In this episode, Cameron is joined by Dr. Sara Trammell, boss lady and head bus driver of The Abilene Beauty Bus, and they discuss Sara’s journey from starting Botox parties in 2019 to expanding her practice to include 12 employees and two locations. She emphasizes the importance of strategic growth, starting small, and maintaining financial stability. She highlights her transition from paper charts to electronic medical records and the significance of online booking and social media marketing. They discuss the challenges of hiring and retaining staff, the importance of team training, and the recent addition of hormone replacement therapy and weight loss services. They also stress the value of honesty, community engagement, and continuous learning in business success.

Transcript:

Welcome to Medical Millionaire, the podcast helping your medspa increase in status, visibility, and profitability. Join your host as he dispels myths, shares trends, and gives you actionable steps today that will take your medical practice to the next level. Here’s your host, expert marketer and founder of Growth 99, Cameron Hemphill.

“Hey everybody! Cameron Hemphill here, your host for Medical Millionaire. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune into the podcast. Our goal is to give incredible value and insight for practice owners. If you own a medspa or you’re thinking about getting into this space, all of these episodes are 100% designed for you and to help you take your practice to the next level.”

“Today I have a guest on the show – Dr. Sarah Trammel from Abilene, Texas. She started the Beauty Bus. She has a super cool story and a very relatable one in terms of how I’ve seen patterns where you start something and continue to see it grow without going all-in from the onset. What I mean is being strategic – saying ‘hey, I’m going to come into the space and maybe start smaller.’ For example, she started with Botox parties, and I’ll let her tell her whole story.”

“Her business started growing, finances probably got stable – and I’m totally guessing here, but I’ve seen this movie before and I’ve seen what success looks like. I’ve also seen what failure looks like too. I think a lot of times when people get into this space, they think they have to start out with state-of-the-art everything. This lady has absolutely nailed it with continuing to grow a practice. She’s had the practice for five years, has a really cool historical building they just moved into, and a few providers that are just cranking and having a lot of fun. So, Dr. Sarah, thank you so much. Welcome to the show.”

Sarah: “Thank you, I appreciate you having me.”

Cameron: “I know we were talking a little bit offline. Take us through your whole story – you have a unique story with the Beauty Bus. It’s not a bus anymore, but it was, and now it’s like a mascot. Walk us through that story – how did it start there and transition? Now we’re in year five and it’s a beautiful home, and there might be a swimming pool involved. I’ll let you tell that part.”

Sarah: “We’ve come from a bus to a pool, so I’m not sure what’s next! I loved your intro because that is usually the advice I give people – you don’t have to go all in at the beginning. Obviously, if I were looking back, I would give myself even more advice.”

“Basically, I am an MD – I went to medical school and my background was family practice. I never really had a very traditional family practice job. I did urgent care, had three babies in four years, so I was playing mom for a long time. We had moved to Abilene, maybe 17 years ago this summer. I eventually found myself with three or four different part-time physician jobs – I was doing hospital work, ethics committee, hospice, and working for a medical spa that the hospital owned, which was kind of a weird situation, but that was my entrance into the medical spa world.”

“That closed and I learned a lot from it. I don’t think I knew at the time how much I was learning, but six months later, when I was looking back, I had actually learned a lot of really good lessons. I literally said, ‘You know what? I can do this on my own. I can do Botox.’ A lot of my friends were saying, ‘Well, where are we going to go now?’ So I came up with the concept of just doing small parties.”

“This was in 2019, before the whole big medspa rush. I literally bought a box on Amazon – I still have it, I should have brought it out – but it’s really cute, just a big black cosmetic box. I bought that, bought a couple bottles of Botox, looked up how to do paperwork correctly, called a couple of friends, and we set up some kitchen Botox parties.”

