Welcome to today’s episode of True to Form with your host, president and co-founder of Crystal Clear, highly regarded speaker and two time Inc 500 Entrepreneur, Tim Sawyer.
True to Form is a podcast that highlights leaders making headway in the aesthetic, anti-aging, and elective medical industry. Learn from the experts to discover the secrets of success and pitfalls to avoid when growing all aspects of your elective medical practice. This week’s episode is brought to you by Candela, a leading US-based global medical aesthetic device company engineering technology that enables practices to provide advanced solutions for a broad range of medical aesthetic applications. Including hair removal, wrinkle reduction, tattoo removal, women’s health treatments, facial resurfacing, traumatic and surgical scar treatments, body contouring, improving the skin’s appearance through the treatment of benign vascular and pigmented lesions, and the treatment of acne, leg veins, and cellulite. Please join me in welcoming your host, the authentic, the transparent, Tim Sawyer.
Hello and welcome to True to Form the podcast that connects you to the people technology and hot topics that shape the elective medical community. Provided to you by Crystal Clear and brought to you by this week’s sponsor Candela, the leading US-based global medical aesthetic device company. I’m your host Tim Sawyer. To our returning guests welcome back and to our first time listeners we appreciate you joining us and encourage you to become a subscriber.
In the last episode, we spoke with the owner and CEO of LifeScape Premier, Dr. Susan Wilder, who shared her unique holistic approach to improving overall patient health as well as the proactive measures she has taken in her practice to address COVID-19. If you missed it, you need to check it out. With all that said, super excited to introduce our next guest on the podcast. We’re going to head out to California. We have the pleasure of having John Wheeler, who is the CEO of the Aesthetic Center of El Dorado Hills for two years.
During his time as CEO, he has grown revenue exponentially. The achievement he is the most proud of, however, is creating a healthy and high functioning team that gives great results to their patients every single time. John earned his bachelor’s of arts degree in theology we’d love to talk a little bit about that and worked as a pastor for seven years after finishing his masters in div, I assume his divinity degree.
That’s true.
He [crosstalk 00:02:34] full time pastoral ministry and instead pursue his passion for business. That passion eventually led him to the Aesthetic Center. So without further ado, I want to welcome to the program, John Wheeler. How’s it going, John?
Going great, Sam. Thanks for having me man.
Oh, we listen. Appreciate it. Appreciate it. Super, super, super much. So of course I have to start with what jumps the page in your bio and that is that you have your master’s degree in divinity and actually worked as a pastor for seven years. So talk a little bit about your journey to become the CEO of the Aesthetic Center.
Yeah. Well, it’s definitely a winding road type of journey. But long story short I love, obviously I’m a man of faith. And I love people, I love working with people, leading people. I think that being a pastor is really a leadership focused. It uses the same muscle. And so super long story short, my dad died when I was 10 months old and he was a big business tycoon. So I just kind of felt like I had it in my blood and didn’t know it to be a business leader. And I went to seminary, had no money. First time in my life I interviewed for a job and wasn’t able to get the job or a job at all. And so I just decided, hey, I’m going to start my own wedding DJ company because I just got married and I saw how much it costs to get married.
And I’d never DJ-ed in my life, never emceed in my life. Been to like two weddings other than my own. And I ended up just posting an ad on Craigslist and said, I’ll DJ your wedding for $1000. And ended up getting 30 people that wanted me to do it. And so I had $15,000 in deposits and I went out and bought all the gear. I learned how to do it and ended up kind of taken over Southwest Michigan with this wedding company, hired a bunch of DJs sold the company and I was like, “Hey, I love this. I love business. I’d have to take a pay cut to go back into ministry even though that’s not what it was about anyway.” So I stayed in the business lane and just am super happy with it.
That’s amazing though that’s what I love about doing this podcast is hearing the incredible stories of people. How they got to where they are today and the true entrepreneurial spirit because you had to get creative, right?
Absolutely.
And you did. So that kind of leads me to my next question, which is, so now we’ve got COVID. We’ve got to deal with that and that’s going to take a little bit of creativity. And obviously you’re running a super successful business. So talk a little bit about how the Aesthetic Center is coping with that and some of the measures that you’re taking to keep the ball rolling as you go on.
