Sliding Along

Keith and Andre West-Harrison were sipping cappuccinos on a beach in Miami, enjoying the 78-degree weather and the brisk wind in their faces. “You know that movie Sliding Doors,” says Andre, referring to the 1998 film starring Gwyneth Paltrow in which we see what happens to her character when she manages to slip past a subway’s sliding doors--and also what happens when she misses getting in. For the rest of the movie, viewers are given a peek at both of Paltrow’s futures, depending on which side of the sliding door she was on.

“That’s what I feel like our life has become,” says Andre. “We basically had two tracks to our lives, the one we wanted to lead and the one we could lead, and every now and then, I glimpse what Track B might have looked like.”

It’s easy to see what he means. The past few days have gone well, but only because they had a plan--or what turned out to be a back-up plan.

It didn’t look good at first. Thanks to airline snafus, they arrived in Miami on Saturday night for a day spa industry trade show, missing the first day of the two-day show. When they got to the convention center Sunday morning, they were disappointed to hear that the number of visitors had been few and that today wasn’t looking much better. What had been a large, bustling crowd in past years just wasn’t happening this year.

“The trade show,” says Keith, “was dismal, really, really slow.” Fortunately, from that point on, Keith and Andre managed to make the proverbial lemonade from lemons, but only because of their pre-planning (Track A). Without pre-planning, it’s easy to guess what their future would have really been like (Track B). With apologizes to the cast and crew of Sliding Doors, we thought we’d take a look at the past few days of Keith and Andre’s life and what might have been if they hadn’t been thinking ahead.

Track A
In preparation for their trip to Miami, Keith and Andre had set up some meetings with existing clients and contacts, and those yielded enough results that it “more than paid for the trip,” says Keith.

Track B
Keith and Andre sit at a booth, begging the lone man walking by to listen to their pitch and hire them as day spa consultants. But the janitor insists he isn’t interested.

Track A
One of those existing contacts that Keith and Andre met with was a physician. Over dinner, they talked about the doctor’s plans to start a medispa, which is a day spa that has a doctor on staff. The thinking among some day spa owners is that having physicians on staff can add more value to the spas because they can offer more health benefits than those without.

“He liked what we discussed so much that he brought another doctor over,” says Keith, and so on Sunday night, they talked to two physicians who were both planning to open their own medispas.

Medispas are a growing niche in the day spa industry. Keith says he and Andre picked up on the trend about six months ago. “I kind of look at it like in the 1980s when rap music started getting popular,” says Keith. “I thought, ‘Well, this is good, but it’s not going to last.’”

Keith had actually first heard of the concept two years ago, but he didn’t think they’d make much of an impact on the industry. “I didn’t weigh in the fact that baby boomers would be aging, and what are they going to want when they go for a check-up? A facial.”

He’s being facetious and serious, since the combination of a day spa with a doctor on staff truly makes sense for people who want to be treated holistically. It also makes sense that a doctor would want to hire a consultant, because, as Keith explains it, doctors are used to letting patients wait in a room for 45 minutes until they can get to them. “Those principles don’t go over well in a day spa,” says Keith. “They understand the medicine part of wellness, but they don’t understand the experience side.”

And for Keith and Andre, it simply makes sense to gravitate toward medispas. “The great thing about doctors is that they don’t mind spending money,” says Andre. “They’re more likely to use a consultant and look at it as an investment.”

Since they launched their consulting practice last year, Keith and Andre have noticed a few medispa consultants competing against them, but the partners believe the consulting services they’re offering are equally good, if not better.

Track B
Rattled by meeting nobody of consequence and making no sales, Keith and Andre check into a medispa to be treated for on-the-job stress.

Track A
On Sunday, Keith and Andre met up with two day spa entrepreneurs they’d already been consulting with: the owners of SpaBoom.com, an online service that specializes in providing online gift certificates to day spas.

“We’re going to cross-market our services to their clients,” says Keith, explaining that he and Andre will offer a free hour of consulting to any of SpaBoom's clients. And in exchange for this access to SpaBoom's customers, Keith and Andre will continue to provide the owners of SpaBoom with consulting services at no charge.

It’s an offer that benefits both sides: SpaBoom gets to offer a free service to their customers while getting free advice from Keith and Andre, and our dynamic duo is being exposed to more owners of day spas, who may eventually hire them as consultants.

“There are a lot of potential alliances out there,” says Keith, when asked about the importance of finding these partnerships. “You have to pick the ones that are important and will benefit you the most, as well as ones that you can offer a benefit to. And it should ideally benefit the industry as a whole.”

Track B
Having been treated at the medispa for stress, Keith and Andre return to the industry show and try to launch a conversation with the entrepreneurs at an up and coming company called SpaBoom. But they’re told by the company’s owners that they’ve already initiated talks with another day spa consultant.

Track A
The day after the show, in a good mood and with time to spare, Keith and Andre wandered around South Beach, Florida, visiting six different spas to try and meet the owners and introduce themselves. Just getting the front desk clerks to pay attention to them was a challenge, causing Keith to remark to Andre, “God, we picked the right industry. There’s plenty of work for us here.”

Track B
The day after the show, in a dismal mood and with time to spare, Keith and Andre wandered around South Beach, Florida, often getting mistaken for beachcombers, causing Andre to remark to Keith. “God, what were we thinking of? Maybe we should have never left New Orleans.”

Back on Track A: Now and Later
Keith and Andre spent one more day in Miami, lounging on the beach and feeling good about their immediate future. They’ll be flying back the next day to their home base in California and, within days, will be doing two training sessions with day spas in Modesto and San Jose. Then they’re immediately off on a business trip to Vancouver.

“The realization that what we do has value, and even more value than what we thought, is just amazing,” says Andre. He recounts how two day spa entrepreneurs recently called them to thank them because they’d followed Keith and Andre’s advice and recently took home their first paycheck. “I know how that feels,” says Andre, “where you think, ‘Oh, [censored], we’ve got to have three grand in a week and a half for the mortgage payment,’ and you’re so broke, you don’t get to go to Miami or even to the mall in your hometown. So now they’re taking in money and have money in their account, and they’re very happy, and it tickles me to death.”

Keith agrees. He recognizes that he talks a lot about their old lives in New Orleans, but being in Miami--a hurricane hub and a city that he and Andre had seriously considered living in before the Big Easy was overtaken by Katrina--he can’t help but think about it all again.

“The first time we came to this trade show, we were struggling spa owners trying to make a profit. The second time, we were in exile from a hurricane, and the third,” says Keith, “we’re extremely happy consultants here to meet with clients and work the trade show, and that’s all been in just a year and a few months. Goodness, look how it quickly it changes.”

Small wonder Andre feels like they’ve been living out the plot of Sliding Doors. Just days before coming out to Miami, they were in Los Angeles, and having one of their now-routine celebrity sightings in the parking lot of the affluent department store chain, Barney’s New York.

“You know who that is,” said Keith, watching a familiar face passing by in a Mercedes. “Joan Rivers.”

“She looks even better in person than on TV,” marveled Andre.

But even that celebrity sighting might have been a little different, if Keith and Andre weren’t always thinking ahead and creating plans for their future, not just in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina but in the months since then. If things had worked out a little differently, if they'd let their guard down and not dashed through open doors, they might have found themselves panhandling from Ms. Rivers in Los Angeles, instead of sipping cappuccinos in Miami and plotting their next career move. You just never know.

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