In this episode of the Beyond Page One podcast, host Mickey interviews Tracy Hotta, a pioneer in the medical aesthetics field in Canada. Tracy shares her inspiring journey from nursing to becoming a leader in aesthetic training and consulting. She discusses the challenges faced by practitioners in the evolving landscape of aesthetics, the importance of education and training, and the role of digital marketing in the industry. Tracy also emphasizes the need for balance in a busy career and offers valuable advice for new nurses entering the aesthetics field. The conversation concludes with insights into the future of medical aesthetics and the exciting developments on the horizon.

Listen On Spotify- https://open.spotify.com/episode/3VPus5stWzCP0py9f4y5C9?si=mHFb5igARauD-JB9QF9M-g

If you have any questions or would like to connect with Tracey Hotta, visit-

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LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/traceyhottarn/⁠

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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB4M7jSPkhDFKqG6jK48PlA

Email- Training@THMAConsulting.com 

• Tracy Hotta has nearly three decades of experience in medical aesthetics.
• The transition from nursing to aesthetics involves significant challenges.
• Social media has transformed marketing in the aesthetics industry.
• Education and ongoing training are crucial for success in aesthetics.
• Nurses must navigate business aspects when starting their own practices.
• Digital marketing plays a vital role in reaching clients in aesthetics.
• Maintaining a work-life balance is essential for long-term success.
• New practitioners should have nursing experience before entering aesthetics.
• The aesthetics field is evolving with new technologies and treatments.
• Networking and continuous learning are key to thriving in aesthetics.

Mickey (00:01)

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Mickey. am your host of the Beyond Page One podcast. Today’s guest is a true pioneer in the field of medical aesthetics space in Canada. ⁓ Tracy Hotta is here and she is the president of THMA Consulting. Has nearly three decades of experience in shaping the landscape of the aesthetics nursing world in Canada. From being one of the first RN injectors in the country ⁓ to leading

national training programs and mentoring new practitioners. She brings a wealth of insights and experience into entrepreneurship, the patient safety and the art and science of the aesthetic space. She’s a leader, an educator, an advocate, and we are thrilled to have her today. Tracy, welcome to the show.

Tracey Hotta (00:47)

Great, thank you very much for this opportunity, Mikey. This is awesome.

Mickey (00:52)

Yeah,

of course. We’re happy to have you here. know, such a dynamic and inspiring journey that you’ve had looking through kind of, I did obviously have done my research. Can you take us back a little bit to what first drew you into nursing and eventually into the world of the medical aesthetic space?

Tracey Hotta (01:08)

Sure, I mean it’s been quite a journey. I graduated back and I just have my 40th nursing anniversary. ⁓ I graduated in 1984 from nursing, but my first desire to become a nurse was when I was nine years old and I would go to my dad’s office. He was a GP in Moncton, New Brunswick and I would go there on the weekends just to help out. And that’s where I met his nurse, Alice, and she

I was intrigued by her confidence, organizational skills. She was so respected from the patients and my father and had a true passion for nursing. that’s when I first decided that I wanted to be a nurse and caring for others has always been in my nature. So if somebody asked me 30 years ago what I would be doing at this point of my nursing career, it would not be in aesthetics. That is not the path that I had intended on taking. ⁓ I moved to Ontario.

Mickey (02:00)

Hahaha

Tracey Hotta (02:07)

three years after graduating from nursing and was working in the operating room with a plastic surgeon who decided he wanted to open up the first, one of the first out of hospital premises cosmetic surgery facilities in Toronto area. So I was 28 years old and he was like, yeah, you want to come and manage it? And I had no idea. I had operating room skills, but no management skills. And he certainly saw something in me that I did not see. So I…

Mickey (02:28)

You

Amazing.

Tracey Hotta (02:36)

Yeah, it’s a full time, you know, it’ll be a great job. So I managed the clinic for five years, but also still worked in the hospital because I thought definitely this little bubble was going to was going to burst. ⁓ But it was amazing. So that was back in 1990 that I started working in his office and being aligned with a plastic surgeon at that time where there was no other nurse injectors really opened some career paths for me.

Mickey (02:48)

Mm-hmm.

