What to Stop Doing in Your Practice (If You Want More Clients): Ep 91

There’s a lot of noise right now about what you should be doing to grow your practice.

More content

More platforms

More offers

More strategies.

But what if the real shift isn’t about doing more… It’s about doing less, far more deliberately?

In this episode, Cassandra shares what she’s seeing right now across practitioner businesses, and why many are feeling stuck, scattered, or struggling to bring in consistent client flow.

Because this isn’t just a “you” problem. It’s a market shift.

And in this kind of environment, adding more often makes things worse.

Instead, Cassandra explores why subtraction, simplification, and clarity are becoming the real growth drivers, and what that actually looks like in practice.

You’ll hear:

• The common patterns showing up across practitioner businesses right now
• Why more platforms, more offers, and more content aren’t fixing the problem
• How scattered energy is quietly weakening your results
• The shift from “doing everything” to focused, intentional action
• A simpler way to approach marketing that’s working in the current market
• This episode is a direct, practical reset.

Not another list of strategies.  Not another thing to add. But a chance to step back and ask:

What actually needs to stay, and what needs to go?

FREE RESOURCES TO BOOST YOUR PRACTICE

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Visit the website www.cassduffill.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:46

Hi everyone, welcome to this week's episode. Now, firstly, a little apology from me. I know there's been a couple of weeks where I haven't got an episode up, and I'm really sorry for that. I've probably explained earlier in this year that I'm sick of the wheel of content. And one of the things that I wanted to bring in to my world this year for you guys is more on the pulse sort of information. Because as much as I can batch content like a queen and I can put a heap of episodes on YouTube and a heap of episodes on here, I felt a little bit that it felt almost a little bit energetically detached because I was thinking ahead, topics that would be interesting, interviewing people I thought you'd like, and just putting stuff up there. But what I realized this year is what you need is things that are on the pulse that are actually happening, what we're seeing right now, what to do about it, how to take some action. And that's why I changed the format. So what I might have been doing was batching, you know, just two, maybe even three weeks at a push. But um, I've gotten to the point where, frankly, I ran out of episodes. I had a phase where I had these massive migraines. It took me out of action for a couple of weeks. And um, if you see me online at the moment, you'll see I finally got glasses. So you can stop messaging me saying, Cass, buy some glasses. I finally got a prescription. And I've also been flat out with the new practice. Those of you that are associated with me on social media know that I'm bringing back my Healthhaven practice, as was always the plan post my pelvic mesh removal and my recovery phase. So my removal was last year in May, and um now I'm building the clinic again. So I'm gonna actually do a separate episode. I want to talk you all through that and I want to share some of the the highs and the lows and what's going on, but I just wanted to fill you in about what's been going on here. So because I'm trying to be more real and on the pulse with this content, the flip side of that is that I don't have six months worth of pre-recorded podcast episodes just sitting here dropping for you every week. So I apologize for the gap, but I think it's actually a better way to go because the content you're getting here is real and it's what's happening right now, things you can action immediately. And I think that's so much more valuable than having pre-recorded content dumps of things that I thought you might have needed six months ago when I recorded it. So anyway, after that I'd like to move into today's episode. Today's episode is going to be straight to the point, really, and you know I'm not really about any fluff, I'm pretty much straight to the episode point every time we do these. What I want to talk about today is the things I want you to stop doing immediately in your practice. Because most practitioners, and I'm speaking to so many lately, my one-to-one clients, and also a heap of you who are coming through on discovery calls, most of you actually don't need more strategy, more ideas, more actions, more revenue streams. By and large, many of you need less and you need more clarity. So, what I want to talk about today is what you need to stop doing immediately in your practice that's going to start to improve your results. Because in a market like we're in right now, and it's a contracting market, it absolutely is. In a contracting market, subtraction in your business can create growth faster than any addition ever will. And what do I mean by that? I mean about simplifying, streamlining, making it easier than ever before to work with you. And that's what we're going to talk about today. So, Pracky friends, you probably don't need more strategy or more things. We need to start taking things away. Who was the the fashionista? There was someone, was it Dior or somebody that used to say that they would get dressed and then they would look in the mirror before they left and they would subtract one thing to add elegance to their outfit, they would always take something away. Is it Chanel or Dior or one of those names anyway? Tell me in the comments, send me a message, let me know who I'm actually talking about. But this is something we need to start doing in our practice. Because what I'm seeing by and large is practitioners that have too many