There is a version of success that looks like doing everything — and it costs you everything else.
Amanda Loyd knows that version well. Before she joined the Addo Aesthetics coaching team, she was Director of Esthetics and Director of Marketing at a three-location plastic surgery practice — and still seeing patients in the treatment room two days a week. She wrote a 65-page SOP manual by hand. She did the phone screens, the clinical interviews, the social media, the email blasts, and the events. She built a team from two people to a practice large enough to need a second location.
And she did most of it while trying to figure out how to get out of the treatment room without everything falling apart.
The Transition Nobody Talks About Honestly
Most content about stepping back from the treatment room is aspirational. Here’s the revenue you’ll unlock. Here’s the freedom you’ll gain. What it doesn’t say is that it’s bittersweet. That you have clients you love seeing. That handing off the room isn’t just a business decision — it’s an identity one.
Amanda names it plainly: when you’re muddled, when you’re in the treatment room five days a week, and you have two days left to run everything else, there’s no time for your family, yourself, anything. The math doesn’t work. And knowing the math doesn’t work isn’t enough to make the transition feel easy.
What makes it survivable — and worth it — is having someone in your corner who has lived the same transition. Not just read about it. Lived it.
What Changes When Your Coach Has Your Background
One of the reasons Daniela brought Amanda onto the Addo coaching team is the depth of her experience in physician-owned practices. The operational nuances between a traditional med spa and a surgical practice are real. How the aesthetic division integrates with surgical scheduling, how you build client trust differently when someone is considering a procedure that requires anesthesia, and how marketing strategies that work for injectables have to shift when the client journey is longer and more emotionally complex.
Inside Growth Factor® Implementation, that level of specificity matters. The framework is consistent. The coaching is customized to the business in front of you.
Amanda also brings something else: she built systems the hard way. The 65-page manual that needed updating before she’d finished writing it. The boot camp training she ran with providers every month. The clinical interview process she designed to feel a provider’s touch before an offer was made. She knows what it cost to build those things without a framework — and what it means to have one now.
The Call That Leaves Her Beaming
Ask Amanda what she loves most about coaching, and she’ll tell you about getting off a call and just beaming. A med spa owner who’s scaling into wellness services. A physician-practice director who finally has a real conversation with her surgeon about what the aesthetic division actually needs. A spa owner who hires her first aesthetician using a clinical interview she built herself.
These aren’t hypothetical outcomes. They’re what happens when someone who has done this work coaches someone else who is doing it now.
The full conversation — including how Amanda thinks about soft skills and sales training for clinical teams, why ‘no is a complete sentence’ has become a personal operating principle, and what she wishes she’d had access to when she was building SOPs by hand — is in the episode.
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About Your Host, Daniela Woerner
Daniela Woerner is the founder of Addo Aesthetics and creator of the Growth Factor® Framework, a proven system that’s helped hundreds of spa owners build profitable, systemized businesses. With nearly 20 years in the aesthetics industry, she transforms overworked aesthetic professionals into confident Spa CEOs through strategy, systems, and soul led support. Daniela is also the host of Spa Marketing Made Easy, a top ranked podcast with over 1 million downloads, where she shares real world strategies to help spa professionals grow with clarity and confidence.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:
Daniela Woerner
All right, Amanda. Welcome to Spa Marketing Made Easy. I’m so excited to finally bring you on the show, introduce you to our community. It has been a long time coming, because we brought you.. when did we start having our conversations?
Amanda Loyd
Ooh, a couple months ago, a
Daniela Woerner
couple of months ago, yeah, so we, we were kind of getting to know one another, having some conversations. We ended up bringing you on the team, which I’m so grateful for, and we’ve been kind of having you behind the scenes, working with our implementation clients, with our fundamentals clients, doing some stuff in that arena, and now I’m like, so excited to introduce you to our entire adult family. So, welcome
Amanda Loyd
to thank you. I’m happy to be here.
