Shaping the Future of MedSpas

Alyssa Rapp, CEO of Empower Aesthetics, discusses her journey and the company's mission to boost confidence through aesthetics. She talks about her firm’s M&A strategy for MedSpas, their support services offered to partners, and shares insights on values-based leadership from her book, Leadership and Life Hacks, in a conversation with Solomon Managing Director, Brad Hildebrand.

Transcript

Alyssa Rapp (00:03):

We at Empower empower the joy and confidence through aesthetics. I'm not Botox Barbie. If that's what they wanted in the CEO role, I ain't it. I mean, I'm just not. I'm a proud consumer of the services that I hope are expressed into my appearance in subtle, more natural ways. I hope to be empowering a whole bunch of entrepreneurs to build great businesses and a whole bunch of women and men to live their best lives. That's the goal here. That's bigger than me. It's bigger than Empower. It's bigger than our team. It's building a company.

Brad Hildebrand (00:37):

Welcome to another episode of the Solomon Presents podcast. Today we have Alyssa Rapp, CEO of Empower Aesthetics with us. Alyssa, thanks so much for joining.

Alyssa Rapp (00:44):

With pleasure, Brad. Thank you so much for having me.

Brad Hildebrand (00:47):

Maybe just to dive right in, you've had a diverse background starting on the venture side and founding and running an e-commerce business before you got over into various ventures in healthcare. What attracted you to Empower Aesthetics particularly and then the aesthetics universe more broadly? What was interesting to you?

Alyssa Rapp (01:05):

First and foremost, it was an interesting marriage between my background running a dot-com in Silicon Valley that was consumer-facing and a half a decade running a PE-backed, multi-site healthcare company for Sterling Partners that then morphed into a health tech investing role for my SPAC Healthwell for a couple of years. So you take a half a decade in healthcare and a decade in consumer internet and you put them together and you have a consumer-facing, multi-site healthcare company that seemed like a great marriage. That said, there's nothing hotter and sexier than medical aesthetics these days. I've been on the right side of market timing in my career and the wrong side of market timing in my career, and man, is it fun to be on the right side of it, to be on the beginning of a cresting wave. The space is on fire, which is why everyone and their mothers and banking and PE is running at it.

(01:53):

It is also a space where the demographic trends are awesomely on our side, not just because it's hot from an investing standpoint, but it's hot from a consumer standpoint. And those two things are obviously related. We're 60-, 70-, 80-somethings. We’re already consumers of these services for the last 20 years. Now 50s and 40s are coming in in droves to look good, feel good, do better, to quote my favorite Peloton instructor, Alex Toussaint. And also, we at Empower empower the joy and confidence through aesthetics, and that ethos is something that transcends age, right? You could buy into that belief system and value system in your thirties and twenties from a preservation of youth standpoint just as easy as later. And what is exciting about the category are not just the demographic trends, not just that it's cash-based, there's no RCM to deal with, not just that investors are watching it like a hawk and watching those of us beginning to scale the assets, but it's also exciting to see the power of what we're doing for the women entrepreneurs who've built the practices we're buying.

(02:53):

It's exciting to see the platforms start to achieve scale, many of which are —not all — many of which are being led by women CEOs. There's just a lot of good stuff there, too. But most importantly, I'm excited to also partner with Shore. I've been on the Shore board for the last four years and Together Women's Health and was on the Empower board for a year before I was asked to step into the CEO chair in December, and Shore's track record in microcap roll-ups is second to none. In that narrow band of competitors, they’re top 1%, and their cash-on-cash returns speak for themselves. So, working with a capital partner who is a playbook for this exact strategy that they've built billion-dollar companies in veterinary services and orthodontics and ophthalmology and more, it's really fun for me. Because while I'm a seasoned operator, it's always fun to learn, and to learn and partner with guys I've worked with on the board side and now get to work with as an operator: Justin Ishbia, a friend and someone I deeply admire; Mike Cooper, who's one of the other founding partners at Shore, who's the chairman of the other — Together Women's Health — board I'm on, and now John Hennegan, the other founding partner of Shore, who's the chairman of my platform here at Empower. It's just really fun to work with great guys with a great track record, great standard operating procedures and get to leverage that in building a company. 

