TRISH:

Hello. It’s Trish Hammond here from the Transforming Bodies Podcast, and today I’m over, over excited. I am here at the end, actually, of the Rockstars Of Aesthetics2024 in Sydney at the W Hotel. And I’m here with Aaron Burton, who’s the CEO of Sciton Worldwide, Sciton Inc. And I’d like to have a chat with him because he’s got so many great, like, gems to share, and I’ve listened to his inspo and I just love him.

So I’m really excited to be here today. So welcome, Aaron.

AARON:

 Thanks for the invite, Trish. Is it gonna be fun? It is gonna be fun.

TRISH:

 It is gonna be fun. So tell me, how long have you been with Sciton?

AARON:

 I’ve been with Sciton for thirteen years.

TRISH:

 Okay. So you started in 2011.

AARON:

It’s 2011. Good math. Good job.

TRISH:

 I’m good at math. Yeah. Now so tell me, first of all, like, what’s your background? Because I believe that you actually started, like, not at the bottom because I don’t mean the bottom, but you kind of started from the ground roots level. Hey.

AARON: 

Yeah. It’s an interesting story. I mean, I started as a sales rep when I was in North Texas, and I guess I did that for two years, then I was in South Texas for two years, then I became a regional manager. But it’s, you know, interesting at Sciton. It’s very common for people to start at a lower ground level before they move up.

So I started in sales and then I ran a department or, I guess, a division of ours. Then I became our chief operating officer and then I became our CEO a little over four years ago.

TRISH:

 Oh, wow. It’s a bit like McDonald’s about the sound of it.

AARON:

 Yes.

TRISH: 

You have to serve the customers.

AARON: 

That’s why I like that example. I like that.

TRISH: 

Yeah. Awesome. So tell me, obviously, you’ve seen a lot of change because, like, how long has Sciton actually been going, when did it start?

AARON: 

We’ve been in business for twenty seven years. So we started in Palo Alto and we started as a little small little operation that Jim Hobart and Dan Negus founded. And it’s kind of a cool thing because they’re both still working hand in hand every day. Helping the company still today even though I’m the CEO. It’s really a partnership of the three of us and then all of our entire leadership team.

And it’s really cool to see where the companies come from. You know, I think we’ve always had the reputation of really quality high end products. You know, the Bentley of lasers is kind of the term you hear all the time. And we love that. But, you know, over the last, I’d say, six, seven years, we’ve really had an added focus on culture and who we are and how we take care of our people and what we can do for our people.

I think for twenty seven years, we’ve been known as the best laser manufacturer out there. And it’s a fun thing to build on.

TRISH: 

Yeah. That’s so interesting that you say that because I’ve only been in the industry since about 2013. And so when I started in the industry, I’d never even heard about Sciton. And even only up until about when it came to Australia, which I’m thinking is about five years ago, would that be right?

AARON: 

I think that’s about right. We hired Phil Schramm. We were nobody in Australia until we hired Phil. I think it was a little longer than five years ago. I think it may have been seven years ago.

But Phil is really what put us on the map here. And it’s interesting. I don’t think Australia is that much different than the US. It was a time – I’d probably go back seven, eight, maybe even ten years ago where Sciton was known as the best kept secret – In kind of the laser space, but we did not like that. That was not a compliment. You know, the people that knew us loved us, but most people didn’t know about us. Our brand really had not been built – or wasn’t, and you see that in Australia. And now I feel like we are really – after watching just this rockstar event this weekend – It was amazing how many people were here.

I mean, I expected it to be a good event, but it was even better than I expected. And you can see this is Sciton not twenty seven years ago, but it’s the earlier days of Sciton where it’s really starting to take off and the brand is really starting to pick up. It was really fun watching everything that was happening here this weekend.

TRISH: 

Yeah. And, you know, you’re so right in the sense of, like, it was, yeah, seven years ago, but it’s so funny because I hadn’t heard of it. And then when I heard of it, I I had no idea it was the company that it was. And the more I’ve gone – it hasn’t been the evolution of the company. It’s actually been the evolution of my mind because now I realise who is true you know, you know, what and who Sciton really is.

