“Glow Getter”: from Community College Student to $2.5B PublicCo CFO
Q&A with Liyuan Woo, CFO of BeautyHealth (NASDAQ: SKIN)
This story is part of the Entrepreneurship of Life series, a collection of interviews with immigrant startup founders, venture capitalists, and tech business leaders.
INTRODUCTION
Born in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution, she grew up as Deng Xiaoping’s “reform and opening up” policy was reshaping China. She moved to the US as a teenager who barely spoke English, and yet began earning her own bread within months. Fresh off the boat, she waitressed during the day and took language lessons at night; if someone had told her then that, in 20 years, she would be running a multi-billion-dollar US company as CFO, she would have laughed.
If the story of Liyuan Woo, CFO of BeautyHealth (NASDAQ: SKIN), isn’t one about transformation (or being a “glow getter”, to use a term coined by her company), then I don’t know what is.
Wearing an energetic short bob and a warm, captivating smile, Liyuan greeted me on Zoom from her hotel room for a management offsite. For the next hour and a half that felt like minutes, we chatted about, among other things:
Liyuan’s unconventional formative years from China to the US
An explorative career journey leading to BeautyHealth
What is this thing called HydraFacial that BeautyHealth created? How did it grow 3.5x (~$120MM sales increase) in three years?
Why did BeautyHealth practice radical generosity within its ecosystem, and how?
What is a harder career challenge than leading a business under existential threats through bankruptcy?
How did Toastmasters and acting play a part in Liyuan’s “glowvolution”?
Throughout her career, Liyuan has provided leadership to both growth oriented and turnaround situations. Prior to joining The Beauty Health Company as CFO, EVP in September 2020, Liyuan was the COO & CFO of The VOID, a highly rated virtual reality brand. Prior to The VOID, she was the CFO, EVP at SharkNinja, a growth oriented multi-billion dollar consumer electronic brand. Previously, she served as a Director of Alix Partners and acted as CFO during Gymboree Group’s multi-billion dollar restructuring process. Prior to that, she spent 6 years at bebe as a public company CFO. Liyuan started her career with Deloitte, providing financial advisory services to public and private companies for M&As, IPOs and growth initiatives. Liyuan currently lives in Southern California with her husband, Nick, and son, Theo.
THE WAY SHE CAME
Your life in the US had an interesting start. Tell us more about it?
To put things in context, let’s go back further. I was born in Beijing during the 70s to parents who worked cross-border jobs — a rare breed back then when China was still largely isolated from the world. My mom worked in the export-import industry, and my dad was an international news reporter, translator, and radio anchor. He was dispatched to Africa when my mom was expecting me, and I had never met him until five. I was named “Liyuan” (力援) — “aid with strength” in Chinese — to commemorate my dad’s work of supporting China’s “African brothers”. It also embodied my parents’ hope that I, too, would grow up to support others one day.
With two workaholic parents, I grew up in boarding schools since I was a toddler. Books and everyone around me were my earliest teachers. Perhaps due to a lack of traditional parenting, I was a rebellious kid and a “headache” for my teachers at school. Getting good grades or obeying authority was simply not my thing.
Over the years, my dad left journalism to become a turnaround specialist for Chinese exporters. He hopped from country to country for work, and after high school I visited him in the US.
After staying with him for just a month, though, I began to miss my freedom. So I packed up and moved three hours away to Boston, daring myself to make it on my own. Not speaking much English yet, I found a waitressing job to pay bills and enrolled at a community college to take language and other classes. I worked six days a week and took six courses in the meantime — it was busy, but my self-reliance was worth it. When the first transcript arrived, I couldn’t believe what it said — a 4.0/4.0 GPA. I had never cared about being a model student, but once hard work by choice and not by external pressure yielded results, it felt incredibly rewarding. I got into Bentley University after two years of community college, with a lifelong lesson learnt about intrinsic motivation and the value of hard work.
You started your professional career as an auditor at Deloitte. Could you recap the professional journey that has brought you to the CFO role at BeautyHealth today?
