Episode Transcript
[00:00:20] Hey, this is Lacey with Smartcast. And today I'm going to give you my speech that I've been asked to give at the Dallas beauty boss conference for Sinclair Medical. And the topic is going to be building a legacy business. So here we go.
[00:00:38] Hello, my name is Lacey, and I am the operating partner at Smart Skin Medspa in Homewood, Alabama. And I'm going to talk to you today about building a legacy business, because in smart skin and Homewood, that's exactly what we've been doing for the past 25 years. My mom began smartskin over 25 years ago when she developed cystic acne. And everyone at the time was just trying to cover up acne and acne scarring. And if you know my mom, you'll know that that is simply not good enough for her. She was on a mission to discover how to treat the scarring. And whenever she was in medical device cells, she met a husband and wife team that taught her how to layer treatments together to get an effective result in treating acne and acne scarring.
[00:01:24] So with microdermabrasion, being the first person in Alabama to bring that into the state, she started out with that. And alongside that, she brought in ultrasound, which, as you know, now helps with tone, texture, elasticity, and allows for active ingredients to be able to penetrate deeper into the skin. But 25 years ago, they were really only using that in burn victims for treating burns for children and adults, as well as equine therapy. And we've been using it in our practice since then, up until now, because she was a single mom and had to work all the time, she wasn't able to attend a lot of my school functions. And I never thought that I would be working in this industry. So when she asked me to come to work with her at Smartskin when my daughter was two years old, I was a little bit reluctant. But when we came to a mutual agreement that I was going to be able to attend all of her school functions, if I couldn't, she would be there. I decided to join, and I'm really glad that I did because now I get to see her every single day, talk to her every single day, and. And I get to spend time with my daughter. My brother, my cousin, my husband even helped join in on some of the foundational parts of smart skin.
[00:02:41] So the first thing that I did after I joined smart skin was get rid of all the paper. She had paper calendars, paper note cards that had all of our clients information on it, phone numbers, packages and all of that. And I have a little bit of a paper phobia. So I decided that I was going to find an EMR system that would work for us along with a two way texting program so that I wouldn't have to spend so much time calling, confirming appointments, returning phone calls for messages while I was calling those people back. And so now we use a program that is based out of Canada. It's a small company and it's worked fantastic up until recently because we've grown so much that now we needed a system that would meet our needs. So we've been working with a company for the past 1516 months to build a brand new company called Reveal. And it has some really unique features in it that I've asked them to include. That's been so exciting for me because I just love technology and how it can help us to be more efficient and effective in the work that we're doing.
[00:03:47] So I'm really excited about bringing that into the practice moving forward.
[00:03:57] And so building a legacy business, as I told you, I get to work alongside of my mom, my brother, my cousin, my family.
[00:04:05] You'll see at the left is my family. My husband helped us to build our very first website. He taught himself how to build websites and SEO and we used that website for the first 15 years that I've been here. And until just recently, we've decided to implement a professional website to help us grow the business as we grow and expand into new territories. My oldest daughter Bailey is 16 years old. She is under an apprenticeship to get her aesthetic license and she will be a licensed esthetician before she graduates high school. I also apprenticed under my mom to get my license as well. And my 13 year old daughter Isabella, she also would like to go into the aesthetics industry and she is undecided as to whether she will join our business or she wants to go out on her own and do her own thing.
[00:04:54] My son Liam is ten and he is a self proclaimed professional VR player. He would like to get into software engineering, but we'll see. I'm sure we'll find some way to drag him into the business too. My brother Sage is over our podcast and my cousin Mary Margaret apprentice to become an esthetician as well. But she's also our marketing director. And then of course, the famous Carmen, my mom. She is the founder and CEO president of Smartskin today.
[00:05:29] Three generations in business. We were recently featured in a publication and I'm just so excited for where the business started and where it is today. It's just come such a long way. And it's really taken a whole team of people to be able to get us where we are today. And we have learned a lot along the way. And I'm really excited to talk to you guys a little bit more about that today as well.
