Alyssa Rapp: An Inspirational Leader’s Journey of Success and Giving Back to Society

Meet Alyssa Rapp, the dynamic and visionary CEO of Empower Aesthetics. Alyssa brings a unique and rich background to her leadership role. Alyssa’s career began in Silicon Valley, where she spent a decade as the founder and CEO of a consumer internet company before returning to her hometown in Chicago and embracing a new challenge of leading a private equity-backed healthcare services company.

As the CEO of Empower Aesthetics, Alyssa brings a wealth of expertise, seamlessly blending her experience in consumer business and the healthcare sector. The unique blend of retail dynamics serving consumers and medical aesthetics practices requires the same optimization and management strategies she honed in Silicon Valley. Simultaneously, the clinical care delivered by Empower Aesthetics’ partners draws on her deep understanding of healthcare services.

More than just a strategic leader, Alyssa is a passionate advocate for women entrepreneurs and business leaders. Her commitment to empowering women is not just a statement but a deeply fulfilling reality. By partnering with talented women business owners, Alyssa has integrated the various practices into the Empower Aesthetics team, bringing to life her advocacy of women leadership.

Key Factors Influencing Alyssa’s Journey

The medical aesthetics field is experiencing significant growth across various key areas, including expansion into new demographic groups, overall market expansion, favorable industry trends, and advancements in services and technologies. The industry is experiencing a burgeoning stage of consolidation led by private equity firms such as Empower Aesthetics’ sponsor, Shore Capital Partners. Within this dynamic field, Alyssa enjoys creating opportunities for partnership with business minded clinical leaders/entrepreneurs in the medical aesthetics category. More specifically, Empower takes on the administrative tasks of operating the aesthetic practices thereby allowing the clinicians to focus on clinical outcomes, training and patient satisfaction.

Lessons Along the Way

From her experience in the alcoholic beverage/e-commerce world of Silicon Valley through her time as the CEO of SPAC, Alyssa has honed a proactive approach to regulatory shifts. She seeks to anticipate and adapt to expected changes in the industry in order to minimize the negative consequences of any events. As it relates to the aesthetic industry, Alyssa believes good medicine is good business. That is, seeking top tier outcomes provides for patient satisfaction, which in turn provides for word-of-mouth growth. This commitment to excellence and compliance forms the cornerstone of Empower Aesthetics’ strategy, reassuring stakeholders of the brand’s unwavering commitment to quality.

Key Principles that Shaped Alyssa’s Leadership

Insights from Alyssa’s book Leadership and Life Hacks: Insights from a Mom, Wife, Entrepreneur, and Executive particularly emphasize the importance of “breaking bread” and recognize that “all relationships are unique.” These insights have deeply resonated throughout her professional journey and serve as a guiding light in her role as the CEO of Empower Aesthetics.

Alyssa also recognizes the importance of “be one, get one” and the transformative power of mentorship/sponsorship. She learned much from one of her most important career mentors and sponsors, Joel Peterson, who taught her that values-based leadership attracts the most talented people and best teammates, which she still strives to follow.

“The values-based, entrepreneurial-style leadership learnings I gained from one of my favorite Stanford GSB mentors, Joel Peterson, shaped many of my approaches to leadership. Similarly, leveraging some of the insights and recommendations for managerial strategies from the brightest academic minds, like one of my favorite Stanford GSB professors, the late, great Ed Lazear, on “incentives and productivity,” and specifically, his theories on tournament theory (oversimplified to be outcomes with outsized prizes will drive outsized efforts from founders and executives alike), continue to shape my thoughts on compensation design, incentive alignment, and more,”- remembers Alyssa.

Picking Right Partners

Under Alyssa’s leadership, Empower Aesthetics focuses on partnering with the best clinical leaders. When the company brings top clinical leaders to its platform as partners, they often invite their colleagues to join as well. Empower Aesthetics listens closely to its clinical advisory board and leaders to ensure they provide top-notch clinical training while staying ahead of the curve and delivering excellent outcomes. Alyssa hopes and believes that as the organization grows, it will maintain its commitment to delivering the highest quality care.

Maintaining Work and Life Balance

In her book Leadership and Life Hacks: Insights from a Mom, Wife, Entrepreneur, and Executive, Alyssa discusses episodic versus daily balance. She prioritizes having a clear understanding of the key stakeholders in her life on any given day and prioritizing them with self-awareness. This means deciding which stakeholders she will focus on and delivering her best efforts daily. Some days, she strives to be an excellent CEO and mother, while other days, she prioritizes being an excellent wife, board member, or a great daughter and CEO.

“Whatever the stakeholder prioritization, if that’s the area of focus, I darn well better give those people/priorities my 150%. Similarly, “balance” is thus not achieved amongst all stakeholders on any given day. But if I widen the aperture of time and attempt to satisfy all stakeholders over several days or a week/two, it is infinitely more achievable. And the magic is remembering to put one’s own oxygen mask on first each day. That is my responsibility and no one else’s.”- she explains further.

Looking at the Future

Alyssa’s vision for Empower Aesthetic is to uphold its mission of “inspiring joy and confidence through aesthetics” while executing Shore Capital’s exemplary playbook for microcap roll-ups. The goal is ambitious: achieving $200MM+ in revenue and $40MM+ in EBITDA within the next four years. To achieve this, Alyssa aims to continue collaborating with a team of passionate, talented, and dedicated executives and board members. With everyone aligned on strategy, values, goals, and a shared vision for the future, Alyssa believes that excellence will naturally follow.