someday retire on, I turned my attention to profit margins, efficiencies and cost-management, employee compensation structures, and service pricing strategies. I questioned everything, tested new management methods, rejected trends that seemed to serve manufacturers’ interests more than the businesses they sold to, and slowly created an adjustable operating system that one day other spa owners could adopt for their own facilities.
COMING INTO THE SPOTLIGHT
As a result of our increasing notoriety as a high-caliber spa operation, we began to attract the attention of local and, later, national media requesting to do interviews and profiles. USA Today sent a wary, hard-boiled reporter to spend several days with us to “see what all the fuss was about.” I had no idea that there was any “fuss” at all surrounding the spa, but its story was spreading, and people were interested. The formerly skeptical USA Today reporter departed as a huge fan and the magazine printed two full pages of glowing words about their writer’s experience with us. This was especially surprising considering what we were a rather compact day spa in a pretty shopping complex, not a grand destination hotel facility. We appreciated the gesture, needless to say.
Then the phone began to ring.
Initially, it was small spa owners calling to pick my brain about a few business questions. But, before long, my brain was being picked savagely by distressed entrepreneurs in the beauty industry searching for some way to reverse their sagging fortunes. It was at that point I made the difficult decision to retire from my aesthetics practice and focus full-time on the management of my own company while helping others with theirs on a fee basis.
A NEW BEGINNING
Attending a roundtable discussion at a major spa symposium, a moderator introduced the topic of employee compensation. As a wireless microphone was being passed around, various spa owners would stand and proudly announce their belief in fair pay, citing generous commission and salary levels to the applause and approval of the audience. But, fully understanding the relationship between operating costs and net profit, it was clear to me that so much of what I heard was far out of line with what almost any business owner could sustain. Taking my turn at the microphone I asked my colleagues this, “I’m hearing a lot about ‘fair pay’ in this room, but how many of you owners are paying yourselves fairly?” Silence followed. Not wanting to hijack the discussion, or further kill the joy, I gave my name and said that if anyone would like to continue on that subject later, I would gladly meet them in the hotel lobby. 45 people showed up. In that moment, I became a spa business consultant.
Evidently, there was more business trauma beneath the serene surface of day and resort spas than was openly understood or anyone was anxious to admit. Without the least marketing effort, I received a stream of inquiries regarding spa management questions, everything from service pricing and timing to employee motivational techniques. For all the widespread new investment in spa operations, it seemed that the concept and design work had raced well ahead of operational strategies, and the gap was starting to tell.
THE SPA GOLD RUSH
Those calling for help ranged from one-off day spas to large corporations with far-flung locations. Like the dotcom boom and bust, the spa industry had seen its own gold rush of eager investors betting on a business idea whose heat was lowering into a chilly reality as far as return of investment was concerned. And, like luxury cruise ships and top-flight restaurants, everything on the surface had to appear calm and seamless. While below deck, in the kitchen or the spa employee break room, trouble was stirring. The demand for corrective action was tremendous. And because I was better skilled at management programs than floorplan layouts, I concentrated my coaching work accordingly, particularly in business turnaround planning. That was 18 of the most lucrative yet unpleasant years of my career.
When the naïve, inexperienced, or overly optimistic investors finally began to realize what they had gotten themselves into with their spa investments, it became evident that perhaps a seasoned industry expert might be useful. Many faced the loss of thousands of dollars monthly, and, for some, financial catastrophe hovered close by. The problems facing these operators were remarkably similar: run-away expenses, underfunded startup, overly-ambitious sales projections, insufficient management experience, and human resource challenges – all combined to defeat the objectives of new business owners. But what were those objectives?
Most could not articulate anything beyond the grand opening event. A great number of these spas had been designed by consultants who were attempting to decipher an entrepreneur’s vision, clouded as that vision often was by the rush to establish a new business in an untouched market. There was plenty of opportunity for consultants whose work was directed at fixing some other consultant’s mistake, pushed as they so often were to make them by those overriding sound judgment. It was astonishing how even large companies that might have known better would barrel into the spa game with seemingly little background research or strategic planning. So many were set up to fail.
