To succeed in facial aesthetics you need to acquire a set of business skills different to those we use in dentistry. The good news is that these skills are learnable and can be mastered to allow you to profit and get a return on your investment. I see many dentists who attend clinical training (which, in my opinion, is the easy part) neglect the business side and wonder why they have only a handful of facial aesthetic patients.
When it comes to the business aspect of facial aesthetics, a whole book could be written on the subject covering topics such as marketing, assessment, referrals, retention, teamwork, leadership; the list goes on. However, from my experience, there are two critical success factors that if you fail to master the rest won’t make up the difference. These two critical success factors are your vision and the finances.
Your facial aesthetics vision
You will have a greater chance of success in your facial aesthetics business if you have a specific vision for it. It must be inspired by something you are passionate about. You need to start with the end in mind and from this you will overcome obstacles.
There are several relevant issues and I suggest you spend some time answering each following section and undertake it as an exercise with your dental team:
1. What is the ultimate result you want to achieve?
- Do you want to create extra income?
- Do you want to have facial aesthetics integrated within dentistry?
- Do you want a business separate from dentistry?
- Do you want a mobile facial aesthetics service?
2. What strategic goals do you have for your business?
- Will it be financial goals in terms of turnover or profit?
- Will it be the number of patients undertaking facial aesthetics?
- Will it be the number of days you want to do facial aesthetics per week?
3. Identity
- What is your business going to become?
- How will your patients describe it?
- Will it be as a spa environment?
- Or more an aesthetics practice?
- What’s your USP – unique selling proposition?
- Why should a patient choose you?
4. What resources are available to you?
- What training will you need to achieve clinical and non-clinical success?
- Will you delegate facial aesthetics to someone else or will you do it yourself?
- What kind of capital investment will you need to set up the clinic and keep the promotional activity ongoing?
- What ideas would you need to come up with in terms of marketing, joint ventures, and so on?
5. What’s your “Three to thrive”? (Courtesy of Tony Robbins)
If there were three areas of the business you need to attack to close the gap, what would they be? For example, would it involve marketing, team training, equipment, technology (website) or, perhaps, clinical training? What three areas, if you focused on them, would make your business immediately thrive?
Create year-long strategic goals, referring back to your answers from section (1) in terms of what you want to achieve. What are the most important results your business must achieve this year? What do you need to do to achieve these results in terms of financial time spent on facial aesthetics?
Once you’ve worked out your one year goal, you need to break it down into 90-day goals; so, to achieve your one-year goal, what must you do in the next 90 days? What are your top three outcome-oriented goals for the next 90 days?
When I decided to build our facial aesthetics business, there was a specific vision I wanted to achieve and by having a target I knew where to ‘point’ to. Here is a summary of my initial vision/goals:
- I wanted to create a facial aesthetics business that was equal to my dentistry business.
- I had a financial goal of a minimum of £10k turnover per month from facial aesthetics.
- My USP was that I had a fixed separate entity for the facial aesthetics in my dental practice and was therefore easily accessible and accountable for my services.
- I decided to concentrate on partnering with local beauty salons as my main resource for attracting patients.
- My three to thrive were team training, marketing to potential joint venture partners and creating a separate dedicated website for facial aesthetics.
- My one-year goal was to achieve the previously mentioned target of a turnover of £10k per month.
- I decided that every 90 days I needed to add £2,500 to my monthly turnover. By focusing on this smaller figure, I made the year-long goal seem more easily achievable.
- Get clear. What do you want? Clarity is power.
- Get certain. Be certain about your capacity and the resources available to you.
- Get excited. If you don’t, no one else will.
- Get focused and stick to it.
- Get committed. Be accountable to someone.
- Gain momentum. What one thing can you do now to make a difference? Put this article down now and just do it!
- Get smart. Measure and review everything.
Financial mastery
Managing money is simple - earn more, spend less. But most businesses either constrain themselves and forget about costs, or strangle costs and forget about sales. Being a spendthrift or overspending will kill your business. Weekly accountability to numbers and good discipline will help to manage costs while allowing for growth.
