Professor Eduardo Picanço shares business management tips for health and wellness clinics, covering financial control, pricing and human-centered care to help you achieve greater success in 2025.
Published on January 15, 2025
The aesthetic health market is booming in Brazil, but many businesses never reach their true potential because they lack efficient business management.
With balanced finances, strategic pricing, human-centered care and results tracking, it is possible to grow solidly and profitably in a market with so much potential.
That is why we spoke with Professor Eduardo Picanço, a dentist, business consultant and specialist with more than two decades of experience in the health and wellness sector, with the goal of helping managers and independent professionals.
By putting these tips into practice, you will master the pillars of efficient business management and take your clinic to a new level of success. Check it out!
The aesthetics and wellness sector is being driven by growing demand. This is due to several factors, above all a greater concern with appearance, a focus on health and wellness, and an aging population.
According to Professor Eduardo Picanço:
"Demand [...] tends to keep growing, mainly because of the aging of the population [...] which gets older and needs more care for longer. So it creates what we call recurrence."
This happens because clients, especially in treatments focused on skin, rejuvenation and preventive physiotherapy, need ongoing care over time.
The specialist points out that with a base of 100 patients following an annual care protocol (aesthetic treatments and procedures, such as facial rejuvenation therapies), it is possible to achieve impressive financial results.
He gives an example: with an average ticket of R$ 20,000 per patient over one year, a clinic's annual revenue would be R$ 2 million (100 patients x R$ 20,000 each).
But how do you improve business management and reach that result? Eduardo Picanço's tips are what we want to dig into now.
According to Professor Eduardo Picanço, the first step in building a thriving business is self-knowledge, so you can outline the profile of the target audience you want to reach:
“[To] have a target audience, first, you have to know yourself. Because you have to be yourself, genuine in what you are doing [...] You will choose an audience and find out what their pains, doubts and desires are. And then you will see what you can do in a unique way for each type of audience.”
Self-knowledge is therefore essential to understand the purpose behind your work. It is the path to defining what truly makes sense for your business and how your skills can connect with the market in an authentic way.
For independent professionals in aesthetics, defining a target audience based on self-knowledge is even more important for efficient business management.
The specialist also highlights the importance of structuring your clinic strategically, using the following points as a reference:
• Mission: What you do, who you do it for, how you do it and what your competitive edge is;
• Vision: Where you want to take your business;
• Values: The principles that guide your actions and connect with your essence.
This clarity is much more than theory. It is a study to choose the right audience and understand the needs of these groups of people.
Imagine you want to focus on rejuvenation treatments. After identifying your mission and values, you realize that your edge lies in human-centered care and in the personalization of your protocols.
Your target audience, for example, might be women over 40 who are concerned about healthy aging and who may be interested in fractional radiofrequency treatments.
With this clear definition, you can create recurring protocols and generate steady revenue.
Understanding the market in depth is a step toward building a strong brand. However, many entrepreneurs and managers do not do this analysis before opening their businesses and end up falling behind, blaming the competition.
As Professor Eduardo Picanço points out:
“People don't want to study the market. Knowing the market, knowing buying behavior, is pure marketing study. In essence, studying the market is knowing how I am going to create an experience for [those people] I have chosen as my target audience. Then I start to have an absurd competitive edge from the moment I understand how people think.”
The specialist stresses that studying the market goes far beyond analyzing competitors.
It involves understanding political and economic events that, at first glance, have no direct impact on the health and wellness sector.
These situations and circumstances influence clients' behavior and decision-making.
Many managers and independent professionals at aesthetic clinics still confuse pricing with perceived value. Although both directly influence revenue, they are distinct concepts and affect business success in different ways.
Professor Eduardo Picanço explains:
“Perceived value is not about your service, it is about [people's] behavior, about how they see things. Why does a person pay for first class to fly to New York? And they are on the same plane, arriving at the same time. They don't arrive earlier. People pay for an experience. I have to understand how people think in order to buy, in order to sell a high ticket.”
Pricing, then, is tied to the cost of the service: materials used, appointment time, professional qualifications and profit margin.
Perceived value, on the other hand, is tied to how the client sees the benefit and the experience provided.
Two aesthetic clinics can deliver the same technical result, but your business can add value through a differentiated experience.
Clients feel they are paying for something more complete and exclusive. The secret to this lies in human-centered care.
In aesthetics, technical quality is essential, but the edge that truly builds loyalty and attracts new clients is a human-centered relationship. In the words of Professor Eduardo Picanço:
“The central element must be liking people. [...] I have to have a genuine interest in caring for people.”
A human-centered approach goes beyond courteous service. It involves empathy, active listening and personalization.
In a market like aesthetics, where clients seek not only to improve their appearance but also to boost their self-esteem and wellbeing or to overcome some kind of pain, feeling valued and understood makes all the difference.
Good financial management is one of the pillars of success. It involves properly organizing fixed expenses, variable expenses and provisioned payments so you have predictability and control over your results.
The specialist explains these expenses as follows:
• Fixed expenses, such as rent, salaries and utility bills, stay constant and should be prioritized in monthly planning.
• Variable expenses, such as purchasing disposable supplies, cosmetics and syringes, can fluctuate with the volume of appointments, requiring more dynamic, seasonal monitoring.
• Provisioned payments, such as taxes, social security costs and equipment maintenance, need to be planned in advance to avoid cash flow surprises.
When it comes to provisioned expenses, many aesthetic clinic managers are caught off guard:
“Provisioning to repurchase equipment and replace teams, [for example], nobody does it. [...] But the person sees leftover money, takes it, thinks it's profit. But it wasn't, it was provisioning to replace a team, to replace the protocol. So indirect costs have to be provisioned as a cost, not as a profit reserve.”
Managers therefore need to keep an eye on future and provisioned expenses, not allowing these funds to be spent too early, which would compromise the clinic's growth, its operations and its capacity to make investments.
Another aspect of managing aesthetic clinics is not mixing personal expenses with business revenue.
This practice, common among independent professionals, not only undermines clarity about the business's real profitability but can also create serious tax and even legal problems.
When finances get blurred, it becomes hard to correctly calculate the taxes owed, which can lead to tax assessments and penalties.
Eduardo Picanço also notes that mixing accounts can mask the real financial health of the business, making it harder to spot excessive expenses or investment opportunities.
To avoid these problems, the ideal is to keep separate bank accounts and set a fixed pro-labore (owner's salary), ensuring transparency and making more assertive financial decisions easier.
A correctly priced treatment should reflect not only supplies and accessories for aesthetic treatments, but also the time the professional dedicates and the results delivered.
That is why knowing how to price your own effort is very important for efficient management. To find out the real cost of one hour of work, Eduardo Picanço proposes a simple formula:
• Add up the monthly costs of the practice, such as bills, supplies and salaries;
• Divide that total by the total hours worked in the month.
This calculation is important for arriving at fair and profitable compensation. The formula can also be used to set realistic goals, adjust your schedule and eliminate waste.
Tonederm believes that efficient management is the key to the sustainable growth of aesthetic and wellness clinics.
That is why we are sharing Professor Eduardo Picanço's tips, aiming to help entrepreneurs reach and exceed their results, with more financial control and a human-centered approach.
We are committed to supporting your success, offering not only the technology for your clinic to stand out, but also the knowledge needed to transform the operational side of your business.
Keep following the Tonederm blog for more useful information about the fascinating world of regenerative medicine and aesthetics.
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