Be an Aesthetic Injector, Think Like an Entrepreneur

I'm going to start off with a question, all right? So everybody pay attention. I know you came back from lunch, but this is probably going to be the most important question. And thought of the day. What is the most important thing? What is the most important aspect that's going to help you be successful in your practice? All right, what is the most important thing? Is it. And let me give you a couple hints, okay? Try to direct. Try to help you out a little bit. All right, so do you think it's the type of laser that you have? All right, remember, this is the question. Is the most important thing that you're going to need to be successful in your practice? Is it the laser, the quality of the laser? Anybody? Feel free to throw some answers out there. You want to throw an answer out there? Most important thing that you're going to need to be successful in your practice. Education. Okay? Education. I like that answer. Let me keep going with some, some hints. Okay, so lasers. Maybe we need lasers, right? We're going to open up an aesthetics practice. Definitely need lasers. What about how important we always hear in real estate, right? What are those three things? Location, location, location. So maybe it's the office location. As far as how successful you're going to be in your practice, that could be an answer. How about your skill as a practitioner? Whether you're a medical doctor, whether you're a dentist, a nurse, whatever you are, what about your skill? That's got to be important. Is that the answer? Possibly. Okay, so what is the real answer? While these things are all very, very important, the most important quality trait asset that you're going to need in your practice to be successful is your skill and knowledge in business and marketing. Above all else, that is the most important thing. All right? And I've had this conversation so many times with so many different people. They think it's your skill as a practitioner. They think it's how good you are as an injector. They think it's a lot of different things. But in the end, it comes down to how good you are in business and marketing. What else is there to help you be successful in your practice? There's another concept that I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about, too. So in addition to business and marketing, there's another concept called grit, which is explained, and I'm going to go into that in a little bit of detail. And these are, again, these are going to be the most important things for you to be successful. And let me give you a couple examples in case you have any doubt? So let's take a restaurant, for example, and think about the best quality restaurant you've ever been to. All right? Is that the most successful business out there? Is that the most successful restaurant out there? And the answer is no, because it's not. Again, the point I'm making is it's not just the quality. Right. And the example that I want to use here is McDonald's. Why is McDonald's so successful? And it's not because they make the best hamburgers or the best fries. It's because their ability to market, to reach their audience so effectively. Couple other examples. Okay. And we can use this. This doctor, he's a graduate of Harvard Medical School, Harvard residency. Yeah. He has all these accolades. Is that going to guarantee him success? And the answer is no. It's not about his. It's not about his accolades. It's not about how good this person is. Success comes from how well you market yourself. And imagine if we knew this early on, you know, like in medical school, nursing school, and dental school. Imagine if they had shared some of this information with us, right? And we had all this training. In my case, this would have saved me at least. Well, I had one bankruptcy early on. But imagine if I knew something about business. All this trouble that I went through trying to develop businesses and practice in the past, I would not have had to have gone through all of that. So it all comes down to business and marketing. Okay, now I can share with you a little bit about my background. Again, thank you to beauty boss for inviting me. I'm very, very happy to be here. I'm Doctor Cosentino. I'm the president, founder of Empire Medical Training, also the American Academy of Procedural Medicine. We also have several other companies that deal with products, Alari skin and Alari threads. So let me tell you, or share a little information about my journey in medicine and entrepreneurship. Like many of you, I would guess my upbringing, my background. I had a very traditional upbringing as far as going into medical school and so forth. My dad, who was a very, very loving father, he was a physician, actually a pediatrician. His brother, my uncle, was also a physician. And the advice that they gave me, they said, just focus on getting into medical school. Just become a doctor. And I guess the word that was probably not the best word is you will automatically be successful. And the reality is that's not really the case. You don't just get accepted to medical school, dental school, and automatically be successful. Right? There's more things you have to do. You have to be good at business in marketing. So what happened to me is I followed his advice, and all my efforts were geared towards, towards getting into medical school and becoming a doctor and so forth. And I had an opportunity very early on. This is an incredible opportunity. Imagine graduating medical school and being able to buy a medical practice with your best friend. And this is exactly what we did. I had a good friend, and