THE BUSINESS DOCTOR
For the better part of two decades, I toured the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand engaged as a business doctor, someone who could hopefully find a cure for the numerous afflictions spa owners found themselves struggling with. However, for every company I could make headway with, a dozen others continued to sink. The frequent modus operandi became, “Improve everything without changing anything.” Business owners feared losing staff, dreaded being asked to take on a stronger leadership role, refused to accept crucial cost-cutting measures, and, terminally, waited until too late to implement life-saving measures through inertia, disbelief, or a false faith that things would eventually work themselves out on their own.
Some even paid my fee, ignored the advice they received, and sought out yet another consultant whom they hoped would deliver a more palatable plan. One after another disappeared while a savvy few learned, adapted, and prospered. In the end, all businesses of all types are subject to the laws of cost versus revenue. Spas were just a nicer place for receiving bad news. For all the good work I performed and the encouragement I dispensed at length, I began to feel like an oncologist whose patients were all stage 5. For most of these clients, my arrival on the scene was simply too late to do more than comfort the patient until the inevitable liquidation sale. Management would conceal the embarrassing truth, wary staff would torpedo new procedures and protocols, though those very methods could have saved their employer, and thus, their jobs. Product representatives would, in my absence, whisper to devoted owners and aestheticians not to trim their inventory where critical cash flow depended on such reductions. For all the management systems I created, the novel compensation models I introduced, the service and sales training concepts I developed, so much of which performed wonderfully when directed by competent supervision, the emotional weight of those assignments began to wear.
Finally, the day spa startup tsunami receded, the competitive herds thinned, and I turned my attention to the real power holders in those operations: the individual and largely independent-minded service providers, aestheticians. They could yield to or veto virtually any business improvement program, as so often they knew more than management about their work needs and methods. They wielded an economic power or threat in terms of client loyalties few spa owners would risk alienating. As I saw it, an ideal way to continue my success as a spa or aesthetics business coach was to work directly with those who could put solid advice into immediate, beneficial action. This led to my present full-circle, and likely final career profile.
DIVING BACK IN
During my years away from the aesthetics practice, I routinely missed it. I hadn’t entered into a skin care career with the goal of leaving it for some other role in the industry, though evolving business needs eventually demanded that. Following two years in Los Angeles, California, consulting for spa owners and aesthetic surgeons, I chose to return to the San Francisco Bay Area and launch a new skin care practice from scratch. Located in Silicon Valley, well within the reputational influence of my former well-known day spa, I created a compact solo facility devoted entirely to age-management and acne treatments.
This was an interesting challenge as the recession that began in 2008 was still gripping the economy, though the financial engines of high technology were performing better than most segments of industry. Preston Skin Center rapidly gained a devoted following and now is in its 10th year of operation. Remarrying to a brilliant and soon-to-retire human resources director from Kaiser Permanente, my wife, Cathy is now a key contributor to the organizational success of our business. This truly is a labor of love.
More recently, I have authored two books dedicated to helping new and solo aestheticians gain business insights. I have reintroduced a revolutionary comedone extraction tool, initially created 38 years ago, newly refined and produced in the United Stated and selling world-wide. I have created numerous technical, spa, and skin care industry business classes, and I serve as a career coach for aesthetics professionals all while maintaining brand independence and freedom of perspective. It’s a busy and satisfying life.
WHAT LIES AHEAD
Now, a retirement of sorts lies somewhere on the horizon. Most likely, this will shape up as the closing of my skin care practice while maintaining an online presence where I’ll continue to offer business tools, training, and consulting services. Even after four decades of work, the prospect of retiring is challenging to visualize because this profession has become so ingrained in me. And while I doubt it will shape up as days of golf and crafting bird houses, time becomes ever more precious as the years pass. There is still so much to learn, see, feel, taste, and contemplate. Those hours must come from somewhere, but, like so many of my established colleagues who have given much to the profession, I will stay connected and informed regarding the profession of aesthetics.
Among the wonderful things I enjoy in life are travel, reading, symphony and opera, fine art, architecture, collecting vintage American appliances, and just about anything that involves my wonderful wife. We have many far-flung friends and never enough time to see them all. I also love to write, particularly humorous stories and satire, and have at least three unwritten books waiting to be created, published, and ignored. But, as it has been said, most people who haven’t written a book, shouldn’t.