In this episode, we are joined by sister act Jessica Stellwagen and Melissa Mickelson, founders of Bodify. They join us to share the skills that helped them become leaders in CoolSculpting. Jessica and Melissa reveal their client-focused approach, the power behind their motto “do what’s best and delegate the rest,” and their unique method of rewarding their employees’ behavior. Tune in as they share how fostering a collaborative team environment is key to reaching their goals.
Listen to the full episode using the player below, or by visiting one of the links below. Below is the episode’s transcript which has been edited for readability. If you have any questions or would like to learn more, email us at info@byrdadatto.com.
Transcript
Intro: [00:00:00] Welcome to Legal 123s with ByrdAdatto, legal issues simplified through real client stories and real-world experiences, creating simplicity in 321.
Brad: Welcome back to the Legal 123s with ByrdAdatto. I’m your host, Brad Adatto, with my co-host Michael Byrd.
Michael: As a business and health care law firm, we represent clients in multiple business sectors, especially health care.
Brad: Yes we do.
Michael: This season we are finding common ground for our audience. Regardless of your background, our theme is leadership, where each episode we’ll talk about leadership from different perspectives.
Brad: Yeah. And Michael, we’re more seasoned individuals now, so in our lifetime we probably have done some kind of crazy stuff like maybe plunking or jumping out of planes or bungee jumping or whitewater rafting. All these are thrill Vince, is there something that stands out in your mind?
Michael: Yeah. Well, I mean, you’re probably [00:01:00] a little more of a thrill secret than me, but I have bungee jumped. But back in our younger days, I can think of it when we’re in our thirties, my younger days. You and I did go on a few adventures together that may have not been the wisest decisions. You once took us on a joy ride in a golf cart during a golf tournament where we even almost jumped a sand trap.
Brad: We did.It was Dukes of hazard, like.
Michael: It was very, very close to not ending well for both of us. I think I did the same thing once on an all firm retreat at our old firm where I decided to take my truck off roading while we were on a retreat together. Might have run over a couple of barriers along the way, but those were our younger, not as smart days.
Brad: Yes. We’re much wiser now. Now, besides partnering with me, what was the craziest business decision you’ve ever made?
Michael: [00:02:00] Well, actually partnering with you probably was the craziest, not in a normal make fun of Brad way, but just because you and I both know how we started, but if I can’t say that one, I’ll have to say us deciding to start our own firm. And just a little bit of context is that, as you know, Brad, I had just gotten married and I was bringing a lot into the marriage. My sweet wife had never been married and I had been married and had four kids that were with me all the time. And so she was not just marrying me, she was marrying a lot and it was great. And I told her the one thing of stability I could offer her into this marriage was that I’d been with the same firm for 15 plus years and that I was going to be the president of the firm soon. And then at least there was stability. And six months later I had to go tell her that scratch that Brad and [00:03:00] I are going to go start a new firm where we put all of our chips on the table.
Brad: That does sound crazy.
Michael: What about you?
Brad: I think for us, probably the craziest thing we’ve done is we’ve actually moved to a four-day workweek. That really does sound like a crazy business decision, especially for a law firm. But I know right now audience members, our firm and team love it. So I guess that’s working. So it’s not as crazy as sounds, but let’s switch from business to employees. Michael, what was the craziest request you’ve ever made to an employee?
Michael: Well, in the spirit of being a 13 year old boy, it was making fun of somebody. It was a friend, of course, only friends. I, with a couple of other friends at my very first firm, the named partner was out of town and we went into his office and pretended, or called one of our other friends and pretended to be the partner.
Brad: Oh no.
Michael: And asked him to say we were in a meeting with a client and asked him to go get us a grape knee-high or get him a grape [00:04:00] Kneehigh. Do you remember what that is?
Brad: No.
Michael: It’s a grape soda drink. It’s really difficult to find.
Brad: Oh, no.
Michael: And so he was gone for an hour and a half. And then we told him to leave it by the door because we didn’t want to be interrupted. And so we had some really good laughs over that.
Brad: Yeah. That’s pretty torturous.
Michael: What about you, Brad?
Brad: Well, I guess I’ll confess today, since no one’s really listening today I used to torture our clerks back at the old firm, Michael.
