Leading a Cloud Medspa Revolution

Dr. Grant Stevens

Welcome back to the technology of beauty, where I have the opportunity to interview the movers and shakers of the beauty business. And today is no exception. Today I'm going to be interview. Iggy Fanlo from Vansanity, correct? Vansanity. Welcome. Thanks for coming all the way out here to Manhattan Beach here and joining us at the technology of beauty.

Ignacio Fanlo

I've come from Boston, it's March, I left snow and rain and here I am. It's it's sunny and beautiful and I'm, I can't wait to enjoy the day.

Dr. Grant Stevens

Well we are so happy to have you, and I'm glad you came all the way out from Boston. Today everybody's flying in for the technology of beauty. It's great to have you.

Yeah, just don't spend too much time here. We, everybody's coming here. The weather's so great, so Iggy. Tell me a little bit about yourself. Where'd you grow up? Where'd you go to school? Tell us about yourself first before the company. All right.

Ignacio Fanlo

Yeah. I know. I appreciate it. Iggy is Ignacio. So my parents are Cuban refugees. And I was born in Miami eight weeks after they left Cuba. They fled Cuba illegally in 1961. And so I, they left on the Feast of St. Ignatius July 31st. And that's why I got the name Ignacio.

Dr. Grant Stevens

I love it! Habla español tambien? Muy Bien. So you were born in Miami 61.

Ignacio Fanlo

Yeah, I'm an old fart.

Dr. Grant Stevens

So where'd you go to college?

Ignacio Fanlo

I went to Princeton, chemical engineer, and then went straight to Wall Street to trade derivatives. So I spent 15 years on Wall Street. My dad was a engineer. He is a PhD, actually a professor of engineering,

And he told me — he passed recently, so I'm sorry if I'm getting a little emotional. But he always told me, study engineering, it's a great discipline. You'll learn how to solve problems, but don't be one, don't be one. Use it as a tool, use it as a stepping zone. And that's what I did. I considered going into engineering.

I've, I found this fascinating thing that was going on Wall Street. It was the derivatives in the early eighties, like it changed. So before the early eighties, wall Street was more of a kind of a boys club and high brokerage fees. Probably pre- free brokerage or low brokerage and then like the things exploded in the late seventies and eighties and there was this sort of sea change for technologists and math and and it completely changed the world.

And honestly I was cutting edge on that, but 10 years later I was blown away by PhDs and math guys and physics guys. You probably read about all these quants now and so that was just on the cusp when I went there. So I was there for, 15 years. And me and a couple of partners from Morgan Stanley left in 98 to try to do this kind of crazy thing with REITs and derivatives. And our timing couldn't have been worse.

Dr. Grant Stevens

Because seven and eight happened, right?

Ignacio Fanlo

Well, 98.

Dr. Grant Stevens

Oh, 98 we had another turndown. That's right.

Ignacio Fanlo

Oh yeah. There was the Russian debt crisis. Huge. Actually it was a Russia like today there was a Russian debt crisis. The thing. And there was this hedge fund.

I don't know if you remember the name, long Term Capital that was based outta Greenwich. It was all the guys from Solomon Arbitrage Desk. They had repurposed themselves as this massive hedge fund. super smart guys and we were using similar strategies, , and we were looking at doing kind of what's a, what's called a resume reit, where you, a few guys that know the world go out and just raise some capital.

Unfortunately, our timing was so bad. Our underwriters who were no longer with us, they was leaving Brothers of Bear, bear Stearns. They told us, listen, there's a couple of Nobel Prize winners over at Long-Term Capital, so we like you guys, but you don't really, no, we don't know if we're gonna be able to make this happen.

So if you guys wanna go to the beach for a couple of years, let the dust settle and come back. So my my partners went back to Wall Street, but I said, eh, I don't really, I don't know about this. And it so happened that there was a woman named Mary Meeker at Morgan Stanley. She was a partner.

Now back then, Morgan Stanley, in the late nineties. I don't know the exact number, but I think my year when I became an MD in 94/5, I'm gonna say they, they made 12 that year, like it was a big deal right now, there's tens of thousands of employees. But anyway, I knew her, not well, but I knew her and she was talking to me about the internet and what was going on, and I was like, oh my God I gotta get involved.