this was back many, many years ago when hospitals were allowed to, to help you financially. And they did. They helped us. We bought this medical practice. And long story short, because even though the medical practice itself was a very, very good medical practice, it was in existence for many years, and it should have continued to do well. But the problem was neither one of us, myself and my friend included, neither one of us had the expertise in business and marketing. We need to understand contracts, all the things that we know now with payroll and the different things, we didn't have that knowledge. So unfortunately, we had to close down this practice. Both of us ended up in a bankruptcy. It was a very, very traumatic experience as a young person, a young professional just starting out. Fortunately, thank God, another opportunity came along. And this was probably the turning point in my career. This was my opportunity that I had. And I met a physician, and I still remember his name. This is many, many years ago. His name was Doctor Lawrence Goldman. And he had a very specialized practice. This was a interventional pain management practice where he did injection procedures and things like that. And this doctor not only taught me how to do all the medical procedures, but he also, and he was a much older doctor, but he also taught me a lot about business. And if you can imagine, this was about 25 years ago, imagine the kind of marketing that was around back then. The Internet was just starting out. So what he had, it was kind of funny seeing this older man who I respected as a physician, but to see him sit down with, with a newspaper person, and they wrote out this whole schedule about how many ads are going to go in a newspaper. And we had the practices information on this newspaper ad, and it came out every week. And that's how he grew this practice. And from this, I learned how important it is. This is how he, he got his business from these ads. So I learned how important it is to understand about advertising, how important it is to understand about marketing. And I was very, very proud at the time and still looking back, that this was a practice I was able to take over and grew it to something very, very big. And we were able to sell it to private equity. And it all came back to it all stemmed from what we learned, or what I learned in business and marketing from that. And I'll just glance through this, just, again, from this information. Again, it's not, you know, I like to, I believe I'm a good doctor, but really, the successes, the achievements that I have all come down from the skill in business and marketing. So we have empire medical training. We have some of these other companies as well. And it all comes down to actually two things. So we said about business and marketing. But there's another concept that I'm going to share with you right now. This is a concept called Grit. And this is not something that. It's not a made up word. It's not something that I've made up. Has anybody ever heard of this concept? This lady actually is pretty famous, and I would encourage you to look her up. She has many TED talks. She has many books. She's actually pretty famous, and she's a great speaker, too. And what this concept of grit is, this is, it's basically your passion, your perseverance, your love, your energy for whatever it is that you do. All right? And I could see from this group here, you're all here, you're all a bunch of super overachievers. So this is something that you could definitely relate to. But she started off pretty early. Oh, let me come back to that. So she started off pretty early. She was, I don't remember if it was kindergarten or was just a very young grade school, that she was a teacher. And what she did is she wanted to understand why is it that there are some students that are really smart, but they don't do that well, and vice versa? There are students that are not that smart, not that intelligent, but do very, very well in school. So she made a whole career out of it, and she developed a team, and they went around and they interviewed different people in different categories. She interviewed doctors. She interviewed lawyers. She interviewed entrepreneurs, all sorts of business people. She interviewed people from the military. What is that academy, that West Point Academy? So she interviewed all these people and what she found. I thought this was really interesting. It's not the skill, it's not their knowledge. It's not their intelligence, which is something you would think, right? You would think that. Listen, Elon Musk is brilliant. Of course that's part of it, but that's the reason why he's so successful. Her point or message, and this is true, is that is only part of it. The most important thing, really, is your passion, your love for what it is that you do. You guys love aesthetics. Right. And hopefully you continue developing this passion for it because this is something very important. All right. And it's something that's going to really help you do well in your business, your practice, whatever it is. So I wanted to share with you just for a second, this person, we all know him, right? Steve Jobs. He's a master in business. And this is kind of his version, or this is how he explains grit. He doesn't use the word grit. He just talks about passion. But it's kind of, it's kind of cool. People say you have to have a lot of passion for what you're doing, and it's totally true. And the reason is because it's so hard that if you don't, any rational person would give up. It's really hard and you have to do it over a sustained period of time. So if you