Subscription-Based Aesthetic Technology | The Venus Concept Model | Dom Serafino & Chad Zaring
you know it was in 2009 2010 and we were just coming out of the the massive recession you know in in 08 and 09 and you know the the device business was completely decimated nobody was getting really any kind of traction banks weren't lending money and so on but what was interesting during that time is that clinic traffic actually was pretty stable and in some cases actually increased so it gave me hope that if we could put together the right business model we could continue to expand this market and actually sort of i'll set it restart it again and basically how the model worked is we avoided the doctors having to go to third party lenders and so on and we became a subscription model with our technologies so that a doctor didn't have to worry about credit ratings per se we held the paper didn't have to worry about tying up their personal credit that was available if they want to do something personally etc and even if they'd overextended themselves in their clinics they could bring in the latest greatest technologies from us under this model and what that did is it actually forced us as an organization to have a much higher bar i guess to achieve because the paper was with us so it wasn't like you know we could sell something that didn't function didn't work and so on and because we would be on the hook and you'd be left with two scenarios the doctor could either stop pain and you could either sue them which is usually not good for your creational brand you know or you take the machine back which is also not good hello everyone and welcome back to the technology of beauty where i have the opportunity to interview the movers and shakers of the beauty business and today is no exception today we're going to get to know a little about venus the company that dom started 11 years ago yesterday and both dom and chad will be uh talking to us here i'd like to welcome both of you guys dom is the ceo and founder chad is the chief commercial officer is that right that's correct and uh we are so fortunate to have both of them on a zoom call today and uh let's get started with you dom where are you from yeah that's great thanks ranta we've been looking forward to being on this unfortunately travel restrictions forced us to do this over zoom but you know living in toronto and canada we finally got the clearances that we can travel without restrictions if you have your double dose so i've got my double dose and i'll be able to get back on the road and spend time you know with guys like yourself but you know it's it's a pleasure to be on your show um you know we've been in the industry a long time we've known each other an awful long time as well um but it's it's funny when we look back and sort of see the evolution of the industry from you know essentially the mid-90s when i was a distributor in canada and we represented pretty much all of the technologies that were available at the time and we also owned a plastic surgery clinic with a plastic surgeon partner so it gave us a little bit of a you know very real life experience to understand you know what happens at the clinic level and i think we we gained a real appreciation for the challenges that docs have every day you know not only with technologies but just running a business and and that so you know we we we appreciate that and i think that that's part and parcel to how quite frankly is venus became venus concept as a company and the programs and the way we've positioned ourselves as a company in general and where did you go to school i went to school in toronto business school here in toronto focused on marketing interestingly enough on the device side i started in the cardiology cardiovascular care area uh in the mid 80s and uh with a company called marquette electronics out of milwaukee and um you know you start to learn about you know the importance of technology and how the role it plays in medicine and it just evolved into aesthetics when aesthetics really on the device side was you know really in its infancy in 92 93 right and uh it was it was fun to watch it sort of grow and continue to grow which makes it so exciting i call it sort of my my beauty drug you know you you just can't get away from it because it's always something happening and always something exciting to talk about and and if you've got a really great team that you know are sort of you know very open-minded about where to take technologies and work with docs that can you know really make it work um that's that's the excitement here for us and we think we're still at the you know i'll call it uh teenage stage of the industry right where there's still lots of room for growth and lots of room for improvements but we're excited to be part of it for sure yes indeed how about you chad where are you from uh yeah thanks uh again it's an honor to be on the show grant um so i grew up in pennsylvania i live in nashville tennessee now franklin it's been pretty open for a while i will tell you nashville and florida have kind of led the way um i married two daughters um moved to nashville from florida about seven years ago um dominic's path converged so i spent about 17 years in surgical robotics okay it was with a few companies intuitive surgical which soft tissue surgery urology gynecology it's become the standard of care you know i was there when you really couldn't give a robot away and now most surgeries are done minimally invasively and then i spent some time at an israeli company robotic spine surgery that was acquired by medtronic and then maybe a year and a half ago i met dom he was on the board of one of the companies i was with and you know when he when he talked about bringing the artist robot which i'm sure we'll talk about for hair