The Staff Excellence Playbook: 5 expert lessons for hiring, training and keeping great teams

A hire who looked perfect on paper turns out not to fit the team once they start. A newer team member you spent months training gets recruited away just as they hit their stride. Another asks what’s next, and you have no next step to offer. Multi-location operators know these moments well and most have the same question: How do you hire, train and keep great people as you grow?

At Innergize 2026, Zenoti’s annual conference for beauty, wellness and fitness leaders, four operators took on that question in a panel session called “The Staff Excellence Playbook.” Their answer: build the team around shared values, and make every hiring, training and growth decision prove it.

The experts:

• Emily Fernandez, Co-Founder and VP of Operations, Evolve Med Spa. After 25 years leading operations in hospital-based healthcare, Emily co-founded Evolve in 2020. It now has 14 locations across New York, New Jersey, Maryland and Pennsylvania.
• Nate Costa, President and Founder, FX Well. Nate grew a small personal training studio into a portfolio of fitness, salon and spa, medspa and corporate wellness brands.
• Julie Acarregui-Frost, Founder and Medical Director, PURE Medical Spa. A Board-Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist and U.S. Army veteran, Julie leads three PURE locations in Idaho and trains aesthetic practitioners nationwide.
• Jo Kelton, COO, Removery. Jo is a founding member of Removery, which grew from 33 acquired locations in 2019 to 165 tattoo removal studios across the USA, Canada and Australia.

Kelton moderated the panel and shared Removery’s own challenges along the way. Here are the five lessons that came out of it.

1. Hire for fit, then teach the skills

Evolve learned the cost of hiring in a hurry as it grew. Co-founder Emily Fernandez opened the first location in June 2020, in the middle of COVID, and was so busy that a second followed quickly. With two locations, the founders could split their time between sites. By the fourth, Emily said, “Things get real right around there,” and that approach stopped working.

She admits she was too controlling at the time, and she was also stuck juggling a point-of-sale system, medical records and a CRM that did not talk to each other. In desperation, Evolve brought in someone who was not a cultural fit to lead growth, which Emily calls the biggest mistake the company has made. She is clear that the lesson is about fit, not the individual: “When it’s a fit, it’s a fit. And when it’s not, it’s hard.”

The other panelists screen for fit in layers. Nate Costa’s teams interview in two gates, fit for the team and then fit for the role, and one culture question asks candidates to describe a favorite boss and a least favorite one. A candidate who blames the boss who held them accountable with data is a red flag at FX Well, where data is meant to lead to action.

At PURE, Julie Acarregui-Frost saves the team’s voice for the end. Finalists who have already passed several management interviews spend a day with the people they would work beside, sometimes treating a model in a working interview. She has never had to overrule the team’s choice, and she weighs any red flag they raise.

“We can always teach things. People are teachable. AI is teachable. Everything that we’re talking about is something that needs to be learned. As long as you’re willing as a leader to invest in them, pick the fit that works for your organization.

— Emily Fernandez, Evolve Med Spa”

Emily Fernandez, Co-Founder and VP of Operations of Evolve Med Spa, on stage at Innergize 2026

2. Let your values make the hard calls

Julie Acarregui-Frost, who has run PURE for 18 years, spent her early years focused on her highest-producing providers. Around year 15, one of them lied to her about something serious, and Julie saw that keeping that provider would tell the whole team she valued revenue over culture. Trust is now a line she will fire over, and the values behind it are written down: about four years ago, a leadership coach led her management team through a day-long card-sorting exercise that narrowed 52 values to five.

Her fellow panelists added their own angles. FX Well has a saying, Nate Costa shared, that trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets, and the team keeps redefining its non-negotiables as it learns. Emily Fernandez offered a counterweight: values do not replace performance data, and Evolve looks at both.

“It really clicked with me that every decision I make has to go back to the culture of the business… If you can just believe in your culture and you make every decision in your business that goes back to each one of your values, you’ll never go wrong.