Daniela Woerner
So, I want everyone to know kind of who you are as a human, what you’re about, what your background is, all that kind of fun stuff, because I think what really stood out to me in our like beginning conversations was like how similar our path was, and you know, like, like I started at the front desk when I, when I first got into, like, I started at a day spa, well, I started as a solo, right? So I, I got out of school, I started as a solo, and very quickly moved into medical esthetics, and that was just kind of my home, my, my place, but I feel like I’ve worked every single role, I’ve done front desk, I’ve been in the room, I’ve been the patient care coordinator, I’ve been the spa director, I’ve been, you know, the like person that they hire for people when you leave because you’re doing whatever needs to be done to get that practice going, and I know what you really connected on that as like fulfilling like you’re the coach, you’re the men, like the coach to the injectors and to the estheticians, and you’re like doing the marketing, and you’re just everything. It’s like there’s so many different aspects that it takes, wearing
Amanda Loyd
a lot of hats, for sure. Yeah,
Daniela Woerner
wearing a lot of hats. So, tell me about your journey. Like, let’s.. let’s.. did you always know that you were going to get into esthetics.
Amanda Loyd
So, I remember being well, this is kind of funny. I remember being my daughter’s age, so 11, and I remember saving up my allowance and going to this day spa in Indianapolis to get a facial, and I remember my parents were like, “You want to get? And I was like, “Yeah, I want.. I want a facial, I want to like go to a spa and do this whole thing, and I literally remember giving them, like, I mean, like paying it out, and I think, like, the last $2 were in quarter, so like, I was like, I’ve always loved taking care of my skin, I’ve always loved makeup, and was actually in your
Daniela Woerner
family, like, I didn’t even know spas were a thing, like,
Amanda Loyd
yep, I know.
Daniela Woerner
I was like, you can actually.. I always thought, you know, like, you.. you go.. everyone in my family is an engineer, a teacher, or in the military, that’s what everybody does, and.. or they’re an entrepreneur, right? We do have some sprinklings of those, but there’s like these very clear paths. I have no idea spa could be a path,
Amanda Loyd
so I remember when my parents would travel a lot of times, the like the husbands would golf and the wives would go to a spa, so I think that’s why it kind of stood out to me.
Daniela Woerner
Okay,
Amanda Loyd
and so I remember doing that, and then I remember in high school kind of thinking maybe I want to be a makeup artist or do something, and feel like when you and I started, like the esthetic license was kind of a newer thing, right? So I went to college, I
Daniela Woerner
was 2006 were you? So
Amanda Loyd
I graduated high school in oh three, but I graduated esthetic school in 2006
Daniela Woerner
Okay, exactly the same year.
Amanda Loyd
Yep, and I went to, or I went to college, then I worked at a day spa there, and just started to fall in love with it, and so I ended up working there, moving into an esthetics role, and I worked at that day spa for a couple years, and then I just moved into, I really wanted to do some more aggressive treatments, so I took an admin role at a med spa and worked my way up. I would say more recently the thing that, like, thing I’m the most proud of is really my time at the plastic surgery practice that I was at. The surgeon that I worked for, we had worked together at another plastic surgery practice, and he told me, I don’t want to have a med spa, I don’t want to have 30 employees, like, I don’t want to, it to be a big thing, like, I just want to operate, so when we opened, it was him, me, we had a nurse, and then a front office, and little by little I was seeing patients. Since I got booked, so I helped them hire another esthetician. We expanded that location, and then in 2020 we started really talking about a second location, and then everything with Covid, there is like kind of that uncertainty. So they put the pause button on that, and then in 2021 just moved forward, and I ended up the director of esthetics and director of marketing there, so I was wearing a lot of hats, as far as doing all of, like, the social media, email blasts, events, all of that. Still
Daniela Woerner
in the room, or did you transition out of the room?
Amanda Loyd
That’s what I get so excited about on these calls, because I was still in the room and doing all of that, that’s how
Daniela Woerner
I was at Bell Asante. So, Bellasante was three location day spa, med spa, and I was still, I was in the room three days a week, and then I was doing leadership, you know, like on just on the medical esthetics stuff. I wasn’t doing anything on the day spa, but I was just focused on the gals that had, you know, were given the title of, like, medical aesthetician, and so I really focused on, like, that division and kind of coaching and training between the three locations, but you ended up with three locations, ultimately.
