Do you like to buy stuff? Of course you do. Most people love to buy stuff.
They buy stuff they need. They buy stuff they love. And the weird thing is, people also buy stuff they don’t need. More often than not, they buy stuff they don’t even want.
Just look at your garage, or your wife’s closet, and you’ll know what I mean.
Spending money feels good, right down to the brain chemistry. Buying gives you a dopamine hit, a sense of control, and the illusion that your life just got better. All any of us needs is an excuse to justify the purchase, and some money to spend.
Why do you think businesses pour billions into marketing and advertising every single day? To hand you those excuses. So you won’t look, or feel, stupid when you’re spending your money.
And it works.
When I say people waste money on things they don’t need, I mean you. And when I say things, I mean that $10,000 piece of hardware sitting in your storage room collecting dust. You know the one. The rep swore up and down it would change your practice, then disappeared the moment you paid his invoice. You’re still paying the monthly lease. You can’t wait to get rid of it as soon as you recover your original “investment,” which, if you’re honest with yourself, you know will never happen.
What if I told you there’s a way to know whether a new piece of equipment will pay for itself before you buy it? That every service you roll out in your clinic can be validated before you spend a dime on hardware?
For $4,999, I’ll share my secret formula.
No. I’m kidding. It’s below, and it costs you a small PPC budget and some honesty.
This is the final part of my series on the costly marketing mistakes plastic surgeons and cosmetic clinics keep making. Part 1 and Part 2 cover the first six. These are the last three, and they’re the ones that cost the most.
Key Takeaways
- The only opinion that matters to your practice is the market's. It votes with dollars.
- Never buy equipment on a rep's demand claims. A small PPC test tells you the real demand in your area before you sign anything.
- Experts with beautiful portfolios and no financial metrics are better at getting your money than growing your practice.
- Knowing the mistakes changes nothing. Implementation is the whole game.
Mistake #3: Letting Staff and Sales Reps Dictate Your Marketing
It’s tempting to assume that if you like something, everyone must like it too. I see far too many cosmetic surgeons fall into this line of thinking. You might be guilty of the same. You add products and services because you, your staff, or your wife likes them. You oversee the creation of a web page and assume it’s great simply because you had a hand in it. You set your office hours to match your schedule, giving no thought to the needs of your prospective clients.
There is only one opinion that matters to your practice: the opinion of the patient. And I don’t mean running surveys and implementing every suggestion that comes out of them. I mean focusing your practice on the needs, wants, fears, and desires of the market.
Business is simple. The market will always tell you if you’re doing the right things or the wrong things.
Through careful, controlled testing, you never have to guess at buying new equipment or adding a service. Here’s how it works.
Say a rep comes to you with the latest piece of technology that she swears is in high demand. You’re not sure, because it’s a huge financial commitment and reps exaggerate consumer demand for a living. So you test before you buy:
- Run a PPC ad targeting the brand name of the treatment or device. This immediately shows you the real search demand for that exact machine in your area.
- Send the clicks to a landing page promoting a special introductory offer for anyone who fills in a form. Be honest that the treatment is under consideration, and comply with your local disclosure laws. I’m not a lawyer, so ask yours.
- Count the forms. That’s your demand, measured in actual interested patients instead of a rep’s pitch deck.
Even if you decide not to buy the equipment, you now have a list of interested prospects you can make an alternative offer to. Either way, the market told you what the right decision was.
I had a client who let his twenty-something office manager decide what treatments and services to offer, with no consideration for the market. If she liked it, it usually got added. He refused to listen when I raised it, because of the trust she’d built with him over the years. The result was a constant bleed of profits into bandwagon equipment for treatments that were little more than fads. Sometimes they eventually turned a profit, but they left almost nothing on the table for marketing and business stability.
It all boils down to one concept: do what’s right for your patient, and that ends up being what’s right for your business. Use your patient’s logic and decision-making path, not your own. It’s not about what you do. It’s about what you do for her.
The market is always right, and we're wrong more often than not. It doesn't matter that you've been in practice for decades, or that I've helped build multiple 7 and 8 figure cosmetic and plastic surgery clinics over the past two decades. If you bet your practice, and your child's college fund, on what you or I happen to like, you're guessing.
Mistake #2: Trusting “Experts” Instead of Testing for Yourself
We trust experts with our wellbeing. After all, they know better, right?
At its best, this instinct drives you to seek competent help for your practice. At its worst, it sends you into the hands of companies that look professional and have a large client list.
The kind of businesses that help you equate activity with progress.
These are companies with a beautiful portfolio and no financial metrics to back up their claims. No testing protocols. Nothing that shows you what they do makes a difference in dollars. These companies are typically better at getting your money than growing your practice.
The truth is, your practice doesn’t have to run on anyone’s unfounded opinions, including mine. You went through medical school learning to test and observe. Marketing is no different. The market will tell you if you’re doing the right things or the wrong things. The market votes with the only thing that matters to a practice: dollars and cents. If you change your website, that site has one job: drive more patients through your doors, onto your table, and money into your bank.
“There is only one boss, the customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”
– Sam Walton
So here’s the test-everything checklist:
If you don’t have separate incoming phone numbers for your different marketing channels, such as your print ads and website, you’re operating blind.
If you don’t know how your web pages convert visitors, you don’t know what your site is doing.
If you don’t know which PPC ad and landing page combination converts best, you’re wasting time and money.
If you don’t listen to incoming calls to hear whether your staff is saying the right things and booking those precious leads, you’re just plain losing money. (Check your local laws before recording.)
If you’re not testing, you don’t know what you’re doing. If you don’t know which numbers to watch, start with my guide to medical practice KPIs.
You have to test.
Mistake #1: Knowing All of This and Implementing None of It
Let’s be blunt. Running and growing a plastic surgery clinic is hard. There are a lot of competitors out there. The internet and social media only make it harder. Being the best doctor in town no longer guarantees you’ll be the most successful.
Competence is still the foundation. A few bad reviews online can kill a busy practice, and I’ve seen it firsthand. But the foundation is all it is.
The look and feel of your clinic, how your front desk picks up the phone, how you run the first consultation, the follow-up after it, even what you do one year after the surgery. They all matter. They matter a great deal if you want to build a 7-8 figure practice.
It’s possible to make millions in this business while putting in part-time clinical hours. I’ve seen it with my clients. You know someone from school who’s doing exactly that.
So here are the big questions.
Why are you still struggling to get more patients and book more surgeries? Why don’t you have a waiting-list practice? Why aren’t you getting the recognition you deserve from your peers even though you’re an excellent surgeon?
The answer, in one word: implementation.
You probably recognized yourself in some of the nine mistakes across this series. Recognizing them changes nothing. Most surgeons read articles like this one, nod along, close the tab, and change nothing. The few who act on them pull away from everyone else, because their competitors are all nodding and closing tabs too.
And here’s the uncomfortable part: you shouldn’t be the one doing the implementing. You’re not trained for it, you’re too close to it to be objective, and every hour you spend fiddling with marketing is an hour you’re not getting paid to operate.
This is literally what we do. We took Toronto Cosmetic Clinic from under $100K to multiple 7 figures by building and testing these systems, one measured step at a time. If you’d rather skip the years of trial and error, our plastic surgery marketing agency page shows you exactly how we work.
Listen to the market. Test against it. Let the results guide your decisions.
Everything else is opinion.