FLORIDA MOM MAGAZINE - January '09 - Pam Mahan - Youthful PassionBy: Michele Gillis Photos: Carrie-Lynn Smith
 Pam Mahan, owner of Youthful Medical Spa, has learned how to juggle owning a business, running a home, overseeing five children’s extracurricular activities and still keep smiling. “I’m a very Type A personality,” said Mahan. “I’m very organized. I think that’s the only way that I kind of get through. I have four lists. One for work, one for home, one for the nanny and one for my husband, Troy.”
Together she and Troy, have five children, Blair, 16; Jacob, 12; Sterling, 7; Berkleigh, 5 and Ainsleigh, 3. “They are all very active children,” said Mahan. “Our house is loud and energetic. We live in Marsh Landing and built our house because we couldn’t find a house with the right number of bedrooms to accommodate all of the children.”
Mahan and her husband Troy are the founders of Youthful Medical Spa, a non-surgical medical spa that performs procedures to enhance beauty and fix problem areas. When they opened the business, Mahan an aesthetics-trained physician assistant was doing all of the procedures herself. Since then, she has hired additional physician’s assistants to help her. “I do some procedures, consultations, seminars and speaking engagements,” she said. Mahan started out with a business partner, but ended up buying them out. When that happened Troy stepped in and took over the marketing and advertising of the company. “He has a background in sales, so he does training for the employees on sales,” she said.
Now that the business is up and running and doing well, she devotes one day a week to be in the office and the rest of her week is devoted to being a mom. “I am physically committed to being in the office every Wednesday,” she said. “I am in and out multiple times on the other days. This way I try to still be mom. Ainsleigh goes to pre-school Monday, Wednesday and Friday so on Tuesdays and Thursdays I try to stay home with her.” She also volunteers at Ponte Vedra Palm Valley Elementary on Monday’s and Fridays for an hour or so in the morning.
Mahan has a nanny, Sarah Swartz who comes to help her in the afternoons.
Swartz has been working for Mahan for three years. “She helps me when the children need to be multiple places at the same time,” she said. “One will have T-ball. One will have ballet. One will have basketball. One will have tutoring. One will have cheerleading. There are so many activities that sometimes it takes all three of us (Her, Troy and Sarah) to handle it all. We divide and conquer.”
Swartz also helps in the spa part-time with marketing and other projects. “She’s been a part of our family for so long,” he said. “She goes on vacation with us too.” Mahan’s mother is also local and enjoys coming to help with the children often. 
Since Troy owns his own company, Miracle Ear Hearing Centers and Amplifon Hearing Centers he runs his 46 offices in five different states via cell-phone and computer and is very involved in helping with the children.
With five children and several companies, finding time for each other could be hard, but, Mahan makes sure to fit it in. She and her husband have date night every Friday night.
Several struggles early on in their relationship have made Mahan a stronger woman. “One of the biggest struggles I’ve had is when Troy and I started dating, my father was extremely ill,” said Mahan. “Troy had not even met him and he was in the hospital about to die. Troy met him at the hospital three days before he passed away.
Within the next year, we got married and it was hard for me not to have my father walk me down the aisle. At the same time, my mom who was rock solid and wouldn’t even take a Tylenol got colon cancer. Six months later, she got it again. Five years later, she went to the doctor for a check-up and they told her she had lung cancer. She had never smoked a day in her life. They had to take one whole side of her lung. They told her she had a 20 percent chance of surviving for two years and is at almost five years now. We call her the woman with nine lives.”
That experience made her able to handle a lot of stress and multi-task even better. “I really try to value our family time,” she said. “If you don’t set it out and block it off something will always come in. That has been the hardest thing about owning my own business. My day consists of getting up very early in the morning to exercise from 5-6 a.m. Then I try to check emails, bank statements, get kids up for school, do whatever we are doing that day or go to work, then do the ballet or tutoring right after school, then get them ready for dinner, homework and bed. Then I’m back on the computer again working. My life is very busy.”
She opened Youthful Medical Spa in early 2006. Mahan has worked side by side with numerous plastic surgeons. “I have personally performed all of the procedures provided at Youthful Medical Spa,” she said. She has a bachelor’s degree in psychology, sociology and philosophy from Jacksonville University. She has another bachelor’s degree in physician assistant studies from University of Florida and a master’s degree in physician assistant studies from the University of Nebraska.
She has been a physician’s assistant for 18 years with experience in family practice, internal medicine, gynecology, natural hormone replacement therapy/holistic medicine and plastic surgery. “I had been doing family practice at the beach for 11 years and then started having all these babies,” said Mahan. “That was a full-time job. I started some part-time work at a gynecologist office for a doctor that did natural hormone replacement. I ended up having another baby and thinking that I just wasn’t going to work because we had five kids total between us. So, I said, ‘Ok I’m done.’” 
Eventually, she went to work at a plastic surgeons office part-time. “I worked one day a week doing all of his non-surgical procedures,” she said. Mahan began to notice that all of her friends and past clients were coming to her for their non-surgical procedures, so it just made sense to open an office that only provided non-surgical procedures. “Our main niche is a procedure called Thermage,” said Mahan. “It uses radio frequency waves to tighten and contour loose skin. We can do it on the face, eyelids, body parts, abdomen, loose skin after babies, buttocks and on cellulite.” They also do botox, laser hair removal, fillers and fractional (non-surgical skin resurfacing), facials and microdermabrasion.
“We do aesthetic and medical procedures,” said Mahan. The spa has Dr. Patrick Kamish who oversees the procedures and does consultations.
Mahan said the idea behind the procedures is to get the best look, not a totally different look. “I don’t think that the majority of us that are in our 40’s want to look like we are 20,” she said. “We want to look the best that we can for our stated age. I think that some of the non-surgical procedures can give you that verses the surgical.”
With the non-surgical procedures, they are able to work on lines, wrinkles, brown spots on face, broken blood vessels, tighten skin, cellulite and body contouring and scarring. “People often times are afraid of face lifts and other surgeries because they are not necessarily going to look the same as they did before,” said Mahan. “With the non-surgical, you have to have realistic expectations. I tell my clients to look at turning the clock back maybe five years and then we are building that foundation under the skin so you are going to age less rapidly and more conservatively.”
Pam, Great job being a true Florida Mom!
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