Every day we are asked by customers and prospects about strategies and ways to increase the revenue and profit of their dental and medical clinics.
To reach this answer, you need to understand that a clinic goes through phases, from a financial point of view, from the moment it opens.
These financial phases can be classified as follows:
Financial childhood
It is normal in the initial phase, in the first months, or even years after the opening of a clinic that it has cash difficulties, low profitability and high financial disbursement.
Of course, when a clinic is opened, many investments are made: property, furniture, equipment, staffing, bureaucracy, marketing, etc.
In the financial childhood phase, the owners have two main points as their initial financial goals:
01 – Reach the balance point.
That is, make it happen as soon as possible so that income and expenses in the clinic are equivalent and it is no longer necessary to invest capital from partners or third parties to finance day-to-day operations.
02 – Return on investment
The partners seek intensively to recover the investments made in the opening of the business, whether that investment in money, goods, time or services.
Financial maturity
Clinics that are in the phase called financial maturity are those that have already reached the financial break-even point and have already recovered the initial investment made.
Right now, they are on the rise with increasing revenue and an increase in the patient portfolio.
They are already able to pay pro-labore (salaries) to the partners and they withdraw part of the profit in the form of dividends.
Many clinics stabilize at this level and remain at that level for long periods of time, entering a new cycle when a crisis occurs or a new, more commercially active competitor enters the market.
Financial decline
Many clinics do not go through financial maturity and end up in decline soon after opening. These go bankrupt and become yet another number in government statistics.
Others, which have been on the market for a long time, start to have their billings drop and a constant loss in the portfolio of patients who are not renewing themselves.
This happens for several reasons, among them:
Financial management failures;
Absence of competitive differentials;
Commercially aggressive competitors;
How to increase the revenue and profit of a clinic
See, if your clinic is going through a financial childhood, or is in financial decline, you will need to take different steps to increase sales and profitability.
How to increase the revenue of newly opened clinics?
Clinics that are new to the market require a lot of investment in attracting patients, in marketing, dissemination, publicity and advertising.
If your clinic wants to increase revenue while being new to the market, you will need to have two tools at hand:
A – A good business plan
B – Equity or third party capital (leverage) to invest in disclosure
We know that many people believe that a good idea, hard work and quality of service is enough to be successful in the market. Not enough.
It is necessary to identify, meet and exceed the expectations of a group of people in the market to be successful. This is done with planning. It is done with a good business plan.
Second, it is necessary to have a capital to advertise your clinic. A value that is invested to communicate your presence, the differentials and the work proposal of your clinic to attract more patients.
How to increase the turnover of mature clinics on the market?
If your clinic has been established in the market for many years and your revenue is stagnant or declining, it is essential to have a series of actions, namely:
A – Diagnosis of the clinic – Understand how the clinic is in financial terms, its profit margins, profitability, etc.
B – Brand positioning – How the clinic is perceived by customers, market research, how the brand is currently evaluated, etc.
C – Competition – Assess what competitors do better than your clinic, what aspects they explore and you don’t explore, etc.
Anyway, for clinics that have been in the market for a long time, it’s not just about investing in advertising to make the clinic better known in the market. This is often insufficient.
How to increase the revenue and profit of a clinic
There are 3 ways to increase your dental or medical clinic’s revenue and profit.
01 – Attract new patients
This is the way that everyone thinks first. Of course, every clinic needs to attract new patients. Every day.
It is necessary to have a strategy to attract new patients in your clinic, whether that strategy through digital marketing, active or passive recruitment.
If your clinic has a consultation-based prescription model, more than ever, if new patients don’t enter your daily schedule, billing will dry up.
So, yes, you need to have a plan to attract new patients to your clinic.
But there is a problem here. Attracting new patients is expensive. And that is why it is necessary to invest in two other strategies to increase the revenue of a clinic to follow.
02 – Increase the average ticket per patient
If you have a clinic and want to increase revenue, one of the best ways to do it without increasing the associated fixed costs is by increasing the average ticket.
That is, if the average amount spent by your patient in your clinic is R $ 200.00, increasing this ticket, to say R $ 250.00 will generate a direct increase in your billing by 25%.
Of course, it is necessary to do good financial engineering so that the cost associated with providing services does not increase properly.
But, how to do to increase the average ticket of your clinic? Often to increase the average ticket of your clinic it will be necessary to implement one or more of the actions below:
Reassess the price of your services;
Reposition your brand to other audiences;
Search for new customer segments;
Change location;
Package services (combos);
Etc.
The fact is that, as a rule, seeking to increase the average ticket and not the number of clients is usually a healthy strategy for the cashier and the profitability of a clinic.
03 – Sell more times to the same customer
If you have a patient who visits your clinic once a year, you can literally double your bill from him if he comes twice a year.
Always remembering that profit and costs are a complex equation that must always be evaluated together.
Increasing the patient’s frequency in your clinic is one of the ways to increase your clinic’s revenue, keeping the customer’s acquisition costs at the same level.
Think about your service, how you can develop ways to get your patient back to your clinic more often, whether for preventive check-ups, routine checks and corrections.
Conclusion
Clinics go through phases or financial cycles and each of these cycles determine the pursuit of specific financial objectives.
To increase the revenue of a clinic, it is necessary to understand the moment or cycle that your clinic is experiencing and apply the correct strategy to increase revenue and profit.
Senior Marketing