Brad Hildebrand (04:06):

It sure works nice when industry thesis aligns with platform thesis and then partners that want to go do it with you. 

Alyssa Rapp (04:13):

It sounds too good to be true. You're making it sound too easy, Brad. There is a ton of work here, let me assure you of that.

Brad Hildebrand (04:19):

Of course, of course. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about the thesis that you've undertaken at Empower and what is the model, what differentiates the platform? Why do people choose you? Tell us a little bit about what you're building. 

Alyssa Rapp (04:30):

So, we at Empower Aesthetics are an M&A-driven platform. We are partnering with med spas throughout the country with certain geographic focal points, which I can get to. We are going after pure-play med spas, so not derm and not plastics. And what pure-play means to me and to us is a third injectables, a third lasers and a third body contouring. Now, the subcategories of those can vary widely. Whether you're a Botox house, an Allergan house, or a Galderma Dysport house can vary; whether or not you are providing all the filler services or not can vary. From a laser standpoint, it can be everything as aggressive as CO2 and Halo to microneedling in less-aggressive treatments. Body contouring can mean freezing fat, melting fat, or medical weight loss. And then in some of our sites, we are exploring that medical weight loss piece when clinician led, and in others we're also exploring HRT or the other form of wellness, which is hormonal balance and hormone replacement therapy as needed as we age. That's how we think about the service mix. That's how we think about the service lines. And what we offer at each site is, as you would imagine, a hundred percent dictated by the clinical leader at those sites, but those are the general categories.

Brad Hildebrand (05:44):

That's great. Maybe talk to us a little bit about practices that are a good fit for Empower. As you guys are scouring the universe to look for folks that fit the platform, what are the characteristics of a partner that's a perfect fit for Empower?

Alyssa Rapp (05:58):

First of all, a good, old-fashioned, terrific entrepreneur, right? Someone who's built something great, most likely she has built something great as a nurse or a nurse practitioner, and someone who's excited to partner with a seasoned operator in both me and in my team. But even more than that, with Shore Capital, whose track record in micro-cap M&A is second to none. Why does that matter? Well, because our seller partners have to want to stay in the game. If they want to just a hundred percent cash out, fly off into the sunset, they have every right to do that. We're not the right fit. If this is a partner that wants to de-risk their entrepreneurial journey and take 50% or 60% of the enterprise value of a deal off the table in terms of cash, we are a great partner. And the rest of that comes in the form of rollover equity in the consideration — without getting too much into the weeds, that could be a seller note or rollover equity in the platform as a whole.

(06:48):

And so we have to find partners that believe firmly in the value of that rollover equity. And again, Shore’s track record here is awesome. It's why I'm diving in. And their average returns of seven times cash-on-cash return for this size asset are second to none. But we need seller partners who understand that, because then they could potentially have a second bite of the apple, proverbially speaking, that was bigger than the first. But they have to not just understand it intellectually, but believe in that if they're going to be willing to take that much consideration as rollover. So the right seller partner for us, to summarize, is a clinical leader who is obsessed with clinical excellence, clinical training, and clinical outcomes and loves to focus on growth, and she's more than happy to partner up and potentially offload some of the more painful points of running her business, like finance, HR 101, Marketing 101, Tech 101 — tech being cybersecurity, et cetera, et al. — and wants us to take on those more traditional business functions so she can lean into her superpower, which is clinical excellence, outcomes, and growth.

Brad Hildebrand (07:50):

Maybe talk a little bit about some of the support services that you've developed. You alluded a little bit to the Shore model and the types of services that can be brought to bear for your practice partners. Talk a little bit about the MSO build here and what types of services you offer to your practices.

