1: Digital In Aesthetics. Ep1. Askari Townshend

With clinic owner and software entrepreneur Dr Askari Townshend

Episode Transcript

(00:10):
Rick O'Neill:Today I'm going to be joined by Askari Townshend, who is founder and chief entrepreneur at Collums, and also ASKINOLOGY, very successful aesthetic clinic and delighted to have him with me on my first ever podcast episode. Askari, thanks for coming. Nice to see you, and thanks for agreeing to be my first guest and yeah, here we are on Zoom again. Spent a lot of time on here in the last couple years, haven't we?
Askari Townshen...:Hi, thank you for having me, Rick. Yes. Yeah, it's been a year or two of Zoom, hasn't it?
Rick O'Neill:Yeah, absolutely, and the part of the driver for this podcast venture, if you like, is the bringing together of the aesthetics market and digital stuff, which have crashed together, unceremoniously, over the last couple of years. All sorts of lessons have been learned, all sorts of fallout, all sorts of realizations as to number one, "Oh, it is actually really useful.", and number two, "Oh, my God. I'm clueless about it, and the tools that I've got are rubbish.", et cetera. Or "I haven't got the right partners around me.", all of that stuff.
So that's why I've got you in as my first guest, because you are the perfect mix, I think, of successful medical aesthetic clinician practitioner, business owner, and, now, having crossed the chasm into a digital entrepreneur, because you've built a product which we'll talk about.
Askari Townshen...:And I suspect you've sneaked to look at my socials and seen how bad they are as well.
Rick O'Neill:I'm saying nothing. I'm not here to coach you today. It's not a digital academy call. You're not being assessed. But, despite what you may think about your Instagram, you've obviously done well. For anyone who doesn't know you or how you got going, I just wanted to give people a bit of background on where you came from and what's kind of led you up to now, and then we'll talk a bit about what you're up to at the moment.
Askari Townshen...:Sure.
Rick O'Neill:I was going to sort of start with just what's your background in aesthetics? How did it all start? How did you get started?
Askari Townshen...:Sure, okay. Thanks, Rick. I qualified in 2002 up in Nottingham and I spent the next six years in the NHS on a surgical training scheme and there was a lot of changes in surgical training and I was one of the few who was true to my word. We all grumbled and said we were going to leave the NHS if it all happened, and I actually did. I'd already started doing Botox and filler treatments for friends and family, having done a short course. It was the days where you'd just rock up, you did an afternoon course or in-a-day course and off you went and I decided to set up a clinic. So off I went to Northampton. I can't really remember why I chose Northampton, but I found a nice spot, set up, but it was tough because the year was 2008 and people were queuing up outside banks to get their money out and there was a big crash.
Rick O'Neill:I remember it well.
Askari Townshen...:And some...
Rick O'Neill:Yeah. Right.
Askari Townshen...:Baptism of fire, and, there I was, naive arrogant surgeon who thought he was going to take over the world and kind of had a rude awakening. Probably the rudest bit of it was going down to the local council to see if I could sign on for benefits because I'd spent all my cash setting up the clinic and I literally had no money-
Rick O'Neill:Wow.
Askari Townshen...:... And then they said, no, I can't sign on for benefits because I had a house in Nottingham that I was renting out, which was in negative equity. The house was costing me more money than I was getting, but because of that, I wasn't eligible for benefits.
Rick O'Neill:Wow.
Askari Townshen...:So yeah, that's where I was at in 2008.
Rick O'Neill:That's amazing.
So really been there in terms of crashing into the bottom and having to fight your way back up again.
Askari Townshen...:Yeah, but the great news is that I plodded on and stuck at it, and despite the crash, kind of 12 months, 18 months into it, actually, the business started doing okay, and a couple of years into it, we were making some money, which was fantastic. Making enough money that I made the decision to sell the business to sk:n. I don't think there's a problem saying that now. They were the UK's largest chain of aesthetic clinics and I went to work for sk:n for five years. During that time, I became the Director of Medical Services and it was probably the best thing that I've ever done, in terms of my aesthetics and business career, because I knew nothing about business and those guys, they're on it. They're not the biggest for no reason. Now, you can question how they do stuff, but there's no doubt they know what they're doing and I got to learn some of that.
Rick O'Neill:What were the big things that you learned from that time with that business?
Askari Townshen...:The thing that I think stands out is processes and numbers, just a ruthless focus on what are you doing, how are you doing it, how do you measure it and was it worthwhile doing, and that's it.
Rick O'Neill:Which is pretty alien to your average clinician coming out of the National Health Service, right?
Askari Townshen...:Right. But what's interesting though, is that I've started talking again, I've done a few business talks about processes, and you're right, it is alien but, if we switch the word process for protocol or audit or clinical audit? Actually, everybody feels a little bit happier about that because they get clinical audit.
Rick O'Neill:Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:It's the same thing, you know? So you need to apply the principles of clinical audit that you do with your treatments, apply that to your business-
Rick O'Neill:Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:... And actually you're going to build a strong business and I think that's what really got into my mind with my time there.
Rick O'Neill:Absolutely. There's so many analogies between the clinical side and the business side and the marketing side.
Askari Townshen...:Right.
Rick O'Neill:They all require the same basic approach. Holding yourself to account on certain metrics and-
Askari Townshen...:Right.
Rick O'Neill:... Protocols, as you say, and being consistent with it all the way through as well.
Askari Townshen...:And being willing to learn and questioning yourself and being honest when things aren't good enough and making them better.
Rick O'Neill:Absolutely. So you talked about trying to sign on, at one point, and getting turned away and then things turned around. You skipped quite a bit, I reckon, in between one minute, "I'm signing on.", and the next minute, "I'm selling my clinic.", right? I'm not going to let you get away with skipping that bit so how did you manage that and what sort of challenges did you face along the way, and at what point did you think "I could sell this."? Or, were you just approached, out of the blue, or how did that happen? Because that's, for me as an entrepreneur, that when you get to a point with a business where there's some sort of exit in sight, oh, it's really-
Askari Townshen...:Yeah.
Rick O'Neill:It's exciting, but it's also super stressful and it's much harder than you think and it takes longer than you think. Was that your-
Askari Townshen...:Yeah.
Rick O'Neill:... Experience as well?
Askari Townshen...:It certainly was. So if I rewind then, I got my clinic. I decked it all out. I did all the exciting bits. I chose the color of the walls and the carpet got a nice desk and then, when I'd done that and spent all that money and everyone had patted me on the back, which I always think is strange. It's like, "Oh, well done. You've spent loads of money." Well, yeah, spending money is kind of easy. It's the making the money back that's the difficult thing.
Rick O'Neill:Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:So I was there, in this building, with no staff and some fancy kit that I'd spent a lot of money on and then it dawned on me that I needed to get people in through the door. This was before social media really was a big tool. I'm sure some trailblazers were on it, but, in 2008, we had websites.
So I got a grant actually, in the days when you could get business grants and your local chamber of commerce and people like that would help out. So, I got a grant, I got a website going, I got a business mentor. That was actually really valuable. It's a very lonely period when you are a sole founder and you don't really know what you're doing.
Rick O'Neill:Absolutely.
Askari Townshen...:So to have somebody that can come see you once a month and you can just offload to, and they can help guide you. A little tip, actually, to people out there who maybe are looking for mentors, it doesn't have to be from the same industry. In fact, I'd probably recommend, that if you go find a mentor, that it isn't someone from your industry. It's someone who knows about business and their business knowledge can be applied to any industry and they can do it in a way that isn't biased or unduly affected by being too close to what you're doing.
