DEEP DIVE: The Esthetician's Path to Success: Unveiling Client Psychology with Douglas Preston Part 1

[Intro] Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Facially Conscious with myself, Trina Renea, Esthetician, Dr. Vicki Rappaport, dermatologist, Rebecca Gadberry, the cosmetic ingredient guru, and our fabulous overly educated consumer, Julie Falls. 

We are gathered here together with you to talk about this crazy world of esthetics. It's confusing out there in this big, wide world. That's why we are here to help explain it to you all, subject by subject. We will be your go-to girls. 

And from our perspective, without giving medical advice, we will keep things facially conscious. 

Let's get started!

00:59 Rebecca Gadberry: Well, hello out there, and welcome to the Facially Conscious podcast where you get the skinny on all things skin. I'm Rebecca Gadberry and I'm our local ingredient expert around here.

And this is Trina Renea. 

01:13 Trina Renea: Hello. 

01:14 Rebecca Gadberry: Who is our wonderful esthetician and a very good friend. We just love doing this stuff with you guys. 

01:22 Trina Renea: Yes, and today we're doing an excellent deep dive with someone very important in our industry. I'm so excited he is on.

01:31 Rebecca Gadberry: Yes, his name, I'll save that for just a second. We're going to be talking about the psychology of esthetics. Most people think, “Well, I just go in. I get my skin worked on and I leave,” but there's a lot behind what happens to help you feel better about yourself, to feel more connected, to feel less stressed. There's a lot of work that goes into helping you, as our clients, relax when you're in that chair or on that table. 

02:02 Trina Renea: And there's the psychology for the esthetician as well, dealing with clients.

02:08 Rebecca Gadberry: And a lot of the problems that we bring to our estheticians, we leave them there in the room with them, and then we leave and they have our problems. So, what do they do?

Also, when you're a popular esthetician, how do you take care of yourself going from one treatment to the next to the next to the next without any downtime to take care of yourself? Being other-focused.

02:30 Trina Renea: There's a way that I teach estheticians about that particular thing that we could talk about with Douglas too. 

02:36 Rebecca Gadberry: Excellent. So you slipped there. You said, ‘Douglas’. 

We are going to be talking with, as a matter of fact, he is on the line with us right now, Mr. Douglas Preston. Hello, Douglas. 

02:48 Trina Renea: Hi, Douglas.

02:49 Douglas Preston: Hi, everybody. Thank you for having me. 

02:52 Rebecca Gadberry: Absolutely. When we talked about Facially Conscious last year, when we were starting to talk about concepts and episodes, we said we have to have Douglas on. 

03:02 Trina Renea: We finally got you a year later. 

03:06 Rebecca Gadberry: Let me explain why we're so excited about Douglas. For those of you who don't know Douglas, if you're in the esthetics industry, you know Douglas. But for those of you who are not, Douglas is one of the most experienced estheticians in our business. He's been working in professional esthetics for 40-plus years, and yet he's only 30 years old. It's amazing how that works. 

03:30 Trina Renea: Because he ages backwards. 

03:31 Rebecca Gadberry: Yes. Actually, Douglas and I are the same age. He's been in spa management. He's done skincare career mentoring. His business articles appear in a lot of our top trade journals and magazines. He was even named the Day Spa Association Spa Person of the Year and voted favorite spa consultant in an American Spa Magazine readers poll. American Spa is one of our leading magazines for the spa industry. And these are people in the spa industry who voted him as one of their favorite or their favorite spa consultant. 

He just published a book called An Esthetician's Guide to Growing a Successful Skincare Career. Not business, but career. And is a top seller among ambitious working skincare professionals, not only just in the United States but all over the world.

In 2022, he was inducted into the DERMASCOPE Magazine's acclaimed Academy of Legends. I was inducted like 15 years ago, I'll have you know. But, anyway, I beat you to it. 

Douglas and I are like brother and sister. I was just explaining to Trina. We pick out each other so you may hear some of that.

And this is a coveted distinction for the spa and skincare professionals, because it's who's made it as far as making exceptional contributions to the growth and the excellence in our industry, the esthetics industry.

He also has consulted for spas and salons internationally. His clients have included Estee Lauder Spas, Kimberly-Clark Corporation. I remember that project that you and I worked on for Kimberly-Clark. That was a blast. 

05:15 Douglas Preston: Oh, that's right. You were there.

05:16 Rebecca Gadberry: Yeah, we had so much fun. Kimberly-Clark brought us in with some other professionals to talk about the idea of them opening spas. I can't go any further because of our nondisclosure agreement, so I better stop that. 

