When you think of a healthcare marketing agency, your mind probably goes straight to Google Ads campaigns and SEO strategies. But business coaching? That sounds like it could be a bit out of scope, no? Well it’s something we’re now offering to every single one of our customers at zero extra cost. Not only that, but we’ve partnered with Celia Champion, one of the best coaches in the industry, to deliver it. Why? Because we know that without a solid foundation in business practices and processes it’s difficult for any clinic to become successful, and it’s successful clinics that we want to partner with.
I think a good place to start when understanding our ‘working out’ is to think about why you should work with a business coach at all. So let’s dig into it:
2025 is not 2023
The industry entering into 2025 is a lot different to the past few years. The post-covid boom of record numbers of patients seeking private care, driven by excess cash in people’s pockets and record high NHS waiting lists is clearly over. Inflation has swallowed their savings, and the NHS is actually getting back on its feet. In real terms this means that competition for new patients is greater than ever before.
In this increasingly competitive market, it’s crucial that you stand out from the crowd and we can help with a huge part of that – ensuring that patients can find you and choose you for their care – Marketing 101. But this isn’t the only way to set your clinic apart. You also need to be delivering the best clinical experience of anyone around. You don’t just want people to find you, you want people to find you, choose you, then recommend all their friends and family to come and see you. This is what drives a successful clinic.
That process of perfecting the patient experience, from the moment they enquire, to the discharge and recommendations that follow, needs thought and planning and implementation. This goes beyond the scope of any marketing agency, but it is exactly where expert business coaching can step in.
It’s Lonely Out There
Over the years there have been a growing number of coaches offering their services to clinic owners across the country. Some are excellent and will help your business immeasurably! But just like in the clinical world there is also huge variation in the quality of advice that’s given. That doesn’t stop them promising results – every coach has to sell their service and some do a very good job of that selling. But honestly, we see as much bad advice out there as good and sometimes it’s impossible to tell the difference.
The reason why there are so many business coaches out there is precisely because many clinic owners feel isolated and have nowhere to turn for even simple business questions and advice.
“Should you employ or take on sub-contracted associates?”
“Should I raise my prices?”
“Do I need a call-answering service?”
There isn’t a day that goes by where we, a marketing agency, don’t get asked these questions. We understand why we get asked them – who else is there to ask? But are they really questions for a marketing agency? Absolutely not. And we’d really like to ensure you’re getting those questions answered by someone who really knows what they’re talking about. That is why we have taken the decision.
Part of our mission in 2025 is to ensure that every single one of our customers has somewhere to turn to ask these questions. It doesn’t matter if it’s simple, or complex; whether you’re a small clinic or a multi-practice behemoth, every single one of our customers now has somewhere to turn to when they need help making broader business decisions. We’ll still take care of the marketing, but now with Celia, we can also help your business truly grow.
Bad advice has real-world consequences
As time goes by we’re seeing more and more clinics take up offers of clinic coaching with varying degrees of success. The inconsistency in the advice is crazy. One coach tells you to do X and another tells you to ignore X and do Y instead. How do you know what is true and what isn’t?
Truthfully, it is painful for us to watch otherwise successful clinics follow bad advice and make mistakes that should never have been made. These mistakes can have a profound impact on the clinic and it’s growth.
Let me take a real-world example to drive this home:
A clinic was doing rather well. After starting off brand new with zero customer base the clinic grew and grew through the first year. The clinic owner had a clinic diary full of patients. Marketing was going fantastically, but also word of mouth recommendation was the biggest patient generator and the clinic was going from strength to strength.
Until the business coach came along.
The advice from the coach was fairly simple – you need to hire another clinician in order to grow further but also you could employ someone else to take over your caseload too, allowing you more time to concentrate on the business admin and stop working 60 hour weeks. Absolutely reasonable advice at face-value, except for the lack of caveats, follow-up and oversight that was needed.
What ended up happening is that the clinic owner employed new members of staff, handed over their clinical caseload in its entirety, then watched in horror as that clinical caseload evaporated as the new clinicians had terrible retention rates and generated little to no word-of-mouth referral.
Simplistic cookie-cutter advice that sounded reasonable caused the clinic to suffer immeasurably and once the clinic started to suffer it was already too late to turn it around easily.
Marketing is only one part of what makes a successful clinic
It’s stories like the one above that have led us to really think about our offering for customers. Sure, we can find you new patients, that’s our bread and butter, but what happens when the patient comes through the door is also of huge importance. You can have the best performing campaigns in the world, but if your pricing is off, your processes are clunky, the phone doesn’t get answered, or your patient experience leaves a lot to be desired, those patients won’t stick around. Your return on investment suffers and you rely more and more on paid marketing streams (us) to find you more and more patients to fill your ever-leaking bucket of a diary.
This is where coaching comes in. A good business coach can help you nail all of the above so that when our marketing works, your clinic can actually handle the growth and utilise it to drive even further growth! Hardly any clinic owner we speak to set up their clinic because they just love running a business. They all did it so that they can deliver the best clinical product as possible and help as many people as possible. You didn’t go to business school; you did a clinical degree. So when it comes to the business operations, smart advice from people who’ve done it before goes a long way to help!
Well-run clinics are easier to market
Simply put, the hardest clinics to market are the ones run by people with no idea what they’re doing. And conversely, the more successful you are as a clinic and the better your processes are, the more successful we will be in marketing you. And let’s be honest – a clinic that’s barely holding on isn’t going to stick around for the long haul. But when a clinic sees real, sustained growth, it’s more likely to continue investing in marketing.
We see this as a simple win-win.
You get: an excellent level of coaching, avoiding the common pit-falls that lead clinics to fail.
We get: a clinic that’s a million times easier to market.
We take immense pride in what we do, just like you do with your clinical work. We want our clinics to blow away the competition – the best in the area. Not only this but we’re passionate about raising the standards of the entire industry because if the industry does better, then we, as a marketing agency, also do better! Again, another win-win.
So, why are we doing this?:
OK then, cards on the table – what’s in it for HMDG? Are we just becoming the first charity to focus on clinic owners? No. But quite honestly, we benefit in plenty of ways:
- We care about our clients and we want to see them be successful. In order to achieve that, our clinics need to be the best-in-class, not just in their marketing, but in the entire clinical experience that they offer too.
- We want our marketing to be even more successful than it already is and well-run clinics are just far easier to market.
- We want an easier life and we think you do too – clinic owners who are feeling less stressed have far fewer heart attacks (this also applies to marketing agencies).
- We don’t want to see a single one of our customers struggle with the day-to-day running of their business or have nowhere to turn for good advice, it pains us to see it and it doesn’t have to be the case.
So with all that in mind, for us, this is a no-brainer. Every single one of our customers will now have access to regular business coaching through Celia Champion through our own platform – HMDG Connect – at zero extra cost.
Celia has been running Painless Practice for years, helping countless clinics to improve their operations and make savvy business decisions to help grow their businesses and best of all, she does it in exactly the same style as we do our marketing – no nonsense evidence-based advice that isn’t some get-rich-quick gimmick. She knows the industry inside-out and we’re honestly delighted we’re going to be working so closely together over the next year and beyond.
So what do you need to do?
Sign-up already.
You have a clinic – it needs marketing – we’re a marketing agency and we can help with that. It’s just that this particular marketing agency also offers best-in-class business coaching at zero extra cost. It might sound too good to be true, but it isn’t, for us it’s just common sense.