Amanda Loyd
Yep, so we ended up with three locations, and yeah, I mean, I did really from start to finish, so I did all of the staffing, so creating the job description, drop job listings, screening people, not only like the phone interviews, but like the clinical interview, because you want to be able to feel their touch and see how they would interact with a guest before you bring them on, and then creating protocols, I mean, I think about what we can do with Claude, and, and just this like framework that you have. If we had had that a couple years ago, I cannot tell you. I think I feel like there was a manual that I put together that was like 65 pages, just of like SOPs, you know, and it took so long, and it was like
Daniela Woerner
by the time we’re done, it already needs to be updated again,
Amanda Loyd
and then if someone had a question, I’d be like, have you checked the manual yet, or like, but yeah, so I just think about what we can do for business owners, and that’s been really fun, and it’s fun to be able to help people, spa CEOs that are, whether it’s like, you know, there’s one provider, or we have a lot of multi-location, a lot of med spas. It’s just fun to see what other people are doing, and kind of talk that out.
Daniela Woerner
One thing I was really excited about with you is that, you know, my background – I kind of grew up in Durham, and you grew up in plastics, and while they’re very similar, there are like nuances that happen between these types of just like, you know, when we look at what I kind of call med spa light versus like a physician on site practice, whether that’s a derma plastic, there’s all these little nuances and how the practice operates, how they’re communicating with their patients, what the touch points are, what the follow-up are, follow-ups are, how the med spa is interacting into the practice.
Amanda Loyd
Oh, that conversion is key. Absolutely,
Daniela Woerner
yeah. And I worked for two plastic surgeons in 20 years, so I had like a handful of a little bit of experience, but I wouldn’t say I feel so much more comfortable in Durham, so because we have, you know, plastic surgeons that come in, it was there were certain pieces that I’m like, oh my gosh, I’m so glad that we have somebody that like speaks that language, because when you get so I realize it’s all spa, I realize it’s all like we are all, but like the nuances of each individual business model makes a difference when you understand those type of aspects.
Amanda Loyd
Absolutely, well, I think about I think about the team, and I think I was thinking about this conversation today, and I wanted to say, what is it, long time, long time listener, first time caller type deal, so I’ve listened to your podcast for a couple years, and one of the things that stood out is everyone kind of has a little bit of a different skill set, so we’re still, we’re working off of this guide, this framework, but I think you do such a good job of taking, you know, people’s experiences, and really we’re going to customize everything. We’re going to see, did that work well? Maybe we implement that. Like, I think that’s important. I think with plastics, there it’s become a little bit easier in marketing, just from the standpoint of it’s definitely a little less taboo. People are talking a lot more about what they’re having done. Actually, just saw today a picture of Rosie O’Donnell. She had a facelift. Did you see that?
Daniela Woerner
No,
Amanda Loyd
I just thought that was interesting. It came across my thing, and I was like, “Oh, so I think it’s becoming more mainstream than it was before, but there’s definitely still a little bit of.. I don’t want everyone to know everything I’m doing. So trying to get creative with, like, your referrals, you know, of your word of mouth, the events that you are working with, and that you’re putting on all of that is a little different with plastics.
Daniela Woerner
Yeah, I think I think definitely, like energy-based devices are much more accepted than, and I think there’s also a lot more hand holding in the sense of like surgery is obviously it’s an invasive,
Amanda Loyd
oh yeah,
Daniela Woerner
you’re going under anesthesia, you’re for most, you know, I mean there’s a lot of pieces there where it’s like am I doing the right thing, what are the risk and complications, which are very different than like getting a BBL, you know, it’s
Amanda Loyd
yes, yes, there’s
Daniela Woerner
there’s the emotional piece that needs to be kind of, I
Amanda Loyd
think that’s that’s the thing, though, like just and thinking about the team, like all of us as estheticians and just providers getting into this, like, we, we have these wonderful tools, we have all of these things that we can do to, to help people with their confidence, and to sometimes even educate them that, hey, this is a concern you have, and, like, I actually can help you address that, and and then there’s this piece of, like, almost a wellness that’s kind of being married with esthetics too, that’s cool, so people can feel as good as they look. It’s just I don’t know. I think most estheticians are caregivers at heart, and so the fact that we can kind of help, you know, them gain that confidence is huge. Whether it’s a BBL or whether it’s a breast augmentation, I think people, you know, sometimes even need permission to know that it’s okay to do this for you, and it’s okay to do something that will help you with your confidence and help you feel better. It’s not vain, you know.
