Speaker 1: Welcome to today’s episode of True to Form. True to form is a podcast that highlights leaders making headway in the aesthetic, anti-aging, and elective medical industries. Learn from the experts to discover the secrets to success and the pitfalls to avoid when it comes to growing your aesthetic revenue.
Speaker 2: Hello everyone, it’s Adam DeGraide, I am the fill in host this week for True to Form which is typically hosted by my business partner and best friend Tim Sawyer. So glad you can join us today. I am the founder and CEO of Crystal Clear and today we have the distinct privilege of having Greg Chernoff with us a triple board certified facial plastic and reconstructive surgeon all the way out from California and beyond. Doctor Chernoff has been in practice for over 25 years in Indiana and California and he is an international research lecturer thought leader featured on ABC, NBC, CBS, Dateline, and Time.
Doctor Chernoff received America’s top doctor award for four consecutive years. Doctor Chernoff is national institution of health certified researcher he has expanded his research in treatment that includes an office in China. Doctor Chernoff has authored numerous scientific papers in medical laser textbook chapters, he has given over seven hundred lectures to physicians around the world on both surgical and non-surgical therapy. Doctor Chernoff is the founder of survivors of violence foundation providing reconstructive surgery and scar treatment for people who have been injured or disfigured. I look forward into getting to that with you as well as doctor. And he combines meticulously surgical techniques with the latest non-surgical therapies to give his patients consistent rejuvenation results. For close to 25 years Chernoff cosmetic surgery has brought state of the art procedures and exceptional care to patients in Indiana California and around the world. Doctor Chernoff welcome to True to Form.
Speaker 3: Thank you. Glad to be to here.
Speaker 2: So, glad to have you here, Tim wishes he could be here, he was all excited-
Speaker 3: Tim.
Speaker 2: -But unfortunately, he’s been hanging out in a Jacuzzi this week as I’m working here at VCS.
Speaker 3: How do you like that, tell him he’s been replaced.
Speaker 2: I don’t know if he’s been replaced or not, but at the end of the day, it’s an honor to have you here.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 2: Tell us a little about your practice over the last 25 years and how many employees you have and locations and-
Speaker 3: I think I’m one of the luckiest people in the world because I genuinely love what I do. I have an office in Santa Rosa, California, in Indianapolis, in Xian China and everyday is just so much fun. Every day we get to help people with self-esteem we get to help people really feel great about themselves and we have you know probably one of the best things about what we do is really how the technological advances have really been improving exponentially. Your company is a good example of that with the-. You know my practice is limited solely to aesthetic work head to toe inside and out.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: We’ve 25% of my practices remain dedicated to research in the exciting fields of cellular medicine, regenerative medicine and stem cell therapies.
Speaker 2: That is amazing.
Speaker 3: So, we’ve-
Speaker 2: Tell me a little bit about more about that, so stem cells.
Speaker 3: So, we’ve, it all began for me in the early 90s when we came to see that we could take some behind the ear biopsies, tissue culture, a patient’s fibroblast send them to our lab, grow them, expand them, freeze them for injection on another day.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: So, that was the, the problem was that it took us six months to a year to grow in the cellular medicine realm of a small number of cells only 20 to 30 million. So, we took that technology to China, we have automated it now and we can now grow a billion cells in a month. So, it really is-
Speaker 2: That is unbelievable.
Speaker 3: Yes, life changing, with a population of the billion-four, and a large ageing population the Chinese FDA is much more forward thinking unfortunately than our FDA.
Speaker 2: That is unfortunate.
Speaker 3: Within the US though, there’s several, you know, there’s several FDA compliant amniotic products placental products that we can use topically intravenously, in wounds which is very helpful as you know for 25 years, I had a foundation for survivors of violence and-
Speaker 2: That’s amazing.
Speaker 3: We’ve sadly accumulated thousands of scar and wound care patients. You know, I find those patients to be among the most gracious, because I take care of a lot of sadly raped at knife point patients and I just find the sooner that we can help them with their physical wounds the quicker their psychological wounds heal, which are often much deeper than their physical wounds.
Speaker 2: And I would imagine that’s a big piece of it because when they look in the mirror or they think about the tragedy that just happened to them.
Speaker 3: It’s a reminder of what they went through.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So, the sooner we can help them forget that we then opened it up to injured drivers. As being an [indiscernible] [04:57] you cannot be a racing fan.
Speaker 2: But you are a racing fan
Speaker 3: I have the pleasure of being in a two-seater with Mario Andrade-
Speaker 2: No, you didn’t.
Speaker 3: -For four laps, so you need to-
Speaker 2: Now, Tim has promised you several times.
Speaker 3: So, you and Tim, you should come.
Speaker 2: You should call Tim up. You’ve got to call Tim up right now.