Yeah. First of all, this might not be politically correcting, but it’s something I’m passionate about. What’s been really bugging me about the medical spa space the last couple of weeks anyway, has been just a lot of the shaming going on around businesses that decide to stay open or not stay open or whatnot. So I’m really glad we can have a conversation without any kind of social pressure. Everybody, when they start their business a lot of people take out personal loans from family or friends or they got a big payroll that they got to figure out how to make. And so every decision for every business right now is completely different. And but what we’re doing is basically we do feel like we want to do our part to help flatten the curve. That’s what everybody’s talking about.
And so we have closed until April 16th. Being in California, we’re actually technically legally allowed to be open because the directive from governor Newsome says any healthcare organization can legally be open. And so we obviously fall into that category, but we’re reopening on the 16th. And it’s a scary time, man. I wish I could roll out this big master plan about how we’re going to be okay. But we secured a lot of financing as far as the line of credit. We’ve upped our line of credit with the new SBA loans that just came out this week. We’re looking to take advantage of those just as a cushion if we need to. When we reopen, obviously we’re going to take every precaution, but at the end of the day, it takes quite a while to build a three month cash reserve, right.
As you know leading your business and not every business is there. And we’ve been around for just under two years. I wish we had three months of cash reserves to float the business for multiple months without a dime of income coming in. But we don’t. What’s that?
I said very few people have that.
Right. And so we can make it about a month. That’s what we’re going to try to do. We’re going to come out guns blazing the day that we’re allowed to reopen. I told every provider on our team be ready to work for multiple days on end. Thursday, Friday, Monday, even if you’re not normally scheduled and we’re just going to come out with a bang because, well, I’ll tell you, Tim, is I’ve been talking to so many wives and moms and grandmas and they’re like, “Hey, my hair roots are growing out. My Botox is wearing off, my nails are getting chipped. The first thing I do when I’m allowed to leave my house is go and get Botox. Go and get a facial, go and get laser, whatever it is.”
And so we are really going to maximize that opportunity. And as far as plastic surgery goes there’s been a couple of prearranged surgeries that we’ve done and people right now are beating down the doors for surgery. A lot of your surgery folks might know. There’s literally never been a better time to get facial plastic surgery or any plastic surgery because you’re getting paid for your downtime. You’re not having to take PTO days. You’re getting like, nobody’s going to know what you did. You come back in a month, you look like a million bucks and nobody knows what you did.
Yeah. It’s true. Do you know what’s cool though? Just I can hear it in your voice, John, that you’re one of these people that you’re a realist, but you get that this too will pass. And so it feels like we’ve been talking with two groups of people. Those are the people who they use words like everyone, everything, the world meaning these generalizations that everyone’s going to die and it’s going to end. And they’re not thinking, okay, how can I regroup in my business right now? To your point, be proactive around, and I encourage everyone listening to be proactive around securing financing.
We’re all in this boat together, but you’ve got a positive outlook and even the words that you’re using in terms of we’re going to hit the ground running as soon as the [inaudible 00:09:28] gets opened up again. How are you encouraging your team right now to keep their minds occupied and thinking positively? I’m assuming that’s a big task, right?
Yeah. We just had an all staff call this morning. Everybody’s feeling a little bit nervous, obviously about loss of income potentially. And we haven’t laid anybody off, but even so, typically everybody gets bonuses and they have goals tied to how much retail product they sell, all that. They’re getting their hourly but really none of us are getting bonuses or that.
So there’s a loss in revenue for every single person on our team. They’re a bit apprehensive, but like you said, they know that this is going to pass. So for me, I’m getting the chance to work in a lot of, I call them WIGs, wildly important goals. A lot of those things that kind of fall by the wayside during normal day to day operations. I’m rewriting our whole entire website right now, really ramping up our ads and some of those things that I just don’t have a chance to do when I have when I’m getting pulled in 50 different directions.
Right. Well, I was talking with some colleagues the other day and I actually did, I was invited to speak on a webinar and I was talking about the tyranny of the urgent, right.
Yeah. Let’s talk about that.
That CEOs were constantly faced with the tyranny of the urgent. It’s stuff that just needs to get done and then we have the stuff that’s super valuable long-term that ends up in a pile. And I don’t care how motivated you are or how intelligent you are as a CEO or a person around your business. We all have that pile that we look at every morning and go, I would love to get into that pile.