AARON: 

Yeah. And I don’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing. But I would say over the years, I don’t know that we did a really creative job building our brand. But you know what it does tell you? It tells you the power of people because I can tell you our products from day one, twenty seven years ago have always been the best.

Anybody who knows Sciton – knows we make really, really good products. And that just tells you that it’s not all about just the product. It’s a combination of the products and the people. And if you look at where we’ve come, who we are now in Australia, it’s really because of the people we hired. It starts with Phil.

I mean, Phil really deserves a lot of credit for helping us take a really good product and go build the brand. And he had such a good brand. So, you know, then to go to David Percival who heads our international business, who knew to go find somebody like Phil that could really complement a really good product. And, really, the change you’ve seen over the last five, six, seven years – is just really the people that we’ve hired. It’s always been a great product, but a great product alone.

It’s very hard to commercialise a product too. And Phil and the team have done a really good job of building our brand here.

TRISH: 

You know, you’re so right because I’ve met so many people before Sciton, I’ve met so many people in the industry. And Phil was always a standout for me because he just knew his shit, like, you know what I mean? Like, I don’t even know how to explain it because I’m not – well I have no qualifications in the aesthetic space whatsoever. I’m a consumer of things that are gonna make me look good. And so I’ve tried and done everything that you can possibly imagine, but Phil, when he spoke and he actually spoke you know, the lingo, the tech lingo, but it was so that I could sort of understand it in a way that it would affect me personally as a person. And so I’ve always thought that he was the smartest person in Australia in the aesthetic business. So you definitely did a good job employing the right person.

AARON: 

Yeah. Like how you said Phil knows his shit. He definitely knows his shit. Yeah. So much so that I’m not sure if I should report to him or he reports to me.

I don’t know how this works, but he’s very good, and I will tell you we do a lot of internal training on a lot of our products where Phil’s leading it. In some cases, we have our KOLs leading it. In some cases, we have our, you know, product management team leading it. But there’s a lot of cases where Phil’s coming in and leading stuff, which is really kinda cool. You don’t see that so much from a, you know, a country manager or a sales leader.

Usually the marketing or R and D side that’s leading up, you know, a technical talk. But, commonly, you’re here to filter on it. Yeah.

TRISH: 

Well, that’s true. I mean, having come as a leader from another competitor – and coming to you. I mean, he’s not gonna – you know, he’s not gonna do that for no reason.

AARON: 

Yeah. Well, first off, we don’t and we really don’t do that. It is very rare that we’ll hire someone from a competitor. I mean, we’ve really kind of liked it our way, you know, so someone who’s been in the business for a long time. But Phil was one of the first exceptions to the rule. Maybe one of a very few exceptions to the rule. We wouldn’t hire somebody from a competitor, and it really was a home run. And so he had so much knowledge and he’s so well known here and he’s so involved in teaching and education here that it has really been a good move for us.

TRISH: 

He’s definitely probably the most – I believe in my mind, the most highly respected person who works in a device company in Australia. I’ve got to say that for my part, from what I’ve seen, the people I speak to, you know, everybody has the utmost respect for Phil.

AARON: 

And I’ve heard the same thing. And we’ve heard that from when we were first recruiting and looking for somebody here. That was the common theme. And it’s really cool because now here we are, five, six, seven years later. We have to figure out how long he’s been.

I feel like it has been seven years. But it’s been a long time, and obviously he’s done really well. He’s been here for a long time. And just here this weekend, how many people were bragging about Phil? How many people were bragging about our people?

And you just have to remember that you could still have the best product, but you have to have great people too. And you have to go out and find the best people. And I think seven years ago, we did a really good job of that.

TRISH: 

Yeah. That’s so true. And you know what, on that topic of people, one thing that for me that has been an absolute standout is the fact that like, I I know that every business is in the business to make money and and all that sort of hoo-ha. But, like, seriously, Sciton is a people business. Like, it’s all about the people, once you join or become part of the “Sciton family”, it’s not whether that’s as a contractor, as an employee, as a sales rep, or as someone who’s buying a device, or whatever – you become a part of this family.