[00:05:55] We were recently featured in about Town magazine for women in business, which is really great. It was such a wonderful opportunity for us to spend time with local business owners. We really try to work with all of the other businesses in the community and lean on each other, especially during COVID It was such a special moment for us to realize how much our community reached out to make sure that we were okay. They were texting us, calling us, they were purchasing gift certificates over the phone and over the Internet to make sure that we were okay. They kept their memberships active while we were closed down just so that they could help support us. I went up to the office every day with my children to do e learning, answer the phones, text messages, do curbside service, and it was just a time in our career that we just really felt all of the years of us pouring into our patients that they were pouring back into us during that time and again. My mom was featured in about Town magazine. This is one of the ads that we did. We haven't done print ads in a really long time because it was really hard to track. But now, with the help of our website company and QR codes, we're able to track and measure the marketing that we're doing. In this particular ad, we did my mom and her favorite services, her favorite skincare products, her favorite injectables. And then at the bottom, there's a QR code where our patients can scan and find out exactly what we have at smart skin that's going to be the right fit for them. And so I just think that it's a really fun and unique way for us to be able to market our services and show what we have for each age group. In the next couple of magazines, we're going to do one for me in my age group and then one for my daughter and her age group. And I think that that's really fun.
[00:07:46] So here's a little bit about where we started. The top left photo is the very first location that my mom was in when I was in middle school. She was in this building for ten years. It was 640 sqft, had two treatment rooms, one bathroom, and no laundry room when she was there. I was in middle school all the way through high school, and I was the little spray tan girl. Spray tan clients in the little tiny closet and help answer the phones and help her take home the laundry.
[00:08:18] And then we moved into the crestline location, which is the top right location. And we were there for ten years. It was 1500 square feet, nine treatment rooms, a laundry and a kitchen. And we loved this little location. We just ran out of parking and we outgrew the space pretty quickly.
[00:08:36] So we opened up the bottom right location. That's our homewood Oxmore location.
[00:08:43] We were there for five years and it was 1500 square feet and five treatment rooms, a laundry and a kitchen. We did have both of those locations open for a couple of years at the same time, as well as a high end luxury retail space that was a pop up shop for one year and it was one room in a small retail counter. And what that really did was teach us that we could afford to move into our brand new space that we're in now, which is in Homewood. Right in between those two locations. It's 3500 sqft. We have 313 treatment rooms, a kitchen, laundry, injection room. We now have three injectors, eleven estheticians, a nurse practitioner, an RN, an MA, and front desk coordinators for a total of 20 staff. We love this location. We have been here for almost four years. We have also grown out of it pretty quickly. But we're trying to be extremely diligent in how we use our space and making sure that we are being as efficient with our space management as we can.
[00:09:52] So like I said, we recently just launched our brand new website and we have used this as if it were an additional employee. It works so hard for us. It is 24/7 tons of patient information where they can educate themselves. It's a lead generator. We use it for SEO, continued marketing. There is a virtual consultation tool on here.
[00:10:16] There's just so much education and knowledge on here for our patients and our staff to go and educate themselves on everything that we have to offer at the Spa.
[00:10:29] So here's a picture of our virtual consultation guide so our patients can go on and select their areas of concern and it will send them a personalized recommendation of all the services that we offer that's going to be the right fit for them. So we use this for our patients, for self education, as well as for our staff. Whenever they're doing consultations with our clients, then this way they can use this as a tool to go over specifically what the areas are that they're concerned about versus trying to go over 35 different treatment options and overwhelm the patients with too much information at one time. And so whenever our patients fill this out over the Internet, our front desk will get a copy of it, and then we would follow up with them and offer a free consultation to go over the results. And this has been a fantastic tool for us. It's really helped increase our patient experience as well as our staff.
[00:11:26] So here's the three pillars of truth that have helped us stay relevant in business today. Even though other practices are popping up all over the place, we've set ourselves apart from the competition with excellent customer service, educated staff and top of the line equipment, making sure that we are educating our staff on services. And we're never selling our patients. We are always educating them on the good, better and best options to choose from for their individual needs, whether that's going to be their budget time or both.
[00:11:57] So this is a picture of our face wash bar. We use this to allow our patients to come in either with a clean face or they're going to wash their face whenever they get there. And this way, we're able to offer our patients the most affordable treatment in a timely manner. And we can also use this as a touch point for clients to experience the skincare that we offer that they can use at home in between their treatments.
[00:12:21] So we really think that this is a very special way for us to be able to offer top of the line services at a very affordable price.
[00:12:33] So we also have a membership program that we've been offering for over 14 years now.