Tracey Hotta (03:03)

because we worked really well together and we were entering this whole new space together. In 2005, I became the first Canadian president of the American Society of Plastic Surgical Nurses. So that was a really ⁓ high point in my career. And having to be in that position, and there’s been no Canadians since, we’re still, I’m hoping that there will be, but I’m still holding that title.

Mickey (03:29)

Yeah.

Tracey Hotta (03:30)

I had to learn leadership skills and organizational skills, I really didn’t have. Policy development, strategic planning. ⁓ I even had to testify at the FDA hearing for the silicone breast implants. So that was amazing. Yeah, that was terrifying. ⁓ Because since I was president of the association and I did work with plastic surgeons that ⁓ use silicone breast implants.

Mickey (03:43)

Wow. ⁓

Yeah, no kidding.

Tracey Hotta (03:59)

So this kind of reinforced my ⁓ need to be an advocate for the nurses and for patients. And moving forward from 2005 of working under the American Society, we started a Canadian Society. And CSASN is still established today. It’s the leading voice for nurses in anesthetics. And my biggest…

accomplishment with starting CSASN is that we had a task force of 10 nurses and we developed the practice standards and guidelines for across Canada, which the provincial nursing colleges still use to this day. And we’ve had three revisions since, so every five years we’ll revise the practice standards. So 2016, you know, sort of launched THMA Consulting, went in into my own practice.

And that’s where I really decided that I really loved the educational piece. And with this, in order to develop this program, sort of did a gap analysis to see what was missing with training. And we were the first ones to start a business ethics and professional standards and had that as part of our training program. So, you know, learning how to inject, but also the why to inject and following your standards. So.

Mickey (05:17)

Yeah.

Tracey Hotta (05:20)

I just became very passionate about the education and, you know, being an advocate for nurses and for patient safety. So that’s kind of how I got into it.

Mickey (05:27)

That’s awesome. That’s awesome. I mean,

obviously you were one of the first to be a part of it, right? So you’ve seen the aesthetics, medical aesthetics community evolve tremendously over the past few decades, I’m sure. What were some of the biggest challenges that you faced as a practitioner and on the business owner side navigating that evolution?

Tracey Hotta (05:51)

Yeah, a couple of the biggest challenges. ⁓ They would be one was how to run an independent practice. So nurses don’t do business. We take care of patients. We don’t do business. And then having to sort of navigate into this space. ⁓ It was totally out of my realm. And how do you ask patients for money? We’re not used to doing that in the hospital. So that was a huge challenge. ⁓ You know, we

Mickey (06:02)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Tracey Hotta (06:20)

We don’t sell, you know, it’s difficult to determine the cost of your services because, you know, typically we would say, okay, well, a syringe of filler is $250 and that’s what you just double it and charge that. knowing when you’re looking at the business, there’s a lot of other things that come into play. So you’ve got all your material costs. We’re looking at our annual dues, our insurance liability, business insurance to have your own practice.

If you needed an authorized prescriber, you had to pay for that authorized prescriber. You had to take that into account. And the continuing education. I would say probably most nurses spend at least $10,000 $15,000 a year for continuing education because it is such a growing, it’s an ever-changing field. It always has been right from the very start. And nurses don’t have the hospital, when they’re independent, they don’t have the hospitals to…

Mickey (07:06)

Mm-hmm.

Tracey Hotta (07:14)

do lunch and learns and things like that, we have to take it upon ourselves to do it. So we have to take that into account of how much that we charge for a procedure. And I always tell nurses that they should not undervalue their clinical knowledge ⁓ and their skill set to be successful. you know, all these things have to be taken into account. So that was a big challenge. The second biggest challenge was social media because…

When I started, there was no social media. This was back in 1990. To try to get patients, we had newspaper ads and everything was, we got our patient list according to patient referral, not from advertising. And we would go to the hotel rooms and we would have little seminars and bring our patients in there and teach them and educate them that way. So when social media came in, that was huge. Just even having a website.

Mickey (07:44)

Yeah.

Tracey Hotta (08:13)

It was, yeah, I found that that probably was the hardest and going, I’m not gonna do that, I don’t need to be. And then you have to have social media. Like it is a, you definitely have to have a marketing tool to market your business. When it first came out, it was very ⁓ disturbing of what people were putting on social media as nurses, because it was very degrading to the profession itself.

because people just wanted to get followers. And nurses are, we have our professional standards that we have to follow. And when we give the title nurse, we have our code of ethics. So that was a challenge of trying to ⁓ not teach nurses, but educate them on proper social media etiquette when you’re putting your name on it, saying that you’re a professional nurse. So that was tough and it’s still tough to this day.