How has Sciton managed to do that? 

AARON: 

Well, I would tell you it’s been a lot of work, but I think it’s a lot of work and a lot of focus. I think over the years, we’ve realised that – I commonly talk about Milton Friedman once said, the business of business profits and every business needs to make money. Obviously, you can’t help people if you can’t have a business that makes money. But then Herb Kelleher was the founder of a company called Southwest Airlines in the US, and he had a phrase that the business of business was people. And I think you have to get that order.

Right? And if you understand that the way a business becomes successful is through people, your kind of your culture changes and the way you start acting changes. And over the years, we started doing really cool things like every quarter, we share our profits. So if we do really, really well as a company, don’t have two founders that say give me all the money. We have two founders that say we should share the money.

And then ten percent of all of it goes to all of our people. And we’ve done that for eighteen consecutive quarters now. So when we rolled out the program, it was thinking, man, we’re gonna be giving out a lot of money to people that we probably need this cash in the bank, but I gotta tell you some very interesting things happened. The more we gave to our people, the more profitable we became. And you realise that if everybody in the company is really an owner of the company, you treat everybody like an owner of a company. Well, they wanted to be a profitable business, and they started doing things a little bit differently.

And I guess that all probably started, I guess, probably five or six years ago. We really started focusing. And it’s, I guess, the answer to your question: we started focusing on culture.

TRISH: 

Yeah. That makes so much sense because even as a small business, like mine, if people have got skin in the game, I guess, for want of a better word, or that’s what we use in Australia’s terminology, skin in the game.

AARON: 

We use it too.

TRISH: 

I never know what’s different with that. But because if someone’s got some skin in the game, there’s not necessarily more effort put in, but there’s more of a connection that you wanna make that succeeds. That’s your thing. That’s your baby. You own it.

AARON: 

Yeah. Owners act differently. You’re an owner of a business. Then if you believe you’re an owner or a part owner in a business, you will act differently.

I don’t think we’re the first ones to prove it. But we’ve proven that if you have a bunch of people and we have nearly five hundred, employees or contractors, and if all of them are acting like they own the place, I mean that in a good way. I mean, everybody takes it more seriously. Everybody wants it to be successful. I mean, you start acting a little bit differently.

You treat customers differently. And it’s almost like we’ve had this snowball effect that has really worked out really well for us where It just seems they keep getting better and better and we keep bringing on more people and now we’re attracting people. This isn’t because we’re not so much in the business of recruiting people now. People are in the business of calling us wanting to come work for us all over the world. And it’s kind of a fun feeling to think, okay, and it wasn’t easy at the beginning.

So a small business is probably thinking profit sharing is not an easy thing to do because you’re giving away cash that you think you need in the bank, which you do need in the bank. So it’s complicated. But, you know, it’s something that I think that the more a focus you put on people and ultimately the more you end up giving to people, including profit sharing and ownership. Giving them a little bit of ownership or skin in the game. Ends up working out more in the end.

It actually benefits everybody in the end.

TRISH: 

Yeah. I agree one hundred percent because that way, when you make a mistake – in my situation where you put a wrong post up or you put the wrong whatever, it really freaking hurts because it’s like you’ve punched yourself in the face.

AARON:

Sure. And I mean, in business, you make mistakes all the time. And we talk about it. Mistakes aren’t bad. Making mistakes over and over again is bad, but we all make mistakes. You almost want to encourage mistakes.

You almost want to reward, you know, mistakes. But I think everybody that has that kind of a pride and ownership attitude, you know, takes that mistake a little more seriously, and they don’t make it again.

TRISH:

That’s so true. So can we briefly touch on because, like, can we briefly touch on how the company started and the fact that they’re committed to continuous improvement. Because I’ve actually been into the Office in Palo Alto, and on that last trip, I was blown away by – it was not like we have a business – It’s not like we’ve got a business, we’re gonna sit back. We’re gonna like – we’ve got this and we’ve got the best of us. But like, Sciton is committed to just always making better, better.