So I plugged away, I contacted local gyms. I gave talks at their little open days. Gosh, I was everywhere. I was flyering cars in Morrisons car park, and I remember getting an angry phone call from a lady who was really upset that I'd left this flyer under her windscreen wiper and declared that she might have come to see me, but she definitely wouldn't now.
So, you know, I've seen it all. Open days. We got a stand one time at the local shopping center. Adverts in magazines. You know those local glossy, local magazines, like Northamptonshire Life?
Rick O'Neill:I do know [crosstalk 00:09:49].
Askari Townshen...:[crosstalk 00:09:49] On the back.
Rick O'Neill:I live in Northamptonshire so I'm familiar with it. My question is, right, Henry Ford used to say, "I know for sure I'm wasting 50% of my ad spend, but I don't know which 50%."
Askari Townshen...:Yeah.
Rick O'Neill:So which of all those things worked, and did you know? Were you tracking it? Because a lot of that stuff was real world, quite hard to track. Which-
Askari Townshen...:Yeah, it was-
Rick O'Neill:... Really kind of filled up the clinic for you?
Askari Townshen...:I tried my best to track it. I knew I needed to track it, and I really tried hard. Print advertising, in my mind, was a waste of money.
Rick O'Neill:Right.
Askari Townshen...:There was a lot of money spent on print advertising and it just didn't work for me. I tried different things, different types of adverts, the local magazines. I even put something in the local paper. Things where people would have to give you the code to get access to some kind of discount. It was super slow.
Rick O'Neill:Right.
Askari Townshen...:Really slow, and I think the website, even in those days, probably provided me with the majority of my customers.
Rick O'Neill:Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:I think what really happens is that you imagine there's this Eureka moment and suddenly everything comes together, but it's truly that analogy of the snowball and it starts slow, and the thing is it's slow and small for ages.
Rick O'Neill:Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:People try and kid you that it's a really steep hill and after five minutes, you've got a huge snowman and you don't. It's small and it's slow for nine months, 12 months, and then you wake up one day and, almost without you realizing it, you've got something going and that's a special time. Once you've got the momentum, actually, things can start moving quite quickly.
Rick O'Neill:That's right.
Askari Townshen...:I think that's what happened in Northampton. You had all these little things going on, a bit of print advertising, the website, people started hearing about me, the word spread slowly, slowly. Then I woke up one day and the snowball was rolling and then you kind of don't look back.
Rick O'Neill:Plugging away at all of those things, whether each thing in its own right worked or not, all of it contributed to-
Askari Townshen...:Right.
Rick O'Neill:... The awareness. The momentum, the drive to keep going, the brand positioning, all of that stuff, because it may be someone read something or they caught a glimpse or they got your Morrison's flyer. Then when they Google something, because Google was still a thing in 2008 and before, then they make that sort of brand connection. "Oh, okay. Yeah. I've heard of these guys."
Askari Townshen...:Right.
Rick O'Neill:You know, but that-
Askari Townshen...:You said awareness. I think awareness is a really important word because I don't know how many times people... People talk about the number of times they need to see your logo or hear your name before they become familiar with it and they see it in Morrison's car park and then it's in the newspaper and then maybe it's the website and then you do a talk at the local David Lloyd and all of a sudden somebody clicks and says, "Oh. Oh, yeah." Then they walk passed one day and they're, "Oh, you know what? I'll just nip in.", because they're comfortable now. They know what you're about.
Rick O'Neill:Yeah. I think the established wisdom used to be seven touch points, right?
Askari Townshen...:Mm.
Rick O'Neill:And it's really just because of the sheer volume of stuff that you get thrown at, on a day to day basis, that it's going to take six or seven times before you really clock and make a connection between having seen or heard about something and knowing what it's for or whether it relates to you or it might be useful for you.
Askari Townshen...:Exactly.
Rick O'Neill:The same applies in digital marketing as it does in print and Morrison flyering techniques, which I think they should bring back personally. I'd love to know what the flyer said under the windscreen. Did it say "Blimey,"-
Askari Townshen...:I don't even remember.
Rick O'Neill:... "You're looking a bit rough, love. You've just done your weekly shop. You need to..."
Askari Townshen...:I think she just had a bad day. She'd had a bad day. And, do you know what, actually, just as a segue from that or to go left field a moment... As I've got older and as I've run my business for longer and looked at customer service more and more and more, I give people a lot more leeway these days. There's a lot of people out there having a lot of bad days.
Rick O'Neill:True.
Askari Townshen...:It doesn't mean it's acceptable to be rude or mean, or violent or any of those things, but it helps me understand and it helps me be calmer and less upset about humanity. When I think to myself "Actually, you know what, somebody probably just had some really bad news.", or maybe their parents unwell, maybe they're getting divorced, maybe their kids sick?
Rick O'Neill:Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:But, you know what, sometimes we just need to be a bit kinder to each other and give each other a little bit of leeway.
Rick O'Neill:Amen to that. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, and you're going to get me off on a right tangent about stoicism, because I'm a big advocate of stoicism.
Askari Townshen...:Yeah.
Rick O'Neill:I don't know how much you've looked into it or not, but that's a big part of it, is the things that people are going through, that's that's on them. That's about them, right?
Askari Townshen...:Right.
Rick O'Neill:Someone's reacting to you or being a certain way to you or near you is always 99% of the time is a projection of what they're dealing with, and just knowing that and remembering that really, really helps if someone-
Askari Townshen...:Yeah.
Rick O'Neill:... Is being a bit of a dick to you and that'll be why, usually.
Askari Townshen...:It helps both ways. It helps them because you respond to them differently and it actually helps yourself, and do you know what? I do like stoicism, but I'm also kind of selfish. I partly do it for myself.
Rick O'Neill:Yeah. Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:Because I can go home and I feel less grumpy and less angry about the world and people.
Rick O'Neill:Absolutely, because you can take it all on and take it home, if you're not careful. And all of these things, although tangents, they may seem, are super relevant, because they're always things that are going to help you in the running of a business because when I first got started, I had an agency before LTF and also LTF is now 14 years old.
Askari Townshen...:Wow. Congratulations.
Rick O'Neill:Thanks. Actually, today it's our 14th birthday.
Askari Townshen...:Oh, wow.
Rick O'Neill:I incorporated the company when my wife was two weeks from due date for my first son and we just bought a house and she thought I was completely insane, starting a business and leaving the previous business behind. But that's just that I'm not averse to risk, I like to jump out of the plane and then design a parachute on the way down. But yeah, that whole thing around how to deal with it and how to detach yourself from certain things is really helpful. I used to feel emotionally connected to my P&L reports and was up and down like a yo-yo, in terms of my mood, if we were doing well or not doing well. When you've been doing it for much longer and you know, that's just how it is, the ups and downs, you can cut a line across the middle of it and feel a bit more stable and just start your day in a certain way, that kind of levels you. But that takes a while.
Going back to where we forked off of our path, in terms of marketing and what works and what doesn't and stuff, all of it is about marginal gain. You talked about the snowball, getting back to that analogy. It is small for a long time, but, if you don't keep pushing it, it stays small-
Askari Townshen...:Right.
Rick O'Neill:... and it's marginal gain. One of the things that does get my goat, with my tongue in cheek, most of the time, is the amount of content, if you like, out there that suggests there may be some sort of magic formula or magic pill or super neat trick that unlocks you from a hundred grand to 10 million in a very short space of time, and you and I know it is not that easy. There's no such thing as an overnight success. Most overnight successes take 20 years.
Askari Townshen...:Yeah.
Rick O'Neill:That's one thing that I think applies in business and the marketing side is the marginal gain of relentless consistency and not leaving a stone unturned.