restoration into the venus portfolio and you know basically he wanted to define the next decade of devices for cosmetic and aesthetic surgery by incorporating robotics ai advanced vision i said samya so um and then covet hit about two weeks later so uh you know it's uh it was a it was a great time but it was a great experience to go through and um got the wheels back on the bus and really optimistic about the future well that's fantastic and i guess welcome is in order absolutely the business into the marketplace dump we threw into the fire right yeah and i'm kidding for sure so dom tell me when did you first get into the aesthetics arena going back with the 94 like it was co2 lasers that sort of thing yeah it was co2 um you know we then that evolved as you know into erbium and so on and as you know you know co2 was this really hot category everybody was going crazy finding ways to use it and then you know you learn a year later with delayed hypopigmentation so we were able to make faces look like a woman that was 60 look 40 but her neck looked 70 you know and it was all of the the challenges that went along with that and then ipl came along as you know and yep with esc back in the day and uh you know and the thing was interesting because you know we worked with candela and we worked with palomar that was just getting started at that point and that's when hair removal came onto the scene and really that was the first i i'll call it commercially viable mass appeal technology that was the good news the bad news is in the clinic when we were using things like the epi laser that as you remember was very large and you know good lifting in canada where you need a building heated you could certainly build it with the btus the heated excuse me with the btus that you put out but it was a spot size that you know you did hair removal with a seven millimeter spot size one pulse every three seconds and i remember our first patient that we actually signed up at the clinic wanted all of her legs done and we had to charge her twenty five thousand dollars to do a treatment on her legs it took 24 hours to do so you can imagine sitting three or eight hours a day for three days in a row to do this ladies legs in a clinic and that that made it quite challenging so clearly technology has evolved since then but you know we we've had the the privilege quite frankly of really understanding how most of the companies in the space even today you know operate and you know where their strengths are and kind of where their weaknesses are and hopefully hopefully we're able to leverage that into the models and the things that we do with our technology you know i don't think everybody knows about the venus uh model uh could you share with us uh one of you the the venus model yeah i think it's important to recognize i mean you know venus became an idea i started to look at you know where we could manufacture i had a partner in israel which is you know as we all know a hotbed for technology development and so on in aesthetics and you know it was in 2009 2010 and we were just coming out of the the massive recession you know in no 1809 and you know the the device business was completely decimated nobody was getting really any kind of traction banks weren't lending money and so on but what was interesting during that time is that clinic traffic actually was pretty stable and in some cases actually increased so it gave me hope that if we could put together the right business model um we could continue to expand this market and actually sort of i'll set it restart it again and basically how the model worked is we avoided the doctors having to go um to third-party lenders and so on and we became a subscription model with our technologies so that a doctor didn't have to worry about credit ratings per se we held the paper didn't have to worry about tying up their personal credit that was available if they want to do something personally etc and even if they'd overextended themselves in their clinics they could bring in the latest greatest technologies from us under this model and what that did is it actually forced us as an organization to have a much higher bar i guess to achieve because the paper was with us so it wasn't like you know we could sell something that didn't function didn't work and so on and because we would be on the hook and you'd be left with two scenarios the doctor could either stop pain and you could either sue them which is usually not good for your creational brand you know or you take the machine back which is also not good right and i remember you were one of the first customers really with the venus freeze really early on and and so what we really focused on as a as a mantra for the company was we weren't going to reinvent the wheel with some new energy source or wavelength or pulse duration per se we wanted to take a look at technologies that had already been really well developed over the last 20 years and and modified a little bit i mean uh i'm going to call him a quasi mentor dr gary lask which i'm sure you know oh yeah i remember i remember yeah exactly right so we went to cheesecake factory in marina del rey for lunch one day and he and he sat down and he goes uh you know all you laser guys are jerks and i said well thanks thanks yeah thanks gary am i paying for lunch or you right but but but i took it very seriously because i said tell me more right and and so he said you know he goes you guys don't understand how doctors are wired you know everybody comes into our clinics and are always preaching about and he goes i'd like to use a baseball analogy my technology is like i hit home runs right he goes that's not what doctors are looking for they're not looking for the home run they're not they're not wired that way they don't think that way they want to