— Julie Acarregui-Frost, PURE Medical Spa”

Julie Acarregui-Frost, Founder and Medical Director of PURE Medical Spa, speaking at Innergize 2026

3. Start day one with what you promise, not what you expect

Orientation is where a team first hears what the company stands for, and the panelists ran it in two ways that both rest on trust. Emily Fernandez leads the first orientation for every new Evolve hire herself, batching hires so she can hold one a month. She covers culture and opens with what Evolve promises employees: to be open, honest and transparent, and to always explain the why, which she calls the best context for growth. A new hire who meets a founder on day one, she reasons, sees an organization to collaborate with, not one that dictates. The team then handles the hands-on training, such as dealing with difficult client issues.

Nate Costa used to lead FX Well’s orientations as well, but found that he was inconsistent, feeding off whoever was in the room. He handed the session to the company’s director of brand and culture, who started as a part-time front desk employee 13 years ago. For Nate, the handoff is trust and empowerment in action, and it frees him to meet new hires later on the floor.

“It is our job as leaders to always hire people that are going to be better than us at that part of the job, and then growing them into the people that can take over from us at the end of the day is what we’re here for.

— Jo Kelton, Removery”

Removery COO Jo Kelton, COO on stage in Seattle at Innergize 2026

4. Protect your training investment, and put the terms in writing

Training your team well also makes them easy targets for competitors to recruit. Emily Fernandez said recruiters start messaging injectors on LinkedIn once they reach about a year of experience, and Evolve lost a decent share of them right after their contractual training payback period ended. The story did not stop there: almost all came back and told colleagues the grass was not greener, and Evolve has since lost almost none apart from moves and parental leave.

Not every team can count on a homecoming, though. Nate Costa has found that at FX Well, a returning employee can meet resentment from the team that stayed.

Julie Acarregui-Frost chose to protect the investment up front, after nurse practitioners she hired absorbed PURE’s programs and then opened competing practices. PURE now trains newer injectors through a roughly 250-hour apprenticeship valued at $20,000, under a separate agreement that declines over 18 months. Julie covers it in the interview, and only one person has tried to leave early. She and Emily both said they would release someone from the agreement if they proved not to be the right fit.

Asked to share annual retention, Emily put Evolve at 62%, Julie put PURE at 66%, and Nate said FX Well’s churn is about 30%.

5. When there’s no ladder, find other ways to help people grow

Growth does not always mean promotion. Jo Kelton described the challenge at Removery: many team members work in studios, and there are few steps up, so when someone asks what is next, the honest answer is to keep delivering an excellent client experience.

Emily Fernandez starts with the same honesty, saying plainly whether a role exists and what she foresees, then asks what the person actually wants. If it is money, they talk about retail. For some clinicians, it is training others. And when someone outgrows the role, she compares it to her daughter heading off to college: she is proud, not upset.

Julie Acarregui-Frost builds growth into roles she already has. At each of her far-apart locations, one provider serves as an apprenticeship assistant and earns 1% of the new hire’s gross revenue for a year after the trainee graduates. She also asks team members what matters to them, from a custom schedule to a path toward becoming a trainer.

Nate Costa takes the same spirit to its limit. He has sat across the table from team members who told him they were leaving to open their own studios, and he believes the rest of the team is always watching how leaders treat the people who go.

“I will help you. I will support you. I will actually tell you all the secrets that I’ve learned because I want you to be successful. Just don’t do it right across the street, because that’s really messed up.

— Nate Costa, FX Well”

Nate Costa, President and Founder of FX Well on stage at Innergize 2026

Conclusion

Although the four leaders run very different businesses, they build teams the same way: hire for fit, hold every decision to your values and keep investing in people even if they may one day move on.

Want to hear more leaders share how they’re growing their brands? Learn more about Innergize 2027.

Evolve’s growing pains started with systems that didn’t talk to each other. See how Zenoti connects them in one platform.