Interview with Kathy Keeney, Owner of Boss Gal Beauty 

Interview with Kathy Keeney, Owner of Boss Gal Beauty 

What started as a side hustle doing microblading in a rented Clintonville studio has grown into four thriving locations and one of the most recognizable med spa brands in just five years.

Kathy, a former ER nurse, handles the clinical operations and client-facing side of Boss Gal while her husband, Lance, manages the financials and back-end strategy—a partnership that turned a leap of faith into one of Columbus’s fastest-growing beauty businesses.

Learn about the bold moves they made during COVID that transformed their trajectory and whether Boss Gal’s expansion ambitions reach beyond Central Ohio.

How did the idea of Boss Gal come about?

I was doing microblading as a side hustle, came home one day, and told Lance I wanted to open a med spa. He said, “Let me crunch some numbers,” and he was confident in the projections. I was working in the ER at the time—three 12-hour shifts a week—and had become interested in microblading after getting it done myself. I realized there weren’t many options in town and started doing it around 2017. On my days off from the ER, I rented a salon loft-type space in Clintonville where I was seeing clients. The original name was “Boss Gal Brows.” I got really busy pretty quickly and pretty much stepped away from the hospital altogether. The next step was getting into injectables and figuring out how to combine my medical expertise with the beauty world.

How did you decide on your first location in Clintonville? 

If we could have picked anywhere, we wanted to be in downtown Grandview, where our current location is now. Lance was like, “Let’s look at this place in Graceland Shopping Center,” and I was like, “Oh, it’s not that sexy.” But the rent was affordable, and honestly, it ended up being a great first location. It was centrally located, so people came from all the surrounding areas, there’s good parking, and we lucked out because Casto, the property manager, has invested in the shopping center since we’ve been here. Now we have Starbucks, Ulta and HomeGoods—it’s really developed around us.

 

How did you build up that initial customer base?

The brow market was really underserved in Columbus at the time. I was doing good work and getting a lot of referral clients, plus we were seeing strong growth through Instagram—it was much easier to get organic reach back then. When we opened in January 2019, it was just me, one front desk employee, and one esthetician. By that fall, we’d hired a couple more estheticians and front desk staff. Lance is very financially conservative, so we let the business tell us our growth path—how much we could grow and how quickly.

 

You expanded from one to three locations during COVID. That seems counterintuitive.

By 2020, we couldn’t get clients in—they were frustrated because we were so booked. We were about to sign a letter of intent on a second location literally the weekend before Ohio shut down in March. During COVID, our Grandview location became available when an optician who’d been there 20-plus years decided to retire. Nobody was signing leases, but we still took a leap of faith. Then, within weeks, Easton reached out to ask whether we’d open there. I was like, “No, we just signed a lease!” And Lance said, “You don’t say no to Easton.” So we signed both leases during COVID. That was a pivotal, game-changing moment for our business.

What did you do during those eight weeks you were closed?

I know many business owners felt pressure during COVID, but for us, it felt like three times the pressure because we had just signed two new leases. We were scrambling to try everything just to get by. We threw up a Shopify site in about two days, and I started making “facials in a box” with our skincare products. We were literally shipping them or driving door-to-door dropping them off in Columbus. I think we did like $10,000 in sales doing that—we were just trying to pay our rent and loans. It was all about survive now and we’ll eventually thrive with the new location strategy.

 

What made Boss Gal different from other med spas at the time?

A lot of the med spas that existed were more traditional medical clinics in doctor’s office settings. We’d seen more approachable, warm, inviting spaces popping up across the country. We’d visited open concept facial bars in other cities, but nobody was doing medical aesthetics with the facial bar concept. That was our unique angle. The beauty of Columbus is that you can bring concepts that are working in larger markets to this city. The timing was good too—the stigma around people getting aesthetic treatments was coming down. The Kardashians kind of made it mainstream by talking openly about what they were getting done.

