The last time I wrote an article like this was about 2 years ago, and my Ultimate Physio business coaching journey was in it’s infancy.
I had some ideas about who I was and what I had to offer physio clinic owners but I didn’t have the clarity I now have. So read on.
There are some really good quality physio business coaches in Australia. Some of them have coached me. For the purposed of this article I will break allied health business coaches into 2 types.
- The traditional business coach (focus on marketing and systems)
- The new age business coach (focus on helping all Allied Health professions with an emphasis on social media and multi speaker events)
I am alluding to the fact that I don’t fit into either of these categories and this is why I’m perfectly geared to work with physio clinic owners ONLY.
So let’s go.
Firstly I’d like to talk about Type 1 – the traditional business coach.
The traditional coach started out owning their own clinic. They had some great business skills and generally were always more of a business owner than a clinician.
Generally this profile of coach had great success growing and scaling one clinic, and did this multiple times.
With all respect they generally did this process in either the 1990s or early 2000s – when competition in the physio industry wasn’t nearly as fierce as it was today. It was the era of plentiful staff, 15 minute consults, bugger all health professions competing, and plenty of blue ocean in business. Put up a good yellow pages ad and your marketing is set for the year.
I had learned heaps from this style of coach years ago. They gave me excellent grounding in the concepts of marketing and systems. And they are still highly relevant today – often especially early in a physio clinic owner’s journey.
Now for their weakness.
When a clinic owner does some hardcore learning and implementation in the areas of marketing and system, they often create a rod for their own back. Inspired by all of this new info the clinic owner proudly returns to their clinic, begins taking action – and finds they are the only one doing the marketing and systems!
This makes patients wants to see them even more, and often leads to a clinic owner completing treatment plans, block bookings, and creating loads of checklists, how to videos etc – all for their teams to sit idly by and ignore the owner’s great work – or worse still – question the owner’s motives, get defensive about not wanting to do treatment plans or recalls, and worst still leave their job for an easier one.
This can be quite deflating for an owner.
I know this because it happened to me.
This got me thinking more about how to solve the problem.
More about this later.
So let’s now talk more about the New Age Business Coach.
These guys are generally interesting (and yes, 99% of them are guys).
I remember the first time I attended a multi speaker event.
You rock up, find your seat. If you are seated next to a seminar junkie you will get their life story.
Music blaring, the New Age Business Coach, miced up, runs through the crowd up to the stage and instantly commands your attention. With intro lines that make the audience respond like “yes or yes” and “does that make sense?” they are showing the crowd that they are interactive!
And yes, there is a crowd. As many people as can fit into the room.
And people of all types. Physio clinic owners, chiros, osteos, myopractors, podiatrists, psychologists, dentists, even the odd doctor (good luck getting too many of these to an event not sponsored by a drug company).
The New Age Business Coach has generally one of two modus operandi: the first being the heavy use of “case studies” (read testimonials) to share how successful their existing clients are, with the purpose of attracting more of the same clients.
What you may or may not see that of the 100 or so people in the room, the “case studies” tend to be the same 4-5 people. And don’t get me wrong, these allied health clinic owners have done really well – but if you are anything like me having attended these events – I often wonder about the other 95% of people.
And the other thing I often wonder is if the time spent spruiking the obvious success of these “case studies” could be better spent teaching and implementing valuable content.
The second modus operandi of the New Age Business Coach is the use of leverage through multiple speakers.
I have been part of business organisations in the past, that (to be blunt) “run out of original material”. The most foolproof way to avoid this issue is to call in subject matter experts – experts who generally live in the city the event is held to present on their level of expertise.
This method is fine – it offers value on lots of different areas – but my opinion on this is that when a coach’s programme or curriculum is partially driven by the availability of subject matter experts specific to the location of the presentation I feel like I hope I came to the event where I got the good guest speakers – and not just the reps from the organisation who sponsors the speakers or whom they have a cross referral relationship with.
Attend enough of these events and you will see the same old people rolled out – generally they are developers of novel software offerings that help to make our lives easier as clinic owners.
My final point on the New Aged Business Coaches is this.
They are for anyone and everyone. They don’t discriminate. Whatever your allied health profession, the size of your business, your philosophy, and where you are at in your journey, they will work with you. They have the cookie cutter approach and you are always the right fit.
And therein lies the problem.
The traditional business coach can help you greatly with marketing and systems. But what about when you implement them in your clinic and they don’t work?
The New Age Business Coach can help anyone and everyone. But what about who you are, the stage your clinic is at, and what you want in the future doesn’t fit their cookie cutter approach? And what about if you want something more personalised where you don’t want to be one of the 95% of clinic owners in the room where you aren’t a case study.
This is not a sales pitch for me. I won’t state anything in this post about how I coach – but what I will say is I am
Not a traditional business coach
Not a New Aged Business Coach
If you want to find out more, get in touch.
I only work with physio clinic owners, and I tend to work best with clinic owners with a bit of grey hair (like me) who have owned their clinics for a while, have a team, but have built a business that relies too much on them and want a more personalised coaching experience, especially if you have worked with either the traditional or the New Age business coaches.
