If you’re tired of being the answer to every question, the solution to every problem, and the reason your practice can’t grow beyond your personal capacity, this episode provides the roadmap you’ve been searching for.

In this raw and honest episode, Gerda pulls back the curtain on her journey from overwhelmed practice owner to confident business leader. She shares how she transformed her practice from demanding every minute of her time to requiring just 45 minutes of oversight a week.

If you’ve ever thought “I can’t possibly step away – everything will fall apart,” this episode is your wake-up call.

Take this opportunity to learn why most practice owners stay trapped in the day-to-day operations far longer than necessary, and how to break free from the endless cycle of putting out fires.

In this episode, you’ll learn (amongst others):

• What a Self-Running Practice truly entails.
• The impact of your personal constraints.
• Why working harder isn’t the answer and what actually works.
• The impact of short, medium and longterm expectations.
• How to achieve sustainable success.

Special Bonus: Ready to stop being a prisoner to your practice? Learn more about Gerda’s proven frameworks and systems through her Private Practice Success programs at [website].

This Episode Is For Group Practice Owners who:

• Want to transform their practice into a sellable asset.
• Haven’t had a real vacation in years.
• Feel chained to their business.
• Want to stop being the bottle neck within their business.
• Are ready to build something bigger than themselves.

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.comPrivate Practice Success Facebook Page

 Do you prefer Reading to Listening? Find the full transcript of Episode 3 below.

 

Episode 3: How long does it take to build a Self-Running Practice?

Well hello there brilliant private practice owner. My name is Gerda Muller and you are listening to episode number three of the Private Practice Success Podcast. And today I want to answer a question that I have been asked like a million times, and that is, Gerda, how long does it take to build a self-running practice.

Defining a Self-Running Practice?

Now, before I answer that question, which I most certainly will. I think it’s important to just spend a couple of seconds defining what is a self-running practice. The short answer is this, a self-running practice is a practice that can run in your absence, and therefore it’s a business that runs in your absence.

In other words, it’s a practice that doesn’t need you as the owner and founder in order to operate, to make money, or to fulfill its vision.

Now more broadly, it’s a practice that therefore has been structured, and equipped with the necessary systems and processes to sustain all the workflows, deliver the services, manage the operational tasks, and maintain those high standards of performance that you’ve set as the owner, but without you. And when I say this, a lot of people I know are secretly thinking, Gerda, but that’s not possible.

Well, it is, you know, for a long time in my business, I thought that the one person that I couldn’t possibly replace is myself, right? Because I am the business owner? And I thought that until the day that I actually did replace myself. So currently I live seven hours away from my business. So if I had to hop in the car and drive from where I live to my practice location., it will take me seven hours. And I do not run this business even remotely via zoom or online. I literally spend 45 minutes a week providing mentoring and coaching and consulting to the Practice Principal that runs my practice. That is the extent of my involvement into my practice.

Now, obviously I have trained my Practice Principle into how to implement, run, understand and embrace my Private Practice Success Model. So she follows all my processes and systems. But we know that even though you might have a really robust operating model, things still happen. And that is why I offer that 45 minutes a week to Chelsea, who runs my practice, to provide her with consulting and coaching and mentoring. Like those are three different things, and I provide whatever it is that she might need during that week.

And it’s why I still believe in ongoing mentoring and coaching, right? It doesn’t matter how big your business is, but that’s a topic for another day. So I hope that I’ve clearly defined to you what a self-running practice is. In short again, it’s a practice that can run in your absence. So coming back to the question at hand then, how long does it take to get to a place where you can have your own self running practice?

Navigating your Unique Constraints

Now the annoying answer is, it depends, right? Because how long is a piece of string? But that is the right answer, and that is the honest answer, because each of our circumstances are different. And each of us is running our business, which is our private practice, with our own individual constraints. 

Now that could be financial constraints. It could be time constraints. It could be energy constraints. And if you want to compare your situation with somebody else and how long they took to get to their self-running practice, it’s not going to be a helpful exercise, because you won’t be comparing apples with apples. So it’s really important first off, for you to acknowledge the individual constraints that you have in your world right now.

So if you are, for example, a single parent. You’re not going to have the time available to you that somebody that has a dual parent family has, or somebody that doesn’t have kids as yet, would have. So it’s really about also looking at the growth of your business and the speed at which your business grows, by going right now I’m in the season of life where maybe my kids are smaller, so growth might take a little bit longer. 

