Today we’d like to introduce you to Adam Corfee.
Hi Adam, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I’m a Jacksonville native, born and raised, and everything I’ve built has been right here in my own backyard.
Back in 2014, I opened my first spa as a franchise of Massage Green Spa. I was young, hungry, and convinced this city deserved a wellness experience that actually delivered. So I put my head down and went to work. Over the next decade we didn’t just keep the lights on. We became the number one performing location out of more than a hundred across the entire country. One studio, in Jacksonville, outperforming every other location in the system. That’s something I’m still proud of.
But somewhere along the way I realized we had outgrown the box we were operating in. We were doing the work, building the reputation, earning the loyalty, and I kept circling back to a harder question: what could we become if the vision were fully ours? So in late 2023, after roughly ten years inside the franchise, I did the thing that genuinely scared me. I negotiated our way out of the franchise agreement and went completely independent. No parent company. No safety net. Just the same team, the same standards, and a name that finally belonged to us. That’s when RE Spa was born.
Going independent meant betting everything on the people who got us there, and they bet right back on me. That same team is the reason any of this worked.
Then we grew. RE Spa became a true full-service destination: massage, Classic Facials, waxing, infrared sauna, HydraFacial, and Keravive, the kind of menu where someone can walk in carrying the weight of their week and walk out restored. In 2025 we expanded again, acquiring two Reveal: Waxing & Skincare studios and bringing a second brand under our roof. What started as one franchised location became a growing, independent, multi-brand company.
Today, by every metric that matters to me, RE Spa is the highest-volume and most successful spa in Jacksonville and the surrounding area. We have a team of 40 service providers and 50 talented people overall. We’re open 8AM to 10PM, seven days a week, which means our guests have more availability than anyone else in town. Twelve years in, we’ve built a reputation this community trusts.
And we’re not slowing down. We have a brand-new location, RE Spa at Seven Pines, on the way, and we’re laying the groundwork to franchise the brand we built. There’s a full-circle moment in that I don’t take lightly. The business that was once the top performer inside someone else’s franchise is now becoming a franchise of its own.
If my story comes down to one thing, it’s this: bet on your people, hold your standards, and have the nerve to walk away from comfortable when you know you were built for more.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
No, it has not been a smooth road, and I’d be lying if I said otherwise. The smooth version of this story doesn’t exist.
Our first real test came early, in 2017. We hit a point where we were roughly six months away from running out of money. If I couldn’t turn things around, we would have closed our doors by that summer. That is a sobering place to stand as an owner, staring at a finite runway and watching the clock tick down. So I dug in, made the hard calls, and went to work on every part of the business that needed fixing. By the end of the first quarter of 2017 we had turned the corner, and that turnaround became the foundation for every bit of success that came after. Surviving that taught me early that this business would never reward comfort. It would reward grit.
The next test was one nobody saw coming. Like every hands-on business built on people being together in a room, COVID hit us hard in 2020. We were forced to shut our doors, and 2020 became the first and only year in our entire history that revenue has ever declined. But in the middle of all that uncertainty, I made a decision I’ll always stand behind. We paid our entire team 100% of their normal earnings for the full nine weeks we were closed. They had families and bills and lives that didn’t pause just because the world did, and there was no version of this where I was going to let them carry that alone. When we reopened, it wasn’t business as usual either. We were masking, building extra time between every single guest to sanitize and air out each room, and rethinking the whole experience to keep everyone safe. Plenty of spas across the country never reopened. We did. We kept our heads down, took care of our team and our guests, and came out the other side stronger. In fact, 2021 turned around and became the strongest year we had ever had to that point.
Surviving 2017 and 2020 is a big part of what gave me the nerve for the scariest leap of all. Walking away from a national franchise meant walking away from the safety net that came with it: the brand recognition, the systems, the marketing machine, the playbook for nearly every decision. The day we went independent, all of that was gone, and the job of replacing it landed squarely on me. I had to rebuild the entire backbone of the business from scratch. The brand, the marketing, the operations, the software, the training, the standards. Things a franchisor used to simply hand me, I now had to build myself, with a lot of people counting on me to get it right.
Staffing has been the constant challenge underneath all of it, and anyone in this industry would tell you the same. We hold a high bar for the talent we bring on, and skilled, licensed providers who fit our culture are not easy to find and not easy to keep. Building a team of 40 service providers and 50 people overall, and keeping that team strong, has taken years of recruiting, training, and learning to lead better than I did the day before. There have been seasons where I’ve stepped right back into the day-to-day operations myself, because that’s what the moment called for. Even our growth came with curveballs. When we acquired our two Reveal studios, we inherited someone else’s systems, culture, and guest relationships, and had to thoughtfully bring all of it under one roof.
