Inside Sona Medspas Part 1: Why I bought a Sona franchise.

Medical Spa MD series: Inside A Medical Spa Franchise: Part 1

These posts are written by former Sona Medspa owner Ron Berglund to provide an inside view of the way medical spa franchises recruit, train, and support their owners as well as detailing some of the problems with medspa franchises.

You may ask additional questions using the comments link at the bottom of the posts.

Part 1: Why I bought a Sona Medspa franchise?

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, a friend of mine opened one of the original six Sona operations in a suburb of Minneapolis. This was during Sona's "pre-franchise" period. Sona owned and operated a couple corporate centers in the east (the headquarters was in Virginia Beach) and a number of individuals (all non-physicians) opened centers in various parts of the country. I believe the initial operations began in late 1999 and 2000. The original owners were called "affiliates" and operated under a licensing agreement. Sona required that they use the "Sona approved" Cynosure Apogee 9300 alexandrite lasers, and the operations were limited to strictly laser hair removal.

 

The founder is an individual named Dennis Jones.

 

My friend and his daughter operated their laser center in Edina, Minnesota as a Sona affiliate from the fall of 1999 through early 2003 when they "converted" to a franchise under Sona's new franchise offering which was rolled out late in 2002. I had taken up my friend's offer to have his staff remove some of the unwanted hair on my back some time prior to this.

 

Even though I knew my friend and his daughter were still pretty much just "breaking even" financially at this time, I was very intrigued by the operation, the lasers, and the fact that this seemed like pretty much a "ground floor" opportunity at the time (circa early 2002). I had been working as an employee in the spa industry for some period of time and I knew first hand about the dawning of the "medical spa" throughout the U.S. Having been "working for the man" most of my career, I was also looking for an opportunity to own my own business-- to finally take my own shot at achieving "the American dream". For these reasons, I casually mentioned to my friend that "the Twin Cities is a big place" and it would seem to make sense to operate more than one center in MSP to take advantage of shared advertising and other synergies. "When you are ready to open a center in St. Paul", I told my friend, "please give me a call."

 

Some months later, my telephone rang and my friend and I discussed the prospects of forming a partnership and opening a second Sona Center in one of St. Paul's premier suburbs. Sona was on the verge of switching from its original affiliate program to a franchise program, he said, and since he was one of the original six he claimed that he had been promised "special treatment". Whereas everyone else would have to pay over $400,000 to own a Sona franchise, my friend had been led to believe that he would be allowed to open additional centers on a "cost of merchandise" basis only. Needless to say, this sounded intriguing to me, so my partner and I decided to move forward with the opportunity. The first step was to get more information about Sona and the new Sona franchise program, so I scheduled an appointment and booked a flight to Virginia Beach in the early fall of 2002.

Ron Berglund

The Beauty Brains: Answers about cosmetics.

The Beauty Brains blog.

 
The Brains are both professional cosmetic chemists with over 30 years experience creating cosmetics and personal care products and answer questions about cosmetic products.

From Beauty Brains:

How Does This Blog Work?
You can ask us questions two ways. Use our Ask The Beauty Brains link or email us at thebeautybrains@gmail.com. Check back for your answer in a few days; depending on our traffic and how much research we have to do it may take a little longer.

What Products Do We Discuss?
It depends on what you ask about, but pretty much anything you put on your body is fair game.

• What you can really expect the product to do (or not do)
• How the product does what it does.
• How the product is made.
• How the product is (or isn't) different from similar products.
• What the advertising behind the products really mean. 
  

Gore (Gortex) throws in the plastic surgery towel.

Gore & Associates to Exit the Plastic Surgery Market

 This exit includes ...'all of the GORE Subcutaneous Augmentation Material (GORE S.A.M.) products including TRIMENSIONAL 3-D implant extended chin, nasal dorsum and malar, sheets, sutures for plastic surgery applications, facial slings and strands.'

Obviously the risk / reward ratio wasn't working for them.

Hollywood doc gets 18 months in prison: Was he injecting Silicon 1000?

 Doc gets 18 months in federal prison.

