Add to this the fact that many practitioners don’t have any ‘business experience’, and it can be all too easy to focus all your efforts on the part you are confident with – your clinical skills and patient care.

Compared to essentials like insurance and training, some practitioners don’t feel that software is a priority from day one. It can be seen as an unnecessary additional cost on top of all the other expenses that are incurred when starting out before you have started making any money. So, the mindset can sometimes be, “I can manage with paper for the foreseeable future until I have enough clients to justify the cost”. This is understandable but what many people don’t realise is that great software can be affordable! Ours costs just £15 per month, which is just 50p per day to save you hours each week!

Back in December 2021, we surveyed our user base and found that 81% were independent practitioners. Of these, 34% had been practising aesthetics for under 12 months, and another 31% said they’d been in the sector for one to three years.

It’s a known fact that many aesthetic nurses, doctors and dentists work as independent practitioners. While this doesn’t mean your business is small or reflect how many clients you see, it does mean that a lot of responsibility falls on your shoulders whether you are new to the business or not.

The main problem I faced when starting out was the amount of paperwork.

I am an independent nurse practitioner myself, and this is why I started Aesthetic Nurse Software.

If, like me, you have come into aesthetics from the NHS, you will have been used to having record-keeping processes in place. When you are running your own business, you have to set these processes up for yourself. You need to know when patients are due in again, keep a diary and schedule appointments. There’s a lot of admin involved. I had paperwork coming out of my ears – medical questionnaires, consent forms, prescriptions, patient records – and I didn’t know how I was going to keep on top of it and build my client base and see patients.

“But, I have only just started out in Aesthetics”

Software has many benefits when you are starting out or running a small one-person led aesthetics business. It will actually help you focus on your core purpose – your clinical skills and patient care –even more because it takes away these admin frustrations that quickly start to pile up, giving you the time to focus more on growing the business by saving time on admin and diary management tasks.

It will also save you so much time and hassle once your client base picks up. So, essentially, making a small investment to start with will prove hugely beneficial and set you up to be able to grow quicker and more efficiently.

Interestingly, in the last 12 months, there seems to have been a change in mindset around using software from the get-go. We are finding that more and more practitioners see the value in having software when starting out – perhaps this is because it’s more widely adopted, particularly when many of the practitioners who use ANS are telling colleagues and new practitioners about the system and how it has helped them.

“How can it help me with my aesthetics business?”

The main feedback we get from our users is that using software has:

• Saved them time managing appointments and/or record-keeping
• Made their processes quicker
• Made life so much easier
• Streamlined their business and made it more efficient

This is precisely what it did for me and exactly why I developed my own software, especially for aesthetic practitioners. You don’t need to struggle when you are starting out with piles of paperwork and admin. Having software is like having a super-efficient PA who does all the admin work so you can focus on doing what you love – transforming your patients’ lives

Jo Hayward, Independent Nurse Prescriber & Founder of Aesthetic Nurse Software