Yup.
And we have patients and the deadlines and emails and phone calls and we never seem to get that. And so what I’m trying to encourage folks to do, and I love the term WIGs, wildly important goals. I’m trying to encourage people to say, hey, listen, take this as an opportunity to focus on that stuff. And to your point you have to keep the team involved at this point, right? Because most people they’re unsure. There’s a lot of uncertainty. And I would assume that your faith plays a huge role. Not to overstate that or understate it, your faith plays a huge role in that, right? That most people are operating in fear, they call it FUD, right? Fear, uncertainty, doubt, and you’re operating in faith and I guarantee you that’s having a super positive impact on your team.
So which leads me to my next question because I noticed it says one of the things you’re most proud of is that you’ve created a high functioning team. Can you talk a little bit about some of the principles that you’ve applied not only to motivate those folks as they go, but to attract talent to the practice. How are you handling that?
So the first thing that I do is I’m really, really rigorous in my hiring process. And what that looks like is, first of all, I look for… This is stupid, but I look for resumes because when I open up a job on Indeed, a lot of your listeners can probably relate, I’ll get literally 500 to 700 applicants. I do take those very seriously. I try to go through each and every one. I look for the ones that write the cover letter it tells me to care the most, but then I look for the ones that have the resume that’s just a little bit special looking.
And that sounds totally stupid. Like maybe they went on Etsy, they bought some sort of a template. They just took a little bit extra time and made it look really nice. And that just tells me that they get it on a certain level. They know they just have a taste or an eye for beauty and they value quality work. And so then what I do is I’ll bring them in for a meet and greet. And I asked myself the question, you’re in Florida, right? So this probably wouldn’t work for you. But I asked myself would I want to go on a road trip to Florida with this person?
And that right there is the most important question that I answer during the whole process. I don’t really care about their experience. I don’t care about X, Y, or Z on their resume. I care about who are they as a person and are they going to fit into our culture? Because ultimately I’m going to be spending 2000 hours a year with this person and to have it fit from that standpoint. And then secondly, what I’ve done is I’ve really created a very firm, definite culture within our organization. So we have three core values. I tell my team, after you get through orientation, you’re going to be dreaming in these three core values. We call them the three Hs. Humble, hungry, and honor. I hear humble and hungry, thrown out there a lot. Pat Lencioni wrote a really good book about culture that I borrowed that from.
But then the honor piece as well it really plays a huge factor into how we operate. For instance, my only role as your leader is I’m only going to make you look like a genius. So anytime I call you out in front of the team, you’re going to look like the smartest person in the whole darn team. You know what I’m saying like, I’m never going to chastise anybody publicly. I’ll have difficult privately, but never publicly. Another value under honor would be brave communication. So people cannot believe this when I tell them this, but we’ve never once had a gossiping problem in our office, on our team. People just know my role is not to talk about this person with somebody else, but it’s to go and just say, “Hey, Tim, I value our relationship too much to not bring this up. What you said yesterday really hurt my feelings. And again, I just value you as a person too much to harbor this resentment.”
And so again, we talk about some of those like ministry muscles and it’s kind of the same thing of just wellness of the soul and wellness of the heart that really impacts who we are as an organization. And then when it comes to hunger that really impacts who are you as a provider, how hungry are you to grow your skills to provide the best outcomes possible. So it’s all kind of baked into the cake.
I love that. And another reason that I love doing podcasts is because in my former company, which we sold. We had one of, part of our credo was honor the absent. I feel like we’ve in this company kind of I’m on air, I’m the most transparent person in the world. I feel like we’ve gotten away from that a little bit and it really is a powerful principle, right?
It really is.
Yeah, someone comes and says, “Blah, blah, blah.” You say, “Well, did you talk to him first?” If not, direct them over that way. Right. And so I think it’s those principles that makes such a meaningful impact. And when you talk about culture, culture, is what it’s internally, but that culture is actually what manifests itself as a brand, right?
