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If you're looking at getting the patient from point A to point B, the philosophy is the beliefs that you need to have and that the patients need to have in order to actually commit to the frameworks and the methodology. So one of the beliefs is that this is an ongoing relationship. This is forever. You know, this isn't one and done right? This isn't one and done. Fix it. This is improve it greatly. And then we want to keep those results and keep improving.
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Are you growing a business or creating the Most sought after MedSpa in your market? Welcome to the MedSpa CEO podcast where growth means better results, bigger profits and a schedule that actually gives you your life back. I'm Heather, strategist to the industry's most profitable aesthetic practices. From solo injectors to multi seven figure teams, I'm here to help visionary leaders like you package your brilliance, scale with clarity and build a business that feels as beautiful to run as the results you give your clients. It's time to set the standard, not.
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Blend into the industry noise.
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If you're ready to lead, to be seen and to grow a category of one brand, you're in the right place.
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Hey beautiful friend.
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If you're a longtime listener of the podcast who's been dying to work with me but hasn't pulled the trigger yet, I have an incredible opportunity to work with me for a fraction of the cost. If your estheticians can't explain your signature plans or your new injectors panic every time they have to sell a high ticket consult, it's not their fault, it's.
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The system or more specifically, your lack of one.
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That's exactly why I built Ask Heather AI, the first strategist level tool for aesthetic and wellness CEOs who want to scale with precision and stop flying by the seat of their pants. Inside, you get three powerful tools, each designed to solve the exact gaps that keep your growth tied to you. Turn your basic menu into a branded high ticket signature offer suite your whole team can sell. Train every team member to lead premium consults with confidence, even if they've never sold a thing. Write magnetic messaging that attracts premium patients without sounding like every other clinic online. These are the same frameworks we've used to scale clinics to seven figures and beyond. And they used to cost five figures to access. Now you can have them in your back pocket. Try ask Heather AI for 30 days and see what happens when you stop guessing and start scaling with words that work. Head over to heathertraveen.com trial to learn more.
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Hello my beautiful Friend. Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. Today we're talking about a topic that if you were to nail this topic, it would make every single other thing that you're doing in your business 10 times easier. This is the big domino you hear people talk about. Like, oh, what is the one big domino where if you figured this out in your business, it would make everything else, all the other dominoes fall more easily. And it is this. And we're talking today about how, like the actual title of this episode is 10 reasons your lifetime customer value is lower than you want and the reason why. And it's honestly not the thing that you all will naturally think about and work on because there's so many other shiny object marketing things that you guys have flashing at you that seems so much more exciting than working on this one key thing. But if you want to have the time and the money and the energy to actually have for all the other maybe flashier marketing things you want to do or initiatives that you have on the back of your mind in the pileup zone that you eventually wanna get to, knowing that you have an incredible lifetime customer value is going to be the key. Because then you know, oh, hey, you know those two numbers that we care about, the average transaction value, right? So the average visit value and then the lifetime customer value. Now you have an incredible lifetime customer value. We can probably assume you have a really great average transaction visit value, right? And they're kind of symbiotic, right? Like they go hand in hand. But for many of you, your lifetime customer value is lower than you. It could be. And it's killing you. I have so many clients, when they come and start and working with us is that they're really busy, but they are not nearly as profitable and they feel like they're spinning their wheels, right? And so this episode is for you. And I highly, highly, highly recommend actually taking notes on this episode and writing down the 10 things, like a little checklist for yourself of what's gonna really help you if your lifet customer value is lower than you want. Okay? So number one is your team doesn't know how to hold the roadmap for the year. Now, sometimes I've said in the past that your team doesn't know how to create a roadmap, and I would say that that is still true for some of you, but for some of you, they can make the initial roadmap and then they don't know how to hold it. They don't know how to hold it in the actual initial conversation. And then there's no system to actually hold that roadmap throughout the year where you're reconnecting with the roadmap throughout the year every single time, if not every single time, but at a cadence that would make sense depending on how many times you're seeing the patient. That alone will many multiply your customer value because of the fact that it is actually way easier to sell more things to the people who have already raised their hand and said that they want to be a patron of your clinic practice med spa. Right. So the second one I alluded to last week. And by the way, if you have not listened to last week's episode, I actually recommend pausing this and listening to that first. Cause last week's episode, we talked about the shift in thinking around, like, the mindset and the approach that I want you and all of your team members to have when it comes to consultations, when it comes to actually being the captain of the ship for every single patient or client that they see. And we talked about how I want you guys to be like interior designers, slash general contractors, as opposed to being like the paint store, but. Or Home Depot. Right. And that analogy will make sense when you go and listen to that episode, but I'll kind of be weaving it into this conversation, too. So, number two. So if number one is your team doesn't hold