Around the country each year, weight loss clinics struggle with issues like the ones probed by this article. The factors that give rise to these issues are many, but it’s never too late to address them when they come up and turn things around for your business.
However, it would be even better if you could prevent some of them before they ever occurred. If any of these considerations has strayed into the forefront of your mind – or even if you are constantly plagued by them – it might be high time for you to hire a weight loss consultant to improve your process, provide a better overall experience for your patients, and give your clinic the ability to succeed.
Keep your mind sharp for these concerns. They may indicate a need to give us here at Healthy Habits Weight Loss Business Builders a call.
- Patient results are erratic or consistent, or there aren’t enough good results to show.
This may be the biggest sign that your weight loss clinic needs to improve somewhere. It may not mean, categorically, that you need the help of a weight loss business builder to support, motivate and educate, but it does mean that something has to change.
A weight loss clinic that does not secure reliable or adequate results will run into issues sooner or later. Patient results – real, recognizable patient results – are the cornerstone of weight loss programs and the key to success in this industry.
Lack of reliable patient results could indicate that you are not providing the right dietary advice to your patients. It could indicate that any suggested fitness regimens do not support the dietary programs with which they are paired. It could also indicate that your clinic needs access to specialists to make more targeted recommendations for your clients.
These are some large tropes, but really, given the number of factors at play it’s impossible to pinpoint anything without more information.
The key takeaway, however, stands on its own. If you need to see better client results, then you need to make some changes with your processes or procedures.
- Patient feedback and satisfaction are suffering, or patients are visibly dissatisfied.
Now let’s consider what may in reality be a very different issue that some clinics face. Perhaps even in the face of veritable results, your clients are, for one reason or another, dissatisfied with the program and resources you provide them.
It could be because you lack the staff power to answer queries, address concerns or provide support in a timely manner. It could be because your patients actively seek additional products or supplements that your clinic could provide but is not.
Just like the above consideration, there are innumerable reasons that patients might be less than happy with the services a clinic offers, but in every case, customer dissatisfaction uncovers a place for improvement.
A weight loss consultant partner like Health Habits Weight Loss Business Builders can provide you not only with the supplemental products but also the consultancy services and resources you need to address these customer concerns.
- Your clinic isn’t receiving enough referrals to keep business growing.
Another issue that many clinics face is a lack of referrals that keep new clients coming in. For some businesses, referrals are one of the main avenues (for some it may even be the main avenue) by which the clientele base expands.
You might be seeing a common theme by now, but there are a lot of reasons that referrals could be languishing or even shrinking, and not all of them are easily identifiable. Obviously, inadequate client results and patient dissatisfaction might result in sluggish referrals. However, poor outreach or patient engagement could also hinder the influx of referrals.
One of the factors to improve on here is scaling. If your clinic can make better use of its resources, it will potentially improve the patient experience and facilitate outreach and customer engagement efforts to encourage new referrals.
- Business is stagnant or shrinking.
Referrals notwithstanding, a business that is shrinking month over month or year over year is a big red flag and cause for alarm. It doesn’t matter at the point that business is shrinking what the cause is. It is a cause to be addressed regardless.
It is important to try to determine what the reason is for the lack of growth or for the loss of business, but regardless of what you uncover you will need to be proactive about making changes to ensure future success.
One of the key benefits of working with a weight loss consultant is to identify what these reasons are so that you won’t just be throwing darts at the board. Responding effectively to challenges in business requires a plan that addresses a problem.
Remember this: a current problem may indicate, among other things, a lack of resources to address that problem. That’s one of the reasons that working with a consultant can be valuable.
- Your business expenses are squeezing your profit margins razor thin.
Now we can take a look at a specific example of a problem that is faced by weight loss clinics around the country, as well as businesses in general: thin profit margins or overall lack of profitability.
A business that does not make money will not be in business for long, and the case is no different with weight loss clinics.
A sad truth about this matter is that regardless of the stellar successes you might be able to provide for your clients, when you can’t pay the bills, your model will not succeed. What you need to be able to do is unite the quality of your processes with a cost-friendly solution.
Perhaps your overhead is too high. Perhaps you need to pay too many HR-related expenses. It doesn’t matter what the expense is as long as you can identify it and shave it down. A consultant may well be able to help with that.
- You would like to expand your access to dietary specialists, consultants and nutritionists.
