This post is about the trade-off between spending time delivering your services as a practitioner in private practice and marketing your business in a variety of ways. If your practice attracts the right number of clients to keep you busy and support your expected lifestyle then you have been doing the right thing for a while. Your existing clients are enough to generate sufficient demand for your business and refer you to their friends and family; this is probably the best way to maintain a busy and healthy private practice.
On the other hand, if the amount of clients you see on a typical week/month/year is substantially less than what you’d like, you need to spend more time/money/effort in marketing your business. Depending on your circumstances you can choose what proportion of money vs. time you want to allocate to your marketing.
I spend a substantial amount of time managing and marketing our clinic and I know it pays off by the amazing growth we experienced in both customer enquiries and by the number of practitioners who join our clinic on a monthly basis: we reached 60 therapists earlier this year and we have in the pipeline about 10 who are due to join us by the end of 2016.
I devote a significant part of my work helping practitioners working at Salus Wellness to grow their respective practice; I do that by spending some time one-to-one with them and organising workshops and networking events for them. My baseline advice to anybody running a private practice would be to spend on marketing all the time not spent delivering their therapy. That means allocating a working week into their own calendar as if they were going to the office/shop/factory and working, regularly and consistently, 4-5 days per week 6-8 hours per day. The illusion of making a decent income working 10-15 hours per week and doing nothing else is merely, as mentioned above, an illusion.