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Fixing Dermatology’s Purchasing Problem · The Science of Skin

• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: Hello everyone, I'm Dr.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: Patty Ferris.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a board certified dermatologist, and I'm your co-host of this episode of the Science of Skin Summit podcast.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: This is a special episode because we are just coming off the Science of Skin Summit.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: For those of you who are there, thank you so much for joining us.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: We had an incredible meeting, but without a doubt, one of the most highly anticipated sessions is always our innovation session, as we like to call it.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: And we had this year, I'm going to tell you it's like a shark tank, just to explain what it is.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: We have some really uh, I like to say barracudas that do our shark tanking for us.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: We have investors, not uh a new big panel of investors.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: Umberto Antunez, who works with Gore Range Capital, is there.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: We have Dr.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: Boo Dong and Dr.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: Ross Perlman.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: They're with the Skin Angels.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: And if you all haven't heard of them, Skin Angels is a really kind of a cool, large group of dermatologists that's doing really early stage investment, making investments in all kinds of technologies to make the life of dermatologists and dermatology patients better.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: We also had Ben Perkins, who's a founding managing partner at PHP in Austin, Texas.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: And we had eight companies present at this, and it's always one of my favorite sessions.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: Unfortunately, I was podcasting at the time, and I missed the presentations.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: But I know because I had a chance to look at the slide deck before, that there was a lot of very interesting things presented.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: We had new skincare technologies, we had new photographic technologies and ways to standardize photographs.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: And the the the end of the eighth session, we always award an investor's choice award, and that is voted on by our judging judges.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: And this year our winner was somebody who a lot of dermatologists actually know.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: And his name is Errol Clark Jr.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: And Errol is a Harvard MBA.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: Am I right about that?
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: He's a Harvard MBA.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: He grew up around dermatology.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: We have to take our hat off to Errol's mother, who's Dr.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: Valerie Callender, and his daddy, Errol Clark Sr., who has been in the business end of um practice for a while.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_01: So you you certainly have seen all the good sides, all the difficult sides of running a practice.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: You probably grew up inside that practice.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: I know you did, because I've seen you at meetings for so long, too long, that I wouldn't even want to admit it.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: But you came up with an idea that won yourself this award.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I think you're just a year out of your MBA, right?
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, uh just uh a little, a couple of months, actually.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: But I've been building this for a year and six months, so it's uh it's finally come together.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I I remember you talking to me about it last year when you came to the meeting.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm gonna let you pitch our audience and tell us everything about what you're building and why what our investors are so excited about.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, I think thank you for having me first off.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think we're in the dawn of technology and AI, and how can we use that to help our businesses?
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: And what's happened in kind of the dermatology aesthetics space, maybe 10, 15 years ago, there was only five, six really like top companies, and maybe you ordered or dealt with those companies.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: Now there's like over a hundred or more.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: And that process has become so complex that people can't really keep up with it.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: And what we do, we have a procurement, so a purchasing and inventory management software that helps that process for providers.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: So instead of ordering from 30 different places, you can order from one single place, keep all your rep relationships, and manage that and then manage the inventory of all those orders.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so that helps us or helps providers increase profit, save time, and then build a more scalable operating system that can grow and scale.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: So if you want to hire more people, you can open new locations, you can do that with a more efficient procurement and inventory management process.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: So, like, how does it deal with, you know, like there's so many different tiered pricings?
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, how did how did you deal with all of that?
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so we go in when we onboard customers, we go in and we see what their current pricing is, what their tiers are, and build that into our platform so you can stay on top of it.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: So, really the problem we're solving here is a lot of these orders will live in somebody's text message, someone's email, they're calling, and maybe a vendor portal if you're lucky.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: We want all that to take place in a centralized place.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: So if you want to look for what you paid for products, you're not calling somebody and trying to figure out what they paid for it through a text or through an email.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: You can come to one single place and then you can manage your pricing through our platform.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: So not only does this help you save costs, but I believe this also can help you generate more revenue and profit.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: Because now that you know your margins, you can actually price your procedures and your and your products accordingly.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: So did you develop the software itself?
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: So I built the MVP uh thanks to a lot of AI tools now, but thankfully I have a CTO who he was the executive director of software engineering at CVS Health.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: He managed 80 engineers, and he was acquired, his company was VP of technology that got acquired for a good amount of money.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: He was then at Oak Street Health, which got acquired by CVS Health.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: So he managed 80 engineers during his time.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm I'm lucky to have uh somebody that's been through that uh company building process to help me build what I want to build, which is the biggest software company in the aesthetic space.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so he's a total pro.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: So for somebody like me, who's sort of just a lost ball in high weeds, basically, when it comes to anything technology-wise, this seems like a really easy way to streamline things for practitioners, especially when you're private practice.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you don't have people managing all that for you.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's really very hard, as I'm sure you know.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: So this makes a whole lot of sense.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: How does it financially uh work out for the practices?