When I graduated from Bentley with an accounting degree, auditing at Deloitte was a natural gateway to the world of business. I spent five years as an auditor, learning about businesses in various industries and stages. I later explored a few different roles internally and eventually landed in M&A consulting, which was fast-paced and mentally stimulating — exactly what I was looking for.
In 2008, when the market froze and M&As were on pause, my husband Nick and I saw it as a perfect time to welcome a new life into the family. I took six months off, which turned out to be yet the most redefining six months of my life. As someone who used to never sit still, I discovered unprecedented peace from being present with my newborn boy Theo, second by second. This tranquility went much deeper than what I had felt after a month-long yoga retreat in Bangalore a few years before — great as it was.
Motherhood also made me reflect on my career — I felt the urge to own something completely: “raise” a business as if it were my child, and answer for its success or failure. With this epiphany and a preference for less travel as a working mom, I decided it was time to leave consulting.
I joined bebe, a women’s fashion brand and began a tumultuous ride, initially as the Controller and Principal Accounting Officer and later taking over as CFO. Shuffling through two boards and three CEOs during my 6-year tenure there, the company fought for survival during the offline retail apocalypse. Sinking my teeth deep into a business for the first time, I was humbled to learn the complexity of a global retail operation like bebe. It was nothing like what it appears on surface (“How hard can it be to sell stuff?”– you’d be surprised).
I eventually departed after realizing the dynamics at bebe were no longer conducive to a successful business turnaround. I then dabbled at an early-stage startup but discovered it wasn’t a good fit for my experience managing finances for a scaled, complex business. In 2017, I joined children’s apparel brand Gymboree as interim CFO during its bankruptcy reorganization. To me, it was a fascinating crash course on corporate bankruptcy and a rewarding challenge.
After Gymboree, I joined SharkNinja, a fast-charging new home appliance brand that had scaled sales from zero to $2bn in just six years. It was a vastly different creature from anything I had known. Growing at all costs amid cutthroat competition, it steadfastly placed tangible outcomes over what was considered best practice. While to me this philosophy has its flaws, the exposure was invaluable and offered me fresh perspectives. The breakthrough growth mindset with a firm belief in progress over perfection rings true to all blue ocean growth companies.
After SharkNinja, I locked my eyes on fast-growing category creators — companies with similar momentum as SharkNinja but also a moat from pioneering something new. I joined the VOID, a VR experience creator; it was a fulfilling ride, but the business sadly had to shut its doors in 2020 during protracted pandemic closures.
In the summer of 2020, I got a call about the CFO role at HydraFacial — which is now BeautyHealth. The company was exactly what I had been searching for — a hyper-growth category creator, in the booming beauty health space. In my first call with Clint Carnell, then CEO, I was compelled by his vision to build not just a business, but a thriving whole ecosystem. More on this later, but the chemistry was mutual between me and the company, and I came onboard in September 2020.
THE BEAUTYHEALTH STORY
A growing number of spas and dermatology clinics now have “HydraFacial treatment” on their menus. As the primary brand of BeautyHealth, what is HydraFacial exactly?
A HydraFacial® treatment is a quick, non-invasive, and approachable professional skincare procedure. It uses a unique delivery system to cleanse, extract, and hydrate with our patented hydradermabrasion technology and super serums, delivering an immediate outcome in just 30 minutes. It can be either standalone or a priming step before more involved skin treatment, done anywhere from once a year to once a month depending on personal preference. HydraFacial products are currently available in over 90 countries, with over 20,000 delivery systems globally and millions of treatments performed each year.
Can you elaborate on why you joined BeautyHealth?
As I mentioned, I was looking to join a category-creating hyper-growth platform, and BeautyHealth is just that. It fills the void between retail beauty / personal care and aesthetic medical (e.g., a Botox) — by providing more instantaneous, notable results than the former while costing less money and hassle than the latter. It also serves as a gateway to many other potential treatments or products. The market appeal was clear in numbers: in the three years before the pandemic, HydraFacial product sales multiplied 3.5 times.