Michael: What about that? I knew you were evil.
Brad: I’m very evil. And I’d walk into Clerk Central where we had all the clerks. There’d be four to six clerks sitting there, and I’d say, “Hey, does anyone want to go to California or New York?” And a whole bunch of enthusiastic young attorneys to be would raise their hand, and as soon as I got that volunteer, I’d let them know “great, you get to go to see the laws of that state and do just a really massive research project.” And I could see the confusion in their eyes all the way quickly to the disappointment that I just gave them the really boring research project that quickly.
Michael: We just revealed our [00:05:00] maturity, Brad.
Brad: Yeah.
Michael: Okay.
Brad: Alright. Michael, real important, we’re going to get rolling here. How much do you love ByrdAdatto?
Michael: Now you’re starting to make me nervous. And we have two nice guests waiting for me to respond, and I feel like you’re setting me up. So why do you want to know?
Brad: Michael, what if I asked you, would you test a product on behalf of ByrdAdatto?
Michael: I guess I would join Access+ if I needed to give myself some legal advice, or I needed you to give me some legal advice, but we don’t really have any products. So now you’re starting to confuse me.
Brad: Okay. Well, what if ByrdAdatto made tasers?
Michael: If I had a taser, I think I would test it on you right now.
Brad: Okay. That’s not fair. That’s not where I wanted to have to go with it. If I had a taser as a product, could I test it on you?
Michael: Oh, right. Back at me? [00:06:00] Well, if I could make these questions stop, I might say yes. I’m starting to have concerns that Brad has been testing the taser or something else on himself. Can you jump to the end, Brad? Why are you asking me about tasers?
Brad: Alright. So there’s a company called Axaon or AXAON, that make the tasers and reportedly they take their employees royalty. How loyal are you to the company? And apparently a lot of the ex-employees say that staff tasing is “audience members” voluntarily encourage and that these tasings frequently happen at the auditorium of the headquarters where everyone chants tase, tase, tase.
Michael: Oh wow. They need Access+, I think, but it does remind me Brad, at one of our retreats, our partner Alex may have offered you $100 to allow him to tase you.
Brad: Yeah. He may have. And I said, no. Well, [00:07:00] and the company actually said that you know, that it’s not that bad, but of course there are waivers and other things that they have to sign if they are going to get tased, which always is a bad sign to ride the lightning and they were asked to get tattoos and other things. But, Michael, I guess since our guests are sitting there, I’m going to sum up, the whole reason why I brought this up, is the headquarters for this place is right down the block from where they’re seated today because the headquarters to this company is Scottsdale’s, Arizona. And our guest today [07:31 inaudible] about 30 miles from there. So I thought when I read that article, I was like, “oh, well they’re locals. They probably know all about this.”
Michael: Deep Siri research to make that geographical connection.
Brad: Yes.
Michael: Okay, let’s move on. Let’s bring your guests on. Alright. Our guest today are co-founders of Bodify, a Phoenix, Scottsdale, Biltmore CoolSculpting certified practice. We have Jessica Stellwagen and Melissa Mickelson. So Jessica is a graduate of Santa Clara [00:08:00] University Levy School of Business with a bachelor’s in marketing and Spanish. She is project manager for Piranha Marketing before partnering with Melissa Mickelson. Melissa owned a cosmetic surgery recovery business in Southern California where she cared for liposuction and tummy tuck patients after their procedures. She also ran a med spa prior to Bodify, kind of wearing all the hats in the business. Both have been on stage with Brad most recently at MSS on their M&A experience of selling their practice. Jessica and Melissa are also sisters, and this is not their first venture together. When they were five and seven, they started a lemonade stand together. Welcome.
Jessica: Hi.
Melissa: Hey. Thanks guys.
Michael: Well, we’re so happy to have you guys here. And we’re going to start off by asking the very important question. [00:09:00] Since your sisters and you’ve known each other for a while, have you ever been tempted either to tase one of your sisters or get company logo tattoos for the benefit of the practice?
Jessica: Definitely tase. I would say before we owned a business together, we like completely got along. But now that we own a business together, there’s been a few days, maybe, what, four of the eight years, we could definitely tase each other. Arizona is relatively hot, as you know, and I think probably a year ago she was driving me home and we were getting in a little bit of a fight so she pulled over her Range Rover and “said, fine, get out and walk.” And I walked.
