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Foreign. Hey there. I'm your host, Ricky Shockley, owner of Med Spa Magic Marketing. And this is the Med Spa Success Strategies podcast where med spa and aesthetics practice owners come to discover strategies and tactics that help them better market and manage their practices so they can grow, improve profitability and have greater impact for their teams and their patients. Today we're going to be talking about 7 Ways to Take your med spa from good to to great, as inspired by the Jim Collins book. So one of the things that was at the top of my agenda here to talk about was just the, the idea and it's going to tie in at the end of the presentation here. Our discussion today is the idea of the flywheel effect. And in the med spa space we talk about this. It's hard to differentiate, it's hard to stand out. Some of these services are commoditized, we have lots of competition, and many times we're not looking for the home run thing that's going to transform or change our business. It's really about the details and the attention to detail and the nuance of everything that we do from leadership, management processes, hiring, patient care, patient experience, all of those things that tie together, that start to build momentum to ensure that our med spa is growing and scaling as successfully as we want it to. So let's go over these seven concepts in order, with number one being level five, leadership. So leading with humility, drive and vision, and leading by example. A couple things here. I'm going to talk about my experiences, even just with running our business and how they apply to you and your med spa as well. So one of the things here is when it comes to leadership, we need to lead by example and not with ego. And that means showing up for our teams consistently. We are there, I think, primarily to make the lives of our teams better. Right? I want to create impact for our team and the people inside our walls. We're remote business, but for you, it's actually inside your walls. That should be your focus. If you've got great people doing great work who are excited to be there because you're helping create that environment with great leadership, everything else works better, right? We're, we're oiling the joints there when we do that type of thing. So the other things here, don't make decisions yourself. As you empower your team and providers to think like owners and make strategic decisions, you create the opportunity to scale if you're a bottleneck in your business and all of the key decisions have to run through you because we don't Trust the judgment of our teams or we don't have people that have good enough judgment to be trustworthy, that's going be a problem. Right. So as owners, our job is to take responsibility when the systems break down and to give our teams as much credit as possible when things go well. One of the other things to keep in mind here is setting a vision that's bigger than a sales objective. We've talked about this before on the podcast with things like sales incentives and cross selling and reselling and retention. But if the end of the day you're existing to help people feel more confident in their own skin and that's your guiding light, that's your North Star, I think everything else falls in line. So like for us, one of our core values is we do what's in our clients. Clients best interest free of self serving financial impact. So as an agency, we have no incentive structure with the way that I built this for our team to upsell or cross sell a client into a service they don't need. The only thing we're going to sell our clients is what we believe they need in this exact moment. And we're going to treat this as if we ran their business. What would we do? If I'm in charge of running a business, where am I spending my marketing dollars? That's our only incentive. That's the only alignment I want our team to have in terms of how we guide and direct our clients. I think you can have the same type of thing in your med spa. And I really do believe that that creates momentum and trust in a way that's intangible but very, very impactful. So again, leadership level five, leadership. Extremely, extremely important. This tone is set by leadership. If your team doesn't love working for you and they don't feel like you have their back and their best interest at heart and you're not doing your best to make sure that they're succeeding, I think everything else falls apart. Number two, hiring for what matters. Right. And I think that's heart and discipline more than skill. So you can hire like again. I'll use an example. When we're hiring somebody for our team that is coming in for like an account management role. Yes. Do I want people who are coming in that have like extensive experience with Facebook ads and they understand consumer psychology and they have a good frame of reference? Yes, those things are important. They, they are for sure. I'm not going to discount that. But at the end of the day, long term, it's the heart, the discipline and the soft Skills that are going to make someone an A plus team member and the ability to develop skills, not necessarily for what skills they have today. So when you're thinking about injectors, I think this just goes back to something that's come up on the podcast time and time again, which is it's going to be more sustainable to build the talent internally to hire injectors who are newer, to train them, to have them shadow, to get them up to speed, and to hire for heart and discipline, not just skill, few other things. You've heard it before. Hire slow. Fire quick. You cannot compromise attitude or attention to detail. Even if someone has years of experience as an injector, if they come in and they're not meeting the expectation and the demand for what you need your team to be able to do and how you want them to operate and interact with clients, it all your business is going to fall apart. Right. That's a loose thread. So hire slow. I like to be really clear with expectations when we're hiring. So I like to say, hey, here's what it's like to work here. Here are the things that some people might