“Sometimes these get a bad rap, but these were all people I knew – they knew me, I knew where I was going. Six months later, I found myself with a list of almost 200 patients that I had treated. I realized, ‘Huh, this actually is working.’ Those parties turned into just a list of clients, and then came the requests – ‘Well, I need somebody to do my lips,’ ‘We need a laser.’ All the requests were coming in, so I just let that drive me.”

“I did a lot of training on my own, paid for a lot of training, which definitely served me well. Then I purchased an Airstream trailer and drove that around for probably about four or five months, doing pop-up Botox parties. That was really fun. I did all my own marketing – it was basically just an Instagram account, so very low expenses. I was literally buying Botox just a couple bottles at a time for each party I needed, doing all my own follow-ups, and just running a one-woman show.”

“Fast forward six months later, I was getting requests for the next level. I had a guesthouse on my property, so we converted that into my office and I functioned out of there for five years. It was about 300 square feet – had a bathroom and an extra room. From there, it has grown a lot. I started with more fillers and more services, purchased a couple of lasers – probably maybe a little bit early, but it actually served me well and I was able to round out my entire service offerings.”

“I functioned by myself for a year and then hired my first employee in February 2020 – so you can imagine how much fun that was when March and April came around! But you know what? We learned a lot from that. We put on our bootstraps and just made it work. She worked above my garage in an apartment we had previously rented out. She did laser treatments, permanent makeup, all kinds of facial treatments. She was my first esthetician and she’s still with me today – about to be a five-year employee come February.”

“Over the last four years from that point, I now have twelve employees. We have four estheticians. We now have a separate practice twenty miles south of us in Buffalo Gap. We finally moved out of my house situation and gathered everybody up. We had really expanded into all the garage space – I kicked my husband out of the garage! I now have a dietitian nutritionist who does wellness for me. She still functions over there, but we have the Buffalo Gap location with a massage therapist and my estheticians rotate out there.”

[Commercial Break – Growth 99 University Advertisement]

“I have an RN injector that has been very successful the last two years. My nurse practitioner unfortunately just moved this week, so we’re all a little sad about that, but it was fun to have her on our team. Now we all function in this space together, which has been a lot of fun. We’re about to embark on a little more of the wellness journey, which I think many people in this industry are doing.”

“I kind of drag my feet on all the new things – I want to do all my research and really get a feel for it. But we’re getting ready to launch into wellness services. That’s been my story – it was me, and five years later, there’s now twelve of us. It’s been quite an adventure.”

Cameron: “That’s amazing and such a cool story – from going from Botox parties to being creative with a cool Airstream. You guys, got to see her Airstream – go to her website at AbilineBeautyBus.com or check out her Instagram. The bus is so cool. It’s a great way to be completely different, keep costs low, mitigate some liability exposure, and get creative.”

Cameron: “From the Airstream bus to the house where you actually had another piece of real estate on property that you leveraged – these are some great callouts. Dr. Sarah has done a fantastic job of mitigating risk from a financial standpoint and growing correctly, instead of over-extending yourself and investing in potentially the wrong areas. I’m sure there were failures throughout that journey, and we can jump into that. But some of the patterns that I see that build success is this doesn’t happen overnight. It just doesn’t.”

“I think there’s this misconception that you can pull up Instagram and see success and instantly think ‘I need that too,’ try it, and then throw in the towel in six months after spending a tremendous amount of money without really having a plan. Taking things slow – that’s what I love about your story. Going from wanting to do this to twelve employees, to having a really cool historical property – I’m sure the culture of the team is amazing.”

Sarah: “When I speak to groups or when individuals reach out to me, I have to remember how small I started. I always love doing these talks because it reminds me to go back and remember the Botox party and the black crate and my paper charts. It wasn’t that long ago – it’s not like telling a story to my children about high school thirty years ago. Five years ago, I was literally in my car with my printed consent forms and a digital camera for before and after photos. I found that camera not too long ago, and my kids were searching through it asking, ‘Who are all these people?’”

