About the Guest:
Richard Moore, MD
Medical Director and Owner at The Edge for Men and The Lifestyle Center
Dr. Richard Moore is the Owner and Medical Director of The Lifestyle Center and The Edge for Men in St Louis. He is also a board-certified physician and internist. Prior to his role as the founder of The Lifestyle Center and The Edge for Men, he was a Hospitalist Physician in St. John’s Mercy Medical Center (now Mercy St. Louis) and Midwest Internal Medicine. Before his career in medicine, Dr. Moore also had a fairly extensive business career as a Logistics Analyst with Conoco Chemical Company.
Dr. Moore is a recognized pioneer and national speaker in minimally-invasive aesthetic procedures; He is an associate member of the American Academy of Cosmetic Surgeons and the American Society of Hair Restoration Surgery.
Dr. Moore has been in the full-time practice of hair restoration and aesthetic surgery since 2003. He often appears as a contributing physician on articles relating to aesthetics, health, and nutrition in the St Louis community. Dr. Moore’s interests include reading, biking, hiking, resistance training, spinning, economics, and travel outside of medicine.
Connect with Dr. Richard Moore:
About the Episode:
For this episode of Entrepreneur Rx, John was able to speak with Dr. Richard Moore, an internal medicine hospitalist, pioneer, and national speaker in the field of minimally-invasive aesthetic procedures, owner and medical director at The Lifestyle Center, and founder and medical director at The Edge for Men. The Lifestyle Center is a medical spa that provides a wide selection of aesthetic procedures to help clients look and feel their best. The Edge for Men is a premiere men’s clinic offering customized treatment approaches that help restore and improve appearance, performance, and vitality.
You will hear Dr. Moore share his business background and how he transitioned from the medical field as an internist to become an entrepreneur. He also talks about the challenges of establishing a business that was quite ahead of its time and how he pivoted to aesthetic services. Then he moves to how to deal with competition, the evolution of non-invasive body sculpting devices and procedures, and how to manage your own business.
Entrepreneur Rx Episode 31:
RX Podcast_Richard E Moore: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix
RX Podcast_Richard E Moore: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
John Shufeldt:
Hello everybody and welcome to another edition of Entrepreneur Rx, where we help health care professionals own their future.
John Shufeldt:
Hello everybody and welcome back to Entrepreneur Rx. I'm your host, John Shufeldt. Joining me this week is Dr. Richard Moore. He is the Medical Director and owner of The Edge for Men and the Lifestyle Center. Dr. Moore is a pioneer and natural speaker for the field of minimally invasive aesthetic procedures, and he's an active member of the American Academy of Cosmetic Surgeons and the International Society of Hair Restoration Surgeons, which sadly, I probably need sooner than I want to believe. Dr. Moore, welcome to the show. Glad to have you on it.
John Shufeldt:
Thank you so much. It's good to be here.
Richard Moore:
So you've been doing aesthetics, we're going to get back, I want to get back to your background, too, but you've been doing aesthetics for quite a while before aesthetics was even a thing, it sounds like.
Richard Moore:
Yeah. You know, back in the early 2000s, I think we opened up in 2003. We opened up the Lifestyle Center and the original intent behind the Lifestyle Center was to be more of a wellness center. I came from the field of being a hospitalist physician where you would see all of the illness and everything of lifestyle choices, and the idea was, let's see if we can open up a center that will have an impact on people's lives in a healthy manner. We were ahead of our time, that model flopped. Either that or we poorly executed, one of the two. But as a part of the original plan, we did have some aesthetic services and that became the focus of our center after about four to five months when I realized the original model was not going to work.
John Shufeldt:
So let's back up. So where did you go to medical school at?
Richard Moore:
The University of Minnesota.
John Shufeldt:
All right, excellent. And then you did internal medicine?
Richard Moore:
I did internal medicine at a private hospital in Minneapolis called Abbott Northwestern.
John Shufeldt:
All right.
Richard Moore:
And I actually did a year of neurology as well. I was going to become a neurologist. But before I did all of this, I actually got my Master's in International Management and worked in the petrochemical field for six years. So I had a fairly extensive business background before getting into all of this.
