Although a sound educational platform is a big contributing factor to being a successful facial aesthetic practitioner, another massive element is how you grow a list of patients and ultimately a business, which is sustainable. Although this is not something that can be explained comprehensively in a short article like this, we can certainly start unravelling the superficial layers to gain a high-level understanding of potential strategies.
One way to think about creating a strategic model for building a patient base is to consider the concept of a patient journey as potentially being never ending. The fact that cosmetic injectable treatments typically do not last forever (Botulinum Toxin tends to last for 3-4 months and dermal fillers 12-18 months) and that the aging process never stops means that patients can conceivably keep coming back to see you for recurrent treatments (if indicated/appropriate). If you acquire a patient (i.e. a patient attend for a consultation), based on the consultation treatment is indicated and the patient opts to proceed and then subsequently the patient attends for future treatments at regular intervals they will then be in a cycle (see diagram below).
If more patients enter and stay in this cycle than leave you essentially have a growing business, which has much more chance of success. By analysing the reasons why patients may enter and leave this cycle you can really start to understand how to develop your patient base. The reasons are vast and out of the scope of this article but the diagram of the patient cycle starts to give you a small insight.
As a training provider, we appreciate that although we can help you acquire the academic and clinical skills to perform cosmetic injectable treatments, we also want you to actually utilise them to help steer you career as far towards non-surgical facial aesthetics as you would like, and maintain this in a sustainable way. With this in mind we offer help to all of our candidates in this domain and in particular spend a lot of time with those embarking on the Postgraduate Certificate in Non-Surgical Facial Aesthetics who by enrolling are demonstrating their desire to commit some or all of their future clinical activity to this field.