And he also works with many day, medical and resort spas that are seeking assistance in staff training and profitability. He's really good on helping to give better service, more service at value and helping the esthetician make more profit so that they can stay in business and keep serving you.

He's also just started a new company, which we will talk about at the end of the podcast. 

We want to welcome you. And I think, Trina, didn't you have a little something you wanted to say too?

06:04 Trina Renea: Yes. I just wanted to say welcome, first of all, Douglas. I got introduced to who you were in 2004 when I became an esthetician. I was searching out a really good esthetician in the market that I could go to in Los Angeles and get advice from, because I was in school.

I found who became my mentor, this woman who was in Allure Magazine is one of the best estheticians. She taught me so much. I was like, “Should I charge $50 for a facial?” And she's like, “No, you charge what I charge.”

At the time, it was like $135 she was charging 20 years ago, and that was a lot. 

She's like, “You know, you charge what you're worth.” And she's like, “I learned this from Douglas Preston.”

I was like, “I don't know who that is, but okay.”

And she goes, “No, you charge what you're worth. And if you want to give someone a deal after that, but you put your dollar amount where it should be.” She was like quoting Douglas. 

Then maybe like a year later, maybe less, she went to one of his classes, Douglas's classes. She came back and she's like, “Okay, he convinced me. I'm changing my prices to $200.” She jumped from $135 to $200. 

And I was like, “What are you doing? You're going to lose all your clients.”

07:29 Rebecca Gadberry: Douglas, what’s the story behind that?

07:31 Trina Renea: No, and she said, “Listen, I want to work less and make more. This is what he taught me. And so I'm going to bump up my price to $200. Everybody who can afford $200 is going to come to me and then they're friends and I'm not going to have to do as many facials. And if I lose the people below that, it doesn't matter because I need to make the $200.”

07:54 Rebecca Gadberry: They can go someplace else. 

07:55 Trina Renea: Right. So I was like, “Oh, my God, oh, my God, should I do it?” I mean, I've only been an esthetician for a year.

And she was like, “You should do it.” So we did it together and I raised my price too. But I grandfathered in all my clients. 

08:12 Rebecca Gadberry: You did it the chicken way.

08:14 Trina Renea: Yes. I was like, “None of you have to pay this. You can keep paying what you're paying, but my new price is $200. So anyone who comes to me after this is $200.” That's kind of how I did it, but I did it, and it was because of Douglas.

08:28 Rebecca Gadberry: She owes you a commission, Douglas. 

08:32 Trina Renea: Then anytime I go to any of the facial conventions and he'd be there speaking, I would sit in all his classes. 

08:40 Douglas Preston: Thank you so much. 

08:43 Trina Renea: And every successful esthetician I know in the business says it's because of Douglas. I mean, he's really helped a lot of us in the industry go a long way. 

And the way that you teach, Douglas, with this, the psychology of the whole game, the whole thing, the whole thing that we do is so important that I feel like a lot of people who don't make it, it's because they're not doing that part, which is what you teach a lot of. 

Can you talk to us about that, how you teach estheticians to address and support the psychological needs of the clients during treatments and also for themselves?

09:28 Douglas Preston: Sure, sure. And thank you. I'm a little overwhelmed by that introduction from the two of you. Thank you so much. 

You know, I hear a lot of nice things, but I only do this for the money. The advice that I gave about raising your prices, I had no idea if that would work or not. I just wanted someone else to try it. I figured if it succeeded, I would raise my prices, but why take the risk?

09:58 Trina Renea: Oh, my God, you're hilarious.

09:59 Rebecca Gadberry: Did you raise your prices? You raised your prices. I know you did. 

10:04 Douglas Preston: I’ve never stopped. 

10:06 Rebecca Gadberry: Weren't you a psychology major in college? 

10:09 Douglas Preston: Behavioral psychology. One of the differences in various schools of psychology is when you study behavioral psychology, what you're really focusing on is behavior based on observation and listening.

For example, if you want to know where to put the cat toys in the grocery store, you have to look at who's reaching for them? It's the children in the carts, right? Because they're fun. So they move the cat toys to where a child in a cart can reach them because the cat, as you know, if you've ever owned one, they don't want the damn thing. They want a bottle cap, right?

10:50 Rebecca Gadberry: Or a box.

10:53 Douglas Preston: But the kids, they locate it there. Well, this happened and it's rather simple. But, on the other hand, it takes a lot of time. You have to make sure that what you're seeing is what's happening.

So through observation, through interview, through listening and compiling evidence, you can then begin to make decisions whether it is about how you're going to interact with other people, how you're going to position your business, the protocols that you use when introducing a new client and how you talk to them afterwards.