John Shufeldt:
So were you in medical school then in your thirties?
Richard Moore:
I went to medical school, I was 29, just about 30 when I started medical school.
John Shufeldt:
Wow, that's awesome. Ok, so business background, internal medicine hospitalist, and then all of a sudden, what prompted you? Because people are going to hear this and say, OK, that's kind of a big leap, I mean, you know, in the emergency medicine aesthetics business, OK, I can kind of get us episodic, you know, we're kind of crazy to begin with, but the internist, that had to be a big leap of faith for some of your colleagues to hear that.
Richard Moore:
Yeah. You know, and it was probably a little crazy when I did it. But I'm married to a physician as well, and my wife does high-risk obstetrics. And at the time, she had one other partner and they were doing on-call every other night, every other weekend.
John Shufeldt:
Wow.
Richard Moore:
The hospitalist system and I had become the director of the hospitalist system, and these were in the infancy of the hospitalist systems. Originally, when we set the program up if somebody came into the emergency room, the E.R. was nice enough to write the admitting orders for us, and we would see them in the morning unless there was a pressing need. Well, that lasted for a year, year and a half. We were moving to a system where we were going to take call in-house seven consecutive nights and then we would have daytime coverage. And that just wasn't compatible with having young children at home. And so I left and did a little bit of day trading actually until September 1, 2001. But in that interim, I was making plans for this wellness center, The Lifestyle Center, and we were going to focus on executive physicals and lifestyle choices, we had a dietitian, we had personal trainers. And that concept just didn't meld well back in 2003. And so we, I had some aesthetics and that became the, I went and talked to a friend of mine who helped people in businesses sell their practices, I was desperate. And he said you got something that isn't worth anything, you've got to change your focus. And so that's what I did. And so then we focused on the aesthetic side of things.
John Shufeldt:
So as you go back in the aesthetics class because I took one way back when on, you know, laser hair removal and injections and stuff.
Richard Moore:
I don't think they even existed back then. You know, back then, all of your training was by the companies that would sell you the equipment, you know, neurotoxins and things like that, there was not training out there back in 2003. And so a lot of that was self-taught by studying and watching videos and things until the companies came in with their training programs.
John Shufeldt:
So I think I did it in 2005 I want to say. So you started this even really before it was a thing. Did you start with injectables and hair removal and photo facials?
Richard Moore:
We started with photo facials and leg veins and laser hair removal and injectables. And the injectables back then were Botox and Restylane.
John Shufeldt:
Right.
Richard Moore:
You know, I think that was about the only thing that was around back then. It was really in the early days of doing injections.
John Shufeldt:
Wow. Ok. So hospitalist, day trading, and then The Lifestyle Center, which was again, so you have some really the disease model of medicine, which is how we're all trained to the prevention model of medicine but that did not take off in the Twin Cities?
Richard Moore:
No, I was in Saint Louis.
John Shufeldt:
Oh, in Saint Louis at that point, that's right. So just they weren't ready, they weren't ready for prevention, huh?
Richard Moore:
Right, right. I mean, I think I was just ahead of my time.
John Shufeldt:
Yeah. So how did you grow that business? Because at least where I'm from, at least where I am in Phoenix, Arizona, that's an incredibly competitive business.
Richard Moore:
Yeah. At the time, it wasn't as competitive, and I talked to somebody and they said, and this particular guy sold green tea extract and he had one product that he would sell the heck out of and then get people to buy additional products. And what he told me is, you really have to focus in on one thing that's going to bring people into your center. So what I focused in on was laser hair removal, and we became the largest laser hair removal provider in Saint Louis. And then after that, I began to focus more in on the injectables because that would bring people in. And then over time, body sculpting. We started with some of the non-invasive body, early non-invasive body sculpting devices like Velashape, and things like that. Velasmooth I guess was where we started. And then somebody sold me a laser called Smart Lipo. I actually learned that I had to learn how to do liposuction when I bought that device. And so I became a very large liposuction provider. I still do liposuction to this day. And so it's just evolved over time. And our greatest emergence now is the non-invasive body sculpting has really caught on with things like CoolSculpting or CoolSculpting of Lead and Sculpt and Sculpt Neal. Things like that have actually cut, you know it used to be that if you brought those services in, it would increase your liposuction value. But the technology is catching up such that you can get nearly as good results today, or sometimes better results with a non-invasive technology than I could get with an invasive procedure.