Like, there’s just so much stuff coming out that’s just always better and better.

AARON: 

We could talk about this for hours.

TRISH:

Maybe let’s just make it five minutes.

AARON: 

I mean, if you go back to when we started twenty seven years ago, it really starts with the people who deserve the most credit are Jim Hobart and Dan Negus. I mean, those were the two that founded our company twenty seven years ago. And they’ve always built what they’ve always wanted, and they’ve built a company on culture. They’re both physicists. They’re very scientific.

They’re very science-based. They’re very much the product’s gonna work. I can’t tell you how many times we have studied a product, looked at a product more than clinical research on a product, but ultimately we don’t launch the product. It’s somewhat crazy to think about how many things we’ve looked at that we could have launched and made a lot of money. But you sit back and you ask a question, I can’t tell you how many times Hobart has said, do you think the product works?

Not “do you think we can make money?” He says, do you think the product works? Then you really, your perspective changes. So, you know, we jokingly say, we only make shit that works. We’re not gonna roll out a crappy product.

But in this industry, while there’s a lot of good and I have to acknowledge, there’s a lot of good competitors out there too. There’s a lot of good products. There’s a lot more crappy products that you somewhat wonder how in the world did this product even get launched? Why did somebody even launch it? So really, I mean, the foundation of everything we do, from the quality of our products, the longevity of our products, the fact that we continue to innovate existing products, which helps our customers – if you take a product, you sell it to someone, and then you forget about it, then you go move on to somebody else’s – not the way we run our business!

It’s always about how you constantly provide a path for people to keep upgrading. If you think about all of that, it’s Hobart and Negus that deserve the credit for that. They started this twenty seven years ago. They’re still actively involved today and their fingerprints are around everything.

TRISH: 

You know, it’s so funny that you said that because it just made me think I’ve done a couple of interviews today. And one of the questions that I asked was, you know, well, what are you looking forward to next? Like, you know, because that and I’m talking, I’ve spoken to people that have got seven devices in their clinic, and they are looking forward to the next one. So that’s exactly what you’re talking about.

AARON: 

Yeah. We’ve developed a brand where almost it’s like 59.7%. We’ll just say 60% of all of our orders come from someone who already owns our device, which really tells you something. I think we’ve built a reputation over the years that we’re not gonna roll out a crappy product that doesn’t work. Therefore, when you roll out a new product, everybody wants it.

And you’ve seen that in 2020 because in 2020, we rolled out the new mJoule platform with Moxi on it, and everybody wanted it. Then we rolled out Hero, which is the next version of BBL. Everybody wanted it. In Q2, just, what, four months ago, just recently, five months ago, we rolled out HEROic – sales skyrocketed. And it’s mainly because it’s a lot of new customers, but it’s existing owners too, which makes you feel good that so many people that own your equipment come back.

You know, the fact that we’re here where you had hundreds of people in a room together where they’re happy. They’re not throwing anything at you. They’re not angry and pissed off at you because the product doesn’t work or their customers are upset. And in a time where you do hear a lot about the market is shrinking, you know, you know, consumer spending is going down, we have not seen that. And we have data proving that we have products Halo, MOXI, BBL, and Profractional compared to all of the competitors’ products are the only ones in the economy right now that are going up.

What does that tell you? That means our customers are gonna be happy right now, which is why you come to an event like this and everybody’s high fiving versus people are angry at you and throwing stuff at you.

TRISH:

And I guess that that kind of resonates back to, like, the practitioner is the one that you’re saying is happy, but then the patients are happy with the practitioner because, – like everyone was saying in my earlier interviews today – the reason they chose to use Sciton technology in their clinic is because the results speak for themselves.

AARON: 

Absolutely. And one thing – we track all the time, we’re always tracking. We have something called Sciton IQ on all of our systems. So it’s a modem and it’s sending data back to us. And it’s basically just telling us know what treatments are being done, what, you know, what settings are being used, how long the treatments are, and we watch that every single week.

