Clinic businesses: Chelsey Brown’s top tips for building success

Dr Tim Pearce

June 27, 2024

It takes guts, resilience, medical expertise, confidence, and unwavering determination to build a clinic empire, want to learn how to achieve success? Dr Tim Pearce sat down for a podcast with Nurse Chelsey Brown, a Canadian RN from The Cosmetic Clinic who has built three aesthetic clinics in Canada in four years.

This blog gives an insight into their discussion, touching on how she successfully established her clinics, the ingenious marketing strategy she employed to keep selling aesthetic services during the COVID-19 lockdown, and her top tips for building a thriving aesthetics business.

Read our previous blogs covering Nurse Chelsey’s journey towards building 3 clinics in 4 years, and why she is choosing to pivot from aesthetics towards longevity medicine.

Learn how to introduce longevity to your aesthetics clinic with a new eLearning course from Dr Tim Pearce, with insight from leading longevity experts: Dr Simisola Elizabeth Oke, Dr Nichola Conlon, and Nurse Chelsey Brown.

Keen to understand more about how Chelsey has built a successful chain of clinics, Dr Tim quizzed her on some top tips for a winning business.

Emulating others and the way they do business is credible and can make you happy when you are starting, but it is not sustainable because it lacks the authenticity of who you are, Chelsey doubts that it will lead to long-term success. You need to find and be yourself and do your thing. A large part of your business needs to be standardised, to ensure patient safety, but there is plenty of room for creativity.

Building a successful business – stay lean

When asked about growing her clinics and the advice she would give her younger self, Chelsey emphasised the importance of staying lean and starting small (no overspending on a fancy clinic) to avoid the financial burden of large debts whilst working your way up.

She noted that success also comes from being open to pivotal moments, for example, multiplying her clinics arose out of necessity, rather than a desire to expand, and she worked to make them successful. Dr Tim agreed that when you stay lean it is not necessarily just about the financials, you are no longer in a fear mindset which means you make more abundant decisions which tend to be better decisions because you are not fighting for a short-term goal to generate the extra pennies to pay the debt. He also recommended keeping your overheads as low as possible and reinvesting according to your income.

Similarly, Chelsey does not make decisions in her business if they will cost her sleep at night because this causes her IQ levels to lower and puts her health at risk, a recipe for a downward spiral. Staying lean allowed Chelsey to sleep at night.

Successful entrepreneurs note that you can tell the success of your business after about the fourth year because of everything you have done which has created the platform for success; if you expedite the process, you miss the valuable lessons you should have learnt in years 1 to 4 which lead to sustainability.

If you are still in those early years, you must dig deep and acknowledge that the steps you are going through are part of the process. You are not in the same place as the people you aspire to be, but this is where you are supposed to be right now because that’s the recipe for keeping you in business. Keeping lean saved Chelsey and allowed her to maintain her business when the COVID-19 pandemic hit because she was not saddled with too many bills to pay in an embryonic business.

Building a successful business – learn to pivot

Reflecting on that time, Chelsey’s next lesson and a top mentoring tip is being able to pivot fast if required, which was needed when she had just opened her clinic and the world was locked down.

Call it foresight or intuition, but Chelsey realised early on that, unlike mainstream healthcare settings, she needed to embrace technology in her business with patient records, moving away from paper and investing in software. She made everything virtual, so as soon as the clinic was shut down due to COVID-19 restrictions, she could do virtual consultations from home. She aligned herself with a company that had an online service and was able to sell medical-grade skincare through them which paid the few bills that remained, without taking a salary. When the clinic was allowed to reopen, the patients who had virtual consults all booked appointments. Without the flexibility to pivot (and stay lean), she believes she would have been in a very different position with her business.

Chelsey affirmed that what she had to offer her patients in those early days was good but is a far cry from what she offers them today. She has reinvested in the business and has grown the services exponentially, always staying lean, not just financially, but in growing her knowledge. Her success comes from knowing that you cannot offer everything at the beginning and should offer what you know, which for most aesthetic clinicians is usually neurotoxins and dermal fillers.

Dr Tim and Chelsey continued to discuss ‘doing the scary stuff’ and being brave enough to have confidence in your ability to push forward and act decisively. Chelsey found hiring the scariest part of growing her team from 0 to 23 staff, as it involves the daunting prospect of investing profits into new employees.

Building a successful business – hire the right people

Despite the fear, she learned that strategic hires, even those not directly tied to sales, are crucial for propelling the business forward; her first hire was a receptionist, the same as Dr Tim. Discussing the approach of other entrepreneurs from the Inner Circle, they noted that the business journey emphasises the importance of replacing oneself to scale effectively, by hiring another clinician. However, Chelsey finds deep inspiration and fulfilment in patient interactions, which are crucial to maintaining her passion and driving the business forward; without this connection, she feels she might lose the motivation to continue.

Chelsey also finds her staff to be incredibly inspiring. She hires for personality over skill because skills can be taught. She looks for staff whose strengths complement her weaknesses; admitting that she doesn’t love managing people or doing marketing. She believes having team members who excel in areas where she might not be as strong is crucial for filling different niches, making the organisation more well-rounded, and driving the business forward. Dr Tim admitted that he also dislikes managing people, he enjoys coaching and leading but agreed that managing people is a different skill and praised Chelsey for hiring someone else to manage her staff.