[00:12:39] We were in Crestline, and our patients were traveling out of the country or out of the state for holidays, summer, spring break and things like that. And so we were having to ask our staff to get second jobs, to be able to keep them on staff without losing them to other businesses. And so my mom thought that we had to come up with something so that we could have regular, consistent revenue throughout the year. So she came up with the idea that she wanted to do a membership program, and at that time, no one was doing memberships other than Jim's. And so we had to figure out a way to make this make sense for our patients and for us, because we were selling big packages at the time. So it was a very scary thought to go from bulk pricing to spreading out those prices for a long period of time. But we knew that it was going to pay off in the end because it was going to bring in consistent revenue and also was going to remind our patients that they needed to come in. And we really wanted to make it fair. Unlike a gym membership, we wanted their credit to be able to roll over and create basically an aesthetic savings account for them in the event that they weren't able to come in every single month. So we do allow our treatments to roll over, and instead of having to make up several different treatments, we turn it into a dollar amount credit. And this way they can put it towards really fun things so they get very excited about that. We also use Groupon to help grow our memberships. I know I hear a lot of moans and groans about Groupon whenever I go to different conferences, but if you use Groupon in the right way, you can really help. You can really utilize that to help you grow your practice.
[00:14:23] We have a groupon that's available that they can come in and sign up for the membership after they've experienced their service. And instead of having to hop around to all of the other different places, they can sign up for our membership and they can continue to come to us and get that same great service. So one facial service a month for a basic facial service is 95. And that's our silver. We have the till, that's 140. And that is two basic facial services or one VIPL. And then we also have our diamond, which is four basic facial services, or two basic facial services and an IPL.
[00:15:02] So Viora has been a huge partner with us while building up our membership program. We use the St handpiece for reaction eyes or reaction mouth or reaction neck. Those are all options as one of our basic facial services. And then the VIP IPL would be two. IPL is something that patients are all very aware of, and they get very excited about it. And so instead of spending $350 on a single visit of an IPL, they know that they can sign up for our membership program. And that's one of the options that they can choose from for their membership. And they really love that they're able to do that, and it really adds a lot of value to their services in their minds.
[00:15:46] So our podcast is called Smartcast, and this is just our educational opportunity for our clients and for our staff members. We have lots of guests come on our podcast to speak specifically about their different treatment modalities, their skincare lines, different services that are in the market, how they can layer aesthetic services with surgeries. And so we really love that we have this podcast available for our patients and for new staff so that they can go on and listen and learn more about things in a more fun and casual way. And so smartcast has been a really fun project that we've been working on, and it's been a really great opportunity for my mom and my brother and myself to be able to spend more time together.
[00:16:36] We do our podcast in our training center, which is across the street from the spa. So we took on the training center across the street so that I could move my office across the street and we could add another treatment room as well as to do the podcast and then just get out of the spa in the area. That is fun and comfortable for our staff to be able to get away and really focus on continued education and learning.
[00:16:59] We really think that it's so important for us to invest in our staff in their continued education.
[00:17:06] We want them to be able to feel really empowered in the knowledge and understanding that they have with all of the services that they're talking about. We never want them to feel salesy at all. We want them to really feel like they're educating. And so I know a lot of people are really worried about spending all this time, money and effort in educating their staff, but one of my favorite people said something to me that really resonated with me and it's just stuck with me ever since. And what he said was that someone told him, what if I spend all this time, money and effort educating this staff member and they leave me? And he said, what if you don't? And they stay? And so I just really feel like no matter what, it's such a great thing to be able to teach somebody and educate them and help them to be the best that they can. And with that, you can just trust that if they're supposed to be with you, that they'll stay with you.
[00:18:00] We create a loyal patient base through our team. A happy team creates better patient experiences and it's just overall better all around.
[00:18:10] And here's some more fun pictures from our staff training.
[00:18:14] The one on the left is from the most recent Viora Sinclair training that we went to with several of my new team members.
[00:18:24] And then we have an after hours dinner and then another overall shot of our training center and the girls eager to learn. It's one of their favorite things to do, especially because there's always free food involved.
[00:18:38] And future perfect is going to be our upcoming podcast that we're going to start soon, and it's going to be about business development.
[00:18:46] We hear a lot of questions and things that get brought up at different conferences that we go to. And so this is going to be a platform that we're going to use to go over questions and answers from a lot of frequently asked questions that we hear when we're at conferences. And again, my name is Lacey from Smartskin Medspa in Homewood, Alabama, and thank you for listening.
