How to open a med spa

Who owns the entity, who holds clinical responsibility, and who supervises which procedures are the questions everything else hangs off. They determine what you can offer, who you can hire and how you must document.

Get this reviewed by a lawyer familiar with your jurisdiction before you commit to a lease, a brand or a service menu. Rework here is the most expensive kind.

Injectables, devices and facials have different room requirements, different appointment lengths and completely different economics. A menu that mixes ten-minute toxin appointments with ninety-minute device treatments needs rooms designed for both.

Decide which treatments are the core of the business and which exist to fill gaps. Then size the room count and provider roster to the core, not the wish list.

Capacity is rooms multiplied by open hours multiplied by realistic utilisation, minus turnover and consultation time. Revenue targets that ignore turnover time are the most common early planning error.

Model provider cost per hour against treatment length per service. A high-ticket treatment that occupies a room for two hours can earn less per room hour than a short one.

Charting, consent, photography, booking and inventory should run in one place from day one. Migrating charts and consent records after six months of trading is painful and risks gaps in the clinical record.

Decide up front how you will record product, lot number and expiry for every injectable appointment, and who reconciles stock. Retrofitting traceability onto months of loose notes is not realistic.

Track four things weekly: consultation-to-treatment conversion, rebooked-at-checkout rate, no-show rate and room utilisation. They tell you more about survival than monthly revenue does.

Set the review cadence with your clinical lead early. Audit a sample of records each month for completeness of consent, photography and product traceability while the volume is still small enough to fix.