Zero to 1000% Growth: How Shane Smith Disrupted the Med Spa Industry | Ep. 203

0:00Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Founder Story. Today, we have Shane Smith, CEO of Upkeep Ventures. And Shane, I got to say one amazing background, all the plants, everything. But something I see up there is Inc. 5000. So I'd love to understand one, what got you into this company? Why this industry? And then after that, I want to talk about how it was to win, you know, such an award like the Inc. 5000. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, ultimately, it really came down to the fact that I was a really great employee for about 12 years. And I realized that I was making a lot of people a ton of money.

0:42And I noticed every year that I aged, kind of my scale of what I thought a lot of money was kept getting higher. And then you hang around enough people to make enough money. And you realize the only way to do that is you have to go own your own business. So I went out, started my own. And yeah, it's been back to back in 5000s now. So what was that like? Because I about 10 years ago, I had the opportunity to to go to the Inc 5000 awardee ceremony. And I heard Damon John speak and what he said almost changed my life. But what was it like for you? You know what? It was. It was fulfilling. You know, I've always said this.

1:20I don't think I've ever been the smartest guy in any room ever. But the one thing that I've always been willing to do that other people aren't is take risks. And I was willing to lose a lot of money because I understood the value of just having rapid growth. How much VCs look at it. How much investors look at it. How much people that want to be involved in something exciting. If you can show astronomical growth, people don't care about them, the bottom line. You can always cut fat later on, but you can't fake sales. So you just have to be fully motivated. And that's just something I've always had.

1:53I've always been, let's just focus on sales. Let's get these numbers as high as possible. And I mean, this company, I think we're at over 1000 % growth in revenue year to year right now. What allowed you to not have that fear? I was just having another conversation with a guest and we talked about their ability to not have fear allowed them also to be successful. What is it that you do differently than most people? Because as we know, most people are not successful entrepreneurs, but they want to be. Yeah. I think what I do and what most people should do is probably two very different things. I think in reality, a lot of my success is because I might not have been smart enough to know that I was doing something incredibly risky.

2:36And I think on the complete flip side, that's why some of the smartest people you know get stuck in that middle management. And maybe they're working at one of the top companies in the country, but they're a director and they're going to make$200 ,000,$300 ,000 and they're going to make that for the rest of their lives. And there's nothing wrong with that. That's amazing. Good for them. But no matter how smart they are, they would never take the risk of going to start a business, risk their money. Are we going to be able to pay the mortgage? Are we going to be able to send our kids to school? They'll just never take the risk.

3:06And I think ultimately I was just so dumb and naive when I was a kid that I just didn't even know I was being risky. And then once it works a few times, you just become less sensitive to it. I don't care. I'm willing to throw it all on black any single time I can and just risk it. Ignorance is bliss. And maybe that's, you know, many times you get asked the question, if you knew now, what would you do different? But maybe it's better that you at that time, you only knew what you knew. because if you knew now what you'd have to go through, do you think you'd even still do it again? Yeah, you know what?

3:39I absolutely would do it again. My life has been so easy. There's so many issues out there. There's so many people that struggle. A little bit of entrepreneurial struggle in the grand scheme of the reality of how most people are living day to day is a first world problem. So yeah, of course I would do it. I live an amazing life. And ultimately, a little bit of stress, some sleepless nights. I'm still in a warm bed. I have a hot meal every single day of my life. So I try to keep it, try to keep my vision looking like that. No matter how big my problems are, there's people with significantly bigger problems, I think.

4:13I love that mindset. That is a great mindset. And I think when you get to travel around the world, you see how other people live, how other people are, and it makes you just even more grateful. So I know you help build and lead top performing, incredible companies. is there something that you do when you're working with a company or you're building a company in order to really scale that organization? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the first is try to separate yourself. You have to do something different. But in reality, I think everything in life just follows good energy. There's a million ways to look at that, right?

4:49You wake up in the morning and you think positive thoughts and you do that every single day, those positive thoughts are always going to come true. We've all heard that kind of hippie mumbo jumbo. I think it's true. When it comes to the idea of a business, though, it's the exact same thing. So what we do at Aki Ventures that's different than most of the people in the med spa healthcare space is every single thing that we do is what's best for our employees and what's best for our customers. I've seen so many doctors driving Ferraris that just jack prices up on everything and they sit back and eat on the margins all day long.

5:23We don't play that game here. There's a ton of money to be made in this space. And we believe, I'll use this example. If you're a single mother and you're in any major metroplex in the US, and let's say you wait tables for a living, and you want to go in and get a service done, an aesthetic, minimally invasive medical service done, what are your real options? The first option is you call a dermatologist or a plastic surgeon. They want a thousand dollar deposit. Well, to that dermatologist, plastic surgeon, that might not be a lot of money. To the large majority of the people out there, that is a ton of money and it's just not disposable income that they can get rid of.

6:02You go to one of my competitors and I'll pay seven, eight hundred bucks. That's still actually a pretty good price, but it's still not realistic to how so many people in this country are living. And so we tried to change that. So we cut prices way down into the two hundreds and three hundreds and set up structures that people can come in and incredibly high quality medical services done at an affordable rate with high quality trained people, clean environment, safe environment. And essentially when no one else wants that customer, we want them. And because we've operated that way, we have an unbelievably large client list in a much shorter amount of time than the majority of the people in the space because we're operating for the people and it's come back in droves.

