How Not to Lose Quality in the Midst of Explosive Growth

Written By TouchMD

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As the VP of Clinical Operations at Holden Timeless Beauty, Katie Martin, PA-C wears a lot of hats. While seeing patients, she leads the day-to-day operations of a thriving, multi-location medical spa which requires consistency across locations and experienced staff.

For Katie, safety and compliance always come first, even in a beauty-forward environment. Her mantra is safety first, beauty second. 

When it comes to performance management, Katie’s team keeps a close eye on metrics like total revenue, revenue per hour, and revenue per visit to gauge each provider’s impact.

As the business grew to four locations, she learned the challenges of scaling and standardizing clinical care while making sure they never lost the personal touch. 

About Katie Martin, PA-C

Katie Martin, PA-C is a Physician Associate specializing in medical aesthetics since 2015. Her passion is in education — clients, injectors and industry professionals. Katie is the Vice President of Clinical Operations and an advanced injector at HTB Aesthetics in Southern California. As a GAIN trainer for Galderma, she travels the country to train other injectors in safe techniques with natural results. 

Guest

Katie Martin, PA-C, Vice President of Clinical Operations

Holden Timeless Beauty

Host

Robin Ntoh, VP of Aesthetics

Nextech

Transcript

Announcer (00:06):

You are listening to the Aesthetically Speaking podcast presented by Nextech.

Robin Ntoh (00:17):

You're listening to the Aesthetically Speaking podcast presented by Nextech. I'm Robin Ntoh, and we are coming to you live from the Med Spa Show here in Las Vegas. Super excited to see all the energy. In fact, everything just opened and there is a lot of people on the floor. And today I have Katie Martin here with me, and I'm super excited to have you here. She's an injector, actually. She's the Vice President of clinical Operations at Holden Timeless Beauty. Katie, tell us a little bit about yourself and this career that you've built.

Katie Martin (00:49):

Robin, first of all, thank you so much for having me. We're so excited and we are really excited to partner with Nextech pretty soon.

Robin Ntoh (00:57):

Exciting, yes.

Katie Martin (00:59):

Coming down the pipeline, but so a little bit about me. My name's Katie Martin. I have been a PA for 15 years now, and my first five years were spent in the emergency department. And learned quickly that I loved it until I absolutely hated it and realized I wanted happy, healthy Medicine and found myself with a facial plastics in the San Diego area and learned this beautiful world of aesthetics and I absolutely fell head over heels in love with it. So in 2018, I actually partnered with Dr. Holden and opened my own little clinic in Fallbrook, California where I did everything from ordering, to treating, to scheduling, to managing all the calls and social media. And then she was my medical director then. And then in 2020 we partnered again and I came on as a director of operations at Holden Timeless Beauty. So since then we've grown to four locations. We have 13 injectors and it's just been a wild ride. But I absolutely love this industry and somehow found myself speaking on stages even though my earlier life I never thought that would happen. But I happily train for companies and I speak for companies and speak at these shows.

Robin Ntoh (02:16):

Well, I've had the opportunity and the pleasure to listen to your presentations and you're very good.

Katie Martin (02:21):

Thank you.

Robin Ntoh (02:22):

So VP of Clinical Operations. Wow. So one of the things I wanted to do today is really think about the fact that you're actually treating patients, but you're also managing the operations of the clinic, big job and especially related to the size of your clinic. What is a day in the life like?

Katie Martin (02:41):

Well, I have to say, Robin, it's gotten a lot better.

Robin Ntoh (02:44):

Good.

Katie Martin (02:45):

So a few years ago before we had more staff to support, I was doing a lot of it. So even handling, moving patients off of schedules and figuring out injector schedules, deciding how much to order of things. But now that we've kind of grown and now we have people in place that that's their superpower when that wasn't mine, our managers can manage the people where I get to step into their true clinical role where I thrive. So not only am I treating patients day to day, but then I also am the helping hand to Dr. Holden to decide what's next, what modalities do we want to bring in, what is coming up in the industry that we want to look at. And I actually also get to train the staff, which is such a passion of mine. I love clinical and I like being their support system in the clinical side of things.

(03:38):

And to your question, day-to-day most days are injecting patients from morning till night. But then also I'm a part of the leadership team. So on Tuesdays we have our leadership team meeting where we all come together, Dr. Holden, the managers, myself and marketing, and we talk about all the high level things that are coming up, what we all need to know. And I bring in the clinical piece of it, talking about what clinical trainings are coming up, what people need, what people want, and yeah, it's just this beautiful operation that we've figured out and I've really found my place, which is really nice. The beauty of my position too is I get a lot of flexibility. So I also train for companies so I can take an afternoon off and go train, but then still see my patients. And I just love what I do.