Askari Townshen...:Sure.
Rick O'Neill:A lot of people want to go for the quick fix and find, "Oh, there must be some way of avoiding this hard work.", or "There must be some way of avoiding the next three years of trial and error.", but there just isn't.
There's a lot of things you can learn. There's a lot of processes you can put in place to make things more efficient and slightly easier, and that's the sort of thing we're going to be talking about on this chat. But I think it's important that people just own that, and as you said it was, and that's why I didn't want to let you get away with short cutting from signing on to selling to sk:n Clinic. That's quite a leap that. In between that, you had to be relentlessly consistent, you had to push on every angle. You had to deal with lots of knock backs and, no doubt, nights of sitting there thinking, "Crap, where's the next"-
Askari Townshen...:I've got a nice story, actually, even before the clinic. I was in Nottingham, I was working as a junior doctor and I'd started doing Botox and fillers and I was getting pretty good at it. I thought that this could be something for me to do on the side or could be perhaps a future career and guess what? I was right, but I remember getting my first kind of partnership with a local hair salon and they seemed to be doing pretty well.
They were big. They were well known and they seemed to take a liking to me and I thought I can have access to this big database of customers. Had my very first booking, I was super excited and got all my stuff together in my bag. I got my Botox and I premixed my Botox up so it was all ready to go. I wouldn't waste any time. I turned up at the hair salon and I waited and I waited and you probably know how this story ends. It ends with a no-show.
Rick O'Neill:Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:And there I was with my bottle of Botox that I'd pre-mixed now and I don't know how much I've paid for my Botox in those days, 150 or 180 pounds. It was a lot of money to me. It was a huge amount of money, and we learned a good lesson there, straight off, about human behavior, about what you should do first. Should you make mix up your Botox before your patient is in front of you? Absolutely not. Even today I learned that lesson. Even today. I was in clinic on Tuesday. I did a full syringe treatment of filler.
Somebody that I've treated in the past. I know they have no problems with the treatment, with the same product. I opened up my first syringe of filler as I was setting up and I was about to open up filler number two and three and unwrap the package and I stopped myself. "Hold on, 'Skari, what if she has a funny turn? What if she has some strange reaction to it? I don't want to open up syringe number 2, 3, 4, because then it's wasted."-
Rick O'Neill:Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:... No, open up one syringe. What I'm saying, I guess, is that you learn stuff and you got to keep learning from your mistakes. Don't forget the lessons you learn 15 years ago.
Rick O'Neill:Yeah. There's nothing more soul destroying than making the same mistake twice.
Askari Townshen...:Right. But people do it still though.
Rick O'Neill:We all do it, and you think, "Oh, not again."
Askari Townshen...:Yeah.
Rick O'Neill:"I'm definitely going to remember that next time. Oh, I didn't."
Askari Townshen...:Yeah.
Rick O'Neill:Yeah, totally. When we were talking about the sale of the business, I said to you that, in my experience, that is a mix of excitement and also stress and also it's usually harder and takes longer than you think. When did you know that was an option? Were you approached at random or is it something you were looking for? How did that all work and how did it pan out?
Askari Townshen...:It wasn't planned at all. Things were going quite well for me and when I had opened my clinic, a large sk:n Clinic had opened, literally, a few meters away from me and had I known this, I don't think I would've set up my business there. I think it was coming up to a two year mark or three year mark and I knew that Lisa's often had breaks at two or three years. I'd heard on the grapevine that the sk:n Clinic wasn't doing very well and I always used to drive past it really slowly to see if there was anyone inside. I'd often loiter just to check, and I just had this hunch. So I went into the clinic one day and spoke to the manager and said, "Hey, my clinic's around the corner. Not sure if you guys are doing as well as you'd hoped. Who would I speak to about buying your stuff when you go?"
Yeah.
Rick O'Neill:Wow.
Askari Townshen...:I did say I was arrogant, didn't I?
Rick O'Neill:I love that.
Askari Townshen...:So she passed on my email address and, lo and behold, Darren, who's now the CEO of sk:n, got in touch with me and we started talking. I don't know, I think he just liked the size of my balls and was like, "Wow." I remember him saying to me, very specifically, "Listen, Askari, people don't buy us. We buy other people.", and that's where it started. I think really what they were looking for... Let's be honest, they weren't looking to buy my clinic because it was so amazing and so successful. They were looking to buy me out of the market and they were looking to acquire Dr. Askari, who they thought was going to be an asset for sk:n, and it helped us both. It was great for me to learn what I learned in my first clinic and then move to sk:n, and it was great for sk:n to have somebody who turned out to be a phenomenally successful injector for them and I made a lot of clinics in their group a lot of money.
Rick O'Neill:Yeah. It's usually the way they want to remove a bit of competition. So, you've become successful enough that you're a pain in their arse.
Askari Townshen...:Right.
Rick O'Neill:And because you've been good at doing that, you will be a great asset to them so that's when the golden handshake comes into it and the golden handcuffs and all of that. At what point, just prior to that, and, I guess, also since then with ASKINOLOGY, when do you think, or is there a point that you feel like you've unlocked the key to this particular business or this clinic? Is there a moment?
Askari Townshen...:I don't know there was a single moment, but I'd been with sk:n for, I don't know, maybe three years. At that time they had, I think, 36 or 38 clinics, and I'd been, what I call, the Botox monkey that went around all these different clinics, not all of the 36, but, in my time there, I probably went around 15 different clinics. Different clinic managers, getting to know other practitioners and I could just get a sense now of how these different clinics were working. Some of them were massive, the big flagship on Oxford street, and some of them were tiny little ones that had been bought as little fairly scrappy clinics.
And I just started to get it and I'd go into clinics and think to myself, "Hmm. If I was in charge, I'd be changing that over there and that over there. I bet you, if you did that, everything would be better.", and it just got to the point where I'd been exposed to so many different clinics in different parts of the country, in different setups, I just knew what worked and what didn't work.
Rick O'Neill:Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:That probably was the most valuable lesson for me, so after the five years, I came out of sk:n and I just knew I was ready to go. With what I knew from a big business and what I knew from having set something up in a small way, on my own at the start, there was the perfect kind of coming together of those two experiences. still tough.
Rick O'Neill:Yeah. I was going to say. So ASKINOLOGY, you came out of sk:n, you'd had the experience of growing your original clinic. Then your five years that you've just described, you would think then that you've got the perfect blueprint to fast track any clinic that you then start. So was it as simple as that to get ASKINOLOGY to where it is now or what's that been like?
Askari Townshen...:Well, it was tough. I think setting up a business is always tough, as we've already alluded to, and it almost ended before it started because the contractors, who were fitting out my clinic, messed up. Messed up in a huge way and it was just a terrible, terrible chapter of my life that nearly ended in a nervous breakdown. We ended up going to court. I hired some really expensive lawyers because it was make or break and it all came down to this one court hearing, which I ended up winning. If I'd lost it, I would've lost absolutely everything and they were looking.
There was a loophole in this contract that had been exploited and hadn't been covered by my team. Not my legal team, but my design team, at the start, and it basically meant that the contractors would be able to sue me for the entire value of the contract. In other words, they were going to do me for, I think, 270 grand-
Rick O'Neill:Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:... Which I didn't have. I'd spent all of my money. I had nothing, and there I was talking to lawyers about bankruptcy. What would happen to my house? Would I need to sell my house? I was thinking about what's going to happen to the kids and stuff like that.
Rick O'Neill:Right.
Askari Townshen...:But, fortunately, we won the case. I didn't get any huge payout or anything, but I got enough money to pay my legal fees and then I could start. Even thinking about it, now, kind of upsets me. You know, it was a very traumatic time.
