One brand, many locations: 7 expert lessons for keeping beauty and wellness brands consistent

Whether a brand has 15 locations or 500, guests expect the same experience at every one. But the owners and teams delivering it don’t always welcome new signs, new standards or new systems. How do you keep many locations consistently on brand when you can’t simply give orders?

During a panel session titled “One Brand, Many Locations” at Innergize 2026, Zenoti’s annual conference for beauty, wellness and fitness leaders, three CEOs, two running franchise systems (FS Cut & Color and Cookie Cutters) and one running company-owned clinics (Genesis), shared how they keep every location on brand. The takeaway? Consistency comes less from rules than from influence, observation and culture. 

The experts:

• Kimberly Amadon, CEO, Dessange Group North America. A stylist by trade with more than 20 years in beauty, she is leading the modernization of FS Cut & Color, formerly Fantastic Sams, a franchise of more than 500 salons.
• Neal Courtney, CEO, Cookie Cutters Haircuts for Kids. He has led the franchise since 2014 and previously ran Famous Brands International, parent company of Mrs. Fields Cookies and TCBY.
• Dr. Alex Spinoso, MD, MBA, Co-founder and CEO, Genesis Lifestyle Medicine. He has helped build more than 50 clinics serving over 125,000 patients and leads a national network of company-owned clinics focused on medical weight loss, aesthetics and wellness.

Jim Lain, Chief Operating Officer of Regis Corporation, the parent company of Supercuts, SmartStyle and Cost Cutters, moderated. Here are six lessons they shared for keeping a brand consistent when you can’t simply give orders.

1. Influence change instead of demanding it

When FS Cut & Color moved away from the Fantastic Sams name, CEO Kimberly Amadon chose not to mandate the rebrand. Her approach is about “influencing change, not demanding change.”

Asked by Lain what taught her where the real dividing line sits, she described a longtime stylist-owner who had grown up in the brand over 30 years and cried when told her sign had to change. Yet that owner had evolved her salon right alongside the brand. Meanwhile, other owners hung the new sign and changed nothing inside. Amadon realized the difference was never the logo. It was the behaviors inside the salon.

So her field team now spends 80% of its time with the 20% of owners who are willing to change. Their results do the persuading, and the rest of the system follows as the story spreads.

2. Start with the numbers, then go see the behaviors behind them

Jim Lain asked what happens when corporate strategy and a local owner’s read on their market collide. Cookie Cutters Haircuts for Kids CEO Neal Courtney, who calls himself a “big data guy,” lets facts settle it. He gives franchisees AI-assisted templates so every conversation about profitability, marketing or hiring starts from the same baseline, then aims to leave each one with one to three action plans to review quarterly. About 80% of his conversations with owners are about staffing.

Genesis Lifestyle Medicine's Dr. Alex Spinoso learned the same lesson the hard way. His clinics’ laser hair removal rooms were booked from morning to evening in 13 locations, yet a look at the numbers for each machine showed the service was losing money. Genesis dropped it, focused its marketing and saw sales improve.

Numbers only tell part of the story, though. Amadon’s field team watches the behaviors that drive the dashboards, like a coach correcting from the sidelines, and both she and Spinoso have found their own ways to see their brands the way a guest does, without announcing themselves.

“You can look at dashboards all day long, and you can look at numbers all day long. But there’s a behavior that drives those numbers, and you’re not going to know what that is if you’re not in with your teams.

— Kimberly Amadon, CEO, Dessange Group North America”

Kimberly Amadon and Neil Courtney on stage at Innergize 2026

3. Stay in your lane and keep communication simple

Before Neal Courtney bought Cookie Cutters, his wife, Alexis, had built six franchise locations that all ranked in the system’s top 10. Lain asked what that view from the kitchen table taught Courtney about what headquarters gets wrong. His answer: stay in your lane. When they bought the brand, Alexis handled operational tactics and he handled strategy, so nothing overlapped and no work was duplicated.

The bigger shift was how much he talks to owners. At Famous Brands, he had 215 employees and 1,300 franchisees and never spoke to the franchisees day to day. Now, he said, talking to franchisees is most of his job. According to Courtney, “the number one arrow in the quiver is communication,” and it has to be streamlined, both inside the team and with owners.

Lain agreed, noting that even with 380 franchisees at Regis, long emails don’t work, so he is exploring AI-generated podcasts and other more engaging formats.

