Register for the Private Practice Business Assessment happening on Thursday, 29 October 2026 – CLICK HERE.

In Episode 87, Gerda is asking you to stop for a minute and have an honest look at your practice.

It’s the end of September, there’s only one financial quarter left in the year, and before you know it, December will be here. Which makes now a good time to stop and ask yourself: 

How is your business actually going?

Not the “yeah, it’s fine” answer you give someone at a BBQ. The real answer.

In this episode, Gerda explores why it’s important to step back from the day-to-day and take an honest look at how your practice is really going. She explains what a proper Business Assessment can help you uncover, why it’s worth doing, the outcomes you can get from one, and how she approaches the process with practice owners.

In this episode, you will learn (among others):

• The 5 reasons why every practice owner should do a proper Business Assessment.
• The 5 outcomes you should expect from completing one.
• Recommendations for how to do a Private Practice Business Assessment.

Who this episode is for:

✔️ Business owners who are stuck in the day-to-day, constantly reacting to problems as they come up.

✔️ Practice owners who feel overwhelmed and need clarity on their next steps.

✔️ Allied health business owners who want to identify what’s working, what isn’t, and where to focus next.

Tune in for a practical conversation about why taking the time to properly assess your practice matters and how that clarity can help you make better decisions about what comes next, so you can build a practice you can’t stop smiling about 😍

The 2-Day In-Person 2026 Private Practice Business Intensive

For all the details or to get your ticket CLICK HERE.

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Here to help you build a practice you can’t stop smiling about 🙂

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• Would you like Gerda’s help in growing your practice? Step 1 is to complete this short form HERE. Gerda will personally go through your answers and will respond asap.
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• Ready to work with Gerda? Send in your details HERE and she will be in touch.

 Well hello there awesome private practice owner. My name is Gerda Muller, and you are listening to the Private Practice Success Podcast, and this is episode number 87.

I don’t know about you, but I recently caught myself thinking, “How the hell is it the end of September already?” We literally have only one more financial quarter to go. I don’t know about you, but in my head, December doesn’t really count because it is just crazy, the kids are home from school holidays, the practice is always buzzing with that end of year energy. There are all these events that you need to attend, not just in your work life but in your personal life, right? And then we close for Christmas, and it’s like, it’s only just two and a half months. December doesn’t count as a full month. 

When I have these moments it’s when I become a bit more reflective than normal because I’m very much a what’s next kind of person, um, let’s do the next thing because I’ve just ticked this previous thing off my list. But these are the moments where I go, “Okay. Well, whether you like it or not, Gerda, it is the end of September. We are about to start October, the last financial quarter of the year. How have you been going? How have you been going with the things that you said you were going to do when you kicked off this calendar year?” 

I asked myself that, but today I want to ask you that question. How are you going? How’s your business going? You know, this is a business podcast. I do hope that personally you are doing well, but I want to ask you business-wise, how’s your practice and your business really going? If the two of us were sitting and having this conversation, what would your answer be? Would it be, “Yeah, it’s going okay”? Would it be, “Yes, it’s going fine”? Would it be, “Yeah, we’re busy. Clients are coming through the doors. Yeah, the phone’s ringing. I’ve hired a clinician or two”. I hope that would not be your answer to me, because that is the answer you give an acquaintance who you’re meeting up at a barbecue over the weekend. An acquaintance with whom you just have a very superficial relationship with, and you’re just giving them this vague socially acceptable response because you can’t be negative, right? You don’t want to be known as the negative Nelly. So it’s okay, yes, things are busy, but you also don’t go into detail about it. That’s not the way that a business owner thinks about their business. Yes, that might be your socially acceptable response to a superficial acquaintance, but hopefully by now we are in episode 87, so I’m hoping that I’m more than that to you. 

I want to remind you of the importance of being honest with yourself as to how your business is going, and not just going, “Yeah, it’s okay. Yeah, it’s good enough. Yes, I’m doing the best that I can with the current freaking environment we’re finding ourselves in. Yes, you know, I’m rolling with the punches, and I’m going to push through, and I’m not going to give up.” Those are great, but they’re very general responses. The thing is, in order for you to achieve the vision that you have for your business, in order for you to achieve the goals that you’ve probably set for your business, you’re going to have to dig a bit deeper. Because we can’t fix things when we aren’t clear as to what the issues are. 