We’re looking to see how that looks every single week. And we know that if our customers are doing well, that we will do well. It’s because we built a product that their customers, their patients keep wanting to come back and get more treatments. That’s the only way it works here. I mean, at some point, if you build a product and they come back two or three times and decide they don’t want to, they don’t like the product. They probably won’t come back to that provider again. If they don’t come back to that provider, the provider is not going to buy equipment from us anymore. So it’s that – you’ve got this whole snowball effect of everybody’s got a win here. You need a lot of treatments. You need patients that want to keep you coming to you.

You need patients that keep wanting to get a treatment, and then they keep coming back for more treatments, and then you see the treatment volume keep increasing. And then what happens? The provider says, well, I need another box or I need another system when you’re rolling out something new. I need whatever new you’re rolling out. And you saw a lot of that.

You saw a lot of people talking about the new stuff and wanting the new stuff here, but this isn’t even a sales event. We’re here to educate and train and help people become better at their profession, but people are buying systems while they’re here, which is not our priority.

TRISH: 

That’s so true. And and I guess as well, with the R & D, the fact that Sciton, you know, researches and develops every single product that they do. I think for me, I I mean, I have heard that a lot, but I didn’t actually realise what that kind of meant until I heard Andy speaking at GTM where he spoke about, you know, a piece of wood and and the fact that, like, the magnet thing or whatever, the the process of it actually – when a company – what I’m trying to say is when a company does the research and development, development starts with like a block of wood in the shape of something like it. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Because I heard it. I can’t repeat it, but I loved it when I heard it.

AARON: 

Watching a product be developed is pretty amazing. I mean, so speaking to Andy Balk who is an amazing engineer, one of our leaders that we have on our engineering team who was very instrumental in the HEROic product that we just launched. Take that product as an example, we’ve been working on that for eight years. And you go back to, you know, Chris Robb was talking about the stories when he saw the first ones and we had the rollers and all the different things we were trying. And, ultimately, you’ve got a team. And I would argue, and I don’t think it’s a stretch that we have the only R & D think tank or one of the few R & D think tanks, which is really an R & D based company.

I think there’s a lot of sales-focused companies or marketing-focused companies out there. And the reason you can prove that is because they don’t build their own stuff. They buy a lot of products that are called OEM. So there’s another manufacturer that’s building it and they put their label on it. And there’s a couple of little ancillary things that we do there too, but that is not our 95, 96% of everything we sell as a product that our team in Silicon Valley designed, manufactured, and we produce ourselves.

And every time we produce a product, that team is also going back to our customers going, well, how can we make it better? What can we do? And they give us ideas. And they’re constantly feeding us stuff And HEROic came from us listening for eight years trying to make it even better. One version was HERO, so he came out with HERO, but HERO was amazing.

And if you have a HERO, it’s a heck of a lot better than a pulse light device out there, but still wasn’t perfect. And we were still trying to perfect how in the world can you stand and have no overlap or pick your overlap and it never changes. You could get distracted. You know, you could get something that could happen in a room and that, I don’t know, one in ten, one in a hundred where you burn somebody because you got distracted is a big deal. I guarantee as a provider, they’re thinking that’s a big deal.

HEROic was created to prevent that. And that was our R & D team thinking about what, our R & D team listening, and then thinking how can we make that possible? And it is pretty. I mean, if you watch our R & D team when you see something from start to finish, and it’s pretty, it is unbelievable, actually.

TRISH:

 I reckon it would just be ongoing. Yes. So tell me, where to from here? Like like, because, like, is it possible for such to just keep getting better and better? Because it I mean, it looks like that, but the only thing it’s already, like, cut it, like, how much better can they make things?

AARON: 

Well, it is always hard from an R & D standpoint or just what the future looks like. It is always hard to predict it. But I can tell you, I’ve always said if you wanna predict the future, study the past when you have 27 years of history, and in those 27 years, we’ve launched more than thirty new products. I mean, it really starts to give you a lot of faith in, I will say, R & D is very hard. You know, there’s research and there’s development, and a lot of products that are in research never go into development.