6:49That's amazing. Do you follow a certain process when it comes to following up with people? I think I used to be in the spa space many, many years ago. And I noticed that a lot of brick and mortar locations, one of their biggest opportunities was they never followed up. People would come in and they would never contact them. They didn't even have a process for that. Is that something that you all have mastered? I don't think we've mastered it. I don't think there's any way to master it. I do believe, first off, I have an amazing team. So it's not like it's me doing it. I've got a great team, but we use, of course we have, we use software.

7:25So every day we have call lists. We pull out all the people that are due for these services, going back X amount of dates, depending on the service that they're getting. We have salespeople that call these people full time. So of course we're calling them. About two to three times a week, we will send out text messages. I think I send out about a half a million text messages for marketing a month right now. So we'll text entire client databases or city specific on set specials. So we are in constant communication. And then not to mention retargeting. Whether or not you're a customer or you've even visited my page, you're never not going to see my ads and you're never going to know what's going on.

8:04So between call lists, text message marketing, managers just doing their job and just reaching out to people as they should, calling top customers and whatnot. We're in constant communication with these people trying to get them back in. If not, you just lose everyone. There's so much competition and so many people going after that same customer. Why would they not just go somewhere else if it's closer to their house? You have to get in their ear. You have to let them know that there's no other choice. But the only side thing there is there's not really very many people that compete with me on price.

8:34So there's not a whole lot of options. There's other med spas, there's other spas, but there's not too many people playing in my price bracket. So when you looked at this as the business model, I know you have multiple locations. How did you look at, okay, we were going to make this work. That means we need to market to X amount of people, or we have to get X amount of clients to come in. How did you look at this as a business model? Or was there something that sparked it to say, okay, these are the clients that we're going to go after? Yeah. You know what? We had so many plans, but I'll be completely honest with this.

9:12We opened smack dab June 15th of 2020, right during the pandemic in New York City on the Upper East Side. So arguably the worst market in the world to be opening a business during the worst time in history is when we opened our first location for this company. So to say that we followed any of our original plans would be a I was just throwing things at the wall and seeing what stuck. We were spending all of our budget on hats. We were just trying to figure out, A, who feels safe enough to leave their house? Who's out there? Who's still in New York City? Market to everyone. And daily, we're going to look at the analytics and see who's responding, who's booking.

9:56We're going to double down on that. And that's really why. I mean, we originally thought we were going to probably live in the mid-30s, early 40s range like most med spas do. But we right now, we're 18 to 34. Really, 18 to 26 is where the large majority of our customer base is. That's not what we planned. That's just kind of what's transitioned. And I think that's important. What your plan is ultimately is not going to matter. It's who's actually spending money. Who cares? Throw your plan in the trash. It doesn't matter if that's not really first coming in. figure out who your customer is who your brand relates with and just double triple four x down on that and just keep doing that and it'll be fun hey airbnb was created in 2008 so there you go you know sometimes when maybe when everyone else is not doing something because it's not a good good time yeah maybe it is a good time but it sounds crazy looking back right like it sounds crazy looking back of when it happened, but that's amazing.

11:00I mean, what an incredible story. Sounds very exciting. And I really like the fact that you're going after a generation of people that are one younger, which other people may not be going after, but that allows them to also, I mean, you have such a long lifespan of that customer. They might be a waiter or waitress today, but tomorrow they might be an executive and then they have more money. So, I mean, that is something very interesting. And I'm fascinated that that group of people are looking for med spa services because they want to be their best self. I think that's very fascinating, but I'm curious, what is a piece of advice that you would give to somebody else who's like, you know what, Shane, I want to follow in your footsteps.

11:49I want to be a successful entrepreneur. I want to get the Inc. 5000 list. What advice do you have for me? You have to be able to switch your mindset on what success really looks like. And I can only answer how that worked for me. The thing that really changed it for me was finding the most successful people that I could get my hands on and making myself so valuable to that person that they could not live without me. And I did that for multiple CEOs while I was growing. What happened because of that is a couple of things. The first is, is it changed my idea of what success looks like. When you see the houses that these guys live in and private jets, you're like, what am I thinking?

12:30A few hundred thousand dollars a year. I can make some real money. So your mindset shifts there, which is fantastic. The next thing there, though, is these guys will keep you around for everything. So you're in every meeting. You're in every conversation. You're listening to private equity conversations. You're listening to them talking to banks. you're listening to them speaking with their friends and seeing what kind of friends they talk to so your mind shit your mindset will just shift completely and then you can go out on your own if you want to just take the risk and do it that's fine you're going to learn so much from mistakes i get it but invest in a few years on trying to surround yourself around the most successful people you can learn a little bit then go take the risks and go all in and you're just going to only learn by mistakes anyway, but try to learn from someone.

13:15That's, that's my, uh, number one piece of advice. Big takeaway from, from this today is, um, you're a forever learner surrounding yourself with much smarter, successful people. Uh, you will help. I think a lot of people sometimes think they know everything or think they know all when, like you said, we barely know anything. Uh, Shane, this has been great, uh, super inspired for me today. I think the audience is going to also take a lot away. If people want to get in touch with you, they want to find out more information about your company, how can they do so? Just go to upkeepventures.com and you can reach out.

13:49We'll be in touch. Always available for free advice. Said I'm always available for free advice if anyone needs anything. There you go. I love that. I love that, Shane. I think that's a great offer for everyone, but this has been great to have you today on Founder's Story. Thanks so much, man. Appreciate you.