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Welcome to The Main Street Minute, your shortcut to small business buying and scaling.
👋 Huge shout-out to the new readers who joined the newsletter last week.
Today’s story: Imagine going from working a 9-to-5 to owning a med spa that’s on track for seven figures. Oh, and the seller financed much of your acquisition.
It’s not easy, but it is possible. Today, you’ll see one way it’s been done.
Dive in below…
When you’re ready to get to work, we designed these for you:
More than anything, know this:
Olman and Jen didn’t just “stumble” into the Wild and Beautiful Austin med spa and get it on track to $1M+.
After we introduced them to Main Street acquisitions, they reverse-engineered a deal aligned with their strengths, negotiated smart terms, and fought through obstacles while still working full-time.
So let’s break it down:
Here’s how they cracked the experience gap, earned the trust of a retiring seller, and built a business likely worth multiples more than what they spent acquiring it.
ACQUISITIONS 101
Here it is. The perfect business to b… C’mon. You know better. There is NO such thing as a “perfect” business to buy. If someone tells you there is, joke’s on you.
Still, the question pops up all the time:
Wrong question. The right one is:
That’s exactly how Olman and Jen started: with a brutally honest look at their Zone of Genius.
See, the best deals align with things like:
They used this lens to filter what might be a fit, instead of chasing whatever niche was “trending.” Could a laundromat work? Eh. A property management business? Not really. But then Olman had a thought…
One day, Jen, a nurse, went to a med spa. Her treatment took 20 minutes and cost $800. Olman did the math. “I started thinking maybe this is a good business to get into…”
So they started digging. What they found was an industry full of high-margin services, but also inefficiencies everywhere. Things like:
In other words, lots of room to improve.
But spotting an opportunity is one thing. Figuring out how to step into it is another.
STEAL THIS MOVE
As soon as Olman and Jen started exploring med spas, one thing became clear: They didn’t know much (on the surface) about running a med spa.
Jen was a nurse, but she’d never worked in this setting specifically. That meant there was a real key man risk. She needed to learn how to be an injector.
Classic chicken and egg. So what’d they do? They got creative and made some sacrifices. Olman told Jen, “Why don’t we email a bunch of smaller med spas? You can offer to work for free and learn. People pay for school, here we’ll just pay with time.”
And that’s what she did.
They sent dozens of cold emails. One owner said yes. Jen started apprenticing. Learning the business. Earning trust. And whenever the owner got overwhelmed, Olman told Jen to drop this one line:
Eventually, the owner was, in fact, receptive to that message. She’d been running the spa for decades and was tired of the day-to-day. But there was a problem. The financials were a mess. No clean P&L. No proper records. Just muscle memory.
“She knew she had more money at the end of the month than at the start. For her, that was good enough.”
Most buyers would’ve walked at that point. But Olman and Jen didn’t. They offered to rebuild the financials from scratch. Olman gathered sales records, pulled bank statements, and built a P&L.
That effort saved the deal and built trust. They weren’t outsiders anymore. They were the ones willing to do the work and earn the seller’s trust unconventionally.
Screw you, chicken and egg.
SMART PLAY
Buying a business is scary. There’s no way around that fact. As Olman put it:
In fact, he and Jen were secretly “hoping” to find a deal-breaker; a red flag they could point to and say, “Nope, not this one.” But the numbers just kept making sense for them.
So they dove into negotiations. The seller gave them a number. Then Olman remembered something Codie told him once:
They made a counteroffer and proposed seller financing. The seller was open to it. She wanted a smooth, quick transition. An SBA loan would’ve taken too long. And the business didn’t have the documentation to support it.
In the end, nearly 75% of the ~$360k deal was seller-financed.
With responsible savings in place, Olman quit his job to focus. Jen held on to hers for a month “just in case it all blew up.”
So… did it?
“Jen’s making more now than she did at her job,” Olman told us at the time. “I’m making less. But next year, I’ll make more.”
PATH TO SCALE
When Olman and Jen took over, the med spa had 56 recurring members and did $370k in business annually. After improvements they made to its business model, marketing, and customer retention, it grew to 420 members.
Eventually, they hit $644k in revenue. Then, a year later, they were tracking to $1.25M. That kind of growth primarily came from doing the basics really, really well:
“We tell people when they don’t need something,” Olman said. “That kind of honesty builds trust. And trust brings people back.”
But with growth comes growing pains…
One day, early into their ownership transition, an $80K machine ran out of refill supplies.
Because the previous owner bought it on the “gray market,” it wasn’t properly registered, and the manufacturer wouldn’t sell them refills until it was. Fixing that alone would’ve cost $15k. With debt to service, early financial hits like that can spiral out of control.
Luckily, they found another med spa willing to sell them what they needed. Crisis averted, lesson learned. As Olman put it:
“We had an attorney. We had an accountant. But what we really needed was someone who had done this before. Someone who could’ve pointed at the machines and said, ‘That one’s a problem, and here’s why.’ If I could do it over, I’d pay someone who’s done this before $300 for an hour of consulting. That one conversation would’ve saved us thousands.”
…And likely a few sleepless nights.
WINNING FORMULA
There’s a saying we love here at Contrarian Thinking:
“Pray like it’s up to God. Work like it’s up to you.”
That’s how Olman and Jen did this. They didn’t have a perfect plan. They didn’t have a perfect business. They had a simple but ruthless willingness to do the work. As Olman put it:
They’re proof that with the right playbooks, smart tactics, and a clear vision, you can go from just thinking about business ownership to actually building toward it.
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The information contained here is educational, may not be typical, and does not guarantee returns. Background, education, effort, and application will affect your experience and the profitability of any business. Individual results may vary.
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