Rick O'Neill:Yeah. Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:But we got through that and then I was ready for the next battle, which was getting my business running.
Rick O'Neill:Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:But, you know what? At the time it felt like that first stage of rolling the snowball was very long time, excruciating, but when I look back at it now? I did actually, I did a talk a few weeks ago at a conference and I promised to share some of my numbers and I put up a graph of my monthly sales from the day we first opened-
Rick O'Neill:Right.
Askari Townshen...:... And it was quite cathartic. You know, that's six and a half years ago.
Rick O'Neill:What does that look like? A hockey stick?
Askari Townshen...:Not quite, no. Doesn't look like a hockey stick. Oh gosh, I wish it did. I'd be on like 10 million, or something, right now. But what was really interesting was that the first six months was almost nothing and I was pointing out to the audience that I was losing a lot of money. We were losing, at one point, 20, 30 grand a month.
Rick O'Neill:Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:And then just there's this point and you can see the snowball suddenly gets traction and just at month nine, suddenly something starts to happen. We start to cover our costs and then we start making money and, within six months, we're making okay money. All of a sudden, I can pay back all of my startup debts and by year three, we are in good money and I'm like, "Oh my Gods, how did we get here so quickly?" So when you're in that first stage, it feels slow and it is, and it's painful, but when you look back? Actually, you have a different perspective on things.
Rick O'Neill:Absolutely.
Askari Townshen...:But that was my experience though. That was my what did I learn to get me going quicker?
Rick O'Neill:Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:If it wasn't for my experiences, that wouldn't have happened so quickly.
Rick O'Neill:Yeah. Do you think that if you've got good processes and you're doing sort of the right things, that period of time and that sort of lag, if you like, when you're maybe losing a bit or it's taking longer to get to profit than you would hope, is that period of time and the phasing of it predictable, do you think? Like if you went and started again tomorrow, do you think it would be the same or does it matter? Does it depend on where you are or what you are offering or your brand positioning or is it predictable, by and large, for a business in this market?
Askari Townshen...:I think almost by definition, it's not predictable because there are so many factors and you just listed a whole load of them and you don't know what each of those things are going to do. Is there going to be another crash? Inflation is going up. You just don't know, but is it predictable, for me personally? Yeah, because I've done this now, twice before and I've had all my experiences I've described. If I was setting up a new clinic tomorrow, I know what I'm going to do. I know how big a hit all those different things are going to be on my business. I know the things I need to do first. And here's the biggest word for me that I love is efficiency.
Rick O'Neill:Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:Everything's about efficiency. You can't control how long it's going to take to get your business going, but you can do everything possible to be as efficient as you can, so that whatever that time is going to be shorter because the difference between success and failure is, do you have enough money, stamina, and energy to keep going until you get the momentum?
Rick O'Neill:That's it.
Askari Townshen...:If you run out of any of those things, you lose. You lose everything but if you can hold on?
Then you win.
Rick O'Neill:Our good friend, Richard Crawford-Small says to all of the clients and members in Aesthetic Entrepreneurs, "You've got three things, time, energy, and money."
Askari Townshen...:Right. Yeah.
Rick O'Neill:And he talks a great process for his clients on how to use those effectively, and, like you said, being more efficient means that you've got more time and more energy.
Askari Townshen...:Right.
Rick O'Neill:And it buys you more time. Time is money. They all work together, don't they?
Askari Townshen...:Yeah.
Rick O'Neill:Yeah, I love that. Speaking of efficiency, it gives us a nice segue, I think, into the more digital area of being an entrepreneur, being a business owner. What over the years of all of the businesses, but particularly the current business, because of where we're at now with tech and digital, what's been your digital experience through the process of running and building ASKINOLOGY, and how has it helped? How has it hindered? What sort of frustrations have you had? And that's both for obtaining patients, the marketing side of digital and also the operational side of digital, like onboarding patients, keeping good records, all of that stuff. Tell us a bit about how that's evolved.
Askari Townshen...:The digital marketing side of things, I have always struggled with, and have always approached with a huge amount of suspicion. A bit like the print advertising I talked about and I think the problem is that anyone can just turn up and say that they're a digital marketer. I'm sure we've all had it. You know, people ping us through Instagram, "Hey, I'm so-and-so. I'm an influencer and I'm going to do this for your business." Like every man and their dog and every woman and her dog. I've just never found someone who really made it work for us.
So I've spent a lot of money, even back in the days in 2008, nine, in my first clinic. Pay-per-click was a thing and we invested in that. I just never really found anything that worked for me. It could have been that I didn't have the flows correct. It could be that my websites weren't good enough. My landing pages weren't right.
So I'm not saying it's anyone else's fault necessarily, but just I never managed to get it to click and even more recently. Before COVID, we tried again with a group of people and it just didn't work.
Rick O'Neill:Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:I'm actually going to speak to you at some point because maybe you guys can help. I think you just have to do it properly. It's the same with everything in life. If you do stuff properly, it works, and if you cut corners and you don't have the right team, guess what? You spend money and nothing comes back.
Rick O'Neill:Yeah, absolutely. It's a lot harder than people realize-
Askari Townshen...:Right.
Rick O'Neill:... And I go back to that thing about, there's no magic pill, it's marginal gain. But the one thing, that we've been talking to people until we're blue in the face, about for a few years now, people are starting to catch up is before any of the stuff that you are talking about, this sort of demand generating activity around pay-per-click and things like that, you got to have your content strategy right-
Askari Townshen...:Yeah.
Rick O'Neill:... You've got to have your user experience right, and we're going to talk about that as well.
Askari Townshen...:Yeah.
Rick O'Neill:... And you need to be 'The clinic' locally, on Google, because those people are at their highest point of intent and they are in your catchment area for your business. So, if you get that singing and then you put them into a user experience which is optimal and will convert them, and qualify people out who you don't want, then, later, you can pour petrol on that by doing pay-per-click marketing.
Askari Townshen...:Yeah.
Rick O'Neill:Automation and the rest of it but you got to get the basics right and have that foundation in place, I think, and that's where some people try to sort of... It's very attractive, isn't it? The thought that you can turn on a Facebook ad and have some patients tomorrow, but it's really not that simple and it's building a bit of a house of cards for the future.
Askari Townshen...:Yeah. This is something that has worked for us then. Let's talk about Google, so our thing are Google reviews. As of today, I'm extremely proud and I don't boast that often actually, we've got 499 reviews. Waiting for our 500th and we've got a score of 4.8. They are all genuine reviews and we do not select out of them. I know that some booking softwares have functionality where they collect reviews, and then you can check that they're okay and then you encourage that person to post them online. I just don't think that's going to work in the long term because people are savvy. They get it and when I look at anything, if I'm on Amazon or whatever, I ignore the one star reviews, because they're often just crazy because they bought the wrong product. The two stars, not much different. The three stars I'm interested in because often these are people who have genuine gripes and complaints. I'm not interested in the five stars. It's just, "Oh, great. You've got loads of five stars. Well, fantastic."
So, when you come onto our site? Yeah, we've got some one star reviews and you know what? They kind of look a bit crazy and we've got some two stars, but then we've got three stars and whenever I get a three star review, that's when I really come into action. Like, "Well, hold on. What's going on here?"
Rick O'Neill:Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:And it's the way you reply to those reviews-
Rick O'Neill:Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:... So, as a consumer, I'm looking at those reviews and I'm thinking, "How does this business deal with complaints?" Are they defensive? Are they coming out swinging? Are they insulting, even, some of them?