Speaker 3: Tim, you guys should come and I get you a two-seater. It was exhilarating, it was-
Speaker 2: How fast did you go? How fast were you going?
Speaker 3: 180.
Speaker 2: Have you ever gone 180 before?
Speaker 3: No, and I got into the car and asked him what do I hold on to, he said, your mid-section.
Speaker 2: You know a very good friend of mine is Bob Tusk the third and he is an NHRI funded car drag racing, so, he goes zero, to you, plus 300 miles per hour, that’s in three, four seconds.
Speaker 3: So, this was, so we were zero to a hundred in two seconds.
Speaker 2: Amazing.
Speaker 3: The straight away-s were fun, but the G, it a G2 force as you are going round the turns it feels like the car’s going to slide out from under you, and you think your eyelashes are going to touch the walls. As you around that’s how close they get, but it was it was definitely fun.
Speaker 2: That must have been amazing. So getting into medicine, so, thinking back 25 years ago, like you know, to decide to open up your own practice, you known, what was going through your mind at the time, and.
Speaker 3: It seem like 25 months, my first 2 years in practice I was in a large group, I was doing mainly reconstructive cancer surgery at that time and then I made the conscious choice to convert to 100% cosmetic, so-
Speaker 2: When was that? When was that?
Speaker 3: That was in the early 90s.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 3: And you know your, I think your company is very approble to the problems we had then. Most doctors know nothing about business, they think they do, they don’t hang their ego coats on the door to admit what they don’t know.
Speaker 2: Doctors have egos I had no idea, you surgeons had egos.
Speaker 3: They don’t know what they don’t know, what they don’t know which makes us even more dangerous, and so-. There weren’t, you know, 25, 30 years ago there weren’t Crystal Clear Companies around to help us.
Speaker 2: That was a bold move back then.
Speaker 3: So, many of the mistakes, many of the mistakes, you made on your, you hopefully learnt from your mistakes.
Speaker 2: What was your first biggest mistake you made when you first started opening a new practice.
Speaker 3: So, I used, it was ahead of its time in a large shop mall down town, I opened a retail laser facility, but I came to realize women wouldn’t drive from the luxurious suburbs to downtown Indi, to come have a facial or a laser treatment. They’d come and they would, they would come and park in the northeastern parking lot, shop North strum and then go home, so in my first three years I became a million dollar personal loss.
Speaker 2: So then, you realized Location was-
Speaker 3: It was a giant mistake.
Speaker 2: It’s interesting because location is not only important now physically, location is important digitally, making sure that you are where people are shopping because just in the old days people would be down at the North Strums, the local church, local community, now they are hanging out on what I call Google street, Facebook town. It’s amazing how the world has changed, is that a difficult thing for you to find?
Speaker 3: Staff, you know good staff, and retraining your staff, or is it been pretty easy for you.
Speaker 2: You know, the internet is certainly a live by the sword and die by the sword phenomena. I’ve just, a year ago, if you would have told me 25 years, that I’d be hiring a but-lad graduate, social media graduate, I would have laughed at you, but we did that a year ago. And she’s been a big help.
Speaker 3: What does she deal with, what does she do on a daily basis for the practice.
Speaker 2: She does, she posts, you know, a lot of our blogs, she takes care of our Instagram account, Facebook account. We make a long-term marketing strategy with her and so she has a calendar of chores to do, she is responsible for all of our photography up to par for all our media sites. So, she’s been, she does all the things that you know, I just want to be in surgery 8 hours a day so she does all the things that I should be doing, but don’t have-
Speaker 3: Don’t have the time to do it.
Speaker 2: -Don’t make the time to.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know it’s interesting because I imagined, it’s got to be a challenge when you are building a business, when so much of it relies on your own hands, and your own ability to how to scale that. I know you have added a lot of non-surgical treatments in the practice.
Speaker 2: Tell us about that.
Speaker 3: It’s about 20, I have between nurse practitioners, nurses, aestheticians, business people we employ 20 to 30 people in each facility.
Speaker 2: Wow
Speaker 3: So, its, in many way it’s like having 60 wives, 61 wives.
Speaker 2: I have had a couple of wives.
Speaker 3: But, you know it’s managing and that again is the next, if you were to say Greg what’s been the least fun part of the last 25 years. It’s the in office baby-sitting that is inevitable that you have to do.
Speaker 2: When you are running a business, and your name is on the shingle. You know, you got to kind off pay attention to it.
Speaker 3: And as we are here in the show, all the machines, all of the different things that each of these are a hundred to three hundred thousand dollar investment.
Speaker 2: It’s amazing.
Speaker 3: So, I have a warehouse, we’ve continued to be, I have made a test site with the majority of the laser company, but I have what I refer to as my laser museum. Where I have 30 to 40 units that are antiquated have of which, I am still paying leases because there is better technologies lasers.
Speaker 2: They got a good thing going those agent companies.