Mickey (08:43)

Yeah.

Tracey Hotta (09:11)

It’s still something

that everybody’s trying to deal with. ⁓ And the college is trying to deal with it as well. So those would be my two. Business, setting up your own business, and social media.

Mickey (09:26)

And it’s still a challenge, I’m sure, because

it’s changing ever so quickly, the social media space and the digital marketing landscape. It’s crazy how quickly it changes.

Tracey Hotta (09:35)

And there’s a benefit to it. There’s a lot of benefits to social media, but there’s a lot of risks for nurses in the profession.

Mickey (09:41)

Yeah, of course. ⁓ You’ve worked with top surgeons and clinics across Canada. Was there a particular pivotal collaboration or a mentor relationship that really influenced your approach?

Tracey Hotta (09:56)

Yeah, mean, definitely the opportunity to manage an operating room. ⁓ That was one of the first ones that were in the Toronto area. That was definitely a turning career, you know, for my career path. And the plastic surgeon that I worked with saw the potential in me, you know, when I was 28 years old, that I had the ability to manage an operating room.

Mickey (10:05)

Mm-hmm

Tracey Hotta (10:20)

So this really allowed me to look outside the box of the traditional institution nursing and really hone in on some entrepreneurial skills because I had my own business within his business once I started injecting. ⁓ I think that ⁓ I don’t think that I realized the impact that stepping into this unchartered territory had. I just kept sort of moving ahead with what needed to be done.

Mickey (10:34)

Mm-hmm.

Tracey Hotta (10:48)

And my plastic surgeon was there with me the whole way because we were working on this journey together because it was new to him as well. He was injecting but a nurse injecting and his whole thing was what if you stick the needle in their eye? Well, why would I do that? It was it was a learning curve for both of us and a learning curve for the nursing college as well. But working with him, I could attend physician colleges or physician meetings because he was a plastic surgeon. So I had that ability where

Tracey Hotta (11:18)

other nurses weren’t allowed to attend any of these. So we really had to educate ourselves. And I just learned that he is retiring after 35 years. So he’s retiring. just his cosmetic practice in Toronto. And I’m forever grateful because without him, I wouldn’t be where I am today. So I wish him a happy retirement.

Mickey (11:30)

Wow.

That’s awesome.

That’s awesome. For somebody that’s new to the aesthetics world and is coming into whether they’re a nurse graduating or wanting to a career path or shifting career path, what’s one common misconception ⁓ they often have that you’d like to clear up early when training with them?

Tracey Hotta (12:01)

Yeah, I think the first one when we start our virtual courses, I always ask them, you know, why they want to get into aesthetics. A lot of them will say, you know, it looks like it’s great side gig and it’s a great way to make money and things like that. And I say, this course is not for you.

Mickey (12:09)

Mm-hmm.

You

Tracey Hotta (12:19)

Because I think it’s a lot of times they see what’s on social media and it makes it look very glamorous on social media, but there is a lot of extra work that needs to go into being in in aesthetic. So that’s what I kind of like to press on them that you’re not just going to take the course and then hang up your shingle and everybody’s going to come to your to your clinic to have procedures done that it does take a lot of work and you have to be accountable for what you’re doing.

Tracey Hotta (12:50)

It can be financially lucrative, absolutely, ⁓ but I wouldn’t say that it’s easy. So it’s a lot of education, work, finances, you know, it’s not just the cost of the course, it’s everything else that comes after it in order to maintain your skills and the commitment. So they have to devote their time, commitment, ongoing education to be successful. Yeah.

Mickey (13:13)

Yeah, of course. And how

long is a course with your trading session? How does that work?

Tracey Hotta (13:19)

Yeah,

with our course we do ⁓ five virtual courses first and they are taught through Zoom but it is in person so that they can ask questions which is good. So those are three hours a day typically on a Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday and one of the assessment courses is a pre-recorded and then they can ask questions about that during that weekend.