When I opened a spa business, all of that was studied and turned into a method that I could teach all of my employees how to do. We eliminated as much of the guesswork as possible, not 100%, that's for sure. But it's based on what years and years of client work has taught me through interviewing them, listening to them, watching them. 

They come out of the treatment room and to the desk. What do they say? What are they looking for? What are the comments that they make? This is all evidence.

In fact, it's what the esthetics business really is. It's purely client experience. And then all the rest is just something that has an influence on that, positive or negative. This is why I could take neophytes, people right out of school, and they would appear to be highly-experienced technicians, mostly because of what they said, not because of what they did, because the doing was controlled by the house. This is how you do this thing. 

12:43 Rebecca Gadberry: By the spa, yeah.

12:46 Douglas Preston: Right. But the communication was not so much scripted but directed. As a result of that, a new person could seem like, wow, they really know what they're doing, because of what they said and how they responded.

13:04 Trina Renea: So you teach your estheticians in your office how to do that?

13:10 Douglas Preston: When I had them. I haven't been an employer for quite a long time. And every day that I'm not one, I'm grateful. 

13:18 Rebecca Gadberry: Yes. Douglas had one of the top spas in the country in Northern California, in the Los Gatos area. No, in the…

13:27 Douglas Preston: It was In Saratoga, which is next door. 

13:28 Rebecca Gadberry: Saratoga area, yeah. 

13:30 Trina Renea: Did you sell it? 

13:32 Douglas Preston: I sold my interests in it. I had a partnership with my first wife. When that marriage ended, shortly after, we had to complete the divorce. One of us needed to go. I didn't want to be saddled with that thing, so I took a buy out for about 10 more years and then sold it to another party. It probably started circling the drain right about then. COVID finally knocked it out. 

But, yeah, it was a celebrated business. I'm certainly proud of its legacy, but it didn't die under my watch. 

14:15 Rebecca Gadberry: It thrived under your watch. What were the kind of things that you taught newbie estheticians to do that the newbie estheticians of today could do too, and even longtime pros? 

14:29 Douglas Preston: Well, Rebecca, the first thing that you have to realize, and I have proven this again and again as I do presentations at trade shows, is to realize that most estheticians don't have a clue what the facial client is like. 

I might have 200 estheticians in a room, right? And I'll say, “Okay, guys, I don't want to embarrass you. But how many of you in this room, before you got your license, was a customer of an esthetician and went and paid for a facial every month?” 

And everybody laughs. They all laugh. That's like hiring a chef who's never tasted food. 

15:16 Rebecca Gadberry: Absolutely. 

15:18 Douglas Preston: I'm like, “Look, I'm not trying to embarrass you, but when you have a customer that comes in, you have the professional's perspective of what you're doing, not the customer’s. They have a different way of looking at this.”

So the question is what is that? What's the best way then to take that knowledge and turn it into something that we can use for building our business and enhancing our reputation and growing it? 

So, we start there. I know that when I have a new hire, even if these guys wanted to become estheticians and were having facial treatments, that's still not enough, because there's a bias there. 

So when I would train people, I would say, "Look, we're going to take the point of view that you are a schoolteacher, you are a stay-at-home mom, you're a busy executive, you're a real estate agent, all the things that our customers are. And what you're not, which is an esthetician. I don't care how much knowledge you think you've gathered through reading and through magazine articles and now of course internet, it's a lot of noise and a lot of information. But how do we distill that into something that's functional for an individual, particularly a potential customer?”

What we have to do is to learn the art of interviewing. Listening, interviewing and then asking the correct questions, because, to me, the esthetics business is two-thirds entertainment business and one-third practical. The better you are at entertaining, the better the practical part will seem. 

What I mean by entertainment is making a customer feel better when they leave than they did when they come in. It sounds simple. In fact, when I had my spa, those were our marching orders. 

17:17 Trina Renea: That's what I also tell people when I'm training estheticians is that what we do, every esthetician does. It's your personality and how the client relates to you that makes them want to come back and trust you.

So asking a lot of questions in the beginning to get to know them and make them feel like they're being heard, you know who they are, you're listening to them, is part of the whole thing. Because, then, by the time you get them on the table, they trust you because you've listened, you've heard what they said, you repeat what they said. 

You just pay attention to those concerns that they're talking about and that'll get you through the first one and get a new booking on right away. 

18:02 Douglas Preston: You're absolutely right. It's also the right questions in the right order. For example, I developed a consultation program forever ago. Every esthetician had this guide and it was a guide how to conduct this consultation.

