Three numbers in — your average ticket, visits per year, and retention horizon — your client LTV percentile out, benchmarked against the California medical spa industry distribution.
LTV horizon is fixed at 3 years — the standard for the CA med spa benchmark distribution. Your numbers map to a percentile.
Blended across services. What a typical retained client spends per visit.
Botox-anchored: 3–4 / yr. Membership facials: 6–10 / yr. Body / laser: 4–6 / yr.
How long a retained client stays before lapsing. Industry typical: 2–4 years.
Percentile bands derived from CA med spa industry surveys plus the observed distribution across the 706 Aura Screened cohort. Median LTV runs ~$2,800; top decile starts around $7,500.
$4,800
90th
Your LTV is rare. Most CA med spas don't get here.
Top-decile LTV usually comes from either a membership-anchored model (Hydrafacial Black Tier, etc.) or a Botox-cycle business that's nailed the rebook architecture. Your acquisition spend is doing real work — each new client compounds.
The benchmark tells you where you sit. The audit tells you which specific architecture changes would move your number — and where your dormant LTV is hiding.
Book your Client Reactivation AuditAcross the California medical spa industry, 3-year retained-client LTV runs roughly $1,500 to $4,500 for most operators — that's the 25th to 75th percentile band. The median sits around $2,800. Below $1,500 is bottom-quartile (usually a frequency problem, not a price problem). Above $4,500 is top-quartile and almost always membership-anchored or Botox-cycle-anchored.
Three numbers: average ticket per visit × visits per year × years retained = lifetime value. Use a 3-year horizon as the industry-standard benchmark window. For a more sophisticated number, weight by retention curve (a client retained year 1 isn't equally likely to be retained year 3), but the simple multiplication gets you within 15-20% of the real number for most spas.
Average ticket only tells you what one visit is worth. LTV tells you what the whole client relationship is worth — which is the only number that matters for deciding what your CAC ceiling should be. Two spas with identical $400 average tickets can have radically different businesses: one where clients come twice and lapse, one where clients come quarterly for three years. The second is 6x more valuable per acquired client, even though the ticket is the same.
The widely-cited benchmark is 3:1 — every $1 of CAC should produce at least $3 of LTV. Below that ratio, your acquisition spend is paying for itself but barely; above 5:1, you're probably under-investing in growth. The math is sensitive to retention assumptions — a spa with median LTV ($2,800) needs CAC under ~$930 to clear 3:1, which most well-run spas do easily.
Botox-anchored practices have the highest median LTV because the 3-4 month treatment cycle does most of the rebooking work automatically — clients return without active marketing. Membership-anchored hydrafacial spas come second. Pure-laser and pure-body-contouring spas tend to land in the lower-middle of the distribution because the treatment cycles are longer and less self-reminding, so retention depends more on architecture than on the treatment itself.
Your LTV percentile tells us how much each dormant client in your list is worth. A spa with a top-decile LTV has dormant clients worth $7,000+ each — the math on reactivating even 10 of them is significant. A spa with median LTV has dormant clients worth $2,800 each, which still adds up across a large dormant pool. The audit pulls your actual numbers and runs the math against your real list, not the industry distribution.
This tool runs on industry averages. The Client Reactivation Audit runs on your spa’s actual data — your POS export, your real numbers, your specific clients. 30 minutes on a call, no slide deck, no fee, no pitch unless our solutions actually fit your problem. You keep the audit either way.
Our solutions only fit a narrow band of problems — by design. If we audit and they don’t fit yours, you keep the diagnosis anda pointer at whatever does — even if it’s not us. If they do fit but it’s not the right time, we stay friends — you know the problem and the solution for whenever it lands. The point is you walk away with a real read, not a sales feeling.