Rick O'Neill:Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:Or, actually, are they kind and considered? I'd like to think that our strength is in getting great reviews, but then dealing thoughtfully and considerately to the ones that aren't five star, and that, I think, is what really wins it for us.
Rick O'Neill:Absolutely, and, whether you realize it or not, algorithmically, that's also the best strategy-
Askari Townshen...:Right.
Rick O'Neill:... Because responding to every review tells Google that you are active and responsive and it increases your rank. Also, if you're smart about how you write the responses, you're including additional keywords and key terms as well, which get-
Askari Townshen...:Right.
Rick O'Neill:... And further improve your rank, and, as you said, for people coming along and checking you out, you're getting your side of events across in a nice professional manner. That's actually in some ways more powerful than the original review because-
Askari Townshen...:Yeah.
Rick O'Neill:... I always think that in any sort of line of business or service related business, anyway, what matters is not so much what happened or what cockup occurred, it's how it was dealt with.
Askari Townshen...:Exactly.
Rick O'Neill:So yeah, I totally agree that's a huge factor and within Google Local, and if you're not sure what I'm talking about, I'm talking about when you search for something on your laptop or on your phone and results appear next to a map that's Google Local. And, by and large, for a clinic, most of which are one business, in one location, they are everything in terms of getting yourself into the mix against competitors and against non-medical practitioners that are rocking up across the road from you, who sometimes are, frankly, better than you at digital marketing and that's something you have to face up to. Google Local is everything, and, as I said earlier, the people that use that are at their point of intent, they've done some research into aesthetic treatments, and now they're looking for "Clinics that provide X, Y, or Z near me." And that-
Askari Townshen...:Yeah.
Rick O'Neill:... The review part is a huge factor in it.
Askari Townshen...:I think, in a world of lies and I don't want to be too kind of gratuitous with that word. We are sold lies every day, aren't we? We get pictures on Instagram that have kind of been tweaked and filtered in the best lighting and we don't trust a lot of stuff in this day and age so being genuine and authentic, I think, is so, so important.
Now we went out on a strategy, which some people might think was crazy or just brave, but if you go into our website, which has not been changed in seven years or nearly seven years, since we started ASKINOLOGY. It's definitely overdue so I'm not trying to boast or say that you shouldn't update your website, but it's still the same site. There are no sexy pictures on there. There's no sort of super luscious lips and the like, and I just felt that I wanted to go down a route that didn't have, "Hey, you could look like this" because you know what? You can't look like this because that's a different woman that's been touched up from this stock image or whatever.
So I deliberately went fairly plain and tried to get this middle path between kind of academic library type content and they're super sexy and "Hey, we treat the most beautiful stars in the world. We can make you look like them." We just do something straight down the middle, and when my customers come to see me, and they're new, I always ask, "Hey, how did you hear about us?" and often they say, "Well, I did some research on Google." And then I say, "Well, why did you pick us?"
Rick O'Neill:Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:Because there's loads of clinics, especially where I am and they say things like, "Well, do you know what? I just liked your website."-
Rick O'Neill:Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:... And they don't say too much more. "I just like the tone of it.", and there's just something comforting. It's not too hard-sell. It's not too sexy. It's just... John Lewis, you know?
Rick O'Neill:Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:I always say that we want to be John Lewis. We're not the trendiest or the sexiest or the most expensive, we're just dependable, good value for money. You're going to get a great service and you know what you're paying for
Rick O'Neill:Never knowingly undersold.
Askari Townshen...:Yeah, so that's how we do it and it's worked.
Rick O'Neill:Your website, for me, is a good analogy of medical aesthetics in general, because it is that sort of meeting of science and sort of beauty. It's halfway between it's educational, it's not too far down the glamor route. I've spent more time than you might realize looking at it, because all of that stuff interests me and, obviously, I've seen so many websites. We build a lot and it's always a challenge. One of the things we've been pushing for, quite recently, is to more of a focus on the outcome and the conditions that patients are presenting with rather than the scientific treatments or the device names-
Askari Townshen...:Right.
Rick O'Neill:... Because a lot of websites are structured around so-and-so machine or so-and-so thingy or this needle, and, actually, a lot of patients wouldn't have a clue what any of that stuff is-
Askari Townshen...:Right.
Rick O'Neill:... Or whether it solves their problem.
Askari Townshen...:If you look at our website, I like to use normal language, and I pride myself in my clinic room. Back in the days, I thought I had something to prove and lots of long medical terms. I never speak medical, and if I'm ever treating a GP, I apologize in advance and say, "Hey, I'm not going to speak to you as if you're a doctor. I'm just going to do my normal day to day talk" and they thank me, "Oh no, please do because then we all know what we're talking about."
Rick O'Neill:Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:So on the website we have Fat Freezing, not cryolipolysis or anything like that. Fat freezing, we all know what that means. We get it. "Oh, I'll click on that and have a look." Everyone knows the word, Botox, all these euphemisms that we use, and, like you say, device names and the like, unless it's really going to be a pull for some SEO reason. Or everyone knows HydraFacial now, for example, so we'll definitely use the word HydraFacial, that's an important term. But I think it's just important to go back to basics and let's just tell people in clear language what it is we're doing.
Rick O'Neill:Yeah. You're right about HydraFacial, by the way. That's a tap you can turn on, if there's not one near you.
Askari Townshen...:We've got two machines now.
Rick O'Neill:They did a good job with that. It's interesting.
So we've been talking about digital, been talking about your journey in business. We sort of touched on user experience and that side of things. What's been your experience with onboarding patients, keeping patient records, good documentation, reminding people about their appointment, that kind of thing, over the years? And I'm leading somewhere with that, as you know, because you've now built your own platform for it so how did you get to that point? Like what led you there?
Askari Townshen...:Okay. I started in 2008, as I said, and I did invest in some clinic software and it was great software, actually. I don't even mind saying it was called Clinic Office and they're still around today. It was good software and it got me thinking about how to maximize what these different platforms can do for you. But at that time, that particular package wasn't cloud based, it didn't have anything specific to aesthetics, consent forms, digital note keeping and that type of thing, so I moved.
Then over the next few years, obviously, I'd gone to sk:n and saw what they were using, which was really old school, really antiquated. I don't think anyone's going to be upset by me saying that, we all know it's the case. Then I came out of sk:n and went to ASKINOLOGY and things had changed. Seven years had passed and there was cloud based systems and the like, so I started using different systems.
I think in that time I used another five systems and I just struggled with each one. Two of the systems I bought, opened the box and just sent it back because the moment I logged in, I just knew it wasn't for me. I didn't understand how it worked, where everything was. So I struggled and I'm not IT illiterate. I don't want to talk names particularly, but I used a very popular package, 2016 to 2018 and it promised a lot and it didn't deliver for me, personally.
We really struggled and we struggled with reliability issues and I think this is when I started getting really upset because I'd gone through a really hard time building on my business, as you've heard and I very nearly had a breakdown, I think, as a result of it all. So this feeling that I was paying for a platform that was meant to support my business and help my business, but, actually, a lot of the time was holding my business back and actually costing me money, I got really upset about that. Like really upset and it felt to me that that business wasn't as interested in fixing stuff and helping me as I was expecting and, I think, at that moment, I just thought, "No, I can't do this.".
And I kind of said to myself that I am going to do something like this myself, and it will be better and it will help businesses grow as it should and, if we make mistakes, we'll fix them quickly. We will tell people what's going on, we'll communicate. We will train. We would do all the things that I wished was happening to me, but it wasn't.
And, that was it, that was the day I decided that I was going to set Collums up and a couple years later, we were up and we were building.