One of the first questions is, “Have you ever had a facial treatment by a professional in the past?” One of the first questions. “Yes or no?” Well, if no, then, okay. If not, what attracted you to the idea of doing it? 

What we're trying to find out is what are the underpinnings of this? We could say, “Oh, well, it's obviously skincare.” Well, wait. Hold it. That's still jumping the gun.

The next question then is if you have had a facial treatment in the past and you thought, “Wow, that was great. I loved that. That was worth the money.” What do you recall about it? That’s a very important question. It's not leading. It's not, “What did you like about it? What was the best part?” No. What do you recall about it?

What happens then is the client repeats back the things they remember in order of importance. 

19:19 Trina Renea: And you write that down. 

19:21 Douglas Preston: You write it down. And almost all of it is visceral and emotional. It is not technical. 

19:29 Trina Renea: You know what's interesting about that? When I first started out as an esthetician, my facials were two hours long, because I'm like, “If I'm going to charge $135, I better make it worth their time.” So they were two hours long. 

Shortly after those, within a month or two, I was like, “This is way too long. I can't do two-hour facials. I have to break this down.” 

So I asked all my clients in an email, I said, “What is it about my facial that you love?” Because I didn't want to lose anything that they commented on. Most of them talked about the massage part of it. I'm like, what the hell? That was not the part that I was, you know, all the esthetic parts that I was trying to do. 

I was like, “Really, that was the favorite part?”

Anyway, so I was like, “That's the part I wanted to get rid of.”

20:25 Trina Renea: Don't do it. 

20:29 Douglas Preston: That makes sense when we're approaching our business from the technical professional perspective, which is incorrect because it's an imposition on the customer's expectations. We don't want to do that. We want to match it. Even if what they say they like from our own value hierarchy, we think, "Oh, crap, that." 

But remember, they're the customer. right? And if I've got a five-star French restaurant but everybody wants the burgers and fries, I'm not going to try to get them to order the Vichyssoise as a side dish. It's like, “No, this is what they want.”

So in knowing that, then you redefine what it is you're doing. If the feedback that I get over and over and over again is experiential first and visual second, then that becomes our priority. Feelings first, everything else second. 

So the question is, how do I make this client feel great? Memorable? How do I send them out with a great story that they can share with their friends, which is our word-of-mouth story, right? It's a hell of a lot easier that way and it's way less expensive. You don't have to buy a $50,000 machine to get someone to say, "Oh, my God, you have the nicest hands in the world." 

But when you calculate all of that data over and over and over again, and this is the feedback that you get, then it tells you how to engineer your work. And it makes it a whole lot easier because, for example, you were talking about the two-hour treatment. I ask this sometimes in my lectures. I'll say, "What's better? An hour massage, a 90-minute massage, or a two-hour massage? What's the best one?" Most people are silent.

I said, "I'll give you the answer. Who's doing it?" 

22:28 Trina Renea: Yeah, exactly. 

22:30 Rebecca Gadberry: If you're under the hands, but if you're the hands.

22:33 Douglas Preston: Right. So who's performing this treatment? Because if it sucks, man, 30 minutes, I'm out of there.

22:41 Rebecca Gadberry: Yeah, you’re tenser than when you walked in the door.

22:46 Douglas Preston: Right. So this point of view has really guided my whole profession. It's repeatable. It's trainable. And the beautiful thing about it is that it can leap over all the years of experience that one esthetician may have over another, if that newer esthetician is aligned with a client's true values and not the one that the veteran thinks they should have. 

23:17 Trina Renea: Yes. I hired an esthetician right outside of school. She was very smart and she retained well. She had good hands, good touch. I trained her in the time that she started with me and she was charging $300 facials right off the bat. People were coming back and back and back. I mean, they can be new in the business, if they learn the right process and how to do the consultation properly and how to get the client to trust them and have the personality. There's a structure to it, for sure. 

23:54 Douglas Preston: Yeah, absolutely. 

23:56 Rebecca Gadberry: If somebody wanted to find out what those questions are that you put together, probably two generations ago of estheticians. We tease each other about how old we are. Where could they find that list? Have you published it? I know you've. done a lot of publishing that's online.

24:16 Trina Renea: Are you talking about the list of questions that you ask in a consultation? 

24:22 Rebecca Gadberry: Yeah, that he's recommending. 

24:26 Douglas Preston: I'm going to have to do a little pitch here, but the list of questions isn't enough. You can have that in front of you. What you need to understand is, first of all, why is this list of questions important? Why in this order? And if you don't get a qualitative answer, how do you repose that question to get it? 

