DDx — MED SPA & AESTHETICS
Med Spas: the five ways this presents
Each presentation below lists what could be causing it, ranked, with the finding that tells the causes apart and what resolution actually looks like. 21 causes, 21 tests, each cited to a primary source for this specialty rather than borrowed from another one.
Nothing on these pages describes a client or an engagement.
PRESENTATIONS
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Patient acquisition cost is climbing
Cost per lead is down quarter over quarter, the media report reads well, and revenue per clinic is flat. Nobody in the room can say what a booked consult costs, and nobody can say what a sold treatment costs. Before diagnosing anything, establish which busines…
5 CAUSES · 5 TESTS
WORK IT THROUGH → -
New patient volume is short of plan
Forms arrive, click-to-call volume is fine, and the consult calendar is not full. In med spa and aesthetics groups a volume shortfall is rarely a demand shortfall — it is usually a capture failure between the inquiry and a kept appointment, and it is measurabl…
4 CAUSES · 4 TESTS
WORK IT THROUGH → -
Growth has plateaued
Media is buying more inquiries every quarter and revenue per clinic has not moved in three. The plateau is the hardest presentation in this category to diagnose because the most common causes are structural — a room ceiling, a service mix at the end of its cyc…
4 CAUSES · 4 TESTS
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Performance varies by location
Same name, same pricing, same promotion, same media — and two clinics forty miles apart perform nothing alike. In this category the spread between the best and worst clinic is routinely larger than the network's own year-over-year change, which makes this the …
4 CAUSES · 4 TESTS
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Preparing for sale
A process is twelve to twenty-four months out and the last two years look strong. The question a private-equity buyer asks is not whether the revenue happened; it is whether it can be reproduced by somebody who does not have the founder, the best consultant, o…
4 CAUSES · 4 TESTS
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WHICH ONE
How to tell which one you have
These five overlap, and two or three usually apply at once. The order to read them in is set by which number actually moved. If cost per new patient moved, start there. If demand held and bookings did not, start with the volume page. If nothing moved at all, start with the plateau page — and if the group total looks acceptable while one site keeps coming up in conversation, read the variance page first, because a pooled number is structurally incapable of showing you what you are looking for.
Every cause on every page above carries a measurement you can run in your own systems, with the finding that confirms it and the finding that rules it out. Run two or three before you brief anybody. If the tests tell you this is not a marketing problem, that is the correct answer and it cost you nothing.
RESOLUTION
What resolves each, and what resolved looks like
Each presentation resolves to a different part of the work, and the pages say which: reporting and attribution where the finding is a measurement error, conversion and desk work where the loss is between the inquiry and the admission, acquisition where the demand genuinely is not there, and pre-sale work where the question is whether growth can be re-run by somebody else.
Each also carries what resolved looks like as a number — the measure, the published median, the top decile where an honest one exists, and a target range — with the source in the row. Where no credible distribution is published, the page says so instead of borrowing one from an adjacent specialty. That absence is itself a finding: it means your own trailing history is the only benchmark worth measuring against.
WHERE YOU STAND
Reference ranges for med spa groups
See also where you stand and what decides the outcome before any of this is treated.
A differential narrows the list. It does not close it — that is what the examination is for.
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