If you would let me, I want to help you with this. This is a very important part of working on your business. I think, you know, this practice owner problem is as old as I don’t know what, I don’t know what’s the appropriate saying in English, but it’s, like, very old, that we struggle to find sufficient time to work on our business. We just keep working in it, doing clinical work, maybe in it for you right now is just on the operational hamster wheel, like, I just need to fight fires, fix all these things, but because I’m just in this mindset and in this space, the business isn’t growing. Our little boat is just going from side to side, maybe two steps forward, but always again two steps backward, and that is an incredibly frustrating place to be in. 

I want to highlight to you today the importance of doing a proper Business Assessment for your private practice. I’m going to be really practical here, and I’m going to share with you five reasons why I’m going to encourage you today to prioritise doing a proper Business Assessment. And to do it not eventually, not when things calm down, not when I’ve reduced my clinical client load, but now 

Reason 1: You cannot fix what you cannot see 

Now, I know this sounds really simple, it might sound really obvious, but I find that almost nobody actually operates based on this principle. Most practice owners that I talk to, I find, and they tell me this, they are just reacting. It’s like they are in reactive mode the whole time, and reflect for yourself whether this is true for you. When we are in that reactive mode the whole time, what we are in essence doing is just reacting to symptoms, and I’m going to use the word symptoms because I’m speaking to health professionals here, so I’m hoping this analogy will help. So you’re just reacting to a symptom. 

Now, in your business, from a business perspective, this symptom could be a clinician who resigned, and now you need to do all the things you need to do when a clinician resigns. Maybe the phones are just quiet all of a sudden, and that diary is looking so freaking empty. Maybe it’s an unexpected cash flow scare where you thought you had money in the bank and then come payday and your bills are due and there’s just no money, the money’s gone Those are all symptoms, and when you keep on just dealing with symptoms without ever identifying the underlying cause, what do you think is going to keep on happening? You’re just going to have more symptoms and more symptoms. 

So when you do a business assessment, a proper business assessment, and you’re looking at the right things in the right way, that actually forces you to investigate and then discover the underlying cause of those symptoms. The great thing is that once you can see it, guess what? You can now act on it. But until you’ve done that, you’re just treating the symptoms over and over and over, and it’s why you stay on the hamster wheel, it’s why you stay feeling overwhelmed, and you might be really good at treating the symptoms. You might be somebody that thinks on your feet. You’re like, you’re a hustler, right? You just get shit done, and you fix it, and you problem solve it, but that also keeps you stuck. It keeps you stuck fighting symptoms instead of fixing the cause. 

Reason 2: Growth without structure doesn’t solve problems – it magnifies it 

Growth without proper structure and foundations does not solve your problems. All it does is magnifies it. It freaking multiplies it. What does this mean? It means that if there’s a weakness in how your practice runs, whether that is in your systems, in your business model, in your team structure, in your fee schedule, AKA your pricing, and all you do is to add more clients and more clinicians on top of that weakness, what do you think is going to happen? It’s just going to get worse. It just puts more pressure through a pipe that’s already broken. 

I’ve seen practices chase growth as the solution to a problem. They think, “If I can just get more clients in, this problem will no longer be there. If I can just hire more clinicians, this problem will no longer be there.” But I can tell you, because I’ve spoken to enough practice owners, that that is not always the answer. A lot of times, that is the worst thing that you can do, especially if you’ve not looked at the structure. What do I mean with structure? Those frameworks. The frameworks, the scaffolding that supports your business. We have to fix that, and that’s, that’s not the sexy bit, right? I know. That’s the stuff that it feels like, “Do I really have to do this? This is so boring. This is taking so long. There’s not a direct line between doing this task and actually making money, because that’s my problem, cash flow particularly.” And therefore we avoid doing the boring bits. But the boring bits are so important, and if you can focus on the boring bits and fix those structural problems right now, I can tell you now, the compounding growth will blow your mind, because I see it with my clients that I do business coaching with every day. 

Reason 3: It is dangerously easy to mistake being busy with growing 

It is dangerously easy to mistake being busy for actually growing your practice. I know we are all freaking busy. I’m freaking busy. You are freaking busy. But being busy is not a business metric. It’s actually not. Busy just means that your allocated time in your life, in your world, in your diary is freaking full. That’s all it means. Whereas actually growing from a business perspective means that your business itself is getting stronger, is getting more profitable, is getting more sustainable, and is getting less dependent on you personally. 

By the way, did you notice that I did not say – is getting bigger? Because that’s another mistake people make. They equate growth to getting bigger. That’s not always the case. And when you do a business assessment, for a lot of people, it’s often the first time that they realise just how far apart them being busy, and them actually growing their practice are from one another, and you need to know this, you need to be aware of this, because otherwise nothing’s going to change.

