Hunt Club vs Bolster for Specialty Outpatient and MedSpa Groups
Choose between Hunt Club and Bolster for a medspa group executive based on whether your urgent gap is marketing and membership growth or clinical operations and medical director alignment. Most states require a physician medical director for injectable and laser services, even at non-physician-owned businesses, and that relationship shapes what you can safely offer.
That's the backdrop for this leadership search. Hunt Club and Bolster both place healthcare services executives, and which one fits depends on whether your more urgent gap is marketing and membership growth, or clinical operations and medical director alignment. Getting that distinction right before the search starts saves you from evaluating candidates against the wrong criteria entirely.
Separate Provider Recruiting From This Executive Search
Injectors, aestheticians and nurse practitioners are recruited through clinical staffing channels, not through an executive search firm, and neither Hunt Club nor Bolster is the right tool for building that provider bench. This search covers the CEO, COO or CMO who runs the business, brand and growth strategy within the boundaries your medical director relationship allows. Keeping the two searches distinct matters even when a provider shortage is part of what's driving the urgency behind this executive hire, since a job description that quietly tries to solve both ends up attracting the wrong candidates for either.
Why should the medical director relationship shape the hire?
A CEO or COO candidate needs to understand, concretely, how to work with a supervising physician on protocol approval, adverse event reporting and scope-of-practice boundaries for injectors, not just respect the relationship abstractly. Ask candidates to describe a specific disagreement they navigated with a medical director and how it was resolved. A candidate who has never had that kind of conversation hasn't been tested on one of the more delicate parts of this job, and their answer to a hypothetical version of it will tell you far less than a real story would. Weak answers tend to describe escalating every disagreement upward rather than resolving most of them directly.
Ask each CEO or COO candidate about the medical director relationship:
- Describe a specific disagreement you navigated with a medical director and how it was resolved.
- How have you worked with a supervising physician on protocol approval for injectable and laser services?
- How did you handle adverse event reporting when the operating side and the clinical side saw it differently?
- How did you respect scope-of-practice boundaries for injectors while still growing the business?
Membership and Package Sales Demand a Specific Marketing Skill Set
Aesthetic services are often sold as memberships or prepaid packages rather than one-off visits, which means a CMO here needs direct experience with recurring-revenue and package-based selling, not just general aesthetics marketing or social media growth. A leader who has only run brand awareness campaigns, without ever owning a membership retention number, is missing the half of the job that actually protects revenue between a client's cosmetic procedures. Ask candidates specifically how they've handled a member who wants to cancel right after a disappointing result, since that conversation says more about their retention instincts than any campaign metric would.
Where a Referral Search Pays Off
Because leadership experience spanning both medical compliance and aesthetics marketing is genuinely narrow, Hunt Club's model of sourcing through operators who personally know a candidate's track record on both fronts carries real value. A referral from someone who watched a candidate balance provider satisfaction, medical director compliance and membership growth simultaneously tells you more than a resume listing separate wins in each area. Finding all three strengths verified by one trusted source is rare enough to be worth the extra time a referral-based search usually takes.
Where a Flexible Engagement Solves an Urgent Gap
If your COO departs while membership renewal season is approaching, or right after a medical director relationship needs rebuilding, waiting months for a permanent hire risks real revenue and real compliance exposure at the same time. Bolster's marketplace model, spanning fractional and interim placement, can put an experienced aesthetics operator into the seat quickly enough to protect both fronts while a longer, more deliberate search runs behind it. That kind of dual coverage is exactly what a rushed permanent hire usually can't deliver under the same time pressure.
Sizing the Investment Against the Marketing Skill You're Actually Buying
The harder part of this hire to price isn't the operations experience, it's the combination of medical compliance judgment and aesthetics marketing fluency, membership and package sales specifically, that rarely shows up together in one candidate. Executive hires broadly average $35,879 in cost per hire against $5,475 for a nonexecutive role1, and a leader who can genuinely do both jobs at once tends to cost more than that average, not less, given how few candidates can point to real experience in each.
What Good Looks Like
Good looks like an executive who can work through a real disagreement with the medical director without it becoming a crisis, while still hitting membership renewal and package sales targets consistently.
Building The Capability (5-Stage Skill Ladder)
How to Get Started
Frequently Asked Questions
Should the CEO also serve as the medical director?
Only if the CEO is a licensed physician in your state and genuinely wants both roles. In most groups, keeping the roles separate, a physician medical director focused on clinical oversight and a business executive focused on growth and operations, produces a cleaner division of responsibility and a healthier working relationship between the two.
Can a fractional executive manage provider relationships credibly?
Yes, if introduced properly and given real authority over scheduling, compensation structure conversations and escalation decisions. Providers generally respond to clear, consistent authority more than to the specific employment structure of the person holding it.
How long should this search take?
Expect this search to run past the executive median of 45 days from open role to accepted offer, toward the 60 days seen at larger organizations. Medical compliance judgment combined with aesthetics marketing experience is uncommon, which narrows the candidate pool.
What's the biggest risk of rushing this hire?
Damaging the medical director relationship or the membership renewal cycle at the same time, since both require steady attention during a transition and neither forgives a long gap in leadership. A rushed hire who's weak on either front tends to let that side slip first, often quietly enough that nobody notices until the next renewal cycle already looks worse.
Sources
Where we quote a benchmark, we show its source. Other figures in this guide are estimates or general guidance, so check them against your own numbers.
- Average cost-per-hire (SHRM 2025 Benchmarking). SHRM 2025 Benchmarking Reports press release, 2025.
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