A training program that needed to scale
Neil ran a training program for many years. It had been a success, and he wanted to use it to put something back into his industry. The question was how to reach more people than he could train himself.
I started about two and a half years ago looking for ways that I could replicate my training and make it more scalable, and AI was the road that I chose to go down for that.
Inside the black hole
Clinara works in the room where the consultation happens. In hair, beauty, body, aesthetic and cosmetic medicine, that is usually one clinician and one client behind a closed door.
Inside that room, Clinara takes accurate treatment notes and prepares the follow-up email to the client. Then, in Neil's words, “more importantly”, it coaches the clinician.
We live in what we call the black hole. In other words, we live in the treatment room, which is a room that's typically run by a clinician by herself, one-on-one with the clients.
It's how well you explain it
The idea behind the coaching comes from what Neil has seen in his industry.
Clinara is built to close that gap, and Neil says the benefit lands with the clinicians themselves: “They are ultimately enjoying their job better because they have more of their clients and patients accepting their suggestions and recommendations.”
What we've discovered in our industry, it's not how much you know, it's how well you can explain it or articulate it, and some people have a really good bedside manner, and some people don't.
Five steps, back in under 60 seconds
The coaching is Neil's own training, built into software. Clinara takes a transcript of the consultation and lays it over his five-step protocol for running an effective, conclusive consultation. The feedback is practical: listen better, ask better open-ended questions, or bring the consultation closer to what the client was looking for.
Neil is just as clear about what AI should not do. It “will never replace people in our industry because our industry is a personal service industry. It's a very touch industry.” Its job is the work around the consultation: turning it into meeting notes that go into a CRM and preparing information quickly, so clinicians get time back.
That whole process can be done in under 60 seconds for us, and that is a huge, huge benefit where someone can walk out of a treatment room and actually have live and real consultation feedback.
A non-technical founder finds his partner
Neil knew the industry and he had the training. The technical side was the missing piece, and that is where AI Pathfinder came in.
Today the two have a formal partnership, which Neil says he “could not have done without this program.” Asked what the best thing about AI Pathfinder was, he kept it short: “Their understanding of what I needed and their ability to point me in the right direction.”
I don't have a technical background, so I actually had to find a business partner, which I now have, who was tech and AI based, and it was through this pathway that I actually got introduced to that business partner.
Still early days
Neil does not oversell the numbers.
The plan is to keep growing in Clinara's current market first. Interest has already come from other markets where a consultation sits inside the sales process. As Neil puts it: “We are a specialist in helping people have a more productive consultation in the client's journey.”
We're still in our early days. We've only just clocked our first 1,000 client consultations or sessions, as we call it, through our system, and it's still relatively early days.