Starting in 99, I I took a couple courses at night down at NYU about web development and Unix, and I convinced myself I gotta get involved in this. And and I did, I don't want to drag the story out too much.

Dr. Grant Stevens

No. I want to get to know you. So you got involved in the internet in the late nineties?

Ignacio Fanlo

Yeah, late nineties. I joined I was fortunate enough because of, back then, Even then I had some gray hair. So back then in in the late nineties, it was a lot, all kids, and I was my early forties. And people said, okay, you can be the CFO, COO of these little startups. And I picked this one startup.

I just like the people. I like the idea. And that was in 99, I joined. Five years later, we took it public in 2004 and a year or two after that, eBay bought us for, I think it was $675 million. And and I was hooked. I just loved being an entrepreneur and I loved being part of, sort, like a new idea. And it was fun.

It was just fun. Going to work was fun. And so since then I've had a lot of failures, I could go over those.

Multiple Speakers

Like all good entrepreneurs. Yeah, exactly. If you're not failing, there's no way you're gonna, you're not trying hard enough. No. And there's no way you're gonna be truly successful.

Ignacio Fanlo

There you go.

I like that. So we we try to do something. We were the first ones, we believe we may be wrong to try to do what's called an at exchange a real time bi. So you know how on Wall Street they do I think it's called high frequency trading? Yes, I do. So they're like they literally try to get closer physically so that the milliseconds on the wire, like that's why racks of space, literally servers, the server space is so expensive near the exchanges because they want to have the bid so close physically cuz of speed of light. Oh darn. I didn't know that. So that's what high frequency does. And so 99, 90 5% of bids and offers on the exchange never trade because it's these little high frequency trading guys trying to find where the market is.

Dr. Grant Stevens

They're playing on the vig. They just want to get that arbitrage.

Ignacio Fanlo

Well, they can stake by putting bids and offers really quickly, they can find where the real volume is, what's behind it. And front running is too strong a word, but it's what it is. If you know that there's a big bid and not much offers, you're gonna go chase the offer and move it up, and the bids will follow you, right?

So they get out in front of it. That's why these guys like Robin Hood, honestly they were getting paid for what's called trade flow. So they were the ones sending that information essentially to the citadels and others of the world. I'm probably gonna get in trouble saying this, but that's what happened.

That's why for high frequency trading, Robinhood got in trouble for, Hey, you're not making any commissions. How are you making money? It was selling the order flow.

Dr. Grant Stevens

So how did you get involved in the beauty business? Take us back to the beauty business.

Ignacio Fanlo

Yeah, so I had done a healthcare startup that was moderately successful. We sold it to Great Call who then got bought by Best Buy, and so I looked at the healthcare business and I really liked it. It was it really helped. I have a mantra that your company is worth ex pretty much exactly. The average amount you help someone times the number of people you help. Okay.

I literally believe that. Like you can Google, it helps me a lot. Facebook helps people connect but they do it at the scale of billions. Or you can help people a great deal, not a little bit, but do less, I gotcha. The bigger, like you might say, a Gucci, they help people feel good about themselves, anyway the, I was watching, and I don't remember if it was the 80th or 90th Academy Awards and we were at somebody's house. I always like to say the Academy Awards is the wives version of the Super Bowl. So they're up in the front watching the Academy Awards and the guys are hanging back I don't know, drinking bourbon or wine, I don't know.

We're in San Francisco and they're showing all these clips of 10, 20, 50 years. And you notice, anyone could notice, but the bar for personal hygiene, for aesthetics, for looks for teeth was way lower 50 years ago, they, Hollywood Star would look like that now at the Academy Awards.

Not hardly. Not hardly. And then I thought, I remember David Beckham when he came out in the nineties, is the first, it's gotta be 25 years ago. The first metrosexual, didn't have any body hair. It was all gone tattoos. And I remember going with my friend who has a place down South Florida.

And we, I said, Brian, things have changed. He's my age. And I said, let's go down to South Beach and I'm gonna make you a, an I'm gonna ask you for the over under of the, we pass a hundred men on South Beach. How many will have chest hair? And I think he said, I think 30 or 40 will have Chester. I said, I'll take the under on five

Those are young men. They're all, there was one person out of a hundred that had Chester and I said, The beauty industry's changed. The bar is changing and it just keeps moving, because I said, a hundred years ago you didn't even use shampoo. And so I said, there's this massive megatrend, and you have selfies, you have social media.

