Picture borrowed from our Plastic Surgery San Joaquin website

Plastic Surgery Open House - the finances and lessons learned

Setting up a plastic surgery open house.  Disclaimer - use at your own risk.  I'm not a financial expert or open house consultant by any means.  Under construction - more stuff coming soon.  The info here is just the sharing of some of our behind the scenes experiences in having a plastic surgery open house.  Hope you can modify them to help your plastic surgery event.  The intended audience:  other plastic surgery practices thinking about having open house events.  There's a good amount of info here - enjoy!

Why have an open house

• Lets other people know about the existence of your plastic surgery practice
• It's a party for your existing plastic surgery clients
• It's a get together for new and existing patients to your plastic surgery practice.  The new will get to know some of the "old" patients and there will be a sharing of excitment.
• A chance to sell some skin care products, such as Obagi and Latisse
• It's also a great excuse to advertise more

How Often do we have Plastic Surgery open houses?

• We try to have them about once a year.  Making money from them isn't the main theme.  It's more of a social event for us.
• Sometimes we don't call them open houses - it makes people think that we've moved.  Some have called these events Fair's (Faire's - or a day of beauty).
• We've had about three at the initial writing of this blog.

The Food for the Plastic Surgery Open House/Celebration where does it come from?

• Catered is an option - there is work involved in coordinating this.
• Getting food from Costco might work as well, and put the staff to work on this.

How much does the food cost for our Plastic Surgery Open House event?

• Catered - about $1200 (including tip and tax).
  • We had food catered for 60 people (probably should of had it just for about 40 people at our last event.  This was our third annual open house.  Exactly 100 people came who were interested in our plastic surgery practice, and we had this event on a Thursday from 9a to 4p, and advertised it as a OBAGI skin care specific event).  The caterer was Surla's Restaurant in Modesto, CA.  Surla's telephone number is 209.550.5555.  We supplemented with about 100 dollars extra worth of breakfast food from Costco's - because according to the health code for food, it can't stay out as long as our event which was from 9a-4p.  The food from Surla's restaurant (catering) came at 10:30a as planned.  We didn't go for the grand Cadillac version of the catering which would have had hot food - we went for just the cold food option.
• If bought at Costco is costs about $500 (we had our second open house done this way, I can't remember the specifics about the 1st open house, but it was catered)
• We had about 100 napkins folded up (paper napkins) around a fork.  We probably only needed 80.
• Factor in an extra $160 for drinks (coffee, soda's, ice).  I'm thinking in the future that we would probably try getting some fresh orange juice!

This picture is not exactly at an open house at our office,
this was at the Gallo Center, Modesto, CA

Lessons Learned - what I would do differently next Modesto plastic surgery open house during the weekday:

• Have less food.  Cater for 40 people instead of about 60 people.  It would depend on the minimum for the caterer.
• Have the open house open for fewer than 6 hours so that food can stay out the whole time according to food-health code.  (maybe 4 hours is enough!)
• The high time is really between 11a and 1p - this is when people have lunch hour.
• We are really thankful for our reps, maybe we can have more reps at the next event (we really had one - which was our OBAGI rep Jen - thank you Jen!).  By having more reps - this would diffuse the crowd around our place somewhat.
• We limited the excursion of patients to just the lobby - but perhaps we should have had some guided tours (like our previous open houses).
• We had two staff members dedicated to working the "cash register" (more like the credit card register) - we may need to have three people dedicated to this.
• Wrapping up 80 forks in napkins is probably enough.
• We did just right having a dozen balloons - it's otherwise hard to fit more into a car and drive safely after picking up these helium balloons from Grand Events in Modesto.

What are our Total Costs for having a Plastic Surgery open house
(not counting potential revenue not earned due to not seeing patients that day):

Also not counting raffled off prizes.

The format of this open house was a free for all - fair type format - no RSVP's needed.

Rounded numbers:

Then add in what you wanted to do for your plastic surgery/skin care raffles, and then subtract any product rep support (such as from OBAGI and Allergan/Botox).  Thank you very much to our Modesto product reps (Mike and Jen)

Could probably count on spending $4000 to put on an open house event like the one we had on Nov 5, 2009 (our third open house).  The $4000 figure does not include revenue lost for not seeing patients that day, the cost of electricity, the cost of raffles, the cost of extra decorations such as flowers, and doesn't include the cost of buying more products to sell on that day.

Other things you have to bring in

• Extra garbage containers
• Extra help cleanup, food
• Extra tables
• Bring in an Ice bucket/container for the drinks
• Signs
• Tablecloths
• Balloons - we got these as helium balloon (red and yellow) from Grand Events in Modesto, CA

Raffles for Skin Care products

• We have about $1800 worth of raflles - this is completely up to you in your own plastic surgery event.
• We stay away from raffling for plastic surgery procedures.

Advertising for your plastic surgery event

• This is also completely up to you.  We have years where we just handed out flyers.  We had other years where we sent out mailings.  And this year we tried advertising in the newspaper at the cost of about $1500.  We were happy with our ads in the Modesto Bee:  We had a 2x4 ad which ran for multiple days (about $140 each day) and we had an online banner for $300 that got us 75,000 impressions online as a banner on top of the local page in the Modesto Bee Newspaper.  The Modesto Bee did the graphic design for us.
• Modesto Craigslist beauty and events are good places to advertise

Getting reps to help with some of the expenses of the plastic surgery open house

• OBAGI and Allergan (Botox, Natrelle, Latisse, Juvederm) have kindly donated some funds to help with these events.  They also donate raffles.
• Of the $1800 raffles, $1500 advertising, $1200 food, we received about half from reps.
• In the end if we break even on the event (after selling products, etc) we're happy.

How many people come to our Plastic Surgery Open House events

• First year open house about 240 people
• 2nd year - I didn't count
• 3rd year 2009 - 100 people <--- this is the most recent as of the initial writing of this webpage.
  • Of the 100 people, 47 people had purchased something from the office.

What Skin Care Items did we sell at the third open house (no RSVP, fair type setting, food, walk-ins)

What's not listed here is something we call "Bank Your Botox"

Links:

Local Catering - a website resource... I haven't tried this yet.
Modesto Plastic Surgery Statistics of Dr. Tammy Wu

About us (we're a plastic surgery medical office in Modesto, CA):

(209) 551-1888
Located in Modesto, CA
Services in Plastic Surgery, Veins, Acupuncture, and General Surgery

email clee [at] surgerytoday.com - share some of your experiences with me!

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