Mistakes clinicians make when starting an aesthetic business

If you have just started out with your aesthetic business, you may feel overwhelmed, be working long hours, making mistakes, fearing failure, and asking yourself if you should just quit aesthetics.

In this blog, Dr Tim Pearce will discuss the common mistakes clinicians make when they start their aesthetic businesses. He will share his tips for success and four steps to help you to build your confidence if you are on the verge of quitting.

Do you feel anxious about causing complications? Many clinicians feel so overwhelmed with the thought of causing a vascular occlusion that it stops them growing their aesthetics business. Dr Tim is currently hosting a webinar series to help you overcome your fear of complications so that you can uplevel your knowledge and increase your CPD-certified learning to build a successful aesthetics business. Sign up here >>

Seven things you can get wrong that will cause you to fail in medical aesthetics

You are not alone if you have thought about quitting medical aesthetics, Dr Tim did too. Aesthetic practitioners can often feel very much alone in their practice; being stuck with a difficult patient and without any support can make you question whether you are in the right place. It is worth remembering that if you have ever found yourself at a low point, this is often when people bounce and end up getting to new highs, once they have overcome the problems that precipitated that position. But, let’s look at some of the common mistakes clinicians make in those early days.

Mistake 1: The mañana syndrome

When coaching delegates, Dr Tim often hears them remark that they are not yet moving forward with their aesthetic business but plan to ‘start tomorrow’ –

mañana, mañana.

There is no better time than today; act today to move your dreams forward. The people who start with ‘tomorrow’ often leave it for years.

Mistake 2: Waiting until things are perfect

A similar mistake to make is ‘waiting until the conditions are perfect’ to launch something, create content, or act in some way. This is particularly true when considering creating content – you do not require a full production studio before you can put out content to your audience of potential patients, just pick up your phone and make a video.

Waiting for things to be ‘perfect’ is an issue because no matter what happens, there will always be a reason why you postpone, delay, and do not do the thing that you need to do to move forward with your future. Better to do it imperfectly and get better at it over time.

Mistake 3: Copying your competition

Virtually every clinician makes this mistake when they first start out, and Dr Tim also admitted to setting his prices by copying the local competition and hoping that they were doing it right. If you think about it, this means that you have copied the most important part of your business strategy from someone quite average.

Instead of the approach of copying a cohort of struggling local businesses, work backwards from a goal that really matters to you. Think about the profit margins that would make your struggle worthwhile, and work backwards from that to think about how you become valuable enough to justify those prices. This is a far more strategic way of designing a business model. Otherwise, you will end up amid the ‘pile’, where it is most competitive, and where there is the greatest number of people doing the same thing, and that is very hard work. Think differently, start with the end in mind, and do not copy your local competition.

Mistake 4: Downplaying goals

Aesthetic clinicians often suppress their excitement and optimism for the future, so they better fit in with those around them – family, friends, and colleagues – who are predicting a more mediocre future. This can manifest if you get excited about your plans for an aesthetic business but someone close to you gives off signals, verbal or non-verbal, that it sounds like a pipe dream. Colleagues may not believe that you are going to start your own private aesthetic practice and be successful because they cannot imagine doing that for themselves.

This is a common reason why people hold themselves back from their goals. They downplay and try to think about not being too ambitious or getting too excited, but all this achieves is that you begin to choose a mediocre strategy for a mediocre dream. You work harder to execute it because your motivation is lower (the excitement is reduced), you struggle, and the worry sets in. Be bold when you set out your first intentions and goals; do not worry about those around you who may think it is impossible. State what you want in life and then design a strategy that you think might get you there.

Mistake 5: Undermining your value

Dr Tim explains that many aesthetic clinicians start out by commoditising themselves. They position themselves as just another injector, weighing up against the competition according to the price of a 1ml syringe of dermal filler or a unit of botulinum toxin, instead of asking what it is that their patients value.

Healthcare professionals have lots of people skills, and an ability to connect and coach patients in consultations, and guide their treatment plans and choices, but often this is not factored into the pricing. Instead, choosing to copy other local injectors who operate a ‘vending machine’ style business model, who do not do any of the things that you care about as part of the service, can leave you frustrated and unrewarded dealing with patients who do not value you and are simply driven by the commodity price.

Know that patients are willing to pay for aesthetic clinicians who provide good explanations and education on the treatment options, who make them feel safe, who listen to their problems, and who really care about the outcome. Find out what is valuable about you, pitch yourself as valuable to the people who care about it, and make sure your prices fit the set of values. Otherwise, you will be underselling yourself, attracting the wrong type of patients, and it will become a struggle to get your business going.

Attract new aesthetic patients by clearly displaying your status as a healthcare professional by purchasing The Patient Promise Pack.

