Find out why Anna Dempsey from Skinvae ditched paper and loves Consult

From Salon Owner to Clinic Owner

Anna Dempsey has been in the industry for 13 years, opening her first salon 12 years ago at the striking age of 19. With the success of one salon not being enough, she opened her second business Skinvae in Cambridge five years ago. “At Skinvae we started with your standard beauty treatments like massage and waxing, but now we’ve gone into higher-end treatments like skin tightening, injectables and cosmetic tattooing”

The Green Eyebrow Epidemic…

Unlike other countries, in New Zealand there is no law or regulation for injectables or cosmetic tattooing. Anna believes invasive treatments should require a thorough consultation to ensure that clients receive the results they desire and to protect yourself and your business.

The green eyebrow epidemic has lead to Skinvae becoming famous for transforming botched jobs. Anna believes that a lot of the work she fixes could have easily been prevented from going wrong if a thorough consultation took place. “A lot of my ‘fix-up’s’ are because the client was tattooed while they were on a certain medication, making for a bad end result. If the tattooist did a consultation and asked the right questions, they would know why it’s gone AWOL.

Depending on what treatment the client is having done they may need to fill out multiple consultation forms. For example, our cosmetic tattooing form is four-pages long and goes really in-depth.

Great Consultation + Medical History = ‘On Fleek’ Brows and Happy Clients

When Anna is doing a fix-up job, she needs a lot of information about the client’s previous tattooing experience, as well as their skin and medical history. This helps her work out what steps she should take for the best results. “We need to make sure that we are asking the right questions, we need to know everything about their skin, medications and what they’ve been doing, not just now, but up to ago a year ago!”

Skinvae also has a cosmetic tattooing agreement form which states that the client has agreed to the shape and colour and that they want to go forward. Anna would advise any cosmetic tattooing business to do the same and make sure everything is thoroughly documented and signed off before starting work on a client.

A client could come back to you and say that they’ve changed their mind and that they’re unhappy, so it’s important to make sure that we have everything documented and signed so that we’re protected.

Skinvae does this level of documentation for all invasive treatments to protect themselves, but also to protect the client so they know what they’re getting.

It’s all about the client’s signature, that’s why Skinvae uses Consult

If you’re not currently getting your clients to sign on the dotted line, you’re putting your business at great risk. Anna knows that having signatures and before and after photos is everything when it comes to protecting a business that offers invasive treatments.

Consult protects our business as it ensures we’ve got proof that the client signed off on what we’ve done.

“Consult sets out everything really clearly so you can have signatures under each area of a form so that the client isn’t just singing once, which sometimes doesn’t hold up in court. You have that guarantee when you have your consultation and the before and after photos, you’re sorted.”

Okay, Consult sounds great, but going paperless is a nightmare, right?

Nope, it’s easy, it took Skinvae one day to move over 10 of their paper forms onto Consult. “We’ve gone completely paperless with Consult. I found it really easy to make the forms, I think we have at least 10 forms on Consult and we did it in a matter of a day. So we went paperless in a day.”

They still have some paper files, but when those clients come back in, the therapists ask the client to re-fill out the consultation form on Consult so they can get rid of all the paper ones.

From paper to iPad

We know it’s a big change moving from paper to iPads, so we asked Anna how her staff and her clients are finding it. “We weren’t using iPads in the salon beforehand, but as soon as Consult came out, we purchased two iPads and they’re constantly used. Our clients find iPads really easy to use, we thought it would be an issue because we do have some older clients, but it’s super easy, we just show them how to do it and then they’ve got it.”

Save time and money on painful data entry

Anna is noticing that Consult saves a lot of time, money and helps make sure you’ve got the correct details when it comes to processing forms. “Some clients don’t have the most readable handwriting, with Consult you’re more likely to get the correct information first try. Also, not having to input consultations ourselves saves me $200-300 in wages per week. My staff used to literally spent two days a week transferring all of the data into the computer, so really I’ve paid off my iPads in a couple of months. I don’t know why people wouldn’t use it, to be honest!”

My staff used to literally spent two days a week transferring all of the data into the computer, so really I’ve paid off my iPads in a couple of months. I don’t know why people wouldn’t use it, to be honest!

Going paperless is easier than you think, and it can be as simple as getting a couple of iPads, downloading Consult and setting aside a day to create and review your forms!

Annas advice to you (It’s ‘start using Consult!’ But you can hear it from her)

1. It makes your client experience seamless

“Let’s say your regular Jane comes in. Thanks to Consult you have everything there in front of you, no searching for files or history required. You’ll know exactly if she’s on any medication, if she’s got any allergies and what her treatment history is. You can check Consult and the information is already right there.”

2. Paper is the WORST

“The biggest thing, I think, is saving time with not having to print consultation forms out all the time, and always have enough ink, because if you’re using paper and you run out of ink all of a sudden, you have no consultation forms! What are you gonna do? You’ll need to get ink from the store. What if you run out of paper? That used to happen to us all the time, also, we were constantly wasting consultation forms and we hate wasting stuff. We wouldn’t go back to paper now, I wouldn’t even know where to start with the paper consultation form or filing it away, it would be a nightmare!”

3. It’s 2019 and We’re not living in the dark ages

“The environmental factor of not using paper is also important to me, as a boss it shows I’m using my initiative to look for other things to stop being wasteful. Keeping up with the times is crucial, especially with younger staff. A lot of my staff are in their early 20s and they’re really up to play with all the technical stuff. I feel like if I didn’t have Consult, they’d be like “why don’t you have Consult? Keep up with the times, it’s 2019, we’re not back in the dark ages!”

Thank you Anna and the rest of the team at Skinvae for your time last month, we loved speaking to such an inspirational business and gaining insight into how useful Consult is for your business. If you’re feeling inspired to go paperless, download Consult today, here.