Rick O'Neill:So that's quite a thing, and, as you've described, you're a busy guy, busy practitioner, busy clinic. Did you know when you made that decision that "I think I could do this in a way that would work better for me and for other practitioners."? Did you know, and that you would be able to commit to that somehow and make it happen? Or did you think it was an impossible mountain or did you think you'd have to get other people to do it and you'd be the visionary or how did you think it would pan out when you first had that thought and how did you get from that to where you're at now?
Askari Townshen...:Okay. I left that system and went to another system for a kind of final throw of the dice. I went with a system that's globally known. It's a unicorn now, and so valued over a billion dollars, and they promised me even more than the previous people and literally within the first couple of weeks, I just thought, "Oh, my goodness, I've been sold a pop again.", and that was it for me. So I reached out to someone who had built other big software systems and we started chatting. I set up the business and it was just low key, starting to have some initial conversations and the like, and, at that time, I was actually saving to open up a new site. We were going to open a huge flagship clinic in Holborn. Four and a half thousand square feet, and my plan was to open the biggest and best and most talked about aesthetic clinic in the UK and it was just going to be phenomenal.
I signed the deal. It took me two years, I think, to set this all up and I signed the deal two weeks before the first COVID lockdown and I had 750K set aside for this deal. Not all my own money, but from a variety of kind of ways of robbing banks and the like. I had this money, the lockdown happened and I just said to myself, "Do you know what, mate, bricks and mortar clinic right now is ridiculous. There is no way on earth. You can spend every penny that you've ever had in your life on this project."
At that moment, I basically switched and I called up my software guy and said, "Hey, you know those conversations we've been having and what we've been doing so far? We're going to turbocharge this." By then, actually, we had already started building and spending quite a lot of money, which I thought was a lot of money at that time. Then we went full pelt and my goal was to have something up and running so that when we came out of COVID, my clinic would be able to use my software because I knew we were going to be closed for some time. Lo and behold, by the time we got round to the next January, we were just coming out of the lockdowns and I had a framework of Collums working in ASKINOLOGY and the rest is history, I guess.
Kind of forgotten what your question was, to be honest, but that's... I didn't know how I was going to do it. I didn't have big plans, other than I was going to make it work.
Rick O'Neill:You have answered the question, but I'm going to give you another one. You talked about what drove you to do that in the first place, so it was born out of frustration with the existing solutions around you and how they didn't work for you. I was going to say, when you kept jumping around, maybe it's you, but I don't think it is.
Askari Townshen...:It could be.
Rick O'Neill:But, in building it, how have you approached it differently? What is Collums and for those that haven't heard of it, I'll let you do a 30 second elevator pitch and how is it different? What's it offering to aesthetic clinics?
Askari Townshen...:Okay. So, to answer it in reverse order, I'm not going to go down the line of people saying, "Oh, this product is completely different to anything else you've ever seen before." It's not. Collums is a cloud based system to help run your aesthetic practice. You'll do your bookings. It'll ping out emails and reminders, aftercare, pre-care. You can keep all your patients there. You can keep all your consent forms. You can get people signing consent forms at home, on their iPads, and it'll update to your system. Online booking, digital notes, marking all your Botox injections and the like, running reports, looking after your staff.
Basically everything that Askari would've needed when he first opened his clinic and it's big enough and powerful enough that, as you grow, you'll be able to continue using it. So you could be a one man band, like I was when I turned up at that hairdressers in Nottingham in 2006, all the way to clinics that have multiple locations. We are talking to international clinic chains to try and support them. That's what Collums is.
How is it different? So let me answer this in a slightly different way. I've been exposed to seven different softwares over the years, and I've used some of the newer ones where you can do free trials. So I've poked around the Freshers, the Treatwells, of [inaudible 00:52:05], Aesthetic Nurse Software, Clever Clinic... All these ones that you can dip into and, what I did was, to be honest with you, is I pinched all the best bits from everything I'd ever seen and rolled it up together and all the things I knew were really annoying and made my life harder, rather than easier, I left out.
Rick O'Neill:Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:Then I've put them all together, always from a position of being a practitioner and saying to myself, "Okay. If I was sitting in my room and somebody came in, what was the thing I want to do first? Oh, okay. I'd want to see what their previous treatment was. And then what would I want to do? Oh, I'd want to do that." and I built a journey around myself and how I treat in my room.
Rick O'Neill:Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:Then we built it and then we tested it and I started using it in my clinic and I kind of went, "Oh, do you know what? That journey isn't working how I thought it would work.", and then I'd go back and we would change it and then I would use it again in my clinic.
Rick O'Neill:Surely that's unique in itself.
Askari Townshen...:It is. Yeah.
Rick O'Neill:I don't know for certain, but I can't think of another tech platform, in this space, that's devised and run and optimized by a practitioner.
Askari Townshen...:Well, there's some software out there that has been built by practitioners or part built by practitioners, but I believe that we can make some pretty kind of bold claims as to saying things like I think we're the only software that has been built and developed in a true commercial space. ASKINOLOGY tested Collums and continues to test Collums to this day. We are the most tested aesthetic software, I believe, because nothing gets sent to anyone else until it's in ASKINOLOGY. We test Collums, we make changes, we test it. We then put it live in ASKINOLOGY, and then my amazing staff there suffer whatever problems there might be, but they're a great team and they deal with it in their stride. Then when we are happy and we know that everything's working as good as it can, I give the nod, and that then gets pushed out to the other customers. What that means is it reduces the chance of people feeling like they're guinea pigs, which is how I always felt. Something would be updated and this thing wouldn't work and then something else wouldn't work or something that previously was working, would, now, not work and I get that.
It's not that anybody was doing anything badly. That's the nature of software, but I wasn't paying to be someone else's test, and nobody who signs up to Collums is going to pay to be a tester. My clinic, in ASKINOLOGY, we are the testers, and then you can get a product, that may not be a hundred percent perfect because there will always be small little niggles that we miss, but I'll tell you what? When you find the niggle and you tell us about it, depending on how important it is, that's going to get fixed because that niggle will affect me and my staff in ASKINOLOGY too, so we're all in it together.
Rick O'Neill:Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:I'm very kind of... What's the word? Evangelical about this. I truly, truly believe that this is a product that is being designed in a way that it's going to help other businesses become stronger and make more money.
Rick O'Neill:I guess it's fair to say, as well, that some solutions are not really built for aesthetic clinics. They're more for salons or all different types of businesses and they've been kind of bent and shaped to try and service an aesthetic clinic, right?
Askari Townshen...:This is true. I mentioned a few names already for the big global ones or the multinational ones where you can kind of just sign up and get going, and I'm not here to talk bad about them. Some of them are really good actually, and if you are early in your journey and you are fairly simple in your setup, they can probably look after you. But for those people who are thinking about that, I would say this, and I would also say this to naive Askari from many years ago, is think big, set yourself up for the future. Don't set yourself up for today because all you're doing is putting yourself in handcuffs, because when you do get bigger and you do need support for consent forms, or digital notes, or whatever, well, by then, you've now got 500 patients and all that data stuck in another system or in bits of paper and how are you going to get all of that into your new system so that you can grow more quickly now?
It's going to be a barrier and then you're going to go, "Oh, well I don't know if I'll bother moving just now because I haven't got time to type up these 500 notes and put them into Collums.", or whoever it's going to be. Just start proper at the start. Okay, it might be a few more quid, but you and I, off-air, talked about this beforehand, what is the value of great software that is going to run your business successfully with minimal downtime and minimal problems?