“Keep it simple – it does not take a $50,000 loan to do well. Fifty thousand wouldn’t even get you very far now, but you don’t need to buy a whole space or office right away – test the waters. I’m in conversation right now with a provider about an hour and a half from us. We’re in Abilene, which is 125,000 people. We’re three hours west of Dallas and two and a half hours east of Lubbock. If you know Texas at all, first of all, it’s huge, but those are our pinpoints, and we’re right in the middle.”

“We’re discussing and I literally sent her an SOP on how to run a Botox party. We’re trying to decide if her community is open for a whole medical spa situation or expansion. I can thankfully go back and say, ‘Do it like I did it’ – maybe a little tweaked since I’ve learned a few things, but let’s just start with this and see what interest you get.”

“You can move forward really fast – I mean, I learned. It didn’t take but three to six months before I outgrew the bus and people’s kitchens. But you never know what kind of environment you’re in. From a financial standpoint, everything’s a little different now compared to 2019. Test the waters – you shouldn’t need a loan to figure it out. Until I bought this office at year five and a half, I really had zero debt from my business. I was able to slowly work it so I could eventually keep building.”

Cameron: “That’s great advice – test your demographic, know exactly what you’re dealing with. You may not even like it!”

Sarah: “That’s what I tell them – you need to see if you like this. It’s more than just injecting Botox. Like you said, Instagram makes it all look very glamorous. Some people get really bored with that. I love it. I love the interaction and talking. I have colleagues in the industry who are four or five years in or more, and they’re like, ‘If I never have to inject Botox again, I’ll be happy.’ That’s not me personally.”

“I love chatting, the interaction. It’s like the beauty salons of the fifties – like Steel Magnolias, where it’s just so much interaction each day. It’s where I gain my adult conversation, especially when my kids were much younger and I was really hungry for that. So make sure you like it. Yes, there are lots of ways of doing it, but you shouldn’t have to go into stupid amounts of debt just to see if this is something you want to pursue.”

Cameron: “I completely agree. You’ve got to enjoy what you’re doing because burnout’s real. You make a great point about having adult conversation and something that’s intellectually intriguing. My wife’s been in the beauty business for over twenty years as a stylist, and the amount of interaction – I think at this point she just goes there to have connections and conversation and see women build confidence in themselves.”

Sarah: “And you get all the scoop – they’ll tell you all kinds of things when you’re sticking needles in their face! I’ve done a lot of work with Kaylee in business consulting, and that all came as I got further in. She really drives home ‘what’s your mission and why are you doing this?’ I always go back to – and it sounds a little cheesy – but I want to instill confidence in people. That truly is the reason I get up and walk to work in the morning.”

“We have women come in almost every day who are just thankful for all the things we can provide. Some things sometimes seem excessive or vain – you can use a thousand different adjectives – but when they walk out feeling more confident about themselves, then I feel like we’ve done our job for the day.”

[The conversation continues with discussions about team building, technology evolution, marketing strategies, and future plans for the practice, including expansion into wellness services and hormone therapy. The transcript maintains the authentic dialogue while improving clarity and readability.]

Cameron: “You’ve done an incredible job with retention, which is hard in this industry. What is it about your practice and team that creates such a close-knit group?”

Sarah: “Self-exploration isn’t always my forte – I’m more of a critic than a cheerleader. But one thing I’ve always been adamant about is honesty and being very open with my employees. We don’t have secrets. Even from a financial standpoint, at the end of each year, I walk through how much things cost. I learned early on that I was the only one paying the bills, and all they could see was the intake from patients – they didn’t understand the output.”

“I’m very honest about financials and the health of the business. I hope they understand my goals both acutely and long-term. I’m very cautious with new things, and I hope my patients and employees realize that anything I present has been thoroughly researched.”

“It’s interesting because most of my employees’ average age is probably 26. They’re very young, and I try not to be too much of a mother figure, though I could be their mother to most of them. I think they see me as someone who’s calmer, not quite so reactive, and goes with the flow a little bit.”