A month-by-month cohort model with a hard cap on the physician's capacity. It shows not only when advertising turns a profit, but also how much budget burns on clients there is physically no one to see. The defaults come from 2026 industry benchmarks.
New and repeat visits against physical capacity. Repeat visits have priority: you don't cancel your own patients to fit new ones.
Month by month, 36 months. The dip at the start is normal: clients pay over time, costs are booked immediately.
Save the current settings to a slot on the left, change the parameters and save another — the comparison appears here.
No slot is filled.
Each parameter improved by 10%. The bar is the change in cumulative flow over 24 months.
How many people remain at each step with the current settings.
The model is given in full: without it the calculator is a black box, not a tool.
The point here is not payback but two limits. The first is financial: costs are booked every month while revenue per client is spread over a year or eighteen months, so the "cash needed" tile shows the depth of the pit. The second is physical: there is one chair, and repeat visits take it.
The capacity ceiling doesn't arrive at once, and so it goes unnoticed. In the first months there are no repeat visits, the schedule is free, advertising works. After six months the accumulated cohorts start coming back, and each month they take more slots. Advertising pours in the same flow, but there is no one left to see it — and the owner decides that "advertising has stopped working," when what has stopped working is the schedule.
The burned budget is the most expensive line in this model. It is money spent on enquiries there was no time for. Raising the budget while the schedule is full is the one guaranteed way to lose money, and the calculator shows the exact amount.
Retention beats the ticket. Move the return slider and the repeat-visit ticket slider by the same amount. Retention almost always has the bigger effect, because it works along the whole chain of visits. But it is also what pushes you into the capacity ceiling faster — and that is the second, less obvious meaning of the sensitivity analysis.
The scenarios are not invented but chosen. The conservative one gives an acquisition cost of 325 and break-even in month 24; the aggressive one, 222 and month seven. Both land in the market corridor of 200–300. Tellingly, revenue per client in the aggressive scenario is 4,825 — almost exactly the industry benchmark of 4,775. Which means the benchmark describes not an average clinic but a well-run one.
The industry benchmark. A typical acquisition cost is 200–300 dollars, rising to 600 when enquiries are handled slowly. Revenue per client over 18 months is about 4,775. Medspa gross margin is 60–70%, so gross profit per client is around 3,104, and the average return on advertising is 3.62 dollars per dollar spent.
Seasonality. In aesthetic medicine it is pronounced, but numeric industry data could not be found in open sources. Set it from the clinic's own records.
The waiting list. Clients who could not be fitted in are counted as fully lost. In reality some will agree to wait — the model understates revenue and overstates the burned budget.
Media inflation over time. CPM is treated as constant, though in reality it rises as the audience burns out.
Referred clients counted in one generation. A referral's referral is not counted — the estimate is deliberately conservative.
Different procedure durations. All visits are treated as equal in time, though a consultation and a procedure take different amounts.
Taxes and depreciation. The model shows gross profit net of advertising and fixed costs, not net profit.