⁓ They have access to these courses as long as they want to so that they can review them. So they take them once and then three years later they can take them again. Once they finish that and they have to pass a test to make sure that they have the proper knowledge to go into the in-person training. And the in-person training is typically one or two days depending on how many people are in that course. But we do one-on-one training. There’s no group training.

That’s awesome. Yeah. Wow. Very cool. So I want to talk a little bit about THMA. Starting and scaling a national training organization can’t be easy. ⁓ What were some of the early strategic decisions that helped you grow across so many regions?

Tracey Hotta (14:12)

So you’ve got an instructor with one provider and one P. Yeah. 

Yeah, I think, mean, this was my second training company. My first training company that I had developed was when we first started being nurse injectors in Canada. So would have been back in 1998, probably, is when I started that because there was nowhere for nurses to be trained. So I developed that along with the industry, person that came over from industry. We developed a training company. ⁓

Mickey (14:40)

Okay.

Yeah.

Tracey Hotta (15:04)

a company in the US bought all my training material to submit to the FDA for an H.A. filler that was being approved. So I was like, that was early 2000. I was like, been there, done that, don’t have to train again. Then a number of colleagues had asked me to because I had, you know, you’ve got so much knowledge in your head. Why don’t you need to, you know, disseminate that knowledge? So 2014, I started to really think about it. And that’s where.

Mickey (15:15)

haha

Tracey Hotta (15:31)

I did put a survey out just to get the sort of get to the gaps in training to see what we should focus on to be a little bit different and making sure that people get through that global amount. The main gap was anatomy. So we do a three hour course on anatomy and it’s not textbook anatomy. It is related to aesthetic injections.

Mickey (15:43)

Mm-hmm.

Tracey Hotta (15:54)

So it took about two years to develop that whole course because there were study guides and presentations that go with it that have to go, you know, side by side and then getting all the resource articles to support it. Before COVID, COVID actually worked in our favour. Before COVID, it was always in person. We taught these courses in person and then when COVID hit, we could do all this virtually.

Mickey (16:20)

Yeah.

Tracey Hotta (16:20)

So that’s where I would teach the Friday, Saturday, Sunday. I had somebody else teach the Monday course and we could do that across Canada. And then I have 13 training sites across Canada that then I would push out the people that took the training, the virtual courses, push them out to the training centers.

So yeah, so that’s kind of how it worked. So COVID definitely worked in our favour and all the training centres are within clinics so that they follow the public health guidelines. We don’t inject out of hotels or anything like that because we want to keep our standards as high as they should be. And I still continue to, I just changed the course up. I went to a meeting last week and just changed some more information in our course because things are constantly changing.

Mickey (17:00)

Yeah, makes sense.

Yeah.

Tracey Hotta (17:11)

And

a training program should not remain static. It needs to change with, you know. Yeah. Yeah.

Mickey (17:16)

with everything else,

100%. ⁓ The industry is driven a lot by visibility, right? ⁓ Being found online, especially if everyone has a cell phone nowadays and we’re glued to that thing. ⁓ So what role does digital marketing ⁓ play in THMA’s success and outreach without giving away all your secrets?

Tracey Hotta (17:32)

Yeah. I don’t have any secrets with anything. I like to share all my knowledge.

Mickey (17:47)

Okay, awesome.

Tracey Hotta (17:48)

⁓ Social media definitely. Like I said, it was hard for me to accept at the very start. ⁓ But it’s extremely important. You have to have a social media presence. ⁓ I have for my social media person, his background is journalism, which is great. And ⁓ he knows the medical industry ⁓ because there’s certain things that we have to follow through our standards of advertising rules and regulations

Mickey (18:05)

Really.

Tracey Hotta (18:18)

we can’t ⁓ So you know doing a lot of blogs so he would interview people and do blogs so we do that. Loved LinkedIn I think LinkedIn is such an awesome platform more of a professional platform. ⁓ I think everybody has to have Instagram. I think that’s just the way that it has to be. ⁓

Mickey (18:18)

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Tracey Hotta (18:39)

but they have to ensure that they are professional. Evidence-based is what we say and pertains to what they’re teaching. So they said there’s benefits to social media and I think, you know, strengthening your personal brand and you can be authentic on social media.

personal connections with patients, you’ve got consumer access to information, you have networking that you can network with people across the globe, which is amazing. But then there is the risk where the professionalism is overshadowed by the posts. So inappropriate posting, inappropriate attire, unethical. ⁓ I found that nurses were normally very… ⁓

Mickey (19:14)

Yeah.