Robin Ntoh (04:22):

It takes a special person to enjoy training and to actually execute really well on it. And you seem to have that passion, but I've also seen you on stage and you do a really good job with that, but things are moving so quickly and you hire a new person. When you think about from an operational standpoint, how do you measure effectiveness for someone?

Katie Martin (04:45):

Oh my gosh, Robin.

Robin Ntoh (04:47):

Okay, maybe that's a very loaded question.

Katie Martin (04:48):

If I knew the answer to that. It is a loaded question, but I will say we've gotten to the point in our, we've made the decision as a team that we don't hire anybody brand new. And I know there are offices who want brand new so that they can train them in their ways, but I've found that the two year to four year injector is that perfect sweet spot, I think because they know enough, but then we can develop them into the more advanced skills and that's where I shine. And then effectiveness wise, we look at KPIs every single week. That's part of the leadership team meeting. So we're looking at everything from overall revenue of the office to by site, by provider. Revenue per hour is a big one for us. Revenue per visit, new clients, I mean, we just have the snapshot of the clinic weekly so that we can all keep up and decide what levers we need to push marketing wise or what have you to keep things moving along the way we want it to.

Robin Ntoh (05:54):

You also mentioned that you're very focused on, obviously teaching, learning, and for example, we're here at this show. One of the things that I'm probably interested always when I'm at these shows is what's new on the market, what's evolved, what's changed? And I mean, I remember, I hate to say this, 25 plus years ago when the first website company came on into a plastic surgery meeting and now we have actually stand aside med spa meetings. So many changes in this market, so much going on, but okay, so you evaluate a new device or a new product or a new modality of any sort that you want to bring into your practice. When you think about that, do you look at it from what the industry is bringing or what problem, or is it based upon the problem you're trying to solve in your business?

Katie Martin (06:44):

That's a really good question. And I have to say, also being a part of the Alpha community, we have so many partners that have so much experience with other modalities that we don't have experience with. So we reach out to them a lot to decide what we need. But honestly, Robin, I think to that question, we typically find the need in our patient base before or we talk to our alpha partners who are loving a certain thing. So for example, because of all the medical assisted weight loss happening right now, hair has become a huge thing recently. So hair loss and then promoting hair growth and the regeneration of all of that because of all of the weight loss that's happening. So that's our newest thing that we brought on. But then leaning on our partners, what's working for them in their offices has been really, really helpful.

Robin Ntoh (07:36):

It's interesting. Your career has gone from emergency room, wildly different. I did that too. And then you move into your own niche of a small business that you were on your own and you managed it day in and day out. Then you were absorbed into a bigger organization that you then grew and now you're part of an enterprise that just continues to grow. Do you ever feel like that there's always more learning to have or is there more things that you want to do beyond this? Or do you feel that this is just a very gratifying place to be?

Katie Martin (08:14):

I look around sometimes and can't even believe that this is life right now. So I love what's happening right now and what's in front of me. You'll learn about me, Robin, or you might already know, I'm a very black and white person and I have trouble with the big picture and looking forward. So that's why I rely on John Wheeler and Amanda Holden for.

(08:35):

They give me the big vision and then I help them implement it. So where I am in my career, never thought I would be here from PA school. I thought I was going to do emergency medicine the rest of my life. I fell in love there and now looking back, I'm like, I should have done this from the start. But everything happens for a reason. I learned so much in the ER that actually translates to this industry from bedside manner to always, my brain always goes to worst case scenario, and I can handle those complications if they are to arise because I have the perspective of, but nobody's dying. So at least we can rest assured in that and patience, we can handle it.

Robin Ntoh (09:19):

I think that there's got to be a place with your history of working in the emergency room, being able to react very quickly and understand and assess very quickly, which to your point really translates very well to what you're doing now. Probably not where you would've thought it would. I think there's a lot of that that goes into why you actually hire people that actually have experience. It says a lot about the environment or the ecosystem you're building. Where does that training translate into consistency with your practices?

Katie Martin (09:54):

That's a great question. So how my role is set up, I am doing one to two trainings for our staff a month, but that can look very different. So it can look from everything from, we do, this is getting kind of off topic, but we do PPFs, so personal, professional and financial goal meetings with our staff who our managers, I'll do them with our staff. And then that's when they hear what they want to learn next or what area they want more experience in. And then that's where I step in. So those trainings can look like a four hour training with one injector who wants to focus on tear troughs. And then we do a couple of those together until she feels more comfortable. It can also look like doing me actually injecting, but doing video and then kind of putting that video together so that we have it in a bank too. So we are trying to find ways to kind of change from being a one location practice where I'm with everybody all the time and Dr. Holden's with everybody all the time to now having four, or we need to be a little more strategic and think about how we can get those trainings out to the masses.

