I’m A Hair Transplant Repair Patient
That is the basis for how I view the industry, through the eyes of a skeptic and that has kept me honest from the beginning. I first got started when I became the world’s first hair transplant blogger, sharing my repair experience in near real time, way back in 2002. I posted on all of the popular internet forums at the time and gained a strong reputation for being open and direct about my experiences. Fast forward a year and a half later and I was working for the clinic that saved me. That clinic was Hasson & Wong.
The Early Years
I worked for the clinic in the Seattle and Vancouver locations for eleven years. I would spent countless hours in the OR with both Dr. Hasson and Dr. Wong, learning the basics and then absorbing the details that make them so good at what they do. I wanted to understand all facets of hair restoration so my first day as a consultant was not spent online or on the phone. I spent it learning how to cut grafts. I learned the value of stereoscopic dissection. I spent hours observing the lead technicians placing grafts and of course I’m intimately aware of the finer nuances of how to remove a beautifully excised donor strip. I was an addict and beautifully performed hair restoration surgery by two masters of their craft was my fix, every day.
The first thing I was asked when Dr. Hasson, Dr. Wong and I agreed that I should work for the clinic had to do with my compensation. Having already established a strong sales background, I knew very well what it took to be a good salesman. However, I wanted nothing to do with being a salesman for my new position so I insisted on being a salaried employee rather than a commissioned one. I did not want to have the pressure, nor such an appearance, that I had a motivation based on meeting a quota or making enough money to buy a new toy. This proved to be the right decision as I was left to manage patient education as I saw fit. This is how I referred to being a consultant because as it is indeed an education, not a sales pitch, when you have a great product. One of commitments I made to the doctors once they hired me was that I would improve the rate at which patients would book appointments. At the time they were only booking for two weeks in advance and I told them that in one year I would have them booked six months in advance. Obviously, this was appealing to them. I fulfilled my promise in only six months.
Over the years of my tenure with the clinic I helped to push Hasson & Wong into greater internet popularity but this wasn’t through any sort of insincere manipulation. I was able to do this for two reasons.
It helps that both Dr. Wong and Dr. Hasson are masters of their craft. I needed to have that to work with because I learned long ago that you can’t put lipstick on a pig and tell anyone they’re looking at Marilyn Monroe.
I have a real passion for getting the word out about things that I believe in, and I believe the world should know about better hair restoration clinics. At the time, it was Hasson & Wong.
It is pretty simple, but the second point is what drove me to come up with new internal operations protocols, streamlining patient interactions, and making sure that when anyone looked at our work online that there really was no question as to the quality. Combined with being the face of the company online, having a deep understanding of hair transplant surgery, a real passion to help my balding brothers and sisters, and a willingness to challenge any patient or doctor that wished to debate our abilities and sincerity, I was able to propel Hasson & Wong to being the most recognized independent clinic in the world.
The Later Years
As time went on, I gained a positive reputation, not just with patients, but with clinics as well. Doctors in the field knew my name and many were aware of my reputation among patients. This eventually encouraged doctors to call me to ask my opinion on matters, or to seek my input on how they could improve their presentations and if I had any insight in how to deal with a particular patient that was unhappy. It seemed unusual at first but I was happy to help. Occasionally, these calls would also be for job offers as a few clinics were hoping they could recruit me to help them the way I helped H&W. I stayed where I was out of loyalty but also because I was happy.
This started to change when I started to realize that H&W was going to be left behind as FUE became more popular. The position of the clinic was that FUE was far inferior to FUT, and compared to most FUE clinics, this was true. But some were gaining on FUT both in numbers of grafts and quality of outcome and they were doing so more consistently than ever before. I saw the writing on the wall and in 2010 I refused to denigrate FUE as a procedure. I realized that the quality from doctors such as Dr. Cole, Dr. Lorenzo, Dr. Bisanga and a few others was really quite good and I could find nothing wrong with their results. Keep in mind, the challenge at the time was to get a high growth rate and naturalness wasn’t even in question because these doctors already understood how to do this with FUT. Unnatural results as a standard for FUE would not come until several years later.
I tried to get H&W to transition to FUE officially and to offer it as an adjunct procedure to start. Little known fact, Dr. Hasson was one of the very first doctors to offer FUE but he only did so for a few months back in early 2002. He stopped offering it because he didn’t believe it was good enough as a procedure to put his name on it. At the time, he was right. But in 2010, and for the next four years, I tried to turn this around and unfortunately the clinic held strong and resisted the call to become a hybrid clinic. In 2013 I attended the ISHRS conference in San Francisco and I received several tempting offers to leave H&W. In 2014, after nearly a year of negotiations, Dr. Rahal of Rahal Hair Restoration was successful and I was finally free to discuss FUE as an option for patients of a clinic I was working for. After six months, I realized that my problem was not working for this clinic or that clinic. My problem was that I could not truthfully tell patients that any clinic I work for is the best clinic for them. In other words, my ideas about which clinic is best for anyone evolved beyond what any single clinic can offer. In January, 2015 I officially left Rahal Hair Restoration and set out on my own. The Hair Transplant Mentor™ collection of exceptional hair restoration physicians was born.