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so we can save up to 10% or more on your current spend across the practice by just by managing this process very closely.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I can tell you, uh I don't want to say vendor names, but if you pay attention to orders, whether something's on back order or if the invoice price is correct, if you manage that really closely, you can find savings just within vendors, not to mention when you can compare vendors across 30, 40, 50 different vendors, you can find savings.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: So we manage that very, very closely.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: And then one thing we're really proud about too is that you can save money just by managing your inventory better, you know, by just simply tracking everything very closely and building a system which we're creating, we've created our proprietary inventory management system.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: You can actually save a ton of money there and keep track of what might be going expired, what's been used, what's been given out for samples and promotions and discounts.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: That whole process is very messy.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: And without eyeballs paying attention to it, you're easily leaking out plenty of margin.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so we want to be those hands and and and arms that are helping you in that process so you can confidently run your business at the highest margin.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: It it sort of sounds like Amazon-ish.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: You know, like you're laying this huge blanket out over the is it all aesthetic products or all products?
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: All aesthetic and medical supply products.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, medical supply too.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: So you can, you know, still so many practices have that hybrid model where they're seeing Matt Durm, they're doing a couple of fellers and Botoxes, and then they're doing surgery.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: So that makes total sense.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: So you have the whole package of products and things that anybody might need.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: I guess, I guess I should ask you where did you get this idea?
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's such a great idea.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, thank you.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so what's funny, um, I was in my Harvard MBA and I had a little bit more time on my hands, and I started getting more and more involved into the real financial operational uh juices of our practice.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I asked my mom one day, Dr.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: Callender, hey, how do we do the purchasing in our practice?
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: And she said, Errol, you know, we order a little bit frequently.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I kind of heard that and I was kind of like, that doesn't make any sense to me.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we your book's six months out, we have room in our practice, and you have visibility into what your procedures are going to be for the most part.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: You know, why aren't we taking advantage of both purchasing and planning and scheduling?
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so I went to 15 or 20 different med spas, dermatologists, and I asked them the same question.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: How are you doing your purchasing?
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: How are you doing your inventory?
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: Every single one of them said it's a messy process.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: I have a process, it's it's not efficient.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then because of my, I was in the investing world, so I worked in private equity beforehand.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: I saw the pattern recognition of successful dental procurement softwares, you know, that have done really well.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: I've saw the pattern recognition of successful veterinary and procurement softwares.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: I saw things in the DME medical equipment space where they have a procurement process there.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: But there was no process in the aesthetics and dermatology space.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: And that was kind of the blue light or green light, if you will, of you know, there should be some market.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: Do you have devices at all?
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: Or so we don't have devices, but we've had actually conversations with device companies on the consumable part, which can be for them hard to manage because they would want a more automated way to reorder.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: So that's actually, I'm glad you asked that.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: Is that this is really great for the practices, practices, but this is also be really great for the brands and the vendors.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because they want to keep tabs of when client, when customers are reordering, how much they've ordered they want to be able to denote between product that they're selling uh at price and then samples and free products, they want to be able to denote that so they can have that conversation.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then also, too, it's just the world has become more competitive than ever.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: AI and technology should be leveraged to drive your business and margin.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so I don't think that the vendors and the vendors and brands obviously want to take advantage of technology.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: Why not take advantage of it with a platform that can help automate their end of the business?
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that makes total sense.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: What about skincare?
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: Are you doing skincare?
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: So we're doing skincare.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: We're having we have some early partnerships that also see this as an opportunity for them to gain new business, right?
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: So we have this platform or this group group of providers that are looking for the best products.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: So we've had some early conversations there that they're excited about what this can do for the business.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: Because if I mean, if you're not a L'Oreal, let's just say, you know, and you're and you're an up-and-coming skincare brand, you don't have the capital to, you know, hire this big robust Salesforce team.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: So um so we we've had some really, really great conversations there, and they see the value uh of the platform as well.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: Well, all I can say is congratulations.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_01: Genius idea.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_01: Sounds like your execution is going really well.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not even surprised because you've been, like I said, those little wheels have been turning a very long time.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I think being around practices and seeing the I mean, there's a lot of touch points, but there's a lot of pain points too, as you well know.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so anything you can do to make things smoother and easier, especially with all the consolidation, I mean, that has to be a huge opportunity for you as well to get into some of these larger groups who think they're really good at doing this, but having been in one, they're not as good as they think they are.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_01: But that's neither here nor there.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: They do a lot of things well, but it's harder when you're really on your own.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: Well, this is incredible.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna keep our eyes on you because we know where you are.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: And again, I I was so excited and so pleasantly surprised.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: And like I said, he survived the sharp tank of those guys because I've heard them interrogate people and they're not easy.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: So, this is an investor's choice award that's well deserved.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: And we're gonna, like I said, keep following your progress.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: I wish you the best of luck.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I hope everybody out there enjoys this episode.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's this is something that we're gonna keep our eyes on because this is gonna really change, I think, the way dermatologists practice medicine.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: And that's always always something good for us, is good for patients as well.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: So, everybody, I hope you all enjoyed this episode.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: Science of Skin Summit again 2026 is in the bag.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: It was a great time, great meeting.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: We want to thank all our speakers and our sponsors who were there.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: We're looking forward to Science of Skin longevity, which you might want to come to, Errol.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: That's gonna be in Scottsdale, Arizona, the 19th through the 21st of February.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: So that we're really excited about that.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's gonna bring on a whole new uh, I say, group of vendors and group of um products and things that'll be coming into the longevity space.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: So it's an exciting time in dermatology, and as expected, you're in the mix, Errol.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: So thanks so much, everybody.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: Have a great day, and again, congrats.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Gonnie.