Most of us would think twice before handing a marathon training plan to someone who had only just started running.
The distance is different. The weekly load is different. So is what progress looks like.
Private practice is much the same.
When you are starting out, you are not running the smaller version of somebody else’s business. You are at a different stage, dealing with different problems.
The difficulty is that a lot of business advice comes from people who are already some distance down the road. It may be perfectly good advice, but that does not make it useful to you now.
Same sport. Different race.
I often see clinicians trying to build the practice they might need in five years before they have filled the diary they have today.
A brand film before it is easy to book an appointment. Software designed for a twelve-chair clinic when it is still one person in a rented room. Taking on an associate before there is enough work for the owner. Opening another site because the first one is not full.
None of those things is necessarily wrong. It may simply be too early.
Starting is not the easy bit
Couch to 5K is sometimes spoken about as though it is the easy version of running. It does not feel easy when you are the person doing it.
The same is true of starting a practice. Every job is a first.
Finding a room. Arranging insurance. Setting a fee. Explaining that fee to a patient. Learning what needs documenting. Sitting with an empty Wednesday while somehow having more demand than you can manage on Saturday.
You are making some of the biggest relative gains you will ever make, but they rarely feel impressive at the time.
Someone with three sites and a team will have difficult Tuesdays too. They are just different Tuesdays.
Comparison becomes unhelpful when you start treating somebody else’s week as a report on your own progress.
What matters at the beginning
At this stage, the most useful work is usually fairly ordinary.
Make sure the foundations are sound: insurance, records, consent, complaints, safeguarding and the other things that protect you and your patients.
Make it easy for somebody to become a patient. Be clear about what you do, what it costs and how to book. Answer the phone when you can and make sure your website makes sense to someone who does not speak like a clinician.
You probably do not need to be everywhere. Being visible and useful in one or two places consistently is better than continually starting something new.
Then watch a handful of fairly boring numbers: new patients, return visits, missed appointments, reviews and whether you were paid.
An empty session is information. It is not a verdict on whether you should be in business.
A useful filter for advice
Before acting on a piece of business advice, I think it is worth asking:
What stage is this person actually at?
Does this solve a problem I have now?
If it works, what will genuinely be different in the next few months?
You can learn a great deal from people who are further ahead without copying their entire operation.
“Make it easy to book” works.
“Hire a coordinator and run more advertising” may not.
A well run practice that looks after its patients and its owner is a success. It does not need multiple sites, a large team or ambitions to become an empire before it counts as a real business.
Know which race you are in and do that work properly. The marathon plan can wait until the 5K starts to feel small.
This principle matters to us at OSGO too. Compliance, templates and CPD should make running a practice simpler. They should help you deal with the work that matters without giving you another complicated plan to manage.
The aim is not to make a small practice behave like a large one. It is to help you run the practice you actually have, well.