I was further sold by the ecosystem mindset of BeautyHealth’s leadership. Since BeautyHealth primarily sells its products to treatment service providers, its success ultimately hinges on theirs. Recognizing this, BeautyHealth makes providers its partners and invests heavily in supporting them. Case in point: the company offers extensive educational resources and business tools to estheticians and spa owners — not for a profit, but to help them better serve patrons and run businesses. Naturally, when they thrive, these partners place more HydraFacial orders and tell their friends about the brand.
Positioning itself as a platform, BeautyHealth also collaborates with a variety of physician beauty brands (e.g., Dr. Murad, Dr. Nassif, etc.) to offer booster serums as customizable treatment add-ons. Consumers love experiencing their favorite brands in a new format through HydraFacial. To me, openness and a platform vision differentiate the company and set it on a path to succeed, which makes a leadership role here highly rewarding.
In December 2020, HydraFacial was acquired by a SPAC — Vesper Healthcare Acquisition Corp, for $1.1 billion. Vesper was founded by Brent Saunders, the ex-CEO of Botox-maker Allergan and a respected dealmaker in the medical aesthetics space, after he sold Allergan to AbbVie for $63 billion. Can you share the backstory of the HydraFacial / Vesper merger?
With his expert eyes, Brent saw tremendous value in our industry-leading brand affinity and unconventional go-to-market strategy.
When Brent was heading Allergan, Botox had for years held a Net Promoter Score that led the beauty industry. [Author’s note: Net Promoter Score®, or NPS®, is a widely used measure for consumer brand loyalty. It represents the percentage of total customers who are active promoters of the brand, less the percentage who are potential detractors. The higher the score, the better.] A few years ago, a newcomer overtook Botox on the NPS leaderboard with a score of 40, well ahead of household beauty brands such as Lancôme and Estée Lauder. Just like this, HydraFacial caught Brent’s attention.
Upon more investigation, Brent discovered another thing he liked: HydraFacial’s sales strategy was opposite to industry traditional wisdom, but perfectly aligned with his own vision. Most medical aesthetic product sales are “top-down” — i.e., focus on dermatologists and plastic surgeons, who are believed to be the most influential in their practices’ medical equipment procurement. Competition for this small group of professionals’ attention is ruthless. To make things harder, as competitors themselves, dermatologists and plastic surgeons often pressure suppliers to “pick a side”, effectively limiting the addressable market for anyone who obliges.
Contrary to popular beliefs, Brent sees estheticians and nurse practitioners as overlooked key influencers in the sales funnel. They hold consumer relationships and educate consumers about new products and services — which makes them fantastic external evangelizers. Internally, their voice matters as well, and often more than the doctors’ when it comes to buying equipment for their own use.
Sharing a similar view, HydraFacial works hard on making estheticians its allies and advocates. Their internal lobbying plus HydraFacial’s favorable spa and clinic economics often close the sale: HydraFacial delivery systems are easy to use, produce reliable and visible results, pay themselves off in 5 months on average, and generate good margins. As a result, facilities often order our products without involvement or even knowledge from their doctors.
Recognizing the value of our brand and business model, Brent made an offer for Allergan to acquire HydraFacial, but HydraFacial’s private equity owners at the time weren’t ready to sell. Fast-forwarding to fall 2020, Brent reached out again and proposed a deal with his new SPAC Vesper, when our owners were contemplating an exit. We’re fortunate to partner with an industry veteran and visionary like him for the journey ahead.
Can you zoom in on the company’s partnership with estheticians?
We are symbiotic with our esthetician community through a “training-marketing-sales” triangle. To win over new providers, we initiate with radical generosity by offering them a broad selection of low-cost continuing education resources. We provide podcasts, virtual expert hours, business building webinars, in-person workshops, and even multi-day career programs. Topics range anywhere from treatment procedure safety and product ingredients to selling skills, social media marketing, and even tax planning. Providers love our training which helps them upskill, and we benefit from a growing pool of well-trained practitioners rallying around our brand.
This army of advocates play an integral part in our marketing. On the one hand, our brand awareness campaigns draw interested new customers to our spa partners; simultaneously, our providers promote us with passion by voluntarily publishing 4 out of every 5 social media posts about HydraFacial. In fact, they post 5x more about us than about our competitors, and 45% of our users heard about HydraFacial through estheticians. Another great example of our synergistic marketing is the HydraFacial “#GLOWvolution city takeovers”, where we send out retrofitted 16-wheeler trucks that serve as “pop-up” HydraFacial treatment rooms, and local practitioners volunteer to administer our free trials, building a new customer pipeline for us as well as for themselves.