Reason 4: Your blind spots compound over time 

So let’s imagine today, September 2026, you’ve got a small gap in your system, and that small little issue is just a minor inconvenience. But if you leave this unaddressed for next year, the year after, the year after that, and the year after that, now this gap that started as a small little minor inconvenience has become embedded within your whole business. And when something becomes embedded, take it from me, it’s much harder, much, much more expensive, and a lot more disruptive to unwind, to fix, to redo. And I know this because people often reach out to me to fix things that’s broken in their business. And the more embedded it is, doesn’t mean we can’t fix it, it’s just going to be harder. It’s going to be harder to fix, okay? So the earlier you find it, it’s going to be easier, and a hell of a lot cheaper. Cheaper in terms of the resources, that is time, money, and energy. 

This one alone is reason enough to do a business assessment, because you want to know now, you don’t want to not know, and then it just becomes bigger and bigger and bigger.

Reason 5: Clarity overcomes overwhelm 

Gaining clarity is the single bestest thing that you can give yourself in order to change your overwhelm into a clear plan. Because overwhelm, more often than not, is very often because you’ve got all this shit that you need to do, and it’s about not knowing what matters most, where do I start, because everything just feels important. But the moment you allow yourself to just stop, to pull up the handbrake, as I like to say, and just get clarity on where your practice genuinely stands today, this week, this month, that is when it stops being this endless, shapeless, ever-growing pile of stuff that you need to do, and I want that for you because overwhelm is not a pleasant emotion. It is a very debilitating emotion to have. I know. I’ve had it a lot. I still have it from time to time, and when it shows up, I know that I need to stop, pull up the handbrake, as I said, and get clarity on what actually matters. What are the priorities, what’s going to move the needle, and that is what I want for you.

Alright, so let’s say that I have convinced you, that you’ve listened to these five reasons to do a proper Business Assessment of your practice, and you’ve gone, “Okay, Gerda, I think this makes sense, but tell me more. If I do this and I make the time and I do a Business Assessment,” and by the way, I will still get to the how of this, ” what’s in it for me? Okay, yes, I’m going to feel less overwhelmed, but really make it worth my while.” Alright, here goes. So I’m going to now share with you five outcomes that I would expect you to get if you do this right. 

Outcome 1: Real clarity 

We’ve already alluded to this, but that is real clarity. So I do not want you to run your business based on your gut feeling. I will say I’m very much a believer in instinct and in gut, but what I also know is that the best decisions I’ve made in my life have been the decisions where I’ve listened to both my head, my heart, and my gut. But I always lead with the head. What do the numbers say? What does the data say? And of course, I’m talking about business here, right? So you don’t want to just go on that gut feeling like, “Oh, something feels off.” You want to go, “Alright, something feels off, but let’s get the specifics around it. Let’s look at the data. Which parts of the practice are actually genuinely doing well, so we’re strong in this area? But which parts are dragging us down, keeping us stuck?” This is the foundations that everything else is built upon. You need that clarity, and you will get that if you do this right. 

Outcome 2: A benchmark you can measure against 

A great Business Assessment gives you a benchmark. A benchmark that you can actually measure progress against, right? This generally looks like a number, a score, or a rating. So when I run my Private Practice Business Assessment, I specifically help practice owners to score their business against the 10 growth accelerators that I know you need in order to have a successful private practice. And what we do is we go through this process, and then you get a score out of 100, which means you get a score for each individual Growth Accelerator, and you have a total score. Which means that now when you redo this in six or 12 months’ time, you can see your freaking progress, and you can see where you’ve gone backwards as well if you’ve not done what you needed to do. There’s a lot of accountability here because there’s numbers, and the numbers don’t lie. 

Having a quantitative benchmark like this turns, “I think we are doing okay,” into, “Here’s exactly where we stand, and here’s what we need to do to change that number,” ideally to improve that number. And you can’t track progress against a feeling. We are all humans. Our feelings go up and down, right? So you can’t track business progress based on that. You have to track it based on a number, and a business assessment allows you to do that. 

Outcome 3: A prioritised plan 

It allows you to have a clear, we’ve already touched on clarity a lot of times, but I’m going to say it again, a clear but very importantly, prioritised plan of what to actually focus on next. We’ve spoken about overwhelm, and knowing what to focus on next helps to break through the overwhelm. So this one is really, really important, because clarity on its own is good, but having clarity without knowing what comes next, i.e. what direction am I going into? What is that next step that I need to take? That can also be anxiety-provoking, that can also be overwhelming, because now I need to make another decision, So it’s important to know what is that right next step, and a good business assessment will help you with that. And I want to be clear here, it’s not about walking away with another 50 item to-do list. It’s about what is the right next thing for my individual private practice. 