the roadmap for the year, number two is there's no forecasting built into your operations. So this is something we're really diving into in MSA as well, too. But you're not looking ahead at the calendar to flag who's due for what. Like, what could we be selling more of, like, forecasting the appointments? Actually strategically looking at the appointments and saying, okay, let's actually engineer a promo with our calendar in mind of appointments and how that promo may help close the loop for a number of our patients who are recommended something at their initial consultation, who are coming up with either their rounding third on another package or another protocol that they were recommended and making it through. And then there was another package that solves a different problem that they can be reminded of. Now. How can we strategically really be forecasting every month, every single week, every single day? Right. And if your team members like the actual service providers, whether that's injectors, estheticians, laser techs, what have you, don't have time to do this, then can somebody else on the team, in cooperation and collaboration with them, start forecasting for them? So that is part of holding the roadmap for the year. Is actually looking back and saying, okay, these are the appointments I have today and going through, what did we recommend, what did they do? And what can I do to make sure that I'm holding them accountable to, to this recommendation for the year? Okay, Forecasting equals proactive revenue. No, forecasting equals more of a flat line in revenue. Right. And what's beautiful is like when we double down on the humans, we already have, like, we don't have the new patient acquisition cost that's associated with new folks continually coming in. So really dialing this in makes all the other marketing and investments, energy, time things, marketing, advertising, things that you're doing to build visibility, get new traffic, new people into the, into booked appointments is going to be that much more fruitful because you know that you have this system in the back end working. Number three, you don't connect promos to appointments on the calendar. What I mean by this is that the promos like, live in this isolated scenario, right? And you probably are, are doing things to let everybody know about the promos, meaning social media, email displays, telling your team to tell everybody about it. But it's oftentimes not like, connected to the humans that are already like, that are on your calendar. Right. There is so much fun we can have when we get really strategic behind the scenes with incentives and promos that maybe just behind the scenes, right? Like, maybe we have a bunch of people on the calendar that are good candidates for XYZ package, the brightening package. Or, you know, they're making it through the first part of the acne boot camp and where we are getting their, you know, acne under control. And now they have to go to part two of the acne boot camp and get, you know, told that they need that and recommended that maybe strategically behind the scenes, we can have a promo for, for that second part of the acne bootcamp that's running this month. Right. Or maybe we strategically have some promos that aren't even publicly advertised. That is just for your team to be able to hold that roadmap accountable and be able to have an interesting way to re engage a patient or client on a package or a recommendation that the timing wasn't right when it was first recommended to them at the initial annual roadmap conversation. Okay, which brings us into number four. You don't have an annual consult system you're using consistently. Okay, not the first time you've heard it here. But this is the one key thing that if you can nail this and if you can get in the habit of Doing this, if you can shift yourself over to this, there's so many other things. And this is like level one, right? Getting the annual consult system in play where you just draw your line in the sand and say like, we are going to do an annual consultation every, every single year. And you get better at that. You build your menu around that. You start building out signature plans and signature annual roadmaps, if you will, for your team so that you actually have some, a number of examples of what you would recommend for certain types of humans. And then when you start doing that consistently, we can start layering in all of these other little micro. That's a big lever point and then there's all these little tiny micro levers that we can do within that system. Right. Forecasting is one of them. It might be that a six month tune up. I was just having this conversation with a client and we were helping her implement a six month checkup, right? Because it could be like she's gonna have an annual, she's been doing the annual game plan now and she's ready to layer in, letting her patients know about the six month check in, if you will. Okay, so this is where you're going to see the revenue from your existing customer base. Compound number five, you don't have a long term plan for existing patients and clients. This is actually a common one. Meaning you haven't really thought through and actually just sat down and thought to yourself, okay, if somebody is with us for years, right, and they're, you know, take, you know, one of your ideal patient avatars, right? And so what will the plan be in year two? You know, assuming this or that for year one, right. And really actually like what are the maintenance plans going to look like? What are, what are the plans going to look like for the upcoming years? And like mapping that out, deciding ahead of time on what those scenarios could look like.
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Right.
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Because this goes into number six as well too, which is your team doesn't know how to recommend the next step. This is where they get confused. Right. And this is why it's helpful to have, for them to have folks to, you know, whether they're an msa, they can come to us and ask and we can coach them through it, or they have ask Heather AI, they can use our, our consult bot to help them through it. But your team doesn't know how to actually navigate those conversations. They don't know how to actually hold the space, hold the recommendation, like some of those more intermediate advanced scenarios where they can maybe do the initial consultation. You're tracking them on the initial consultation, but then it's like you've got that going consistently. That's only one piece of the puzzle. They're going to need to be able to have intelligent, easy conversations where they can do with confidence and conviction, where they're actually leading them through the year and coming back to that initial recommendation throughout the year.
