Launching a private ophthalmology practice is a significant undertaking, but with careful planning and execution, you can succeed.

This plan leverages my advertising, outreach, content creation, and patient engagement skills to have patients fund their acquisition costs after the first week of advertising. If you lack these skills, consider outsourcing them.

Focus solely on this for the next 16 weeks full-time. If you can’t commit full-time, you’ll need external help.

Doing this part-time without external help will delay your success and reduce its likelihood.

Weeks 1-4: Planning and Preparation

Week 1: Identify your ideal patients and the problem you want to solve. Understand their demographics, needs, preferences, fears, frustrations, wants, and aspirations. Choose one avatar and one problem to solve.

Avoid trying to solve many problems for different people. Select a digital platform (Google, Facebook, Instagram) to acquire leads.

Google provides leads that are more ready to buy but are less in number.

Meta (Facebook and Instagram) offers more leads, but they are less likely to be ready to buy.

Older demographics are on Facebook, while younger audiences are on Instagram.

Remember, one product, one avatar, and one channel. That’s it.

Week 2: Identify your core offer (the treatment you wish to perform) and the entry-point offer (how you want people to take the first step, like booking a consultation).

Offer your consultation for free. You have more time than money at this stage, so invest your time wisely in patient acquisition.

Week 3: Use your name as the business entity to start. You only need three things:

1) a business bank account
2) a way to process money
3) register your private practice with the appropriate bodies (in the UK, this means the Information Commission and the CQC if you still need to register under another entity).

Create an ad account on your chosen platform (Google Ads or Meta Business Suite) using your business name, and connect your business credit card to pay for clicks.

Week 4: You’ll feel compelled to create a brand name and logo. Resist this impulse; that time will come. Use your face for now. Create a logo with a free logo maker (e.g., Canva, Wix) if necessary. Don’t pay more than £50 for this.

Create a one-page website using a free builder (e.g., Wix, Squarespace, WordPress). Choose a plan that is as close to free as possible.

Spend at most 4 hours on this. It’s temporary. You can hire someone to rebuild it in 16 weeks.

People who click your ads will visit your website, so design it to drive action toward your entry-point offer (e.g., book an appointment).

Weeks 5-8: Increase Visibility and Engagement

Week 5: Clear your schedule. Availability is the most significant lever of opportunity in private practice.

Rent a small office for consultations and offer as much availability as possible to avoid being a bottleneck to growth.

You will be under capacity for a while, so keep busy with advertising, posting free content, or doing warm reachouts. Plan to do this for the next 100 days straight.

Be ready to take calls from inquiries, do follow-ups, write emails, and book consultations. Expect to spend at least 4 hours a day on these tasks. Doing everything yourself will increase your chances of success and help you understand what’s needed when you make your first two hires (a patient liaison and an optometrist) or hire a marketing agency.

Document everything as you do it to leverage what you learn and quickly onboard your first hires.

Week 6: When you have an entry-point offer (e.g., a free consultation) and availability, increase your visibility with paid traffic.

If you’re offering lens replacement (including cataracts), start with a Google Ads budget of £100/day and commit for 100 days.

After spending £10,000, you should get at least 100 leads (assuming £100/lead). Respond and follow up diligently; 100 leads should result in 20 free appointments. Aim to close 50%, which should give you ten patients.

Assuming you charge around £3,000 each, you should expect sales of £30,000.

That’s a Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) of 3 (for every pound spent, aim to earn three). If you’re offering laser eye surgery, plan for a significantly higher ad budget.

Week 7: Spend 4 hours a day on marketing.

What are you doing? Collect other people’s ads for inspiration. Review how your ads are working for you.

Write alternatives and split-test them against each other.

Test everything from the headline, images, copy, and calls to action. Tweak your website landing page (where you send the ad clicks) to maximise the conversion rate from visitors to leads.

If you’re using Meta, engage actively with your followers by promptly responding to comments and messages and participating in local community groups and forums.

Week 8. Keep running and testing ads. Answer calls. Follow up with every lead you get. Add them to a mailing list (even if it’s on a spreadsheet) and start writing emails to send to them.

Note: Whether you run ads or make free content, never publicly sell anything. Only provide free value. Your calls to action should solely be to calls and free appointments. Interested people will contact you if you run ads or post value for 100 days straight.

Weeks 9-12: Start getting helpers

Week 9: Keep doing what I suggested in week 7 or 8. Start writing down everything you’re doing right now. You’ll need these instructions to make process documents so others can do this on your behalf when you’re too busy with patients to do it.

Week 10: Draft a job description for a patient liaison. Run targeted ads on Linkedin, Facebook, Instagram and job sites to reach your ideal candidate.

Begin sorting through applications and invite shortlisted candidates to send you a video of why they think they’re most qualified for the job.

Further, shortlist and invite 5 to an interview, offer the job to one or two and begin onboarding. Give them all the playbooks you’ve written. They can work remotely for now.

Week 11: As you approach the launch (or relaunch), plan to host a grand opening event. Invite the community to visit your practice, offering free eye screenings and educational talks. This event will help build local awareness and generate buzz.

Week 12: If you started advertising in week 6, you’ll be spending more time seeing free consultations by now.

After the first 30 days of paid traffic, expect ±30 leads. As you see people for free consultations, playbook what you do and how you do it to prepare for your next hire (an optometrist).

Weeks 13-16: Final Push and Launch

Week 13: If your paid traffic model goes according to plan (Cost per lead is £100), increase your ad spending to maximise reach.

Week 14: Gather and share testimonials from your early patients. Highlight these testimonials on your website and social media channels to build credibility and trust.

Week 15: Hold your launch event. Invite all the patients, co-managing optometrists, and other doctors you know. Invite a happy patient to speak about their experiences on your behalf.

Week 16: By now, you’ll generated 70 leads, treated seven patients, and generated £21,000. Congratulations, your cumulative earnings surpass your costs (£17,000, more than a ROAS of 3 (for every pound spent, you earned three).

Post-Launch: Maintain Momentum

Continue with paid ads. Track key indicators like ad spend, lead conversion rates, appointment close rates, and ROI on marketing efforts. Use these insights to refine your approach and ensure continuous improvement.

After your launch, you’ll have enough capital to hire a patient liaison, a locum optometrist, a marketing consultant, and continue to fund your advertising campaigns.

You can reinvest your profits from this launch phase into a professional website, a CRM system, and outsourced paid traffic management.

You might choose to redesign your logo, but by now you’ll realise you likely wont need to. Instead, focus on doing higher-return work—surgery.

To get started on the right path, take our Practice Marketing Assessment quiz to see which areas you should focus on first. Then, customise this plan to fit your unique needs and achieve your goals. Alternatively, if you’d like to discuss further, book a free 15-minute compatibility call with Laura today!