I loved the question about the salesman and the consultation [see: Hair Salesman]. I am a professional salesman selling high end cars, and I fully understand this issue. When one is selling a car or a service, the businessman asks: how many people does one have to go through to get a sale? Now with that said, How many prospective candidates do you go through to make a sale?

We call this conversion rates. Taking 100 people coming through, how many will sooner or later (within 2 years) make the decision to have a surgery. I have found that the number for my practice is between 33-40% and for other doctors working for me it is about 25-30%. My ‘conversions’ are higher because most of the people who come to see me know about my reputation in advance and often have made up their mind in advance of the visit. I am often the last doctor that they will visit. Still, my conversion numbers are low because I turn down most women (they often can not be helped), young men (who are too young and therefore too early in the process), people with unrealistic expectation, etc.. A salesman would view that the right conversion rate should be the majority of people coming through the door-whether they truly needed the surgery or not. When I had worked for another medical group who had employed a full time sales force, the conversation rates ranged between 50-95%! They would have fired me for my low conversion rate if I was one of their salesmen. That tells me that those doctors who employ salesmen, insulate themselves from the patient. These doctors build more a money focused practice than a people focused practice. My style is to use the medical forums and meeting, my website, the internet and activities like this BaldingBlog to communicate and educate, then have the prospective patient come to see me after they are informed. I have built a boutique practice where I have Hollywood stars and heads of state or CEOs of large companies as often as blue collar workers.

I am 34 years old and I have a receding hairline. Now, I am getting a bald spot on the top of my head. What should be my first course of action to save my hair?

The first course of action should be to see a competent doctor who understands the male pattern balding (MPB) process. He will examine the hair on different parts of your scalp and look for the amount of miniaturization that you are showing in various locations. The things he will identify will not be the level that you can see with the naked eye as balding occurs slowly and insidiously and can not be picked up without high powered examination of the hair. Based upon a proper examination, he should develop a master plan for you that will cover your worst case scenario and probably include the use of medications for MPB if that is your diagnosis.

I was doing some research on your company and your service and was intrigued to see a number of actual patient photos and their results. I was very impressed, but I did not see any photos of patients with blonde hair. I am 26 years old and have incredibly blonde, fine hair and I am interested to see if I can get similar results as your other patients and how natural it will look given my complexion.

Do you have any photos of light blonde patients? If so, could you forward them to me or send me a link if you have them posted online. Thank you for your time.

Blonde hair is my ideal patient because of the low contrast between hair and skin color. In our video, there is a fellow with VERY fine platinum blonde hair who had a relatively low number of transplants in an advanced balding pattern. You can see that his results are better in proportion to the balding pattern and other hair colored people. You can get a free copy of our video (now on DVD) by calling 800-NEW-HAIR or visiting newhair.com.

Also, take a look at Patient VS on the NHI site. This young man had excellent results with blonde hair. Unfortunately, the photo made the hair appear much more sandy colored than the pictures suggests. Blondes are my best patients and those blondes with ‘reflective’ blonde hair do even better. We do have a lot of patients online, but I don’t believe there are any that truly represents a platinum blonde hair color. We’re continuously adding new patients, so please do keep checking back for updates.

Received this email yesterday…

Why would someone who has been in Cardiac, Orthopedic and General Surgery be doing Hair Transplants? Did you fail at these other fields?

I would start off saying that I was very successful in every field I have been in. Part of the reason that I moved around a great deal was general boredom or lack of stimulus. In the hair restoration field, I have had the opportunity to become intimate with my patients. I have had similar intimacy with my patients when I treated their cancer, but the involvement with them was make the best out of a bad situation. If they survived the cancer, they wanted to forget it and I was more part of that period of their life (where forgetfulness is part of the denial process).

In hair restoration, the entire process up-scales as it progresses. The further down the path you take it, the more the intimacy and the pure pleasure you get with each milestone the patient achieves. First, getting to establish rapport is a challenge. Two people getting together, one with a problem and the other with a potential solution. The prospective client wants to determine: “Can I trust this doctor to do what it is he says he can do?” Once the relationship is cemented in place, you plan together what you are going to do. You share his/her intimate thoughts and fears and guide him/her though the plan like an architect experiences when he/she shows the plans for a new house to a home buyer/builder. This is a wonderful experience that for me only gets better as I deliver what it is I promise to deliver. While waiting out the growing stage, like a find lawn and garden, it takes time for the brown dirt to turn green and for the flowers to bud and bloom. But when the hair comes in, wow, what a HIGH it is for the doctor and patient to share.

I have been in the unique position of having done some of the most difficult surgeries on the human body. Early in my career, being able to perform them competently was my goal. The intimacy part of the process in the world of difficult surgery does not have the same significance with it as in the hair restoration business. The general surgery focused for me on issues of technical competence in the first half dozen years. Once I had proved to myself that I could perform almost all of the difficult surgery before me and treat the sickest of patients, the process becomes a matter or routine. Every sick patient in Intensive Care is so sick that they are as far from their normal selves as they could be. Aortic Aneurisms are the same. The ones that are acutely life saving (like those that are rupturing) brings up the adrenaline in the surgeon. Like a ride on a roller coaster, the feeling is frightening and wonderful, both at the same time. But the anxiety of holding a human life in your hands, no matter how exciting, still produces bad outcomes and brings heart break to surgeon and families. Half of all ruptured aortic aneurism patients die within a day of the event, even in the hands of the greatest surgeons. Hair, on the other hand, is almost a complete opposite experience for the surgeon. The results almost always come out the way a good surgeons predicts that they should. The key to success, like aortic aneurism surgery, is skill and in building a good surgical team. The hair restoration business is no different on this technical end where skill and team building is critical, but the patient is always awake and he/she is coming to see the doctor because he/she wants to be there (not has to be there like a ruptured aneurism). My days in the office make me feel that I have great value to people and because of the trust that is built, I have looked at many of my patients as friends for life.