I took when I was my daughter's age, maybe I took, I don't know, two, three photos of my myself a year. My daughter takes hundreds, thousands, the scrutiny is incredible. And so I was like, this is inevitable. And I looked at some of the numbers. I looked at medical aesthetics. I loved it too, because it was consumer pay, so there wasn't that whole insurance issue.

Dr. Grant Stevens

No government, no third party.

Ignacio Fanlo

Bingo. and I was like, boy, the margins are amazing. So this is an amazing financial opportunity. And then the last thing I checked out was, Hey, there's this weird, I call it, this is my marketing, sh vocab cac, ltv, maybe, customer acquisition costs versus lifetime value.

Every marketing person will say, what's your customer acquisition cost and what's the lifetime value of the customer? And there's this really weird thing that I saw in the hair care, and it applied here too in medical aesthetics, and that is that 20% of the hair care business is now a rental model. For people to rent the chair, rent the booth.

Dr. Grant Stevens

The cutters, the yeah. The stylists. I'm sure it's over 20% here in Manhattan Beach. Everybody has their own chair, right? They rent it.

Ignacio Fanlo

And the reason they do it is it's CAC/LTV. In the past, the hair salon would pay for the marketing cost. But the customer were with the stylist.

If the stylists moved, they went with them. So I was like, this is really weird and this is what's happened. It's moved more and more to rental. And I said, this is the exact same dynamic in medical aesthetics, the exact same dynamic where the med spas. The, and I've talked to some of the large mid-size chains.

Or groups. They've said to me their biggest problem is hr. It's not necessarily getting patients, it's keeping the top injectors, the top providers. So I was like, this is the perfect model. The rental model will move to medical aesthetics. It's inevitable. I hope it's Vansanity, I think it's Vansanity that's gonna make it happen, but it will happen with or without us.

Dr. Grant Stevens

So before you go any further, Where did Vansanity come from? Tell us about the derivation of the name and then we're gonna go back to, I want to know more about what the heck it is. So tell our viewers and our listeners, what is Vansanity?

Ignacio Fanlo

So Vansanity came to me from a former board member of mine a woman I just love her. She's fantastic. She's her name is Laura Carstensen. She is a, so a psychology professor at Stanford University for 20 odd years. And she said she's National Academy of Sciences, and she had worked with me on a couple more, what I'd call obviously, socially beneficial companies. Okay? And when I told her about this idea, I told her sheepishly cuz I was like, it's gonna seem frivolous and this is a very accomplished, she said this, Iggy is the best idea you've ever had.

And I was like, wow, I didn't expect that at all. And I said, why do you say that? And she said, as a psychology professor, I could tell you. that people do these things not for others. Whether it's the way they dress, whether it's the hairstyle, whether it's cosmetics, they do it for themselves. That 95% is to make you feel better about yourself. And so I said vanity is sanity. Vanity is sanity. Okay? It's improving your sanity, your self worth.

Dr. Grant Stevens

And I thought it was vanity/insanity. Yeah. But it's Vanity Sanity. So Vansanity.

Ignacio Fanlo

Vanity Sanity, and I checked out the URL and there was a punk rock group that had the url. They'd held it for 20 years, and the, but they were defunct.

So I, I messaged the guy through one of the URL domain registrars, and I bought her for a few hundred bucks, I really think it's true. And so it, it was thought of as a brand name and so I could have called it Medical Suites or Med Spa suites, but it is too generic. I want people it's a weird name, but I wanted people to remember it.

Dr. Grant Stevens

They're gonna remember it after today. Okay, so Vansanity is the name of the company. Yes, it is. Now tell us what you do.

Ignacio Fanlo

Yeah, so the first thing we started with, I've always wanted to make across the country, across the globe with this idea, but it didn't exist. I kept looking around, there must be somebody who's done this.

And the reason I don't think they had done it yet, not that somebody hadn't thought of the idea, it's just about critical mass. it. Unless there's enough providers and enough demand for this kind of rental model and aggregating it doesn't really make economic sense. It's Uber. If there's not a lot of drivers and not a lot of rider, you need density.