Rick O'Neill:Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:The value of that is massive and the idea that we're going to skimp on like 10 quid or 20, 30 quid. In fact, I've got a story for myself, which is that we've got a fiber broadband available in our clinic now. I didn't take it and we've had a load of problems over the last year or so and my manager finally said, "'Skari, this... We can't keep on with this. Because Collums is cloud based, we need great internet." So I said, "Well, okay, do you know what? It's a small building with big thick walls. We don't get good wifi." So I looked up the fiber broadband price, which my memory told me was really expensive, which is why I didn't go for it, when it first came out two years ago.
Rick O'Neill:Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:What was it? 80 quid a month. Are you joking? And right now, I'm paying 60 quid because I've had to buy a... What's it? A dongle thing for in case the internet goes down, then the dongle kicks in.
Rick O'Neill:Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:So it's like, what was I thinking? What am I even thinking now? Pay the 80 quid, Askari.
Rick O'Neill:We also talked before we hit record, as well... In fact, I might even throw it back in the edit, but we talked about medical practitioners and, obviously, I understand medicine is important. Get that, but there's no question about the amount that you guys will spend on clinical training, right?
Askari Townshen...:Right.
Rick O'Neill:But when it comes to your businesses and software and providing a great experience from that side of things to your patients, you count in pence not pounds or thousands of pounds. You count in pence and it's always seemed strange to me, that one. But you did say, if you could go back and talk to yourself in the early days, you would say set up for the future, invest now. How do we all get around that and have those conversations?
Because I have lots of conversations with people that are not ready to hear that in-
Askari Townshen...:Yeah.
Rick O'Neill:In coaching and things like that, you know, straight away, "Oh, we can't afford things like that.", but they're already treating hundreds of patients-
Askari Townshen...:I know.
Rick O'Neill:... Who are all having a really crappy experience because of the Wix website and the string and cello-tape onboarding process that they have.
Askari Townshen...:I think the answer to that is a sad one, which is that we learn from our mistakes and the more painful the mistake, the more we learn from it. So, how have I learned about my broadband? Well, I've had a lot of pain and, my God, is all of that pain has been far more than the 80 quid a month that I've been not paying over the last few months and now I just feel a bit foolish. I've just told the whole the world who's listening or anyone who's listening to this podcast, that we all do it. But what I can say on a positive note, though, is that the feedback that we've been getting from the demonstrations of Collums has really been about price. We've had very few people say, "I think that's too much money."
It's a bit like Apple. Oh gosh, I don't want to compare myself to Apple, but you know-
Rick O'Neill:Not? Why not? Go for it.
Askari Townshen...:It's amazing stuff, yeah. If you want great stuff, you're going to have to pay that bit extra. Well, a lot extra, but you know when you get that Apple device, that, actually, it works really well, it's not going to go down. It's worth paying the extra money for it and we have a very similar mindset here at Collums, which is that to build great software, in that kind of detail, takes a huge amount of investment-
Rick O'Neill:Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:... And I will tell the world this as well. This has cost, so far, over a million pounds. Straight up, without a shadow of doubt, and I'm not a millionaire. I didn't have a million pounds, and if I knew how much it was going to cost, I wouldn't have done it. Without a shadow of a doubt, I would never have done it. But here we are, we spent it, but we have a product that reflects the investment and the investment isn't just the million pounds, it's over a year and a half of day to day testing in ASKINOLOGY. This is something different we've ever seen, I think, in this country and, you know what, on the planet. I think we have one of the best systems that you can get.
Rick O'Neill:I've had several demos of it. I've played with it. I've also seen all of the others. I am inclined to agree with you, as you know-
Askari Townshen...:But let me say this, I'm going to interrupt you. Let me just say this though, before I run and someone starts chucking stuff at their phone or radio, is that I'm not saying that it's perfect.
Rick O'Neill:No.
Askari Townshen...:No software system is perfect and it might be that you look at it and it's not for you, but what I'm saying is that the ethos behind it, and the journey behind it, is purely about creating something that works as well as we can get it working and we will continually change. If I sit here in a year's time talking to you, Rick, I'll be even more evangelical about what we've got, so I don't want anyone to say "Yeah, but you know what, Askari? I was using it yesterday and I clicked this thing and it didn't work a hundred percent." Yeah, that might be the case. Tell me about it and we'll fix it.
Rick O'Neill:Yeah, absolutely. So last thing on Collums, and then I want to talk to you, just before we close, just a few general questions about the aesthetics market and some things that, I think, will be useful takeaways for people, but what's the vision? What's the future for the Collums platform?
Askari Townshen...:Okay. This is quite simple, really. In the first instance, we're just building up our user base in the UK. I want to be the name that everyone thinks of when they're thinking about software. I'm extremely confident that over the next 12 to 24 months, you'll see Collums... I don't know if I can say in that time frame, we'll be the number one in the UK, but we will have people extremely worried if they are holding that number one position. That's the first thing, we are set up and ready to be international and I expect that to be happening sooner rather than later, and the third part of it is the clinic chains. We are already built, in a way, the clinic chains are looking at us as serious contenders of running their businesses.
Rick O'Neill:That's great. Well, I wish you all the luck in the world with it, as you know.
Askari Townshen...:Thank you.
Rick O'Neill:I highly respect your entrepreneurial side and the way you've invested in it. I also completely agree, from my own ventures in business and also property renovation, that if you know, on day one, what it's going to cost, you won't start.
Askari Townshen...:Yeah.
Rick O'Neill:I've been there, for sure and I've no doubt that you'll be successful with it.
Askari Townshen...:Thank you.
Rick O'Neill:So I wanted to close by just asking a few questions about the aesthetics market in general, really. What is your view on the medical aesthetic market as it stands in the UK? Today, we are recording this on June the 10th, 2022. We are just coming out the back of the pandemic. We are facing, supposedly, a cost of living crisis. Costs a lot of money to fill up your car, et cetera, et cetera, inflation's gone nuts. Does that bother the aesthetic market or it seems to be growing regardless? Does it bother you? What's your view of the market from an economic perspective and also a growth and trend perspective? Over to you, Askari.
Askari Townshen...:Yeah. Well, I think the market is strong and I think there's a positive outlook. I think the market has been growing for some time and I don't really see that changing, although I'm not an economist. I think how it's going to affect clinics and practitioners will depend on where they are and what part of the market they're focused on. So I'm in the city, I'm opposite the Lloyd's building. There's a lot of wealth around where I am and those people aren't getting hit by the cost of living crisis. That's not going to affect them in any way whatsoever. If they all start losing their jobs and their bonuses? Well, maybe, but I don't see that that's on the horizon so I'm very happy. We've had a great bounce back, coming out of COVID, and we've just had our first positive quarter so I really feel like, "Wow, come on. We can start moving forwards now."
Rick O'Neill:Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:If you are a solo practitioner or you have a clinic that's still trying to find its place and you are at the lower end of the market, where your customers are people who are worried about the cost of living and so might be cutting back on their aesthetic treatments, I think those clinics will find a difficult year or two ahead.
And, that word, efficiency, we spoke about earlier? This is the time to start getting efficient, get your processes down to a T.
Rick O'Neill:Absolutely.
Askari Townshen...:Get decent software, get all your processes running because you're going to need to be as sleek as possible to enough through the next period of time.
Rick O'Neill:That's right, and don't wait, because what you do now, doesn't land until six months later.
Askari Townshen...:Exactly, and if you are better prepared than the other people in your area, well, guess what? You are the people that will float, and they're the ones that are going to sink.