Daniela Woerner
It’s such an important piece, like when I was doing consultations, it’s always like my approach was, if it doesn’t bother you, it doesn’t bother me, right. So we are in the business of building women up and men, right. We are building people up to look and feel their best, and I think that and feel is really coming to light, especially in the past three to five years, really post Covid. You know, there’s been a lot of the wellness, whether it’s with the GLPs, whether it’s with hormones, different aspects of what am I going to be doing for my long-term health to really, and like not having as much concern about what other people are going to think about what they’re, they’re doing for themselves. That’s still there, it’s still there, for sure. That kind of worry of, like, am I making the right choice, or should I, should I not be investing this amount of money, but I do see people being more and more open, but what did you notice at the plastic surgeon’s office? I feel like wellness is getting incorporated not as much as at plastics as it is in med spa light or more traditional med spas than we’re seeing at plastic surgery offices.
Amanda Loyd
It’s interesting you say that. So, the the office that I was at there was definitely kind of the plastic surgery focus med spa added in, and then for a while we were really focusing on weight loss, and this was kind of pre GLP one. It was more, more like that consultation time, you know, with a with a physician to really look at like your habits, help with just making like long-term changes, and then eventually kind of started into some of like the wellness, as far as like the B 12, and things like that. I will say, I have there a lot of offices that I’ve worked with that are doing like the IV therapy and wellness, and you’re right, it’s not as often in plastics. It’s definitely more in feel like we’re in like med spas that are doing a lot of laser and a lot of injectables, typically seem to be doing that, and it’s amazing what some of these peptides can do, and I mean, there’s there’s some really cool internal things that we can make happen, so
Daniela Woerner
yeah, I feel like a lot of the NPS, because it is something that you definitely have to have knowledge, you know, and, and experiences, it is certainly like a booming industry, but I feel like the NPS kind of have the background, yes, to be, you know, very good with whether it’s GLPs or peptides, hormones, like whatever they’re doing on the wellness. The arena,
Amanda Loyd
and even the some of the hormone replacement, I feel like that’s definitely, and I don’t know if it’s a little bit of it, is I’m in my early 40s, so I feel like a lot of my peers, my friends are like, hey, like, are you doing HRT, like, what do you know about this, so, and I think a lot of times people feel safe asking their friends, but also their esthetician, or asking their nurse injector. Those are conversations that it feels safe to have, and yeah, it’s pretty amazing what we could do. It all kind of marries well together, which is fun, and that’s that’s why we got into this, is that it evolves into something else. It’s always, it’s never the same thing. There’s always kind of something new. I remember when I first started, like really what I could do was microderm, and I still love a good microderm, but like I, you know, there are so many other tools that I can use at this point, um, you know, to get great results for whatever their skin concern is. So
Daniela Woerner
you are now kind of in this new season, this new season is the best word of your career, of your life, of your kind of experience in the esthetics space as you’ve moved into coaching. What are your favorite, like everybody on the team? I always, I’m always asking, like, what do you enjoy the most, because I feel like if you’re happy, if you’re passionate, if you’re like really obsessed with a certain topic, you know, I obviously want to make sure everybody has the experience and background, but I also want everyone to really become experts in a niche, because we talk about the brand that does everything is the brand that does nothing, it’s also like you want to get so into a particular area, so what is the area that you just absolutely love that lights you up, that you’re like this is my happy place when I see a call talking about this, this is what I love.
