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About Rod Solar

Rod Solar is the Director of Practice Development Consulting of LiveseySolar, a healthcare marketing and sales training company. Rod has created successful and engaging training systems for over 25 years. His advice routinely generates 6-figure incremental increases in income for his clients by teaching them how to systematically improve customer service while increasing sales at the same time. His training offers an elegant (and fun) step-by-step conversational approach which benefits surgeons, practice managers, hospital staff, and non-medical staff working in private healthcare settings. Rod wrote and delivered the Business Development, Clinical Governance and Medicolegal Issues module for the University of Ulster’s Postgraduate Diploma in Cataract and Refractive Surgery (Theory) - PgDip. He is a regular presenter at the European Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgeon’s Congress Practice Development Programme and has regularly published articles about healthcare marketing in The Ophthalmologist, Optician, European Ophthalmology News, Cataract & Refractive Surgery Today, Eurotimes and Independent Practitioner Today. Rod has been a professional salesperson (B2B and B2C), management consultant, college lecturer, an industry leader, and executive coach. His clients include Optegra, EuroEyes, ZEISS, Moorfields Private, London Vision Clinic, Thiele, and many other high-quality, private Ophthalmology clinics from the UK, Europe, USA, Canada, and the Middle East. Rod has a degree in Psychology and Human Performance from UBC. He lives in London, UK and you can follow him on Twitter: @rodsolar.
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Using the hero’s journey to overcome the fear of surgery

As the race to the bottom has proven, price-cutting is not the route to jump-starting eye surgery volumes. For the majority who could benefit from laser eye surgery, even the lowest-price inducements of £399/eye are insufficient. No, the price objection is a superficial smokescreen that often masks a deeper objection - fear. Overcoming the fear objection, therefore, is one of the most important jobs for anyone offering laser refractive surgery. In this post, I write how using the hero's journey in patient stories can help people overcome their fear of surgery.

2019-01-02T01:01:45+00:00By |Categories: Customer Service and Sales Observations, Marketing Feature, News|Comments Off on Using the hero’s journey to overcome the fear of surgery
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To people who want to write a book but can’t get started

In this post, we share our top "lessons learned" after writing our first book - How to Grow Your Practice with Presbyopic Patients. If you've ever contemplated writing a book of your own, read our tips to help you get started, and most importantly, finish that book inside of you.In 2017, ZEISS commissioned us to write a book aimed at summarising everything we know about what we do best - growing medical businesses - and apply it to their most recent innovation - PRESBYOND Blended Laser Vision - or LASIK for people who wear reading glasses.We've wanted to write a book for a long time. We even had about 70,000 words written as a draft that we'd been slowly working on for years. However, it took a customer (ZEISS) to prompt us to finish it, and for that, we're genuinely grateful.If you want a copy of our book, you can get it in this post but first, let's get started by answering the question - why should you write a book at all?

2018-12-10T20:51:30+00:00By |Categories: Marketing how to|Tags: , , |Comments Off on To people who want to write a book but can’t get started
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7 tried and proven approaches to boost creativity

Creativity is a crucial business skill - especially in healthcare marketing. Most of the medical marketing we see out there is boring, bland and has a bad case of me-too-itis. Patients hate it. The good news is creativity isn't solely a talent possessed by artists, designers or musicians. You can learn how to be creative about your clinic or healthcare business by tweaking the way you think and behave. Here are 7 approaches to upgrade your mindset and produce the results you need from your patient communications...

2018-11-29T12:26:33+00:00By |Categories: Customer Service and Sales Observations|Comments Off on 7 tried and proven approaches to boost creativity
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Did your website traffic just plummet? The Google Medic Update may be the reason

In this post, we give you some quick facts about what you need to know about the Google Medic Update, what you can do about it if the Google Medic Update affected you, what we’re doing to help our customers deal with the Google Medic Update and what you can do for yourself.

2018-09-18T14:52:21+00:00By |Categories: Step 1: Getting more leads|2 Comments
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How to write compelling healthcare blog posts that drive leads

Writing website copy that keeps your prospect's attention and interest is a crucial skill. But we know you're busy and have no time to waste on writing healthcare blog posts if they don't generate results. That's why we've packed over 30 specific writing tips in this post to help you write compelling healthcare blog posts that drive leads to your clinic. The quality of your copywriting can mean the difference between a website bounce versus a website conversion. After reading this post, you'll have an easy-to-follow blueprint you can use to write compelling healthcare blog posts that produce qualified leads for your practice. Does this sound like a good way to spend 5 minutes? Great - let's get on with it...

2018-02-27T14:16:18+00:00By |Categories: Step 1: Getting more leads|Comments Off on How to write compelling healthcare blog posts that drive leads
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Presbyopia – The biggest laser eye surgery market in the world

Should refractive surgeons consider the presbyopic market in the laser eye surgery marketing mix? Or should they leave this market to at worst, reading glasses and at best, intraocular surgery? In this video (and the transcript), I argue the case for complementing your practice marketing efforts by offering presbyopic LASIK.

2018-01-10T18:40:22+00:00By |Categories: ESCRS, Step 1: Getting more leads|Comments Off on Presbyopia – The biggest laser eye surgery market in the world
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How to get healthcare marketing projects on time and on budget [a client’s guide]

In this post, we'll share some of our standard timelines and orders of dependencies for healthcare marketing projects. We break down a realistic timeframe for a website project, showing why a good website takes the time it does. To make the exercise a bit more relevant, let's also attach some sample dates starting January 1st, 2018.

2018-01-24T17:02:31+00:00By |Categories: Step 1: Getting more leads|Comments Off on How to get healthcare marketing projects on time and on budget [a client’s guide]
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One-page website or multi-page website? Which should surgeons choose?

There's something very different about the website we launched for Professor Michel Michaelides in August 2017 - it's only one-page. In this content heavy marketing era of "more-content-is-king", why did we design it this way? We'll reveal the reasons in this post and how one's choice of website size depends entirely on one's objectives...

2018-01-24T17:02:31+00:00By |Categories: Case Studies All, Case studies healthcare marketing|Tags: , , |Comments Off on One-page website or multi-page website? Which should surgeons choose?
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Why we challenge our doctor client’s expert power

Despite having expert power, our doctor clients are prepared to be challenged on their marketing and sales opinions. Of course, we listen to their views with an open mind. In this post we reveal why we challenge our healthcare clients and why it's critical to do so.

2018-01-24T17:02:32+00:00By |Categories: Step 1: Getting more leads|Comments Off on Why we challenge our doctor client’s expert power
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Will Millennials save laser eye surgery?

Laser eye surgery, while delivering outstanding outcomes, has been limping along as a product for a decade since the great recession of 2007. Optimistic refractive surgeons await the maturing of the Millennials, the children of the parents who once took up laser eye surgery in droves. Is this wise? This healthcare marketing post argues why the Millennial market may not purchase laser eye surgery as their parents once did, and provides advice on what to do instead of tie your practice success solely to this target market.

2018-01-24T17:02:32+00:00By |Categories: Customer Service and Sales Observations, Step 1: Getting more leads|Tags: , , , , , , |Comments Off on Will Millennials save laser eye surgery?
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