Pat Phelan has a canny eye for spotting business opportunities and scaling them up for buy-outs. The Cork entrepreneur did this with his Cubic Telecom, which he founded in 2005 and exited in 2012. Then it was on to Trustev, established with former employee Chris Kennedy, and acquired by TransUnion for $40m in 2016 and now it's Sisu Clinics time.
Phelan has teamed up with James Cotter and Brian Cotter to roll out a string of clinics that will be like the Starbucks of beauty. The Cotters are two doctors, also from Cork, who ran a beauty clinic in Academy Street for medically supervised facial 'tweakments'.
Phelan persuaded the brothers to think bigger and establish a global chain, branded as Sisu. The venture opened its 14th clinic in Terenure recently and one in Belfast, and the game plan is to take the concept to the UK and the US, backed by substantial venture capital.
Pat Phelan (56) is very much a self-made millionaire. Persuaded by his parents to leave school after his Junior Cert, he became a butcher's apprentice and at night pulled pints in his father's pub.
At 21 years-of-age, Phelan was married and a father of two children. Life took a turn for the worse due to alcohol addiction, until one day he signed up with Alcoholics Anonymous and swore off the demon drink.
Sisu is Finnish for resilience and making it through. Pat Phelan embodies the concept, and sobriety and ambition turned him into a techno-charged rocket.
"Sisu will follow a similar successful trajectory to Cubic and Trustev and be a multi-million euro bonanza business too. "We are witnessing a growing demand for aesthetic treatments across Ireland and beyond," he says.
"We have 70 employees in Ireland, and this year revenue is 180% ahead of a year ago. We don't have to worry about major risks or going broke like future-based tech concepts. We have built an extraordinary team and are putting key people in position. We are aiming for 20 Sisu clinics in New York's Manhattan area, and have signed six leases so far."
The Sisu concept is pop-in, non-surgical treatments to refresh and restore the skin. The company has trademarked the phrase 'Tweakments' for applications including Botox, fillers, skin boosters, and more.
Sisu's Botox anti-wrinkle tweak is priced at €170 for one facial area, such as mouth or forehead, and €250 for two tweaks. The brow lift price is €170, lip augmentation costs €300, dermal fillers under the eye costs €550, and there's also teeth whitening for €79.
Another procedure offered is Prophilo a tissue modulator and skin booster to increase collagen and elastin, leaving a glowing result. This is priced at €675 for two treatments delivered five weeks apart. The Slim procedure that removes fat cells from under the chin using deoxycholic acid costs around €400.
Sisu's operating company is called Sempiternal Aesthetics Ltd, which is slightly hyperbolic, as sempiternal means everlasting. In fact, Sisu customers tend to return for tweaks every three months or so.
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The enterprise was funded from the off in May 2018 with €1m in equity capital. Phelan invested €350,000, and the Kielys of Voxpro fame invested €150,000, with Linda Kiely joining the board of directors. PCH's Liam Casey stumped up €75,000 seed capital, while Jonathan Kelly, with an address in the Netherlands, parted with €100,000.
A much larger fundraiser followed in September 2020, when 4.4 million preferred shares were allotted for a value of $5.5m. Investors in this round included serious players such as Greycroft Partners in New York, Bullpen Capital in San Francisco, with most of the charter investors following-on too.
The result was that Sempiternal Aesthetics ended 2020 with a balance sheet cash of €5.1m and plenty of firepower for the clinics roll-out. Start-up losses at the end of 2020 amounted to €530,000, and now Phelan insists that the clinics are paying their way.
Sisu co-founder Dr Brian Cotter (36) believes the Covid pandemic stoked up facial vanity. "We call it the Zoom Boom," he says. "The pandemic forced people to use screens to communicate. The digital screen sees you in a different light because the traditional mirror turns everything the other way around. Suddenly people became aware of unfamiliar lines, shadows and ageing marks that the mirror had failed to highlight."
Pat Phelan agrees. "I think that our customers want to sustain the looks they have now. They want to slow the clock and retain their appearance for as long as possible. People are time poor, and they want swift efficient treatments intersected with medical safety. Our Sisu clinics intersect between beauty and medicine.
"The average age for Botox now is 28, and women and men are very well informed about the choices they have out there because of the internet. Botox and fillers are the most popular requests."
Though Phelan made enough money from Trustev to never have to work again, now he's back in road warrior mode, sourcing clinic locations in America.
"This is the hard part now as we scale up the size," he explains. "I am based in the United States with Brian Cotter to work on the upward trajectory. The two of us are like the odd couple, he's Felix and I am Oscar."
"We are up at 6am every morning, on the phones, seeking locations and looking at architectural drawings. We finish up with the gym every evening, then one of us does the laundry and the other takes on the cooking. It was great to travel to Miami recently to open our first clinic there and meet the team.
"We are looking at extreme growth, doubling year on year as we target amazing locations," Phelan adds. "We have attracted venture capital companies who had not previously considered beauty clinics.
"Brand loyalty is key to our future success. Here is a company that started out with one clinic in Academy Street in Cork, and now we are hitting Manhattan, which has a larger population than Ireland. Once we achieve the right scale we will be going for an IPO. We will be thinking along the lines of Warby Parker opticians in the US who floated and made over $4.5 billion."