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Right.
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Most of your team members struggle with this and it's a skill set that they are going to need to hone. And it's a skill set that if you can get your team members to do, oh my gosh, you can turn team members where they can really, they can go from like $15,000 a month to like 50, $60,000 a month and more. Right. Number seven is you're not tracking key metrics related to patient value, lifetime customer value. You're not actually tracking very much. Right. For any of you who've ever done the 30 day sales challenge with us, that is a huge part of tracking. There's a lot of other things that people have told you to track which are important, like rebooking rates and that sort of thing that do matter. Those are like micro levers too. But one of the really key big levers is to actually track what your team members are doing. My clients that have the most incredible like high sales volume numbers per team members are tracking and keeping the team members accountable. That is the big. I see a big, big, big difference between the folks that track and between the folks that don't track. And tracking is like a habit. Right. You have to actually decide what you're going to track and then, yes, for team members who've never been tracked before on things, it's going to be a new habit for them too. And keeping them accountable in a way that maybe you haven't done before. But I'm telling you that, that this will be lightness into the darkness. And what I mean by this is you will find out really, really quickly what's going on. You will find out really, really quickly. If you had a hunch about a team member that is really not even maybe break even or profitable for you, this will highlight that in a way that will show you quickly and show them quickly. And then you can have more honest conversations around it as well too. So tracking is huge for customer value. The more you track, the more lifetime customer value you will have, the more revenue and profits you will create. You haven't ingrained the philosophy that successful results are ongoing. Successful results are ongoing. And what I mean by this is your culture Implies that the goal is effectively fix, not an ongoing relationship. Clients think they're done once they see one result or there's an endpoint. And your team unconsciously kind of agrees with this. And I would even say this for I was telling one of my plastic surgeon clients this a number of years ago. He is a facial plastic surgeon and he does a lot of facelifts, obviously. He does rhinoplasties and other things too, obviously. But we were talking about the idea of shifting him from this. Cause he has an aesthetic clinic as well too. And I am like, surgery is thought of that way. But I was helping him with his aesthetic clinic. I'm like, you will actually see exponentially more when you shift from thinking it's a fix it mentality. Because even for surgery, the results do not last forever. And what you do after surgery will help prolong the life of the results too. And so like, really shifting from like, hey, you're going to have this surgery and then you're going to come see our aesthetic providers in order to really not only elongate the results, but help the results look more natural over time as well too. There's so much that can be done that's just a shift in philosophy and really thinking through that this is not just to fix it. And actually ingraining that in your team members. And then therefore you're doing team members should transfer that philosophy to your patients and your clients and your customers. And so this is when I talk about having process and philosophies, like having methods and frameworks and having core philosophies. Your whole goal in your practice is to get a patient or client from point A to point B, right? That is the goal. They come in with problems and desired outcomes that they want. And your team's entire job is to help them solve those problems and get those desired outcomes. Okay? That is the whole goal. So the process, your framework, your methods, your clinical protocols, your signature menu of packages, programs, CSBs, BMOs, all of those things are literally designed to help your humans get from point A to point B. That is the progress, right? And then they get to point B, and then we move it down and then they need to help. Getting from point B to point C or point B to point C is like keeping it going and improving it over time still, right? Because they're still going to go out into the world, drink wine, be out in the sun too long, and, you know, be exposed to free radicals everywhere. And all the things that they are going to do that is going to make It So the results aren't forever, right? We all know that the philosophy, if you're looking at getting the patient from point A to point B, the philosophy is the beliefs that you need to have and that the patients need to have in order to actually commit to the frameworks and the methodology. So one of the beliefs is that this is an ongoing relationship. This is forever. You know, this isn't one and done, right? This isn't one and done fix it. This is improve it greatly. And then we want to keep those results and keep improving and really having that be the philosophy. One of my philosophies is that results create sales or results create profits, or results create demand. And that is one of my core philosophies. That is the backbone of every other framework and methodology that I share with you guys. That is an example of a belief system that I have that I want to transfer to all of my clients. That's going to make you implement my methods better to get the outcomes that I want for you. In other words, me getting you from point A to point B. Right? All right. So number nine, your team isn't bought in to the idea that you are results driven and that everything lives to serve. Getting incredible transformations and results. Now, if we were to ask