Key takeaways and context.
Clinical training prepares providers to deliver excellent care—but practice ownership requires an entirely different skill set. Whether you’re launching your first location, trying to stabilize growth, or leading a mature practice, the business side often determines whether clinical excellence becomes sustainable success. In this 90-minute educational panel, four experts (including an Ekwa Marketing specialist) break down the realities of running and scaling an aesthetic practice beyond clinical work.
Instead of “new practice” tips or tactical how-to’s, this session focuses on the real drivers of long-term success: financial literacy, operational structure, marketing alignment, and the leadership mindset required to make confident business decisions. Attendees will learn how successful practices build systems that support growth, reduce costly mistakes, and create stability across every stage—without losing focus on patient care.
Understand the business fundamentals that clinical training doesn’t cover.
Recognize common blind spots that impact growth, profitability, and stability.
Differentiate clinical performance from business performance.
Identify financial, operational, and marketing gaps across different stages of practice.
Make more confident owner-level decisions that support long-term success—not short-term fixes.
Read the full conversation.
All right. Welcome, everyone. Who do we have here? Welcome, Lana, Karen, Jill. All right. I'm seeing a few recurring names here. Donna, welcome back. All right. So everyone join in. I'll get things started here. Kate. Right. So good evening, everyone, and welcome to the Business of Aesthetics live webinar series. I'm your host for this session, Don Adisha, and tonight we are talking about the business side
of aesthetics, what they don't teach you in clinical training. Now, clinical training prepares you to deliver excellent care, quintessential for any work we do in aesthetics. But ownership asks for a completely different set of decisions: financial literacy, operational structure, marketing alignment, and the leadership mindset to make confident decisions without losing focus on patient care. Now, a couple of housekeeping notes before we get things started to help you maximize the value. So first of all, yes, we are recording, and you will receive a replay link after the event, so you can go ahead and re-watch and share it along with your colleagues and partners.
However, do not let that make you passive, because the real value is happening right here, right now, live. So go ahead and use that Q&A box to ask any specific questions you want me to ask the panelists, or you can go ahead and use the chat to share your thoughts and comments amongst your colleagues as we go along. I have my eyes on both the feeds and will do my best to weave in your questions and your thoughts into the conversation as we go along. Or else we might just use the dedicated AMA section a bit later towards the event to answer all of those in bulk. Right. Now, I also want to extend an
appreciation and thanks to our sponsor, Ekwa Marketing. Ekwa was founded by Naren Arulrajah, the very same founder of the Business of Aesthetics community. And the team works with aesthetic and private practice owners on digital visibility, patient acquisition, SEO, conversion-focused websites, and content authority. So we'll be hearing a little bit more from Ekwa a bit later down the line. Right. The program itinerary. So here's how tonight will flow. We'll start with the focused marketing and business framing conversation with Naren. Then we'll move into a round-robin panel discussion with our experts, and
towards the end, we'll open the floor for live audience questions. And we'll close with practical next steps you can take back to the practice. Right. Okay. So it seems our panelist Naren seems to be stuck in traffic and is getting a bit late here. So what we're going to do is we will go into the round-robin panel first, and then we will go into the marketing segment after the fact. So
let's see. Here we go. Right. Let me realign myself here. But before we do that, I do want to get a quick pulse check on who's in the room here tonight, right? And what are your concerns. So I'm going to launch a poll. Here we go. Where are we? Yes. So I'm going to launch a poll, and the question is: what is the biggest business gap holding your aesthetic practice back right now? Is it A, profitability, B, team training, C, patient experience, D, ideal patient acquisition,
or the last option is, I don't know, unsure, which is totally fine to be. So right now, ideal patient acquisition, it was in the lead, and now profitability is taking the reins here. Ideal patient acquisition coming neck to neck with team training following along right behind it, and then, of course, patient experience being part of it as well. All right. Ideal patient acquisition seems to be a recurring issue for our members of the audience and of course, profitability. Because being busy is one thing but having that profit and patient value not aligned is another whole subject matter.
So again, profitability, ideal patient acquisition, neck to neck, and we're going to close the poll in three seconds. One, two, three. Right. I'm going to end the poll, and I'm going to share the results with our panelists here and so we can have an idea of what are our problems here tonight. So ideal patient acquisition and profitability are neck and neck. So a lot of y'all are having issues with that, and then followed by team training or lack thereof following right behind it, and then patient experience and being a bit unsure as to what your biggest business gaps are. So Totally fine, and I just wanted to let you know you're in good
company, you're in a good community because that's what we're here for. Hopefully, by the end of the session here tonight, you will have a bit more confidence with regards to your profitability, ideal patient acquisition, and of course, the rest of the things as well. I'll try to do my best to maneuver the conversation a bit more towards those that are on the highest priority list over here. With that being said, thank you very much for everyone who joined in and engaged with us. Let's get into the main discussion. Right.
Right. So, mm. Before- We got everyone in here? Okay. Gina, there are two of you? Yeah, I just saw that. Yeah, I'm having issues on my computer- Of course ... because this is the name of the game today. Yeah. So I'll make sure I log off. Of course. I'm going to re-- Shall I remove the one from your computer then? Perfect. We should be good now. Okay. There you are. Right. Let's get into the brainstorming session here without further ado.
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