Ladies and gentlemen, it’s been a year for the ages. For those of you who know me, I believe honesty and authenticity are paramount. They equal customer service and sales in my view. Here, I’ve taken a few minutes to share our client results of late (truly worth checking out!), wax poetic on the life of a consultant during strange times, and have a little fun.
I am forthright to a fault, tend towards R-rated language, actually have fun with staff and clients, and if a body could be comprised solely of metaphors, analogies, and random quotables, I’d be a walking, talking ball of anecdotal content. Sure, we run a serious consultancy (stay tuned for exciting announcements about 4-peating on the list of the 50 Fastest Growing Companies in South Florida, plus larger awards), act professionally where appropriate, and simply achieve client results nobody else does (more on this below), but we do it as practice partners and peers, not as sycophants or yes-men.
With that in mind, I don’t mind sharing what words came to mind when I contemplated the front half of 2020. R-rated and hyphen-necessitating, sh-tshow gurgled into the view of my mind’s eye. Something with “cluster” preceding it also became illuminated. Other choice options shall remain in the proverbial vault. Finally, over a well-earned and much-needed respite with my son and wife in our favorite little hamlet of Bridgehampton, NY the appropriate word came to me as I gazed at the post-Tropical-Storm-Fay washing machine-esque sudsy waves. It’s been utter pandemonium during this pandemic. How appropriate.
This fiasco, this hullabaloo, this medical practice chance-medley if you will (and even if you won’t) put our consultancy, overnight, quite literally, into utter pandemonium. All hands on deck. No vacation or days off. No leaving at 5pm. No time to be sick. No time for family or friends. We just hunkered down, got focused, and got back to our “WHY” we often reference, created after reading Sinek’s “Start With WHY” ages ago: Help Motivated People Reach Their Capacity. And off we went – in my case canceling 25 days of travel for work and vacation to quite simply, and solely, help my clients.
I don’t really remember much of March or April, nor May or half of June. During what felt like one long 2,000-hour day, like a man floating through space, I recall sending every client on our roster from Europe to Hawaii multiple 8 to 60-minute voice memos guiding them, but can’t recall much of the content. I know I recorded masses of videos for our YellowTelescope YellowTelecast podcast with our absolutely committed and unbelievably talented EVP Ed Syring, but topics escape me. It was clear to me my clients would come out of this better and growing, though how felt nebulous. 2008 was the year we opened (great idea, Jon!), and we grew, and our clients grew, so this created no fear in our team or me, but exactly why escapes me.
As I left that haze, as offices reopened in early June, and I looked at what we created for our clients during that time, hindsight became 20/20. In “Blink” by Gladwell, the author refers to a “state of flow” (SOF) which we all know well. In a sense, when we are doing what we are intended to, what we love, we essentially blackout. Time loses feeling. We simply are – as we look up, hours, days, or months have passed. For many doctors, time in the operating room brings about their SOF – indeed, I’ve seen surgeons create superb, natural results over 5 hours as very serious surgeons, while dancing and rapping to the Notorious B.I.G. and Outkast on high volume (you know who you are, doctors). When it’s done, they barely remember – they just do what they do. Consultants, those who truly succeed in their craft, may think they hate working through these adverse times and pandemonium, but the reality is we love the challenge, are at our best during it, and are paid for exactly these times. Now ask me if I want a 2nd wave or another economic downturn or any more emergencies and my answer would be “the word following cluster, followed by no,” but I’m not naïve that my team and I have been more valuable the last 3 months to our clients than at any point in the prior 144 or so months we’ve been in business. Ask the 100 other people who just decided to put “Aesthetic Consultant” or “I Help Practices Thrive” on their LinkedIn profile in the last month after being laid off from their job in aesthetics, or the 10 new podcasts that are suddenly out there from various lone-wolf consultants who didn’t find time to do it before (ours has been coming to you since 2014, replete with fine whisky reviews and witty repartee) exactly how they completely transformed practices over the last 3 months with a near 100% success rate, and let me know if you get a reply, let alone one with data, let alone the data we share below. We eat and breathe this stuff. We are aesthetic consulting. And I write this, in part, to memorialize this interesting time, but also to prove it.
In addition to being a word nerd, I’m a data guy. With that in mind, I’ll digress first, but then get to the numbers. We’ve overseen something close to half a billion dollars in sales results since inception. The proof is in the pudding as they say. My son is 6 and here on the eastern end of Long Island, each small town has a windmill. We visited one in another local hamlet called Sag Harbor when my son was 3, and it was inhabited – or perhaps a better word would be staffed – by a nonagenarian who didn’t look a day over 150, and so I, like any loving father, lied to my son and explained that this was, in fact, Don Quixote’s house as he loved windmills so much he just moved in. Quixotic? Sure. But so it goes, I told my young lad. The little windmill had pamphlets and tourist information Mr. Quixote gave us before sending us on our way, and to this day my son remembers that Don Q “really, really, really loves books.” He also is credited with the saying “the proof is in the pudding” – or at least his author, Cervantes, did…or at least many widely attribute the 17th-century book with this credit though it seems to be incorrect and more likely dating back to the 14th century when a bad pudding, or blood sausage as it was in that time, could literally kill you if not fresh and made properly. No matter, it is in the pudding, that you’ll find the proof.
