Copyright 2013 Salus Wellness Limited
Many professionals starting a private practice in complementary health are inspired to do so because they want to help others and just as secondary goal they want to get money out of it. Being in the position of helping a person experiencing pain or other discomfort to feel better is a great gratification; however for the majority of us there is a financial and economical need behind the simple life mission of helping others simply because there are bills to be paid.
Some practitioners are happy to build up their business little by little, without too much planning, and doing their best while I always suggest new practitioners joining Salus Wellness to have a plan and some criteria to measure results. Business schools will teach you a number of possible planning and forecast models but some of them might be daunting for people with no experience in this field.
For this reason, over the years, we have created and developed here at Salus Wellness a very simple planning model (see picture above) that fits in a single page and allows anybody to adjust it to their own needs by changing figures to the amounts they are comfortable with. As indicated in the picture we follow this simple process:
- let’s suppose we expect to make £1000 per month
- and for example we are charging £50 per each of our sessions
- we will have to deliver 20 session per month at £50 to achieve the expected £1000 monthly income
- the above translates into 240 sessions to be delivered within an expected year for a total of £12000
- if we can expect that on average each client comes back two more times (e.g. 3 sessions per client) we need to see 80 clients in that year in order to deliver 240 sessions
- assuming that on average each client will bring in 3 successful referrals we will just need to find, for that year, 20 new clients and the other 60 will come as referrals
The above mentioned numbers are realistic averages that we calculated across a broad number of practitioners we worked with. Once the plan has been drawn there are some obvious actions to take in order to secure the flow of new clients, together with the need to keep track with results and compare them with the actual plan.