The booming popularity of medspa services means it’s no longer a question of if clients in your salon, spa, or barbershop are getting them. It’s a question of when and where.
The high-ticket pricing of medspa services has a lot of appeal, and the question of whether to offer them is valid. The answer is never simple, and depends on variables unique to your business. Specifically: your clients, your local marketplace, state and federal laws governing medical services, and the logistics of turning something profitable on paper into real-life cash flow.
Incorporating medspa services into a business is no small decision. It will involve checking state regulations governing medspas, and often speaking with an attorney or law firm specializing in medical aesthetics.
In most states, injectables can only be done by RNs or APRNS with prescriptive authority, and boards require that medical spas have a designated medical director who is a licensed physician.
Is the juice worth the squeeze? It could be — so it's important to be very methodical in making the decision.
Here are key actions to take, and factors to consider, when deciding whether to partner with a licensed medical entity or provider for medspa services.
Ask Your Clients!
Your best source of insight is in front of you every day. There are two ways to get info from your clients, and you should be doing both: asking and listening with an open mind. (This is true of any product or service you offer them, actually!)
If your clients tend to talk openly about their personal lives, this topic can naturally come up in conversation. If it doesn’t, go ahead and ask: Are you getting {Botox/ fillers/ etc.}? Where do you go? Are you happy with your provider? How could that experience be improved?
If you want to be more methodical about it, email or text a free survey to them (from services like Google Forms, SurveyMonkey or CrowdSignal). You can also provide tablets to clients in your business to fill out the survey then and there.
Most likely, the answer to that first question is yes. So now you’re looking for context on where your clients are getting these services done, and whether they’re satisfied with their experience.
If it seems everyone has a local provider and they love them — well, that’s a good indicator the time is not right to jump into the fray (especially if clients are naming different providers).
But if they’re giving responses such as: “No one around here does it,” or “It’s such a far drive,” or “It’s hard to find time to fit it in,” or “I don’t love my provider, but there are no others in the area” — those are flashing green lights. They tell you an opportunity exists to fill the void and provide a better, more convenient experience. Just listen and ask.
Research Your Local Market
Do your homework on the local market extensively and repeatedly — emphasis on repeatedly. With how fast the medspa market is growing, and how frequently new establishments are popping up, an area that had one medspa three months ago might have five today.
If you’re thinking seriously about making this move, it’s not enough to have researched your local market a few months or even weeks ago. You must research it today — and again tomorrow — and throughout your process of adding medspa services.
You also need to be brutally honest about what the research is telling you. If the market is saturated, or if a small but reputable provider or two appears to have a strong foothold on most of the available business in your area, those are flashing red lights.
Adding medspa services to a business model takes lot of work. If you have to squint super hard to convince yourself it’s worth pursuing, it’s usually not.
Test the Waters
So you’ve had the conversations and done the research and all signs point to strong interest and viable opportunity. Time to partner with a licensed medspa provider and update your service menus, right?
Absolutely not.
Test the waters before you dive in. One great way to trial a potential partnership with a medspa provider is to host "Botox parties" or similar events that offer these services. Promote them extensively in advance, and use the response among your clients and the community to gauge the true level of interest in your market.
After all, a client may say they’re interested, but they really speak with their dollars. This trial approach will also help you better understand which services are of most interest to clients.
Again, you have to be really sure before you do anything official or even semi-permanent, so host at least two or three medspa events, spaced out at a few weeks apart.
Just like it’s one thing to say and another to pay, it’s one thing to show up once for a special occasion, but another to return. The former shows you have clients who are curious, but the latter indicates a real opportunity for sustainable profit.
Build in Increments
So you’ve hosted some medspa events and the response was overwhelmingly positive. Time to partner with a medical provider and offer these services full time, right?
Absolutely not.
If this is truly a long-term investment in your business, you have plenty of time and much still to learn. The right way to build is in increments.
Start with a partner provider on-site one or two days a week. Once they’re booked to 80% or more for three consecutive months, add more days. Until then, it’s unwise to offer services full-time when those bookings are few and far between.
This measured, incremental approach comes with another major benefit: ample time to experiment with and adjust your space so you can find the optimal layout and traffic flow to accommodate the new services.
Do you need to move furniture around or reconfigure your layout? Do you need to repurpose a low- or no-profit area of your business into a medspa space? Do you need to think about moving to a bigger location altogether?
You don’t want to guess when answering these questions. The only way to know for sure is to build incrementally and accumulate practical knowledge on which to draw.
When You Know, You Know
As exciting (and profitable!) as it may be for your business, integrating medspa services can be scary. This is, after all, a seismic change. But it’s no more seismic than the leap you took when you started your business in the first place.
As was the case then — if you do the research, ask the right questions, choose a trusted medical partner, and follow what you’re seeing and hearing, you’ll know if and when the time is right. When it is, you’ll be ready.
Skya Jones is Medspa Education Manager and in-house aesthetics expert at Boulevard, where she works directly with the company’s staff and medspa customers to design memorable client experiences. Jones has more than seven years experience in the beauty industry with a focus on medspa services, leadership, and management.