Alyssa Rapp (08:06):

So I think in an MSO build, it's pretty standard operating procedure to add great financial acumen, which includes data dashboarding and reporting, HR 101, which includes recruiting, training, and retention strategies. We also obviously have what we hope to be proprietary and a cut above, which will be those same-store growth, organic growth, marketing strategies, which are well underway. The obvious ones would be digital membership and otherwise, the less obvious ones would be tech-enabled tools that we hope will allow our practices to have higher conversion rates from all leads, let alone the use of AI or anything else which we're just scratching the surface of. And tech right now, we are employing a strategy of allowing our partners to stand their own EHRs and piping all that data into a data lake and having proprietary piping out for business intelligence purposes. That is the current strategy. I would see us following in the footsteps of other Shore scaling platforms and probably limiting that to three or four EHRs over the next year, and a year and a quarter; and over time, of course, the Together Women's Health board I'm on for sure, it makes the most sense to ultimately be on one platform. But we'll probably half-step it there without going all the way there over the next 12 months, to make it less painful for our partners, by and large.

(09:19):

Those are the primary functions. We pride ourselves on “white glove” integrations activities when we bring a partner on; again, that's a classic Shore playbook and strategy, U.S. specifically. About the MSO, it's those classic functions and operations, right? Best-in-class operations management, which means scheduling optimization, synergies that can be derived from economies of scale in terms of COGS, et cetera, all those classic MSO activities that Shore and any other PE firm would use when consolidating up an asset or a platform we're using here.

Brad Hildebrand (09:50):

How much do you think the potential partners understand sort of the value-add of Shore and their track record? Is that something that most understand? Some understand?

Alyssa Rapp (09:59):

I think at this point in our evolution, since we're less than two years old, we're still leaning heavily on that track record. I would say that everyone therefore has to understand Shore, believe in Shore, not just little old us. As we scale, we hope and expect that our case studies around how we're driving the growth you were just asking about, Brad, are what people are buying into, not just Shore — and I adore Shore, otherwise I wouldn't be on two boards for Shore and CEO-ing this platform — but pretty natural for the first couple of years, you're selling their bona fides. After that point, we need to be selling our bona fides because that's what people would move buying to.

Brad Hildebrand (10:34):

Maybe we can shift gears a little bit and talk about the injector market. How have you seen the availability of injectors for practices in your markets? Have you thought about tools to further align with those folks and keep them retained on the platform? Just any comments that you'd have on that topic I think would be interesting.

Alyssa Rapp (10:53):

It's the ever-, omnipresent question in the industry: How do you retain your clinical providers, and how do you keep them incentivized to stay with you? I think that compensation — I know, because we’re working on it hard behind the scenes — that compensation plan design is pretty crucial to that. But it's not just about comp, it's about training and education, and it's are we a platform where people can plant and grow their skills and lives? And so I think that we do think about it rigorously. It's something we expect to get right. The challenge and the opportunity is to think about how to design a platform, and a compensation model associated with it, where you incentivize young clinicians and injectors to join you and grow with you, and to keep those million-dollar-plus injectors happy, satisfied training- and comp-wise, that they don't want to leave. And we're of course going to strive to do both, but it's hard.

Brad Hildebrand (11:42):

Yep. As we see across healthcare, just provider satisfaction and retention is a hugely important piece of it, and obviously as the platform continues to grow, people can begin to have real connection to the brand and to the practice beyond just the provider, but keeping those providers certainly makes it a whole lot easier.

Alyssa Rapp (12:02):

It does.

Brad Hildebrand (12:05):

Maybe we could talk a little bit about the supplier dynamics here. I know just given some constraints on the supply side of injectors, the OEMs here are starting to think about, “how can we get more people into this field, how can we train more folks?” I know, as well, helping platforms like yourself with inventory management. Any comments on the provider side, how you're managing those relationships?

Alyssa Rapp (12:28):

Yeah, I think that the Allergans of the world and Galdermas of the world have extraordinary supplier power in this space, and they have also extraordinary resources as a result. And to leverage those resources for added value, education, training and customer engagement, retention and training, and ongoing incentives to increase their share of wallet and number of visits to each of our clinics is how we think about the partnership with our supplier partners. Anyone can just ask for price slashes. Anyone can. The big pharma companies in this category and any other are going to understandably resist that race to the bottom. So we think about them as partners; we think about them as having extraordinary experience and data in the category; and we like to think about how we can have them as value-added partners, not just beating 'em up on price but leveraging their insights to improve our operations.

