Following the end of the pandemic most clinics rebounded and started to grow again. However, as we enter a more uncertain economic period where the effects of inflation have started to impact consumer spending it’s important to plan for a potentially lower growth period.

It’s always interested me how some clinics avoid, and others get trapped in a “Feast and Famine” cycle - yo-yoing from busy periods to times when they struggle to fill their treatment rooms for weeks on end.

Macro-economic cycles (“boom and bust”) obviously have an effect – but the businesses that prosper in both good times and bad generally have a systemised process of Getting and Keeping Customers that guarantees consistent and predictable profits.

However, there are many clinic owners who struggle to implement a well thought through and systemised process of “Getting and Keeping Customers” – and this is often the biggest barrier to them achieving the lifestyle that they originally envisaged when they set their business up.

IMPLEMENTATION is the key word here. In other words, it’s often not about knowing stuff, its about doing the stuff.

And, when you examine and closely observe individuals who move forward with their business and achieve personal goals consistently, you will find that they do the stuff that many others know about but aren’t doing.

Deep down we all know this statement to be true, and it sounds easy to do – but its also difficult to change behaviour and thinking.

As an aesthetician, therapist or medic starting off in aesthetics with a desire to achieve results and help people, it can be easy to invest everything in training yourself alongside kitting out a clinic/salon and lose sight of the fact that as the owner of the business your number one responsibility is to acquire and implement the skills to get and keep enough customers.  

In helping my daughter who started a small skin treatment clinic at the start of the pandemic (not great timing!), I made sure that she did not book any treatments in on Monday and Tuesday to allow her time to acquire and implement the skills of getting and keeping customers. This meant that she quickly built a profitable client base for the days that she was treating and then she subsequently employed a therapist to cover the Monday and Tuesday to enhance revenue out of the room.

If you’re not initially disciplined in this way, it’s easy to hit a ceiling and get stuck treating 5/6 days per week and not have enough time to either learn or implement the key skills required to consistently grow a business.

It’s also easier to fall prey to companies offering “quick fixes” or the latest shiny “marketing tactics, hacks and tools” that won’t really solve the number one problem around how to get and keep more customers. They typically tackle the symptom, but not the cause which is often that the base foundations and strategy that the business is built on are not properly thought through and sound.

As our industry has become increasingly competitive in recent years, linked to a potentially more uncertain macro-economic environment, I think that we are now at the stage where the business owners that will survive and thrive will be those who are professional at properly running their business.

Its not about being professional at what you do – as getting great results for your clients is obviously a key factor in running a successful aesthetic clinic – its more about your ability to manage and run a business in a professional and proper way. And, right at the core of that, is cracking the rhythmic acquisition of customers.

One of the ways that you can make the leap towards becoming a professional businessperson is to ensure that you block time to learn and implement the required skills on a weekly basis. If you’re spending all of your time doing lots of the day-to-day treating, managing, administering, dealing with staff issues and customer complaints etc. then you have got a problem.

Just as I advised my daughter – you need time put aside every week for the mental and physical capacity required to learn and implement the right strategies.

The extent to which you can do this on a consistent basis, regularly implementing the things that will move your business forward will often be the rate limiting factor in how fast you grow, alongside what you take out of the business to support your personal lifestyle.

Its easy to get trapped on a treadmill of dealing with the day-to-day stuff that needs to be done, but with the discipline and a system or structure to guide you in making the right decisions, you can fast-track the process to building the type of business that serves you and your needs instead of you serving the businesses’ needs.

If you need a template to follow that guides you through the process of getting and keeping customers in a systemised way, I recommend the Entrepreneurs Marketing & Sales System. Its packed full of practical implementable training, advice and support that has kept me on the right path to building different businesses over the last decade.

They currently offer 1 months free access to the system (NB: A credit card is required to register, but no payments will be taken if you cancel before the end of the free trial).

In addition, they run over 120 monthly networking and business building events across the country. This gives you the ability to learn from like-minded local business owners across a variety of industry sectors alongside the potential to generate new clients for your business for free.

If you’d like to learn more, contact me for a “virtual coffee” (via the contact page on my website) and we can discuss this in a little more detail.