Welcome to the inaugural episode of the Private Practice Success Podcast!

Join award-winning practice owner and business mentor Gerda Muller as she unveils the essential secrets to building a thriving allied health practice – insights gained from 17+ years of building multiple 7-figure practices in Australia.

In this foundational episode, Gerda shares what university never taught us about running a successful private practice. Through her own journey of blood, sweat, and tears, she distills the crucial elements into seven game-changing secrets:

Secret #1: Ditch the 911 Marketing
Discover why panic-driven marketing is sabotaging your practice’s growth. Learn how to replace reactive, emergency marketing with planned, structured, and consistent strategies that deliver reliable results. Understand why today’s marketing efforts may take three months to bear fruit and how to maintain momentum even when fully booked.

Secret #2: Love Your Practice Angels
Master the art of cultivating and maintaining relationships with your most loyal referrers. Learn why you only need five ‘Practice Angels’ per full-time clinician and how to protect these vital relationships from competition. Understand the critical link between consistent marketing and strong referral networks.

Secret #3: Hire Your ACE Team
Build a team that drives your practice’s vision forward. Understand the equal importance of clinical and administrative staff, avoid costly hiring mistakes, and create a culture that attracts and retains top talent. Learn Gerda’s practical ‘bus analogy’ for ensuring team alignment and cultural fit.

Secret #4: Know Your Numbers
Prevent the common fate of brilliant clinicians going broke by mastering essential financial metrics. Learn which numbers really matter, how to set appropriate KPIs, and manage cash flow effectively – all while maintaining focus on clinical excellence.

Secret #5: Embrace the Profitable Private Practice Mindset
Transform your relationship with money and profit in healthcare. Understand why it’s not just okay but necessary to be profitable, and learn the five pillars of the profitable private practice mindset. Bridge the gap between helping others and running a sustainable business.

Secret #6: Dynamic Diary Management
Master your practice’s engine room – the appointment diary. Learn the difference between static and dynamic management, create robust booking guidelines, and balance the needs of clients, clinicians, and the business. Develop effective policies for cancellations and reschedules.

Secret #7: Add the WOW Factor
Stand out in a crowded marketplace by creating genuine differentiation. Move beyond common claims about relationship building and discover how to create memorable client journeys that truly set your practice apart.

Who This Episode Is For:
• Solo practitioners building strong foundations
• Group practice owners scaling their business
• Allied health professionals planning their first practice
• Established owners optimizing operations
• Clinical team leaders seeking business understanding

Special Bonus:
Download the first two chapters of Gerda’s book, “The 7-Figure Practice,” FREE! Chapter 2 includes a valuable benchmarking

Connect with Private Practice Success & Gerda here:

• Follow the Private Practice Success Facebook Page
• Follow Gerda on Instagram
• Connect with Gerda on LinkedIN
• Join the Private Practice Success Facebook Group – exclusive to practice owners.
• Email Gerda @ gerdam@private-practice-success.com

  Do you prefer Reading to Listening? Find the full transcript of Episode 1 below.

Episode 1: The 7 Secrets to Private Practice Success 

Well, hello there, fabulous private practice owner.

My name is Gerda Muller, and you are listening to the Private Practice Success podcast and this is episode number one. That’s right. It is episode numero uno and I am so excited that you are getting to listen to the very first episode.

Now, today we are going to get straight into it.

I’m going to share with you my seven secrets to Private Practice Success. Now, these are seven secrets that I learned through a lot of blood, sweat and tears and not the metaphorical blood, sweat, and tears. Like the literal blood, sweat, and tears, because I can tell you that it is really, really hard learning how to run a long term, sustainable, and profitable allied health private practice when you weren’t taught how to do that at university.

We all know that we go to university and we learn a lot of things that’s going to enable us to become technically really good at being clinicians and then you get your first job as a clinician and you realise, you know nothing and then the learning starts, but it is all geared towards becoming amazing clinicians.