Michael: Oh my God. That’s still better than tasing, I think.
Brad: Yes. I guess so.
Jessica: That North Star is definitely family first, so we always come back to that.
Michael: There you go.
Brad: That’s amazing. It’s a good North Star.
Michael: Well, that’s really cool. And well, so tell us about Bodify, your business.
Melissa: Yeah, so I mean, we opened Bodify in 2015. We wanted to open a practice where basically we did one thing and we could become the expert at one thing. [00:10:00] And to be honest, we only raised enough money to do one thing. So that’s kind of how it started. We decided on CoolSculpting. I had been doing it with a practice that I ran. Before that I knew that it worked. I knew that it got great results. I knew that we could do some sort of guarantee around it. And here we are, eight, nine years later, we sold our practice. We have three locations. We’ve done over 36,000 CoolSculpting treatments and we just really love what we do.
Michael: That’s amazing. Anything else you want to add?
Melissa: It’s interesting because we’re talking about leadership. So much of what Bodify is today. I’m excited because it came from a mentor that I had and just kind of listening and having an open heart and open mind when I worked for that gentleman and just saying, “okay, maybe that doesn’t work for us because he was in a space of attorneys.” But how can we pivot? How can we make it a right fit? And then how can we infuse that into Bodify and I just really believe because we were able to kind of create who we wanted to be before we started, we were very, very intentional about a lot of the choices we made. And I just think [00:11:00] that the importance of that is evident in the success that we’ve had both with our team and leadership and ultimately our clients results and then selling the business.
Brad: That’s awesome.
Michael: I’m curious too, so y’all been in business for a while now and had a big event. Were you guys along the way tempted or did you end up expanding your service offerings as you matured or grew or have you since y’all sold, or y’all still very niche focused?
Melissa: So we were one trick pony for eight and a half years. I always had learned that niches lead to riches, and there are a lot of similarities for the attorneys, but one of the gentlemen I worked for, he was like, look, if you put a shingle out on the front of your law firm and you do 6,000 things, people are nervous. They don’t know who to go to. If I have a heart problem, I don’t want to go to a general surgeon, I want to go to a cardiac specialist. And so that idea just really kind of, I think impacted us and was like, “Hey, maybe people will pay more [00:12:00] to go to a specialist.” Maybe we really can hone our craft. Maybe our marketing will be different and someone will want to go to someone who eats, live, sleeps and breathes one thing versus a jack of all trades.
And so for eight years, that really served us quite well. But most recently we did decide to bring in another service offering, not because CoolSculpting is not wonderful, but we just feel like we’re ready, we’re ready to pivot, we’re ready to add another service offering. And more importantly, we were listening to our clients and the feedback was, we love you, we trust you. We are loyal to you. I don’t need more fat frozen, so what else are you going to give me? And so that was really the impetus to bring something else in.
Brad: That’s amazing. And by the way, I’m stealing that phrase. I’ve got to use that sometime.
Michael: Yes. That’s really good.
Melissa: I’ll appreciate it. Swipe away.
Brad: Alright.
Michael: Well, and as you mentioned, this season we’re really focusing on for our audience leadership. And as you guys are leaders in the industry, we’d love for you to share a lot of thoughts with us. But one of us is kind of taking a giant step back, besides your lemonade stand that y’all put together.
Brad: Maybe it was the lemonade stand.
Michael: Maybe it was, but what was really your first leadership position? [00:13:00]
Melissa: Yeah, I could really boss Jessica around at the lemonade stand. I think I’ve definitely, like a very reluctant leader, I just have always naturally liked to control the situation and be in charge, but I don’t want to be that outspoken, like “listen to me because of this.” So maybe even like soccer and junior high and high school, always the captain of the team just led by example. And I think that was always super important to me, like I don’t tell people what to do. It’s like I work hard, I do the right things and just follow along.
Michael: Interesting. How about you?