John Shufeldt:
Yeah, I had a cool sculpting machine for probably six years or so, and gosh, was, you know, I think, $100.000 dollar machine and you had to pay every time you used it with the little cart they gave it. It really worked, people loved it. The thing really worked well, and it was kind of weird, but it was genius. I thought the thing was excellent. So tell me when you started a business, you know, one of the things you focus on is your brand and who is your target customer in Saint Louis back in 2003?
Richard Moore:
When I started out in 2003, I hired an agency to help promote me. They put me in the playbill at some of the downtown, you know, theaters and things, and that didn't pan out at all. Eventually, I went to print advertising and radio advertising. Today, we don't do any traditional advertising at all, but in the early days, that was how we got started. And it just, it's grown over time.
John Shufeldt:
How did you compete with, you know, I always used to say when I owned urgent care centers, you're only as good as your dumbest competitor because the person on the street opened up urgent care and they said, look, our average net charge to you, the managed care organization third-party payer will be X and X might be 25 percent less than we take in, and the health plan will call me up and say, hey, John, you know, the guy down the street, the woman now, she said she'll do it for seventy-five bucks a visit and your charge is a hundred, and I'm making the numbers up. How do you compete with them? Because to me, it was always a race to the bottom like, oh, you can do the CoolSculpting for a thousand. I'll do it for seven-fifty.
Richard Moore:
Right. One, in Saint Louis, probably in the early days, we didn't have as much competition. What hurt was when the large chains started coming in. The ideal image who comes in and they spend $50.000 dollars a month in advertising. And we really what I saw was that there was a race to the bottom on things like laser hair removal because of Groupon and things like that. And so we just decided we weren't going to consider it a strategic part of our business as such. We would continue to charge a fair margin. It's a procedure that has its degree of risks and you didn't want to cheapen the value of that product. So we recognize that our volumes would drop in that area, but we were innovative enough in the area of non-invasive and invasive body sculpting procedures that we continue to grow despite that.
John Shufeldt:
So who was in 2003, who was, how did you identify your ideal, your target customer?
Richard Moore:
Our target customer was a bit younger back then because our focus was on laser hair removal. So we were focusing on the 20s and 30s back then. For the anti-aging treatments, we would focus on the 40s, 50s, up to maybe 60 years of age.
John Shufeldt:
But let me ask another question. This is a little more, a little more recent. You started The Edge For Men, which is designed as I read in this research is to restore men's vitality, sexual performance, and overall appearance. So you're doing both now, I suspect. But what was the transition point? What prompted that?
Richard Moore:
Well, we would have men come into the clinic, and at the time we were offering procedures like the p-shot and they would be sitting out in the lobby and kind of look like, you know, a deer with its eyes in the headlights because they felt a little bit out of place and right next door was a vacant spot that somebody had started to build out on and then her husband got transferred and that spot became available. So I said, now, what could I do over there? And the idea came along of a center for men that helps them feel better about themselves to the point that they'll want to look better, too. So linking hormone replacement therapy, ED, as well as the aesthetic side of services, and that's worked out well. The hormone replacement therapy is a very, very competitive market. You have to, by offering these ancillary services, we were able to become profitable much quicker.
John Shufeldt:
So you do the injectable hormone, the pellets, the hormone replacement pellets?
Richard Moore:
We largely do injections instead, the testosterone injections versus the pellets. When I initially started doing hormone therapy, I thought that pellets would be the way to go. But in men, I think that injectable, weekly injectables are better. The pellets I had them placed once myself, I couldn't sit for 10 days. I was so uncomfortable and my wife was wanting to know what was going on and I didn't tell her. And your levels would get to a nice level and then they start to drop off. And then it would be kind of like, well, when do I need to go back in and get pellets? When how is it going to be dosed? It's much easier to dose somebody on a weekly basis and adjust it than to try and stagger when you're going to put the pellets in.