Vansanity right now is a location in Boston and Dallas. Were a provider, nurse, practitioner, doctor, whoever esthetician can come in rent rooms. Rent machines, get prescription products at wholesale and do it by the hour.

Dr. Grant Stevens

So it's kind of a WeWork?

Ignacio Fanlo

Kind of a WeWork, a little bit. But it's

Dr. Grant Stevens

So I as a physician, I could come and rent space from you. You can come and rent. Or if I were an esthetician.

Ignacio Fanlo

Yeah. If you're legal, you have a medical director, you had your malpractice insurance, you could come in and say, I'm gonna rent. Four hours today I'm gonna bring eight clients through. You can buy Botox from us or Dysport or other

Dr. Grant Stevens

Do I pay you by the time? [By the hour.] So it's by the hour. So it's not a percent of my revenue. So if I make a lot or a little, I just pay you by the time.

Ignacio Fanlo

We have many nurses, I'm not kidding, who make three to $600, and you could do the math, a Botox treatment, five or 600 bucks.

Dr. Grant Stevens

No, I get it. And you'll sell the product. Or if they bring their own product in?

Ignacio Fanlo

They can bring their own product in. We have a group called Vansanity Medical Services. It's owned by physicians. It's a sister company of ours. And we resell or sell the product at our wholesale price. We don't take any markup.

Dr. Grant Stevens

Do you have devices there like lasers and so forth? Rent them? In addition to the, so walk me through that. Sure. Let's say I want to do a BBL Halo Sciton.

Ignacio Fanlo

We have one. We have the Joule X . So we have that. They come in and they, if they wanna do a halo, they buy the Halo tip from us, and they rent the machine for the hour.

They rent the room, they go in, they do their treatment. Probably charge 1500 bucks. And between the room and the tip, maybe they pay us 405. And so they pocket a thousand dollars in, in, off they go and it's their own business. They even charge their client, whether it's Venmo or Square or they have a, a card they use or whatever.

But people go in and, essentially what I think of this model, I know it sounds a little too, I call it a Cloud Med Spa. Okay? And the reason is, this is my theory as a finance guy, is that cloud, everybody thinks it means, It isn't. The first cloud was electricity, okay? All cloud is rentable, scalable, and on demand.

So before you used to have your own fire, your own whale oil and lanterns, now you can just turn it on and off when you want. You rent it by the kilowatt and you can do one kilowatt, or I can do a thousand kilowatts and that model. Jeff Bezos and Amazon took it to computing. They took it to storage. Now there's even, I think it's Travis Kaeni from Uber.

He's the ceo. They did it with kitchens. Now, I don't know if you've heard of cloud kitchens? All these things are, whether it's electricity or kitchens or it's capital expenditure, FinTech, it's about taking someone's capital. Expenditure needs to start a kitchen, start a restaurant to start to create their server rooms and saying, no, just rent it by the hour.

In fact, at my, at the company, we sold shopping.com for 675 million. Of our 350 employees, we had close to 120 doing network operations, meaning they were in three different locations around the world putting in servers and racks. You could do it with five people now with AWS or Google Cloud or Azure or Microsoft.

You could just turn it on and off. So you've taken all that expense. Buying your own compute, buying your own servers, buying, renting your own space. That's what they did. We're trying to do the same thing for med spas cuz it's such a great business. And these ladies, and it's 95% ladies, are now their own boss.

And I will send it to them. They'll be so excited. They're working one day a week and making four or $5,000 in one day. Making a quarter of a million dollars a year. Net. They probably have some marketing costs working, I don't know, probably 30 hours a month. And I love it. I love it.

Dr. Grant Stevens

So you're not responsible for any of the marketing or patient acquisition? No. Or any of the metrics or analytics. You just, you rent the space and or the supplies, the consumables, be it capital or injectable and so forth? And where's the liability lie?

Ignacio Fanlo

The liability lies with them because we don't even know the patient's name.

Dr. Grant Stevens

Do you share any of the liability? Are you like a renter? Are you like landlord? Are you a landlord?

Ignacio Fanlo

Yeah, we're more like a hotel. More like a hotel. But the interesting part I wanted to talk about too. And I'll go back to it, I'm sure, is we really want to become a management services organization.

Dr. Grant Stevens

Ah, because I know a little bit about MSOs.