look at technology as like hitting singles you know make it a little safer make it a little faster make it a little bit more comfortable maybe a broader audience of patience that can be treated and you know keep moving the ball or the you know along the bases with each of the singles because whenever you're swinging for the fences you may hit a home run but nine times out of ten years you're within right and i took that very seriously and i think that we we sort of built our entire model and our expectation based on that sort of premise because technologies have continued to evolve and and the customers the 14 000 systems we've shipped globally one of the things that's the common denominator has always been that you know you guys are under promising and over delivering because we don't want to set a bar that is so ridiculously you know unattainable that it disappoints right and that doesn't mean everybody's perfect in the technology by by no means is that the case but because we have a direct relationship through our unique subscription model with the customer it does force us to pay more attention quite frankly post sale than than most other companies because they move on to their next sort of sale chad how does that subscription model work for the actual uh for the physician who puts one of the technologies in their office yeah sure it's a it's a great question so we take um i mean we try to emphasize as dom said we want this to be a repeat relationship so we really we try to we try to make lower the financial burden up front so we take a nominal fee up front to cover a license fee to license the technology and then it's just pay as you go for 36 months it's a monthly payment but what we really try to do is like i'll give you an example with bliss you know our bliss our fat reduction device it also has the the rf body contouring and skin typing is you know we've added we just you may have seen we signed a global ambassadorship with venus williams recently which was a lot of press and publicity about that especially around the wimbledon time of course um we do we've developed bliss academy so you know for a lot of these clinics of course non-invasive fat reduction is getting a lot of legs globally and so um new clinics are getting into it but they don't it's not build it they'll come right they need some coaching and how do you talk about it with your patients how do you close them so we develop bliss university and then we've um we have a pretty strong practice enhancement team so they really latch themselves onto these customers for the first year or longer so we so basically we lower the financial burden you know we take a nominal fee up front it's 36 payments um but we what we try to do is emphasize the roi you know how do we increase clinic traffic how do we provide great outcomes to the patient how to recreate this domino effect so that the next patient can influence the next patient um and then we of course we provide a three year warranty so we just don't want the customer to really worry about anything but maximizing revenue and offsetting this this monthly fee that they have to pay yeah and i think that there's one other element to that that you know cost certainty is really important for physicians who are you know bringing technologies into their clinic so that they can understand the competitive landscape and price their procedures accordingly and the second part to that is you know obsolescence as you know grant i mean this industry you know every two years there's some new story right and so historically what companies have done is said hey let me give you a trade in value on the device that you still have three years left on your lease and you know the doctor gets rinsed you know at 20 cents on the dollar or has to now be a laser sales rep and sell it themselves on uselasers.com uh and you know and then they still have a payment with their leasing company and they double down and they do the exact same thing for the next platform what we prided ourselves on is no matter where you are in that 36 month sort of spectrum whether it's at 12 months 24 or whatever if you if you want to now change gears and you want to move from hair removal to fat or you want to go to hair removal 2.0 or whatever we simply do it like a cell phone model we we forgive the balance of the contract that was on the first one we replace it with the new one we start the clock again for 36 months so the clinic the doctor is only using the technology that they're actually monetizing and there's nothing sitting in a closet that's not being used that's still being paid for and that was we recognized that certainly only in a clinic i appreciated you know the burden of having you know these costs that are really not generating any kind of revenue for you for one reason or another sitting in closets or back rooms while you're always trying to chase your tail to stay ahead of the i'll call it the technology advancement curve and that was a big part of our model as well that i think has differentiated us from everybody else and and the benefit to us on that quite frankly is you don't see a lot of our devices in the used market so we're not we're not competing against ourselves per se you know we're able to control our distribution channel we're able to refurbish those devices put them back and play for a tier 2 tier 3 customer that for whatever reason may not be able to afford the original full you know program or whatever the case would be or we ship them you know overseas to other markets that are more price sensitive than say north america at the end of 36 months then does the practice own the uh the they're on the device and uh in terms of the payments are they spread out just equal payments 136 if you will per month or is it based on consumption yeah so what we