Listed like that, it sounds like a plan. It was not a plan. It was a series of expensive lessons, in public, with my own money and other people's.
What I actually did
I opened the first clinic and learned the trade from the floor. Reception, the diary, the phone, the awkward conversations about money. Then I opened more, and at some point it became obvious I could not fund the expansion myself.
Aesthetic clinics are expensive to open. The equipment alone eats capital, and in the mid-2010s there were very few private investors in this country with any appetite for putting money into a chain of aesthetic clinics. So franchising was not a strategy off a whiteboard. It was the only route available to me.
That decision turned out to be the most useful thing that ever happened to my education. Because instead of running one clinic and learning one clinic's lessons, I watched nine different owners in nine different towns, from fit-out to opening day to the quiet month that follows, over and over.
Same model. Same brand. Same suppliers. Wildly different outcomes.
My first refurbishment taught me most of it
Everyone makes mistakes on their first project, and I made all of them. The plugs went in the wrong places, so the machines never sat where the room actually needed them. Moving them afterwards meant redoing the electrics, and that one mistake cost me an extra six thousand pounds on a job that was supposedly already finished.
I cut corners on the finish, too. In one clinic I tiled the floor with something cheap from B&Q, and it lasted a few years before it looked tired. It should have been porcelain from the start. I only learned that on the next fit-out, and the one after that, each build a little better than the last.
On one refurbishment we did not soundproof the walls that mattered, and you find that out the first time a client can hear the consultation happening next door.
The most expensive lesson was not on a wall at all. I did not sign a proper contract with the contractor. When the work ran over and the details were disputed, I had nothing in writing to stand on. I have not started a build without a signed contract since.
None of that is in a brochure. You learn it by paying for it, which is the theme of this whole page.
I also did the marketing myself
This is the part people are surprised by.
I was not a clinic owner who hired a marketing agency. I ran the group's search and website work myself, with staff under me, for years. Through every change Google made to how any of it works.
That is why I am blunt about websites and about agencies. It is not a sales position. I did the job, and I lived with what happened when I did it badly.
And once I had worked it out, I taught it. At our quarterly franchise meetings I stood up in front of the CoLaz owners and trained them on the tactics of marketing — what was changing, why the old advertising had stopped working, and what to do instead of pouring more money into it.
The thing I would undo first
Machines before marketing.
I did it, and then I watched franchisee after franchisee do it. Premises, fit-out, equipment on asset finance, and then whatever was left for the marketing. Which was never enough, because by the time wages, rent, VAT and corporation tax had gone out, there was nothing left at all.
The clinic that most needs to be found cannot afford to be found. I did not understand that for years. There is a longer version of that mistake here.
The second thing
I paid a Google Ads agency £2,000 a month for our London clinic and let them report success in a currency that meant nothing.
Their conversions were form fills. We rang those people hours later and half of them had moved on. Then we blamed each other, which is what always happens, and the actual problem sat untouched in the gap between the form and the phone call.
I was the client in that story, not the expert.
The thing I did not expect to matter
Across nine franchises, the clearest predictor of a clinic coming apart was not the town, the treatments or the marketing budget.
It was who the owner had gone into business with.
Where two people had gone in together without being equally exposed, one of them eventually felt they were carrying it. That resentment never stayed private. The staff could see it within a week, and once the staff believe the people at the top are not aligned, you can hear it on the phone.
I have no data for that. Just nine of them, watched closely, over years.
What it was really like
Launch days were the best days. A clinic that has just been fitted out, staff in new uniforms, an owner who has put everything into it. Genuinely one of the best things I have been part of.
Four or five months later is the other visit. The diary has gaps, the excitement has gone, and the owner is standing in a beautiful room wondering what they have done.
I have been in the room for both, more than once, which is not something a marketing agency ever has to do. It changes how you think about who you work with and what you promise them.
Why I do this now
I sold the business in 2023. Seven of those clinics kept paying me every month afterwards, to run the system behind their front desk, which is not something I expected and is probably the achievement I am proudest of.
What I do now is the same job I was doing then, for people who are not me. I put in the front desk, the follow-up and the website, and I try to stop owners spending the first two years learning what I spent twenty-five learning.
I am not a marketer who found a niche. I am a clinic owner who had to learn the marketing because nobody was going to do it for me.