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Your Surgical Calendar
Has a Block in It.
A midtown Toronto surgeon went from 72 to 125 consults a month, in a recession, with BOTOX up 83% and JUVEDERM up 1,200% on Allergan's numbers. What was blocking him wasn't the ads. It was a brand that couldn't carry his fees and a front desk that gave them away.
Send Nick Your NumbersWhere Surgical Practices Leak
She Researched You for Months.
Then Your Front Desk Quoted a Price.
A woman considering a breast augmentation or a facelift doesn't click an ad and book. She reads for three months to a year. She compares you against two or three other surgeons, reads your reviews before she reads your credentials, and calls when she's nearly decided. The call is the end of a long process, which is why what happens on it decides whether all the money you spent getting her there was an investment or a donation.
Phone handling is the number one failing in the cosmetic practices I've audited, and that call is where the block usually is. The person who answers thinks the job is to inform, so she quotes the fee, the caller says she'll think about it, and that's the last anyone hears of her. The surgeon then concludes the market has gone soft and the agency agrees, because the agency gets paid either way. We wrote up the mechanics in the consultation is where you win or lose and the hidden cost of free consultations.
It isn't always the phone. A brand that can't carry the fee collapses every conversation to price. In Toronto, every procedure term that carries buying intent is owned by someone, and if it isn't you, those patients never knew you existed. Operations can be the block too, when a new patient walks into the same payment policies that are already driving the old ones out. The job is to find out which one it is before anybody spends a dollar on ads. Our full guide to plastic surgery marketing goes through all of it.
Proof
What Was in the Way
at Three Surgical Practices.
72 → 125
Consults a month, midtown Toronto
The block: a brand that couldn't justify his fees and a front desk apologizing for them. We rebuilt the positioning and trained the phones. BOTOX up 83%, JUVEDERM up 1,200%, in a recession.
Read the case study →1 → 3
Offices, New Jersey to Manhattan
The block: payment policies and staff problems driving patients out the back while ads would have pushed more in the front. We fixed the inside first. The marketing came last.
Read the case study →#1
Organic and paid search
The block: a consultant collecting a retainer for nothing while she stayed invisible for the procedures that pay. New positioning, new site, search and paid search, and print for the consult room. The feast-or-famine cycle ended.
Read the case study →How an Engagement Runs
Diagnose. Prescribe. Dominate.
01
Diagnose
The engagement opens with an audit of the practice: where inquiries come from and what each costs, what happens on the phone (we listen to the calls), how consults run and how many become surgery, what the fees are and how you set them, what the reviews say. We find where patients are leaking out before we spend another dollar reaching them.
02
Prescribe
A short plan with the fixes in order and who owns each one. For a surgical practice that often starts with the phone and the consult, because they recover patients you're already paying for. Then procedure-level Google Ads, search work on the terms your patients type, a site built to book, and call tracking on everything so you know the cost of a booked consult to the dollar.
03
Dominate
We run it and measure it in booked consults, procedures and revenue, and we keep pushing until you're the surgeon the others in your city are compared against. The Toronto Cosmetic Clinic engagement ran six years that way. How the work works.
What It Costs, and Who It Fits
From $15,000 a Month, Plus Media.
That covers the diagnosis, the plan, the team that builds and runs it, and Nick's time in your numbers every week. Media spend is on top, in your own accounts. It fits surgical practices doing roughly $2 million a year and up, and established practices with the capital to fund a turnaround.
Plan on $6,000 to $30,000 a month for media, with surgical and non-surgical practices at different points in that range. No long-term contract: the first engagement is three months, enough to see whether the phones and the campaigns are producing, and surgeons stay after that because the consults are there.
If it's out of range this year, read the plastic surgery marketing guide, listen to your own incoming calls for a week, and fix what you hear. That's the same advice, and it costs nothing. If it's in range, send your numbers and you'll get a straight read on the first call.
Questions
What Surgeons Ask First.
What's different about how Think Basis works with a plastic surgeon?
We don't sell a package. Every engagement starts with a diagnosis of where patients are leaking out of your practice: the searches you're missing, what happens when the phone rings, how consults are run, what your fees say about you. Then we build what that diagnosis calls for. For one Toronto surgeon that meant a rebrand and a retrained front desk before we touched his ads. For another it meant six years of search work.
What does it cost?
Engagements start at $15,000 a month plus media spend, which stays in your own ad accounts. That fits surgical practices doing roughly $2 million a year and up, and established practices with the capital to fund a turnaround. The number is on the page so you know it before you call. If it's out of range this year, the articles on this site are the same advice and they cost nothing.
How long until it produces consultations?
Phone and consultation fixes pay off in the first month, because they recover patients you're already paying to reach. Google Ads produces booked consults within weeks when the phone can handle them. Search work takes four to six months to move and compounds from there. A patient deciding on surgery researches for three months to a year before she calls, so the system has to be built for how long she takes, not for how fast you'd like it to go.
Is there a long-term contract?
No. The first engagement runs three months, which gives the process a fair chance to start working. After that, surgeons stay because consults are up, not because they're obligated to. Media is separate and sits in your own accounts. Most practices should budget $6,000 to $30,000 a month for it; we've run campaigns from $100 a day to $60,000 a day.
Do you only work with surgeons in Toronto?
No. We're in Markham, Ontario, and we work with plastic surgeons and cosmetic practices across Canada and the United States. We grew a New Jersey practice into three offices including Upper Manhattan, and took a midtown Toronto surgeon from 72 to 125 consults a month.
Send Nick Your Numbers.
Consults a month, procedures a month, what you spend on marketing, and what you think is blocking the practice. Nick reads it himself.
Send Us Your Numbers