Ignacio Fanlo

Okay. There you go. So we can start one in Boston and we'll start one in Dallas like we did LA. Chicago, Florida, Atlanta. But we could scale this 10, 20 times faster. And we now have had three or four people have contacted us saying, can I franchise you?

And I was like, no, I'd rather do an mso. I don't want to get into the brand stuff. I don't want to get into the geography stuff, what I'd love to do is, Here's all the tools. We have proprietary software app this large buying group that's getting lower prices. We have these relationships with a couple of the machine manufacturers who have, I have convinced them we're so small.

I think it's a small risk. I can't say who they are and I've under nda, but a couple of the. top manufacturers have, I've told them just like software moved to SaaS. Your machines, you should move to mass machines is a service, right? You should be renting these things by the use, not a hundred thousand dollars machine or whatever the price is.

You rent it for a hundred, $200 a use. The amount of people that can use it will explode. It is the story of technology. It's lower the price, explode the application. And so that's my goal is if we do an mso, a management services organization for Vansanity, instead of having five or 10 locations in a few years, we can hopefully have hundreds of others with their brands, their businesses, and they create.

If you want to call it WeWorks, but they create their little rental groups. They can make great money their, they empower their providers, their client pri provider clients like we do. They're making great money. And we're just like a Marriott taking a little bit for providing the software in the platform.

Dr. Grant Stevens

This is unbelievable. So you now exist in two locations?

Ignacio Fanlo

Correct. Boston and Dallas. And we just opened Dallas not even five weeks ago.

Dr. Grant Stevens

And where's your funding coming?

Ignacio Fanlo

It's friends, family, and myself and a couple partners, and we've

Dr. Grant Stevens

Are you gonna do a raise or you have a series?

Ignacio Fanlo

We're looking at doing one now.

Dr. Grant Stevens

Because you're talking about going to many other cities. Is this gonna be all friends and family or angels or how are you gonna do this? I don't know.

Ignacio Fanlo

The beauty is, When you do an mso, it's super capital light because we don't, we're not doing the leasing. We're not buying the machine. If we're, we'll put the machines in that do per use, so there's no capital to us. We're not renting the space. This is software services.

Dr. Grant Stevens

Wait, you're renting the buildings, aren't you? Who's renting the buildings?

Ignacio Fanlo

So I can't mention the name, but we have a medical director in Arizona. We have one in Massachusetts, another person here actually in Manhattan Beach that used to be in Boston's looking at opening one.

She works with us now in Boston, and she's I'm moving back in the next six to 12 months, I can get toge. They're basically people that either have a group of injectors that they know, but what's even better is either an existing med spa or a medical director who has 20, 30, 50, 70 injectors in their group and we'll say, listen, you just have to open a space, outfit it, and we'll provide all the rest of the infrastructure, all the other infrastructure.

It's like Marriott, right? You, do the hotel and we'll make it happen. If you, if the key is bringing the providers, that's another thing I realized, unless you are world class at something or it's incredibly strategic, you shouldn't do it, and.

We're not world class at attracting providers. We'll do it if we have to. Like we had to in Boston, Dallas to prove the concept, right? But I'm sure there are people in Manhattan Beach here. They either a group of injectors or med spa and I'm sure there's people at the top at the bottom that go, Hey, this is a better model.

I'll never have to worry about people leaving me again. Because it's like Amazon Marketplace. People don't know this Amazon marketplace. I'm gonna get the number slightly wrong. It's more than 90 and less than 10. So something like 7% of the merchants do 90 to 95% of the sales on Amazon marketplace. Is that right?

It's a complete power law, and it's because the cream rises and we see it not 97, but 80 20 for sure, maybe 90 10. The best providers that do the best marketing, that provide the best service, the hustle, get the line, share the business. And so you don't have. be the HR filter. It sorts itself out. The best ones are killing it, renting rooms, and they're psyched and they're, and the more we grow, the lower our prices get, and so the more and more money they make.

Dr. Grant Stevens

And the more affordable it is for everybody.

Ignacio Fanlo

Exactly. Exactly. It's just a win, win.

Dr. Grant Stevens

So you have two locations now, right? And you've talked about many more. Where are you gonna go next? What's the future, future look like?

Ignacio Fanlo

We would consider, I guess I've heard it describes as the smile of the country.