any of your team members that, on the surface, they would of course say yes. But many of them, when you actually peel the onion and look underneath the hood of the car, they aren't really bought into it. And you can tell by the actions, right? If you're really bought into that, then even if we haven't put the signature menu together for them, they should have already been really selling comprehensive clinical protocols already. And many of them aren't doing that, right? For a variety of reasons. They're like, oh, we don't have time. Oh, this person doesn't care about that. Oh, they book this. We're just going to deliver on that. And that's just like, that's how it is. That's how the system has worked and that's how their belief systems are right now. 100% can be shifted by really, really, really unpacking what you mean by the idea that you really want to be a practice or a clinic that is based on transformation and holding that for them, right. And showing them that this is why we are changing our offer suite to actually cater to that, to actually being a practice that is really double down on transformations and outcomes and then looking through all the little micro ways that this is showing up for you and your team and your systems. And your offers and your marketing and your sales systems. Number 10. This is a good one and the one that is great for us to end on. No one owns the lifetime value inside of your business. You're the only one thinking about it. And even then, only when things slow down. If no one's responsible for for patient client progression, no one is creating it. So who is going to own the idea that we are obsessed with lifetime customer value and actually make sure that we are continually improving this over time? It is not a one and done. Right? The things I do with clients in MSA and in other containers and what have you, our frameworks is never one and done. You don't just learn it and then, oh, I learned that and now I'm all good. It is something that you will work on in perpetuity in your business because these are skill sets that take time, that take ongoing training, that takes ongoing improvement over time as well. And so it's the same thing for lifetime customer value. If you own it, if you start really looking at it, if you start looking at all the different areas that you can start improving it. So this episode was not comprehensive, but these are the things that I see that most other folks in our industry don't talk about. A lot of times people talk about all the automations that you need, which is great. I think automations are great for reminders and all the things that we can do from an automation and a marketing perspective and communication perspective on that. But these touch points where the hume the real life humans in your practices can actually implement and guide someone through are going to dramatically improve your lifetime customer value if you really take them to heart and implement them. All right, my friend, I hope you enjoyed that episode. I'll see you next time.
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That's it for today on the MedSpa CEO podcast. If this show's been valuable to you, the best way to say thank you is to leave a quick rating and review. It means the absolute world to me. I read every single one and it helps more women like you find the support they need to grow something they're proud of. I'm so glad you're here.
Episode Title: 10 Reasons Your Lifetime Customer Value Is Too Low (And How to Fix It)
Host: Heather Terveen
Date: January 28, 2026
Podcast: Med Spa CEO
In this episode, Heather Terveen breaks down the core reasons why many med spa and aesthetic practice owners see a lower-than-desired lifetime customer value (LCV) — and what practical changes they can make to fix it. Far from just a “numbers talk,” Heather emphasizes how raising your LCV is the pivotal domino that enables profit, time freedom, and better patient care. Instead of chasing flashy marketing tactics, Heather advises listeners to create systems that deepen client relationships, ensuring revenue, patient retention, and business growth.
[04:20]
[06:45]
[09:10]
[11:10]
[12:48]
[13:50]
[15:00]
[16:50]
[19:43]
[22:40]
On the core mindset shift:
“This isn’t one and done, right? This isn’t one and done, fix it. This is: improve it greatly, and then we want to keep those results and keep improving.”
— Heather Terveen [00:04]
On the power of annual consults:
“If you can nail this [...] you get better at that, start building out signature plans and signature annual roadmaps for your team... That’s a big lever point, and then there’s all these little tiny micro levers...”
— Heather Terveen [11:26]
On tracking as a difference maker:
“My clients that have the most incredible like high sales volume numbers per team members are tracking and keeping the team members accountable. That is the big. I see a big, big, big difference between the folks that track and between the folks that don’t track.”
— Heather Terveen [15:20]
On leadership and culture:
“If no one’s responsible for patient-client progression, no one is creating it. So who is going to own the idea that we are obsessed with lifetime customer value and actually make sure that we are continually improving this over time?”
— Heather Terveen [22:43]
Heather wraps the episode by emphasizing that while automations and marketing have their place, nothing replaces personal, strategic engagement with clients. By adopting the practices outlined — from annual consults to team philosophy — med spa owners can dramatically increase their LCV, boost profits, and enjoy an easier, more rewarding business.
Episode Recommended For:
Med spa owners seeking next-level profitability, those struggling with client retention, and leaders ready to move from “busy and burnt out” to building a business that sustains their lifestyle and legacy.
For ongoing resources, Heather recommends revisiting the previous episode on consultation mindset before implementing these LCV strategies.