Exactly how much does it cost you to book a new patient consultation?
If you can answer that with a real number, you’re on your way to a successful practice. A 7 to 8 figure cosmetic surgery empire.
If you can’t, your practice was built on a happy coincidence. The number of patients you see swings from one extreme to another depending on the time of year. You’re either too busy to take time off with your family, or you’re sitting at your office waiting for the “new patient” who was supposed to show up for her consultation 45 minutes ago.
At this moment in time, your practice is unscalable.
Worse than that, it’s unpredictable and unstable. You can’t make plans and grow because you can’t anticipate where the next patient will come from. And you’ll never break the eight-figure mark until you know your magic number: what it costs you to book one new patient consultation.
Key Takeaways
- The number that decides whether you scale: cost per booked consultation. Most surgeons can't produce it.
- Activity does NOT equal progress. Task lists from agencies are not results.
- Changing ads on gut instinct without testing kills profitable campaigns as often as bad ones.
- One client who found his magic number now books 42 consultations a week and returns $10 for every marketing dollar spent.
The Practice That Books 42 Consultations a Week
Here are some numbers from one of my current clients.
On average, he receives 50 phone calls a week from prospects looking to book a surgical consultation for breast augmentation. Of those 50 calls, 92.4% are serious, qualified leads, and his clinic books 42.4 in-office initial consultations a week.
That’s not a typo.
It took us about 6 months to help him create a marketing funnel that positioned him as the leading authority on breast augmentation for the Toronto area. That process is what let us figure out exactly what it costs him to book a new patient consultation.
We then spent another two months working with his front desk receptionist on a patient-centric phone script. It screens out tire-kickers (the bane of my existence) and answers the questions prospects actually ask. That script is one of the reasons he books more consults than he needs and runs a waiting list.
Booking the Consultation Is Only Half the Battle
We send prospective patients a series of emails, text messages, and voice follow-ups so they show up to their appointment.
The result: 98% of leads arrive on time, eager and ready to speak with my client. They’re convinced he’s the best, and only, choice for the procedure before they’ve even spoken to him. What happens in the room after that is its own discipline, and I’ve written about it in the consultation is where you win or lose.
All of this was possible because we helped him figure out his magic number. He now knows exactly what it costs to book an in-office consultation, which gives him the clarity to know precisely where, when, and how to spend his marketing budget. Every dollar he spends on advertising comes back with friends.
Enough about him. This is about you and your practice.
If you can’t tell me how many new leads you’re getting a week, or where those leads are coming from, it’s not unusual. It is NOT your fault. You’re being kept in the dark by one or more of the 9 costly marketing mistakes commonly made by plastic surgeons. I covered the first four in part 1 of this series. Those were the fundamentals.
Now that you know what you’re doing wrong, it’s tempting to jump in and start “fixing” things. That’s when you fall into the trap and make the next two mistakes.
Mistake 5: Equating Activity With Progress
I see this over and over. It’s how most marketing, consulting, SEO and design companies sell their services. They give you a set of activities they’re going to perform. Everything from redesigning your website and posting on Facebook twice a day to the number of links they’ll build weekly. It’s usually presented as a nice mindmap or a long list of deliverables. You feel good because you can see all the stuff you’re getting for your cash. You feel great because you know people are “working” for the money.
Activity does NOT equal progress.
If you’re paying attention to how much your staff or contractors are doing, you’re watching the wrong metrics. It’s not about the level of activity. It’s about results. If what you’re doing doesn’t rank your site higher, doesn’t convert more prospects into paying patients, and doesn’t put more money in your bank account, you’re doing the wrong things.
Running around in a circle doesn’t mean you’re taking a single step forward.
When I walk into most practices and evaluate their efforts, it reminds me of my time as a young boy. Growing up, I’d watch my grandparents kill a chicken for dinner. They’d grab one from the yard and quickly sever the head with a knife. The chicken would thrash around the yard for what seemed like 30 minutes to me at the time, until it exhausted all its blood and effort. Then it was ready for plucking and cooking.
Most practices are no different. They stick their neck out unwittingly and put their fate in the hands of a marketing amateur with a good portfolio, featuring other chickens he’s plucked. They expend tremendous effort accomplishing no meaningful action. All that thrashing doesn’t save a failing practice.
Whatever you’re doing, stop. Look at your activity and ask whether it has made a meaningful difference in your business. I don’t mean the modest growth most practices drift into over time. I use the word “meaningful” deliberately. Are your efforts propelling you to the head of the industry in your city? If the answer is no, you’re equating activity with progress.
Mistake 6: Changing for the Sake of Changing
One of my clients had a simple strategy for his advertising. He changed things all the time. He rarely ran the same ad twice. There was no strategy other than change, no reason behind it other than a gut instinct that something needed to be done.
His real problem was that he didn’t test. He had no way to gauge how much business came from which advertising vehicle. He lumped everything together and hoped for the best. The danger with that kind of thinking is that you’re just as likely to kill a profitable marketing vehicle as an underperforming one. If you’re not testing and tracking, you have ZERO idea what’s working.
John Wanamaker, the merchant many consider the father of modern advertising, put it this way:
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
Wanamaker had an excuse. He was buying newspaper ads in the 1800s. You have call tracking numbers, instant ad testing on Google, and split testing software. There is no reason to operate with the ignorance my past client did. He didn’t listen, and he didn’t change. I learned long ago that I cannot, and should not, care more about a client’s business than he does.
Find Your Magic Number
So here’s that critical question once again: Exactly how much does it cost you to book a new patient consultation?
Without that number, there’s no chance of building a real strategy and a step-by-step plan to move your business forward. Most of what you’re doing to grow your practice will end up being busy-work that leads nowhere. You know this is true, because with all the time and money you’ve spent on marketing, your schedule is still half empty.
Remember the client with 50 calls and 42.4 booked consultations a week? He was just like you when we started. He couldn’t even tell me how many new patient calls he received weekly. Today he knows his cost per consultation, and roughly 70% of his consultations turn into an $8,000 surgical procedure. For every dollar he spends on marketing, he brings ten back.
His challenge now isn’t finding the next patient. It’s managing rapid growth. When you quadruple your business in 12 months, it’s not all roses. I can’t tell you how many times his receptionists called asking us to turn the traffic off because they’d hit full capacity. The waiting list got so long that prospects started putting down $1,000 non-refundable surgery deposits to jump the queue.
It’s a problem. But it’s a fun problem to have. And it all started with one number.
There are three more costly marketing mistakes on the list, and I cover them in part 3. Before you read it, do the homework: figure out your magic number. Pull your marketing spend for the last 90 days, count the consultations you booked, and divide. If the answer embarrasses you, or you can’t get the data to calculate it at all, that’s exactly the problem we fix for surgeons. Reach out and we’ll look at your numbers together.
Until then, go find your magic number. The last three mistakes will mean a lot more once you have it.