what we do just to be uh clear like so we have like as chad said a licensing fee up front right and then the first 12 months typically represents 40 of the total value of the contract so that get paid in the first year in the second year that goes to like 35 or sorry 25 of the payments okay of the total value and so by the time you get to third year the the payment schedule sort of mimics depreciation so the it that's an advantage to the doctor as well so that they're not getting rinsed if you will on the trade-in when they give it back to us because they've got disproportionate amount of payments we know that the maximum time or the best time to monetize the investment is usually within the first two year window and so therefore the payments mimic the earning opportunity off of that device so that when they get to the end of year two which is normally when we upgrade customers uh to another platform and they and we forgive the last year of the contract there's very little left on the contract so the doctor doesn't feel like you know um i i have you know a big payment that has to be made or you know there's still value in the machine and so on and then you know at the end of that the machine always has a sort of an intrinsic value at the end of the day after 36 months but what this allows us to do is really position the payment schedule so that it cash flows properly with the clinic when there's peak earning periods in the clinic versus non-peak as time goes on yeah that's a very interesting model very creative and very user friendly and i applaud you guys for doing that can you guys go through your product line and what you have you mentioned uh fat reduction so let's start with the fat reduction technology and then go from there because i'd like our our viewers to hear about all the different things that venus offers because it's quite it's a quite broad uh offering and so why don't you guys pick it up from there and start with the fat reduction technology yeah sure i mean i think in many ways we're the we're the best kept secret in the market with 12 different platforms that we make available and i think there's going to be a secret after this yeah that i appreciate so chad maybe you can talk about you know the the clinical efficacy the number of treatments that you know typically the cost certainty that type of stuff would be great on the fact that and then i will talk to you absolutely absolutely so you know we're focused on as dumb said we have 12 commercial products but we're really focused on six and i'll start with two you brought up the bliss 1064 diode uh with also our um rf device for octopolar for skin tightening and so so far you know we're in the kind of call it the first phase of launch we've been customers have been really happy with it the clinical data shows after one treatment up to a 41 reduction in the adipose layer at 12 weeks 27 at six weeks 41 percent of 12 weeks often times are what we're learning from our clinics is they're packaging it differently some combine it with the rf treatment and they want to do multiple treatments and they want the patient to come in every week some clinics package it as a package of three laser treatments perhaps but what we've the anecdotes we've gotten back is it's very tolerable for the patient um our iot data is is pretty promising it's as the brand recognition's increasing and the custom clinics are getting comfortable it's increasing to i believe it's now over six thousand dollars per week so when there's there's no consumable and it's a three-year warranty so you start to look at the roi if you if you take advantage of the investments we've made recently in the b2c campaigns like with venus williams if you attend bliss academy and you really understand you know how to counsel the patients how to position it in a competitive market how to price it you know how to create this brand recognition of your clinic and and you're using this as much as possible we're not taking anything back there's no direct cost associated with consumables there's no direct costs associated with warranty for three years so the customers have been really really happy and we're generating a payback now in six months you know in a lot of these clinics and we have some clinics that are far exceeding that so we're starting to get a little traction a lot of traction with it as you know the global market for fat reduction body contouring is really exploding right now and um you know the results have been really good so far how many installs do you have on that so we're we're over a hundred now um and happy to say um we're starting with clients are you know we have one chain that has a lot and they're starting to look at second units which is great um we've seen our pipeline consistently grow we've we've also in conjunction really hired a ton of people in the u.s you know we're making
serious investments in the u.s and north america and that's starting to pay dividends so i think you know once the idea was to hit that first hundred you know get a stable product out there that is getting good results that patients can tolerate that the clinics can learn how to use it doesn't have a lot of technical issues and then really turn on hit the gas and that's really where we're at right now one element to be added to that just because chad touched on it but the iot our system has internet of things built into it so we can see in real time exactly how many treatments are being done what areas of the body are we treating how long who the operator is so we can actually audit the technician that's doing the treatments to make sure that they're getting consistency in the clinical outcomes and that's really important for a clinic because it gives you valuable information you know you can't be in the room all the time so it ties