don't love it, if you're not having fun doing it and you don't really love it, you're going to give up. And that's what happens to most people, actually. If you really look at the ones that ended up being successful, unquote, in the eyes of society and the ones that didn't, oftentimes, it's the ones that are successful loved what they did so they could persevere when it got really tough. And the ones that didn't love it quit because they're sane. Who would want to put up with this stuff if you don't love it? So it's a lot of hard work and it's a lot of worrying constantly. And if you don't love it, you're going to fail. So you got to love it. You've got to have passion. And I think that's the high order bit. The second thing is you've got to be a really good talent scout, because no matter how smart you are, you need a team of great people, and you've got to figure out how to size people up fairly quickly, make decisions without knowing people too well, and hire them and see how you do and refine your intuition and be able to help build an organization that can eventually just, you know, build itself because you need great people around you. So remember this concept. Okay, is the mic still on? It feels like it went off. Is it still on? Okay. I think it is. But is, is it still on the. Oh, is it going to record? Okay. Okay. So, so remember this concept of grit. It's very, very important. It's really important, especially if we're going to be entrepreneurs. All right. And entrepreneurs. Right. I have a feeling. A lot of us here, entrepreneurs. We're a different group of people. Entrepreneurs. I'm this. I don't think this is anything new. Entrepreneurs are very different people. They're looked at differently. They think differently. They're very neurotic. We're very neurotic. We're very meticulous. We constantly, we're methodical about how we do things. And, you know, unfortunately, this is a quality that we need, you know, to be successful in our practice. How many of you here consider yourself entrepreneurs? It's okay. We know you could admit it. Hopefully, it's all of us here. So these are qualities. Don't forget this concept of grit. You really want this passion for what you're doing. Okay, so studying medicine and everything, what is your plan? What are we going to do next? What are you guys going to do next after you learn all these concepts with lasers and aesthetics? Everything. What is your plan? Studying medicine isn't everything. There's more to it. We want you to think and be an entrepreneur before we think and we start being, like an entrepreneur. There's just some statistics that you probably already know. Just understand that every business is very difficult. Most businesses will actually, 20% of businesses fail within the first year. And I'm sure you've heard this before, many businesses fail early on. All right, so it's this perseverance and it's this dedication. It's this commitment that you're going to need to be successful in your practice. So how do we think like an entrepreneur, these. I'm going to kind of skip through this quickly, but these are some qualities that you're going to need as a business person, as an entrepreneur. One of the qualities that, that I always love whenever I watch rocky movies, because Sylvester Stallone always talks about this. It's, it's think about something bad happening in your practice. How are you going to react to that bad thing? Okay, you're going to fold up and overreact, over dramatize, or you got to deal with it and be strong. Okay, do you guys remember the quote from, from all the Rockies? He has the same concept. Okay? So it's not how hard you can. Hit or be hit, all right? It's. It's how you. I'm not getting the exact words, but it's how you react, how you get back up and you keep moving forward. All right? And it's the same thing, not just with boxing or whatever the story that he was in. It's. It's about life. Life hits hard. All right? Business hits hard. So if you get a lawsuit, if you get something bad that happens in your practice or your business, you have to fight through that and be strong. These are qualities of an entrepreneur, right? And you can read about that and you can learn more. But to be successful, you have to think like an entrepreneur. So moving along, we're going to, there's education that we want you to continue. We break this education down into two aspects. There's the day to day business, and then there's what we call entrepreneurship. What I'm talking to you about, or what I'm about to share with you is more about the entrepreneurship, but the day to day business stuff that you need to know is the email marketing, the strategies, the profit analysis, how to set up your LLC, all the day to day things, your website, your marketing, all the things that you typically hire a company for. The entrepreneurship is high level marketing, high level strategies, things that I'm about to talk to you right now. So when you think about your business education, you want to divide it up into two parts, like this, understanding that both are equally important. The reason why I tell you this also is I don't want you to make the mistake of just hiring a company and not understanding what they're doing. All right? You really, really want to learn as much as you can about business. All right, this is kind of interesting. So I want to ask you guys, first, I want to tell you there's three personality types in business. Three personality types. There's the artist, the manager, and the entrepreneur. All right? First, I'm going to just tell you a little bit about each one. And then I want you to ask yourselves and try to