Staffing. Construction. Leases.
Successfully opening a new fertility center takes months of meticulous planning. Then you actually have to launch it into the marketplace. But when? And what if you can't?
In the last three years, Fertility Bridge has advised seven aspiring fertility centers prior to market launch. Only one of them opened on time.
The other six faced delays of three months to two years, and some decided against the idea altogether.
Owners of brand new fertility centers struggle with an inherent Catch-22 in the timing of their go-to-market strategies.
Invest in strategy, content creation, customer service systems, and advertising only to have your opening date pushed back indefinitely
OR, equally bad
Have only days or a few weeks to create everything you need for a full pipeline of new fertility patients.
The Catch 22 is a result of a concentration of risk and investment. I’ve separated the operational sequence of opening a fertility center from the sequence of launching it in the marketplace. To solve the Catch 22, we have to be able to distribute the risk and investment across the sequence at the correct corresponding phase.
The 5 Operational Phases of Opening a Fertility Center
The operational phases aren’t my area of expertise, but as far as I can tell, IVF centers face opening challenges in this operative sequence:
Market selection
Choosing the geographic market, funding sources, and partners.Lease or purchase
Real estate sales fall through right before closing. Landlords don’t include something in the lease agreement that was important in the discussion. A physical or zoning limitation is revealed at the last minute.
Construction
Even when you lease space in a ready-to-go medical office building, it’s likely that you will need to remodel the plan for your IVF center. You were going to put your collection room on the other side of the lab? Turns out there’s a multi-split HVAC system that connects to the outdoor unit from there. Call the architect. Again.
Staffing
You’re likely not opening a new center without a few saved numbers in your phone. But how many of them are certain to be the Renee Zelweger to your Jerry MacGuire? Lab Director, Nursing Manager, Office Manager? Then you have to negotiate their salaries, start dates, hire their direct reports, write their operating procedures and train them.
Compliance
You need insurance (malpractice, liability, worker’s compensation), tax certificates, a payroll executor, an IT/communications provider, EMR, billing software, scheduling software, practice management software, compliance training (OSHA, HIPAA, CLIA, Stark). Each of these requirements comes with the possibility of delay.
I can’t offer much insight into the operational phases of opening a fertility center. I can sequence the Fertility Center Market Launch into five phases to reduce your risk and progress your investment in a successful business in the fertility field.
Below I've outlined the Five Phases of the Fertility Center Market Launch — a tactical approach designed to help you circumvent the Catch-22 of opening a brand new fertility center.
The 5 Phases of Fertility Center Market Launch
VIABILITY
If you create a successful fertility business, you will spend millions of dollars in expenditures, maybe even in your first year. Before you do, spend a fraction of that investment assessing the total investment requirements of your plan. The viability assessments come before you make your final decision to start your venture, but before you create a go-to-market strategy or secure a location.
At the time of writing, Fertility Bridge helps with part of the marketing analysis for just $597. You'll also want to hire good operations, finance, and compliance consultants. I can recommend a few of them. In total, you should expect to invest a couple of thousand dollars to make an informed decision about moving forward with your venture or not.
You paid handsomely for a worthwhile education in medicine; consultants are sometimes your highest yield education in business. You can't lose here. Either you move forward with a more educated foundation, or you abort the idea, and you've saved yourself a fortune in time and money by making your decision at the right time with the right information.
POSITIONING
While you assess the viability of your practice, you have to consider the positioning of your vision before you commit to bringing it to life. It’s called positioning because it sets your brand, company culture, and growth goals. These are the first steps in establishing your brand identity, so if your positioning doesn’t excite you more than the anxiety deters you, do not start the company. Decide your positioning while assessing market viability. Do this before developing the rest of your brand, creating a marketing strategy, and buying or leasing a location.
•Core Values
•Main Focus
• Ten Year Target
• Three Year Picture
3. BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT AND MARKETING STRATEGY
Congrats! Your vision for your practice is viable in the marketplace. You are excited about the position it will occupy, and you’ve made a down payment on the facility. Now that you’ve reached the point of no return, it’s the right time to craft the marketing and business development strategy for your first 18 months in business. Your strategy includes your systems for the various points of the Four Phases of the Fertility Marketing Journey. You begin creating your strategy as soon as you start construction or remodeling. If done correctly, it should take about two months to craft your marketing and business development strategy.
If opening is delayed, you don’t have to invest in deploying the strategy. That comes later.
What if remodeling is minimal and there are no delays? What if you’re already compliant and you have a burgeoning payroll, and you need to start seeing new patients within weeks or even days in order to meet your financial obligations?
The third and fourth phase of the Market Launch is where the Catch-22 is most acute. Under increasing financial pressure, many practice owners fall behind. That's when they get into trouble.
4. IMMEDIATE MINIMUM IMPLEMENTATION
Here, we break up the concentration of risk and investment to reduce your risk and maximize your long-term return: do not rush the formation of your strategy. Implement the bare minimum in the meantime.
It doesn’t matter if construction is delayed. These processes, content outlines, advertising strategies, and brand development aren’t just for acquiring new patients. They convert inquiries to consult, consult to treatment, and measure and improve patient satisfaction. They inform who you hire, for which outcomes they’re accountable, and how you train them.
Remember, three months is a liar’s six months. The timelines that agencies, marketers, and freelancers estimate are often half or a third of how long it really takes. Sure, a monkey can get a website up in a week. The site you really want, with your developed brand and content that represent your points of view, probably takes six months.
So why not just be honest about that and separate what you need at this very moment from what you need for the foundational health of your fertility center?
Open your patient acquisition pipeline without sacrificing the planning of the long-term productivity of your fertility practice by covering these four bases:
Initial brand assets (name, logo, colors)
Home page
Let them know your positioning statement, method for scheduling new visits, and that you can’t wait to show them your new brand and website later in the year
Digital real estate
URL, social media accounts, and local listings of your brand name. You’re just claiming the real estate here. The only content you have to create at this time is a similar message to your homepage and the documentation of your opening journey if you so choose
Google listings for providers and practice
Implement the minimum after you put a down payment on a facility, while you work on your strategy, but before you start seeing new patients.
5. DEPLOYMENT OF STRATEGY
Time to start delivering care according to the standard you’ve envisioned!
When fertility centers rush to the fifth phase of Market Launch, they sometimes make errors that take them years to fix. The most common of those errors is hiring full-time marketing personnel. Depending on your growth goals, you may indeed need marketers on your staff. You don’t need them right away. In the beginning, your needs are too varied for one person, and it isn’t cost-effective to build an in-house agency. The time needed to build a new patient pipeline is shorter than the learning curve for someone who’s never done it for a fertility center before.
You deploy the rest of your marketing and business development strategy only after you are ready to see and treat new patients. This is when you film the videos, write the content, produce the referring provider assets, roll out a Customer Relationship Management software (CRM), and hire marketing staff.
ESCAPE THE CATCH 22 OF LAUNCHING A BRAND NEW REI PRACTICE
New fertility practice owners might think that their marketing strategy must be 100% in place on day one — or worse yet, they rush to create one and miss the foundational advantage of setting up their practice the right way.
Separate the operational phases of opening a new fertility center from the five phases of the go-to-market launch. Break up the concentration of risk and investment by distributing them across the sequence at the right phase.
If you’re thinking about launching a new practice, you might consider our introductory engagement which is only $597. If you would like Fertility Bridge’s help with assessing the viability of your fertility center’s market launch, and our framework for your opening sequence, start here with our Goal and Competitive Diagnostic.