John Shufeldt:
Yeah, it makes sense. So it sounds like The Edge does more than just procedural basis, sound like there's almost a psychological component as well. Do you do anything on the kind of mental well-being of men and women?
Richard Moore:
We don't focus a lot on that. And, you know, it's not a field of expertise that I have. We certainly talk to that can be an issue that is contributing, but I don't offer a program to deal with the psychological aspects. Interestingly enough, I got a call from somebody that we had been treating for ED with a procedure about six months ago, he had a P-shot and all of a sudden he was very stressed out and very anxious, wasn't sleeping at night and was having problems with ED once again and wanted to know why his P-shot had failed. And he's going through the natural course of, you know, the effects are going to dissipate over time, but more so he was having psychological issues and wanted something for anxiety and things like that. In a situation like that, I send them back to their primary caregiver or care provider because I'm not going to be their physician for all medical ....
John Shufeldt:
Right. Now when you started this, did you go back to rely on your business education that you gained in your six years you spent in the petrochemical business?
Richard Moore:
Oh yes. You know, I prepare an operating budget every year. I do a capital analysis on any piece of equipment that I'm going to purchase. I try and make a projection of how long it's going to take for that piece of equipment to pay for itself. I look at equipment utilization, I look at it, how we utilize our people, what kind of utilization rates we're getting on the people that we have. And we developed a compensation model where all of our providers, whether they're aestheticians or nurses or whatever, are basically operating a business within a business. And so as their practice within the business grows, their compensation grows and the front desk is compensated in a way that as the center grows, their compensation is, they get a bonus, basically.
John Shufeldt:
Right. Volume-based bonus.
Richard Moore:
Yeah. So everybody in the center is working on some type of productivity to help grow the center.
John Shufeldt:
Right. How many people do you manage right now? How many employees do you have?
Richard Moore:
Right now we have 16.
John Shufeldt:
Wow.
Richard Moore:
So we're in the process of hiring I think three more.
John Shufeldt:
Three more. So what do you describe your leadership style? Is this mentor you had? Books to read? School of hard knocks?
Richard Moore:
Oh, there's always the school of hard knocks is always a component. There are mistakes that are made along the way. I, myself, have tried to stay out of the personnel end of things and have a management person handle that so that I could stay focused on the clinical aspects of the business. But I've kept a strong hand in the financial aspects of the business. When we put a new model in place about two years ago and we've been growing about seven percent a year prior to that. This past year, we grew 47 percent. That model has really taken fruition, and we feel like it's a reproducible model that as we bring a staff member on, that staff member is going to be able to take us to the next level and each staff member that we bring on will be able to do that as well. We're running into issues of space and equipment utilization now. Some of our equipment is utilized at a very high rate such that you can't match a provider or a client and the equipment up to availability.
John Shufeldt:
So do you think COVID helps or hurts you guys?
Richard Moore:
Helped.
John Shufeldt:
Why is that? I mean, it sounds like it did, and it helped businesses that I have as well. But why? It tends to me, it doesn't seem like it would.
Richard Moore:
I think there's a few factors. Number one, people are looking in at themselves in Zoom meetings, so that's one aspect. And early on in COVID, that was a big one. Everybody, when we opened back up, they wanted their Botox or Discord or whatever right away. A second element is that people's capital, what they can spend their money on, they're not traveling as much, they're not going out to restaurants as much. And so they're spending more of their money on themselves. I think this industry in general has had a real boom as a result of COVID. How that's going to move going forward, you know I'm not sure, but there's been tremendous growth in the industry overall. I talked to other colleagues out there and they're experiencing very rapid growth as well.
John Shufeldt:
Yeah, it's funny. I'd ask other people this and they have the same answers. that people look at themselves and zoom and go, I could look a lot better and make appointments. It's fine, I would never, never have thought that was the initiation. Did you all? And I don't know how you were, but did you move into telemedicine consults as well?
