Every discovery call I take starts with a version of the same questions. And when owners aren't asking me, they're asking Google — where most of the answers are written by marketing agencies that have never run a clinic.
So let's do this properly. I've spent 20+ years opening and operating more than 50 businesses across eight states — including founding Options Medical Weight Loss, scaling it nationally, and exiting to private equity. These are the questions I hear most, answered the way I'd answer them across the table.
Is a weight loss clinic profitable?
Yes — and more of them are unprofitable than you'd think, for the same reason.
The margins in a cash-based weight loss clinic are real. What kills them isn't demand — it's commoditization. Every clinic in your market now offers GLP-1s, which means the patient can price-shop your core offering by lunchtime. Profit doesn't live in the medication; it lives in three numbers most owners never track: your booking rate on inquiry calls, your consult close rate, and your retention. In my clinics, a trained front desk booked 80% of inquiries and a systemized consult closed 88–92% — and patients came back weekly because the program was built to prove its own results. Same medications as everyone else. Completely different P&L.
A weight loss clinic selling a program is profitable. A weight loss clinic selling a drug is a pharmacy with worse purchasing power.
What is the most profitable wellness business?
Wrong question — and I say that kindly, because I understand why people ask it.
Owners want to know which modality wins: med spa vs. weight loss vs. longevity vs. IV bars. But I've watched every one of those categories produce both fortunes and bankruptcies, often on the same street. The most profitable wellness business isn't a category. It's whichever one runs on recurring programs instead of one-off transactions, measures its funnel from phone call to renewal, and trains its people on one consistent process. People + process = profit — the modality is just the vehicle.
If you're choosing a category today: pick the one where you can build proof of results into the program, because proof is what drives the weekly visit, and the weekly visit is where retention and revenue live.
What does a wellness clinic consultant actually do?
A real one builds systems and trains your people to run them. In my engagements that means: the phone and call management system (scripts, tracking, follow-up), the consult process (discovery, the patient journey, closing), staff training and incentive structures, the KPIs and audit rhythm so performance is measured instead of assumed, and program design with proof-of-concept built in. For owners who want an operator in the seat, it can extend to fractional COO/CEO leadership.
What a consultant should not be is a deck-and-disappear act. If the engagement doesn't include training your team to run the system after we leave, you didn't buy consulting — you bought a PDF.
Is concierge medicine booming?
Yes — the numbers are unambiguous. The concierge medicine market is projected to grow from roughly $25 billion in 2026 to over $36 billion by 2030, around 11% a year (Research and Markets). Physician burnout is pushing doctors out of insurance-based volume medicine, and patients are proving they'll pay for access and time.
But here's what the market reports won't tell you: a boom means competition, and competition means the same commoditization wave that hit GLP-1s is coming for concierge. When every physician in your metro offers a membership, "more time with your doctor" stops being a differentiator. The practices that win will be the ones that operate like hospitality businesses with medical outcomes — systemized patient experience, measurable results, and a team trained beyond the physician. Get in, but get in with a system.
Is longevity testing worth it?
For a patient, that's between them and their provider. For a clinic owner, biomarker testing isn't a product decision — it's the retention engine, and most owners completely miss this.
In my weight loss centers, the InBody scan was the machine that proved fat loss was happening — and it brought patients in every single week, and every week they bought something while they were there. Baseline-and-retest is the same play for longevity: blood panels, biological age testing, strength and performance metrics. Testing answers the three questions your staff must be able to answer — Why should I do this? How do I know it worked? Why should I keep doing it? When you can prove results, you create raving fans. When results stall, the data shows you why. Either way, the patient has a reason to come back — and a clinic without a reason to come back is a clinic renting patients from its ad budget.
Who can own a weight loss clinic or med spa?
It depends entirely on your state. Many states enforce corporate practice of medicine (CPOM) doctrine, which restricts who can own a medical practice — often requiring physician ownership, with non-physicians participating through management services organization (MSO) structures. Other states are far more permissive. Medical director requirements, scope-of-practice rules for injectors, and telehealth prescribing rules all vary too.
I'm not an attorney, and this is the one area where you should not economize: get a healthcare attorney licensed in your state before you sign a lease. What I can tell you is that ownership structure is the easy part compared to what comes after — the operations, sales, and training systems are where clinics actually live or die, and no legal structure fixes an empty consult room.