However, if we then bring in money constraints or financial constraints and therefore also financial resources, you might have big time constraints, but maybe you’ve got significant financial resources that then makes up for the time constraints that you might have. Or maybe you’re in a situation where you don’t have those financial resources. 

So what I’m saying is that you really do not want to compare your business growth to the business growth of others. I’m not saying don’t use other people’s growth as inspiration and motivation, because that’s helpful. And that’s a resourceful way of looking at what other people are doing.

But we know ourselves, we don’t do that, right? Instead, what do we do? What is our default mode? We go, I’m not good enough. I’m not working hard enough. I’m not spending enough time working on my business. So I’m not a good business owner and I’m really bad at it. And then we go into this downward spiral of self-judgment because we’re not there yet. Wherever there is, and there is normally when we compare ourselves to others.

So today I want you to really just go, you know what I need to acknowledge my very own constraints. And it just is what it is. And you also need to remind yourself that when you start and build a business, surely you’re in this for the long-term, right? I, I don’t think, I ever would have started a business if the plan was to only be in it for 12 months or 24 months or three years. I’ve always played the long game, which meant that when my kids were little, I could go, you know what, this is maybe a period in my life where, yes, I’m still going to work really hard and I want growth, but I’m not going to give myself a hard time when my business isn’t growing as fast as other people’s businesses out there. And that is okay, because the time will come when I will have more time or I will have more money that I can reinvest back into the business. And at the end of the day, what is important is for my individual business to keep growing.

It is about having momentum. Whether that momentum is one step at a time or 20, 30 steps at a time, that is what’s important, forward movement. And that is really important. If you can embrace that type of thinking, you will just be happier in general. Not just in terms of your business, but you’ll be happier at home and your family life and your personal life.

So that is the first thing that I wanted to remind you of today. Be aware that we all have our own unique individual constraints. You don’t always see other people’s constraints and they also won’t see yours. So you need to run your own race. 

My 4-Year Journey to a Self-Running Practice

Now, if I look at my own personal journey, how long did it take me to get to what I define as a self-learning practice? Now, I started my practice in 2007 and it grew incredibly fast. I started it in February 2007, and by the end of that year  I was fully booked and I was in the market to hire.  And I hired my very first two employees both at the same time. I hired a five day a week child and adolescent psychologist as an employee, and I hired a two day a week adult psychologist, two days a week because I still saw adults. I’m not a child adolescent psychologist, and I had so many child adolescent referrals coming to me. So I went okay, I’m going to hire a child psych for five days because that’s a lot of work that I have for them, and I  was very confident that I could fill them up. But because I was still doing adult work. I only took on the adult psych like two days a week and, from there things just continued to grow and grow and grow, which was awesome.

So that was the end of 2007, start of 2008. And of course, you know, what happened then… global financial crisis hit. But the interesting fact was that on the ground, The consequences of the GFC only really started to have an impact on business in 2009, 2010. So it really took a bit of time for it to trickle down to impacting small business.

That being said, my business still continued to grow. Yes, I had more people asking for reduced fees, more people asking to be bulk billed, but the demand was still there, and we continue to grow really significantly to 2012. By 2012 I had two locations and each location had four rooms and each room had two shifts happening in it. So I did a two shift model. Back then already we were booking 12 clients a day per room across the four rooms within each of the two practices. 

So I had created two seven figure practices. But you know what? I still had issues. So if you had to look at my practice from the outside, you would think that I was highly successful and you would look at it and go, wow, that is so inspirational Gerda, that’s so amazing. How did you do it? 

Behind the scenes, it was a very demanding business. I was working so many hours a day. I would not get to bed before midnight, because yes I would still be a mom to three young kids. And you know, I love my children, my family, and I would do all the home stuff, and by the time everybody was in bed, I would literally sit up and work and work and work so hard. But I loved it. I loved every minute of it, but it was freaking exhausting.  

When I say I loved it, it’s not that I loved the hustle, but I was so driven with the vision and my mission, my purpose in my private practice has always been. And it’s this question that I kept asking myself, how can I help more people in better and more effective ways?  Everything was about that. That’s what sparked the two shift model. So instead of only being able to book six clients a day, with normally five showing up after cancellations, reschedules, no shows, that type of stuff.

How could I help more people in better, more effective ways? And that was the two shift model, right? Which meant that we doubled our capacity whilst keeping our operating expenses very low still because there was no additional rent. I’m happy to do another podcast on the two-shift model at some point. But that’s the thing that always drove me that allowed me to sit up until midnight, because I knew this is my purpose. I want to help more people. As a psychologist, I can only see so many clients a day. And then when I have a team member, okay, now we’ve doubled that. And how do we double that again? How do we double that again? But at the end of the day, I want to help people with mental health issues.  And that is what drove the passion, but it was still tiring.