define who you are as a practice owner or who you are as a business person. So. And all of these are important. The artist is somebody who, who really focuses on the, on the product. All right? And in our case, aesthetics. This is somebody who really wants to learn the procedure, really wants to understand about patient care, wants to understand everything about that product. And really, their love and their passion is focused on the artistry as on the product. All right? The next is the managerial person. All right? The managerial person is mostly interested in the processes that's going on. All right, whatever process, everything. Like with empire medical training, we have so many processes. When we do the training, we want to make sure that people are safe. It's the same thing in your practice, right? When you're doing a toxin injection or something out, you have protocols, and you want to make sure everything is lined up. You want to make sure. Your medicine is sterile, and everything that you're doing is correct. Right. That's super important . That's the managerial type of personality. And the last personality is the entrepreneurial, the entrepreneur. And the entrepreneur is the business person. They're the one that is invested in the business. They're the one that wants to make money. So real quick, what do you guys think is the most important one? Just throw out what you think. What do you think the most important one? They're all important, but what's the most important one? Artist. Who said artist? Artist. Okay, so where's the title? You sure? Artist. Can I. Can I do the. Can I start over? Okay. What is the presentation about? It's about being an entrepreneur. So I know it was a trick question. I tried to set you up, but it's being an entrepreneur. Of course. These are all important. You want to be good at what you do. All these things are important. But if you want to make money, if you want to grow your practice, you have to start thinking like an entrepreneur. How do we do that? All right, well, this is what we're going to talk about right now. I have five key things. There's so many things that we could talk about for being an entrepreneur. Right. Entrepreneurship. But based on time, I only have two minutes, so I'm going to have to kind of go through this quickly. But these are what I think are, if you don't have every one of these right now, these five points that I'm gonna talk to you about, it will be a challenge to be successful in your business, in your practice. And that's why I chose these five things. The first one is mentorship. Mentorship is learning from like minded people, learning from other people. All right. It's. It's. Some people say that, you know, maybe you have a friend, a wealthy friend, or somebody who's done it successfully. What do you want to do? Sure. That could be a mentor. The problem with that type of mentor is they may not want to give all their time. They're busy, they have a life. Right. So they may not want to give you the time that you need. So what's a better type of mentor? A better type of mentor is somebody. Maybe you have to pay this person. All right. Some of my favorite mentors in business, I'm talking about in trading. That's a separate topic. You're going to learn aesthetics on a different pathway, but now it's time to learn business. So people like Anthony Robbins. Has everybody heard of Anthony Robbins? Hopefully. Okay, good. Anthony Robbins, my favorite mentor, my favorite business person, my favorite professional coach. The guy is amazing. Anthony Robbins, J. Abrahams. Hopefully you've heard of him. He's a guru in marketing. There's Keith Cunningham. There's somebody new that I started to follow. You should know all these people and follow them, but there's many more. There's a guy that, his name is Dan Martel. And just watch some of the things that he says. You'll learn so much, so you have to continue your learning. Mentorship, very, very important. All right, the next concept is something called proximity. All right. You guys know this because you're here, and this is so smart of all of you to be here. So proximity is not doing what unfortunately. We see. Some people do that attend our programs. They come to a program, they learn a little bit about toxins or whatever, and then they go back to their practice and that's it. They end their education. They think it ends there. Proximity is putting yourself in this environment and learning from others what a great place that we're at right now. You're not just learning about aesthetics. You're not just learning about lasers. You're learning about business, marketing, legal. There's an attorney that's going to talk to you about very, very important things that you're going to need for your practice. So these kind of events, put yourself in this, in this atmosphere. There's one, just want to tell you real quick, there's one story or one example of a movie that I like to watch movies. And there's this one movie, maybe you've seen it. The name of the movie is Rudy. Has anybody seen that movie? You have. And it's actually based on a true story. The guy's name is Rudy Rudiger and his goal was to go to University of Notre Dame. That was one of his goals. And his second goal was to play on the varsity football team. The problem was University of Notre Dame was a very, very good school. He wasn't that smart. He also weighed like 160 pounds and he wasn't that athletic. So how is he going to end up doing? Followed, pursuing his dreams. But as you know from the movie, he did it all right. He got accepted to that school and he even played on the football team. And he even did