How much does a clinic consultant cost?
Anyone who quotes you a price before understanding your business is selling a package, not consulting. So instead of a number, here's exactly how my engagements are structured, so you know what you'd actually be buying:
TIER ONE
The Audit
I come in, evaluate your operation, and give you direct feedback with action items. Audits range from high-level to deeply detailed, and pricing varies with the depth you want. Some owners take the findings and run with them internally — that's a fine outcome.
TIER TWO
Project or Monthly Consulting
We build and install specific systems — the call process, the consult, training, KPIs. Typical engagements run 3–6 months, structured by project or month depending on what the business needs.
TIER THREE
Fractional COO
I take the operating seat and actually manage your reports — not advise from the sidelines, run it. Because real operating change doesn't happen in a quarter, this is a minimum 6-month engagement.
The comparison that matters is against the alternative: a true COO with real clinic operating experience runs $250,000+ a year in total compensation, plus the six months it takes to find one. Fractional gets you the same operating experience for a fraction of that, without the recruiting risk — and a system that raises your close rate from 40% to 80% pays for itself out of calls you were already generating.
And the first step costs nothing: I do an intro call at no charge to review where your business is and tell you honestly which of those — if any — fits. Sometimes the answer is "you don't need me yet." You'll know by the end of the call either way.
What are the red flags when hiring a clinic consultant?
Use these on anyone you're vetting — including me:
They've never operated. Ask what they've owned or run, for how long, and what happened to it. Agency experience is not operating experience.
No numbers. A real operator talks in booking rates, show rates, close rates, and retention — and can tell you exactly how those numbers were measured. Vague promises of "growth" are a tell.
One playbook for every client. If the proposal could be copy-pasted to a dental office, run.
No training handoff. If the plan doesn't include training your team to run the system without them, you're buying dependence, not capability.
Guaranteed results. Nobody who's actually operated guarantees outcomes — there are too many variables they don't control, starting with whether you'll implement.
When should you NOT hire a consultant?
Three situations, honestly:
You won't be involved. A consultant installs systems; the owner has to enforce the standard. If you're looking for someone to care about your business so you don't have to, save your money.
You're pre-revenue with thin capital. Get open, get calls coming in, get real data first. A consultant multiplies what exists — there has to be something to multiply.
You're not willing to change how your team works. The system only works if it's actually run. If scripts, tracking, and audits sound like things your culture would reject, fix the culture question first.
If none of those are you — if the phone is ringing, the team is willing, and the numbers just aren't what they should be — that's exactly the business a system transforms.
WILL BARTON VENTURES
Got a question that isn't here?
The intro call is free — and honest.
Boutique firm — limited clinics per quarter
My father weighed more than 400 pounds.
He tried everything the system offered him, in the order it offered it. He had the gastric sleeve. When that failed, he had bariatric surgery — and it worked, for a while. He lost 200 pounds. Then, like so many patients, he put it all back on. That’s not a personal failing; it’s the statistical norm. A 2023 systematic review found that nearly half of all bariatric surgery patients experience significant weight regain.
I watched the rest of it happen in slow motion. I hired him one of the best personal trainers in the area — he never once stepped onto the workout floor. His doctor, who by his own admission had almost no training in nutrition, referred him to a nutritionist. The nutritionist handed him a plan that required cooking five meals a day. For a man who had never meal-prepped in his life, that plan was dead on arrival. So he went back to his doctor, who did the only thing left in his toolkit: he prescribed antidepressants for how the whole cycle made him feel.
Surgery. Trainer. Nutritionist. Prescription. Four providers, four buildings, four philosophies — and not one of them talking to the others.
My father wasn’t failed by any single one of them. He was failed by the gaps between them.
He passed away in 2012.
Two years later, I co-founded Options Medical Weight Loss. I’ll always believe that if a place like it had existed sooner, I might have had more time with him.
Year One (2014): The Place That Would Have Worked for My Dad
If you weren’t in the weight loss world back then, it’s hard to remember how fragmented it was. One company sold a diet. Another sold pills. There were coaching outfits. There were food programs like Weight Watchers. Every one of them was a silo, and every one of them believed their silo was the whole answer.