So here it is. What follows are the results of 17 practices I personally oversee and spoke with on Monday and Tuesday here as I write during mid-July. I’ve left nobody out so there is no “struggling client” I spoke to who is not listed here:
- California – all-time record in June. Up $200,000 for the year with 6 months to go despite Covid. Beat last July’s total before July 15th with 2 weeks to keep adding. Surgery is booked for 2 months fully. SEOversite client as well that is seeing his best web results ever and largest lead counts of all time.
- Florida – 136 surgeries sold in the last 30 days. Almost a 1million dollar month. 1 doctor. Up year over year over $2,000,000 despite Covid with 6 months to grow – pacing towards around $5,000,000 in annual year over year growth. Booked for surgery until January of 2021 necessitating a large price increase to deal with demand. SEOversite client seeing his largest lead counts of all time.
- New England – $600,000+ June, an all-time record. Up $23,000 year-over-year despite Covid with 6 months to keep adding. 100% same-day surgery booking rate the last 3 weeks on both live and virtual consultations. Booked for surgery for over a month. SEOversite client as well seeing his largest lead counts and visitors of all time, plus an iScreamSocialMedia client seeing massive lead conversion from paid social media ads and organic social media posting.
- Carolinas – 20/22 consults booked same day over the last 2 weeks. $375,000 sales month with one doctor. 3rd best month of all time. Up over $200,000 year over year with 6 months to add despite Covid. Booked out a month for surgery.
- Canada – prior best month around $250k. June of 2020 they broke $450,000 in sales for another all-time record. Up year over year despite Covid. Over a 90% same-day booking ratio for surgery.
- New York – 11/14 booked same day in the last week or so. Booked out nearly 2 months for surgery. $270,000 month (up $47,000 from 2019), July pacing towards $300,000+. Just re-opened and on pace to grow in 2020. SEOversite and iScreamSocialMedia client generating record-breaking results.
- Northeastern US – 1 doctor. $1,312,000 sales month (not year, month) for an all-time record. 43 out of 44 surgery consults booked same day over the past 2 weeks. On pace to grow by 7 figures in 2020 and to do between 10 and 15 million dollars as a single practitioner that hired us originally doing under 1 million a year. SEOversite and iScreamSocialMedia clients generated over 1,000 leads a month regularly.
- Texas – brand new client – first month (trained during Covid) an all-time record over $500,000 in sales. 2ndmonth growth of 6 figures year over year. Pacing towards growth despite Covid, averaging approximately 25 consultations a week with a 75% same-day booking ratio.
- Beverly Hills – brand new patient coordinator under a month out of training booking around 75% same day for surgery consultations. All-time record in June, up $74,000 year over year. Booked out 2 months for surgery. SEOversite client generating highest visitor and lead counts ever.
- Colorado – all-time record in non-surgical sales in June. All-time record in surgery sales in June. $250,000 in year-over-year growth in a single month. SEOversite client with record-breaking results. PCC team booking 95% of patients same day over the prior 2 weeks.
- Florida – $200,000 sales week the week of July 6th to set an all-time record. Surgery schedule booked out through 80% of September. 9/11 surgeries booked same day last week. SEOversite and iScreamSocialMedia client achieving record-breaking results
- Massachusetts – hardest-hit state, opened to being fully booked for around 7 weeks. Booking 85% same day. Awaiting sales results for July, the first month open which should be a record-breaking surgery month.
- Georgia – non-surgical services booked out a month with a YT-trained non-surgical PCC. Surgery booked out over a month. Over $300,000 month in June and within 50k of year over year sales numbers with 6 months to grow so pacing towards 6-7 figure growth in 2020. SEOversite and iScreamSocialMedia client achieving record-breaking results.
- California – $900,000 month. 1 doctor. 1 part-time injector. Growth of over $360,000 in June alone and 2ndbest month ever. Up $60,000 year over year despite Covid with 6 months to grow. SEOversite Lite client with record-breaking results. PCCs booked 27/30 over the last 3 weeks same day.
- Beverly Hills – 16/18 booked same day recently. Booked out over a month for surgery. While missing an injector achieved $30,000 in growth in June alone. On pace for growth in 2020 despite Covid. Pacing towards 70% growth in July as of the 14th.
- Massachusetts – 9/10 consults booked same day recently. Booked out around 80% through September. Just re-opened as the last state to allow cases. Should be on pace with the best month or two of surgery ever. Lead counts tremendous – SEOversite and iScreamSocialMedia client.
- Texas – all-time record with over $700,000 in June sales reflecting growth in June of over $400,000 year over year. Averaging about 80% same-day booking ratios on 15 consults a week. Overall, up for 2020 despite Covid with 6 months to keep growing. iScreamSocialMedia and SEOversite client breaking visitor count and lead count records.