Jessica: I would actually say sorority. Very interesting. That was in college. I’m sure I had examples on the playground when I was in middle school too. But I think the sorority, it was just something that I was passionate about. So it was easy for me to kind of rise up in that ranks. And then I think, I don’t know if power is the right word, but it’s kind of intoxicating, when, like Melissa said, you can lead by example. And when you want to take these people who are maybe disjointed, everyone’s not [00:14:00] on the same page and you give them on the same page with your vision, and then you give them the resources and the tools to be successful, and then you get where you want to go. I just think it’s a little bit addicting. You’re like, “Hey, I like this and it’s working.” It serves me, it serves the organization. And I think having kind of that vision of mission first and then team and then individual has allowed us to step into these roles of leadership quite successfully.
Michael: Do you attribute someone in particular as being an influence or someone that you learned from on how to be a leader, even if it’s just the idea of leading by example versus another type of approach?
Jessica: Yeah, I think for me it’s our mom. Both of our parents own businesses and our mom owned a health food store and she worked her butt off. I mean, she was there all the time leading by example, showing it, showing our employees like how it’s done. And I think that really sunk into me. I think also I probably took that to heart a little bit too much. And it was like [00:15:00] working your butt off until you literally run yourself ragged and into the ground. And I think I’ve had to learn to step back and not take that to heart quite as much and have a little bit of balance in life. And I think we had such a great experience because my mom for me was someone who I really admired in terms of leadership and culture and how she treated her staff, where my dad loved him to death, but he just had a very different leadership style.
So for example, he would say things like, well, if you want it done right, you have to do it yourself. And I don’t believe that. We believe in do what you do best and delegate the rest. He also had this fundamental belief that when you brought team members in, you wanted to educate them and train them, but not so much so that they could do it on their own so that they could leave and create their own business. And same thing, Melissa and I have just always felt, you know, dissimilar to that, like, “why would I not train?” If I don’t train people and they stay, I’m crippling my business and if I train someone so well that they choose to go out and do their own thing, then we get to lovingly send them on their journey and say, this is your next step in your [00:16:00] evolution, and we trust that the next right person is going to backfill.
So I think the juxtaposition of our parents was quite wonderful. And sometimes you learn as much from people who are doing what you want as you learn from the people who are doing things you don’t want. And we just had a really beautiful mix, and both my parents were successful in their own right. And so it allowed us to kind of fuse those two what we wanted and then become our own leaders.
Melissa: I really hope dad’s not listening to this.
Jessica: He’s amazing. Just different.
Brad: Well, it’s different styles that always reminds me of that quote that we always talk about is, you want to train your employees and for fear of them leaving if you don’t train them and what happens if they stay. That always gets a little nervous. Well, it sounds like you guys had these, your mom being a great mentor and obviously in a different way your dad mentoring in ways in which you did not see that same leadership style, which is always good, so I won’t use him as an example, but as you progressed in your different roles that y’all had. Was there an experience that you either [00:17:00] had personally or you viewed was a really bad leadership experience that you had?
Jessica: I had a boss once, and I am a huge proponent of Robert Kiyosaki. Not necessarily because of his philosophies, but just in terms of using your own mind and not necessarily following the road and the path that everybody else wants. And he always said that people want to be right. They want to win, they want to be comfortable. And so I felt like this leader so much wanted to be right, that he, it was a he in this case just had tunnel vision. There was no ability to adapt, to pivot, to listen to outside ideas, to believe that he might be doing something inefficiently or not correct. And he just wanted to force that way through telling people and kind of being a dictator to get to that vision that he wanted. And it just was such a visceral reaction for me that nobody wanted to work for him. Nobody wanted to be there.
It was kind of like Dave Ramsey says. You show up to work and you’re like, “oh my God, this is my life.” [00:18:00] And that just left a really clear impression on my heart that like, in business, I want to win. I don’t want to be right. And if I don’t know how to win and someone on my team does, or there’s a new idea or a new concept, embrace that. Throw it at the wall and if it sucks, fine, put it in a bucket and say, we’re not going to do that again. But that constant evolution, trying, pivoting and evolving, I just think is important because it’s really easy just to get stuck in your ways and believe what you’re doing is the best way possible when it’s not true.