The two most common problems any business has are:
1. Under-capitalisation and poor money management.
2. Ignoring margins and profit. With under-capitalisation, the inability to raise capital comes from two things:
1. An inability to sell.
2. Poor money habits.
If you cannot show a command of these two areas, no one will trust that you can generate profit. It is important to take risks to generate business, but forecasting with no budget is a disaster. Putting your future in debt without a solid plan or financial control is like giving your teenager a credit card with no limits. You may require some assistance from the bank; however, in the current climate they are hard to predict and you never know if they will lend you the money.
Ignore margins and profits at your peril. Many businesses do not need to make more sales but rather to obtain a greater margin on what they’re already selling. Every transaction should contribute to a healthy profit. Doing too much free of charge in the hope that more business will follow is devastating to the bottom line. You need to be able to track every pound earned. Offering food for thought, Bob Burg and John David Mann wrote in their book The Go-Giver: “Your income is determined by how many people you serve and how well you serve them.”
Let’s now look at pricing. There’re two models in terms of how you evaluate the fees you’re going to charge. One is the number of units you use, but the problem with this is you won’t know until you’ve completed a treatment on the patient, and if patients are enquiring about prices it’s quite hard to come up with a figure.
Because of this, most practitioners have a flat fee, which is simpler for patients. Although some people may need more time or a larger dose than anticipated others will need less, so in the end it all evens out.
One way of calculating a fixed fee is via average doses needed for particular areas. Let’s say you’re treating the the areas of the upper third of the face. On the first visit you use around 50 to 60 Speywood units of Azzalure, which is almost one vial at a cost of approximately £45. Now you know treating the three areas is going to cost you £45, so you could calculate it as a lab fee, times it by three and charge £135.
Alternatively, you could calculate the fee by time and materials. We already know it’s going to cost you about £45 for these three areas. Now add your time. It’s going to take 20 to 30 minutes to do it so, in reality, it’s going to cost about £70/£80 (in terms of operating expenses). Then you look at your material/sundries cost and work out your profits from there.
Then there are extra units you may also need when administrating any top-ups. Using Azzalure again as the example, I would work out that, say, 125 units from two vials (worst case scenario) would cover three areas, which is a frown, forehead and eyes, and any top-ups that are required. That would cost me £87 for the toxin. The time costs would come out at about 45 minutes in total (which includes the consultation, assessment, first treatment and any necessary review appointments).
Next I work backwards to determine the fee I charge the patient. I charge £250 for three areas. If we take away £87 (the cost of material), minus £5 for the sundries in terms of syringes, saline, gloves, gauze, and so on, we are left with £158 for 45 minutes of work.
Last of all, you would take off your business operating costs for the 45 minutes needed and then you are left with your profit.
Let's look at how we can increase our profit margin. We have got our baseline price. The strategy I use is called optimisation and there are five stages to this:
1. Increase your leads and drive more traffic. How can you get more leads? You can undertake numerous lead-generating techniques, such as direct mail, referrals, setting up a blog, advertising in social media, joint ventures and going to tradeshows.
2. Increase the effectiveness of the sales process. What you could do is have a more robust follow-up system in terms of contacting patients on their phones. Follow those up with an email and a thank you card or a letter, and so on. Basically, you are trying to convert every lead into a sale.
3. Increase your sales conversion. You could ask for referrals from existing patients. Follow up your closing rate and reactivate dormant patients that haven’t been back for a year.
4. Increase the transaction value. You could group your facial aesthetics services into packages. You could do up-sells, down-sells, cross-sells, and so on. You can raise your price, but make sure you’re adding value if you’re doing this.
5. Add more bought value. Give more and you’ll receive more.
Master your vision and your finances, and you will find a place in the top five per cent of practitioners who are offering facial aesthetics. Clinical training and business skills go hand-in-hand, and with the right combination you will inject profits into your facial aesthetics business and improve your professional satisfaction.