Love, Life, Branding and Squash: Perspective from A Serial Entrepreneur

Michael Fensterstock walks into his office every day with a huge smile as the Chief Smile Officer/CEO of Linhart Smile Care, a high-end line of dental products that promotes oral health.  However, he hasn’t always had a reason to smile. Since he was a child, he’s faced serious health problems that forced him to put his health before any other goals — including career goals. “I wasn't trying to be a health nut. I was either going to be in an early grave or choose to be healthy — a pretty simple choice,” Michael said. 

As a young child, Michael grappled with asthma - he vividly remembers cracking chalky pills and inhaling deeply on the soccer sidelines to get back into the game - and at age 15, he was diagnosed with Crohn's Disease and GERD. In spite of his health challenges, he persisted in learning about and managing his well-being to pursue the activities he loved, playing sports like baseball and  soccer. These run-ins with physical obstacles not only fortified his resilience but also honed some of the skills vital for his journey as an entrepreneur. “Dealing with that stuff as a teenager helped to put things in perspective,” he said. “life threatening health challenges make you circumspect about how you want to spend your time, who you want to spend your time with and what you want to be doing.” Michael has never wanted to be a cog in a wheel. 

“I think you have to engineer your own life and think about how you want to spend your next day, week, months, years, if you're lucky enough to have them,” Michael said. With that strategy top of mind, Michael allowed his love for building brands and his desire to be around people and leaders he admires guide his career choices.  

Failure As Instructor

The health problems didn’t end with Crohn’s. In 2012 Michael needed emergency open heart surgery after he collapsed at the gym. He had a heart defect that suddenly became a very real problem, resulting in an aneurysm. After recovering from surgery (BIG thank you to Dr. Valentin Fuster and Dr. Paul Stelzer), Michael decided he needed to do something he loved. So, though difficult, he left his father’s law practice and along with his wife decided to launch their own product line, Aromaflage, which was a line of natural, functional fragrances. “I loved working with my father. He was a special man, a talented leader, and an incredible mentor,” Michael said. “Dad wished me luck - he had success as an entrepreneur and wanted the same for me. We researched plants and essential oils and we learned that natural oils have real capabilities, often therapeutic and some can even repel insects,” recalled Michael, “and they have the added benefit of smelling good and being good for your skin. So we tried something a little crazy: merge two disparate markets, a luxury fragrance market and a functional use market.” He trademarked the phrase “Fragrance with function.” He ran the company for 5 years and learned about direct-to-consumer branding, the vast retail industry and how to garner media attention through on-the-ground outreach and authentic storytelling. “It’s all about building meaningful relationships.”

Unfortunately for Michael, the business failed due to non-market (regulatory) forces far beyond his control. Failure was not the outcome he had hoped for: “I had serious founder PTSD after losing that business,” Michael admitted. But he also had an incredible story about innovation and product branding: “I tried to merge multiple business concepts together and innovate on how products were packaged. Bug spray had typically been in big, nasty cans. We were importing glass bottles from France and Italy, using 24-karat gold and high-end designs that we designed in-house. We were hacking together a super sexy product. It was a fun journey with a very difficult ending. Failure is not romantic.” 

Surprisingly, Michael’s biggest lesson from his first failed business was to love what you do, love who you do it with, and the inherent power of storytelling. “That venture propelled me and gave me the confidence that if I believe in something and can concisely tell a story about it, there’s a chance things can work out — as long as I know that I'm doing the right thing.”

Entrepreneurial Mentors 

After closing the functional fragrance business, he had the luck of meeting Jay Walker, the founder of Priceline.com. Together they shared their founders' stories and failures. “I have so much respect for Jay,” said Michael. “The way he critically thinks and the rigor with which he approaches his work. He's the hardest worker in the room and clearly the smartest guy in the room, but humble, genuine and authentic. And I was fortunate enough to be hired as Jay Walker's Chief of Staff at Walker Digital for a while and learn how a real entrepreneur actually hits the ball out of the park - multiple times. Spoiler alert: It's not luck.”