It really does. And it’s insane how much people can feel it just when they walk into the room, there’s like this tangible atmosphere that is created around culture. Like, “Oh, our big events will have 300, 400 people, we’ll have professional caterers, all that.” And the caterers, they’re typically people that work in the aesthetic space because they know how to reimburse each of the companies that pay for our food. And they always say, “Hey.” They pulled me aside and say, “John, there’s something different about your team. I work in dozens of different med spas all around the region. There’s something different here and I can’t put my finger on it.”
And it’s really a testament to what we built. And well, the other thing I’ll say Tim that I know, I’m guessing you might want to move on from this, is as a leader you have to be willing to do two things. Number one is apologize publicly. You can’t always be right. So if you screw up, you have to hold yourself to the same standards you hold the team. And then second of all, you have to be willing to have really difficult conversations when somebody breaks the culture. For instance, I’ve had a team member call somebody else on the team out publicly.
And I have to be willing to go to that person and say, “Hey, look, I see what you’ve meant by this. But our culture is that we don’t criticize publicly. That’s just not who we are. And I can’t tolerate it.” Because what you tolerate as a leader is what you accept, right? It’s what you condone. So if you tolerate it, you’re saying, “Hey, this has my stamp of approval.” It doesn’t matter what’s hanging on your wall, on your core values. And so that’s really the two hard things that I have to do routinely is apologize and have those difficult one-on-one conversations call, holding somebody to our standards.
Right. And it’s interesting because you’ve applied what are our long proven tried and true biblical principles in a very profound way into the workplace. And it’s tough to lose when you’re doing that.
Right.
kudos to you. And I just wanted to make one more point on that. By the way, whether it’s a medical spa or a marketing company or a restaurant, I 100% and everyone who’s listening to this knows, when you walk into a place and it’s special, you just feel it. It doesn’t matter what it says on the wall. Doesn’t matter what it like you said, it’s people have bought in culturally, they have drank the Kool-Aid and now you’ve got something special.
It’s so true. And I’ll tell you, Tim, I inherited, when I took over as CEO, I inherited probably the most dysfunctional unhealthy team you can imagine. We had to fire somebody the day before my first day because she was so toxic and then our only two full time providers ended up quitting a few months into my time poaching half of our business and going five minutes down the road. And what you find is that health actually repels unhealthy. And so unhealthy people, they love an unhealthy environment. As soon as it turns healthy, they rebel and they kick and scream to go back to their state of unhealth. And what we did is we had huddles every single day for a year up until just a couple of months ago, every morning just me casting the vision for, “Hey, here’s our culture, here’s where we’re going.”
So we fought blood, sweat, and tears to get where we are today. And it didn’t come easy. So anybody who’s listening, you have an unhealthy culture. I’ll tell you might have to meet with your team for 15 minutes, first thing every single morning to find that culture and then just talk about it every day. People are like leaky buckets, Tim, I’m sure that you’ve heard that expression where you pour something into them, they just leak it out. You got to just recast that vision every single day, every day, every day, and then eventually they’re going to start to get it.
Yeah. It’s powerful and it’s a cool thing to be around. And in elective medicine it’s interesting. I’ve said this a few times on the podcast because, so I do historically have done about 40 shows a year. So I spent, do most of my work on the weekend. As a company do about 65 shows-ish. On faculty, we’ve got 33 faculty designations on a bunch of topics, one of which is business, but also marketing and that type of stuff.
And so I was asked to speak on leadership and it was one of the first times that I had spoke on and then since been speaking about it a lot since. And so there’s a room full of, it was a cosmetic surgery event, room full of 100 surgeons and they’re listening to everything in there from the clinical stuff. And then someone gets up and does a little thing on Facebook or whatever.
And then I go up to talk about leadership, which I like you value above all other things because if you don’t have leadership and you don’t show up on time and you don’t care for your folks, you’re going to have problems. Right? Half the people in the room took that talk as their opportunity to go get coffee, use the men’s room and make a phone call.
And I was like, I try not to take it personally because you can’t. Yeah. But I thought a lot about it and I was like, man, they’ve sat through topics in here that they’ve probably heard 4,000 times. And as soon as you go to a place where, yeah, this is your responsibility then it gets a little, “Yeah, I’m going to go get something to eat.”