Brad: That’s such a great point because there are some leaders out there who are very, they think they’re thought leaders and I’m using that word think, because they think they’re doing it correctly and they want to force their stuff through, they miss everything around them because you’re right, they’re so focused and we’ve experienced that ourselves through different, over the years with those individuals who are always right even when they’re wrong.
Michael: And when you were talking about, it reminded me at my first job, I had a supervisor, a partner that was giving me [00:19:00] work that was very similar. And I remember feeling like there was just no space to do anything other than exactly what I was told to do. And it was suffocating. Like there was no joy in trying to grow and develop and expand and learning how to practice law.
Jessica: Yeah. Well said.
Michael: How about you? Do you have an example of kind of a bad leadership experience?
Melissa: Yeah, I think I’ve had a few leaders that just created just such a negative energy in the environment. And I’m such a person that like if I’m in a space and there’s a bad energy, like nobody wants to be there, nobody’s doing their work. It’s like you dread it at every moment. And so I think I really took that and said, okay, whatever we do and whatever we open up and however we choose to lead, like it has to be a place that people have just such good vibes. And I love the fact that people come in, even patients come in and they don’t want to leave. [00:20:00] They’re like, we just love hanging out here. It just feels like family. It’s fun. Like, can I just come and hang out even after I’m done with my treatments? And that is just so important to me. And I think I took that just really awful negative feeling and turned it on its head.
Michael: That’s awesome. That’s great. Well, we’ve kind of talked about it and danced around it throughout the conversation so far. And I know early on, you for sure had the leadership style of leading by example. I’d be curious how each of you would describe your current leadership style.
Jessica: Something that I constantly tell myself is, being a business owner is probably the most challenging thing I’ve done in terms of having to self-reflect. I believe that my team is a reflection of me. So my team is constantly showing up and giving me physical evidence about if I’m on track and if I’m showing up how I want to show up. And so a big thing that I have to constantly remind myself is an entrepreneur has a different [00:21:00] mindset than a team member or a staff member or an employee, whatever you want to call them, we want to fly to F16 as we build it. An employee, a staff member does not want to do that. They want to show up to work, they want to know how to win, they want to have the systems and they want to have the processes. So I think that’s really been something that we’ve focused on quite heavily because I never want to show up one day and hear my phone being answered and being like, that’s not what I said.
But when that happens, that’s not about the employee. It’s about me and my lack of training and giving them the tools and the resources and the processes to be successful. But I would say one of two of the biggest things that I work on today, number one is rewarding the behavior and not the outcome. We’re a sales organization, you are a sales organization, everybody needs to sell, otherwise we don’t have a job. But when we kind of put that and infuse that pressure, like Melissa said, it creates this culture of angst and anxiety and panic and pressure. So it’s like, how can we focus on saying, do you know what? I believe if we do these certain behaviors, the outcome is going to be there, [00:22:00] so let’s reward the behavior and just get them to exercise that muscle over and over and over again believing that will inevitably give us the result.
The second thing, is one of the things my mom did say is, “Hey, people will show up to work.” They clock in and they talk for 10 minutes before they start working and that drives me nuts. But I believe if we don’t spend a small amount of time getting to know our team, who they are personally, professionally, what their ambitions are, what their goals are, what their fears are, well then we just see an inverse relationship with non-productivity. And so we do spend a lot of time getting to know our team. And sometimes I roll my eyes. It’s like, “oh my gosh, if I have to hear about your weekend or if I have to listen to this.” But then I believe when we need them to work and when we need them to go the extra mile, they’re more than happy to do it because they value us as humans and not just as bosses or a place to come punch a clock and get a paycheck.
Brad: That’s a great points. Melissa, you have other thoughts?
Melissa: Yeah, I think as that reluctant leader, not having to tell people what to do is so important to me. [00:23:00] And again, I’ve said I like to show them how to do and all that, but I think you need to get them to a point and train them to a point where you can trust them. So you cannot delegate a task if you don’t trust them and they’re not competent. And so that’s on me as a leader to make sure that whoever I’m hiring is somebody that I can trust. We can develop that trust. And then I also have to get them to a place where they’re extremely competent before I can hand that off. I mean, when Justin and I first started Bodify, it was just us and one other employee, and we were doing everything, seven days a week, all the treatments, all the marketing, all the sales.
