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Welcome to "Beauty and the Biz", where we talk about the business and marketing side of plastic surgery, and Today's Cosmetic Practice Growth Funnel.

I'm your host, Catherine Maley, author of "Your aesthetic practice - What your patients are saying", and consultant to plastic surgeons to get them more patients and profits.

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Aesthetic Authority Article

Today's Cosmetic Practice Growth Funnel

Saying that "times have changed" would be a massive understatement when referring to growing a cosmetic practice in today's marketplace.

To make sense of it, it helps to understand the structure and stages of an industry so you can then adapt to it. This should help….

The Life Cycle of the Plastic Surgery Industry

Every industry goes through stages of introduction, growth, maturity and decline.

Why? For lots of reasons but the biggest one is because society and its consumers accept products & services at different rates. As society begins to adopt and accept an innovation, the demand for new services grows and eventually reaches maturity.

But a lot happens between these stages.

Introduction Stage

It used to be straight forward to grow a cosmetic practice just one generation ago.

Cosmetic surgery was still a taboo topic and only for celebrities and consumers of high worth value. The demand for cosmetic surgery was limited and so were the number of service providers.

Most of the service providers were plastic surgeons who did a lot of reconstructive surgery and wanted to spread their wings to the cash side of medicine.

Advertising was minimal and consisted of a few surgeons investing in mass advertising via TV, radio and print ads that centered on the surgeon's status.

Prospective patients looked up to the surgeons and, most often, went with the surgeons' recommendations since they were regarded as the expert.

When prospective patients called the office, it was to book a consultation with the surgeon. They more often than not, showed up for their appointment and conversions were fairly straight-forward.

This worked well. There were few plastic surgeons to choose from and they enjoyed regal status.

Growth Stage

As society accepted plastic surgery more (thanks to the media who report on it and the Kardashians who partake in it…a lot), consumer demand increased dramatically.

The growth in demand for cosmetic rejuvenation, coupled with exciting technological advancements, opened the industry up to an increase in consumers, but also to an increase of service providers.

You longer needed to be a board-certified plastic surgeon to offer cash-based cosmetic medicine.

Any MD could open a med spa and provide convenience and service for cash-based, non-surgical procedures that fill the need for consumers not ready for surgery.

Then, as government regulations deterred medical providers from practicing insurance-based medicine due to low reimbursement and high cost and hassle of reimbursement, that supply of cash-based service providers increased even more.

Once there is a proven consumer demand for cosmetic rejuvenation, big business and pharma also jumps in and creates more solutions for the service providers to offer to consumers.

And, all of that increases the competition dramatically.

The consumer demand continues to increase even more and includes new types of consumers (men and the younger population), as well as geographic opportunities so the future l