From about the Bay, the smile states, the Bay Area up to DC or whatever. So that's where I think it'll end up going, but. Like I said, we really want to go MSO hard. Could we open a couple more? Sure. I wouldn't be averse to it and I like having one or two because I'd to say, you want to eat your own dog food.

I got my own two dogs. Cause you, when you eat it, you feel all the pain. So it's good to keep your toe in the water, but at the end we're, I'm old enough. You want to help people, right? Like I said, get back to helping people. We can help 50, a hundred, 200 providers in the location, maybe a little more, but if we do it with an mso, we can help thousands.

We won't make as much money, but that's we'll make it with a lot more money, a lot more people, so it's good for us, but they'll be completely empowered. I think that's a trend. We're going back to the future with this whole gig economy. Like I, it reminds me of the old butcher baker, candlestick maker, the heart, the, what's the guy, the blacksmith, this was the way of 200 years ago. That's where we're going back to.

Dr. Grant Stevens

This is gonna be very disruptive for the physicians that have their own medspas.

Ignacio Fanlo

No, they can be part of our mso.

Dr. Grant Stevens

But if they're existing right now in the workplace, and they have their employees this is gonna pull their employees away from them, isn't it? The independent entrepreneurial employees?

Ignacio Fanlo

I hope. I hope the smart ones will say, you know what? Let me join the mso. I'll have less headaches cuz I won't have to, and I've heard this from several. I don't have to spend all my time energy incentives chasing those top 10 20. Injectors. And then the bottom ones, I'm trying to figure out transition plans, and that's a headache.

And then I got the folks in the middle that are just getting by. I'm like, let it sort itself out. Why do you want to. It's like of America. It's bottoms up versus Russia. It's top down, doesn't work. Top down doesn't work. Let it be bottoms up. And this is a bottoms up model for Med Spas.

So I hope that the smart ones will say, Hey, HR is a big problem for me. Let me do it this way. They won't have to spend as much on hr, they won't have salaries, they won't have the fixed costs. They could have one person there at a front desk, 20 rooms, few people cleaning up and that's it. They probably make as much or more money.

Dr. Grant Stevens

Who, the owner of the space?

Ignacio Fanlo

The med spa. The med spa net. Not gross. Yeah, but the net after, I think you're right, they might make about the same with a fraction of the headaches. World sorts itself out the best ones. Keeps being the best ones.

Dr. Grant Stevens

So how will people like myself get ahold of you and get involved in this? Let's say I wanted to switch my med spa over to your your model. How would I get ahold of you?

Ignacio Fanlo

iggy@vansanity, I-G-G-Y. We're a small company. We're less than 10 employees right now because we're just proving the concept. And Theo, we hadn't even. We hadn't even marketed it. People just came to us.

I got one on the plane right over here, from a gal in Atlanta.

Dr. Grant Stevens

Do I get my commission?

Ignacio Fanlo

Absolutely. Absolutely. Seriously, I

Dr. Grant Stevens

You were flying out here from Boston.

Ignacio Fanlo

In fact, I picked up another client, I didn't even know it. I, when I looked at my email that I got a message on LinkedIn from someone from Atlanta said, Hey, I want to talk to you about, that's brilliant franchise.

And I'm like they don't even know I was gonna do the reveal here on the mso. It was. We don't, cause it's not on our website. Our website looks like it's just the locations. So the MSO is literally, it's percolated. We've been building our own proprietary software stack for about 15 months. Okay.

We burned it in Boston and now Dallas, it works. We've got, I think, 95% of the kinks out and now it's time to take it on the road. And we thought we were gonna have to market some of it, and people are coming to us. In fact, I would say that sale has. easier. And my suspicion, and it's only a suspicion, is that the med spa owners, the entrepreneurial medical directors, the entrepreneurial docs, they're business people already, and having this conversation, a B2B sale with them is a straightforward conversation and they get it, and it's a very. Trying to get someone who's an employee at a MES spa maybe dissatisfied and moving to this model from being an employee entrepreneur. They want it, but it's still a, it's a leap. It is.

It's a leap for them. And so that's been a, not hard. They want to do it, but you gotta handhold them along the way. A lot of it. And it's super satisfying when it works, but it is a lot of work. Not so much for me, but for my colleagues, but with the business people that own the med spas that are the medical directors.