...for injections of substances consistent with industrial grade silicone used to lubricate auto parts, as well as medical grade silicone, which is used for some eye surgeries but is not approved as wrinkle filler, according to court papers.

Sona Medspas: Inside a medial spa franchise.

Medical Spa MD Series: Inside a Sona Medspa Franchise

Q&A from former Sona Franchise owner Ron Berglund.

Ron posted a number of thoughtful comments regarding the problems with medspa franchises.

After exchanging emails, Ron's agreed to answer a number of questions about his experiences with Sona including the good, bad, and ugly. Why he chose Sona? What he was told? What really happended? What went wrong?

As far as I'm aware, Ron is the first medical spa franchisee who's been willing to come forward and tell his side of the story in a comprehensive way.

Neuroeconomics & Cosmetic Medicine: Branding your medical spa.

Popular brands may brand the brain.

Researchers think they've now found out why people like expensive (and advertising saturated) brands better.

Researchers at University Hospital in Munich Germany used Magnetic Resonance Imaging technology to scan people’s brains while they were shown different brand logos. The more popular logos “lit up areas of the brain associated with warm emotions, reward and self-identity while less-recognized brands triggered more activity in brain regions associated with working memory and negative emotions — suggesting these products were less easy to process and accept.”

I've discussed the potential problems this poses for individual cosmetic medical practices before. The ability to build a brand is the domain of large businesses with large budgets. Small practices will face increasing pressure. Even the current batch of medspa franchises are being pressured out of existence. But perhaps this explains my wife's love for all things Apple.

In its study, the Munich team hooked up 20 healthy, well-educated young men and women to fMRI. Then the researchers presented them with the logos of either well-known or more obscure automakers and insurance companies. Born did not disclose the actual brand names, calling such disclosure "not useful at present."

Watching the participants' real-time neurological activity, it became clear to the researchers that the better-known brands acted on the brain in a way that was quite different from that of less-familiar logos.

Better-known brands stirred up areas of the brain's cortex and elsewhere that are "involved in positive emotional processing and associated with self-identification," Born said. This activity was specific to the better-known brands and occurred independently of the category of product -- cars or insurance plans.

Besides demonstrating that strong branding does matter, neurologically speaking, the fMRI results "suggest that a benchmark test for strong vs. weaker brands is possible," Born said. That could open the way to further research into what makes great brands great. "Further investigations are necessary to define in detail the conditions for optimal branding," she said.

via Beauty Brains 

NYC bans trans fats in restaurants.

Where health and vanity meet... The waistline.

The board, which passed the ban unanimously, did give restaurants a slight break by relaxing what had been considered a tight deadline for compliance. Restaurants will be barred from using most frying oils containing artificial trans fats by July and will have to eliminate the artificial trans fats from all of its foods by July 2008.

Dartmouth Medicine Online Magazine

Dartmouth Medicine

An online magazine for alumni and friends of Dartmouth Medical School and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.

Dartmouth Medicine's print edition has a circulation of about 28,000. About 60% of its readers are involved in some way in medicine—as physicians, biomedical scientists, medical students, nurses, etc.—and about 40% are lay—patients, donors, parents, residents of the region, etc

6 Letters to Cosmetic Medicine.

The NY Times has published 6 letters to the editor

that they received after printing “More doctors turning to the business of beauty.” (front page, Nov. 30)

Among the letters:

"Physicians who take short courses to learn these procedures are abusing their medical licenses for the simple purpose of generating income. This is hypocritical medicine, not Hippocratic medicine."

Arthur W. Perry, M.D.
A clinical associate professor of plastic surgery at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, was a member of New Jersey’s State Board of Medical Examiners from 1995 to 2005.

"I’m disgusted. We train our best students to be doctors, and look what we get: a bunch of spoiled doctors squabbling over cosmetic surgery like kids over the last cookie."

Christine R. Fry

Of course there are numerous reasons for physicians leaving the existing third party payer system to breach the cosmetic medical market, but the anger from both patients being left and existing cosmetic practices is very real. 

Medical illustrations & animations: The inner life of a cell.

The Inner Life of a Cell: Watch the video here.