You might even find yourself staring down a conflict between the number of specialists you can provide access to. Likely, when that is the case it is a matter of costs as prescribed by the consideration made above.
For one reason or another, it becomes cost-prohibitive to offer patients access to too many resources and the returns are diminishing anyway. With that being said, it still makes sense to offer services as comprehensive as possible. You simply need a cost-effective solution for providing those services or resources.
Whether you need a dietary specialist, a nutritional consultant or a fleet of professionals to perform genetic testing and food allergy testing, we can work out an arrangement for you.
- Patients are requesting services or consultation that your clinic does not offer or cannot access.
It is a dead giveaway that your clinic is offering inadequate resources if your clients are specifically asking for services that your clinic does not provide. It also means that your patients might know something you don’t know. Whatever the case, it’s a concern to address, and right away.
By the way, it might not come in the form of a consultation service. It could take the form of another concern. A statement such as “is there anything more I can be doing to help me meet my weight loss goal?” could be a veiled hint that your patients would like more for their investment.
That’s why, for example, we offer services like Lipo Laser Machines that our customers can use to provide the best support and results for their clients.
- You don’t have the ability to provide supplements to enhance the weight loss plans you devise.
A clinic should also provide additional support products to its patients, to be administered as necessary. However, whether for reasons associated with lack of access or no ability to absorb the costs, many don’t. We have both the products and the experience requisite for how, when and why to recommend them.
You can see a sample of some of our weight loss supplements and other products at the link above. We offer a variety of supplements that promote and support digestive health and make it easier for patients to burn extra calories.
- Your clinic lacks the resources to do personalized or genetic testing.
Part of offering healthy eating habits in accordance with specialized meal planning and suggestions for a healthier lifestyle is the ability to administer and analyze genetic testing.
Genetic testing is one of the cutting edges of individualized dietary planning, and coming up with a specialized meal plan and fitness routine for a patient will hinge, in large part, on the accuracy of genetic testing.
Just as no two coats fit the same person exactly the same, no two diet plans will have the same effect. A person’s build, as in their predisposition to respond to nutrients and exercise, hinges on genetics. Uncovering these idiosyncrasies and unique traits is one of the keys to success.
We provide genetic testing here at Healthy Habits Weight Loss Business Builders; call us to learn more.
- Your clinic does not have the ability to produce individual diet plans and fitness regimens for your patients.
If you really want to do all you can to guarantee your patients success with losing weight and maintaining a healthy lifestyle, then you also need to do all you can as it relates to formulating individualized plans. That means for all of them.
Not all clinics have the resources or the ability to do so, which has been a common theme throughout this article. Many fall short on human resources, physical resources and access to adequate testing. A weight loss consultant that works with clients and takes their needs into account can make quite a difference.
- You’d like to expand your services to your patients, but you lack the human resources.
Sometimes all patients need to boost their confidence in a process is to speak with someone who understands the process inside and out and can effectively put their concerns to rest.
When you don’t have access to those resources, however, you won’t be able to provide them to your clients. Working with a consultant partner may very well give you the edge you need to scale with this demand and provide these resources on a cost-effective basis. We certainly offer consultant services here as a part of our weight loss programs and packages.
- You aren’t seeing the results you’d like for your patients, but you don’t know what is missing from the picture.
Finally, we have the potential circumstance wherein you know something is wrong but you don’t know what is wrong. Well, if you know a business is in trouble but you don’t know why, that doesn’t mean you have the license to do nothing about it.
Working with a partner like Healthy Habits Weight Loss Business Builders can help give you the ability to take a step back to identify potential problems. Even if not, our team of specialists is trained to uncover opportunities for improvement, and it all starts with a call.
These are some of the most common problems faced regularly by owners of weight loss management clinics. They represent perennial concerns and in the event that you are familiar with them, you may want to hire a weight loss consultant to help you improve your processes and make your clinic’s foundation all that it can be.
However, it doesn’t stop here. Running a weight loss business, like so many different ventures in life, is about more than helping clients lose weight. It is a learning process and there’s no handbook you can follow to foresee issues before they arise; at least not all of them.
To learn more about some other issues that weight loss coaches and clinics face, contact a member of our team today at 877-581-4484 and we’ll help you out.
Call us even if you simply want to learn more about what services we can provide on top of those addressed in this article. The problems faced by weight loss clinics are multivariate and sometimes it takes an expository conversation to get the ball rolling in the right direction.