Tracey Hotta (19:25)

nice to each other, very collegial. And then as with aesthetics, all of a sudden people were putting down other people on social media and being, you know, making disparaging comments and things like that. And it was like, that’s not what we do. But it just seems like people were trying to get on top of, know, and everything should be positive. Our posts should be positive and they should be educational, but definitely digital media is a must to have.

Mickey (19:43)

one another, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, I know something.

that I found really interesting. I’ve worked with a handful of clients in this space before. And on the Google advertising side, you actually can’t advertise for Botox, right? So you have, it’s like Kleenex and tissue, right? I think you can’t mention Botox. So you have to get creative in terms of how you advertise and how you get eyeballs onto your posts, onto your website, right? Have you had a similar experience?

Tracey Hotta (20:06)

No, true.

Yeah.

Yeah, and it has to do with the ⁓ Food and Drug Administration because it is a drug. Neurotoxins or Botox is a regulated drug. So which is why you can’t give the name of the without saying all the issues, all the problems that can happen with, know, and you can die. So there it’s been a it’s been a, you know.

Mickey (20:31)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Tracey Hotta (20:49)

sort of an ongoing thing where we’re trying to teach people what they can and can’t do. But you can certainly say, you know, a neuromodulator and what it does. And we tell them add a reference at the bottom to show that it is education, not an opinion piece, because as nurses, we can’t be providing medical advice to people we don’t know who we don’t have a therapeutic relationship with.

Mickey (21:01)

Mm-hmm.

Tracey Hotta (21:11)

and that tends to be what’s happening is that people are you know saying this is what Botox can do and come in and see me but there’s no relationship there yet. yeah so the the other thing sorry the other thing that we tell them if they really want to you know promote we can’t promote specials we can’t say that we have a discounted price we’re not allowed to do that.

⁓ So we tell them to make sure that they have, like if they’re on Facebook, have a private Facebook group just for their patients where they have a relationship with all of these people that are within that Facebook group. And then they say whatever they want privately to people that already know them as patient. And you can steer people towards that, but you can’t just, you know, bring in, you know, say give medical advice without knowing that patient.

Mickey (22:06)

Yeah, and

is it national or are there different governing bodies provincially as well? Like are there different guidelines provincially?

Tracey Hotta (22:12)

Each nursing college sort of words it differently, but they’re all basically the same. A lot of them have to do with the advertising rules and regulations of Canada, or through the Food and Drug Act because neuromodulators are a drug. ⁓ Cosmetics are different, but they all may word it little bit differently, but they’re all basically the same.

Mickey (22:18)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

same.

Tracey Hotta (22:38)

Yeah, I think one of the best ones is with CNPS. So that’s our Canadian Nursing Protection Society. So they’re our liability insurance and it’s a national organization. They have a lot of information to protect a nurse ⁓ on their website. Yeah. Yeah. ⁓ absolutely. Yeah, they are great.

Mickey (22:55)

Well for our listeners go check it out. Yeah

awesome. You got a lot on your plate business, mentoring, speaking, editing, know how do you how do you maintain that balance and that personal balance as well as staying inspired right?

Tracey Hotta (23:15)

Yeah, well that is a good question. It’s, you know, looking back I guess that I am a little bit of an overachiever.

So when anybody would ask me to do something, I would always say yes, because that’s how you learn. So if it’s something that I don’t know, I’ll say, yeah, I’ll do that. And then I have to do all the research to do it. So I always did that. And then eventually things get too much. So I would just sit down and look to see what can I take out of what I’m doing if I’m too stressed out over something. So it’ll always be what’s ever given me the most stress.

So the last time I made a big change was stopping injecting after 32 or 33 years of injecting because I had the training company I had to manage and I’m the only one that manages it along with my husband. ⁓ And then I still had a injection practice. So I decided to hang up my needle, which was difficult to do after that long. ⁓ But.

Mickey (24:07)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, no kidding.