into just how effective you are the payback periods i mean as chad alluded to right now on at this is the average not the best performing clinics the average clinic in the us is paying back the act the total acquisition cost in 34 weeks i think is the number 34 weeks that's pretty damn good i'm here for a platform that has an asp of about 120 000 so you know they're they're easily monetizing their investment that we have one clinic that has done over three million dollars in the first 12 months i i mean to a point where i'm i'm asking myself why don't i have a disposable on the device right yeah but we're letting look my attitude again having run a clinic my attitude is a happy you know doctor is usually going to reinvest in himself and so that's the best possible in the shortest distance to making a doctor happy and you know if they're making money we're ultimately going to make money and that's why 43 of our customers are repeat customers that have bought a second platform or some or a third or whatever the case may be so fat is you know kind of one of our key leading products certainly as a growth driver uh in 2021 and beyond um as chad mentioned i think grant one of the most exciting things i've heard this just in the past two weeks being out in the field you know i started to travel again finally you know from from some select plastic surgeons and dermatologists the the the category has been pretty well established now so patients are coming in asking for this they're not necessarily they may be identifying with a coolsculpting name you know because it's been around but now that the category is established they're you know the patients are pretty open you know if the doctor believes in it if they've gotten good results if the patient tolerates it well if they can point to some clinical study or white paper they're really open to it especially since it's a better economic model as don points out why should we you know why should we continue to pay high high cost of consumables when we can just bring this technology and use it as frequently as we possibly can and then just pay the subscription agreement so so we're super excited about that we're also very focused kind of the second strategic category is hair restoration and robotics yeah let's talk about that the artist yeah so that's that's actually um that we're pretty optimistic on that you know just from traveling around uh we're meeting with some of the largest dermatology groups you know that that market's consolidated to 25 large groups sure and and it's it's really interesting a lot of them dermatologists early on did a lot of hair restoration procedures and then got sidetracked and it was tedious and manual and so a lot of them abandoned it and now you find these these huge clinic chains that see tens of thousands of patients and they treat the they may treat the retention the prevention pharmacologically but they but the procedure that the procedure that patients are really demanding and paying a lot for ends up going somewhere else down the street so we're really devising this hub and spoke model you know focused on training marketing that's where your friends that engage i i actually brought them into a few meetings i i can't think of a better model they they brought up the ophthalmology technology optometry yeah they have a hub and spoke they were on the program also it makes so much sense right uh so um that and then you know the select plastic surgery groups you know as well um that are experts in facial aesthetics that could easily be incorporating this into their practice we just have to show them how you know how do you incorporate a new vertical into an existing practice and make that office productive when you're off operating or you're not there or you're seeing patients from room to room so we're getting a lot of traction the automated device the robotic device is artis which is a form of robotics called programmed automation so you actually program what to do and it does it which you can imagine when you're doing 2 000 mini surgeries in a hair restoration procedure it's a perfect place for automation and then our manual device you may have heard of is neograft which we brought in to the portfolio in 2017 and most customers now are bundling these so i'd say you know what we're doing is a um trying to recreate the landscape of hair restoration procedures with automation so that regardless of where you go a patient can have a consistently good outcome number two we're also trying to take advantage of just this growth in robotic surgery there's seven over 75 companies developing a robot i mean it's amazing every time i if you google robotics you'll find five companies that are raising money or have raised money and they're close to commercial and some of the largest companies in healthcare getting into that space um so that's the second piece and then the third piece is we're really focused on we we acquired this company this this was dom's idea you know to restoration robotics was an example of a great product but the company really tried to get too broad too quickly and so we were able to bring it on our portfolio in november of 2019 i came on board shortly after but what we've quickly done is is built a programmatic approach it's you know it's not about getting a robot or getting a neograft it's about building a program around it and so we're pretty excited we've gotten a lot of traction with that on the other the other piece to that puzzle is that you know as we look at a very crowded call a sandbox and other in other devices right where there's a significant commoditization and hair removal and wrinkles and cellulite all of which we have solutions for and we think very good solutions under our subscription model predominantly you know hair restoration is sort of