Mistake 6: Lacking confidence

Aesthetic clinicians like to wait until they feel confident, explains Dr Tim, and that is partly because they want to think of themselves as safe clinicians; in other words, you should not do things that you are not confident to do.

However, the truth of the matter is that none of us are confident when we start; that is not how confidence works. It does not matter what task you are talking about – a procedure or a video for social media – we all lack confidence at the beginning because we do not fully understand how confidence works. Confidence is the payment you get for successfully performing something and is not something that you have before you start.

Mistake 7: Life is just an employer

Although this is at the end of this list, Dr Tim remarks that it is often the first mistake aesthetic clinicians and all businesspeople make, him included, which is to set goals that you think you can attain rather than goals that achieve what you want. It is better to set the goal for what you really want rather than for the things you know you can get. Although there will be more struggle, you will find a better strategy at the other end of it.

Dr Tim refers to a poem called My Wage by Jessie Belle Rittenhouse that captures this concept for him because it makes you think differently about your goals, encouraging you to get the most out of life and elevate your dreams.

I bargained with Life for a penny,

and Life would pay no more.

However, I begged at evening,

when I counted my scanty store.

 

For Life is a just employer,

he gives you what you ask,

but once you have set the wages,

why, you must bear the task.

 

I worked for a menial’s hire,

only to learn, dismayed,

that any wage I had asked of Life,

Life would have willingly paid.

Ask yourself, what do I want my life to be like in five years’ time; and come up with a strategy specifically to achieve it. It takes bravery to state it, especially because you may not achieve it, but you are more likely to achieve it if you state what you really want rather than pretending that you will be satisfied with what everyone else does or with achieving the things you seem to be able to get easily. Think more carefully, set bigger goals, and go after what really matters to you.

4 steps to confidence in medical aesthetics

Confidence is a primary goal that many business owners and aesthetic clinicians seek, and Dr Tim is happy to share a four-step formula that he has found very helpful from The Strategic Coach, Dan Sullivan which describes the process that you need to go through to become confident.

It starts with commitment and committing to a goal, whatever your goal, remembering that there is a big difference between being 98% committed and 100% committed. When you are 100% committed to a goal, it will change your physiology to a degree and you can then start to move on to the next step, which is courage.

When you have the courage, you can start to move forward to do the things you have not done before. A crucial insight with courage is that courage does not feel nice, courage is quite an unpleasant feeling. We often say to people who are courageous – “good on you” – and we imagine them feeling strong, but that is not courage, that is confidence. Courage is doing things when you do not feel like doing them because there is a risk involved, but that is an essential part of developing confidence because once you have the courage to start to implement something, you reach the next step of capability.

If you are doing new things that you have never done before, you will perceive yourself to be developing capability. Only once you have developed capability, do you get the confidence.

Confidence is a byproduct of executing things you have not done before, and to do that you need to be brave and courageous, and to do that you need to be fully committed.

Get more great tips from Dr Tim in his blogs:

• How to get started in medical aesthetics
• Pricing: how to charge for your aesthetic services

Find more business blogs from Dr Tim.

Download Dr Tim’s free guide on five steps to create a successful aesthetics business. It covers everything you need to know from the equipment you will need, how to get your first customer, the different routes to market, the importance of your business plan, and how to structure your pricing.

You can find Dr Tim Pearce on Instagram if you have any further questions about starting an aesthetic business.

Is your worst nightmare causing a VO?

If you want to be a great injector then you need to get over your fear of complications. Register here for the next webinar to help you overcome your complications anxiety >>

Subscribe to our YouTube channel for really useful regular tips and advice.  

Aesthetics Mastery Show

In this episode Dr Tim discuss the most common mistakes clinicians make and shares his tips for success, plus his 4 steps to confidence formula, which helped him back on the path to success when I was on the verge of quitting.

Read more and join the debate on Dr Tim Pearce’s YouTube Channel.

Is your worst nightmare causing a VO?

If you want to be a great injector then you need to get over your fear of complications. Register here for the next webinar to help you overcome your complications anxiety >>

Subscribe to our YouTube channel for really useful regular tips and advice.  

Dr Tim Pearce eLearning

Dr Tim Pearce MBChB BSc (Hons) MRCGP founded his eLearning concept in 2016 in order to provide readily accessible BOTOX® and dermal filler online courses for fellow Medical Aesthetics practitioners. His objective was to raise standards within the industry – a principle which remains just as relevant today.

Our exclusive video-led courses are designed to build confidence, knowledge and technique at every stage, working from foundation level to advanced treatments and management of complications.

Thousands of delegates have benefited from the courses and we’re highly rated on Trustpilot. For more information or to discuss which course is right for you, please get in touch with our friendly team.