What carried us through every one of those struggles was the same thing every time. A team that believed in where we were going, standards we refused to lower, and a willingness to do the unglamorous work nobody sees. The road was never smooth. But every rough patch made the business sharper, and made me a better owner.
As you know, we’re big fans of RE Spa / Reveal: Waxing and Skincare. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
We operate two brands under one roof. RE Spa is our full-service spa, and Reveal: Waxing & Skincare is our pair of dedicated waxing and skincare studios. Together they let us take care of just about everything our guests need to feel like the best version of themselves.
At RE Spa, the menu is built to do exactly that. We offer massage, Classic Facials, waxing, infrared sauna, HydraFacial, and Keravive, all under one roof. Someone can come in for deep therapeutic massage, glowing skin, or a full reset, and find it in one place from a team they trust. Reveal is our specialist side of the house, focused entirely on waxing and skincare, where guests get that same high standard from people who do this all day, every day, and do it exceptionally well.
What we’re known for is reliability and quality, and I mean that in the most practical sense. When a guest books with us, they know exactly the experience they’re going to get, every single time. That consistency is hard to build and even harder to maintain across a team this size, and it’s the thing I’m most protective of.
What truly sets us apart comes down to a few things. First is availability. We’re open 8AM to 10PM, seven days a week, which gives our guests more flexibility than any other spa in town. Real life is busy, and we built our hours around the guest instead of asking the guest to build their life around us. Second is the breadth of what we offer in one place, so people don’t have to bounce between a massage studio, a facial bar, and a wax shop to take care of themselves. Third is our team. We hold a high bar for the talent we bring on, and our guests feel the difference in the hands of people who are genuinely skilled and genuinely care. And finally, we’ve built a real membership community, because we’d rather earn a guest for life than win a single appointment. We’re here to build relationships, not transactions.
Brand-wise, the thing I’m proudest of is RE Spa itself. When we left the franchise and went independent, we built this entire brand from the ground up. The name, the identity, the standards, the experience, all of it is ours, shaped by what we believe a spa should be rather than handed to us by a corporate playbook. Watching that brand earn the trust of this community over twelve years, and become the highest-volume and most successful spa in the area, is the accomplishment I hold closest.
What I’d want your readers to know is simple. We’re a local, independent, owner-operated business that has poured everything into doing this the right way. We have a team of 40 service providers and 50 talented people overall, and behind every appointment is a group that genuinely wants you to walk out feeling better than you walked in. That’s the whole point, and it always has been.
Any big plans?
The future is the part I’m most excited about, because everything we’ve built up to now was really just the foundation.
The next big milestone is a brand-new location, RE Spa at Seven Pines. It will be our fourth location and our largest, purpose-built spa yet, and it represents a real step up in scale for us. We’re putting a tremendous amount of care into it, because I want it to be the clearest expression yet of what RE Spa stands for. Growing into a new community we’re excited to serve is something the whole team is looking forward to.
But the change I’m proudest to be working toward is the one that closes the loop on our whole story. We started as a franchisee, running someone else’s brand, and grew it into the number one location in the country. Then we left, went independent, and built RE Spa from the ground up into the most successful spa in our area. Now we’re laying the groundwork to franchise RE Spa itself. The brand that was once the top performer inside someone else’s franchise is becoming a franchise of its own.
That means everything to me. It’s the chance to take the systems, the standards, and the culture we spent years building, and hand other driven entrepreneurs a real shot at the kind of success we found. I’ve lived both sides of that relationship, as the franchisee and now as the one building the franchise, and that perspective is something I genuinely believe will make us a better partner to the people who join us.
So the short version is more locations, a brand we’re scaling thoughtfully, and a future where RE Spa grows well beyond Jacksonville. Twelve years in, it honestly feels like we’re just getting started.
Pricing:
- $89.95 for your first one hour massage
- $79.95 exclusive member only rate on one hour massages
- $89.95 for your first one hour classic facial
- $9.95 for your first 45-minute Infrared Sauna session
- Full Body Professional waxing available and your first eyebrow, underarm or bikini line wax is complimentary
Contact Info:
- Website: https://respas.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/respaofficial/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/OfficialRESpas
