As a world-renowned practice management consultant, guest Terri Ross has helped hundreds of medical aesthetic practices launch, grow and scale. Tune in as we discuss industry pain points, internal training and education, and how to minimize inefficiencies for revenue growth.
Visit https://apxplatform.com/ to learn more about Terri’s APX Platform.
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 3, 2, 1.
Brad: Welcome back to another episode of the Legal 123s with ByrdAdatto. I’m your host Brad Adatto with my cohost Michael Byrd.
Michael: Thank you Bradford. As a business and healthcare Law firm, we represent clients in multiple sectors and multiple specialties, especially healthcare. This season, we are searching for common ground for our diverse audience, and we will be bringing in many guests to help us. This season’s theme is the universal language, business.
Brad: Well, Michael, before we bring on today’s special guest, I have an important question for you. [00:01:00] Have you ever met a person named, Michael?
Michael: Well Brad, I’m pretty sure there are several famous Michaels that have been named after me. Have you ever heard of Michael Jordan? Michael J. Fox? Michael Kane? Michael Phelps? Mike Myers? Michael Bublé? Well, I won’t mention Michael Jackson.
Brad: Yeah, I think you just did. Almost every person you named, except maybe for Phelps, is older than you. So they’re not named after you, Michael. And you didn’t answer my question, whether you ever had met another Michael?
Michael: well, it can’t be proven that they’re not named after me. Even though, they’re older, but, to answer your question. Of course, I’ve met multiple Michaels in my lifetime. It’s a super common name. And I knew you were messing with me when you asked that question.
Brad: Yes. And so obviously just not to surprise our audience, but in the 1970s, Michael was born in the 1930s, but the 1970s, Michael was the most common [00:02:00] name for a baby. And Brad, that’s me, Of course didn’t even break the top 100. Do you know anyone who’s not in your family who does not have the last name Byrd with a Y? Not an I.
Michael: you’re asking if I’ve ever met another BYRD Byrd, believe it or not it’s a pretty common name. It’s kind of shocking because you would think, but I’ll meet a lot of people that think it’s a really uncommon name, but, when you grow up with it, it’s amazing how often you get asked, are you related to so-and-so and usually there’s no relation.
Michael: So, where are we going? Brad.
Brad: All right. Well, I was reading this really cool article about this English pub that decided that they wanted to celebrate Nigelness. And basically if your name was Nigel, you could attend.
Michael: I’m guessing you tried to change your name to Nigel, so you could go. [00:03:00]
Brad: no, but I like where you’re going. So the pub’s owner, he was named Nigel Smith and he wanted to put the name Nigel back on the map. So over 400 Nigel’s attended this event. The pub was smart enough to allow non Nigel’s to attend, they had about a thousand non Nigel’s and besides having fun with names, they issued several awards for the furthest travel, youngest, oldest, and other categories that kind of sound like they were made up on the spot. But do you know who traveled the furthest, the furthest Nigel? That is.
Michael: Believe it or not, I’m 100% sure I can get this right. Nigel.
Brad: Hey audience, Michael is correct. Nigel did travel the furthest, but this Nigel, believe it or not, he was a technician living in Denver, Colorado. . And when he found out about it, he decided to travel, from Denver, Colorado to this pub in England. He’s also famous for these Nigel’s because he crowdfunded his trip [00:04:00] because they didn’t have enough money to do it, and so he’s only crowdfunding Nigel. So finally the fund invent also raised money for the British health, heart foundation, but that’s the Nigel story.
Michael: Believe it or not, I have met one Nigel in my life and he was from Dallas, Texas, so maybe it’s the same guy. I don’t remember him living in Denver though.
Brad: Well, now that we’ve established the fact that you’re much older than me, and apparently much older than several of the people who were named after you.
Michael: You didn’t have any discussion about me being older than you.
Brad: Oh no, we’ve definitely established that. And so, you know, one of the things I kept thinking about with this Nigel talk is people’s names are very powerful. They’re significant. They define us as not just a bunch of letters that grouped together. It makes them sound sometimes pleasant to our ears and sometimes not. And even if your name is common, like Michael Byrd or unique, like Bradford Adatto over my lifetime. I have met many people named, Terri. [00:05:00] And if someone had a party celebrating Terriness, there’s this one, Terri, I know that would just dominate that party and went over, like all the Terri awards they had, if they had Terri awards. And in my mind that name Terri, when I hear it, I immediately think of this one of a kind, energetic, awesome, Terri who’s on today’s show.