I think it’s they can’t monetize it right away and it’s hard work. And so it’s not the sexy, hey, buy this device, make a million bucks this year. It’s like bamboo. Bamboo has to develop roots for years before it grows. As soon as it comes out of the ground, it grows 100 feet in some crazy like a few weeks. But what you’re doing is you’re talking about building those roots and nobody wants to hear it, but it’s, if you don’t have roots, you’re going to collapse.
Yeah. Now what’s good is I’ve noticed that it’s become more and more popular. And what’s interesting in times like this with dealing with COVID-19 all of a sudden everyone is a good listener, right? Because the things that a good economy and I want to talk about technology next devices. We had a good run in the economy, the longest bull market we’ve had ever probably.
You’ve got huge advances, huge proliferation in noninvasive technologies. You’ve got great unemployment numbers. You can kind of survive on that, right? I mean, you can draft on that if you’re a gifted injector or decent using laser and that type of thing. But when things get a little tricky that a great market and good employment conditions can hide some scenes.
A rising tide floats all boats.
what’s that?
A rising tide floats all boats.
Exactly.
And now we’re going to see who’s the real deal and who’s the posers in this industry.
We’re going to. And well, I have 10,000 followers on Instagram. I don’t need to have a website, that kind of stuff’s going to be dinged up a little bit. But let’s talk technology.
So first of all this podcast we’re doing today is sponsored by Candela. And I love the folks at Candela. I love Stacy and [inaudible 00:24:26] and all those folks. And I know you’re a big Candela fan. So what I’m curious about is on the med spas side of things, what are you actually using Candela for? Talk a little bit about the treatments and procedures that are the most popular and then also some of the marketing that you’re doing around, because anybody can buy a device but not everybody can come in and use it. So talk about that.
Well, so what got me turned on to Candela was their Candela GentleMax Pro. It’s one of those devices in our industry where it’s like it’s just bulletproof. It’s tried and true. You can’t go wrong with it. And I actually had a hard time landing on it, but I was talking to this guy who buys and sells used lasers. We bought it new. I don’t like buying used personally. I was like, hey, I’m considering the Candela GentleMax Pro or this other device and they’re both regarded as good devices. It wasn’t like choosing between Nike and some in a Walmart brand of shoes. It was both really good. He was like, “I wouldn’t buy that other company’s device.” I won’t say them because I know that you have a lot of different sponsors on this show and all that.
He said, “I wouldn’t buy that device if it was plated in gold. Buy the GentleMax Pro you will not go wrong.” And I just took his word because he didn’t have a horse in the race and we bought it, marketed the heck out of it, man. And that is my favorite device for that reason. Because laser hair removal takes six sessions and Tim is a master marketer. I mean, you could be telling me a lot of pearls and nuggets about marketing. I’m also very passionate about marketing. But you know as a master marketer, that probably the most important thing when it comes to marketing is targeting, right? If you could show an ad to a million of the wrong people versus if you could show an ad to five of the right people, you should probably take the five of the right people every time, right.
Because you know that they’re way more likely to come in and be your client and give you business. So if you can figure out targeting, then laser hair removal is the best. So what we do, we just say dirt cheap first session. We just want people to come in, but we trust our targeting on Facebook ads is my favorite way to advertise. So we’re just hitting all the right people. We were hitting the right income, the right interests, the right age, all of it. The right zip codes. And it’s like Tim, if I came to you and I said, hey, whenever you’re looking for in a mate, I don’t know if you’re married or not, but whatever you were looking for in a mate, I will take your list. I’ll find the exact person that you are looking to settle down with.
You’re looking to marry. I will literally find every single characteristic that you want in a mate. My only question is do you want one date with that person or do you want six dates with that person? If [inaudible 00:27:31] you’re going to say six dates. Right? Because you know that you’ll develop a relationship or rapport, you’ll become friends. The trust will develop. And that’s what laser hair removal does with GentleMax Pro. It’s like it takes six sessions. You’re guaranteed to see them six times. They come in once, they almost always buy the package of five more, which is what we do. And it’s like clockwork. We get literally between 25 and 75 inquiries every day for laser hair removal. I told you about our two providers that left and tried to steal our whole business. We almost had to close down.