Brad Hildebrand (13:20):

I think that'd be great for the market as a whole. Just the more collaboration there is from the different stakeholders, the better, ultimately, quality of care that will be delivered to the patient. So I think that that's certainly something that we'd all like to see in this sector.

Alyssa Rapp (13:33):

I agree, and I found them to be highly collaborative, Brad. I think they're incredibly collaborative if you are willing to be yourself. So I have nothing but high marks.

Brad Hildebrand (13:43):

Obviously there's been a ton of activity over the course of the last five years. Prior to that, there were a few platforms of scale. I'd characterize the last five years as a little bit of a land grab. A lot of new capital has come into the sector, people have formed platforms and are beginning to scale. I'd be curious in any thoughts you have on the path forward for the industry and what you think might look different five years from now than it looks today in the sector.

Alyssa Rapp (14:08):

I think there are going to be waves of consolidation, and you are a seasoned banker, so you'll have better insight into this than I across categories. My experience would suggest that there'll be a wave of those of us, as you said, running at the land grab with whatever our filtering prism is and adding the value we believe we're adding, and strive to add, every day to our clinical partners. There will be a phase one of that consolidation. I would predict, à la plate tectonics, then there'll be a phase two, where two or more of the scaling players at a hundred million revenue and run rate, give or take 10 or 20 million, will come together; two, if not three, of them — probably just two, because a lot of complexity as it is. That would be my bet for the two years from now. And then I'd say five-plus years from now, you're bringing more than two together, and you're having a few chunkier assets. And whether those IPO, sell to the strategic, flip to financial sponsors with larger and larger books of business, I think that — and I don't have a crystal ball there, but I foresee there to be two or three waves of consolidation along that pattern, based on what I've seen and studied in other spaces.

(15:09):

But what do you think? — you've seen this movie before, Brad.

Brad Hildebrand (15:12):

I totally agree, and it's why we've been spending so much time in this category is that it very much is in the early innings, and that's a really exciting time where platforms can go out and build scale. And as the industry begins to consolidate and mature, the focus of investors really shifts to: how is this platform different? What are they doing for their partners? Can we see the organic growth levers that they're pulling in the numbers, in a differentiated fashion — that they're growing above category growth? I do agree that the quality of the platforms that are built, the quality of the playbooks that are being deployed, is what's going to differentiate platforms in the space.

(15:51):

To put a finer point on mix. Do you think that there's anything in the mix that will continue to evolve here? I think what we've found in this category is that it takes a little bit of time for a patient to get comfortable with the services, but once they become a patient and are using the services, they tend to be really, really sticky. Not just sticky in using the services, but sticky in going to that specific practice and injector. Have you seen that in your business, that somebody might start with one service then over time broaden the mix of services that they're utilizing at the platform?

Alyssa Rapp (16:28):

Absolutely, and that's no secret that, and a lot of the big pharma companies have taught many of us, the traditional “tox” — neurotox — patient, by the fourth visit, [if] she hasn't explored other service lines, then she may not. I think that we see a lot of opportunity for cross-selling. What brings you in every four months, like a neurotoxin, is a perfect relationship gateway drug, if you will, for deeper relationship with clinicians, either on sensitive matters like skin resurfacing from childhood acne or anything else that evolves as you age in your life, to fine-line wrinkle management, all that, to fillers and beyond. 

The relationship and the consult with our providers is what I believe drives the trust in the relationship, and they do a wonderful job of that. And then it's our job at Empower to make it easy, easy for the client to both remember what they were told and taught in terms of that initial consult, and also make it easy, and financially easy, and operationally easy, and emotionally easy to come back and execute against that playbook for their own health and wellbeing.