Robin Ntoh (11:03):

Scale. Yes, scale is important. Yes, scale is important. And in any business, I think even think about your small business, you were treating patients all day. How did you translate from treating patients all day to ensuring that the front desk person actually was able to pre-qualify credential, talk about the services that you offer. I mean, you're busy all day. I think that that whole component of scale goes back to no matter what size your business is, you still have to be able to replicate things. You still have to be able to have the referenceable materials. And that all goes back to I love the idea of doing the recordings. I think that there's so much that you can actually use from that, that goes back to scale.

Katie Martin (11:49):

Absolutely. And having really good processes in place too, which I wish we had started way before, but now anytime something maybe out of the ordinary comes up, we'll write a process and have it for each clinic. So the ER heart in me hates this, but we had a complication. We had a VO happen about a year ago. The first one we had seen in our clinic. We handled it wonderfully. The patient's great. She's still my patient to this day. However, it wasn't in my hands, but I helped with the aftermath of it. Now we have an amazing protocol on what to do with a VO, and we had to use it one more time, and it worked perfectly. The team was in sync because everyone knew their role. So an unfortunate situation turned into an amazing one because now we have an amazing protocol and process in place so that everyone feels comfortable when an emergency might happen.

Robin Ntoh (12:45):

The fact that you actually recognize that you needed a process is a lesson that everybody should take, that should be part of someone's playbook. Because I mean, look at it, rule books are built around people breaking rules, and then you create a role around it. But I think that's where processes are born as well, because incidents happen, but there's so much that's already been done and you're part of a bigger network now where that can just manifest itself across the organization. And then people aren't having to learn from scratch

(13:15):

Because you take the time to actually exercise and build upon it. Says a lot about what you're trying to do, which is admirable. What a great organization to be part of.

Katie Martin (13:22):

Yes.

Robin Ntoh (13:22):

Simply cannot, you can't can't re-state how important it is to actually have those written processes in place, especially when you have patients and their health is at stake. Patients are never honest, right? They tell you what they think that you need to hear so that they can actually get their treatment done and be out the door. But it still goes back to, and Alex Tursh brought it up this morning, we're medical spas. The word medical is omitted from a lot of what we do because we want to focus on the spa part of it. But you guys have done a beautiful, I mean, think about the name of your organization, Timeless Beauty, it's a medical spa. It's all about beauty. But I mean, think about you and your career and how you really focused on those protocols and things that actually build back up into safety first.

Katie Martin (14:16):

Absolutely. And when I train Robin, safety is number one for me all the time. Safety number one, natural number two.

Robin Ntoh (14:22):

Love that.

Katie Martin (14:24):

I think, and going back to just having that emergency medicine and any medicine in general background, I won't do a treatment unless I look over all the good faith exam questions one more time just to, I give that checkoff and I have a process where I read it and I put my name on it. Then I know I've signed off on it. So you're right, we are medical and we can't forget that. And we can't forget that bad things can happen and we need to be prepared that,

Robin Ntoh (14:51):

I love what you just said, safety first, beauty second. I love it. Well, Katie, if there was any last party words that you would want to leave, other than that fabulous safety, beauty concept, would you want to share anything else with our listeners?

Katie Martin (15:07):

I just want to say that this is the most amazing industry, and if you're listening to this, you're either in it or want to be in it. And I say, go for it because this is the future. And I think there's so many innovations coming down the pipeline and this new, all the regenerative talk, and it's just a cool place to be, and it's still in its infancy, really. So there's a lot of room and collaboration over competition always.

Robin Ntoh (15:33):

That starts with safety, then beauty. Kind of goes back to med and then spa, right?

Katie Martin (15:38):

Yep.

Robin Ntoh (15:39):

Well, thank you so much. It has been such a pleasure to have you today. Where can we follow you online?

Katie Martin (15:44):

I am at Katie the injector, both on Instagram and TikTok.

Robin Ntoh (15:47):

Fabulous. Thank you again.

Katie Martin (15:49):

Thank you, Robin. It was so fun.

Robin Ntoh (15:51):

It was a pleasure.

Announcer (15:56):

Thanks for listening to Aesthetically Speaking, the podcast where beauty meets business, presented by Nextech. Follow and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. Links to the resources mentioned on this podcast or available in your show notes. For more information about Nextech, visit nextech.com, or to learn more about TouchMD, go to touchmd.com. Aesthetically Speaking is a production of The Axis, theaxis.io.

TouchMD
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