From Running Pubs to Running an Aesthetics Clinic: A Nurse's Story

Joolia Gilvey's first career was running pubs. With two small children and late nights, she took a caring job on a medicine for the elderly ward, decided she could do the nurses' job, and went back to university.

She qualified at around 40, worked on thoracic and surgical wards, and found her way into aesthetics after having treatments herself. To her, pubs and patients have a lot in common: both are a service, and both are about looking after people and making them happy.

She believes her hospitality background is why she thinks so much about the person in front of her. Clinicians who have never worked in sales or service may not have learned to upsell, to stay calm while juggling ten things, or to make someone feel special.

At her clinic the service starts with the phone call or the email, and when the door opens the team stands up, smiles and offers a good coffee. She looks for people who fit that way of working and has invested in communication and teamwork training as the team grows.

Atmosphere matters to her. The clinic sits in a Grade II listed building with three clinical rooms, and she wants it busy and buzzy. There are fragrances, luxury soaps, perfume to try, fresh flowers and Ibiza chill-out music, and patients arrive early and linger.

She sees aesthetics merging with the spa and hotel world: an experience, not just a treatment, backed by membership, rewards and birthday vouchers. Nervous patients are calmed the way she calmed surgical patients, by explaining every step, and she asks her team to sit in the patient's chair and see the clinic from their side.

Retention is a focus. By her account the clinic has about 2,500 patients on its books and she sees up to 13 a day. From the new year the team will invite lapsed patients back for a yearly treatment plan, and payment plans let patients save monthly or spread the cost of a treatment. Her reasoning is simple: cold leads are hard to convert, so the people who already know the clinic are the best place to start.

She calls herself a terrible employee. In the NHS and private hospitals she watched simple problems go unfixed, from broken equipment to a ward with no thermometers during COVID, when she sent a healthcare assistant to Boots with her own cash. She loved nursing and still misses the patient contact, but the setting wore her down.

As an owner she took it in baby steps, one decision and one hire at a time, and she now prefers to spend her days building her own business rather than training for brands.

She wants the clinic to grow, but not so big that she loses sight of it; it is a lifestyle business that she wants to keep hands-on. After ten years of injectables and skin work, she added devices one at a time, each filling a gap in what the clinic offered and backed by demand, and she is drawn to longevity and hyperbaric oxygen while staying sensible about evidence and cost.

Her advice to anyone opening a clinic: find a good mentor and support network, ask the reps what they can do for you, and just start somewhere.