(17:35):

Obviously what starts as a “skin-deep” relationship can go deeper relatively quickly, whether it's body contouring in terms of freezing of fat, melting of fat, or medical weight loss, permanent removal of it. Those are deeper relationships, especially once you get into a notion of use of prescription drugs that we don't have as a mandate throughout our platform. We do have partners who, using best-in-class protocols, are offering medical weight-loss services. We also have others that are not yet, and we know that that's the area of largest growth in the category over the last year. We're not racing to it, and we're not shrinking from it. We're just letting it organically evolve in our practices as our clinical leaders deem fit, based on their comfortability and what their clients want. But that's an obvious place that this is moving, in addition to hormone replacement therapy, also known as HRT. And I think I categorize those two classes of services as wellness. There are a lot of other wellness activities one could consider, like NAD drips and peptides and all sorts of things. We are not at that frontier yet at Empower, although Alyssa Rapp and her husband, Hal Morris, are at that frontier as human beings. At Empower, we are at the frontier of those three classical buckets of services, and when led by our clinic leaders at their practices, dabbling in wellness. That's where we are for now.

Brad Hildebrand (18:48):

I appreciate that overview. It strikes me that the value of having data as the platform matures is going to be huge here. Because if you're able to prove that out over time — visit one, they do this much revenue, and then over time, they expand the service mix. And you can back into, okay, what's the real lifetime value of this patient, and what did it cost me to get them in the door the first time? That's going to be very compelling data to monitor as the platform continues to scale.

Alyssa Rapp (19:14):

I agree, and it's also compelling clinical care, right? When you build a relationship with someone that's about your own personal health, wellness, longevity, and self-perceived beauty, that isn't a relationship that has a beginning, middle, and end. It's not like having a baby. It's not like when you're done having babies. It's a lifelong relationship. And so there's a real wonderful opportunity in the space to think about the patient holistically and what she or he needs, and that will evolve over time. And the lifetime value here could be absolutely extraordinary if we get it right, and that's what we hope to do. But the clinical care here is what's going to drive that outcome, and it could drive extraordinary lifetime value if executed well. So I hope we do. I hope everyone does. It's rising tide, in this case, rises all boats.

Brad Hildebrand (20:05):

I know you're a prolific speaker and writer on the topic of leadership and roles at Stanford and at my alma mater, University of Chicago. I would love to hear a little bit more about your book Leadership and Life Hacks, and if there's anything you'd want to share with our readers coming out of that piece, would love to hear it.

Alyssa Rapp (20:22):

Thanks. That's very kind. I've loved teaching at Booth for the last five years. It's been a great experience. So, great job to your alma mater. Leadership and Life Hacks was a book that was an outgrowth of my experience stepping into my last CEO role for a private equity firm, for Sterling Partners here in Chicago. And I stepped in after a decade as a CEO in Silicon Valley proper and three years doing advisory work for two family offices, two PE firms in two cities of San Francisco and Chicago. As Hal and I were gearing up to move home, and we're both from Chicago originally, life repotted [MLS1] in the Midwest after 14 years out West. And realized that I was ready for my next CEO gig and ended up with a very organic relationship with Sterling Partners, who at that point had many consumer internet practices and kind of operated as a hybrid PE firm and family office, which scared many, but felt very natural to me.

(21:08):

And one of my childhood friends, Kim Vender Moffat, was a former partner at Sterling and was still on the board of Surgical Solutions, and they needed a classic turnaround, a true, classic turnaround. And so I was starting conversations with Sterling on a wide range of topics akin to what my background and some of their portfolio companies or future portfolio companies that were consumer luxury goods or consumer internet-based, which was very similar to my background. But after we got to know each other, we realized it was a good fit, and Kim, my friend, had a real key need for a CEO of this platform that she was — orphan platform, for what she saw on the board at Sterling[MLS2] . And they asked me to step in and I said, thanks, but no thanks. I'm flattered, but no thank you. And the reason I said I'm flattered, but no thank you, was not because I didn't like Sterling.

(21:50):

I liked them a ton. I had no experience in healthcare, like zero. And my best friend, who's an ENT surgeon, laughed at me when I told her I was taking a CEO job then in healthcare. She's like, you couldn't get through the fetal pig dissection in high school, AP bio. How are you going to do this? I said, I'm not going to go watch surgery and pass out. I'm just not going to do that part. I won't look. She laughed. Jokes aside, what they needed was an entrepreneurial leader, to quote my extraordinary mentor and friend, Joel Peterson, who wrote a book of that title, and that's what I delivered. And what I delivered there was an entrepreneurial style of leadership that sort of didn't take anything as given, and just unturned every stone, and was willing to make bold changes because she had nothing to lose, and pull in great people who were general-purpose athletes.

