Ep 23: John Teza, President and Chief Development Officer for Hand & Stone Massage and Facial Spa, On Marketing Franchise Brands to Local Entrepreneurs

Dec 16

Today’s guest is John Teza, President and Chief Development Officer for Hand & Stone Massage and Facial Spa. John’s career has been largely focused on building and marketing franchise brands from the operations and investment side, and he joins us today to share how he is applying his extensive experience in his role at Hand & Stone. Our conversation covers the benefits of recurring revenue subscription models, marketing franchise brands to consumers and franchisees, and a whole lot more. We kick things off with John talking about some of the key differentiators of Hand & Stone. From there, we take a deep dive with him into his past career, what led him to join Hand & Stone in August, and some of the things he is focusing on there in his current role. We get into how marketing Hand & Stone to franchisees versus customers differs, what onboarding new franchisees looks like, and how using an internal ad agency to handle new launches plays into this. Our conversation also covers the recurring revenue model at Hand & Stone and how this helped keep them afloat during the pandemic. In addition, John shares about how the process of migrating from an on-prem to a cloud-based POS tech stack is playing out and the advantages it will provide. Toward the end of the show, John weighs in on trends in the restaurant and health and wellness industries relating to tech, COVID, customer preferences, and more. Tune in today!

Key Points From This Episode:

A fun fact about John that has to do with a special song he is able to sing.
An introduction to Hand & Stone Massage and Facial Spa.
How Hand & Stone differentiates themselves by focusing on skincare and affordability.
The importance of Hand & Stone’s recurring revenue model for franchisees and consumers.
John’s experience in operations and investing and what made him join Hand & Stone.
What John does as President and Chief Development Officer at Hand & Stone.
How marketing to customers and franchisees has evolved over the years.
The benefits of having a subscription model for surviving the pandemic.
Apps like Soothe and Zeal versus on-premise massages given by licensed therapists.
The rise of membership models in the health and wellness space.
What the launch of a new branch and the onboarding of a new franchisee looks like.
Why Hand & Stone uses an internal ad agency and how they split their marketing between traditional and digital.
How much flexibility Hand & Stone franchisees have for doing unique marketing.
Why Hand & Stone are migrating their on-prem tech stack to the cloud and what opportunities this presents.
Competitiveness in the POS space and where different providers are coming from.
Trends John is seeing in the restaurant industry relating to technology, preferences, COVID, and more.
Adjustments at Hand & Stone after COVID: Going from policy to preference.
Lightning round with John: His thoughts on Gen-Z and Yelp.

Tweetables:

“What we are really looking to do is to deliver the experience of a high-end spa in an affordable and convenient manner.” — John Teza [0:06:39]

“The recurring revenue model is critical to the success of our franchise locations.” — John Teza [0:07:54]

“We recognized that to get where we wanted to go from a consumer and business intelligence standpoint, that we needed to evolve the tech stack and so we are neck-deep into a migration to a cloud-based POS system that was purpose-built for the health and wellness domain.” — John Teza [0:29:31]