Michael: We finally agree on something, Brad. Well, let me bring on our guest Terri Ross. This is her second time on our show. Terri is the founder and co CEO of APX platform and Terri Ross consulting. She is a renowned practice management consultant. She is an international speaker. She has her own podcast, “In touch with Terri”. So shout out to anybody in the tribe that are out here. She is an OG of this static space and we’re so glad to have you on Terri. Welcome.
Terri: Hey y’all! How are you? Look at me, I’m talking some Southern Dallas slang here. [00:06:00]
Brad: Well, we’re pumped to have you back. And you know, I think the first question, I think our audience is dying for you to answer. Have you ever met another Terri?
Terri: God, yes I have, not quite as dynamic, but I would say yeah, but I haven’t met any Brad and Michael’s quite like you guys.
Michael: Or as our friend, Alex calls us Brichael.
Brad: well, I’m going to fact check you real quick and you were correct that we have not met another Terri like you, so that’s correct.
Michael: All right. Well, so some of the audience may not have heard us the first time, and would love just to kind of start with getting a little bit of background, getting your professional story so we can kind of jump in.
Terri: Yeah, thank you so much. I love when you ask me that because I’m going to age myself, but like I always say, thank God we’re in the beauty space [00:07:00] Cause you guys were looking quite, you know, quite, unwrinkled over there as well. You know, look I’m currently living in Los Angeles, but I’m just a Small town, Midwest girl from Detroit. I went to medical school, silly enough to go to medical school and then I realized I preferred the business side of things and, got my MBA and quickly went to work for Ethicon endo, which was a surgical division of J&J. that catapulted my career working for fortune 500 in various different therapeutic areas, across my, I don’t know, maybe 16 to 16 plus years working for corporate. I got into aesthetics in 2007. Now moved to Los Angeles and I was the sales director for Medicis, which is now Galderma did that for a couple of years, ran the west coast. I was recruited to Zell teak at the time and launch CoolSculpting in the US and Canada pre IPO. Left made a little bit of money and started Terri Ross consulting, back in late 2012, [00:08:00] so I’ve been working with practices for the past decade, really helping them to launch, grow, and scale, and then that transition into APX platform about a year ago.
Brad: So cool. As Michael said, she is an OG in this world.
Michael: I’m curious though, tell us what APX platform is.
Terri: Thank you. Yes. It stands for aesthetic practice accelerator. And you want me to get into what Michael, what it is?
Michael: Yeah!
Terri: Thank you. Thank you. You know, and look, we’ve been friends for a long time. We’ve worked together for a long time, this is the second time we’ve shared the stage, you know, with AmSpa, we also had a company together. So I’m really honored again for the opportunity to be here. Thank you so much. You’re such an instrumental part of what, what we do and what we offer, but when COVID hit in 2020, and we weren’t speaking all over the country and we weren’t, you know, being out in practices, look, I’m a single mom. Everybody knows I’m very authentic. I keep it real. I’m a single mom. And I, you know, [00:09:00] I was a little worried and concerned what would happen to the consulting business. And ironically it grew about 70%. I had just brought on another full-time consultant. And when I looked at why I think for the first time, and I’m sure you guys would appreciate this coming from the legal side of things that I think whether you’re a physician or a provider, you know, you were forced to have to look at your P and L forced to recognize staff was leaving forced to recognize you. Perhaps didn’t have enough cash reserves in the. To sustain what we’ve all had to go through and endure these past couple of years. And it allowed me and my team to analyze the fundamental problems in the industry as a whole on the business side of things. And I had met a private equity, a friend of mine who owned about 15 SAS companies. I don’t even know what the hell SAS meant at the time. And he’s like, Terri, let me understand what you do. What do you, what do you do as a consultant? And we took an opportunity and we wrote all the pain points that the industry globally faces. [00:10:00] And I think we narrowed it down to, and I’m sure you would agree, you know, that the business and I say this often on stage, there’s no MBA school of aesthetics. There’s nowhere to go, to really learn how to run a business. There is no training courses that teach staff how to do that. Let alone, if you’re a provider or you could be the best provider, but you come out of medical school and you know, you’re again a great provider, but you don’t understand the benchmarks, you know, perhaps the legal issues, the compliance you’re, you know, how do I run a successful profitable business? And what we did was we took 2020, and I took big risks that I know that’s something we might talk about and believed it in my whole heart that I wanted to help people on such a greater scale. Then just being a consultant, which is not a sustainable model, you can hire somebody and they come in and they go out and that’s not that it’s not a sustainable model. So APX platform is an on-demand business intelligence platform. [00:11:00] It’s not practice management software based on the core fundamental things that practices need, which are training courses and sales, finance, and operations, training, your analytics and our community. And we wanted it to be that people could learn from one another, not just from an expert team. In addition to the analytics part that if you think about practice management software, there’s around 60. It’s not standardized data, right? It’s raw data. So we worked with a CPA firm. We built financial tools and analytics that could actually spit out gross profit revenue per hour, how to compensate a forecast and a budget startup costs, really tangible things that practices need to understand the why, why do we do anything? And then how do I do it? And how do I measure it.