And as we started to hire, it was very, very difficult for me to let go of some of that stuff. But I had to do it just like for health reasons and all just, it was so important to do that. And I think just not overmanaging people either. It’s like, I’ve hired the right person, I’ve given you the tools, you show up and you do it and you’re going to be fine. I’m not going to like sit there and micromanage you
Michael: It’s really interesting. I’ve heard both of you, you really empower your team [00:24:00] and you talked a minute ago about having trusting someone as you hire them. I’m curious what you’ve learned or what your approach is on making sure you have the right person because you’re really putting them in a position where you need to have that trust, as you said. And so making the right hire seems like it’d be really important with how you lead your team.
Jessica: There are absolutely industries where if I’m going to be a heart surgeon, you got to have the education, I have to know how to do heart surgery. With CoolSculpting, it is a very particular skill, but it can be learned and you can develop it. So Melissa and I very early on said, you know what, we can train on CoolSculpting, we can’t train someone to have a good heart. And so it might seem like, oh, that’s so like airy fairy, who cares? But like literally when we bring someone in, we ask questions that are going to demonstrate who they are as a person, how they show up for people they love how they show up for strangers. And Melissa and I have a very short [00:25:00] interaction with them before we then kind of have this internal sign that says, let’s bring them in and have them hang with the team for multiple days.
We pay them. Attorneys might have a viewpoint on that. So maybe you can say, don’t do that. Just so that they can interact and kind of ask those questions and say, can I see myself working with this person? What kind of questions are they asking? And inevitably our team instantly knows after that day, yes, they’re a Bodify team member or do you know what, there are some red flags and if there are some red flags, even if we need someone we don’t hire. We have to keep that integrity of the team. And I mean, this is all over the place. Hire slow, fire fast, but people do the opposite. Oh my gosh, I need a warm body, let me put them in there. Let me have no training, no tools, no resources, and then I’m going to yell at you because you don’t do it how I want. And then all of a sudden that trust erodes and you again wake up one day and you’re like, this is not the team that I envision building.
Brad: Great points. Well, I have one more question for you guys. Jessica and Melissa, both of you guys are real thought leaders in the aesthetic medical industry. [00:26:00] So that’s one, again, super excited to have you guys on here, but what are some of the concerns that others in the industry should be mindful of or that they may be missing that you would want to give advice to them on?
Jessica: So something that we do, and I love when you’re like, oh, we did this four-day work week and it was a crazy idea, but it ended up working out really well. Something that people in the industry have continually fought us on is this idea of a team commission. So I worked at PF Chang’s in college and they had a staff commission, meaning the bartenders got a piece of every dollar and I got a piece of every dollar. And the thought behind that was, I don’t want one of my staff members to walk by a table with an empty glass of water and not fill it up because I’m not getting a tip on that. And so they just had this belief that, “hey, if we all work together that everyone is going to benefit.” And I just loved it.
It made it much less competitive, it made the culture better and it did make it, hey, if I’m busy, someone else is going to step in and help me out because they inevitably know that they will be impacted. So again, it was rewarding the behavior [00:27:00] and trusting that the outcome was everybody would do better. And so we do a team commission. Every single dollar that comes into our business, every single person who works for us gets a percentage of that dollar. Is it a different percent based on role and time with us? Absolutely. But that way there’s no cattiness, the person answering the phone, checking in the client, taking the photos, doing the treatment, doing the consult, they are all incentivized to do their best because everybody wins. And I just think it makes that dynamic between our team so much better because we train a lot of people and we hear incessantly, it’s awful. This team, this individual, you eat what you kill nonsense just erodes everything. And people eventually blow out of that space because it’s just not where they want to be.
Brad: Yeah, great points, Michael.
Michael: Yeah, no did you have anything else you want to add to that last question?