That, that's a no brain. That's a that's a downhill slope. Not an uphill slope. So I think my suspicion is that will move much more quickly and we'll reach more and more people. And probably because of this and because of you, I hope we get a big swing. How long have you been doing this aggy?

I. That was the kernel of the idea was at that Oscar's night in 2018.

Dr. Grant Stevens

Okay, so about four years total. Three to four years.

Ignacio Fanlo

Yeah. We incorporated in 19 and we opened our first place in Our timing was impeccably bad again? We opened the Boston location in Q4 of. of 20 20. If nothing else, you're consistent.

Yeah. So exactly. It's, sorry, 2019. So we got Covid, we were hit by Covid within almost weeks of opening . So we we muddled through and we've grown very quickly. Last year versus 2020, it was like five x and, wow. Approaching a million dollars. So it, it's working even in the face of that.

And so this M MSO thing I'm just super excited about it because. It's super exciting to see that ride. That's a drug I love now. I'm on that entrepreneurial drug and yes, boy, it's up and down and up and down. You gotta I, people come and they wanna be entrepreneurs. I go, Ooh, you better strap in baby.

Yeah. One day you're gonna be on top of the world, and the next Saturday you're gonna feel the things going in the toilet.

Dr. Grant Stevens

Yep. Isn't that the truth? Oh God. But that's the thrill of it.

Ignacio Fanlo

Oh, it's, the dopamine hit is incredible.

Dr. Grant Stevens

Are you gonna be in San Diego? Before the Aesthetic Society?

Ignacio Fanlo

Oh no. I thought you were gonna say no. No. But I'm sure it's one of our MSO partners will.

Dr. Grant Stevens

So I would encourage you to get involved with the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery or the Aesthetic Society. Because that's where the best and brightest in this business hang out. Yes, that's Our gal. And I would encourage you to get involved with the Aesthetic Society.

Ignacio Fanlo

So this is not the ASPS.

Dr. Grant Stevens

No. ASPS? Are you kidding me? Those are a bunch of reconstructive wannabees. No, we're talking about the Aesthetic Society. You can just forget about ASPS. American Society for aesthetic plastic surgery. This is the technology of beauty.

There you go. And the beauty business all. Iggy, it's been absolute pleasure having you on the program. And I look forward to working with you, I, and networking with you. I can think of a number of ideas for you and some opportunities for you going to forward. Talk to me. Give me, I'm not gonna do it being recorded here.

I will, I'll do it off camera.

Ignacio Fanlo

All right. All right. And so the one thing I definitely wanted to talk about , and I'm a nerd when it comes to all this stuff. There was a, I don't think he won the Nobel Prize. He might not have. Eligible cuz he died. There's a guy named Frank Coase, c O a S e, and he wrote a paper, c o a s e, I think it's Frank Coase.

He died almost a hundred years ago or wrote the paper almost a hundred years ago. And his economic thesis was. And he proved it mathematically that the only reason for the existence of corporation is transactions costs. That by coalescing people into a or corporation, you reduce friction and transactions costs.

Okay. That was always true until the internet, and now because transactions, costs communication, video, people now are living all over the world, right? We're a remote first company. We have people in California, two in California, we have, one in Texas, two in Texas, three in Massachusetts.

We're all over the place.

Dr. Grant Stevens

So transaction costs are nil, right?

Ignacio Fanlo

They are approaching nil. They're getting lower and lower. So you don't. To have people in one corporation, they're gonna atomize, and that's what's happening with the gig economy. That's where I come back to it. That's why I believe this trend, when you reduce transactions, costs, you reduce the need for the firm.

In fact, I going back to Jeff Bezos, a man I've met once or twice, but doesn't know who I am, but I've met remarkably. I, it, I just admire him greatly with his thinking process. What he did with the cloud, he did, I believe it was 2006 or seven, he created essentially internally separate companies. So they were all under the Amazon.

But they, he said, act as if they're a customer. The only way you tie, you guys can connect. Was through an api, an application program interface. He goes, you don't have a captive customer, cuz if you have a captive customer, you're gonna get lazy and fat and stupid. So everybody and so he's atomized within Amazon.

They don't they are customers of each other, but arm's length and this, that's just a first step I think that's gonna keep happening and happening. And you call it consulting? I believe it's because people will have the tools. You'll be able to do marketing, you'll be able to do communications at the individual solopreneur level.