Amanda Loyd
So I just had a call with a med spa owner, and I would say she’s doing a lot of, she’s doing a lot of what we were just talking about, as far as wellness, she’s doing fighting, body contouring, she has some facial memberships, and just some really innovative ideas, and then just some tried and true things that she’s doing, but she’s wanting to scale, and so that was a really fun conversation, I feel like that’s kind of my, like, plays into my skill set. I would say I love talking to, honestly, I mean, I think it’s always interesting to have, like, your office manager or your spa director with your physician. Like, those calls are really interesting, because it’s they kind of work off of each other, and I think sometimes I enjoy those calls. I think just hearing from both sides, and again, kind of helping them scale. I mean, I did coaching at as the director of esthetics, like I said, I was doing all of like the hiring and all of that, but I mean we had standard operating procedures in place, so we would do like an initial training boot camp, and then I would meet with them a couple times a month, just to kind of go through, you know, here’s, you know, here are these treatments, this is something newer. How are you feeling about it? Or we would sometimes even look at like feedback from reviews, hey, like we got this great feedback. Or, hey, this guest had a question about this. Can we talk through it? So, I think just helping develop people developing their, like, not only their, like, hard skills, but also their soft skills and sales. We
Daniela Woerner
always go back to, like, what we know so well. Also, and for you, being a part of a practice that grew very rapidly, being in a leadership role dealt with you were the director, but then also, you know, in communication with the physician, and kind of building the plan, it’s like when you’ve been in those in that space, then you understand it on such a deep level, which is, you know, allows you to be able to coach in a better way, and having the rapid growth, you know, to three locations in a surgical practice, expanding team, all of that. I think it just speaks very, very much to your skill set, of like, of course, I love doing this, this is what I just went through, and you know, and learn well.
Amanda Loyd
Yes, and I think, like, these are the things that worked really well, or maybe these are the things I would do differently. I think, especially like even initially, when I, when I thought of systems, because I’m also kind of a creative, I think a lot of estheticians are. When you think of systems, you’re like, yeah, but there’s that one, you know, there’s that one patient, and I need to do it this way for them. It’s okay to do that if you have to, but you have that system in place, so that’s the standard most of the time, 99% of the time. And then, if you’ve got this one one offset, like it’s okay to have that, and I think that for me really kind of opened up. My eyes to just systems in general. The other thing I wanted to mention to you, and I, I, this was our one of our initial calls was just talking about, and I know Christy mentioned this on the in the community the other day, but no is a complete sentence. So, where I’m at right now in my life is really setting like a boundary, but in a way of like this matters to me, and when I make time to do this, I can show up so much better in all of these other things, and so being able to help spa owners do that is really cool. It’s so important,
Daniela Woerner
it’s so
Amanda Loyd
important,
Daniela Woerner
because we feel like we have to have, you know, it’s like this is urgent, and this, and I’m like, people, we are not curing cancer here. We are so blessed to be able to do the work that we’re doing, but like it’s very rare that we’re dealing with something that is so urgent, right? And so I regularly will say that, like, you are your business’s greatest asset, and the better you care for yourself, the better you’re going to show up for your team, for your clients, for everybody, and it’s so hard, I think, for women in general, and, like, I’m sure there’s guys out there too, but we just deal with so many women, but and I see it as a pattern over and over, is that we put everybody else before ourselves, but then we’re like, how do I get out of this cycle, and it’s like, well, the cycle is to care for yourself, because then it’s like your cup is full, right. There’s the Instagram of all, whatever, all the quote you can’t pour from an empty cup, right. But
Amanda Loyd
yeah,
Daniela Woerner
when we are full, then we can help so many others, we can really show up as our full potential, but that takes the ability to say no, and the ability to to allow yourself to rest,
Amanda Loyd
and I think sometimes, as I don’t know if you can relate to this, but just as a working mom, I think that’s the other piece of it, is sometimes it’s like, oh, I’m working x amount of hours, and so I do feel bad if I’m not working, doing this for myself, and I was the same as you. I was in the treatment room two days a week, and then I moved completely out, and that was a hard transition. And so, I think I can relate to the spa CEOs as they do that, because it’s bittersweet. You have your, your favorites, and you want to have your hand in that, but you also know that you can’t do everything to the like to the quality that you want to, or as well as you’d like to, if you’re muddled and you know you’re in the treatment room five days a week and then you have two days left to do everything else and then there’s no time for your family yourself anything, so I think that’s been really rewarding so far, and the calls that we have are fun. I mean, I’ll get off the call, and I’m just beaming, because I’m like, she was so cute, I love that, or I’ll learn about, like, new skincare product, or, you know, it’s just fun to sit and chat. Too
Daniela Woerner
wonderful. Well, I’m so glad that we got the opportunity to introduce you. I’m so happy and honored and excited to have you on to our team. It’s been such, like, a nice easy transition. And to all of our listeners out there, I’m so excited for you to meet Amanda. Amanda,
Amanda Loyd
can’t wait to meet you guys. Thank you.
Bye.
