You won’t find it written into the average business school curriculum, but the number one rule in commerce is there are no rules, no conventional paths that need to be slavishly followed.
Ask Spanx boss Sara Blakely, who sold fax machines door-to-door for seven years before establishing her influential shapewear brand at the turn of the millennium. Or talk to AXS TV founder Mark Cuban, whose background as a disco dancing instructor predates the behemoth pay television channel he launched in 2001.
The world is indeed peppered with leaders who deliberately plowed unorthodox furrows. Tom Barr could be the only person in history who went back to graduate school to get out of banking – his joke, not ours.
“Growth allows you to do things, throw things up against the wall, try new ideas; some work, some don’t.”
The Virginia native’s decidedly non-linear career trajectory took him from finance to pharmaceuticals (GlaxoSmithKline) to coffee (Starbucks) to rideshare startups (Hailo Network) to the cosmetic surgery sector, where he now resides as President and CEO of Sono Bello, the largest practice of its kind in the United States.
“I knew nothing about the cosmetic surgery industry,” he admits with a refreshing dose of candidness. “When I first started, I knew I had a vision for where we wanted to go, but not actually a lot about the product side. But I barely drank coffee when I started at Starbucks and I ended up as the Head of Global Coffee.”
Under the aegis of Howard Schultz – the legendary Starbucks CEO, who himself had humble beginnings as a Xerox salesman after growing up in a Brooklyn housing project – Barr was schooled on how growth is sacrosanct to any company, irrespective of its size or status.
“It allows you to make a lot of mistakes. Growth allows you to do things, throw things up against the wall, try new ideas; some work, some don’t,” he notes.
“But I also learned that growth with a mission behind it is supercharged. It gets everyone rowing together, because they care about where the company is going and what they’re trying to achieve.”
Transforming lives
Sono Bello was founded in 2008 with the aim of providing accessible cosmetic surgery to the public. Today, that ethos remains central to Barr’s quest to ‘democratize’ cosmetic surgery, a process he insists not only leads clients on a journey toward a more confident, ‘beautiful’ life, but in a roundabout way, also translates positively to the company’s 1,700 team members.
“Our flywheel is that we believe that if we change our patients’ lives – of whom 85 percent are women – that will allow us to open new centers as the success will generate cash flow. Those new centers will thus allow us to reach more patients,” he says.
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“But it will also mean we can transform our team members and grow their careers. Last year, about 10 percent of them were promoted inside the company.
“We believe by transforming their careers, they get more bought into the mission of changing patients’ lives, which allows us to open more new centers and do it all over again. That’s the circle of growth we try to adhere to.”
A new look
At the last count, Sono Bello, based in the eastern Seattle suburb of Bellevue, had 126 premises on its books, delivering a total of more than 4,500 high-quality transformations per month.
Its team of more than 150 surgeons – whom Barr describes as “part artists, part scientists” – specialize in liposuction and body contouring, a surgical concept that includes procedures such as abdominoplasty (tummy tucks) and breast augmentation, and which enhances the draping of skin and tissue after weight loss.
“We don’t believe in vendors, we believe in partners.”
Barr is also pumped about LiftEX, a recently introduced laser liposuction treatment, touted as a less invasive alternative to traditional body lifts or torsoplasty procedures.
“We strongly believe that you’re not allowed to grow if your patients do not feel they received the service or the treatment they expected,” Barr stresses.
“We survey them after a week when they come in for the first post-op treatment. We see what their net promoter score is, ask how they’re feeling about us and how they feel about the treatment during surgery. Then at three months, we do another survey. So one week tells you about the experience, three months tells you about the final outcome.
“We have more than 50,000 five-star reviews, but we monitor every one, two or three-star review and contact those patients. But the important part is being able to acknowledge what any issues are and fix them quickly and efficiently.”
This customer base, he adds, tends to span the US$75,000 to US$150,000 household income bracket – the archetypal American middle-earner set.
“We’re not doing surgeries for the rich and famous,” he says.
Partnering for prosperity
However, Barr is quick to flag that it’s the relationships he enjoys with outside suppliers that help Sono Bello resonate with clients and staff, and ultimately elevate the entire business. He singles out affiliations with performance marketing agency Havas Edge, health and wellness credit card CareCredit, medical supplies giant Medline Industries and real estate services firm CBRE Group.
Still, he strongly believes these alliances would rapidly turn to dust without an appropriate degree of reciprocity.
“We don’t believe in vendors, we believe in partners. I always tell them, ‘I recognize that you need to make a profit to grow your company, grow your employee experience, satisfy your shareholders and so forth,’” he acknowledges.
“As partners, we need to work together so we can also make our profit. And at times, we need to lean on them and at other times, they need to lean on us. When you find that balance, you have a good partnership across the board.”
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With the value of the global cosmetic surgery industry expected to hit US$207 billion by 2033, Barr is bullish about plans for expansion, insisting the company could easily double its current number of locations, while keeping one eye on a possible move into Canada before hopefully fanning out across Europe, South America and Asia.
This would no doubt present an opportunity for the Sono Bello CEO to leverage the experience he’s amassed across a gamut of sectors.
“Great entrepreneurs, great leaders, find the reason for their mission and push that into the culture of the company,” he reflects. “At the end of the day, team members want to know that they’re coming to work doing something of a higher purpose.
“At Starbucks, I’d tell people that we’re not changing anyone’s life, but we are often the first person somebody talks to in the morning – they may have not even spoken to their spouse. If that conversation or cup of coffee isn’t right, have we ruined their life? No, but we might have given them a moment of the day that is not going to be as great as yesterday.
“That was the Starbucks mission: How do you nurture the human spirit? Our mission at Sono Bello is: How do you help people live a more confident life?”