He also added that learning how to fire staff is an important skill. Your patient is the CEO of your organisation, who you and your staff are working for and as the business owner, you need to love your staff, they are the people who bring value, but not everyone will fit in with the mission and now and then you must recognise that and allow people to go and grow somewhere else. Chelsey’s belief is in hiring slowly, but firing fast because there is a toxicity that happens when people do not match the environment.

Shifting from a family-style business, as she grew, to a more corporate culture was also scary for Chelsey; she was afraid that she would lose staff, but thankfully that did not happen, and her staff understood the need for change with the expansion.

Remember to watch the whole podcast below where Chelsey and Dr Tim also talk about managing staff who become competitive with each other, hiring non-agreeable people who can tell you the truth rather than ‘yes men’, and how the business owner is often the visionary but must hire other people to perform defined business support roles.

Building a successful business – follow a pattern when expanding your business

Chelsey now owns and operates three clinic locations and Dr Tim was keen to understand how you can make the team feel connected to the ‘big picture’ of the whole business when they are in different places. The only way she makes it work is standard operating procedures, a method employed by many large, non-franchised businesses, following these key practices.

• Same training: All staff, including clinicians and administrative personnel, receive the same in-house training to ensure consistency across locations.
• Streamlined processes: Each location must strictly adhere to the standard operating procedures and protocols for all operations, from patient interactions to administrative tasks and safety.
• Go digital: All processes, protocols and documentation are digitised for easy access and reference by staff.
• Consistent patient experience: Uniform practices across locations, such as offering the same amenities and maintaining the same merchandising layout.
• Centralised testing on new services: All new treatments and products should be tested at the headquarters (usually where the principal clinician/business owner is most often present) before being rolled out to other locations.
• Regular staff Interaction: Bring all staff together a few times a year for training and events to maintain cohesion and alignment
• Sustainable management: As a business owner you cannot be everywhere at once to manage everything and should limit travel to all locations; focus on visiting occasionally and maintaining sustainable management practices.
• Marketing: Centralise marketing efforts and manage them from your headquarters.
• Learn from experience: Acknowledge the initial challenges and gradually review and improve your processes.

Building a successful business – consistent marketing

The marketing for Chelsey’s business (across all clinic locations and from all clinicians) focuses on consistent and authentic messaging centred around her business slogan. The team have created detailed marketing plans and ensures all staff follow the same guidelines, particularly for social media. This attracts patients who value high standards and medical expertise. By consistently presenting their brand in the same way they build trust and draw in patients who resonate with their core values – Chelsey explained that it can take 7-10 times for someone looking at your messaging to make the move to call the clinic, so you must be consistent.

But, when you have multiple clinic locations, you must also learn what works best for each. Chelsey agreed with Dr Tim that Google ads and SEO are crucial, but the effectiveness of marketing strategies varies by location and demographic. For her clinic in the larger city, Google ads and online searches work best, while the clinics in smaller locations benefit more from billboards, radio ads, and referrals (word of mouth). Each clinic’s marketing strategy has required trial and error to determine what resonates with the local audience. She has found that social media preferences also vary, with Facebook being more popular in smaller communities and Instagram in larger ones. Her tip is to understand and target the specific needs and behaviours of each demographic in each of your clinic locations.

Dr Tim emphasised that the focus of marketing should not be on selling the products, a common mistake he feels many aesthetic clinicians make when patients mostly seek safety and a reliable outcome. Chelsey’s approach highlights offering a science-backed method for achieving individual goals, rather than simply discussing dermal fillers and botulinum toxins in her advertising.

Chelsey talked about creating a community (of patients) and that community has turned into an army that is now telling everybody else about what they are doing, so they cannot stray from that messaging. They are very serious about their community, and patients are attracted to them because of their standards and medical aspect, which makes them different from other providers, like medi-spas; patients feel safe with them and see that their results speak for themselves.

The pair had a lot to talk about in their lengthy discussion on building successful clinic businesses. It’s worth putting the kettle on, grabbing a notepad, and watching the full podcast.

If you have any questions or discussion points on longevity or aesthetics, you can find Dr Tim Pearce on Instagram, follow Nurse Chelsey, or find her cosmetic and regenerative medicine clinic, The Cosmetic Clinic on Instagram.

Do not get left behind, become an anti-ageing specialist and learn how to introduce longevity to your aesthetics clinic with Dr Tim’s new eLearning course.

Aesthetics Mastery Show

How I Built 3 Clinics in 4 Years as a Nurse Injector

Dr Tim says:

“In this episode, I sit down with Nurse Chelsey, a true inspiration for many clinicians. Chelsey’s remarkable achievement of building a clinic empire in just four years is a testament to her resilience, medical expertise, confidence, and unwavering determination. Discover how Chelsey, as a nurse injector, successfully established three clinics, the ingenious marketing strategy she employed to keep selling aesthetic services during lockdown, and her top tips for building a thriving aesthetics business.”

Watch the full Aesthetics Mastery Show here.

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@TheOrignalTRockz

“Love her, great role model, fantastic, very interesting interview! 16:34 I wrote this comment right at the beginning, but when she said „as being warm“, my positive impression skyrocketed. Really love her way.”

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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.

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