sitting in its own sandbox and from an roi perspective now that the technologies are automated predictive and so on and certainly less stressful for the physician that they don't have to sit in the room for eight hours to do a 2000 follicle transplant i mean the roi is 12 to 1500 an hour which is very nice compared to you know all of the other items that originally placed hair restoration when lasers came available in 94 95 back in the day and so it's evolved and it's sort of coming the pendulum is sort of swinging back as chad said you know the spoken hub model like a lasik model and so on is really appropriate for large chains but even the individual i'll call it mom and pop operations now that they can actually have a device that sort of helps walks them through with artificial intelligence how to do a hair restoration procedure effectively there's a level of confidence that's being created there and you know we've got a lot of work to do to correct some of the errors and sins of the past of restoration robotics we continue to do that i mean they they chose to sell to urologists and anybody who would cut the check which is fine if you're reporting your numbers on a quarterly basis as a public company but it isn't great the day after when you actually have to teach them how to market themselves and how to actually do the procedure and ask for money you know because it's a out of paper you know paper procedure so so you know i think we we took a step back and and we knew what we were buying and the main reason we did this as opposed to say a conventional ipo is because of the the depth of the ip that restoration was able to uh create over their 10 years of existence we were quite impressed with that and and the most important reason i think is in order for a company to understand where the industry's going you have to understand its past right where it's been and you know the luxury of gray hair and thinning hair tells us you know that um we've seen a commonality of problems in the industry number one the continued commoditization as i just described it makes it very difficult for most derms and plastics to compete you know with the med spa down the street that's very happy generating a hundred dollars an hour and groupon advertising all day long and they're competing with the same branded products regardless of which company you know as a plastic surgeon in durham that wants to generate and should be generating a thousand dollars an hour of a treatment room and would be caught dead groupon advertising their you know their brand right and justifiably so so that was one of the problems we identified and we think that as time as as robots have you know evolved we're going to be able to combine the majority of our energy-based solutions with robotic delivery systems with artificial intelligence and machine learning and speed and accuracy and all the things and that addresses i think the second problem that the industry has had pretty much from day one where 20 to 25 percent of patients that are treated with non-invasive technologies don't get the clinical outcomes that they were hoping for or expect and when that and that usually isn't because of the technology it doesn't matter which company it's usually about operator experience fatigue apathy you know multiple treatments and so on so there are so many variables that get thrown into a manual procedure regardless whether it's candela cutera us whoever that the outcomes are are you know all over the place robots are agnostic to fatigue opinion doesn't matter if you're doing a treatment at nine o'clock on monday morning it's the same on a long weekend night at five o'clock on friday right it doesn't change and what it does for the clinic quite frankly is it gives you as plastics and derms and that's where we're going predominantly with all of our robotic technologies that we start are developing and will continue to develop it'll give you a competitive advantage that you guys should have quite frankly to separate yourselves from the rest of the field because we will not sell robots outside of the core audience that is what that's been my mandate to the company that this has to be exclusively available to you guys because we think it's time that you sort of take back the the leadership if you will on technology of evolution and and the procedures are properly suited for the derms and plastics that we're working on so that makes sense and at the clinic level last but certainly not least is you know and you know this grant i mean clinics you you find a good injector you know whether it's fillers or botox and they become a business of their own you know and the problem is is that many times if an injector decides to hold the clinic ransom and they decide to go down the street because of whatever reasons it's like a hair salon right many of those patients follow them because they love the way they do their lips or they do their nasolabial folds or whatever and that's problematic for the clinic so if we're able to provide solutions in many different areas different procedures that aren't dependent on the technique of the operator but rather it's observational more than anything else to set the algorithms at the you know the the customized plan for that particular patient regardless of what we're treating we think that we're giving you guys ultimately over the next five to ten years you know different solutions that i think will allow you to sort of create some daylight between the commoditization of the industry and and what you guys are offering that's fantastic so we've talked a little bit about fat and skin uh as far as tightening uh and we've talked about hair uh what other areas are you are you chasing what other uh problematic areas in the aesthetics yeah so one of the one of the areas that we're