For example, if I ask what are the most important questions that's in this thing? Is, “When you look at your skin in the mirror, this is part of the consultation, what do you notice about it that you would like me to address?” Maybe it's crow's feet or fine lines or I've got the biggest pores in the world, those things. 

And I'll say, “Okay, I got that.”

So physiologically, technically, I understand that. What I don't know is why that troubles them. Now, again, I can assume, but that's not a good idea. 

The next question is, “Okay, so you've got some lines around your eyes and you're noticing some lines across the forehead. When you see that, how do you feel about it?” Because the feeling response to the visual cue is the problem.

25:52 Rebecca Gadberry: Right. That makes sense. 

25:54 Douglas Preston: It's true with acne. If you have a face full of breakouts and it doesn't bother you at all, you don't have acne. I mean, you have acne. You don't have an acne problem. It doesn't bother you. 

If you are aging and you see fine lines, and, my God, when you're in Los Angeles, people hallucinate these things. Something I learned how to handle when I was working with a couple of surgeons. 

But the thing is is that if a person sees something on their skin, it's like, “Okay. Yeah, sure, you've got some crow's feet. Big deal. But how does that make you feel?”

“Well, I feel old. I feel like I look dull. I don't feel very good.” That is the problem. It is the emotional reaction to the visual cue that motivates the customer to come and see us. That's what it is. 

If you don't understand that emotional driver, as I call them, you're not solving the problem, because you're not talking what the problem is. 

Then I'm going to follow that up. I'll do this a couple of times. And then I repeat back, as you so wisely said. “Okay, so what I'm hearing is that you've got some fine lines around the eyes and you feel that your pores are a little bit larger than they should be. Is that correct?”

“Yes, that is.”

“And it doesn't exactly make your day. When you see that, you feel kind of down. Is that correct?”

“Yes, yes.”

Now, we have the problem in the room. Do you see? 

27:46 Trina Renea: You heard that. 

27:47 Douglas Preston: Now, I can't promise to fix that. So I would say then, after that, “Okay, so if we can soften those lines a little bit or somewhat and maybe work to tighten up the pores on the skin, would that make you feel better?”

“Yes.”

Now we know what to do. Then the rest of it is just our method. You can't go wrong at that point. 

Now, I'm not promising I can do it. I'm saying that if that's what I address, how will that make you feel? Great. That is our profession in a nutshell. 

28:32 Rebecca Gadberry: In a nutshell, yeah. 

28:34 Douglas Preston: That's the whole thing. And the beauty of that is, and many other things, no pun intended, is that you can't make a mistake, because you know what to do and they know that you know what to do. You've already asked them earlier what kind of facial treatments have you had in the past that made you feel great, and they say, “Oh, my God, you know, the massage was wonderful, it was so private and the people were so kind and the music was wonderful. I love the scent.”

They never talk about, “Oh, that peel was just particularly effective.” They never say that. The esthetician might, but the client doesn’t. 

29:09 Rebecca Gadberry: I was going to say or Julie would say that. Julie is one of our co-hosts. She is like the epitome of the skincare consumer. She represents our consumers in our audience and our listeners. Julie would say that, but that's because she thinks like an esthetician too. 

29:27 Douglas Preston: Correct. Which is the wrong perspective for evaluating a customer and their motives for coming in. You absolutely should know those things, because we are working with the tools, we are working with the ingredients, all of these things. We don't want to blow it there either, because then the first question goes awry. “My skin burned. She did some horrible squeezing on my skin. It was terrible.”

And you hear that too, because that is the second question, by the way. Have you ever had a facial treatment that you didn't like? That disappointed you, that let you down? Then I ask, “Can you tell me what happened?”

Now, I don't get into it. I don't say, “Oh, God, how awful,” or anything like that. I just listen. Because now I know what to do and what not to do. 

Then the final group of questions is what motivates them visually? Now we have the right order.

So, Rebecca, I have a training a video online at my store. It's called The Client Consultation. It's a long one. It's several hours long. And it really is a psychology lesson. 

What happens is that in the using of these questions, I explain operationally just why you want to do this and why in this order. And if somebody says, for example, about a question, some people are not really good at articulating their feelings. 

So someone, if I ask somebody how they feel about their eyes having lines, and they say, “I don't know. It's not the best.” That's not a feeling. That's a description. 

So I could say, “Okay, so it's not the best. When you're not feeling your best, how do you feel?” You see, we need to get to the feeling part of this. When you've got the feeling, you've got the driver. 

[Outro] This is the end of Part 1. Tune in next time for Part 2 of our conversation.

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