Melissa: I’m trying to think what else people would want to know. Oh, I think [00:28:00] probably on the marketing side, I mean people are like, how do you do what you do? And I think we, Jessica, coming from the attorney background and the marketing to attorneys learned this phrase, “buy, die or unsubscribe” and it’s a little callous and crazy. But we spend a lot of money on marketing. We spend $50,000 a month for our small little business here, marketing. And every single lead that comes in, you get one call, maybe if they’ll even return your call if you go to a different practice. And I mean, we will follow up with somebody, I don’t know how many pieces of contact did they get, like 37 in the first 35 days? And somebody comes in for a consultation and they don’t buy, we’re following up with them 6, 7, 8 times. And I think that’s something that really surprises a lot of practices when they reach out to us, like, how are you doing what you’re doing? And it’s like, we are on top of it and we can get our team to do that because we do it ourselves.
Jessica: But I think it’s about the [00:29:00] education. So the missing piece for that. Because we inevitably tell people that, they’re like, don’t you feel like you are harassing them, you’re bombarding them? We’re giving them education. It would be the same in the legal space. You guys eat, live, sleep, breathe law, I don’t know anything about law. I don’t know the nomenclature, I don’t know the definitions. And so when you educate people, then you become an authority, you become credible and you become that person, that thought leader that they look towards. So I really do think those pieces are key.
And then lastly, and I know you guys want to wrap up, is the experience. Motel six, Four Seasons, same thing, sleep, coffee, restroom. But you pay a very different price to stay at those places. And the only thing that boils down to is the experience. And Melissa with her experience with plastic surgery recovery and working at the Four Seasons and the Pelican, she just sincerely believed in her heart that people would pay more for a better experience. And so we literally dissected everything that we did out of the gate and said, does this build trust and enhance the experience or does it erode it? And I think time has [00:30:00] told that story very, very compellingly that when you obsess about the client experience, people are loyal, they spend more money, they write better reviews, and if there’s a problem they tend to deal direct versus going online and blowing you up. So I just think there’s a multitude of benefits for really focusing on enhancing that client experience.
Michael: I think you need to drop the mic right now. That was awesome.
Brad: I was like, yeah, that’s awesome.
Michael: Let’s go. Yeah. Well, that is our time. It was a fantastic way to end a really interesting conversation. Well thank you both for joining us. We really enjoyed the conversation.
Jessica: Thank you guys. We appreciate it.
Michael: Absolutely. We’ll go into commercial and other side, we’ll do a quick little wrap up on Legal Insights and appreciate you guys.
Mellissa: Likewise. Thanks.
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Brad: Welcome back to Legal 123s ByrdAdatto. I’m your host Brad Adatto, with my co-host Michael Byrd. Now Michael, this season our theme is leadership. And boy, we had two amazing leaders on for today show. I mean, Jessica and Melissa really brought the heat. They both made our minds go kind of crazy with all the words they are using that we’re going to steal from them as the audience member, they said we could steal it. But I think they threw a lot of good things out for anyone to be a leader. And one of the ones I really took away that resonated with me was, as leaders find ways in which you can get everyone to row with you. And their particular case, they wanted to take the [00:32:00] PF Chang’s idea of all of us are rowing together, we’re all going to get some type of, in a pool where she called a commission. But for our audience members who were thinking about that, maybe you can give a little legal takeaway on that.
Michael: Yeah, the main thing to understand is that when you’re practicing medicine, it’s not a restaurant. It’s not PF Chang’s. And so there are laws across the country, varying state by state that deal with how medical revenues can be shared. And so what may be allowed in one state may not be allowed in another state. And so again, it just brings back to the conversation we’ve had so many times that there are so many things that in health care are counterintuitive to normal business practices. And so you want to check yourself when you want to implement something that sounds like a really good idea and make sure that you’re okay from a compliance perspective in your state because you certainly [00:33:00] don’t want to get tased by your medical board or nursing board.
Brad: Ooh, nice wrap up there, Mr. Michael. Well, audience members for next Wednesday show, we will have Dr. Craig Hobar on joining us so that we can continue to learn how to be better leaders.
Michael: Thanks again for joining us today. And remember, if you like this episode, please subscribe, make sure to give us a five star rating and share with your friends.
Brad: You can also sign up for the ByrdAdatto newsletter by going to our website at Byrdadatto.com.
Outro: ByrdAdatto is providing this podcast as a public service. This podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast does not constitute legal advice, nor does it establish an attorney-client relationship. Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement or recommendation by ByrdAdatto. The views expressed by guests are their own, and their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent. Please consult with an attorney on your legal issues.
