Extreme Practice Makeover: A Success Story

The Patient Whisperers
Jul 1, 2024
5 min read

Updated: Aug 6

How Doing Things Their Own Way Helped Two Practice Owners Succeed

As published in the July 2024 issue of Administrative Eyecare. To subscribe or view the entire publication, visit their website.

How did a beauty queen and stylist end up leaders of a small ophthalmology practice (in Arkansas) - and turn it into one of the busiest refractive centers in the U.S.?

This is our unlikely 'zero to sixty' refractive success story. Our journey was way outside the healthcare box: we were either going to be crazy or brilliant, but we knew healthcare had to evolve and we were willing to trail-blaze. We passionately blended our viewpoints as refractive patients ourselves, with the drive as practice leaders to strategically grow our business. Through this evolution, we surprised even ourselves! We grew like crazy and THAT story is what are excited to share.

WHERE CHANGE HAPPENS

If you’re reading this, you are invested in the success of your practice. You are the driving force behind growth, patient experiences, and team culture. We want our story to empower you to challenge everything. It’s your practice: do it your way.

That’s where change happens. That’s where we found explosive growth, deepened patient connections, and created a happier, more fulfilled team. That’s how we grew cash pay revenue by an average of 60% year over year (for four years!) and turned struggling social media profiles into a thriving, patient-generating network of over 14,000 people in under two years. Our processes were unconventional and even laughable at times but always centered around one thing: people.

Rewind to 2014. Pausing a busy career juggling personal styling and advertising, I turned over my small boutique marketing firm to my co-founder so I (Christine) could try the stay-at-home mom thing. I lasted about a year and knew it wasn’t for me, but I wasn’t sure what was. I loved people and the rewards I felt from my previous endeavors: helping people feel better about themselves and enjoy life more through new experiences. A previous client of my marketing firm, the surgeon of the ophthalmology practice I would call home for nearly a decade, reached out asking if I’d consider joining his team. After discussing his goals for my position (growing refractive services and improving patient experiences) I was in because this was about people - and making their lives better.

In just six months I grew cash pay revenue by 97% through one bold, unapologetic, tenacious approach: bit by bit, piece by piece, we stopped and looked at everything from the viewpoint of our patient and their emotions. How did it make them feel?

From my previous careers, I was familiar with the psychology behind emotional decision-making:

86% of people are willing to pay +14% higher for what they feel is a great experience (1)
95% of spending decisions occur in the emotional area of the brain (2)
Emotional vs rational marketing performs twice as well (31% vs 16%) for a higher return on investment (3)

I was obsessed with applying this to the patient experience - from what they saw online about our practice, to their experience inside our doors. Instead of focusing solely on the ‘hard’ or ‘technical’ skills of our staff, we invested in training on ‘soft skills.’ From the front desk to our doctors, our team felt empowered and more fulfilled by understanding the science behind human emotions. They gained new confidence in conversions knowing that it didn’t have to feel like sales and that it was all about guiding our patients in the way that they need. Patients were blown away by their experience, revenue skyrocketed, and we had a great time doing it.

It’s 2018 and we stalled. Like any road ours had bumps, and we were no strangers to setbacks. Staffing turnover, technologies that let us down, leadership changes, life. While word of mouth kept growing, our marketing results started to plateau. Once again, I was challenged to step outside of the ‘doing’ into the ‘what if’ mindset.

SOCIAL MEDIA REVOLUTION

Social media was changing the marketing landscape. What if we used social media differently? What if we tried what was working outside of healthcare? Big brands were working with social media influencers, not just celebrities. Why couldn’t we? I reached out through a mutual connection to Lauren, Miss Arkansas USA with over 50,000 social media followers.

I wore glasses and contacts my entire life (Lauren) and my vision was -8, so I jumped at the chance to have LASIK as an ambassador, especially before competing at Miss USA. First-hand, I was captivated by the way someone’s life is completely changed in 15 minutes. I was also struck as a patient by how emotional it was to undergo an eye procedure. There are so many fears, hesitations, and concerns that can hold you back from a life-changing experience.

I never envisioned working in healthcare, but after graduating with a marketing degree, Christine’s practice offered me a position. Right away I could see that this was a special place, but social media didn’t reflect that vibrance. I leveraged my LASIK experience into user-generated content and landed us on the evening news - which we re-ran through paid social ads, generating over six figures in revenue from that campaign alone.

Social media was the new frontier of marketing in healthcare. We invested research, budget, time, and energy into translating social media strategies into premium healthcare to see what would stick. It worked, generating over two million per year in cash pay revenue. It was all about understanding people, our potential patients. It wasn’t about what we were trying to say, it was about them. What will stop their scroll? What will nurture interest into action and overcome hesitations? What will resonate with their emotions?

THE BLUEPRINT

For years our blueprint for success followed this pattern: Map out the patient journey (from first impression online, all the way through post-op); List every patient touchpoint and human interaction (from seeing a social media post or clicking an ad and where it takes them, to the texts and emails for new inquiries, all the way to their appointment reminders); Look at it through the eyes of the patient (identify hesitations, fears, questions, etc.); Notate everything as a feeling: positive or negative (there is no neutral). Does it feed the drive to act or drive to delay? Rethink everything from this viewpoint, change it, make it better… and then start over! This is a never-ending process, with unlimited results.

We end our story with our final success: during our last year together in practice, we exceeded our goals with a 103% increase in refractive revenue. This was the culmination of our quest to make everything about people and their emotions: from our surgeons' and doctors' passion to our dedicated team (the heartbeat of patient care!) to the patients themselves and their life-changing transformations. From marketing to team culture, we applied our belief that emotions drove people, and people drove success.

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