After training builds a solid provider base and marketing generates growing demand, sales comes naturally after — our provider partners place more orders with us to meet their patrons’ needs. Together, we sow the seeds and reap the harvest.
What are your top areas of investment over the next 12–24 months?
Our priorities are clear: relentless growth, R&D, and data.
While we’re in 90 countries, we’ve only covered one or two cities in many of them, leaving massive room for further penetration. Over time, we’d also like to replace the wholesale distribution model in the newer markets with our signature direct-to-provider model. Our years of history with tight marketing budgets has fostered a sophisticated knowledge of ROIs, and we’re now opening the floodgate where incremental dollars yield the greatest impact. We’re also building out our global operational support system to sustain profitable scaling.
Meanwhile, we’re doubling down on product R&D. We’ve just released Syndeo (Greek word for ‘connect’) — our latest generation of delivery system. As its name suggests, Syndeo is connected to the cloud, which enables more advanced features such as hand gesture interaction, making it more user-friendly for estheticians. We have also beta-launched “Glow ‘N Go” — a brand new at-home device to be made broadly available later this year: it could make HydraFacial part of consumers’ daily skincare ritual between professional treatments, building a direct and intimate relationship with the users. Glow ‘N Go will similarly be connected via our mobile app HydraFacial Nation; the app uses device data and the phone camera to run “face analyzers” for users, assess their skin health, provide care tips, and recommend HydraFacial services nearby.
This brings us to the third prong of our priorities — integrating and leveraging data across our offerings. With consumer consent, our app, at-home and professional delivery systems all collect relevant data and use it to better serve them. The consumer scans a QR code when checking in for her spa appointment, and in seconds, her new esthetician will learn everything about her skin condition and treatment regimen. This means a seamless, personalized experience for our consumer wherever she’s getting her HydraFacial.
Beauty Health just brought onboard a new CEO, Andrew Stanleick, following the departure of ex-CEO Clint Carnell. Unlike Clint whose background was in healthcare, Andrew has spent most of his career in beauty, working for companies like Loreal and Coty (which manages the beauty line for brands ranging from Burberry to Adidas). What changes should we expect from this leadership transition?
Andrew has been great! He brings tremendous branding and digital expertise as well as global experience to BeautyHealth. At Coty, he not only turned around Cover Girl, but also oversaw the hypergrowth of Kylie Jenner’s and Kim Kardashian’s digital beauty brands. He is a true global citizen and lived in Asia for 8 years managing the APAC business for Coach and Loreal. He also spent many years managing EMEA and Americas operations throughout his career. His speed and builder orientation coupled with best practices from established global organizations are exactly what we need to scale BeautyHealth.
On multiple past jobs, you were an operations-heavy CFO that essentially also acted as COO. Is that also the case at BeautyHealth?
Yes. At BeautyHealth, I oversee operations, supply chain, and enterprise IT in addition to finance. As we double down on international expansion, I spend a lot of time optimizing our global infrastructure. We need to source high quality inventory around the world, ideally having supply close to end markets; worldwide logistics need to be meticulously designed for efficiency; multi-jurisdiction tax planning plays an important part as well. These puzzle pieces must all fit together for our expansion to be sustainable and profitable.
THE MUSINGS
How do you apply what you learnt in consulting to running a business?
Consulting takes being inquisitive and connecting dots; being a CFO is no different. You identify suboptimal parts in the business, probe them with curiosity, and piece together data and information to see the bigger picture. You’ll need both intuition and a fact-based, data-driven way of thinking.
Bringing together information requires bringing together people. In a large organization where functions don’t talk, tribal knowledge (and sometimes local agenda) become common and impede effective decision-making and execution. Good consultants and CFOs facilitate dialogues, build consensus, and foster collaboration. Afterall, everything in a business is correlated, and isolated efforts often don’t work.
