The “6 Levers” in your business

Imagine you are the captain of a boat. You can control your boat with six propulsion control levers, all located in the wheelhouse, a mere arm’s length away. Each of these control levers throttle an engine in the engine room of your boat, propelling you towards your destination in different ways.

The levers are labelled with the names of the engines they throttle. The labels say:

  1. Marketing
  2. Telephones
  3. Appointments
  4. Price
  5. Loyalty
  6. Referrals

To move towards your destination, you can pull on any of these control levers. With these levers, you can control the amount of fuel or power each engine will use to move you forward. Pull on all of them, or pull  too much, and you might run out of fuel too early. Pull none, or pull too little, and you might end up dead in the water. What do you do? Which lever do you pull and by how much?

There are as many answers to these questions as there are businesses.

The aim of this post and the posts that follow is to provide you with a boat owner’s manual. This manual won’t tell you how to run your boat. Instead, we’ll tell you what the effects of pulling these levers will do for your business.

There are six control levers you can pull to grow your business:

  1. The marketing lever influences how many new enquiries contact you to inquire about your product.
  2. The telephone lever influences how many sales appointments are converted from initial enquiries (your conversion rate).
  3. The appointment lever influences how many transactions arise from the sales appointments you hold (your close rate).
  4. The pricing lever controls how much you will charge for your product or service.
  5. The loyalty lever influences how many repeat purchases your customers make
  6. The referral lever influences how many customers refer their friends and family to your business

Let’s make this real. Let’s say you run a relatively small business. You’ve invested in a website (the first lever) and get some referrals from colleagues and patients you’ve treated (the sixth lever). In your wheelhouse of levers and gauges, your gauges may look like this for a month:

  • The Marketing Lever is generating 100 enquiries
  • The Telephone Lever is generating 10 appointments
  • The Appointment Lever is generating 5 patient transactions
  • The Pricing Lever is set to £1000
  • The Loyalty Lever generates 2 transactions per customer
  • The Referral Lever generates 1 referral from every 10 customers

Your gauges will tell you what your marketing and sales engines are producing. If you’d like your engines to get you where you want to go faster, you either need to improve your efficiency, divert power to certain engines while leaving the others less powered, or get new engines.
For some, this may be the first time you will have looked at your business in this way.

Regardless of how well you think you’re doing, examining numbers like this will usually reveal how you are really performing.

If you have a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) database system, much of this information will be available through standard reports. If you’re like most private health businesses however, the system you use to manage your diary and your patient information will fall short of tracking or providing information like this.

(NOTE: Want to see how your practice marketing measures up against the best in class? Take this 5-minute quiz to see how you stack up in the 9 areas of practice marketing and get specific tips and advice on how you can improve your weak points and better leverage your strengths).

About the author

Rod Solar
Founder & Fractional CMO

Rod co-founded LiveseySolar and acts as a Fractional CMO for our customers. He’s on a mission to help transform the lives of 10,000 people through vision correction surgery by 2024. To achieve that, he inspires his customers to make confident decisions that will help 50,000 people take the first step towards vision correction.

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Meet our Founders

We’re passionate about helping leaders of high-quality, growth-minded practice owners double their practice revenue

Rod Solar

Founder & Scalable Business Advisor

Rod co-founded LiveseySolar and acts as a Fractional CMO and Scalable Business Advisor for our customers. He’s on a mission to help transform the lives of 10,000 people with vision correction surgery by 2024. To achieve that, he inspires his customers to make confident decisions that will help 50,000 people take the first step towards vision correction.

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LiveseySolar completely transformed the way we were approaching this… We’ve gone from having just the dream of having a practice to having a practice up and running with people making inquiries and booking for procedures… It’s extremely pleasing. We feel lucky we connected with LiveseySolar.

— Dr Matthew Russell, MBChB, FRANZCO, specialist ophthalmic surgeon and founder of VSON and OKKO

Laura Livesey

Founder & CEO

Laura Livesey is the co-founder & CEO of LiveseySolar. She has developed powerful refractive surgery marketing systems that increase patient volumes and profits for doctors, clinics, and hospitals, since 1997.

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Rod and Laura know as much about marketing surgery to patients as I know about performing it. They are an expert in the field of laser eye surgery marketing. They know this industry inside out. I believe that they could help many companies in a variety of areas including marketing materials, sales training and marketing support for doctors.

— Prof. Dan Reinstein, MD MA FRSC DABO, founder of the London Vision Clinic, UK