Michelin for Barbers

Haircuts could be more science than art.

Every few weeks I get to reincarnate myself. I sit in a swivel chair, they pull up my ‘profile’, read out some numbers, and get to work sculpting my hair. After a while, I don my glasses and look in the mirror for damage control measures against the perceptions with which I’ll leave those I meet over the next few weeks.

I wish that besides reading out trimmer guard sizes they would also have a silhouette of my head. I even tried showing screen shots of a TV interview where I felt the cameras had captured two angles of my best haircut, yet no barber was able to replicate that.

We live in a world that transacts on a foundation of perceptions. You can choose the clothes you wear. You can choose the kind of smile you want to wear and where you can (and cannot) smile. You can practice your speaking style. You may even have the foresight to choose the right kind of vehicle to drive in because you are often judged by what you drive. However, the way you wear your hair is rarely in your control.

First impressions tend to last, and leaving a critical component of first impressions to chance seems shortsighted in an age where a realtor can virtually stage a home to help us visualize an empty room, a meteorologist can predict the weather for us, but hair stylists can’t predict or help us visualize the hair style they will deliver for us.

Haircuts are considered more art than science. Social media foments the image of a barber as an artist, and every head of hair as their canvas.

My grandfather had the same barber for years. The backyard barber, Gangaram got to decide how Grandpa must present himself to the world. His haircut used to be consistent month after month. Not everyone has the luxury of providing patronage to the same barber or hair stylist for a lifetime. Time available to spend on a barber’s chair is another constraint.

Just as the Michelin tire company created the Michelin ratings for restaurants, there may be an opportunity for, say, Monster ratings or LinkedIn ratings to create a rating system for barbers, rating them similar to Michelin – on quality, mastery of style and hair-styling techniques, personality of the barber, a balanced haircut, and consistency between visits.

When I observe how I can take a key and replicate it in a kiosk on a blank at the touch of a button, it makes me wonder if the haircut industry will embrace technology beyond having a scheduling app or an app to log the tools used by a stylist. Once a digital map of one’s head pre- and post-haircut is ready, it is probably a matter of time before we see a helmet-like device or kiosk pre-configured to give us that consistently perfect haircut. Meanwhile, that Monster-star or LinkedIn-star barber would work.

Small business, of medicine

 

If small businesses can surf on a community’s patronage, so can medical practices.

In a perfect world, physicians will attend to patients, give or prescribe medicines, and set the patients back on track to health. However, within the practice of medicine, lies the business of medicine. Learning how to navigate the business of medicine ultimately determines the success of a doctor and the satisfaction of the patient.

In the business of medicine, the principles of a profit-making business apply even though the care of fellow humans is best driven not by profit motive, but by altruism commonly associated with non-profit organizations. Non-profit is misunderstood as an endeavor that does need not profits. Even non-profits need to be profitable for self-sustenance.

Running a successful business (including the business of medicine) requires survival, and therefore, positive cash flow.

The challenge with being in the business of medicine is that doctors have fewer hours to spend healing patients. Electronic medical records software, if designed by patients, would have allowed for less staring into a computer by doctors and more eye contact with patients. When the initial or primary care of patients gets bogged down in systems it gives rise to a complex layer of administrative support. The success of a medical practice depends on both, bedside manners, and whether the administrative layer acts as a buffer for both, the doctors and patients, while removing bottlenecks in cash flow.

There may be business models worth exploring for certain service-based medical practices that entail low capital investment.

One model that comes to mind is that of a Chinese restaurant. Often, small towns across America have great Chinese restaurants thriving in a symbiotic relationship with the community they serve. The food is affordable, served hot and fresh, and they are open year-round, even on holidays. They accept cash payments, or for a little extra, credit cards. They probably have zero hurdles in their cashflow pipeline.

A good way to test the waters is in rural areas that could use more local doctors. If a rural medical practice is perceived as a small business that supports a community, and vice versa, whether with cash or in kind (assuming, comedian-ophthalmologist Dr. William E. Flanary’s YouTube alter ego Dr. Glaucomflecken’s skit on rural medicine is to be believed), there may indeed exist a viable patronage model for the small business of medicine. Perhaps, a thousand households in a community could directly fund and sustain a thriving medical practice. Noteworthy also, is renowned author-surgeon Dr. Atul Gawande’s description of a hospitalist in rural India who deftly and swiftly handles multiple medical issues of the local population, supported by the pharmacist across the street.

Such a local doctor could also use a small business’ marketing playbook and become a household name in a community.

The first step is for a community to accept the fact that a medical practice is in the business of doing good, but also one that must remain viable as a small business.

Picture credit: Photo by NCI on Unsplash