Nick Dumitru · Think Basis · Markham, Ontario
Activity Is
Not Progress.
You're paying for marketing and the practice isn't growing. Something is blocking it, and it's rarely the thing you've been sold a fix for. Finding that block in plastic surgery practices and aesthetic clinics, then removing it, is what I've done for 20 years.
Skin Vitality had 4 clinics and sat at #4 in Canada when they called. Within two years: 8 clinics, #1 on Allergan's list.
Featured In and Speaking At
The Situation
The Agency Is Busy.
The Schedule Isn't.
You get the report every month. Impressions are up, the posts went out, somebody tweaked something. And the consult calendar looks the way it did a year ago.
A practice grows when more of the right people call, more of those callers book, and more of the booked ones say yes in the room. Every one of those steps can be blocked, and the block is usually somewhere nobody is looking. The front desk informs when it should book. The fee was copied from the clinic down the street. The owner picks marketing by what he likes, and the agency sells whatever is easiest to deliver.
Another tool won't fix it. Find the block first.
Nick Dumitru
Founder. Author of "A Cut Above." Speaker at IMCAS, the world congress for aesthetic medicine.
The Work
The Ads Are a Tool.
The Practice Is the Job.
I've spent 20 years inside plastic surgery practices and aesthetic clinics, and I've listened to thousands of their incoming calls. We run the Google Ads, build the websites, do the search work, train the front desk. All of it. But none of that is the service. The service is a practice that grows, and every practice is blocked by something different.
So the first thing I do is find the block. A surgeon's brand couldn't justify his fees, so every call ended in price resistance. A clinic's print still worked, so nobody noticed the patients who searched instead. A practice was losing patients to its own payment policies before an ad could have helped. The tools we used afterwards were different in every case, because the problem was.
I don't take on many practices at once, because this only works when I'm in the numbers myself. When I'm full, I'll tell you.
More about Nick →"Working with Nick is like working with an Olympic-level coach when you're a beginning athlete with incredible talent. He is exquisitely knowledgeable about both business AND behavior and uses that expertise to take your business to the next level in every area."
Proof
What Happened After
We Found the Block.
4 → 8
Clinics in the first two years
Skin Vitality Medical Clinic. #4 to #1 Botox provider in Canada on Allergan's list while we ran their growth. 14 clinics today, by their own count.
Read the case study →72 → 125
Surgical consults a month
A midtown Toronto plastic surgeon, in a recession. BOTOX sales up 83% and JUVEDERM up 1,200% by Allergan's count. The block was a brand that couldn't carry his fees and a front desk giving them away.
Read the case study →4 → 44
Staff in six years
Toronto Cosmetic Clinic. Under $100K a year to multiple seven figures, with the HR, training and retention systems built so the practice could carry the growth.
Read the case study →How an Engagement Runs
Diagnose. Prescribe. Dominate.
Most agencies start executing before they understand the problem, because execution is what they bill for. We don't touch a campaign until we know what's blocking the practice.
01
Diagnose
The first weeks are an audit of the whole practice, not the ad account. Where the calls come from, what happens to them, how consults are run, what the fees say about you, what the reviews say. We find where patients are leaking out.
02
Prescribe
A plan with the fixes in order, who owns each one and what it should produce. Sometimes that's a new site and a search campaign. Sometimes it's a fee change and phone training before we spend a dollar on ads.
03
Dominate
We run it, measure it in booked consultations and revenue, and keep pushing until you're the name in your market. You'll hold us to the numbers. We'll hold you to the execution.
The Blocks I Keep Finding
You Are Not the Patient.
I once sat with a surgeon who was opening a new surgical suite and showed me a logo and a website that would have cost him patients from the day they went live. I told him so. His answer was "Well, I like them." Another client let his twenty-something office manager pick the product lines because she used the treatments herself. The practice is still open. It's a fraction of what it was when we had it. Your taste is not market data, and neither is your staff's.
The phone is the other one. Whoever answers it thinks the job is to inform. The job is to book. In the call studies we cite in our front desk article, 42% of calls to medical practices went unanswered and 85% of those callers never called back. You paid to make the phone ring. Then nobody picked it up.
Then there's the fee you set by copying the clinic down the street, the free consultation that fills your calendar with people who were never going to buy, and the agency that pitches branding because branding is easy to deliver. You're not Red Bull. You're a doctor. Sales come first. The brand grows out of them.
What It Costs, and Who It Fits
Engagements Start at $15,000 a Month.
Plus media spend, which stays in your name and your account. That buys my time in your numbers every week, the team that builds and runs whatever the diagnosis calls for, and responsibility for the result. It fits practices doing roughly $2 million a year and up, and established practices with the capital to fund a turnaround.
Most cosmetic practices should budget $6,000 to $30,000 a month for media on top of the fee, depending on whether the practice is surgical or non-surgical. We've run campaigns from $100 a day to $60,000 a day. There's no long-term contract. The first engagement runs three months, long enough to give the process a fair chance to work, and clients stay after that because the numbers are moving, not because a contract says they have to.
I publish the number because it saves us both a meeting. If it's out of range this year, the articles are the same advice and they cost nothing. If it's in range, the first conversation is a diagnosis, not a pitch. I take it myself, with your revenue, your call volume and your marketing spend in front of me, and you'll leave it knowing what I think is blocking the practice. If the fit isn't there, you'll hear that in the same call.
Running a PE firm or a multi-location group? That's a different engagement. Read about Advisory.
Send Nick Your Numbers.
Revenue, locations, what you spend on marketing, and what you think is holding the practice back. Nick reads every one himself and you will hear back either way.
Send Us Your Numbers