Tracey Hotta (24:15)

looking that that was a great choice for me and then I could focus on the training company which was good and the second thing was you know living in Toronto we decided to move to to Nova Scotia which is where I’m from so that was that was a good life balance.

Mickey (24:28)

Okay.

Yeah, slowed down a little bit.

Tracey Hotta (24:33)

Yeah, so I always kind of look at what I’m doing and if there’s something that I can change, but I know I love the education part and being a real advocate for nurses and patients with patient safety, but that’s always going to be key in my books. ⁓ But I may have to shift around some stuff around it to make sure I have enough time to do it and I’m not killing myself. There is a lot going on. ⁓

Mickey (24:54)

Yeah, fair enough. That’s fair. That is very fair. What’s

a piece of advice that you would give your younger self or a nurse that’s starting up?

Tracey Hotta (25:05)

Thank

Yeah, think aesthetics is a very exciting career. It is not a career that I ever imagined that I would be doing. ⁓ But it’s exciting because one, you can be entrepreneurial. Nurses can be their own, you know, they can be their own boss, though a lot comes with that. But you’re blending art with science and it’s really having that ability to do that. It’s not for everybody, but once you get it, it’s very rewarding for patients because you’re

changing them ⁓ on the inside as well as, you know, there’s a mental, psychological component to it as well, but you’re changing them physically, which will change the psychological component. ⁓ I would say before nurses go into this is that they need to have nursing experience first.

Mickey (25:56)

Hmm.

Tracey Hotta (25:56)

That makes

a huge difference ⁓ as opposed to just coming out of nursing school and then going straight into aesthetics because there is a lot of critical thinking, especially if you’re on your own, there’s a lot of critical thinking skills that you just don’t get from nursing program that you can get from experience. ⁓

it’s not going to be a full-time job when you first start. So I think, you know, having a nursing career, working somewhere else, doing this sort of part-time until you build up your practice and you build up your confidence and everything, then you can go into it full-time. But I think you do need to have that nursing experience. ⁓

I would say they do the background research in the area that they’re working. So their geographical area. Is it oversaturated? Is there room for growth? What are the other clinics doing? Is there a way that you can make it a little bit more different than what other people have? Looking at the target market. Younger clientele, are you looking at older clientele or is it women’s health? Are you going to concentrate on men’s health as well?

Mickey (27:01)

Mm-hmm.

Tracey Hotta (27:02)

⁓ And the different services that are being provided. are so many different services now, not just neuromodulators and fillers. ⁓ The whole aesthetics is going more regenerative and skin quality and skin health, brings in technologies and lasers and things like that, which weren’t years ago, they were too expensive. And now they’re becoming more affordable and people are more concerned about their skin health.

Mickey (27:16)

Yeah.

Tracey Hotta (27:29)

in formulating a business plan, get your brand, your mission, your goals together before you actually, you look at that before you take a course and build a network. There is nothing more important than having a network of like-minded individuals that you can respect and rely on and then watching videos and podcasts and getting as much information as you can.

But we do say that, you know, if you’re at a meeting, so a new nurse that’s at a meeting and you get a KOL that’s on the stage and they say, you have to do it this way. Use your critical thinking skills. That may not be the right approach. Just because they’re up on the stage doesn’t mean that that’s gonna be a good procedure for you. So start thinking about, you know, critical thinking about what’s being presented.

Mickey (28:19)

Yep.

Tracey Hotta (28:21)

So that’s, yeah, that’s, there’s a few things to think about as you just

Mickey (28:24)

That’s Yeah, well, thank you for sharing

that. Looking ahead, what excites you most about the future of the medical aesthetics space in Canada?

Tracey Hotta (28:36)

Yeah, I would say, I mean, even though I’ve been doing this since 1990, it’s still evolving. And like I said, regenerative is now the big component. We used to do sculpture and radius years ago, and mainly on HIV patients. And then it kind of went away. And now it’s come back for cosmetic patients because people are concerned about their skin quality. So I think that’s an exciting change, bringing lasers in and microneedling.

Mickey (29:00)

Mm-hmm.

Tracey Hotta (29:06)

There’s know exosomes and PDRN they still need I feel they still need more research ⁓ before you really bring those out too much. There’s not a lot of research done on them right now but that’ll be exciting. All the new products so many new products all the now we have five neurotoxins which is kind of nice instead of having just the one so you can decide which which is going to be the best for you.