4. The experience is your product, so go experience it

Lain next asked when each leader last experienced their own brand the way a guest would, borrowing the idea from the TV show Undercover Boss. Amadon admitted she hasn’t had a service in a salon recently, since she is a stylist and often does her own hair. Instead, she holds meetings with owners in the waiting area of their salon, where the two of them “disappear” and watch what guests see, always looking for wins to celebrate.

Spinoso is too recognizable to go undercover because his face plays on the clinics’ lobby video loop, so he sends friends across the country to pick apart the front desk and the service. He coaches his teams on what he learned from Ritz-Carlton: guests want service without mistakes, delivered fast, with a smile.

Courtney said the gap shows up between owner-operators and owners who haven’t set foot in their store in a year. When the experience slips, families come back for the holidays and back-to-school, but not in between.

“What we’re selling at our salons is not necessarily a haircut. It’s an experience for the child. Our goal is not just a haircut, but it’s building self-esteem. It’s helping kids feel good about themselves when they’re leaving the salon.

— Neal Courtney, CEO, Cookie Cutters Haircuts for Kids”

On stage at Innergize 2026:Cookie Cutters Haircuts for Kids CEO Neal Courtney

5. Ask your team to bring solutions, not just problems

Every Genesis clinic is company-owned and runs what Spinoso calls a “1-3-1” model: anyone with a problem can take it to any supervisor, as long as they bring three possible solutions and recommend one. He borrowed the idea from Toyota’s latticework approach to communication, which lets people bypass a strict chain of command. Managers stop solving everyone else’s problems, and people take ownership of the fix.

Lain asked whether it would survive in a franchise system, where owners aren’t employees.

Spinoso said the method travels well to franchising, because owners and front-desk teams are the boots on the ground. Leaders at headquarters, he said, can launch a new system or AI upgrade that the front-desk person ends up fighting, and they won’t learn how to make it work unless they go talk to that person. Lain added that more franchisors are bringing owners together in forums built for ideation rather than as advisory councils.

Spinoso’s reasoning for franchisors: owners work for themselves, so help them succeed and they’ll “run through walls” for you.

6. Drop the word 'compliance' and plan a dignified exit

Lain raised how to hold brand standards without losing owners, noting that a franchisee recently told him the word 'compliance' doesn’t land. Courtney and Amadon both agreed: it’s a bad word in franchising.

Courtney called franchising “a we win business,” where the franchisor doesn’t win unless its franchisees do. In his view, the word shouldn’t be used at all, because if an owner is out of compliance, he is too. He also noted that the bottom 20% of owners tend to be the ones who go rogue or overcomplicate things.

Amadon is rebuilding FS Cut & Color’s standards after years in which the brand lost its identity. Her team has spent the last couple of years listening and explaining the why. Now it is time to execute, because an owner who can’t recruit stylists may not have refreshed the salon’s look in 20 years, and it’s the many little things that change a business.

Both leaders also said some owners won’t be a fit. Amadon built an exit process that didn’t exist before, so that anyone leaving does so with dignity, and she hasn’t had to use it yet. Courtney likewise favors a graceful, win-win exit and keeping lawyers out of the conversation as long as possible.

“Everybody’s looking for that big thing that’s going to change their business. But it’s nothing big. It’s all the little things. It’s the implementation of all of the little things that’s going to change your business.

— Kimberly Amadon, CEO, Dessange Group North America”

7. Make core values the operating system

When Lain asked how standards show up in a medical business, Spinoso pulled a metal business card from his pocket. Every Genesis employee gets one, with the company name on one side and its core values, including accountability, customer service, teamwork and integrity, on the other. Those values run through hiring questions, and bonuses depend on living them as well as hitting sales goals.

He pointed to Ritz-Carlton, where his wife once worked, as the model for keeping values alive. Each day there starts with a short huddle in which the team picks one core value, discusses how to practice it and recognizes a colleague who showed it the day before. Every Ritz-Carlton around the world discusses the same value that day.

When something slips, like a dirty clinic or a teammate not pitching in with walk-ins, he ties the conversation back to a value instead of to the person.

“I teach my managers to create a problem that’s outside of them. So it’s never a 'you versus me', it’s 'us versus this problem'. Okay, you have a revenue issue. Let’s fight this revenue issue. How can we work together to solve that problem?

— Dr. Alex Spinoso, Co-founder and CEO, Genesis Lifestyle Medicine”

Dr. Alex Spinoso on stage during the 'One Brand, Many Locations' panel at Innergize 2026

Conclusion

Whether they run franchises or company-owned clinics, all three leaders said consistency comes from listening, showing up in the locations and tying every standard to a shared purpose, not from mandates.

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