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Dr Tim Pearce
If you are building a career as a medical aesthetic practitioner, you are on a journey which will hopefully lead to success, but it won’t come easy, and here’s why.
In this blog, Dr Tim Pearce discusses the challenges of medical aesthetic practice and starting a clinic business. He explores the different developmental stages or paths travelled by clinicians, including the mindset, clinical, and business paths. Focusing on the clinical path, he further elaborates on how clinicians develop skills, gain experience, and improve as they progress. Looking at personal and professional growth, amidst the challenges, he highlights the importance of continued learning, mentorship, and a patient-centred approach to achieve success.
“It feels like I’m doing it all wrong!”
Reflecting on his early struggles as he embarked on a career in medical aesthetics, Dr Tim recalls feeling ‘stuck’ and doubting whether he would ever succeed in building a clinic business.
However, as he gained more experience – going through various stages, solving problems along the way – and then began teaching and mentoring others, he realised that many clinicians are doing the same things. They are going through the same challenges, yet they often feel like they have an individual problem and are the only ones “doing it all wrong”. Challenges range from technical issues like understanding anatomy and managing patient interactions to handling complications like bruising or side effects.
But it is not a ‘you’ problem, he points out, explaining that he believes there are three distinct paths that every aesthetic clinician must navigate as they build their career and clinic business.
The Mindset Path
According to Dr Tim, The Mindset Path is the most interesting because it reprogrammes your worldview, as you build your business. It reflects your personal development and growth.
Many people start their businesses with limiting beliefs or misconceptions; real-world challenges often shatter these. Building a business forces you to adapt, grow, and develop resilience. Personal development often goes hand-in-hand with business success.
The Clinical Path
Mastering the technical aspects of aesthetics forms The Clinical Path; from choosing the right treatments and appropriate patients to delivering treatments accurately and managing complications, progressing through facial treatments to the whole body.
We will cover more on this below, as Dr Tim explains the progression from being a ‘pattern-based injector’ where you replicate simple techniques towards becoming an artist who can visualise the anatomy and execute complex treatments with confidence, as a ‘master’.
The Clinical Path also includes learning from mistakes, understanding patient anatomy, and dealing with a wide variety of patients with different expectations and needs – from younger to more mature individuals.
The Business Path
The basic functionality of your business is The Business Path. Building a successful practice requires understanding fundamental systems and processes, such as procuring stock, registering the business, paying taxes, and hiring and firing staff. This path will vary as you develop your aesthetic career, from an employee to a business owner.
The logistical challenges can often stall progress, feeling like you are stuck or static in your business, that is when it is crucial to develop more effective systems and processes to grow again, notes Dr Tim.
He has developed a membership programme to help people keep growing no matter what obstacles they meet along these paths.
Clinical obstacles on the path to a successful aesthetic business
Aesthetic clinicians will encounter many clinical obstacles on The Clinical Path; these are the stages you must pass through on your way towards becoming a proficient injector.
Training
In the early stages of clinical development, most clinicians are concerned with deciding where to choose to train to learn how to inject, usually starting with dermal fillers and botulinum toxin, and may believe it will be easy with their transferable medical skills.
Often, initial training leaves gaps, lacks enough hands-on experience, or tries to cram too much into the time available, and many practitioners face a lack of confidence when going on to practise on real patients, feeling a need to repeat training or refocus on a single area. This can leave you dejected.
Training may teach you how to inject, but there is much more to the story; a lack of confidence when treating patients can be compounded by logistical issues, like sourcing the right products, managing stock and consumables, and learning how to handle equipment correctly.
Patient Selection
As aesthetic practitioners gain experience, they face more advanced challenges, such as learning to develop effective patient selection techniques – treatments do not work on all patients – training days will not expose you to the variations in patient types because models are specially selected. Learning the different treatment plans, approaches, doses, and likely outcomes for a 20-something versus a 60-something is a clinical obstacle you will face.
This is where the real experience starts, explains Dr Tim, because you must make your best place guess with your approach to treatment and then learn from the outcome, which is often a disappointed patient who did not get the result they hoped – although this expectation can be managed. A lot of aesthetic clinicians will lose hope at this point because the feedback loop in medical aesthetics is fast and very visible, unlike other areas of medicine, creating a high-stress experience when the results of poor technique or wrong patient selection are so immediate and evident, and you must think again.
Learning how to select the patient, do the right treatment, and predict the outcome is probably the hardest phase of The Clinical Path into medical aesthetics; treating your first few hundred patients is where you will develop that experience, but effective training and mentoring can shorten and ameliorate that part of the journey.
Complications
Similarly, with more practice (and a growing business) comes the challenge of confidently handling rare side effects, like droopy eyelids (ptosis), asymmetries, haematomas, or even a vascular occlusion; and you may well feel unprepared.
Dr Tim knows that this can be the most stressful thing that you will experience because you will feel a lot of responsibility for your patient; no one likes seeing patients unhappy and their unhappiness will have been directly caused by a procedure you performed. Their reaction will be directly linked to their consultation; the likelihood is you probably will not prepare your patient well enough.
When aesthetic clinicians first start, practice is very formulaic – with consent forms to sign, lists etc. – but you never communicate in the way that you do when you have experienced an adverse event. One of the many things you learn about complications and side effects is how to communicate them to your patients before they happen so that when they do happen, it is much easier to deal with you, maintains Dr Tim.
The Aesthetic
Once a practitioner has mastered the basic injection techniques – cheeks, nasolabial folds, lips, and chins, alongside more advanced techniques that bring the whole face together with the temples, tear troughs, forehead, and noses – they can move into performing full-face treatments. Full-face transformation requires a deeper understanding of aesthetics.
You must develop an ‘eye for beauty’ by studying proportions, ratios, and how features relate to age and attractiveness. This knowledge helps you deliver more harmonious and transformative results, though you may struggle with patient expectations, because they often come to a consultation with limited ideas about their treatments, just wanting more lip filler, for example.
Consultation Skills
Mastering consultation skills becomes crucial at this stage, explains Dr Tim. You must understand your patient’s deeper motivations for treatment – boosting confidence or looking younger, rather than just wanting bigger lips.
Learning ways to tap into that allows them to let go of the control of the treatment plan so you can design the best solution to achieve their real goal using all your skills.
Unless you get to that point, you will always be a vending machine kind of business, where patients walk in, know your price list, select something, go through consent, and you deliver their request. That is a very narrow way of carrying out medical aesthetics, he warns and will leave you disempowered as a clinician. You should be ‘the boss’ of the treatment plan based on their core goal.
Becoming a Master Injector
Once you have navigated the clinical path with real experience – simultaneously increasing your communication skills, injecting skills, and aesthetic skills – you will finally evolve into a ‘master injector’. This person can skillfully perform full-face transformations, manage side effects with confidence, and navigate the complexities of patient communication, their budget and expectations.
This can take many years, but good mentorship and training can significantly shorten this learning curve, although growth is continuous – the learning never stops – even as you master certain techniques, there are always new procedures and challenges to tackle, says Dr Tim.
If you have any business questions or ideas for future podcasts, you can also find Dr Tim Pearce on Instagram.
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.