The technology, the use of ultrasound is amazing. It was, and more and more studies are being done with ultrasound because when we first started injecting, and we would inject on cadavers as well, and we dissect to see where it’s placed.

Mickey (29:46)

Yep.

Tracey Hotta (29:50)

But we assume that you injected it stays as a little ball when you inject it in or as a little strand. And we know now with ultrasound, it behaves totally differently than what we think. So that’s where everything’s changing. We can actually see what happens in live tissue as a pair as composed to cataract tissue. And AI don’t know enough about it kind of scares me, but I’m sure that’s going to be in there in our future.

Mickey (30:10)

Wow.

Yeah, no kidding.

Tracey Hotta (30:19)

Yeah and I really hope that more training programs do more in-depth knowledge-based evidence-based training and I think that that would make nurses more accountable going forward. So I’m really hoping that you know there is some regulation with the with the training companies as to how they can train and what they can train.

Mickey (30:42)

Cool, well, there’s a lot to look forward to. ⁓ For our listeners thinking about transitioning into this field, ⁓ they may have listened to this. ⁓ What are some of the key takeaways that they should keep in mind?

Tracey Hotta (30:44)

There is!

You know, again, medicine’s amazing profession. And there’s so many different avenues that you can take ⁓ for nurses and physicians, because we train physicians as well. Aesthetic medicine is just one of the small growing career paths that you can take. And it is that blend of art and science, which is kind of nice that you can be creative. ⁓

Mickey (31:20)

Yeah.

Tracey Hotta (31:21)

I think it’s important for the new providers that want to enter into aesthetics that they do their background work. Like I said, that they’re, you know, checking out the clinics and the services that are offered and how they can be a little bit different. there’ll, you know, be some people have concierge practices. So you’ve got, you know, it’s, it’s more of a, you know, whole Renfrew kind of thing. ⁓ But it’s exciting, but it’s not as glamorous as people think. There’s a lot of hard work that goes into it.

Mickey (31:28)

Yeah.

Tracey Hotta (31:48)

So I’ve been on several different, know, worked with a plastic surgeon, had my own practice and then worked with a nurse practitioner. So I’ve been, you know, on all three different aspects of it. Yeah. And each one has its challenges and each one has its benefits. ⁓ But I think people have to be prepared when they go into aesthetics that… ⁓

Mickey (31:59)

Go ahead, yeah.

Tracey Hotta (32:12)

there’s extra costs that go into it. So they do have to have a little bit of financing behind them. There’s ongoing education that they’re going to do. I still go to two or three meetings a year. ⁓ Insurance, they need an accountant. Definitely an accountant as they get busier to make sure that they’re doing everything according to taxes. ⁓ They need a lawyer to go through all their business information. ⁓ Social media manager, yeah, if they want to be successful and not

Mickey (32:33)

Yeah.

Tracey Hotta (32:42)

have to spend a lot of time on social media. There’s some, you know, hire a social media manager to do it, but knowing that the nurses are responsible for what the social media media manager puts out because the nurses know what the regulations are.

Mickey (32:56)

Exactly,

being collaborative. Cool. And lastly, ⁓ if people want to find you or learn more about THMA Consulting, where do they go? How do they find you?

Tracey Hotta (32:59)

Yes, exactly.

I mean we have a website which is thmakonsulting.com ⁓ I am on Instagram which is thmakonsulting.com we do have a Facebook page as well thmakonsulting.com I’m on LinkedIn ⁓ I’m on Blue Sky so I would love to have more followers on Blue Sky because I’m not on X and we do have a YouTube

Mickey (33:23)

You

Okay.

Hahaha

Tracey Hotta (33:38)

channel as well that shows videos and you know injection videos and things like that. So I am on there as well under THMAConsulting.com

Mickey (33:38)

Awesome.

Well, thank you so much, Tracy. We’ll link all those social profiles in the video below so that people can reach out and find out some more information and visit your profiles. I just want to thank you for coming out today. ⁓ This was awesome. I learned a ton and I’m hoping our listeners learn a lot as well. ⁓ Yeah. Thank you for coming down. Awesome. Thank you.

Tracey Hotta (34:00)

Awesome, I appreciate it, thank you. Thank you.