The Inner Life of a Cell, an eight-minute animation created in NewTek LightWave 3D and Adobe After Effects for Harvard biology students, the animation illustrates unseen molecular mechanisms and the ones they trigger, specifically how white blood cells sense and respond to their surroundings and external stimuli.

Medical Spa Customer Service: Apologizing to patients.

From James Hong's blog:

 is jetBlue apologizing too much? I think not.

I was impressed by the video of jetBlue's CEO

Putting a human face to the problem and taking responsibility reminds people that his company is not comprised of robots.. it is comprised of real people who make real mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes, so the situation becomes instantly more forgivable. Either the guy is a great actor, or you can tell that he cares.. and that matters a lot. One thing I learned from all my various gigs doing customer support is that people are willing to deal with problems.. they already know the world (and your product) are not perfect... but the one thing they aren't willing to deal with is feeling like you don't respect them or their concerns, and that you don't care. Making your customers feel this way is certain death for even the biggest companies.

Kudos to jetBlue, I only like them more now.

Sermo: Physician 'MySpace'.

MySpace for physicians

...challenge or corroborate each others opinions, accelerating the emergence of trends and new insights on medications, devices and treatments. You can then apply the collective knowledge to achieve better outcomes for your patients.

Cosmetic Surgery Times: Correcting nasolabial folds

Cosmetic Surgery Times: Correcting nasolabial folds PDF

 
This activity is intended to meet the needs of dermatologists and aesthetic surgeons seeking to select appropriate facial filler materials for individual patients based on current research. The activity will also provide information to help physicians improve cosmetic results and patient satisfaction that follows soft-tissue augmentation with injectable fillers.

Aesthetic practitioners seeking to provide facial soft-tissue augmentation for their patients have several therapeutic options. Nevertheless, the recent explosion of new products necessitates that pioneers continuously reevaluate and fine-tune their choices and application techniques. This educational insert is intended to provide state-ofthe- science information that will help these physicians select appropriate technologies based on the latest data on available injectable dermal filler materials.

Want to make REAL money?

Cosmetic medicine may not be the answer.

 
People both in and out of the medical field often comment on how much fun I must have at work.  And I actually do have a lot of fun.  I enjoy my job and I enjoy this field of medicine.  But it's still work.  And there are still problems as there are problems in any line of work.  But I always get a chuckle when people assume that since the office looks like a day spa and since our patients pay out of pocket, that any physician who works in cosmetic medicine must be rolling in the money.  I even hear that from other physicians.  My own ob/gyn is soon going to add cosmetic services to her practice so she "can finally get out of debt."  And while I think there are a few clinics out there that do exceptionally well.  For the most part adding cosmetic services to your current practice is like starting any new business.  For every Microsoft, there must be 5,000 others that fail.  Those odds of success and failure definitely apply to the field of cosmetic medicine.

Course most people think that all doctors are rolling in money.  I think most physicians earn a decent living, but when you take into account all the years in school, tuition, and the residency "stipend" that works out to be about minimum wage....well, I think there are a lot of easier ways to make that same amount of money.  Which is why I'm happy that I enjoy my work.  If I had entered medicine just to make money, then I might be disappointed that I didn't decide to become a plumber.  My plumber makes between $200 - $300 / hr and doesn't have to spend thousands on malpractice.  And he's so busy that his voicemail says don't even bother leaving a message if you are a new client.  He's already got all the work he needs.  And then he takes off to Mexico for 3 months out of the year.  Not that I'd want to muck around in some of the stuff he does.  But if you are only interested in money, then perhaps medicine isn't the right calling for you.  And if you are really interested in money, then cosmetic medicine may not be the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that you think it is.

In fact, perhaps you should head straight onto Wall Street.  Monday's (November 27,2006 Lure of Great Wealth Affects Career Choices) New York Times had a front page article about a hematology/oncology physician who was making about $150,000/year in clinical medicine.  But then he straddled over to Wall Street and is now earning over $1-2+ million a year.  He launched from "decent" money to "insane" money.  

We often hear about Drs. X, Y, and Z entering this field from all different types of specialties.  And I'm sure they are lured by the predictable hours and lack of insurance wrangling.  But if they are drawn by the ideas of wealth and grandeur, they might be sadly disappointed.