Nobody had put it all under one roof and systemized it.
So in 2014, I left the corporate world and co-founded Options Medical Weight Loss — a medical weight loss clinic designed from the ground up to be the place that would have worked for my dad. I was the architect on the business side of the house: I created the branding, built the operational and sales systems, and oversaw the marketing and growth plan. If it touched how the company ran, sold, or grew, it came through my desk.
Why we called it “Options”
The name was the philosophy. We gave every patient options — real ones.
If a patient didn’t want medication, we had a program for that. If they didn’t want our diet, we had a program for that too. Medication was a tool, not the product. The food we offered was a tool, not the product. The product was healthy living — taught patiently, at the patient’s pace, so that by the time someone hit their goal weight, they actually understood how to keep the weight off.
I designed the Options Diet System around the exact failure I’d watched my father live through. No one goes from zero to cooking five meals a day. So the ODS taught meal prep the way you’d actually learn it: one meal first. Then two. Then more, as the habit took hold. Progress a person could sustain, instead of a program a person would abandon.
Everything was customized to the individual, and the individual was in charge. We had a phrase for what we were really selling: empowerment equals confidence.
The numbers came first
By 2014 I had already spent a decade building businesses and the systems that run them, and I’d learned the formula the hard way: people plus processes equals profit.
So Options didn’t grow into its metrics. It launched with them. From day one I knew every number that mattered: leads, consult bookings, show rates, closing percentage, retention. When you can see every link in the revenue chain, you can fix the exact link that’s leaking before it costs you the month.
Years 2–4 (2015–2017): Building the Machine — and Replacing Myself
Once the clinic worked, I went to work on the more important thing: making it work without me.
I built an org chart where every position — every single one — had three documents behind it: a workflow, a training, and an audit. How the job is done, how a new person learns it, and how we verify it’s being done right. (Years later this became the backbone of what I now call the Barton Method: Measure, Systemize, Train, Audit.)
That structure changed everything about how we could grow. We expanded quickly from two small offices into a 2,000-square-foot clinic. The second person I ever hired became the manager of our second location — Glenview. The person working directly under me became our next manager and took over the clinic after that. Promotion from within wasn’t an accident twice; it became the design. Eventually there was a documented pathway to promotion for every position in the company — the front desk knew exactly what it took to become a coach, a coach knew what it took to become a manager, a manager knew what it took to run a market.
Then we expanded out of state, and opened more locations across Illinois. And here’s the part I want every clinic owner reading this to sit with: the system was easily replicatable because it was a system. Not a founder’s instincts. Not tribal knowledge in one manager’s head. Documents, numbers, and training that produced the same patient experience in every location.
By 2017, the machine was documented enough to sell — literally. I converted Options Medical Weight Loss into a franchise. I wrote the operational core of the Franchise Disclosure Document myself — the systems, the training, the way the business actually runs — with attorneys handling the legal framework. When your operations are already documented down to the position level, that part of an FDD isn’t an invention; it’s a compilation.
Years 5–8 (2018–2021): The Franchise Era
Under that system, Options expanded across four states — first Illinois, then Arizona, then Ohio, then Florida — and grew into one of the largest privately held medical weight loss companies in the United States. The playbook never changed as we scaled — measure everything, systemize everything, train everyone, audit relentlessly. Each new location opened with the full operating system on day one instead of learning it live.
By 2020, the growth curve demanded its own infrastructure. In 2020 and 2021 I built out a home office to support massive growth — centralizing the functions no individual clinic should carry alone, so every location could focus on the only thing that happens at a location: taking care of patients. That’s the unglamorous truth about scaling a clinic business. The locations are the visible part; the home office is the machine that makes location twelve run as well as location one.
And then came the test no playbook saw coming. In early 2020, as COVID emerged, I had a feeling something was about to go terribly wrong — so before the world shut down, I built out our telemedicine infrastructure. When the lockdowns hit, we didn’t scramble. We turned it on. The first time our patients ever used telemedicine was the moment the world needed it most, and our care never stopped. That’s what a systems business looks like under stress: you don’t predict every storm, but you build fast enough to beat the ones you see coming.
2022: The Exit
In 2022, I made a full exit from Options Medical Weight Loss. Today the company runs dozens of clinics under private equity ownership and professional management — and to me, that’s the final proof of the thesis. A business built on one person’s talent dies or shrinks when that person leaves. A business built on systems outlives its founders. Mine did.