Outcome 4: Better and faster decision-making 

If you do this well, what’s going to happen is you’re going to be able to make better and faster decisions. Because once you know where you’re not doing well, decisions get easier. Like, should you hire right now, or should you first fix your team retention problem? Probably the latter. Should you invest in marketing, or should you fix the referral pathway that’s already leaking clients? Probably the latter. A good Business Assessment doesn’t just answer questions for today, its job is to give you a map, a framework, so you can keep using this every time you need to make a new decision. 

Outcome 5: Relief 

This one is a one-word outcome, and it is relief, absolute relief. I think relief is actually underrated. And I don’t know, maybe it’s not relief, maybe it’s confidence, but to me it’s been relief. I’m going to go with relief. That is that I think, and I know, that there’s genuine relief in knowing, instead of wondering what’s happening to your business, and of course, what you need to do next. So even if you do a Business Assessment and you go, “This is not looking good. I did not realise how bad it was.” At least now you know. Because not knowing, I personally think it’s worse. I don’t like to put my head in the sand. It’s like, I want to know what’s happening, right? It’s like, I want to know exactly what’s happening. Maybe it’s my control freakish nature, but to me, knowing is a lot of relief. I find comfort in knowing what’s coming because now I can deal with it. 

And the thing is, you can’t change something if you don’t know what’s happening. You can’t prepare for it if you don’t know what’s coming. But when you do, the relief is immense, and business and running your practice is already so freaking stressful, so stop adding more stress to it. I know you might be listening to it and going, “Sorry, Gerda, but I’m more of a head-in-the-sand kinda person.” I get it. You know, putting your head in the sand serves a really protective purpose. Its job is to protect you, because you might not feel ready to make the decisions that you need to do, to put in place and take the actions that you need to do. But that can only serve that purpose for so long until it no longer serves you.  So if you were listening and you’re going, “I’m a head-in-the-sand kinda person,” I want to encourage you to just peek out from underneath it, because I can tell you the relief of knowing what’s happening, and a lot of times it’s not as bad as you think, it’s really helpful. It’s much more pleasant than the darkness that you are faced with your head in the sand. 

Alrighty, so I’ve now shared with you five reasons to do a proper Business Assessment, as well as five outcomes that you should expect when you’ve done it. So the only question that remains is how, Gerda? How do I do this?  Well, I’m going to make this so freaking easy for you. I’m going to make this paint-by-numbers easy for you, and all you need to do is that you need to show up live on Zoom with me personally on Thursday the 29th of October at 12:00 PM Australian Eastern Standard Time, which of course is 1:00 PM if you’ve got daylight savings. 

I’m going to spend 90 minutes with you and take you through this process. I call this my Private Practice Business Assessment. It does exactly what it says on the tin, and I’m going to take you through the 10 Growth Accelerators. I’m going to walk you through it, what it is, what it involves. I’m going to help you score it, and you’re going to get to the end of this process having a score for each of the Growth Accelerators, as well as an overall total score to see where you sit, and I’m going to provide you with ranges in terms of how to interpret it and what it means. I’m doing it in this way so that if you’ve attended one of these Private Practice Business Assessments with me, you will be able to do this with yourself and for yourself in 6, 12, 18 months’ time, so that you can benchmark where you are at right now, and you can then monitor that progress over time. So that is all you need to do. You need to prioritise this time to work on your business and to get these outcomes from spending this time with me, and probably a bunch of other amazing practice owners that’s also going to be there. 

So as I said, this is happening on the 29th of October. Check the show notes for the link to register. There is a fee attached to this one, but it is a mere $47 plus GST, so it is ridiculously cheap. But you know what? I’ve attached an amount to it, because I want you to freaking show up. I want you to prioritise getting this done, because I know what happens when you do this. I know, and I’ve experienced the outcome of doing this, and I see the outcomes for my business consulting clients every day.  

So this is your invitation. Now is the time. Whether you’ve been in group private practice ownership for six months, six years, or even 16 years, you will benefit from this process. And if you’ve been telling yourself, “You know what, self? I really need to spend more time working on my practice,” well, this is your opportunity, and we get to do this together. 

Thank you so very much for tuning in this week, and as always, remember that I am here to help you build a practice you can’t stop smiling about 😊