It was exhausting, and when you grow fast, it’s really hard for the systems and the frameworks to keep up with it, okay. Because if you can imagine growth, every time there’s significant growth, you really need to look at all your systems and processes. And the thing I learned about that was also that when I’m now writing a system, I’m not writing it for the business I have today. I’m writing it for the business I’m going to have in six months time, because I know growth is going to happen. And I don’t want to have to look at this again in six months’ time. But back then I didn’t do that stuff, I was just going, yes, more people coming through the door,  let’s get more team, because that was the vision, and I was living my purpose.

And then I just realized that all this running around, being on the hamster wheel, fighting fires. It was because there were things that I didn’t know I needed to do and I wasn’t doing, okay.  So in 2012, I was introduced for the very first time to proper business coaching and mentoring. And that’s a story in itself, how that started, but long story short, January, 2012, I signed up for my very first, business coaching and mentoring.

And it took me four years to get to my very own self running practice. So the first year of business coaching was really undoing a lot of the stuff that I thought I had put in place. And I thought it was pretty amazing, but actually it wasn’t done properly. Okay, because the thing is you don’t know what you don’t know until you know what you don’t know.

So a lot of change management had to occur and change management is one hell of a process, especially when you’ve got a team of psychologists. You know, I can say this because I’m a psychologist myself. We don’t like change. We are in the business of helping other people change. Don’t come to me and tell me I need to change, right? I would have changed by now if I knew I had to change.  So change management had to happen, which is a daunting process, but we got through that. 

The second year was really much better because now we could build on the change that occurred. So that’s when the momentum started to kick in slowly, but surely.

The third year is when things really started to come together. And that’s when I had compounding growth, that’s where I could really have that hindsight, you know, that 20/20 vision of going,  I can now connect the dots from the change management to what happened 12 months after that, to what is happening right now.

And then the fourth year was what I refer to as my safety blanket year. It’s where I went, okay, surely it can’t be this good. Something is going to go wrong. Things are going to start crashing down any minute now, any minute, it’s going to crash down because it can’t be this good. But it was. And it stayed that way.

It doesn’t mean unexpected things don’t happen. Please, I want to be really clear with that. It doesn’t mean unexpected things don’t happen. But you know what the difference is? It’s when you have the same crisis popping up time after time after time, that’s when you know you’re not doing things right.

But if you have a different crisis happening, a different fire, that is just business. You will never have a business that is free of crises. If you’ve got that type of business, then you’re probably not growing. Okay. That’s just how it is. Because when we grow, when we step out of our comfort zone, when we do something new, there’s going to be challenges. That’s business and we need to embrace that. That’s part of playing the game That’s part of what keeps you motivated to get up and to go and solve this issue. 

And that is what business then became like. Because I actually took the time to do year one, two, and three. So It really took me three years, maximum four years to get to a place where I had a practice that could run in my absence, where I now spend only 45 minutes a week offering my principal psychologist with the coaching, mentoring, consulting, whatever it is she needs on that day, to ensure that things continue to run smoothly and help her problem solve any new challenges that might have arisen.

So that was my personal journey, and it was my journey getting into business coaching and mentoring after having already established two, four room locations that were doing really, really well. 

Why Sustainable Success Takes Time

When I look at the practice owners that I’ve worked with over the last 10 years of having Private Practice Success Australia. What I find is the clients I have that have the best long term sustainable results of people that have worked with me for three years. Okay, that’s the average, you know, some people come into my world, they might stay for six months, 12 months, some people stay much longer, but on average, people that have worked with me consistently for three years get the best results.

You know why? And you might think, geez, three years, that’s a long time. I’m not saying they don’t get results in the first four weeks, right? Again, it depends on constraints. It depends on a lot of stuff. It depends on the starting blocks. Where are they starting from? What is that benchmark that they are starting from?

And I work with people in a vast continuum of places of growth from solo practitioner going, Gerda, I want to start building my practice, my group practice tomorrow, to people that have in excess of 40 people already on the team going, I want to build a self-running practice. I have this amazing business. It’s large. It’s revenue. It’s great. It’s even profitable, but it’s reliant on me, how do I change that? And everybody in between. 

And when I look at all of them, the people with the best long-term results work with me for three years. You know why that is so? Because there’s actually research out there that says that people overestimate what they can achieve in one year.