Then one day you have this amazing idea – or it could be a longstanding dream to start your very own private practice – and, you know, you’re good at research. You’ve got a master’s degree or postgraduate degree. You’ve gotten through university and you think, hey, I can do this. I can research how to do this. And you get started and before you know it, you’ve got a business, and then one day the pawpaw hits the fan, and you realise that there are things that you didn’t know you needed to know.

So today I’m going to take you through the seven secrets. These are seven really big and important things that I learned the hard way that I want you to avoid learning the hard way. So, let’s get stuck into it.

The first secret is to ditch what I like to refer to as the 911 marketing. So why do we do marketing in private practice? Well, you do marketing to get clients, right? Hanging up your shingle and opening up the doors might feel really amazing, but it does not guarantee clients walking through the door. Whether that is the physical door, if you have a brick-and-mortar practice, or a virtual door, if you have a telehealth practice.

If you’ve got a mobile practice, that would mean having clients for you to get in your car and drive to and do home based visits. Clients need to come from somewhere, and you, whether you like it or not, will need to do marketing in order to have this business that you have decided you want to build.

Now, a lot of people realise that, yes, that’s what I need to do and slowly but surely, they start to get a couple of clients and maybe some word of mouth or maybe, some third-party person like a GP might start referring to them.

If you are a solo practitioner, yes, that might be enough, but if you are a group practice owner, where you’ve got not one diary to fill, but 2, 3, 4, 5, even 10, 20, 30 plus diaries to fill, then you’re going to need more than 911 marketing. And unfortunately, a lot of people with even really large practices still end up doing 911 marketing.

So, what is this thing called 911 marketing you speak of Gerda? I hear you say in your head. Well, that is when you’re walking into the practice, let’s say, on a Monday, and you’re sitting down and you open up your calendar, you know, the practice diary where you’re looking at all the appointments and you start to see gaps in the diary.

Maybe this week, maybe it’s over the next two, three weeks. And you start to get this overwhelming sense of stress and anxiety and worry, and even panic because you’re thinking to yourself, oh my goodness, I need to make wages next week and I might not have enough money in the bank to cover wages, given the lack of appointments in the diary.

And then what you do, your mind goes into overdrive and it starts going, oh my goodness, I need to do marketing. What type of marketing am I going to do? Okay. Who can I call? Who can I write to? Should I ring some of those GPs that refer to us and get a quick GP meet and greet, should I send them some letters, should I send them some emails and faxes, or maybe I should quickly do some Google ads or Facebook ads.

And this, my friend, is 911 marketing. When you haven’t been doing marketing and then all of a sudden you want to do this big rush of marketing. And the problem with 911 marketing, is it doesn’t work. Because 911 marketing might get you one client right now, but what we know about marketing is that it takes time.

The marketing you do today does not lead to clients today, or possibly even next week, or even next month, okay. If you do proper marketing, The marketing required within the allied health industry, it might take up to three months for you to see a return on investment. Now, yes, there are marketing strategies or tactics, I should say rather, that you can throw a lot of money at, and it will get you clients faster. Okay. But let’s face it. A lot of practice owners don’t have a lot of money to throw towards marketing, right? And you will need to throw a lot of money towards certain tactics in order for it to lead to clients, like next week. Okay. Yes, it can happen, but it’s the exception rather than the rule and it will require a lot of money and it might not therefore be worth it.

So what you want to do is, you want to ditch the 911 marketing and you want to replace it with marketing that is actually planned, that is structured, and that you are going to be engaging in consistently. And this last word is the most important consistently, okay. Because the thing is, when you stop doing marketing, guess what’s going to happen in three months’ time.

All of a sudden there is going to be gaps in your diary. You know, people often use the words, the ebbs and flows of private practice. Well, actually there’s no such thing. There’s only the ebbs and flows in your marketing activity. Which leads to Ebbs flows in enquiries, therefore conversions, and therefore clients booked in the diary, and therefore money flowing into your business and your ability to easily make wages and pay all your bills and other operating expenses. The biggest favour you can do yourself is to do consistent marketing.