- New York – All-Time Record in June, up $200,000 for the month on over $560,000 in sales. 26 of 28 consults booked same day for the week with 23 more this week. July sales have already eclipsed last year’s totals with over a week to keep adding. Averaging over a 92% same-day booking ratio for the month of July. Adding a new surgeon this summer to keep up with demand. SEOversite and iScreamSocialMedia client as well, breaking records monthly.
Takeaways and final thoughts. Summaries and conclusions. Sentence fragments and grammatically questionable conversational writing. Here we go:
- We were right. We don’t mind saying so. We preached it. We knew it. We often didn’t know why as so much of consulting is intangible and comes from experience, but we knew it to be true. We said to stay open, keep your PCCs (we retained 100% of our surgical PCCs nationally without any layoffs or furloughs across all of our client practices), reinvest in marketing, and to take market share while mastering virtual consultations. And every single idea was the right decision. This is why when so many doctors get their first “real job” running their own practice at 33 years old with no coaching or training, or when they turn 50 and realize they make a great living but have no family time and can grow much more but have hit a ceiling, they hire us. We are the consulting company led by people who’ve run their own company since 19 years old, who’ve overseen teams of 2,000 or more simultaneously in 13 locations, who’ve attended the top business schools in the country, who’ve overseen hundreds of millions in results, who’ve run some of the top practices in the country, who’ve been practice managers and PCCs, who’ve received national recognition and awards annually, who have built their own company to last and grow through Covid without any layoffs, hours cut, turnover, or downturn, and to be much larger than most practices.
- It’s no surprise, really, that we were right that demand would continue. Lesser practices would curl up in a ball, take their ball and go home, and while the pie would get smaller as the economy would be affected, top practices who stayed the course on marketing, employing and motivating their sales teams, ignored big data news, and listened to our guidance, would thrive. We would eat the lunch of other practices, get a bigger piece of a smaller pie, and then see demand return dramatically. We would open to super-packed schedules, people with more downtime, and continued desire for our services. While the circumstances for many would be, and remain, dire, our demographic would remain largely employed, successful, and spending. While many of us, me included, have friends and colleagues who have become sick and even passed away, and while we never wish to minimize the reality that this is an absolutely once in a 100 years catastrophe of epic proportion, if we persevere, we could keep ourselves and others safe, while saving livelihoods and families financially as well. I received a note from one of our YT Seminar attendees that underscores this reality, among many similar stories I can share. He said, “Thanks for the YT approach–it has changed many things in our practice… I plan on opening very soon and I have 109 surgeries booked in May and I have to operate 5 days/week through July to handle the caseload…Demand is high and I find that doing the YT approach with virtual consults has been unbelievably successful.”
- Last, we are, in my view, the leading consulting company in aesthetics in both results and thought leadership. I might not have said that 5 years ago and certainly not 10. I say it now, and largely because of our outstanding team. I’d like to think I do my job well, but my true talent is surrounding myself with the nation’s best people and together we become an unstoppable planet that creates an orbit that attracts more talent to serve our clients. Many others have very much good to offer and say, but I believe our team is operating at a different level and some of that just comes from time coupled with natural talent and skill development. The proof is in the pudding above. We are growing and taking more of the industry’s pie. And we are having a lot of fun doing it.
Beyond “helping motivated people reach their capacity,” our other mantra is “honest and on it.” If you work for, or own, a practice that embodies those two things, get in touch with us. We (Ed, Dan, Abby, and I) are booked out for consulting largely until Q1 of 2021, but you need to sign up months in advance. Attend our 10th Annual YellowTelescope Training live or virtually this November – check out around 400 video and written testimonials about this amazing event on YellowTelescope.com. The reality is that most people invest in the stock market as they get older and a good ROI is around 7-10%. Those that hire us, statistically – and you can see the results above for just a few of my clients, though Dan, Ed, and Abby’s achieve very similar results – grow in year one by 700-800% or so in terms of ROI, which would take around 20 years in the stock market. Show me where else you are beating that other than perhaps with your SEO team (and if you are not, get in touch as well so www.SEOversite.com can help you) and I’ll gladly encourage you to hire them AND us.
The road ahead is bumpy. I bet you haven’t contemplated that the toughest time in your business in the next year will be the months between the time they announce a cure or vaccine, and the time people can get it injected. How will you manage those who want surgery, know there is a cure and the economy is back, but want to wait 5 months to get their treatment as they hunker down at home awaiting a lifesaving needle? Believe me, we are thinking ahead…honest and on it. It’s a time of fear. That also means it’s time to buy low while others sell high, while your competition makes poor decisions, puts their head in the sand, and shudders in the corner. Don’t do that. Take market share. Build with us. Have fun with the challenge. Join our family of practices truly dominating their markets and leading the industry in so many cases. Let’s start the discussion… you can email me personally if you’ve read this far at jon@yellowtelescope.com. Wishing you health, wealth, and happiness in 2020 and beyond.
Jon
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