This is the only client story I can tell you with the figures attached, because it is the clinic whose numbers I know best. She has asked me not to use her name, which I would rather respect than have a logo for this page.
Everything on this page is her account of her own business. I have not audited her accounts and I would not expect you to read it as though I had.
What it looked like from the inside
She was not bad at her job. Ten years in, a loyal patient list, treatments she was good at. She was not short of a website either.
What she had was a quiet diary and no idea why. She had reached the point most owners reach eventually, where the explanation available to her was the economy, or the area, or people not spending. She was already thinking about how much longer she could carry it.
What was actually happening
Roughly ten calls a day were coming in. That is not a demand problem.
Here is where they went.
- Some rang out to a voicemail. Nobody ever left a message on it, because people do not leave voicemails any more.
- The rest depended entirely on whoever happened to pick up, and on that person remembering to try again later, on a day that was already busy.
- Nothing acknowledged an enquiry that arrived in the evening or at the weekend, which is when a lot of them arrive.
None of that was visible to her. There is no report in a clinic that lists the people who contacted you and never heard back. I have written about why that is and why it makes the problem look like something else entirely.
What we changed
Four things, in the first stage. All of them in front of the diary, none of them inside it.
- Landing pages with automation behind them, so an enquiry got a reply immediately rather than when somebody was free.
- Patients booked their own callback slot. When reception rang, they were expected rather than ambushed.
- Follow-up that ran on a sequence, so an enquiry stayed open without anybody having to hold it in their head.
- A script for reception, with one rule at the top of it: never quote a price on the phone. Get her in the door. The clinician closes the price in the room.
Those are rules one, four, five and six from the guide. None of them are complicated. All of them are on this site for free.
What happened
Within about ninety days, more than eight in ten enquiries were booking. Within about eight months she was turning over roughly £30,000 a month.
Two and a half times where she started, with the same two staff, the same room and the same treatment list. Nothing new was bought. No machine, no extra injector, no advertising budget.
That is the part worth sitting with. The demand was already arriving. It was being lost between the phone ringing and somebody being booked.
The website came afterwards
We rebuilt her site properly, much later, and it now brings more enquiries in for the follow-up to catch.
That order matters and I would not reverse it. The automation did not create demand. It stopped her wasting the demand she already had. Had we started with the website, we would have poured more enquiries into the same leak and the numbers would have moved far less.
What I cannot tell you
Four things, and I would rather say them than have you find them.
Four things changed at once. I cannot tell you which one did the work. Anybody who shows you a case study attributing a revenue change to a single feature is guessing, and so would I be.
The figures are hers, not audited. £12,000 and £30,000 are what she told me. I believe them because I watched the diary fill, but I have not seen her accounts and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
The "before" was never properly measured. Nobody was counting enquiries, which is usually the whole problem. So I can describe what was going wrong with the calls, and I can tell you what the booking rate became, but I cannot give you a clean before-and-after percentage. If I quoted you one it would be a number I had reverse engineered.
And she knew me first. She was one of the franchisees in the group I built. She is not a stranger who found me through an advert, and she was the first clinic this was ever tested on. That is a warm start, not cold-won custom. The same caveat applies to all seven and it is the first thing I say about them.
Why one story rather than nine
Because the other six are independent businesses whose numbers are theirs to publish, not mine. I could show you a wall of logos and a page of percentages. Most of this industry does. I would rather show you one clinic properly, with the holes in it, and let you judge whether the thinking is sound.
The strongest evidence I have is not this story anyway. It is that seven clinics have kept paying me every month since I sold the business, when they had no obligation to.