Brad: That’s awesome. I’m assuming, because of that model that you you’re built for everyone with APX, you then have certain commonality experiences that you had from your various businesses that you’ve done before that you saw Sargent seeing, what were some of those things that you, you noticed?
Terri: [00:12:00] I think that commonalities, in my personal background or what I see in the industry?
Brad: I would say in the industry.
Terri: As I said, you know, whether it’s a medical spa, plastic surgery practice, whether you are starting off or you’ve been in business for 30 years, the commonalities are the lack of training, truly. And there’s, if you think about the infrastructure of a practice, you have various roles, you have your front desk. That are pinnacle sometimes the most often overlooked and pinnacle to converting those phone calls and how are they trained? And then you have your, you know, perhaps your, your providers that can range from an, you know, an esthetician in our, and NP, a PA, a doctor, and then you have a lot of non cores, right. Coming into the space, wanting to start up who come from that insurance based business who don’t understand cash based medicine. So, the fundamentals are, and then the benchmarks, like what should they regenerate, what is the average profit margin? And then you can break that apart into medical spots and plastic surgery practices, and what I found [00:13:00] was that I was spending so much time as a consultant, analyzing shitty data, shitty data into the system. And I, it was very difficult and these practices. So to answer your question, the commonalities were, they just don’t know what they don’t know. They don’t know what’s possible in their growth potential.
Brad: And for our audience members that are trying to figure out what is shitty data, like, what are some of the things that you’re noticing that? And I’ve heard you talk about this. That’s why I was asking the question, but what are some of the things you notice that they didn’t even realize was bad data?
Terri: I’ll use one simple thing and I gave a webinar yesterday to the international market. One very simple thing that can exponentially grow the needle, move the needle revenue wise. So if I ask practices how they set up their appointment types. So, you know, Brad’s going to come in and get his Botox and get his injectables. If you get a filler, you’ve got to be looking, you know, looking smooth, looking, fly, and extra full face correction we’re talking about. Okay, look, that’d be so, so what, so what are we going to do? [00:14:00] We know that Brad, the patient needs to numb. So, what people will do is schedule Brad for injectables, and it will just say injectables most of the time. And in that 60 minutes of time, 30 minutes of that is numbing time. Well, that’s unproductive time. So if I go to run a report, how much did Michael the provider make? You know, in that month, it’s going to reduce his revenue per hour because unproductive time was in that appointment time. That’s one small change that I recommend people who move. It should be Brad numbing for 30 Brad injectables for 30. That one small thing helps with efficiencies and will exponentially grow revenue because then we can actually see how much actual time is taking in that room.
Michael: Wow. That’s a great example. Do you get in helping your clients with the turnover stuff that we see in the news? [00:15:00] I mean, it’s, the turnover is just massive. And you mentioned training earlier and I’m curious if you see a connection to a lack of training.