some, something substantial. He played in a game, which is a pretty big deal, and he tackled the quarterback and he became really famous. But he did it through this concept of proximity. So he didn't do anything unethical or cheating. He just surrounded himself with all the people that he needed to surround himself with. And he really made that his number one goal. The next concept is, and again, super important. How are you possibly going to have a successful practice if you don't have a dream team? One of the things I look to my team in empire medical training, I am so fortunate and thankful and blessed. We have the best team of professionals. It's taken many, many years. And the reason is it's not just because you pay them a lot. They don't even care about money. Right, guys? They don't care. Okay. So it's obviously, that's partly a joke. You want to pay them correctly. But what I've learned over the years is more important. Their goals, their dreams. Your. You have to make sure that your dreams as the owner of the practice are big enough to fit their dreams inside. All right, so what do I mean by that? Imagine if you're a practitioner and you just kind of want to coast and you don't really want to do anything substantial, but you hire executives, okay? A marketing guy, a business, you know, whatever the title is, and they want to explode. They have all these great ideas. How are you going to work with that person? They're going to want to leave your. They're not going to want to continue working with you. So their goals, their long term goals need to align with your long term goals. So hiring, creating a dream team, there's a whole process. We could save that for another time. One thing I just want to tell you, something I've learned recently is, you know, just a caution. Working with recruiters, there's value in that, but I don't know how well you guys know LinkedIn, but there's a really good feature within LinkedIn that will give you a lot of the same tools that recruiters use. You have to pay for it, but it's a lot cheaper than working with a recruiter. And instead of hiring people that are unemployed and are desperate, maybe will take anything you could actually scout and find the best people. You have to be a good entrepreneur and have a good business. You need to be a good talent scout. The next concept is, you've heard this before. You can't do it all right. You can't do it all. You want to hire companies or a company to do some of this work, the marketing, the business. You want to hire attorneys to do the work. The one thing I just want to emphasize is, yes, that's important, but at the same time, get educated. Learn everything that you can about business and marketing. Don't just. I mean, I'm thinking back at mistakes that we've made. Hiring companies to build a website when the website was not coded properly. All right. If your website is not coded properly, this is why you have to understand what this company is doing. You need to learn about marketing. You need to learn about search engine optimization and all these different types of marketing. If you just let somebody else do it and they make a mistake, you'll never know. If a website is not coded properly, it's not going to be in the Google search, and it's useless to you. Hire a company. Hire a good company, but learn everything that they're doing. All right? And these are just some examples. We talked about the website. We talked about the coding. The same thing, you know, like with, with legal, all right? You, of course, hire an attorney and have them do all this. But read the contracts. Understand, you know, if it's an asset protection plan or if it's a. If it's a plan, really understand everything that's happening with that. All right. Same thing with your analytics. You. One of the most important things is you want to measure your analytics. You want to do this on a daily basis. You want to know what my sales were today, what they were yesterday, compared to last year. Your team will do this, but you need to understand this. So get involved, get educated. All right, the last point, for now, and again, there's a million points. This is a concept of entrepreneurship. But the last point is, don't love your product, love your customers. And every conference I've ever been to, they get up and they start talking about the customer, the customer, the client, the client, the client. You have to understand what your client wants, never mind your product. All right? A lot of times, people develop a product and they want to sell it so bad, they forget what the customer wants. So it's really important that you understand your client. And how do you do this? There's surveys that you could do. You can sit down. You could have focus groups. When they come to your practice and they're sitting down, ask them what is it that they want, what's mostly important to them. But it's your client that's the most important thing, not your product. So what do we need to. What is our goal here? What are we going to do? We need to become experts in sales and marketing and grit. Don't forget that concept about grit. The last thing I want to mention is empire medical training has an entire curriculum, not just an aesthetics and anti aging, but a curriculum in business. Our new company we're very excited about is Empire Pro and Empire pro. We're working with top people, top practitioners that have done very, very well in their aesthetics practice. We're also working with business people and we're teaching an entire curriculum in business. So I'm just going to conclude with that. Thank you all very, very much. I hope this was very interesting.