Now once you’re in development, you can start predicting things a little bit more because you know it works. She decided, okay, here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna launch it in 18 months. Going to research something, you have thoughts, and you’re doing studies, and you think it’s gonna work, but you never really know. And it’s hard to kind of wrap your mind around that because not everything that you want to get launched or everything that you think is going to happen happens, but it’s not as stressful when you know.

You’ve been doing it for so long. And all of these people you know, Andy Balk won, but then you’ve got Rick Menafi who heads up our R & D team. And then you still got Hobart and Negus who are still still involved. And I could just start naming off people in our R & D team that are, man, amazing, that have been with the company for years and years, you know, fifteen years, twenty years. Some twenty five years and just all the good things that we’ve done and all the people that we’re bringing up for the future.

I mean, we’re thinking about, okay, we’ve done this for twenty seven years, but how do you go do it for twenty seven more? I mean, the fact that we’ve done it for so long really does give you a lot of confidence that even though if you don’t know exactly what’s gonna happen, although we’ve got some things in development that we know are gonna happen, you know, what’s gonna happen in the next twenty five years, it gives you a lot of confidence knowing you’ve done it for as long as we have.

TRISH:

For sure. And so tell me, and I’m guessing this is probably a really stupid question. Although, no, there’s no stupid questions. Has there been stuff that’s just been left on the cutting floor? Like thought, yep, and then No, it’s not gonna work. Can you just walk away from it? Or are they that determined to make something to work that like, surely, there’s gotta be some stuff that didn’t work that you had to get rid of, you know, surely.


AARON: 

No. There’s plenty of things that we’ve decided to scrap somewhere along the way thinking, you can’t work on everything. But I will tell you though, in R & D, and I’m not an engineer. But if you talk to an engineer, I think they would all probably tell you sometimes it’s not that a product you can’t like HEROic. If you go back five or seven years ago, we were really struggling to figure it out.

If you go back four or five years ago, four years ago, maybe it kind of went back on the shelf and thought we couldn’t we’re not really able to figure this out. And then something happens, some evolution or some change or some technology or at least some person comes in and says I have an idea. And then they can revive something that was sitting on a shelf for a couple of years. So it is crazy how the timing of all of it works. We’ve had plenty of things we’ve shelved.

We’ve had plenty of things that we thought were on the shelf that came to life and ended up being an amazing product.

TRISH: 

Yeah. Right. That’s so interesting because that makes so much sense because I don’t see the stuff that didn’t work. We just see the stuff that does work. Of course, there has to be stuff that doesn’t work.

AARON: 

Yes. There’s plenty of stuff. There I could go through a long list of things that are and I know that you never know. Maybe one day, they too do turn into something. There’s a lot of things you’re looking at too.

You’re looking at the product? And you’re looking at it, how big is the market opportunity? Are there enough providers out there to actually want it? Meaning, there’s a lot of things we could launch right now, and some people would be happy, but I don’t think it would be a very big market opportunity. I don’t think there would be enough people.

I don’t think the clients – or I don’t think there’s enough patients out there looking for it. I think we’ve seen some of our competitors rollout products that I thought I didn’t know would go roll out. I mean, that doesn’t seem to be a huge market opportunity for us. But if it becomes a market opportunity, guess what?

We’ve got something on the shelf that could do it.

TRISH: 

You guys are gonna do it?

AARON: 

We would do it.

TRISH:

Well, look, thank you so much. It’s been so good to talk today. I could probably actually sit and talk, you know that, but you’ve got a plane to catch.

AARON: 

I do. I love how you do this. I love how you’re just this normal for you. This is just a regular conversation. We’re sitting here.

It’s been fun. We could do this for a long time.

TRISH: 

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me today.

AARON: 

You’re welcome.

TRISH: 

So listeneners, if you wanna check out Sciton, honestly, you won’t be sorry. Sciton.com. You can even go to Sciton.com.au . It’s what we are in Australia. So thank you so much for joining us today.

So Aaron, Thank you.

AARON:

It’s been fun. Thank you.

TRISH: 

Thanks, Heaps. Yep.

AARON: 

Good job.