Terri: Michael, great question. We don’t do any recruiting, but we obviously, you know, we know the staff turnover is a huge problem, finding good staff, but let’s get down to the root of that problem. There’s staff turnover because they lack the training. So if you think about that, there’s a practice manager. And again, you guys, I had a medical spa in Beverly Hills. So this comes from the most genuinely humble place. But if you lack that training, that people aren’t set up for success. And you know, for those of you guys can see, this is the sales training curriculum. That we wrote that covers all of the aspects of the practice. And when people are highly trained, one, It especially in APX and we built it this way so that it’s on demand so that you can train your team in a consistent way. It’s an enterprise learning management system. So as a manager or an owner, [00:16:00] you can delegate what courses you want your team to take. And there are certifications and accountability metrics built in. So we don’t do any of the recruiting, but we do make sure that the practice has the fundamental tools and resources and expert coaching to prevent that stuff.
Michael: Amazing. Well, this is a very deep question because it’s ironic you are a business owner and have been a business owner in different formats, and of course you help businesses. And so you’ve learned lessons. I’m sure like all of us have along the way, whether it’s in running your own business or in helping clients and seeing theirs, but I’d love to just hear, like, what are some common lessons you either you’ve learned yourself in running your own business or that you just see consistently with, mistakes, with your kind of client base?
Terri: Yeah. I’ll answer two ways. I think that mistakes, I feel are that people try to do it themselves, Right? [00:17:00] And maybe that’s just, again, a lack of education or perhaps arrogance, whatever it might be. But I think, especially in this industry, people think that it’s very easy to just jump into this medical aesthetic space, try to do it on your own or downloading shit online on the internet. They’re trying to get a legal document off the internet and there they ask a friend and I don’t believe in any of that. I believe, you know, and I say this a lot, like Sloan does, my daughter does Taekwondo. I don’t know how to do Taekwondo. So I got her the greatest, you know, sensei at a dojo. And so I think that, and I’ve always been a believer. I’m someone I raise my hand when I don’t know. I don’t want to be the smartest person in the room and I have always invested in. My own coaches, my entire life. So I think there is no glass ceiling to education. And I think that people need to recognize that if you want experts than you it’s, you know, look, [00:18:00] I always talk about it’s an investment or an expense, an expense, you get nothing in return. If you’re investing in yourself and in your career and your, you know, to elevate that, you’re, there’s going to be a significant ROI.
Michael: That’s awesome. Well, Brad too doesn’t want to be the smartest man in the room and he’s been quite successful at it. Right?
Brad: Dang it. I was just holding that back, not to interrupt Terri, just to hit you with that audience members. I mean, Riley, make sure the audience never hears that, Please just strike it completely phone record. You know, that’s, I mean, it, the theme, it seems like we which is great Terri. I love where you’re going with this. And it sounds like you have so many great moments that especially your career, that by going this route, that you’ve taken, that there are really cool moments that you saw these aha moments, but, you know, for our audience, maybe can you tell us like one of the most proudest business strategies or accomplishments that you saw that could be beneficial to any industry.
Terri: Yeah, thank you for asking. I really have to kind of parlay that into APX. [00:19:00] you know, as I mentioned it being a single mother and having a successful business, but then questioning everything at a time of uncertainty for the world, really allowed me to say, I guess, to take the biggest. Risks And I think for anybody that is in that scarcity factor, or you think you can’t, or you’re not good enough, or you don’t have enough money to do it, if you believe in something so much, if you know that you have something to give back and you are talented and you have proven whatever that skillset is that you only get one shot in life. Um, you know, I think that it’s really, an opportunity for, for people to take risks, in your career. And I think for me in the middle of such an uncertain time, I was able to look at how, how I’ve helped so many practices over the past several years and make this leap of faith, invest a whole lot of money. but work with a team of people to be able to build something [00:20:00] and create something that I think is disruptive, It’s unique, It’s one of a kind in the industry that is going to give back and help these practices grow at, you know, at, at rates they could never see before.
Michael: Yeah, we, we know you well, and we saw you going through this and, and you know, what jumps off the page to any of us is just that grit and perseverance that comes when, you know, things are scary, as you just mentioned. But another thing, and you’ve talked about this today is how you went about it. And you’ve mentioned in a few different ways, how you surround yourself with people that are, that know their different disciplines. And, that was the thing I observed is that you were getting a lot of advice, to help bring your ideas to life when you’re building up.
