Fixing the Clinic's Leaky Bucket
Pouring new patients into a leaky clinic never fixes the economics; the real growth is already sitting inside your existing patient body.
Jared Aron
Show notes
Every healthcare provider starts with a single patient who gets the VIP treatment, and that personal touch breaks the moment the numbers grow. Jared uses the image of a leaky bucket: value escapes at every stage, from uncontacted leads to consultations that never convert to patients who quietly lapse. Pouring in more new patients never fixes the economics.
He traces the leaks to three causes: front-of-house staff never hired to be commercial, technology built for admin rather than revenue, and no one who owns conversion. The fix needs tech, technique and team together, and it maps to a hierarchy that runs from survival and stability up to continuity, trust and growth, where most clinics stall.
From there he gets specific: what separates a good practice management system (the integrity of its API), an experiment called Project Alpha that supports patients one-to-one outside the clinic, and why Coherent calls its product a Sales Desk. The episode closes on the mindset that divides owners who keep climbing from those who settle.
Key takeaways
- A personal touch like messaging every patient on WhatsApp works at first but breaks once a clinic passes roughly a hundred patients, because physical capacity is finite.
- Value leaks at every stage (leads, consultations, cancellations, recall), and adding new patient flow masks the problem instead of fixing the economics.
- The leaks trace to three causes: staff not hired to be commercial, tools built for admin rather than revenue, and no single owner of conversion.
- Clinics climb a hierarchy from survival to stability to continuity, trust and growth, and most stall at stability because the next step needs a different kind of work.
- One Edinburgh provider grew 15 percent in a year with no marketing spend, including 48 percent growth from patients who had not visited in six months.
- The defining trait of a good practice management system is the integrity of its API, and the product is called a Sales Desk because closing white space is a sales job, not an admin one.
“One patient coming back for an extra two visits is probably worth more than 10 patients coming in for one visit.”— Jared Aron
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Coherent gives private clinics one patient relationship engine, recovering revenue lost at enquiry, recall and billing.