A featured contribution from Leadership Perspectives: a curated forum reserved for leaders nominated by our subscribers and vetted by the Construction Tech Review Advisory Board.
Milan Laser Hair Removal
Data not feelings: Tech helps nation's largest laser Hair Removal company continue to soar
Maybe I’ve always had a knack for finance.
I think back to my early teenage years when my aunt and uncle took a big interest in investing during the dot-com bubble. My own interest followed, and I found myself at the library reading about the stock market. The concept of investing a small amount of money and seeing it grow in value fascinated me.
Now, I didn’t say I was good at investing that early in life, but still, it was a good introduction to that world.
Those basic concepts stay on my mind here at Milan Laser Hair Removal, the largest laser hair removal company in the country. We’re the best at what we do because laser hair removal is all we do, and the company can claim that distinction already after being founded in 2012. That’s something every member of the Milan Team is proud of.
Reflecting on that time as a teenager gives me so much appreciation for where I am now and how much the advancement of technology and software has had a direct impact on my professional life.
Prior to joining the Milan Laser Team in June 2021, I worked at Union Pacific (UP) and Fiserv. Both jobs were great starts for my professional journey. Union Pacific was my first exposure to working at a Fortune 500 company. At the time, UP had 40,000 employees with $20B in annual revenue, and provided me with essential experience—it’s where I got my foot in the door in Corporate Finance.
That’s why my next move to Fiserv made sense. While still a Fortune 500 company, my role was focused on Business Unit finance supporting a division of Fiserv with a wide scope of responsibility. It was a beneficial step before my move to Milan Laser Hair Removal.
Many positive things can be said about Milan Laser. But I find myself always using the word growth when I talk about this great company.
The most fundamental measure of growth at Milan Laser can be seen through our expansion. When I joined the staff in 2021, we opened our 130th clinic. And now, in the first quarter of 2023, we have more than 270 clinics in 30 states. That’s incredible!
It’s hard not to think about the heights we can reach in the future if we’re able to add nearly 150 clinics in fewer than two years. Five hundred clinics? Maybe 1,000+? The possibilities are exciting.
Seeing growth is great, but having a role in that growth is most rewarding. Focusing on increasing our sales and business model has been a blast! And honestly, one of the best parts of my journey here has been flourishing with the culture at Milan Laser.
For me, that means embracing one of our big focuses at Milan Laser: data, not feelings. It’s our mantra. We’ve made tremendous progress in making it easier to access quality data and how we’re structuring it to give the leadership team the insight they need to expand and run the business in the most effective way.
Milan Laser was already a data- and software-driven company before my arrival, but to see firsthand how we’ve optimized our data to support continued growth and drive strong business decisions has been amazing.
Additionally, the partnership we’ve established with IT over the last year has been critical. The IT team is the backbone of what my team is able to accomplish by supplying quality data infrastructure.
The data at our disposal has allowed us to have a plethora of reports available for analysis to help us make better decisions quickly. All that comes from the support of IT and helps make my team effective.
Another element of growth? My team. Upon my arrival at Milan Laser, our financial planning and analysis team consisted of one other person. Now, we have staff who support our marketing and sales teams, expansion and operations, and team members who support corporate functions and headcount planning. That’s been really helpful for Milan Laser, and outside of that, we also have someone who specializes in business intelligence and tech.
Now we’ve built an entire FP&A support team to collect and analyze data. It’s a much more efficient method.
The data we’re able to gather through technology has been a difference-making force here at Milan Laser. We utilize a variety of sources today. We pull all our financial information from Microsoft Dynamics 365, which is our ERP or accounting system, and utilize a lot of data from our customer relationship management tool, Salesforce. We can get all the data we need around leads, sales, and operating costs to help us make data-driven choices for the company.
Two other software staples are Power BI and Microsoft Excel. Many professionals – even outside the finance world – fundamentally rely on Excel. And with Power BI, we’re able to have the data at our fingertips and create relationships to understand and visualize that data so we can make appropriate business decisions.
We’re in the process of transitioning to an enterprise data warehouse (EDW). It’s a much more efficient method as opposed to using Google Analytics or pulling data from our ERP to find a way to combine all that together.
With the EDW that we’re setting up, it’s going to be a one-stop shop for data consumption. We’ll be able to pull anything we’d be interested in from that EDW and have quality, accurate, timely data available at our fingertips.
But the practice of implementing technology into the decision-making process has yielded incredible results. Putting that data, not feelings mantra into action with my team and seeing how the process has been streamlined, providing important insight into key business decisions, has been tremendous for our company. The team uses sales, financial, and utilization data across our clinic portfolio to empower Milan in making the best possible choices about marketing strategy, expansion, and staffing. We partner with our leadership team to translate operational plans into financial projections and use all of that information to inform the best path forward for our company.
To have the chance to help enhance the data-driven decisions for this already incredible and well-established company has been a tremendous career opportunity.