Though Michael learned so much working with Jay, he wasn’t directly involved in the things he was most passionate about. “I wasn't selling, I wasn't marketing, I wasn't operating, I wasn't doing the tactical hand-to-hand combat that I really enjoy when building a brand,” he said. He decided that even though he loved the people he was working with, he ultimately wanted to be leading a brand and building a company. With Jay’s support, Michael pivoted again.  

Something To Smile About

Dr. Jan Linhart and his son Dr. Zach Linhart have had a successful and growing dental practice in New York City since 1979 and Connecticut since 2021. The Linhart’s noticed a trend developing: patients who used whitening products were often experiencing sensitivity due to the abrasive products they were using. They decided to launch a line of products that helped people achieve the smile they desired, but also helped maintain good oral health.

Michael has been friends with Zach and his family since they played college squash together at Bowdoin College. As CEO of Linhart Smile Care, Michael now runs Linhart Smile Care and loves it. This role ticks all the boxes of well-designed life for Michael: He gets to work with people he respects and trusts for their mastery of their craft and dedication to their patients and business. He honestly loves the product he is selling, and he’s on the front-lines of branding and marketing. 

Three Branches of Linhart Smile Sales

1. Direct-to-consumer: Here, Linhart Smile Care controls all the conversation and contact points. “We built a decent sized patient population with our patients who are hungry for information and want the best care possible, and we want to give that to them,” said Michael. While Jan and Zach operate two full service high-end restorative and cosmetic dental practices, every patient who walks in the door gets Linhart Linamel toothpaste and a nano-silver toothbrush — part of our product line. We also have a subscription service so patients receive what they need on a regular basis. 

2. Amazon: Michael describes the benefits of working through the behemoth online retailer: “It has the best reach of any company ever created, allows you to get a big subscription base so you're consistently delivering more product to more people, which is important. Then we can order larger volumes and decrease our unit economics and cost of goods sold.” It also allows us the ability to understand different markets and gives us the ability to iterate on new product development through research. 

3. Retail: Leveraging his experience from previous ventures, Michael markets the Linhart Smile Care line through luxury spa partners, high-end hotels like Ritz Carlton, 1Hotels, and many other high-end resorts apothecaries and country clubs. He said, “It's important to partner, like we did with our fragrance company, with the right partners for distribution. Linhart is polished, high touch, high quality. We want to be aligned with those retailer partners, which might lead to a longer sales cycle, difficult conversations to have when you're trying to get onto coveted retail shelves, but ultimately, it's what we are as a brand and our true north needs to stay there.”

Key Quotes: Lessons In Branding from Michael Fensterstock

On relationship building: “Developing a brand is about developing really strong relationships where every customer trusts what you're going to deliver, how you're going to deliver, and that you will deliver what you promise and what your brand promises to deliver.”

On the integrity of the brand: “There's a massive shift in influence and what people read, how they consume content and, therefore, make purchases. What's critical to Linhart as a brand is maintaining the integrity of the dental practices and making sure that everyone knows that we give the best service, care and treatment possible for whatever oral issue the patient might be experiencing. So we make sure that we align with influencers that speak the language we want to speak.”

On how to use Amazon: “Ideally, you are controlling your own channel, which is what we do. We don't outsource that. We control all the advertising, all the photography, all the communication. And when you get reviews, you can get direct feedback on what people are saying about your product and syndicate the good reviews to direct-to-consumer channels.” 

How Your Passions Can Shape Your Life

Michael is an avid squash player. “When I got to campus, I wandered over to the squash court and it literally was love at first sight. It's happened twice in my life, once with squash and once with my wife,” said Michael, “Squash is a game where the fast twitch muscles are combined with endurance. It's a physical game of chess that can be won through attrition.”

He credits the sport with informing a lot of his life decisions. His love of the game gave him new momentum to maintain his health and eat healthy so that Crohn's disease didn’t dictate what he could and couldn’t do. But even more than that, the game has introduced him to a network of friends and colleagues. Subsequent to college, Michael and Zach have competed in and won doubles squash tournaments as a team (GO U BEARS).

“That game has sort of dictated a lot of who and what I know and do today,” Michael reflected. “It's an unbelievable network of people. It's a lifetime game. You have to be smart, fit and strong. All things that I admire and respect about the champions of the game.”