Now you might be thinking, but I don’t have a client problem Gerda. That’s okay. I’m not saying you do 10 marketing strategies. However, you need to know what is the minimal viable number of marketing strategies that you need to be engaging in on a consistent basis. So that when the time comes, for you to just push down your foot a little bit harder on the gas, right, that it’s easy. That you don’t have to wait one, two, three months, but you can then easily restart the flow of referrals into your business. And even if you think you’re never going to need any clients ever, I would encourage you to change the way you market from marketing towards branding. Okay. Because that’s going to really stand you in good stead over the long term.

But let’s leave a secret one there for now, because there’s actually a lot that goes into marketing, a lot that goes into branding. But I hope that you get the message that you want to ditch the 911 marketing, and instead engage in marketing strategies that, yes, work for our industry. And then you want to do it in a planned, structured and consistent manner.

Next we’re going to look at secret number two, and this is to love your practice angels.

Now, if you’ve been following what I do for quite some time now, you would know what a practice angel is, but maybe this is your very first time hearing that word. And I actually termed this word back in 2014 when I was speaking to my own team about the practice angles that we were creating at my own group private practice that I still own to this day.

A practice angel is your most loyal. referrers. For the majority of psychology group practice owners, and I’m talking psychology now because I am a clinical psychologist and I’ve got a psychology practice, that is general practitioners, GPs. A practice angel would be that GP that sends us all their mental health referrals.

In other words, we’ve done marketing as you need to do in secret one, and they started to refer to us. There’s quite a number of strategies that we engage in, in order to turn a new referring GP into a practice angel. Let’s say we’ve gone through that process. Loving your practice angles means that you are going to continue to build the relationship with that referring doctor.

And as a result, they keep on referring to you. So they really become the guardian angel of your private practice. And you do not need a hundred practice angels. Even for your standard medium sized private practice, if you’ve got five practice angels for every full-time equivalent clinician that you have at your practice, you’re like set.

You are like set, okay. But you need to follow the process, create those practice angels, and then you need to continue showing them the love. Because if you don’t, guess what’s going to happen next week? That new solo practitioner that moved into rooms down the road, or maybe a new group private practice that opened up just across the road, which is perfectly fine and okay, but they will be doing GP meet and greets for example, with those doctors that are referring to you. And I’m just using the GPs here as one example, right, this can apply to any type of referring, individual or organization.

And if you’ve not done the work to maintain those relationships with your referrers, they might just start referring to the other practice. Okay. So you need to have a strategy around how you, at your business, is going to continue loving your practice angels. And the great thing is there are a lot of things that you can do that can form part of that planned, structured and consistent marketing that you need to do anyway as a result of secret one.

So needless to say, secret one and secret two are very closely related and both of them are drivers that’s going to lead to clients booked into your diaries, which means that is business for your practice. It means work for your clinical team. And of course, that allows you and your clinician team to help more people in better, more effective ways so you can do the work that you’re here to do as an allied health professional. So that is secret one and two.

Now let’s have a look at secret three. Now secret three is all about hiring your ACE team.

And that is a team of amazing people that’s going to work with you to achieve the vision and the mission that you have set for your group private practice. Now when I use the word team, I refer to both the clinical team, and I know that that’s normally the team that people think of first, but I also refer to the admin team.

Both of those two teams are of equal importance. Yes, the clinicians are the one that bills, and therefore ensure that money is coming into your practice, which is essential, because as a private practice, we do not get government funding, we do not get grants, any of those things, right? Every dollar we spend, we need to earn.

So they’re the ones that are able to do the billable work. But the admin team are the ones that are there to support the clinicians, to allow them to do the billable work, but also to provide excellent customer service to your clients, which is both the clinical clients and also your business clients, i.e.: the people that are referring to you.

So, the one team is not more important than the other. They’re both of equal importance. And I can tell you now for a fact that the right team and the right team members can make or break your practice. The other thing I could tell you is that if you’re going to run and build a group private practice, you just need to accept it now, that at one point or another, you’re going to make a bad hiring decision.

But the best thing that you can do when you realise that you’ve made the wrong hiring decision is to correct it. Okay. By letting people go, it’s so important to acknowledge when that has happened and not to let ego stand in the way. Now, that being said, I would encourage you to make sure that you’ve got a really clear recruitment and onboarding process that will allow you to hire your ACE team. Right. Yes, we need to look at people and find people with great clinical skills, great administrative skills, great relationship skills, but we also need to find people that will be a great cultural fit within your business. so you really need people to come on board that is a combination of all of those things.

