When I first decided I wanted to start a practice in the highly competitive downtown San Francisco market, I knew I needed to stand out among all the talented and established surgeons. Even as someone who is highly qualified and skilled at what I do, in this market, that wasn’t enough.
When I started out, I had a common problem that many other young surgeons have: I didn’t have many patients, and as a result, not a lot of people knew who I was in my market. When building a business, this is a huge issue. I couldn’t invest in expensive marketing approaches like buying ads because I was losing money every month. I knew I needed to provide the few patients I had with the absolute best quality of care and results to slowly grow my patient base and recognition.
This is a tried-and-true approach, but much harder and slower in a competitive market, and I knew I had to do more. This is when I came up with a comprehensive approach to aesthetic improvements. For every patient who visited me, I invested significant time in understanding their concerns. This included delving into their specific aesthetic preferences related to their primary issue and exploring any other areas they wished to address regarding their appearance. My comprehensive approach allowed me to develop long-term treatment plans with my patients that extended far beyond the single issue they came to address with me. This technique worked incredibly well for me, allowing my patients to have a long-term roadmap for improving their aesthetics while allowing me to focus my time on a smaller number of patients.
This long-term treatment planning approach worked really well for me, as it allowed me to generate 2-3x revenue per patient and I was able to grow my practice without needing to gain so many new patients. However, as my practice grew, I was unable to spend so much time with each patient and I needed to shorten my appointment times to keep up with the patient load. As nice as it was to see my business grow, I wanted to maintain the high quality of care that I was providing to my patients — I didn’t like the idea of trading off patient experience for revenue.
Eventually, I co-founded a startup where we developed a product called Consult Copilot to be able to solve this issue. With the benefit of AI technology, we created an experience where patients can get education and understanding of how they can look their absolute best in a personalized way, just as if they were talking directly to me or their plastic surgeon. From the provider’s perspective, it makes it so much easier to understand what issues the patients want to address and how to develop a long-term treatment plan to get them there.
From a business perspective, my treatment sales have more than doubled for every patient I use this with, and my patients are excited to learn how the different treatment options we have available can meet their aesthetic goals. It’s truly a win-win and something I’m excited to continue developing with my team.