One crucial trait for a CFO that consulting doesn’t teach is to test and learn. Thankfully it is part of who I am. 180-degree changes in a corporate setting often meet with tremendous resistance and crater; instead, a series of small experiments and incremental changes based on learnings go a long way.
You’ve been through many tough business challenges, such as existential threats for traditional retail, a corporate bankruptcy, and COVID hitting an in-person service business. Looking back, what was the most trying time for you? What have you taken away from it?
To me, issues with a business, process, or system can be difficult but are ultimately all solvable; it is people dynamics that present the hardest tests. For a business leader, that can be misalignment and distrust from a key stakeholder.
When I was CFO on a prior job, the entire management team — myself included — fought hard to turn the struggling business around. Just as our efforts began to bear fruit, however, one of our decisions went awry. Rather than advising and giving us space to course-correct, the company’s founder and majority shareholder charged back in and inserted himself. In the name of a fix-up, he scorched our investments and hard-earned progress. It was deeply demoralizing, and many of us chose to leave. Till today, this experience reminds me that no business problem can be solved without trust as the bedrock, and that zero tolerance for even honest missteps drives away talent.
Ben Horowitz at A16Z has a theory on how businesses during peace time vs. war time call for different leadership styles. You have steered businesses in both types of environments. Do you lead differently during peace time vs. war time?
In a way, being a war time leader is more straightforward. Pressure to survive tends to keep everyone focused on clear, near-term priorities and follow the lead.
Peace time leadership requires more finesse. When the goal is not to survive but to charge ahead, everyone might have a different idea of which way to go. A leader needs to leverage group wisdom in setting a direction and then rally everyone behind it. This starts with assembling a team of similar values and fostering a culture of trust and candor. People engage in constructive debates with egos set aside, arrive at thoughtful decisions, and hold each other accountable in their implementation. This is something we strive towards at BeautyHealth.
Running a company and raising a 12-year-old boy, do you have any tips for fellow high-functioning career parents?
Divide and conquer! Work with your spouse to each find a role that fits your disposition. My husband is a straight-A, no-nonsense MIT graduate — he establishes discipline and structure for our son’s education. I, on the other hand, play the disruptor; I goof off with our son, making sure he gets plenty of playtime and opens up to us. I am not just his mom, but also a naughty sister and confidant. These different parenting roles come natural to me and my husband and complement each other. Don’t get me wrong, often times it’s a struggle to balance the dynamics, but love and over-communication help move things forward.
You used to do Toastmasters and acting to overcome fear for public speaking. Can you share how those experiences affected you?
Early on in my career, I struggled with speaking in front of large groups. I had conviction in my ideas, but my accent and sometimes spotty grammar made me self-conscious and unconfident. When I tried to talk in a meeting, my shaky voice would give away my insecurities and handicap the message.
I was fortunate that a mentor of mine, Mike Richards, saw in me who I could be. He enjoyed Toastmasters himself and encouraged me to give it a try. [Author’s Note: Toastmasters is a global community with local chapters and clubs, where members make prepared and impromptu public speeches and give each other feedback.] I did try, and it was a gamechanger. In front of a supportive audience, I uncovered a new persona in myself: someone good at speaking off-the-cuff and even cracking jokes once the pressure was off, someone who people enjoyed listening to. She was unfamiliar, but wasn’t she exciting! It dawned on me that I could be her, I wanted to be her, and — I am her.
Later on, acting became another instrumental channel for my self-discovery and confidence building. Until I tried, I had had no idea that acting can be about being oneself, just placed in someone else’s situation. It forced me to get out of my head and into the present; to sense, express, and go with the flow. It shook me to the core. As I pushed against my old instincts, I couldn’t help but pondered: why did I behave the way I did? Do I like it? Can I choose to be different? To me, acting started as just a next step to Toastmasters in building my public presence, but over time, it turned into a “glowvolution” journey of my own, leading to self-awareness and growth. I am grateful for the profound way it has reshaped me.
Keyi (Author): If you enjoyed this story, check out my other interviews in the Entrepreneurship of Life series (catalog with links at the end) and subscribe (for free) to get new stories delivered to your inbox. You can also find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.