We bought the GentleMax Pro. We started doing these Facebook ads. We went from one nurse working one day a week to now five nurses working at least 20 to now 40 hours a week based on that device. So it’s been a game changer for us. We also have the nodules, which I believe in a year or two will be probably the number one device in anesthetics.
What’s that? John, I’m not familiar with that.
It’s an IPL and it’s a dang it IPL man. It’s incredible. So I’ve never seen results like we’ve seen with the nodules, we had another device, the Palomar Icon. We had a few another IPL before that. This one is just the best I’ve ever seen. And it also has two laser fractionated hand-pieces on it as well. So like Fraxel it’s almost the exact same wavelengths as the Fraxel device. So it’s a 1550 erbium and in 1940 diode, very high powered, both fractionated. And so it’s an awesome device. And we had the Profound long pulse RF microneedle as well, which is also really, really, really sweet.
Yeah. So you’re on it with Candela and as an aside we are trying, and maybe this will put a little pressure on my friend Stacy, we’re working with them to develop a virtual practice management track and it would be great. And it’ll be Candela users now type of thing. It would be great if we could get you on there. And because I think and to your point, yes, we work with lots and lots of manufacturers and different laser companies. And the good ones are always looking for a way of course, number one is the right technology at the right price, the right support, the right maintenance contract and all that.
Those things are all important. But what people really clamor for the folks that we work with is they’re like, “Okay, I’ve got all that, or I get people here, right? The big investments.” And so part of what we’re working on going into the back half of 20, 20 and beyond is becoming a resource for those manufacturers in terms of, okay, you got the device, now here’s the blueprint. And I know Candela does a nice job with that, but here’s the blueprint for how are you going to go and get people.
I love that. I love that you’re going that route, Tim, because well I think a lot of people don’t understand is you don’t have to get rich off of every device. And that some devices, the way I put it is some devices are gateways and others are destinations. So like our Profound RF long pulse microneedle we charge five grand a pop for that, right? So which is sweet because it’s like a $90,000 or so device. So the ROI is really great. I’m not going to slash that down to next to zero and give that away. That’s a destination device.
But laser hair removal, we’ll give that away knowing, hey we’ll get them six times. We’ll talk about Botox, filler, RF, microneedle, facial plastic surgery, all of it. And we’ll be able to cross sell up, sell and down sell based on giving that one almost a way at first. And we’ll get five more sessions out of them for typically 500 to 1200 bucks.
Well, and what I love about that, John, you said something very profound before, which is you said, hey, would you rather have one date or six? And with that, it gives you six dates to build a relationship with that person and to your point, expose them to the culture, expose them to other treatments and procedures and what’s better than that. Right? So to your point, if you’re going to bundle something and do a little bit of discounting, certainly that would be the way to do it.
I love the way that you’re doing this. And so at that being said. So now we’re headed to the let’s say four weeks, six weeks from now, things go back to normal. What’s the playbook look like for you for the back half of 2020?
Well, I’m addicted to Facebook ads, so to me, when I’m assessing where to put our money, Facebook ads is 80% of our budget. And I would love to hear your thoughts on that. But what I’ve found is the targeting and the cost per click is, and also what I love about Facebook ads is you can drive them. What we do is we just drive them right into messenger. And as a medical spa, that doesn’t take a dime of insurance. HIPAA doesn’t. So this is actually something I had our attorney look out long and hard. HIPAA stands for health insurance portability, accountability act. If you don’t take health insurance, you’re not covered by HIPAA. You’re covered by basic privacy laws.
So we can do things in Facebook messenger, not that we’re not airing out people’s medical info at all. We’re like the most private company, but HIPAA has some overly strict guidelines around IP addresses and private healthcare information on a platform like messenger that I think again, is overly strict. So sorry. And that might be a rabbit hole there. But anyway I love messenger and I love Facebook ads and I just try to put as much money in there as we can. I’m curious your thoughts on that.
Yeah. So number one, always on this show, we always qualify every thing with hey, every state is different and we always encourage folks to do what you did. The responsible thing, consult and attorney who’s got some healthcare intelligence, and then make decisions on there. And a good attorney will never tell you what to do and what not to do. They’ll just share with you where you land on the risk spectrum and then everyone’s going to decide for themselves where they land on that.