You say you got lucky, but it sounds more strategic than that.

The two of us are a good combo. I run the front of house and clinical side, and Lance handles the back of house and financials. Lance had been some kind of manager in retail since he was 15, managing customers and lots of employees, then pivoted to the corporate side, which really built up his financial acumen. For me, with my ER nursing background, opening Boss Gal meant applying my clinical expertise while learning the business operations side. We joke about how all our varied work history from way back helps us on a day-to-day with Boss Gal.

 

What was the biggest challenge going from one location to multiple?

One to two was hard because you want your success to be repeatable. You want everybody doing everything the same way—following exact policies and procedures. That got easier as we opened more because we could integrate existing employees into new locations. We’d ask, “Does anybody want to go to Easton?” and get two or three established employees who could help solidify that culture and process there.

For me personally, the biggest challenge was that for the first year and a half, I was at the spa every day, open to close, six days a week. I knew everything that was going on. Going from one to two meant splitting my time, learning to let go and delegate, trusting the people I hired. You can’t do it all, and you have to let go of the perfectionism a little bit.

How did you continue to scale while maintaining quality?

Once we signed those two additional leases, it was clear we had something really special, and we needed to level up our infrastructure to match. Lance did a lot of work on the back end, upgrading our accountant and bookkeeper. We ended up working with an accountant who was previously the CFO at Winking Lizard, where they had 30 locations and 1,200 employees. We hired a fractional CFO. It was about really leveling up our support team to handle the growth. In hindsight, that was game-changing, but it seemed like a necessity at the time. Doing those things helped solidify our foundation so we could manage the expansion without sacrificing what made Boss Gal special.

You now have four locations. Where do you see Boss Gal in five years?

We opened four locations in four years—people think we’re crazy when we say that. We added Powell most recently, which was intentional because we wanted to be in that area with the high-income demographic.

We’re definitely junkies for opening spas. We love the design and build process. It’s become rinse-and-repeat in a positive way. We took a year off to focus on our processes, but we’re definitely getting the itch to expand more. I don’t know if Columbus can hold another location—we already have four, and you start to get into really fringy areas where you cannibalize your own business.

Other metros in Ohio is definitely something we’ve looked into. We’ve looked at some real estate and had conversations, but we want to be smart about it. Right now, we can get up in the morning, hit every spa, and be in the office by mid-morning. If you start putting one in Cincinnati, you lose that. But in five years, we definitely want to continue expanding.

 

What drives that desire to grow?

I’ve really seen how much clients truly love this place. We call them “super fans.” In a weird way, you almost feel like you owe it to people to continue offering this to more people. And I think we’ve done a good job of making this a good place to work for our team. The beauty industry can be kind of predatory for women—commission only, no health insurance. We pay hourly whether you’re seeing a client or not, and we offer health insurance and benefits. This is our utopia. We can control this world we’re creating, so we wanted to make it a cool place to work. It would be great to continue offering that to more people, both clients and team members.

How important was Columbus to Boss Gal’s success?

I moved here from Canada, and Columbus has been such a great place to build this business. It has that small town feel with big city amenities. There are people here who are more progressive and forward-thinking than maybe people expect, which has been perfect for what we’re doing. We travel quite a bit and have fun in other cities, but Columbus feels like the perfect mix. You can have a great life, do interesting things, and meet interesting people without some of the challenges that come with larger markets. Lance has been here since 1994, so he really understands the city, and together we’ve been able to tap into what makes Columbus special.

If someone’s visiting Columbus for the weekend, where are you sending them?

My favorite restaurant is Third & Hollywood—I love to go there. We like to go to concerts, so we’d probably take you to a show. We’re into alternative music, rock, electronic stuff. We love to see more bands at Newport and KEMBA Live, some of the smaller venues. We see a good amount of shows at The Basement, and just saw a show at Skully’s recently. We’re not above going back to the old haunts.