Why We Still Own Our School

The room above the clinic

In 2003 we converted the second floor of the Tampa clinic into a classroom that seated nine. The first cohort had seven students. Two of them are still on faculty.

We did not set out to build a school. We set out to solve a hiring problem: every esthetician we interviewed had been trained to do facials in a salon and was now expected to assist on injections, lasers, and post-procedural care. The gap between what their programs taught and what our clinical floor required was a full ninety days of unpaid retraining. We were paying the cost of someone else's curriculum twice.

Opening the school was the smaller risk than continuing to absorb that gap.

The calls we still get

Three to five times a year, a private-equity rollup calls. The pitch is always some version of: keep your name, keep your faculty, sign the paper, get a check. The math, if you only look at the math, is straightforward.

We have not signed.

The reason is not nostalgia. The reason is that every franchise med-esthetics school we have watched go through that process has, within four years, made the same three changes:

1. Cohort sizes go up. A 12:1 student-to-instructor ratio becomes 24:1, then 36:1.
2. Faculty churn accelerates. Practicing clinicians get replaced by full-time educators who have not touched a patient in five years.
3. The clinical externship gets shortened or replaced with simulation.

Each of those changes increases margin. Each of them also undoes the thing the school was founded to do.

What ownership lets us protect

Owning the school is what lets us keep three commitments that we have never broken:

• Every instructor practices. Faculty must see patients on the clinical floor a minimum of one day per week. If they stop practicing, they stop teaching.
• Cohort size stays at twelve. We have turned away revenue every quarter for twenty-two years to hold this number.
• The clinical externship is real. Two hundred supervised procedures on real patients in the Arviv Medical Aesthetics rooms. Not a simulation lab. Not a partner clinic we have never set foot in.

These commitments are easy to write down. They are difficult to defend when a balance sheet is asking for a different decision. Ownership is what gives us the standing to defend them.

The twenty-second year

We are writing this in 2026. Our oldest active graduate has been practicing for twenty years. Our youngest is in her fourth week of clinicals as we draft this.

The thing we want to say, to the prospective student reading this and to the faculty member who has been with us since the room above the clinic: the decision to own this school the way we own it is a decision we make again every quarter. It is not a slogan on the website. It is the call we did not return last Thursday, and the cohort we did not over-enroll last August, and the instructor we did not replace with someone cheaper last year.

If that decision ever stops making itself, we will tell you. Until then, we will see you on the floor.

— Tali and Rita