But more importantly, Your ACE team are team members that will be aligned and who are excited to work with you and the rest of the team towards achieving that vision that you have for your business.

And the way that I often talk about team members is if you imagine a bus stop, right… When you are waiting at the bus stop for a bus to come, they drive in, they stop and you can see the destination, you know, at the top, there’s normally an electronic screen that says, hey, you know, I used to live in the outer suburbs of Redland Bay, and I usually used to catch the bus in Springwood and it would say Brisbane city. So I knew that ah, that is the bus that is going to take me into Brisbane city when I used to go there. And, the bus therefore tells you what the destination is. So as a practice owner, you are the bus driver. And at various points, you’re stopping at various bus stops and you are letting people on your bus.

Sometimes it’s admin people, sometimes it’s clinician, but you are telling them where you are going. You’re also telling them what is the route that you’re taking in order to get there. That is your, your mission. So the destination is the vision. The route is the mission, like how we’re going to get there. And then the other people on the bus are your team members. And you want to make sure that you’ve got team members and people on the bus that you want to be on the bus with. A bus can be a pretty confined space, especially if you’re on there for a long time. So you want to make sure that you surround yourself with people with similar values, people that are still different to you, you don’t want to get bored, right? People that’s creative, people that are open to having conversations, to learning new things, that is fun. All of that stuff is so important. And those are just some of the things that you need to consider in order to be successful with secret three, which is hiring your ace team.

Then secret number four is to know your numbers.

This is where the numbers, especially also money related numbers come in. Now, I’m not sure if you’re aware, but good, even brilliant clinicians, can and will go broke as practice owners. I have had the unfortunate privilege to hear people’s stories over the last 10 years of running Private Practice Success Australia. I’ve heard stories of absolute heartache from people that are brilliant clinicians, but had to close their practice doors, because they didn’t know their numbers.

They didn’t even know what numbers to look at because the thing is, we do not go into allied health and mental health, because we like numbers. If we did, we would probably have become accountants or bookkeepers or stuff like that. I, for one, didn’t go into it because I like numbers. I went into it because I wanted to help people. But when you’re running a business, unfortunately, numbers are just an inherent part of running a business and you owe it to yourself, but very importantly your team and even more importantly your clinical clients to know your numbers, because if you don’t everybody loses because you would need to close your doors. And we don’t want that. Which means that you need to have clarity around stuff such as what are your break-events? What are the KPIs that you need to set for your team? Especially billable KPIs. It is so, so important. And I know that a lot of practice owners shy away from those. But you can have it.

And it doesn’t have to be something yucky. You can do it in a way that supports, motivates and inspires your clinical team because at the end of the day, we want to be here to help people. And we can only do that when they’re sitting in the office with you, or when they are on Zoom with you, or you are actually visiting them at home. And that’s why we became allied health professionals in the first place, to help people. That’s what our job is. So we need to have KPIs around the number of clients we want to see each week.

We really need to learn to embrace what numbers can mean within our business. A couple of other numbers that are important for you to know is, for example your average session fees. What is your monthly, operating expenses, what should your contributions to OPEX be each month. You need to be comfortable doing things such as cash flow forecasting. All of those money and number related things come into play when we are thinking about secret number four, which is to know your numbers. Now doing that becomes much easier when you know what secret number five is.

And secret number five is to embrace the profitable private practice mindset.

And that is the mindset that even though we work with people that need our help. And for me as a psychologist, that is often very vulnerable people. I have to believe that I still need to get paid for the work I do. Private practice is not public mental health. Private practice is not a not-for-profit organisation.

I said this earlier and I’m going to say it again. We do not get government funding. We do not get grants or anything like that. Every dollar we spend that we pay our amazing teamwork, that we pay our rent with and all our other operating expenses, needs to come from somewhere. And it’s really important therefore for us as helping professionals specifically to embrace the fact that you know what, just like it is okay for every other person out there to get paid for the work that they do. We should, can, and must do the same.