not like. Here are the things you will like. Here's what's expected of you. If things haven't worked out with someone before, here's why. So I want them to be as crystal clear as possible with what success looks like in our business and to have as much alignment on that as possible. You want people who care about the clients, not just results or commission. So we talked about that with the alignment of incentives. Well, and then building an accountability of culture, or building a culture of accountability and continued learning, I think is really important. So accountability means we're going to take ownership for our mistakes. We're going to hold ourselves to a standard. I think the more meritocratic we can make our businesses, the better. If people are doing a great job, they're accountable, they've got a good attention to detail. Clients love them. We want to be able to create opportunity for those people. But accountability matters. If things are slipping through the cracks and we don't hold to a standard, again, it's another loose thread that risks kind of untangling the entire ball of yarn for us. For example, we're a remote team, but we have an in office mentality. We start work together at 8:30 every day. I set the expectation up front. If somebody rolls into the virtual chat saying Good morning at 8:30, is that a big deal in the grand scheme of things? No. Is it indicative of their work performance? Probably. Not necessarily, but in terms of setting the standard, the standard is we're in office ready to go together to jump in, tackle problems, communicate and coordinate. And if 8:31 is late, then why is 8:33 or 8:35? And it's a slippery slope. So when it comes to upholding the standard, I think also you want to build a team culture of accountability where your team is holding each other accountable, accountable for the standard and everything's not having to come from the top down. Number three, con confronting the facts. When things aren't working right, we don't want to hide when from the issues that are actually affecting our business. So reviewing things like new patient acquisition, retention, rebooking rates, profit per provider, identifying our weak points is going to be critical to overcoming our deficiencies. So if we don't have data, we don't have information and we don't take a look inside our business to know our numbers, to know where things are going sideways, we're not going to be able to implement the corrections and the fixes that are required to get us to the next level. Those things also build trust and operational excellence. So don't be afraid to confront the facts, be honest about what's working and what's not, and have a plan to solve problems. I know there's path release, resistance theory. We all get in. We get into our businesses every day and there's one or two things that are bugging us about our business, but we just don't feel like tackling them. Today I want to encourage you to tackle those things. The things that are frustrating you that you keep kicking the can down the road on are probably the things that are going to create the biggest impact in your business once you get them buttoned up. This episode is brought to you by MedSpa Magic Marketing, my agency. We help med spas and aesthetics practices grow with more effective marketing strategies. And I know that's a vague phrase, right? That's a vague claim. So I have an offer for you. I offer this to any new prospects if you're interested in exploring any of them, another marketing option, a new agency, or just getting into Facebook, Instagram, Google Ads for the first time. I'd love to show you why we're different, what we're doing for clients. And we can do that via a one and a half hour program planning session where I'll outline a specific marketing plan and I'll give you all of the blueprints that we would implement if we were to do business together. Now you can take that use that on your own, hire someone else to help you execute it or work with us. We really don't hold anything back on that strategy call. And I think you'll have a lot of confidence in how you manage your marketing investment moving forward, understanding some of the nuances that can help you implement more effective marketing strategies for your business. So if you want to do that, you can go to MedSpa magic marketing.com number four from the Jim Collins book Straight Direct. Here is the hedgehog concept and that's focusing on your sweet spot where you have an intersection of passion, excellence and profitability and staying laser focused in the med spa space, for example, I see plenty of very successful practices that are pretty much just injectable focused. And then I see a lot of practices struggling that feel like they have to do everything for everyone. They've got weight loss and testosterone and skin tightening and laser hair removal and microneedling and injectables, and they're not really great at anything because they're trying to be everything to all people. I think it's okay to diversify, but I would recommend doing this in steps. If you're really good with injectables, focus on the thing that you're really good at, the things that makes your business money, the thing that creates impact for your clients, and make sure that you're scaling that as efficiently as possible and then strategically add on other services. Don't feel pulled by the necessity to buy the new device. We've talked about that a bunch of on the podcast. And then also in alignment with this, don't sell things you don't believe in just because you get a pitch from a rep that shows that you see some good numbers in terms of profit potential. If you don't love that device, the results that it achieves, and you yourself wouldn't pay for that service, then you should not expect your clients to. And so avoid the temptation of chasing money with your service portfolio and how you build that out. And really try to make sure that you're aligned on doing what's in the best interest of your clients and letting the chips fall where they may after that. But staying lean and efficient and focused on the things that you do best I think is really important. Make sure