(22:33):

And that story of that journey was one that I realized, looking back upon it — as I started to tell it at dinner parties or with friends or whatever the case may be — it felt like if there was an opportunity to spare any entrepreneur or any CEO any of the school of hard knocks I had lived in my first decade as a dot-com CEO, and then the next chapter as a PE-backed CEO of a turnaround, it felt like it would be worth taking a little bit of time to reduce it to writing. And what's interesting about the leadership and life-hack story is that two-thirds of the book are leadership hacks — managing key stakeholders like a board of directors, how relationships need to be bespoke, or pivoting into a new industry and sort of hacks, if you will, for doing so. But what I've found over the last five years in talking about the book, when people are kind enough to ask, is that it's the life hacks, the back third of the book that people like to hear about the most.

(23:23):

So since you asked specifically, I'll take that learning and apply it here. One of the life hacks that I get asked about the most is an idea that was adapted from that same mentor, Joel Peterson of Peterson Partners fame, former chairman of JetBlue, former head of the Hoover Institute, and then some. Joel had given a lecture when I was a student at Stanford Business School and talking about putting the big rocks in first, and if you put the big rocks in the glass jar first, you can get more water in, et cetera, and know thy big rocks. And adapting that concept and distilling it for my own life, I realized that there was simply no way to have balance if you were trying to achieve it on a daily basis. So probably the most iconoclastic hack I have in the book as a working mom and wife and CEO is I say, I seek episodic versus daily balance, and I think that applies to men and women alike, by the way, who are working professionals. And what does that mean?

(24:13):

It means if I woke up every day trying to be the perfect mom, the perfect wife, the perfect daughter, the perfect best friend, the perfect school board member, the perfect CEO of Empower, the perfect board member of Together Women's Health and the school board and then some, I would pass out, because there's not enough time. But if I really try to nail two stakeholders in a day, like today, I'm trying to nail being a CEO, I'm doubling down on it. And the concept on balance here is that if you're trying to achieve it all on any given day, it's impossible. But if you really are intentional about which stakeholder groups you're trying to deliver upon that day — priorities, if you will — and then those priorities and those stakeholders shift over a course of a series of days or a couple weeks, then balance is something you would try to achieve by satisfying all stakeholder groups over a wider aperture of time. It's more achievable, and it also is burdensome in a good way.

(24:56):

If this is the day I'm going to be a great CEO and a great daughter, I damn well better focus on those two things, because this is the only day I'm going to focus on those two things. Okay, maybe it's 80/20 or 90/10 in terms of time, but there's a responsibility to be focused and pointed in your approach to your activities because if that’s the day you have to leave it all on the field for that, you do. And then the days I'm with my kids, or weekend afternoon, if I'm there and this is the quality time, that I can't be buried in my phone or my laptop — this is it. If this is the day I have to be a great mom, then I better show up. That's on me, that's not on them. So I think that the episodic versus daily balance is it puts the burden on you, the person who's working hard and trying to show up for all these folks to be thoughtful about how you stage and focus your efforts.

(25:39):

And then similarly I also say, which is not exactly — I think it is a feministic thing to say, even though it could be thought of as alternatively, it's no one's job to take care of you but you. We're grown adults here. It is my job to put my own oxygen mask on first. It is my job to carve out the hour I need every day to have to work out. That's my sanity. I mean, I do that for sanity, not vanity, I assure you. Some people use that time, take the time they need through meditation, some walk their dog, some have coffee staring out their backyard window or at the sea. It is not for me to tell you or anyone how you put your own oxygen mask on first, but I know it has to be done and that it is no one's responsibility but yours to do it, or mine.

(26:19):

Sometimes people say, how do you find the time and how do you do it? I schedule it. That's my other hack. I schedule everything. I schedule a one-hour podcast recording with you, and I schedule a 20-minute call in the car with a family member and ask them in advance if they're going to be available. I can't function without using time most efficiently and effectively, and that to me is this idea of scheduling everything is the other way. And then if it's in the schedule, if you are going to work out from six to seven a.m. and you put it in the schedule, it's as immutable as this podcast recording. 