So people often set these lofty goals for themselves personally, as well as in business of what they want to do in 12 months. And guess what? They don’t get there. And you know what happens then? They get discouraged. And they give up. And they judge themselves as a failure, that I couldn’t do it. Or they might blame their mentor, their coach, or whomever in their life to say, it’s that person’s fault. They were meant to help me get there. And then they give up. 

That’s the biggest mistake you can make, giving up at the 12 month mark. Because research also says that we underestimate what we can achieve in three years. Because the hard work needs to happen in the first 12 months. That is when we have to undo a lot of unhelpful behaviours and changing behaviours and habits are freaking hard. You might change it for four to six weeks and then you fall off the wagon, you go back to bad behaviours and you need to start again and again, and sometimes you need to learn new skills and new mindset and implement new systems. 

The first 12 months are freaking hard and it’s not a judgment if you stop off the 12 months. I know it is hard. I had moments of wanting to stop after 12 months of going, this is so hard. I should be there by now. And then I realised, Ah, that’s a should statement, Gerda. And lucky for me, I am a psychologist, so I can call myself out on the unhelpful thinking styles that I engage in, and should statements be so prevalent in my own thinking, and it always has been. But I can now more easily catch control and correct myself. When I start thinking in that manner. 

Final Thoughts

So my encouragement to you today is to recognize that the first 12 months with any change is hard. And I also find that when I work with practice owners, I, I don’t know why this is so, it must be my marketing message that I put out there, but I am a bit of a problem solver.

I think that I am the business coach and mentor in our allied health industry, where people come to when they’re struggling, when they are stuck, when it feels like they’ve reached that ceiling in their business and they’ve tried everything and they can’t break through it. And I’m a bit of a problem solver in our industry. And that’s what I do really well. I can look at a business and go, oh, I can see those are the gaps. This is what is keeping you stuck. Okay, let’s change that. 

But that also means that a lot of time where people work with me, there’s a lot of change that needs to happen, and that takes time. And there’s a lot of risks that come with change as well, especially if it’s change that has to do with your team. I’m sharing all of this with you because I really want you to have realistic expectations around the growth within your business and the ease and the speed at which you can reach the goals that you set for yourself.

Business is a long-term game. You most certainly can build that self-running practice. I want that for each and every one of you. It is the best gift that I have been able to give myself and give my family, but it did not happen overnight, and it did not come easily. When I started working with my business coach back in 2012, I was committed, fully and 100%.

I must say it was easier to do that back then, because there weren’t, you know, hundreds of other people offering the same service. It’s like, I found Nathan and it’s like, yes, he’s it, he’s the person.  And there weren’t, like, 20 other people in my Facebook feed saying, Hey, come work with me. Hey, come work with me. Hey, come work with me. So I was very much committed to the process. And I think that really helped. I think in today’s day and age,  there’s so much more options and when there’s a lot of options, it is hard to stay committed.

So I want to encourage yourself, if you’re thinking of working with someone, to really do your due diligence and really do your homework. Because the best gift you can give yourself is to choose a mentor and a coach, and then to stay committed and to really commit to three years.

Okay, now I know for some people that might not be possible again due to constraints, but that is what worked for me. Now that being said, if you can only commit to six months, that’s better than doing nothing, alright. If you can only commit to four weeks, that’s better than doing nothing. And you really need to do something in order to change stuff. Again, for me as a psychologist, I know it’s hard to change. But nothing changes if nothing changes. 

So how long does it take to build a self-running practice? It depends. And it depends on you and it’s up to you to make that decision. But I will be very realistic when I say that if you want that in 12 months, it’s probably not going to happen.

If you want that in two years, it might not happen. Again, depending on where your business was at when you came in, as a general rule, it will probably take three years and that’s the honest answer. But you know what? Three years pass in a freaking instance. In an instance. And the best gift you can give yourself, your team, your clients and your family, is to start that journey because the self-running practice is a practice that you can actually sell one day and you will actually get good money for it.

Anybody can try and sell their private practice, but if you really want to get a return on the time, money and energy investment that you have put into it, you need to be able to show that it is a self-running practice because that is where the commercial goodwill sits. A practice that can run in your absence that doesn’t need you, that is a sellable asset and you can get that. 

Alrighty, so we’re going to leave it at that for today. Thank you so much for tuning in. And as always remember that I’m here to help you build a practice you can’t stop smiling about, and that my friends is a practice that can run in your absence 🙂