you know your numbers too, so you know what things are the economic engine of your business. Number five A culture of discipline. Systems create freedom. We've talked about it. We haven't gone into detail on the podcast or the YouTube channel before on this necessarily, but you need clear SOPs. What is a patient consult look like, what is a follow up process? What is the treatment protocol? Right. How do we market, how do we train? All of those things need to be documented. The goal is that you can step away from your business tomorrow and that the entire thing could operate without you. You could be bringing on new team members, training new team members, dealing with issues, providing service to the clients in a consistent MANNER. We had Dr. Alex Rohr on the podcast who runs a business called SD Botox, and he talked about a little bit of different approach on some of these things. Like, hey, instead of everybody having a consistent protocol in terms of how they consult and follow up, treating each injector is kind of their own independent part of the business where they can experiment. He likes that. But even then, outline that right here are the things that we do that are standard. I want you, I want this to be the experience up until they're in the room with the injector. Then the injector maybe has to check one or two boxes. The rest, they have flexibility and we can use that as a testing ground. They're fine, that's fine. But outline which parts of the process you are allowing to be non standardized and which ones need to be standardized because the systems are going to create freedom for you and your team. Number six, technology. Accelerators use technology intentionally, not reactively. So have your eyes open for what are the things that we could be doing with marketing automation to free our staff from time intensive, repetitive tasks. So for us, that's using go high level, for example, to automate a lot of the lead nurturing. So we're not chasing down texting, calling, emailing leads that really weren't serious about booking in the first place. We're letting the cream rise to the top in terms of those conversations. Avoiding the temptation though, to jump on every new trend. Right. If you've got something that's working, keep using that, pulling that lever as much as you can to generate the result and to do what you need it to do. And carefully branch out into other things because you're going to create stress any change you create in your business. I think Alex Hormozy says this, any change you create in your business to maximize for efficiency, at least in the short term, you're probably causing four or five other problems. So pumping the brakes, thinking about these things strategically and making sure you have the bandwidth to adjust to new technology is important. Don't overwhelm your team with changing that out on a super consistent basis. Make sure that you're thinking that through and finally, number seven, the flywheel effect. I think this is the catalyst of this conversation. The most important part here, which is momentum comes from consistency. Greatness does not happen in the med spa space or in most businesses because of one new service, one big campaign, one new launch, one good month of patient acquisition. Right. We are in a business that's largely based on recurring revenue and retention. So success is built through consistent small wins that compound. Train your front desk to do their job as effectively as possible. Make sure that your injectors and your providers are a plus in terms of the patient experience they provide. And if they're not trained them or hold them accountable to a specific standard, make sure that you've got a marketing system that's lean and efficient. Like, we don't need to do nine different things. There's an infinite number of things we could be doing from marketing and advertising and standpoint. I think you want to focus on the one to three things that are consistently generating a result for you, helping you build momentum and again, strategically branch out to additional strategies. And then also celebrate small progress along the way. Consistent excellence creates an unstoppable momentum over months and years. So do a good job of celebrating small wins with your team. If we're killing it with the way that we're doing our consults, our patient satisfaction is up. Our retention and rebooking rates are a great reflection of that. Celebrate those wins with your team. If somebody does something well, right, the front desk person handled a conversation with a client that could have gone sideways in a really humble, really tactful manner. Point that out, highlight that, share that with the team. The last thing I'll end on here, because it's something that I struggle with, is as leaders, when we're striving for greatness. And that's what this was about today. How do you. How do we go from good to great? Here's some things to think about. One of the things that we can do is we can become so obsessive over the detail that we micromanage our team and we can demoralize them a little bit. So with this in mind, I listened to something recently and they kind of recommended it as a rough ratio, 4 to 1, even with constructive criticism. I think that's probably a good rule of thumb. So if, if we're constantly looking at ways to progress and optimize what we're doing in our businesses and that's the only information and feedback we share with our teams, it's going to wear on them, right? Where people, people want to feel, like, excited about the wins and the progress and the good that happens in their workday, not solely focused on the negatives and the problems that we have to fix. So make sure that you, as a leader and your leadership team and just team culture in general, you have to be really, really good at celebrating the small wins, especially in a business where small wins are the things that generate progress and momentum that allows you to achieve your growth goals. So hopefully that was helpful. Today in seven takeaways for med spas on how to go from good to great, inspired here by the Jim Collins book. Thanks and we'll talk to you on the next one.