The Key To Growing Your Cosmetic Clinic Is Process

While your medical spa is probably at least 'OK' with the procesess of delivering patient care, there's usually quite a bit of slack around other processes, things like marketing and growth. It makes sense. Medical care delivery has the process built in and compliance is enforced by insurance companies, medical licensures and others. In effect, they tell you exactly what you need to do.

But most of the 'business' areas don't come with a road map. 

The result is that things like marketing, positioning, branding, funding, accouting and the rest of the business areas are often just handed to the office manager and team to try to sort out. It's something of a hit and miss endevor and some people do it better than others, either because they got lucky, or they actually found and followed some process.

One of the things that I'd suggest that you take a look at is how you can be more process driven around the business side of clinic. In some cases you might just want to outsource some of the work to professional who have some experience - take a look at some of the sponsors on this site who are focused on these areas - or even try and glean some experince from areas where process is fundimental and data driven like technolgy startups.

Here's one. Dave McClure who developed the AARRR framework, which organizes product development as a series of experiments to improve one of five levers:

  • Acquisition: how many patients come to your website or clinic.
  • Activation: how many patients engage with you and have a good first time experience.
  • Retention: how many patients come back.
  • Revenue: how many patients are monetized (directly or indirectly).
  • Referral: how many patients tell their friends.

Growing your business is not just 'tactics'.

There are dozens of strategies and tactics that you can use to manipulate these levers. But the key to success in growth is process, not tactics.

What worked for other clinics might not work for you. You’re talking to different types of patients, potentially on different mediums, at different times.

Additionally channels and tactics constantly change. The effectiveness of an approach tends to diminish over time. It used to be that anyone could rank well in search engines just by putting up a website. Those days are over. You've probably been pitched about Facebook marketing or whever. There are often windows of opportunity but they will all be finite, process will give you the ability to switch between 'tactics' without disrupting your overall system.