The Bet That Aged Well
Here’s the part that means more in 2026 than it did in 2014.
We built Options years before GLP-1s turned medical weight loss into a national conversation. Back then, our founding premise sounded almost contrarian: medication is a tool, not the product. The product is a person learning to live differently — with medical support, coaching, and nutrition education working together under one roof, at a pace they can actually sustain.
Then the GLP-1 era arrived, and the entire industry ran headfirst into the question we’d designed for a decade earlier: what happens when the medication stops and no one taught the patient anything? The model the field has converged on — medication paired with real lifestyle change, coaching, and nutrition support — is the model Options was built on from day one. We didn’t predict the drugs. We just refused to believe any single tool was the answer, because I’d watched every single tool fail my father one at a time.
Some bets age well because you were smart. This one aged well because my family had already paid the price of being wrong.
What I Do Now
Options didn’t teach me the system — Options proved what systems can do. I’d spent the decade before opening and operating businesses across the country, and in the years since, I’ve taken everything those businesses taught me and built something new: a unique operating system designed to work across every kind of wellness company — weight loss, med spas, concierge medicine, longevity. Every revenue-driving number visible at the click of a button, and a workflow, a training, and an audit behind every position. Through Will Barton Ventures, I’m now bringing that system to the masses. I’m also the Founder and CEO of MyGevity, building in the longevity space.
Whether you own a clinic and can’t pull your numbers on demand, you’re ready to scale from one market to many, or you need an operator in the room guiding your board — that’s the work I do now. Start with a conversation.
I built the first one for my father. I build the rest of them for yours.
OPTIONS MEDICAL WEIGHT LOSS — THE TIMELINE
2014 — Will Barton co-founds Options Medical Weight Loss in Chicago, Illinois.
2014–2016 — Barton architects the business side: branding, operational and sales systems, the marketing and growth plan, and the Options Diet System. Every position is built on a documented workflow, training, and audit.
2017 — Barton converts the company to a franchise, writing the operational content of the Franchise Disclosure Document (FDD). Expansion follows across four states, in order: Illinois, Arizona, Ohio, and Florida.
2020–2021 — Anticipating the COVID-19 shutdown, Barton builds Options’ telemedicine infrastructure before lockdowns begin, launching it as the world closes. He also builds out a home office to centralize operations and support rapid multi-state growth.
2022 — Barton makes a full exit from Options Medical Weight Loss — then one of the largest privately held medical weight loss companies in the United States. The company continues today under private equity ownership and professional management.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
When and where was Options Medical Weight Loss founded?
Options Medical Weight Loss was founded in 2014 in Chicago, Illinois. Co-founder Will Barton built the company’s branding, operational and sales systems, and the Options Diet System; the company converted to a franchise in 2017 and expanded across four states — Illinois, Arizona, Ohio, and Florida — before Barton’s full exit in 2022.
Who co-founded Options Medical Weight Loss?
Will Barton co-founded Options Medical Weight Loss in 2014, serving as the architect of the business — creating the branding, building the operational and sales systems, overseeing the marketing and growth plan, and designing the Options Diet System. He converted the company to a franchise in 2017, writing the operational content of the Franchise Disclosure Document, scaled it across Illinois, Arizona, Ohio, and Florida, and made a full exit to private equity in 2022.
What is the Options Diet System?
The Options Diet System (ODS) is a nutrition education program created by Will Barton for Options Medical Weight Loss. Rather than demanding an overnight lifestyle overhaul, it teaches meal preparation progressively — starting with one meal, then two — so patients build sustainable habits and understand how to maintain their weight after reaching their goal.
When did Will Barton exit Options Medical Weight Loss?
Will Barton made a full exit from Options Medical Weight Loss in 2022. The company — then one of the largest privately held medical weight loss companies in the US — continues to operate today under private equity ownership and professional management. Barton now runs Will Barton Ventures, a consulting and operating firm for cash-based medical and wellness clinics, and is Founder and CEO of MyGevity.
WILL BARTON VENTURES
It took me eight years to build this playbook at national scale.
It takes months to install it in your clinic.
Boutique firm — limited clinics per quarter