really focused on right now is a product that we are code named robocore it sounds like a bad robocore it sounds like a bad b movie but anyway it's robocore but we we've treated uh 15 16 patients now 90 zones and we're focusing really on the body mostly so what we're trying to do now is take a micro coin capability we actually treated our first patient with a robot a breadboard you know obviously prototype this week and we're quite excited in how it worked but what we're doing is we're taking robotic technology and doing a series of micro coring various steps various widths so that we can actually excise this tissue okay very cleanly and then have a directional tightening so what does that mean what are the areas that we're going to focus on where we did a lot of our clinical work so far for feasibility and so on is to potentially replace a brachial plastic so you know a female that has bat wings does not need to go through a surgical intervention leaving a scar and you know the pain of recovery and on so we think we can do that robotically in a minimally invasive way we think that we can do directional breast lifting um robotically okay the same same kind of mechanism of action we think that we can do above women's knees you know when you get the droopiness and saggy skin so that you can't treat it necessarily non-invasively you can only you know minimally invasively we can treat it and this will allow them to you know not have to go through under anesthesia and all the stuff that you know typically have to do with a full surgical intervention this is an area that you know we companies really haven't focused on as much as they probably should because it's either full surgical intervention you know or non-invasive multiple treatments and the in-betweener is where we're looking at with some of these robotic solutions and of course face lifting brow lifting jowls and things of that sort but we want to start first quite frankly for for selfish reasons we want to make sure it was safe while we go through all of these um you know sort of iterations of the technology and i think the big one that's why on the back of the arm it looks very very promising right now and who knows maybe we'll be able to replace an abdominoplasty you know at some point because of the speed and accuracy of the the way the technology can sort of map out the area hopefully measure the the thickness of the tissue from that we're working with a third party as well that's in the ultrasound business and we think that we can integrate ultrasound ultrasound technology into robotic fat reduction devices so now before we actually treat sort of over the entire area we will actually be able to measure where the the thickest fat is and the problem areas are and actually adjust the algorithms to deliver the energy proportionately to the areas that need the most work versus the areas that need the least i mean it all sounds crazy but you know we have really strong belief that this is just a matter of time and and we think that we're going to be able to accelerate this process pretty quickly and grant i'll just i'll just add to what dom said you know about gosh was 17 years ago i was in atlanta i met a cardiac surgeon that had the greatest value proposition you know with technology innovation and he said patience value is efficacy over invasiveness squared which means if you can develop a procedure that provides good clinical outcomes and do it in that like in the robocore context in a minimally invasive way with minimal downtime minimal pain where you're out in and out that's a really really strong outcome for the patient and people are going to come after that and so that's a that's a real value proposition and you know one of the things that you know we probably won't spend too much time on the exciting thing is we have a lot we have a clear view of where we want to go in the future but actually our top selling products are the universe venus versa which is a platform that has skin rejuvenation hair removal uh skin tightening all in one device it's like a build it platform for the clinics up to ten hand pieces uh we have the venus philosophy for hair removal the venus fever which we're get we have a new configuration that's a higher power it's a nano fractional resurfacing device kind of competes with microneedling getting great outcomes from some of the dermatology clinics we work with and we have the venus legacy which is we've got this resurgent demand all of a sudden i don't know if the product's been out for seven years i don't know if it's the clinic's reopening it's amazing it's amazing like we're seeing tremendous demand so it's got it's fun right now it's fun because we have a diverse bag that we can go off offer pretty much anything a clinic is going to need to build the cosmetic and aesthetic part of their business but it's fun to just go in and meet with core doctors dermatologists plastic surgeons and say hey what do you think about robotics you know if you you just came out of training or fellowship uh what do you think 10 years from now how do you think technology is going to be deployed what's going to look like and and that's where i think we want to go so speaking of that what do you think it is going to look like in five or ten years well you know it's funny you say that because that that's always been sort of my vision as to how do we help the doctors quite frankly add value in their clinics i mean at some point every doctor is going to retire okay and one of the things that most doctors don't think about you know because business isn't their primary acumen right they're trained in sciences and they're very good at what they do and most of the stuff they do is from their hands but how do you monetize that when you're 65 or 70 or whenever you decide to retire so