So but in terms of how I think, so I’ve always been a huge advocate of whatever you’re doing that’s working, do as much of that as you possibly can afford. That’s number one.
I like that.
I always believe in, and I don’t know what you’re using and you and I can go off here and talk about this, whatever lead generation you’re using, we’ve got to have a way to capture that lead and be able to market to them on an ongoing basis.
So one of the things that we see a lot, so whatever they use to generate traffic, it’s going into someone’s email or some limited spreadsheet and all the people… Because here’s the issue. Let’s say you’re super successful with Facebook. That’s great. But there’s still going to be a percentage of people who fall through, not fall through the cracks, but don’t do it. In other words, they don’t book a consult with me now. They don’t go on their six dates. I want to have some way to capture that, put it into a database and be able to market to that person in an ongoing basis regardless of where they came from. That’s my number one thing. So CRM technology.
Right. With drip campaigns and auto responders, all of it.
With drip campaigns, automated texting, email, the whole shooting match. That’s number one for me and Crystal Clear fundamentally is built around that. In other words, we can build big, beautiful websites and we can certainly do and do our fair share of Facebook and social media. Organic social media has all those things, but at the core of it is wherever they come from make sure that we kind of use the analogy of an airport, right? You’ve got all these planes coming in. What would happen if the control tower lost side of one of these planes? Bad things would happen. So what we believe is make sure that you have a way to track every plane in and every plane out.
And that’s what I think Facebook offers because for us, if they click on the ad, we know who they are because we see them in messenger and then we ask them for their email and we can harvest their email and their phone number. So then we can do things like automated email and text campaigns. I do love Google AdWords as well, but if they’re directed to your site from Google, then you have to have a popup or some sort of lead generating PDF. You’re not guaranteed to harvest their information the way that you would be with a pop on my Facebook.
And so I’ll finish that topic on this. So what’s interesting is, and like I said, fully fund anything that works, right? So for us almost 70% of our new acquisitions come from shows. Who would actually be honest and say, “Yeah, I want to give up 50 weekends this year.” Nobody wants to do that. But if that’s where you’re going to make your money. So we spend 10% of our revenue on shows, million dollars a year.
And it’s like your Facebook. That’s where the people are, right? And so really [crosstalk 00:37:22] The only thing that I really discourage, it’s so funny and I’ll move on to another topic when someone says to me, happens all the time, “I’ve got this great idea, Tim, if I could implement this in my business or not, if when I implement this in my business, I’m going to make a million dollars a month, whatever it is.” And I go, “Okay, so what’s your strategy?” “Well, I’m going to get my son-in-law’s brother who just got out of school. He needs a job right now. He’s only going to do it part time. And once it gets up and running, then I’m going to invest in it.” And I say to myself, it’s never going to get up and running. If it’s that good, do it.
It’s all about execution, right? I mean, ideas are worthless if you don’t do them. I totally agree with you there.
You got to go for it, man.
Yeah.
Let’s start to wind down with this. So in terms of you’ve been at this awhile, you’ve done a great job. We all know that there’s this massive proliferation of new med spas, A set of clinics opening up every day. They think it’s a gold rush. And that’s on level data would support that. But it’s not going to go on forever. So if you could have two or three little nugget that you would give our audience to say, “Hey, I know you’re excited, here’s a couple of things to consider.” What would those be?
That’s a great question. Well, I would start with what we talked about earlier, be very selective about who you hire and build the culture right. Then number two would be get really good at marketing or get people that are really good at marketing around you at the table. Because like you said, this is such a competitive landscape and it’s getting more and more competitive every day. And in a competitive market, you have to be great to stand out, right? If you’re the only person in your town doing Botox, you don’t have to be that great. You’re the only game in town. But for us, we’re in I believe what I’ve been told by a rep is the second most competitive [inaudible 00:39:40] market in the nation after Southern California here in Sacramento.
And it’s funny because we got CoolTone a couple months ago and we pre-ordered it, we were like the seventh account to get it in our city. And I was seeing people in other cities like Orlando, like two weeks after we got ours, it’d be like, we’re the first account in Orlando to get it. It just came in today and it’s like, dang, it is so competitive and it’s getting more competitive every day.