Rick O'Neill:Richard's got this hilarious meme that we use in the group a lot and it's like, "You can be two versions of Thor. You can be fat Thor or you can be ripped, ready for action Thor" when you come out of these kind of periods or phases, throughout time. So it is exactly that, you got to put in the graft, tighten up, get the efficiency going, create a great experience for customers. It is hard work because you're also busy treating people and being a dad and a mom and a brother and a sister and all the other stuff. We get it, we're all business owners, but you've got to suck it up, buttercup, haven't you, and crack on.
Askari Townshen...:And I would argue a lot of us in this sector, in this industry, are focusing too much on the working, as in providing the treatments. We are fantastic doctors and nurses, practitioners, but we're not always fantastic business owners or managers of teams, and I think focusing more of our time on how we run our businesses is going to be a better use of our time than spending those extra few hours in the clinic room with a needle in your hand.
Rick O'Neill:Yes, absolutely. Sometimes you've just got to work on the business rather than in it, as they say. All right, last question then. What three things would you go back and tell yourself from 15 years ago to achieve success faster?
Askari Townshen...:Yeah. You know I had a little think about this and straight away, my number one, I wrote down location, location, location.
Rick O'Neill:Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:When I came out of the NHS, I thought I was going to have some lovely little leafy clinic, discreet because no one's going to want to be seen coming in or out. And it seemed like a great idea, but I quickly found that my discreet lovely clinic in the leafy side street of Northampton didn't have any footfall.
Rick O'Neill:Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:And that meant that nobody walked past my clinic and saw the name or the logo or the telephone number so getting people in was really tough.
Rick O'Neill:Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:And guess what? My clinic right now is in Leadenhall market.
Rick O'Neill:Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:Okay, pre-COVID the footfall there must have... I don't know, 10,000 a day?
Rick O'Neill:Wow.
Askari Townshen...:Huge throngs of people walk past my clinic every single day, and whether they like it or not, whether they know it or realize it or not, they see the name of my clinic.
Rick O'Neill:Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:Or they look in through the window and they see my staff, our logo, our uniform, our products and, one day, whenever they're thinking about Botox, we pop up on their Google Local search. "Oh, yeah. Oh, that's the one I walk... Gosh, you know what? I walk past that.", and there's my customer.
Rick O'Neill:That's your awareness.
Askari Townshen...:So different ways to do it, I'm not saying that everyone should have like a High Street location or anything like that, but just think carefully about where is your place going to be?
Rick O'Neill:Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:And if it's not on a busy bustling street, how are people going to find you? And you're going to say, "well, because there'll be social... There'll be a website.", but you know what? Everyone's got socials and everyone's got websites, so how are they going to find you?
Rick O'Neill:Everyone. With the Google Local side of it, a large part of how you get ranked is your proximity to the nearest kind of center of activity in the real world.
Askari Townshen...:Right.
Rick O'Neill:And we obviously look after, oh, I don't know, 200 or so Google profiles for clinics, right? And we see data from the leafy side street ones and the central London ones, and the numbers are just night and day-
Askari Townshen...:Right.
Rick O'Neill:... In terms of activity, searches, click throughs, click to phone, click for directions. All of that, the numbers are night and day.
Askari Townshen...:Yeah.
Rick O'Neill:So not everyone can be in the center, obviously, because that's hugely expensive as well, right?
Askari Townshen...:Yes.
Rick O'Neill:So your rental and your lease is going to be very, very, very different to your Northampton one that you had, but, like you say, it's just a bit of thought about how close am I to where people are going to be searching, online and, also, in the real world, of am I visible? So-
Askari Townshen...:Mm-hmm (affirmative). It's free advertising, you know? People walking past the front of your store, if you've got a board outside or something. It doesn't have to be that you are right on the street front, but you have to be visible.
Rick O'Neill:Absolutely.
Askari Townshen...:So number two... Number two I put on here is be ready to convert and I think we kind of talked about this a bit earlier, although I think we were talking more about digital, make sure your landing pages are set up, what are your funnels like, et cetera. But I'm also actually thinking about real life.
Rick O'Neill:Yeah?
Askari Townshen...:Do you have everything set up? When they come in through the front door, do they feel welcome? How will they be welcomed? Who's going to look after them? What's the process that you have flowing through your clinic from the moment they step into the door, to the moment they check out, pay and leave? Every step of that journey in my clinic is defined. It's reproduced and it's thought about and taken care of.
Rick O'Neill:Absolutely.
Askari Townshen...:No point in having a wave of customers come in, if you can't look after them and make them happy.
Rick O'Neill:Yeah.
Askari Townshen...:Yeah. I would rather have no unhappy customers, so they can't go and tell everyone how terrible you are-
Rick O'Neill:Yeah. That's dangerous.
Askari Townshen...:... So yeah, fix it first. Exactly. Fix it, then get the customers in so they can go and spread the good word. Don't get loads of customers in when you're broken, because they're going to spread terrible things about you.
Rick O'Neill:Absolutely. I talk about this a lot, it's about getting the foundations right so that you're not driving people into a leaky bucket, but also, as you said, it's not just about digital marketing. I'm going to be really careful here. I know someone who went to see someone. Right, there you go, that's all you're getting. That's all you're getting... For a paid consultation. It ended after 15, 20 minutes and the person who'd gone in, came out, not really clear what was recommended, how much it was going to cost, when that could happen or what the long term plan was and so never went back.
Askari Townshen...:Yeah.
Rick O'Neill:Was very, very keen to crack on and work with that person because of things they'd heard, but the experience they had was, "I'm none the wiser I've been left with no material or follow up with what the plan is. I paid for this consultation. I'm a bit befuddled and confused. I'm going to go elsewhere."
Askari Townshen...:Right, and the cost of acquisition of each customer, which many people don't know or don't really think about. Every time somebody walks in through my front door, that costs me money. There's a value on that and it's important that we focus on making sure that we recoup our investment.
Rick O'Neill:Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So location and being ready to convert and then your final golden nugget?
Askari Townshen...:Yeah. My last one actually was, again, back in the days, 2008, I bought all this fancy kit. I didn't need it. It cost a lot of money and it was a huge drag on the business. In those early days when your snowball is rolling down the hill and, but very, very slowly.
So here's the thing. Build up your database, your client base, make people happy with a small number of treatments that you're great at providing. Like we've said, be ready to convert. So maybe it's just injectables, you don't need anything other than your injectables and as your database grows and you understand your client base and what they're after, you can start leveraging your existing patient database and sell them future treatments, or even just ask them what other treatments might they be interested in. Ask them just as you're doing your treatments or ask them through an electronic survey and then make wise decisions about what kit you're going to buy at a later date. Don't saddle yourself with expensive kit off the bat.
Rick O'Neill:Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. Some of these things are huge commitments and when you talked about efficiency in business, that's also cost efficiency, right? Compared to returns and how long's that going to take? So yeah, completely, I love that one.
Well, Askari, I really enjoyed that.
Askari Townshen...:Sure.
Rick O'Neill:That was an awesome chat. It's been every time I talk to you, I learn a little bit more about your background and what you've been through and what's sort of driven you to where you are, and I have a lot of respect for that, so-
Askari Townshen...:Thank you.
Rick O'Neill:... Congratulations on everything so far. As I said, I've no doubt that what you're working on now will be successful and that Collums will take over Planet Earth and then look to conquer other planets.
Askari Townshen...:Yeah.
Rick O'Neill:So yeah, no, just thanks very much for agreeing to come on and for chatting with me and, obviously, you and I have got other discussions going on and things we're working on, which is all good as well, but yeah, for now, mate, thank you very much for coming. Well,
Askari Townshen...:Well, thank you so much for having on your very first podcast. It's been fun.
Rick O'Neill:Take care, mate.
Askari Townshen...:Cheers, Rick. Take care now. Bye-bye.