And when we start to deep dive into the profitable private practice mindset, there are five pillars that I like to talk to and refer to in order to really embrace it. I’m not going to go into details around those today because we’re going to be will run over time. But I want to leave you with that important knowing that it is okay to be paid for what you do and to make a profit.

Next, we’re going to look at secret number six. And this is what I refer to as dynamic diary management.

Now the diary of your private practice, whether you’re a solo or group practice owner is the engine room of your business. You need to know it inside and out. You need to know how to not only use the software that runs it for you, but how to proactively manage what is happening in there. Okay. There is a difference between having a static diary and having a dynamic diary. The diary of an allied health professional is often changing.

Why? Because people get sick and they need to reschedule appointments. Life happens and they can’t get there. So there’s constant movement in it. So you need to make sure that you’ve got policies, processes, and procedures around being able to manage the dynamic nature of your diary in a way that supports the clients, that supports the clinicians because a change in their schedule also impacts them. But that also supports the business, because also a change in the schedule impacts the business.

So when there’s a reschedule or a cancellation request, it impacts three people, the client, the clinician, and the business. And we need to be able to roll with all those changes, which means that you would need very good, robust booking guidelines for example. And policies such as cancellation policies, no show policies, pre booking policies. All of those things need to come together to support a great dynamic diary management process within your business.

And then last but not least is secret number seven. And people always look at me like, hmm, what are you talking about here, Gerda, when I talk about secret seven. And that is adding the wow factor to your private practice.

And now you might be going yourself, Gerda, I’ve got a psychology practice. How do I add a freaking wow factor to my practice? Or, I’ve got a mobile outreach practice. What can I do that’s wow? Well, there’s actually a lot that you can do. And I want to encourage you to really reflect on this one. Often, when I speak to group practice owners and I ask them, what do you think is that one thing that makes your practice stand out? That differentiates your practice from other practices. And nine out of 10 times, they tell me, we are really good at building relationships. We are really good at engaging clients. So if 9 out of 10 people tell me that, do you think that’s a differentiating factor? Do you think that’s a wow factor?

I would say no. I actually believe that if you are a allied health professional, particularly my personal field of psychology, if you’re a psychologist or mental health professional, that should be a given. It should be a given that you are great at engaging people. That you are great at building rapport and trust, that you are good at relationships. Okay. That is your job. So it’s not a differentiating factor and it’s therefore not a wow factor. So if that’s what you were thinking of when I started talking about, you know, what you’re really good at, then I want to encourage you to dig deeper. And to really ask yourself, what do we do differently at our group private practice that adds the wow factor?

When I look at the client journey, when they come into the practice from the first phone call they make or the first email enquiry they send to right after they are discharged, what are they going to be telling other people about how that process was? And if I were to ask my clients, was there a wow factor? And if so, what, what would they say?

And just imagine this, if you actually had a really great wow factor at your practice, how amazing would that be for your marketing, for your branding, for your customer service, for your client retention, for your team retention? Adding a wow factor ticks a lot of freaking boxes. So I want to encourage you again to maybe put some time aside and really reflect on what that is for your group private practice.

To recap, we had seven secrets. The first one was ditch the 911 marketing. Two were to love your practice angels. Three was to hire your ace team. Number four was to know your numbers. Five was to embrace the profitable private practice mindset. Six was to proactively implement dynamic diary management. And seven was to add a wow factor to your group private practice.

Thank you so very much for listening right to the end. I know that running a private practice is a hectic job, so as a thank you for being a listener of the very first episode of the Private Practice Success Podcast I’m going to gift you a free download of the first two chapters of my book, The 7-Figure Practice. So, feel free to download it and be sure to specially read Chapter 2, which I think you’re going to find of great interest. It is a really important benchmarking exercise that you will enjoy.

Please feel free to share this podcast with other group practice owners. It’s really important for us to share the love and to break that private practice isolation that we can feel when we are running a group private practice.

Thank you for listening, and as always remember that I am here to help you build a practice you can’t stop smiling about 🙂