Dr. Grant Stevens

Okay. What time, what period of time do you think that's gonna take?

Ignacio Fanlo

Oh, it's gonna take generations to happen. Oh, generations. Generations. But I will tell you, COVID has accelerated, sorry, I didn't mean to point at you. [No, that's fine.] COVID has accelerated, you've heard the great resignation peop and the number of applications for small, for LLCs has exploded. What Covid did, and I it was funny, when you're a, an entrepreneur, when you go do a slide deck, the, one of the required slides is competition. Of course. And as an entrepreneur, I will tell you the number one competition I've always had for a disruptive. status quo. It's always the number one competitor.

Why change? Bingo. COVID made everyone reevaluate. Absolutely. And that has helped entrepreneurs. It hurt us for a month, a year or two, but it made people reevaluate what they were doing. That's why people are remote. That's why people are starting their new business. Wait a second, I can do this.

I don't have to work for the man. I want flexibility. I remember every time I take an Uber or a Lyft car and I've taken hundreds, I don't know if you have, I always, get into a chat with a gal or guy and I , nine times outta 10. I say, why do you do this? They say flexibility. Yeah.

It's wildly my son, he's, he's not gonna do a summer job. He's. do DoorDash or as a college kid or he wants to be able to clock in, clock out on his own schedule. His own schedule. Generations like, I don't want to be nine to five, whatever. There's something to be said for the social aspect of work.

I think there's something that we need to rethink that. I don't know how we bring that in. But you don't need to be there 40 hours a week at the office. There's gonna be some change there. And I think all these things are, it's ground shifting on all this stuff.

Dr. Grant Stevens

No question about it. And Covid certainly brought it to a forefront, right?

Ignacio Fanlo

Yeah. Because working remote and all the zooms. Yeah, exactly. Zoom.

Dr. Grant Stevens

Zoom, geez. Living on Zoom.

Ignacio Fanlo

Yeah. I, I. Without video conferencing. This, our company couldn't exist. Like I said, we have two or three in California, Dallas, and na. It'd be too expensive as a company, no question.

And you can find really talented people. We have our, our front end development folks, they aren't employees, they're contractors, but they were based in the Ukraine, I'll be darn. Now, fortunately a group of them, for their own sake, more than anything. We were talking they moved to Turkey, their families.

So before the war? Before, just before thankfully early February. Thankfully, I, and I love those guys and gal, but yeah, I think they're, it's funny, they're young people and they're conflicted too, about being out. They're sat. They're happy, they're safe. They're happy that their immediate families are safe, but they've got friends and extended family that aren't And their country.

Exactly. And they're seeing, people stand up for incredible things and yeah, it's, I gotta, I can't believe it, the situation they're in emotionally, it's kind tough.

Dr. Grant Stevens

No question about it. Iggy, thank you very much. It's been an absolute pleasure getting to know you. I look forward to working with you more in the future.

I've got a number of ideas for the both of us. And for you. Independent thoughts and safe travels back to Boston. I appreciate it. Stay in touch with me. Stay in touch with our beloved society, the American Society. Aesthetic. Plastic surgery. Plastic surgery, or the Aesthetic Society.

Ignacio Fanlo

Oh, is that with an E or an A? Do you guys call it asaps?

Dr. Grant Stevens

Some people do choose to say asaps. I don't. I was the president and I tried to extinguish part of that, although it's a tough one, but that sounds as soon as, it sounds like as soon as possible to me. So I don't call it asaps number of people. and I refer to it lovingly as the Aesthetic Society.

And we have fellowships and aesthetic surgery and so forth. Oh, and then people are trained and then they go into work in places like you're talking about. Absolutely. I'm gonna talk about your Vansanity to my various fellows in and the people involved.

Ignacio Fanlo

Oh, thank you very much. I'd love to continue this conversation.

Dr. Grant Stevens

Good, really good. I look forward. All right, and I want to thank all of you for joining us again for an exciting episode of The Technology of Beauty. And you can watch and listen to this on YouTube. Just go to YouTube, the Technology of Beauty, and you can watch over 50 episodes where I get the, to interview the movers and shakers of the beauty business.

And as you just heard, and saw, today was no exception. Thank you very much. See you next week.