We all have routines, as my dear friend and coach Abdul Sillah, who works with MLB and Women's Tennis Association stars throughout the world, he always says, we all have habits. It's just a question of is it a good or a bad habit, and getting into the habit of taking care of yourself and getting the habit of doing what's right for you. Again, it's about sanity, not vanity; mental health, not just physical health. But I think that's the other hack that I hear over and over again when I talk to audiences. I see a lot of heads nodding up and down, which is like, yep, that is our responsibility to do that, and yep, I've been letting myself down by not holding myself accountable; well, I'm going to get back on track.

Brad Hildebrand (27:24):

They're really powerful lessons and, I think, just challenges that everybody encounters. I certainly encounter them, and I think at the end of the day it comes down to prioritization. Like you're saying, you can't do 50 different things in a day. You got to really take the time to prioritize and plan in advance if you're going to be successful. I think so much of the time, people just don't consciously prioritize, and you just have a stack of things, and you work through, and that's why you always feel behind. And I think the more thoughtful you are around really prioritizing and planning in advance, like you said, and being able to put your all into what it is that you're doing that's been appropriately prioritized is very effective. 

Brad Hildebrand:

As investors that are looking at the space that maybe are new to the space, what's one aspect of the market that you hope that they will take away from what you're trying to build in this space?

Alyssa Rapp (28:15):

I think that's a tough question, to be honest with you. What do I hope investors take away? I've built companies from scratch, and I've jumped in as the plane is flying and taken over the steering and watched the engines get swapped out, too. I think it's hard. I think a lot of us in the space, we're trying to do both, we're trying to build startups and scale them aggressively, and I think that there is a lot of grit, hard work, tenacity that's needed, and there's a lot of different ways to skin the cat. I believe in values-based leadership. I believe in the good old-fashioned stuff of mission, vision, and values. I believe in clear goals and holding yourself accountable to them, and then it's really obvious if you succeed or fail. There's risk in that level of transparency, and I think that I would ask future investors to really investigate the assets they're buying, and did people just buy a bunch of EBITDA and slap it together, or did people build a company that's built to last? They’re two very different things. There can be a role for both. I'm not saying people who slap a bunch of EBITDA together can't get it right — it's hard.

Brad Hildebrand (29:11):

You're going to do the hard work of building a great company, you might as well do it in an industry with great demand characteristics that aren't going anywhere.

Alyssa Rapp (29:18):

And which is fun. Like looking at doing good, feeling better, we at Empower empower the joy and confidence to aesthetics. I'm not Botox Barbie. If that's what they wanted in the CEO role, I ain't it. I mean, I'm just not. I'm a proud consumer of the services that I hope are expressed into my appearance in subtle, more natural ways. I hope to be empowering a whole bunch of entrepreneurs to build great businesses, and a whole bunch of women and men to live their best lives. That's the goal here, and that's bigger than me. It's bigger than Empower. It's bigger than our team. It's building a company.

Brad Hildebrand (29:53):

That's a great message, Alyssa, and I think it is something that's uniquely attractive about this space as you're helping people feel good about themselves, and that's a very powerful thing. 

Alyssa, it was amazing to dive into your journey of becoming the CEO of Empower Aesthetics and to hear more about the Empower platform. Additionally, the book Leadership and Life Hacks is a wonderful read, and again, do encourage our listeners to tune in to the podcast as well as go out and check out your book. It really contains a lot of great lessons about how to conduct life as an entrepreneur.

Alyssa Rapp (30:24):

Thank you for having me. I really appreciated the opportunity.

Brad Hildebrand (30:30):

Thank you to our listeners for tuning into this episode of Solomon Partners Presents. We did publish a white paper on the aesthetic space that can be found at solomonpartners.com. We'll continue to talk to visionary CEOs and founders in the healthcare sector over the coming months, and we hope you'll tune into the next episode.

 [MLS1]Not sure of this - could someone else listen?

 [MLS2]unclear what Alyssa said here - could someone else listen?