Bringing in a New Service? Let’s Make it Pay!

Industry business expert Liz McKeon discusses the most profitable and effective approach to launching a new service or treatment within a clinical setting.

As an aesthetics practitioner, you are in business to solve your patient’s concerns in a way that keeps them satisfied and generates you a profit. Investing in a new service is a big decision to make, as it affects all aspects of your clinic and needs careful consideration in order to ensure a positive financial return on your investment.

Clinicians may want to consider the following when choosing which new service to add within their business.

Understand Trends
When adapting your business model to include a new service, you must first understand the prevailing trends which influence your patients’ behaviour. This involves doing a little research, such as analysing your current services, competitors, conducting market research, analysing social media trends and engaging directly with your patients to gain insights into their evolving needs.

By staying ahead of trends, you can anticipate change in their preferences and be proactive in adjusting your services menu.

Maintaining flexibility in the services you provide is essential to respond to changing patient needs. This can be achieved by adding new services to the mix, diversifying your products, offering customisable treatment plans or providing additional services that complement your core offerings.

By staying flexible you can quickly pivot and adapt to changes in the marketing, ensuring that your clinic remains relevant and competitive.

Identify the Right Opportunity
The next step in expanding your clinic services is to identify the correct opportunity for your business. Think about your business vision, mission statement, values and objectives to ensure that the new service will align with them.
Take time to consider questions such as:

• What are the benefits and risks of
• What problems are you solving?
• What value are you adding to the clinic and your patients with the new service?
• Who are your target patients? What are their needs and preferences?
• introducing a new service?
• How does the new service fit into your existing portfolio and brand identity?
• What resources and capabilities are required to deliver the new service?
• Is the timing right to introduce a new service?
• Will this service be a profitable addition to the clinic?

Positive answers to these questions ensure you are confident in your decision and on the right track to get a profitable outcome from your
financial investment.

Design the Patient Experience
When you have made your decision to proceed, the next step is to design the ‘customer service journey’, which involves defining the features, functions, processes, and standards of the new service. Take
a customer-centric and collaborative approach, focusing on the customer journey, experience and satisfaction, while involving all
stakeholders, such as employees and partners in the design process.

You should be able to answer questions, such as:

• What benefits and outcomes the new service delivers to patients.
• How patients book and pay.
• What activities, roles and responsibilities are involved in promoting and delivery of new service.
• How you plan to measure and monitor the outcomes.
• Number of services needed to pay for investment and timeframe you realistically plan to achieve this.

‘Standing out from the Crowd’ is important because the patient experience is a competitive battleground and your patients have a lot of choice. It is necessary that you send out a very clear message that your clinic is here and you are great at what you do. Learn to positively differentiate your business from your competitors – providing outstanding ‘customer service’ is the key.

Introducing a new service to the mix gives you the opportunity to re-enforce the message to your database and local community that you are truly a market leader, highly innovative, and on trend. Aim to be
the first, the best, and the only choice in your patient’s minds.

Go to Market
The next step is to introduce and promote the new service to the target market.

• Create and implement a marketing plan and strategy that showcases the value proposition, features and benefits of the new service.
• How do you plan to communicate and advertise to your potential and existing patients? How will you position it from competitors? How will you price and package it to attract patients?
• What is your plan to train all staff to speak about and promote the new service to patients attending your clinic for other services – get your entire team on board.
  For paid advertising, set a budget and stick to it. Evaluate the Performance
• Define and collect key performance indicators (KPI’s) and metrics that reflect the opportunities and outcomes of the new service.
• Identify and implement on-going opportunities for improvement and innovation based on the evaluation results.

Know your Numbers
Set your goals!
Work with your supplier and financial advisor, to clarify financial key performance indicators and targets for your new service, such as:

• Number of new service treatments required on a daily/weekly/monthly basis to break-even
• Number of new service treatments required on a daily/weekly/monthly basis to become profitable
• Actual sales per day/week/month
• All expenses – every cost of providing new service
• Cost of patient acquisition
• Conversion rate – from lead to patient
• Lifetime value of a patient purchasing new service
• Targets and commission per employee for new service
• Sales per employee of new service
• Return on investment

To keep on track, review your numbers regularly, daily if possible.
By following these steps and best practices, you can increase your chances of creating a successful service that meets patients’ needs, market demands, and business goals.