Health & medical
Funding for med spas and aesthetics businesses
A lot of your revenue never touches the card terminal. Memberships draft on the first, packages were paid for months ago, and the rest arrives as a lump settlement from whatever platform financed the client — none of which looks like the daily card volume a file usually gets read against.
See my options
Start here
How a funding partner reads your business
Much of what a partner reads is in your bank statements, and it comes down to three questions. Everything below is me walking you through your own answers, so nothing in your statements surprises you later.
When does the money come in?
Job days, invoice terms, or a slow drip all month. The pattern matters more than the total.
How steady is it?
One great month doesn’t tell anyone what a normal month looks like.
What was each deposit for?
If a reader can’t tell, they assume the worst. A sentence of explanation fixes it.
How it works
You talk. I work. You choose.
- 1You say
Tell me about the business.
What you do, what you bring in, what you need and when. One short form, about two minutes.
“I need $40,000 for a second truck before spring.”
- 2I do
I take it to funding partners.
I get it in front of partners who work with businesses like yours. I do not underwrite, price or decide.
Your request, told once, to people who can fund it.
- 3You decide
You pick, or you walk away.
Interested partners contact you with their terms, if an offer comes. Compare, pick one, or walk away.
“This one gives me the runway without crushing cash flow.”
The arithmetic
How much are you considering?
Play with the numbers
Pick a shape of money, drag the sliders, and watch the math change.
An advance is priced by a factor rate, not interest. Put in the amount, and the rate if somebody has quoted you one.
The arithmetic
- Advance
- $50,000
- Factor rate
- 1.30
- You remit in total
- $65,000
- Cost of the money
- $15,000
An illustration, not a quote: nobody has offered you these terms. Real terms come from a funding partner and depend on your cash flow, and fees can sit on top of the factor rate.
See my optionsEach one has its own page, with a worked example: all six calculators.
What the money buys
What owners in this trade actually spend it on.
The launch, not the machine
Training hours, the consult push, the first run of consumables, and the weeks where a new service is on the menu before it is on the schedule. The hardware itself is usually cheaper somewhere else; the money around it is what an advance is shaped for.
A second provider's ramp
A new injector or aesthetician is paid from week one and the column fills over weeks. You are buying the half-empty schedule in between, which is the part owners underestimate when they hire.
Inventory ahead of the heavy stretch
Product bought for the weeks you already know are busy, rather than ordered week to week as bookings appear. Nothing about this is clever; it is working capital timed to a calendar you can see coming.
Moving one-off clients onto memberships
The software and the campaign that turn a once-a-year visit into a recurring draft. It is the change that makes an aesthetics file read less like retail and more like a subscription book, and it shows up in the deposits within a quarter.
Which one fits
Which financing fits your situation?
I don’t recommend a product without seeing your numbers. Below is how owners in this trade usually think the options through: possibilities to explore, not an offer or a recommendation. Where none of them is the right move, the table says so.
| Your situation | What might be worth exploring, and why |
|---|---|
| The consult list for a treatment you do not offer keeps growing. | A merchant cash advance usually fits the working capital around a launch — training, consumables, the marketing — rather than the equipment. The demand already existing is what makes the arithmetic work. |
| What you actually need is the device. | Not the device: a machine with a long working life is usually cheaper on equipment financing or the manufacturer's own program; equipment financing is a shape you can ask for on the form. The launch around it — consumables, staffing, the marketing that fills the first weeks of the calendar — is working capital, and that is the part a line or an advance is for. |
| You are hiring a second provider before the schedule justifies it. | A business line of credit is the cheaper shape if it is open to you, because draws can follow the ramp week by week instead of taking the whole amount on day one and remitting on all of it. |
| Most of your money arrives as platform settlements and monthly membership drafts, not as daily card sales. | If you take an advance, the remittance shape matters more here than in most trades: a fixed daily debit falls on days nothing is landing, while one that flexes with collections tracks how you actually get paid. Both go by merchant cash advance. |
Which shape fits is my read, not an offer. Partners decide what they will do with a request, and on what terms.
Questions
The ones med spa & aesthetics owners ask.
Read this before you talk to anyone:
Most of my clients pay through a third-party financing plan. How does that read in my file?
It reads as deposits from a financing platform rather than as card volume, which is fine as long as it lands in the business account and you can explain it. Those plans are the client's credit, not the business's — they are not a liability of yours — but they do change the shape of your deposits, and deposit shape is most of what underwriting reads. Say which platform settles with you and how often it does.
Does a membership book help?
Yes, more than almost anything else on this page. Recurring drafts land on the same days every month regardless of how the week went, which is the steadiest line in an aesthetics file and the one that makes the rest of it legible. A business that has moved a good share of its clients onto memberships looks materially different from one that has not.
I have taken a lot of money for packages that are not delivered yet. Does that count as revenue?
Not in the way you would like it to. A pre-paid series is cash you already hold against treatments you still owe, so it inflates a good month and leaves the obligation behind it. Raise it rather than letting a partner find it, and be ready to say what share of the balance is undelivered.
Can I use this to buy a laser or a body contouring device?
You can, and it is usually the expensive way to do it. A device has a long working life and holds its value, which is exactly what equipment financing is priced for, and you can ask for it on the form. I would rather say so than sell you the wrong shape. Where an advance does fit is the working capital around the machine once it is in the room.
Do you work with medical practices?
No. This page covers the retail side of aesthetics: cash-pay, card-paid businesses. Anything insurance-billed is outside it, and I do not advise on clinical, licensing, staffing or regulatory questions of any kind. Those belong with your own advisors, and nothing on this site should be read as guidance on them.
Get funding options
Tell me about your med spa & aesthetics business.
About two minutes, and no credit pull from me. Tell me what you do, what you bring in and what the money is for, and I take your request to funding partners. You can strengthen it with a bank connection afterward.
Free to you. Funding partners pay Addy for the introduction.
Addy is not a lender, and does not underwrite, price or decide who gets funded.
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