we're focused on trying to create sort of a different level of ebitda return and value as a multiple to the clinic that is driven by the evolution of technology and so on so that new doctors that are coming in have some real tangible asset value to coming in other than the the goodwill that the clinic may or may have not created under the previous physician that's why you know these durm chains and that are being created by private equity because most of the durham's that you know in the early days didn't really think about that they thought about you know they're building their product they're building a very nice living for themselves and so on but really didn't take into consideration the holistically what the value of that clinic was going to be at the point when they're saying nomas right i want to do something else and so we we focus a lot on that as well and we do believe that in the next 10 years nothing will be done manually i think every one of the procedures that's in demand the expectation absolutely will be that there'll be some sort of a robotic customized treatment protocol for that patient specifically geared to that patient and i think that we're we're very thankful that we're sort of in the leadership role i mean one of the main reasons i did this very unconventional unorthodox acquisition of restoration was because they had over 200 patents you know that they had filed in a variety of area areas from tattoo removal to hair and so on and so we think that we can leverage that ip uh with the skill sets of the guys in silicon valley which is where we're located for the robotic development and really accelerate the process of developing additional solutions and by the way at a reasonable price we we want to we want to make sure that the doctors understand that when we come to market with the next generation of robotics as pricing continues to improve and our volumes continue to increase i mean right now globally i think we have about 300 artists robots for hair restoration we think that number should be 3 000 systems as we move into skin tightening directional lifting uh perhaps tattoo removal with with later with the robots as well as fat reduction and and ultimately facial structure to do a simultaneous injection of fillers and we've talked about this in the past where we can map the face we can create a customized plan for the patient and do fillers like nasolabial folds and you know brows and whatever it might be with botox we think that that's going to be a huge competitive advantage again you know for the derms and plastics because that's also an area that's been heavily commoditized because there are so many injectors out there and it's price sensitive and all the things that go along with it so we keep sort of our eye on the prize which is ultimately providing the doctor the best possible way to monetize their investments and ultimately create value within their clinic over you know the next number of years i'll add uh one piece of that too dom and i've discussed this and i think we discussed it with you as well grant you know i came from the spine company the spine industry prior to this and you know um when you think about spine screws i mean historically the prices have come down but i mean they all kind of look the same and you know but for decades it was all about the screw and how do you put the screw in it was about the payload but with robotics a company called mazor robotics that was acquired by medtronic it became about delivering the payload payload didn't matter it was how do you deliver the payload underneath the skin without opening the patient up and deliver the payload with with some combination of pre-operative scanning pre-procedural scanning in this case facial scanning right advanced algorithms that can be embedded into a planning software and then mechanical automation so a robotic arm can execute the procedure taking out all of the variability and so you fast forward and look at the adjacency with like fillers and injectables a lot of it becomes about the payload but delivering the payload right is very very important too sure and can you assure us you know can a clinic assure themselves that this that this injector is as well trained and has done as many procedures as this injector so it's it's using robotics to take some of that guesswork out we hope we can lead the way well it certainly sounds like you are leading the way right now and very creative with robotics and your financing and we could continue this forever i'm sure and the next time you're in l.a we'll pick up where we're leaving off because i want to i want to talk to you about some more the ai and robotics as it relates to injectables uh you have i got to see the man cave yeah that's right marina man land where a man can feel good about looking great exactly so i want to thank you chad and thank you dom for sharing your time with us and uh look forward to pleasuring you yeah thank you very much and we and we definitely look forward to talking to you about the whole facial stuff because i think that's going to be a really hot area we'd like you to be involved we'd like you to be involved in that because i would welcome that opportunity yeah great you mentioned engage and i am now the chief medical officer for engaged technologies and uh and aesthetic innovation so uh we definitely want to talk to you and we definitely gotta keep promoting we have a zoom on the calendar dom it's on your calendar yep terrific who knows i may end up on it you never know so again thank you very much and i'd like to thank all of you for joining us today on another episode of the technology of beauty where i have the opportunity to interview the movers and shakers of the beauty business thank you very much and i'll see you next tuesday you
2021-08-17 10:32
