By Madilyn Moeller

Coming from a long line of entrepreneurs, Lora Kassaros has a knack for business operations. After an early test of her abilities and a jaunt in the corporate world, her lifelong interest in aesthetics brought her an opportunity to combine her talent for practice management with her passion at Dermatique Laser & Skin in Geneva, Illinois. The secret to developing a single location into a top 3% account? Empowering her providers and their patients.

Starting the journey

Lora Kassaros’s early fascination with hair and makeup and the confidence they instill in people led her to get her cosmetology license straight out of high school. At 22, she was approached by an investor who was looking to expand his portfolio—would she open a full-service salon and spa?

“Looking back as an entrepreneur myself, that was a ballsy move on his part, because he was the capital, and on me to think that I had any inkling of knowing what was happening,” Kassaros says. “I knew nothing.”

She was driven to figure it out, from the grassroots marketing to building client relationships. Ultimately, the cost of the build-out was monumental, and she was lucky to sell the business 10 years into the commitment after the premature birth of her third child. She stayed home for a few years before returning to work for a large multi-unit location, where she was responsible for a team of 120 people. She learned a lot about the organizational tools that it takes to run multiple locations but felt restricted in her ability to make a difference.

The day after stepping down from her position, she had an appointment at Dermatique. Already a patient under the care of Dr. Gina Lesnik, she knew the practice was facing difficulties. In conversation, she mentioned her experience in reviving struggling businesses and offered to evaluate the practice. Dr. Lesnik called her the next day.

“‘Don’t worry about paying me,” Kassaros recounts saying. “’Let me just take a look to see what’s happening underneath.’ I started getting into nuts and bolts, and I’m like, ‘I think I can help you.’”

The Dermatique differential

In 2020 and 2022, Dermatique was named to the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies in America. Its impressive revenue growth stems from the team of providers and their continuous change with the industry.

Dermatique has a highly qualified medical team on site, with a full-time physician who is there every day, multiple nurse practitioners, aesthetic injectors and aesthetic providers.

“You can never exchange years of experience for anything you’ve learned over a weekend, and our clinical team is unparalleled,” Kassaros says.

This team works just 42 hours a week with 10 treatment rooms and sees a high volume of patients—nearly 16,000 last year as a single entity. Nobody believes her when they hear those numbers.

“We want to make sure that we work hard together and employees are able to sustain their financial capacity,” Kassaros says. “But you have to have the ability to grow with an organization that can help you as well. We work hard together. It takes a village for us to run as an organization. We all work together to be super tight on our financials and expenses. That’s what it takes for us to be able to have all these things.”

They pick each other up and try to help through loss, babies and relationship changes. Through a lot of training and talking and learning, they define each team member’s strengths—their “uniqueness”—to help the team elevate and empower them to get to the next level.

Business sense

Kassaros’s strategy for empowering employees requires total buy-in from her staff, so they are kept in the loop regarding Dermatique’s status.

“We believe in financial transparency,” Kassaros says. “Our providers are able to see where they’re at. If you don’t know where you are, it’s like driving without directions. And, personally, I hate not knowing where I’m going.”

It requires a lot of talking. The team members communicate individually and as a group in meetings, huddles, retreats and team-building exercises. They ask for feedback regularly and evaluate performance metrics, breaking real data down individually for providers.

“It gives you a better ability to help coach them in their areas that maybe, for whatever reason, their performance has slipped, or it’s not where it could be. That’s a training opportunity,” Kassaros says.

The power of customer avatars and marketing

Marketing mediums have changed a lot since Kassaros first began, but she continues to focus on storytelling, relating to patients on an emotional level and knowing their customer avatar.

“What truly fascinates me about marketing is the challenge of standing out in a crowded marketplace,” Kassaros says. “We work harder at trying to be different by being authentic and telling a true story. Our approach involves deeply understanding our customer avatar and the heart and soul of our patients and speaking directly to that.”

To that end, Dermatique developed the Me & My Decade program. Dermatique has many decades represented in the practice, so they see themselves as integral parts of this narrative—they are their customers. This allows the team to reach patients on an emotional level and genuinely understand their needs and desires.

“Crafting a brand’s story that resonates on a personal level with our audience is immensely satisfying, though it requires constant adaptation and innovation, much like adapting to new opponents in sports,” Kassaros says.

Practicing compliance

When Kassaros started at Dermatique, she became concerned about the practice’s legal compliance. Googling “medical spa,” she found Alex Thiersch’s name, learned that he was an attorney, and found out that he happened to be in the Chicago area. She went to several of his classes, absorbing the information about the industry and the responsibility that went with it.

“He was taking it on as his personal mission to help guide the industry through this transition and try to have some form of compliance through education, and it was something that I was very interested in,” Kassaros says.

Kassaros quickly became one of the original members of the American Med Spa Association (AmSpa).

“That was one of the very first memberships in the very beginning. It was money well spent, and it still is,” Kassaros says. “I tell every person, if I had one piece of advice, learning the compliance issues is a big part of your success.”

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and set Dermatique at a crossroads, AmSpa supplied the tools and information to help them and others through it.

“We needed tons of guidance, and there was the whole team up there talking, and that was very, very powerful,” Kassaros says. “It was the guidance that people needed.”

Take the vacation

There’s no getting around it—mom guilt is real. Kassaros wishes that, through the journey, she gave herself more permission to take off more time or work fewer than seven days a week.

“I see some very young mom entrepreneurs in our industry who are having children and still driving a bus—it’s insane,” says Kassaros. “But I see myself as them at that time, and I wish that I gave myself grace on that and gave myself permission to know that the only thing you can never recapture is time. You will never recapture time in your life, ever.”

While every person’s definition of success is different, Kassaros realizes that you need to worry about whether you have molded your children in a caring, loving way to become great human beings. She emphasizes that you don’t have to work that hard when your kids are little, because that time goes fast. You still have many years to be successful after that, and you can continue to drive and make a difference in the industry.

Three decades of aesthetics

What’s next after three decades in aesthetics? Kassaros has a number that she’s trying to hit, and, at the same time, she wants to inspire others and show that there are diverse ways to succeed in aesthetics. While there is an abundance of tools to help you do everything, it can be difficult to decipher the noise.

“I want to help younger entrepreneurs see a way,” Kassaros says. “It’s so hard when you’re watching and you don’t know what you don’t know.”

She loves aesthetics and what it has done for so many. Two of her three kids are also in the aesthetics industry, and she would not be surprised if her third eventually joins.

“It’s a privilege to help someone feel more confident and happier with their appearance, and this is a responsibility I take very seriously,” Kassaros says.

“Ultimately, what drives me is the combination of my love for business growth and the meaningful, personal impact of medical aesthetics.”

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