Richard Moore:
Yes, we do two things. One, we'll do a Zoom consult like this, and the other thing we'll do is we'll do phone consultations. I don't like them as much because I think there's something to be said for a hands-on evaluation of somebody. And I don't know whether they're absorbing what's being said as well, but it's become a part of our every day and it'll continue to be a part of our every day, even as COVID dissipates someday.
John Shufeldt:
No, no, I agree. What do you think was the biggest take-home message you learn from first making a leap of faith and getting out of being a hospitalist and then number two, managing your business? What are the, if you have to give somebody if you have to give a younger self some advice, what would you what would that advice be?
Richard Moore:
I probably would have started my practice very differently knowing what I know today. I would have focused in on services that didn't require a lot of capital investment upfront. So that's going to be your injectable products, some of the lasers aren't as high-end. And you know, the personality is always the hardest part, you know, hiring the right people and getting the right people into the right roles.
John Shufeldt:
I couldn't agree more. Ok, so last question and this is a little bit off-topic. Where do you see the aesthetic business going to? It seems, at least from my naive, you know, you've done a lot and go, it seems like it's moving more and more non-invasive. Where do you see it going?
Richard Moore:
That's exactly what I see. The non-invasive body sculpting procedures are becoming better and better. I was actually out, near neck of the woods doing some training on a couple of pieces of equipment, and I spoke to a plastic surgeon a couple of weeks before about that equipment, and he said you know, if people are using this type of equipment in their thirties, they may never get to that point where they need to have the facelift with me. And it's the micro-needling devices and energy-based devices that can tighten and lift, and, you know. So I see that that is going to be the trend is more and more non-invasive and the treatments are getting more comfortable as well. The technology continues to advance to the point that we're getting effective treatments that are much more comfortable. My first RF needling devices were so uncomfortable they just gathered dust. But now we're using them daily.
John Shufeldt:
I defer. You know, I got into this for weird reasons, but I used to have like a five o'clock shadow like, you know, 10 a.m. So I'm going to laser hair removal then I went to this place and it literally I felt like every shock was just like, I think I'm a high pain tolerance, I'm like, oh my god, this is, you know, an hour of this was painful. I'm like, Okay, I can do this better, and which is what prompted me to get into it. So what's next for you? What's the next iteration of Richard Moore?
Richard Moore:
Ok. One, we're moving to a larger space, hopefully towards the end of 2022. We want to incorporate a training institute within our practice such that we're training as aestheticians that are fresh out of aesthetic school into the med spa industry, as well as nurse injectors. Because we're finding it very difficult to find people today. And then we can be a resource to the community as well. I've met with physicians who have done this before or are doing this, and I think it would be a boo, for us, it's going to make us the elite practice in Saint Louis. Another thing that we're toying with are some satellite centers further out and staying within the state of Missouri, but even branching out more rural.
John Shufeldt:
Branch to the patients. That's excellent. Well, Dr. Moore, if people want to find out more about you or want to go to your training center, how do they get a hold of you?
Richard Moore:
Probably the best way is to reach out to me at my email address, and it's drmoore@thelifestylecenter.com.
John Shufeldt:
Perfect. I'll make sure we include all that and all the connections in the show notes. Thank you so much for your time. A really informative and I think people are going to think, gosh, if he can do it and had a great career, maybe there's hope for me as well. So thank you for the inspiration.
Richard Moore:
Ok, good to talk to you.
Richard Moore:
Thanks for listening to another great edition of Entrepreneur Rx. To find out how to start a business and help secure your future, go to JohnShufeldtMD.com. Thanks for listening.
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Key Take-Aways:
- When your business is not working, change your focus.
- Focus on a specific service or product that can bring people into your business.
- Compete on value, not price.
- Don’t allow the competition to cheapen the value of your product or service.
- Use innovation to grow your business.
- Hire the right people, get the right people into the right roles.
- In starting a business, focus on services that do not require a lot of capital investment upfront.
Resources:
- Connect and follow Richard on LinkedIn.
- Reach out and contact Richard on his email.
- Find out how The Lifestyle Center can help you look and feel your best!
- Restore your performance and improve your vitality with the help of The Edge for Men!