The founder of Balian Springs on the stressful parts of the spa business

Stephanie Chon says she isn’t a wellness expert—she’s a developer.

Chon spent years working at her family’s development firm C. Castle Group, which operates multiple spas, including New York City’s famed Spa Castle. She took over the business during the pandemic.

As people emerged from lockdown craving connection and new ways to care for themselves, she saw an opportunity to create something beyond a traditional spa: a place that brought together wellness providers under one roof and gave guests a reason to stay.

“We created a space where different businesses want to share their own gifts and knowledge,” Chon told Founder Brew.

The result is Balian Springs, a 100,000-square-foot wellness destination in Northern Virginia, housed in a former US Securities and Exchange Commission building. The space features plunge pools, eight saunas, wellness classes, and a rooftop infinity pool.

After a successful soft launch in fall 2022 that brought in crowds, Chon realized the experience didn’t align with the vision she wanted to create. She removed the bar, eliminated phones inside the space, and repositioned Balian Springs as a nonalcoholic wellness destination.

Building a business the size of a warehouse meant learning far more than wellness. Chon had to navigate permits, construction, staffing, and the operational realities of running a large brick-and-mortar business. Here’s what she learned.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

At what point did you realize this needed to be a 100,000-square-foot destination rather than a smaller concept?

We were trying to survive Covid, and to be honest, it wasn’t this glamour story. The banks were only lending if we were going to expand, so we needed some funds.

My father was like, “We got to start creating something.” He wanted to build his own brand in Virginia… “Dad, let’s elevate what you had at Spa Castle,” which is what Balian is…I see where the trends are going. We can’t just go in and build a facility this large and have people come in without creating that experiential stay.

What did you have to become an expert in that you never expected when building a 100,000-square-foot physical business?

I didn’t know I had to be a…social media marketing person. For the first year, I was the one taking all the footage and being really engaged with our Instagram. That’s something very new.

Social media has been a double-edged sword, specifically for volume. We had opened back in October 2022…I wanted a very soft opening where friends and family would come in, stress test some of the systems, hire more people, and then four days into our soft opening, we went viral on TikTok, and we had 800 guests coming in a day.

It helped us get that exposure, but it was a really difficult three months, just volume that we didn’t anticipate. I had to navigate how social media can be used and how powerful it is.

Tell me about an early challenge or setback that caught you completely off guard. How did you work through it?

When we opened for the soft launch, it was 50% off the admission fee. We had a bar downstairs, and revenue-wise, guest count-wise, still to this day, those three months superseded [everything]...But seeing my staff, seeing the atmosphere of things…we were working 20-hour days. I was doing laundry during the evening. It was not what I had envisioned.

I got rid of social media, didn’t allow anyone to bring phones inside, got rid of [the bar], and created a nonalcoholic location. For that first year, starting January 2023, revenue dropped significantly.

Once we changed the narrative that we’re not this place to come party—I wanted people to start talking about coming here to stay—it took about a year to really transition that and get the community to see the value in a place like this. That was a make-or-break point.

What’s a part of running a business like this that’s surprisingly expensive—or operationally more complex than most people realize?

People…This is my first time being a business owner. You can have everything right, the product right, but if you don’t have the right people around you to see that vision through, or you trust them so that you can expand the business in other ways, it’s very difficult to move forward.

I spend 50% of my time continuously interviewing people, finding the right talent who can bring me to the next level. Who can I learn from?

Looking back, what’s one thing every founder should know before signing a lease or breaking ground on a brick-and-mortar business?

Understanding city bureaucracies and red tape, the whole permitting process, and having a big [building] that creates a huge impact…Understanding the permitting process, getting your seals, delays, and the general lead times of permitting for any new business, I think it’s very important.