I started a private medical practice (obstetric ultrasound) with no money, no reputation and no experience running a business - and personally borrowed nearly £100k to open the doors. Three months later, I had to close the clinic due to a nationwide Covid-19 lockdown. Despite that, I took the practice from a loss to a profit and it’s thriving to this day.

What I’ve learned is that there are an infinite number of ways to market a medical practice. This is a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because it means you can always do more to grow your practice. It’s a curse because it’s overwhelming and hard to know where to start.

With that being the case, I learned to focus on building systems that produce revenue for the business and ignore everything else.

Here are the three systems I recommend building first, in priority order:

1. Patient Acquisition - This is the toughest but most important system to build (at least to begin with). Think of a simple series of steps your prospective patients could follow to find, contact and buy from you. For my practice, the first version was: (1) Google Ads, (2) sales page, (3) form to request an appointment, and (4) emails to schedule an appointment.

2. Patient Retention - A very simple way to retain keep your patients coming back is to maintain frequent contact with them. A fast, easy, cheap way to do this is to send regular emails. Forget about making a fancy newsletter. Just write them like an email to a friend.

3. Patient Referrals - Provide a great service. Yeah, you’ve heard that before. But seriously - find a way to make what you do uniquely valuable. In my case, all of our competitors (including the NHS) offer very short appointments. We knew that parents typically felt rushed at their scans. So we tripled the industry-standard appointment length and designed the process to give them time to ask questions, take it all in and savour the experience. This in itself leads to referrals. But we also ASK for referrals at the end of every appointment and give them a card to hand out which entitles them and whoever they refer to 20% off. Even if you don’t want to offer a discount, you could apply this by using a different proposition.

By the way, I use the word system deliberately.

A system is a series of steps you can repeat and produce the same result over and over again.

I believe that one of the biggest reasons most small businesses fail is because they are stuck in a loop solving the same problems over and over again - so they run out of time, money and/or energy.

To avoid this - and build a thriving medical practice - make it your mission to build systems that produce predictable results over and over again.

Creating marketing systems like those described above is one of the most valuable things you can possibly do. After all, no business - and no medical practice - can survive without a consistent flow of new patients who pay, stay and refer.

Good luck - and enjoy the process!