Terri: Well, I love it. Know love and appreciate you guys in for anybody obviously listening, you know, both the ByrdAdatto tribe and the Terri Ross insulting tribe [00:21:00] is that even when we had a company, right, our AMS spurred auto company. So for those of you that don’t know, right? Michael, Brad, and Alex Thiersch, and I really, you know, saw such strengths in each other and what we all do, which was like to bring that business and legal and compliance together And that’s what I still love about our relationship that you can’t do one without the other. You know, APX is sort of the sphere, right. That the pinnacle in the middle, but we need, you know, we need you and we need all of these other components around it. And I think that that’s how I’ve, you know, gotten to be, I guess, as you know, what I would consider the best in my craft, but being, but learning again, learning what I need to from you and then recognizing what I don’t know and, you know, surrounding myself with the right people. And I think that that’s what everybody should take the opportunity to do, especially if you’re in this space. Go seek out the right, you know, the right experts and advice. [00:22:00]
Brad: Yeah, totally agree with that. And, as always, Terri, there’s just so many fun things that, you know, we could talk about, on probably off camera and on camera, but I definitely so appreciative of you coming to join us again today. Michael, I mean, there’s this, I mean, the sadness is there is really only one Terri. I mean, it just makes me so sad. All those other Terri’s must feel awful when they finally meet the Terri.
Terri: The Terri. That’s all you need, one T.
Brad: She’s the APX Terri is the way I kind of see it.
Terri: Oh see? So fitting, guys.
Brad: It just came to me.
Terri: Well, there is only one of you, too, so it’s a triple threat.
Michael: whenever Brad starts breaking off the dad jokes, we know that we’ve come to the end of our time because it’ll go downhill very quickly. Yes. Yeah. As always Terri so grateful that you were able to join us today and we’ll look forward the third time you join us. For now, we’ll go into commercial. And on the other side, we’ll come up with some legal insights and no dad jokes.
Terri: Thank y’all so much. Always a pleasure to be here. See you guys soon. [00:23:00]
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Brad: Welcome back to Legal 123s with ByrdAdatto. I’m your host and still here with my cohost Michael Byrd. Now, Michael, as we’ve talked about this season, we’re trying to find this common ground and our theme for the season is the universal language, Business. And so we just had Terri on and she had a lot to say as usual because we love Terri and she’s awesome. [00:24:00] And I think one of the things we both started thinking about afterwards is really talking about, you know, when employees were leaving, she said it’s just a lot of times it’s because they don’t feel like they got the education they needed to really move forward, I guess, in their career path that they were in. And that got us thinking about the other aspects of on the legal side that you need to consider. Maybe you want to add your thoughts before I jump in.
Michael: Yeah. I mean, we’ve hear themes pick up throughout the season. Education and training came seems to come up a lot now and yeah. She of course connected education and training to turn over and I’m sitting there thinking, yeah, I mean, as lawyers. When we’re tackling that problem or doing things like employment agreements, we’ve talked in the past about the carrot and stick approach to employee retention. You build your employee handbooks to mitigate risk and all those things are important. [00:25:00] I’m not trying to talk us out of a job to do for our clients. It’s interesting to observe that probably as important, if not more important is just this idea of investing in your employees, from a retention perspective, the training and education perspective.
Brad: Yeah, absolutely. And, and, and obviously for those that our audience who are in the medical industry, Training and education is a must. It’s not even a may. And it could be a must in the sense of, if you have a practitioner who is actually doing injections, you know, they need to keep up with their training. What courses have they been taking, to maintain their licenses or maintain their certification on whatever that is. And don’t forget in many states that there is training and education on privacy standards. And by not doing that and just ignoring it or downloading it off the internet, you’re not helping yourself, you’re actually hurting yourself. So training education, doesn’t just stop with the, how do you answer the phone properly, which is important. [00:26:00] It’s also, how do you maintain the privacy of that individual’s information? All which are the legal requirements in your particular state. Well, Michael, I think that’s all the time we have today. It’s going by really fast, but guess what? Terri mentioned his name a few times in this episode and next week, our law partner, the founder of AmSpa, Alex Thiersch should be joining us. Outro: Thanks again for joining us today. And remember, if you liked this episode, please subscribe. Make sure to give us a five- star rating and share with your friends. You can also sign up for the ByrdAdatto newsletter by going to our website at byrdadatto.com. 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.
