The business of cosmetic medicine has its ups and downs according to Dr Rainone.

Name: Donald P. Rainone, M.D.
Clinic: Smoothskin Cosmetic Laser Center
Location: Londonderry, NH
Website: smoothskinnh.com

Tell us a little bit about your clinic.

The clinic is co-owned by me and an RN. I provide leadership and direction, and perform all laser and injection procedures. The RN oversees HR, risk management, and customer service issues, and maintains vendor relations. The esthetics manager directs the esthetician team, and performs quality control over esthetics procedures and equipment. 

I offer medical injectables, laser tattoo removal, laser rejuvenation, microdermabrasion, chemical peels, IPL hair removal, and IPL brown spots and facial vessels. I pared down my services, especially when the recession hit from 2008 – 2011, omitting massage, laser leg veins, lipodissolve, and liposuction. Focusing on fewer services has heightened my expertise level and made me busier.

My patient population covers all ages, both sexes, and a broad socioeconomic distribution. Tattoo removal brings in more lower income, young males, while medical injectables bring in higher income, older females.

I am located about 50 minutes north of Boston, MA, 15 minutes over the New Hampshire border.

I have only about 1,000 SF and every inch gets used to the max: 4 treatment rooms total. One thing I stay on top of is how much revenue per square foot, per hour, is generated by the rooms. This helps me when deciding what to expand or cut.

Can you give us some insight into how you hire, manage, and motivate your staff? 

Hiring is a challenging event and we apply some rigor to avoid getting the wrong person. We usually post on Craig’s List and weed out the obvious poor fits prior to an interview. We then do several return interviews with the RN and Esthetics Manager. We have esthetician candidates do a sample facial on the esthetics manager to test how caring they are in the touch/handling aspect of a client. I have found that anyone can be trained, but you cannot teach “nice.” Kindness goes a long way in this field. 

Yes, I have lots of horror stories. We address problems in real-time, document the discussion in the employee’s record, and promptly terminate any gross violations. One employee was not completing her tasks because she was spending the day logged onto dating sites. She did not even bother to erase the browser history.

Unfortunately, I suffered a great financial loss by an employee who turned out to be a professional white collar criminal, embezzling the total cash equivalent of one quarter’s gross revenues. I was able to recover 20% of that through legal action.

I now run a criminal background check on every potential new hire. I also tightened the password access to transactions in the point-of-sale software, hindering the ability for employees to hide evidence of cash skimming. As a final precaution, I now make all my own bank runs for cash deposits.