But yeah, I would say those two things. And then the other piece would really be to get somebody at the table who’s world-class in the three essential roles of business, which are entrepreneurship, management, and the technician which is from the E-Myth Revisited. So when I call it is the builder, the maintainer, and the doer. So get somebody who is world-class at ed injecting.
If it’s not you, find somebody that is or find somebody that’s just an all around smart, capable, awesome person and get them a bunch of training. Get somebody that’s really good at like doing the day to day. I’m terrible at day to day. I’m not a day to day guy. That’s just not where my head’s at. I’m like 30,000 feet in the clouds. So I’ve had to bring people around me that are just really good at executing on a day to day level and then finally get somebody that’s world class when it comes to working on your business. That’s what I do. Working on the business, not for the business. That’s a common phrase you hear a lot. And I think you can find just top talent at each of those levels. You’re going to be okay.
Yeah, I think that’s really great advice and make sure that you’ve got the appropriate amount of capital to survive for six, nine months or however long it’s going to take. That’s the only thing I would add.
Well John, I really, really super, super appreciate you taking the time today. This has absolutely been, and you’re going to say you say that to all the girls. I don’t, this has actually been one of my favorite podcasts for Kindred Spirits. I’ve done almost 50 of them. I think it’s great advice. And like I said, I’m looking forward to doing some stuff together with you and hopefully together we can make a difference in the industry in general and in the thinking and also around some specific tactical stuff.
I think I saw you got some sort of a webinar coming up that I’m going to be a part of. Maybe not a webinar, but a day or two of training I believe.
Yep. We’re putting it together right now. The Candela folks can’t get enough of you. So if I get one more text that says, “You got to talk to John Wheeler.” I get it.
Who can blame them. Right. No, I’m just kidding. I’m crazy about them too. And I just enjoy so much talking to you. And it’s one of the things I’ll say to Tim is it’s crazy how far you can come if you just grind. And I grew up a huge Kobe Bryant fan and I was just devastated as many of us were when he died. And it’s funny because in sports we expect people like Kobe or LeBron James or Michael Jordan to just be working on their craft every single day, hours a day. But for me it’s like, what if you apply that same mindset to working in a medical spa? And that’s what I’ve tried to do is just never stop growing.
And so this is a crazy story, but I’ll share it with you. So two years ago, September 2017, I had never even heard of what of a medical spa before. I didn’t know what it was. I went to an amp spa bootcamp and you were one of the speakers there. And that’s where I learned even what Botox was. I didn’t know what it did. And it sounds crazy because now we’re here and two and a half years later, and I do know a lot about the industry now, but that’s how far you can come. Your listeners can come even if it’s just you approach your job the way that Kobe Bryant approached basketball, right. Where it is like this isn’t a game this is really like high stakes and you need to know everything and it’s your profession. You’ve got to go pro. So that’s kind of a crazy story that I would share with you on air here, man.
I love it. And I really, like I said, I’ve really enjoyed our time together today and I know that we’ll have you back on again and again. I’m grateful for that. So for everyone who joined us today, thank you. We really appreciate it. We all want to say thank you to John for stopping by spending some time.
Obviously my encouragement for everyone is to try to stay positive through this volatile period. Operate in faith as John does, not in fear, uncertainty and doubt. You’ve got to believe. All right. You got to believe. It all starts with belief. So that being said, once again, we want to thank you. Anyone interested in learning more about Crystal Clear, we encourage you to pop by a crystalcleardm.com. That’s crystalcleardm.com. Take advantage of some really cool promotional stuff that we have going on.
As a result of some volatility, check it out, our specials, specialty promotions. And also for those of you who are listening, we encourage you to check out Candela. Again, the leading US-based global medical aesthetic device company, and you can find them everywhere you look. Thank you. We look forward to seeing you again next week.
Thanks for tuning into this week’s episode of True To Form brought to you by Candela, a leading US-based global medical aesthetic device company. Engineering technology that enables practices to provide advanced solutions for a broad range of medical aesthetic applications. To learn more about this week’s podcast sponsor, visit candelamedical.com. And to learn more about your podcast provider Crystal Clear, visit crystalcleardm.com. Be sure to subscribe to the show on all your favorite music apps, including iTunes, Spotify, SoundCloud, and tune in to stay up to date with the newest episodes. Thank you for listening.