Speaker 3: They do.
Speaker 2: It’s going to be interesting to see in the future in there are museums that go back and have the linage of all the lasers and things that you all spent money on. What you do you see in the future, like what get you excited right now?
Speaker 3: I think medicine is going to change a lot in the next decade, I think the fields of cellular medicine regenerative therapy, all of us have stem cells in our own facts, but we are really at a critical time now with FDA regulations. The FDA really considers your own tissue not be under your responsibility.
Speaker 2: That’s a little weird by the way, try to get your own blood results.
Speaker 3: Exactly, yeah.
Speaker 2: It’s like yeah, how are going to interpret them. Wait a minute it’s my blood result why can’t I get my blood result you have to fight it.
Speaker 3: But, there’ve been tremendous studies all over the world showing first the safety of utilizing your own stem cells from fat they efficacy of it, but it’s more of a big farmer issue because the big farmer doesn’t want one point of care production of things.
Speaker 2: Why would they? Why would they? They don’t want to mass produce.
Speaker 3: It take out of their pocket.
Speaker 2: it’s interesting you know working with the hundreds of practitioners we work with, from wellness to anti-aging to surgical. You are offering both surgical and non-surgical what still gets the greatest results. You know would it be, guess it depends on it.
Speaker 3: I think the greatest follow up and the most predictable and return for service procedures that we do would definitely be the neurotoxins and the inject-able fillers. Many patients, it’s still an art doing what we do to first listen to the patient, it’s my job to help the least amount and look their best. If they are going to spend a dollar to help them spend it where I know they will see the next results. And the surgical patients are patients that really there is nothing else to help with if their gravitation decent of their muscles is beyond a certain point, but for volume loss. For the improvement of tone and quality there is a myriad of things that we can treat patients with that are very profitable if you present them properly.
Speaker 2: And they are very beneficial to the patient.
Speaker 3: Very much.
Speaker 2: And you know Tim is going to be listening to this, and if you’re going to do a procedure on Tim. What procedure would you recommend for Tim Sawyer. You’ve known him well, he and I have talked about a penile reduction several times, so I’m not so sure if he is still interested in that. Tim are you interested in a Penile reduction treatment because doctor Chernoff says he can help you.
Speaker 3: I think you know for all us a healthy heart is important and I’m proud of both you. You’ve shown significant weight loss-
Speaker 2: Trying.
Speaker 3: We are still-
Speaker 2: Not easy
Speaker 3: It’s not easy and maintaining less weight that there’s is such great steadies about heart health that shows staying in good condition good shape will along lane, and that really helps them get a great results, that what I do for people as well.
Speaker 2: If you think about your charity, what are some of the most difficult cases that you have actually worked on?
Speaker 3: You can divide difficult into psychologically difficult on the surgeon and physically. Domestic abuse is still something that it is core-ably prevalent in our country, it’s not an intercity problem it affects all economic statuses.
Speaker 2: Everywhere.
Speaker 3: And you know, I still see an awfully lot of women getting beaten up with baseball bats and things, and.
Speaker 2: Seriously it’s a-
Speaker 3: Rape at knife point is sadly very, very common as well. It’s sadly-
Speaker 2: What are some of the major things you got to take care of in-terms of neuron-treatment.
Speaker 3: I must say from a gratitude stand point again these patients are so gracious and when we are here in a room with all this technology it still seems odd to me that we have still adopted a zero tolerance policy for something that seems so basic in our society.
Speaker 2: In closing what do you want people listening to know about you and know about your practice.
Speaker 3: I think anyone, you know, any-, there’s so much arrogance in my profession and I think that why we’ve also tremendous success. My dad was a mechanic, my mum was a high school teacher, so our patients see the humility and they see that really we are no different from them. We just have very keen desire to take good care of them and not just do things to them.
Speaker 2: That is amazing, I got to tell you. Thank you so much for stopping by, and being a guest host. With my first time guest hosting for time in his True to Form podcast sponsored by Crystal Clear. We really appreciate everyone whose listening and subscribing to the podcast. Doctor Chernoff they can visit you website, your website addresses?
Speaker 3: DoctorChernoff.com
Speaker 2: DoctorChernoff.com that’s pretty easy to remember folks. It’s fantastic he’s a great person, I have known him for several years now and I’m sure that you are always open to take call with people-
Speaker 3: Anytime.
Speaker 2: If they have any questions
Speaker 3: Anytime.
Speaker 2: And obviously if there is anybody out there that happens to be listening that has gone through domestic abuse or is having a challenge. The Chernoffs are there to help you.
Speaker 3: And they can go to survivorsofviolence.org.
Speaker 2: survivorsofviolence.org. Thank you so much doctor Chernoff.
Speaker 3: Thank you, good to see you.
Speaker 2: Have a great show thank you for you time.
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