offers, too many competing offers. They're confusing their potential clients, they're confusing their audience, they're spreading their time too thin between all of these different offers. And by and large, when we go and look into it, most of these offers aren't really selling. So there's no point pushing water up a hill if something's not actually working. I'm also seeing prackies that are on too many platforms, too many. And right now I'm simplifying everything with my clients, and we're doing pretty much two things a week. Two things, and we're seeing steady client flow. My practice opens on the 11th of May, and there's already plenty of bookings in there. Is the first week full? No, it's not, there's still spots. But I'm going from working online part-time to doing six days a week, so of course there's going to be spots. But the thing is, I put out there that there's bookings available and they started to flow in. I put out a piece of marketing, and that same day there was discovery calls, and the next day they were confirmed bookings. Doing things, simplifying things, doing things the right way actually works in this market. So we'll talk about that. I'm also seeing, to be frank, a lot of scattered messaging. And this comes from a few different places, but one I think is financial pressure and financial stress. We have this tendency to think that when things are a little bit tricky, a little bit harder than normal, we have to spread wider, cast that net wider, and we end up with scattered messaging when actually the reverse is true. The tougher the market, the tighter the messaging. Okay, remember that. Write it on a whiteboard, stick it on a t-shirt. The tougher the market, the tighter the messaging needs to be. And the other thing that I'm seeing is exactly what I explained when I started this episode. The constant pressure of content, the constant wheel of content. Isn't it a frustrating, horrible place to be? When I get onto my clarity calls, which are my discovery calls with my practitioners that I mentor, by and large, I would say 99% of them start the conversation with, look, I know I should just do more social media. Or I know that I haven't blogged in a while. But it's this constant pressure of thinking, oh, if I just did these things, my business would turn around. And we know for a fact that adding additional social media in this market will not work. I know, yes, you can come at me in the comments. There's I know that other mentors are saying they will. I know another mentor did a weeks-long social media training. Be careful who you're learning from, be careful what you're learning because not everyone is an expert in their field. And just because something worked for them doesn't mean it will work for you. And by and large, what they're teaching in some of these realms doesn't work for us. What works for a business mentoring business doesn't work for a practitioner business. What works for a chiropractor business does not work for a practitioner business. What works for an e-commerce or a product business doesn't work for a service business. They're all different, they're all unique. So there's some of the things that I'm seeing right now, and I know that you're probably thinking as I'm saying those, oops, that's me. Yep, I feel that. Yep, that sounds like me too. The problem that this is causing, though, having too many offers, too many platforms, scattered messaging, this constant stress of having to be on every damn platform, even though they're not working. What that's actually doing is fragmenting your energy because your focus is over here and it's over there and it's up there and it's down there. What that does though is give you weak results. Think for a minute that you are an athlete. You're an athlete and you're a runner. Let's say you're a long distance runner and you want to get better at your long distance running. However, one day you decide, actually, I think it's gonna be more fun to skip rope. I'm just gonna skip rope today. And tomorrow, oh, I really wish I learnt long jump. I'm gonna go and practice long jumping. And then hurdles, hurdles are good. I'm gonna have a go at those on Wednesday. And pole vault. Pole vault looks like something that would be useful to know. So I think I'm gonna go and learn pole vault. All of those things might be great and they might increase your level of fitness, but none of them are going to teach you how to better run a marathon. And this is the problem. When your problem is client flow right now, by and large, everyone's saying to me, I would like more clients, when we're working on offers, or we're tweaking the website and the messaging and changing it yet again, changing the niche yet again, adding another content platform. I saw it the other day, there'd be discussion of gee, I heard someone's getting all of these clients out of TikTok. Should I join TikTok? No, you shouldn't do any of those things. We need to stop fragmenting our energy because it's giving weak results. We need to start to focus. So before we can get to focus, you need to make time for the focus. And how are we going to do that? We need to stop posting everywhere. I think this is the fourth time I've said it in this one little short episode. Stop trying to be everywhere. It doesn't work. You're not a tuner fisherman, okay? The bigger the net doesn't equal more fish. That's just an analogy that doesn't work for us. So we can stop posting everywhere. So take your breath, let it out with love. Thank you, social media, and everything else we've had at our disposal. But it doesn't work, and we're not going to keep doing things that don't work. We are going to stop creating multiple low performing offers. Low performing offers. Because one week you see someone online saying you just need to have a low-ticket offer with a ads funnel. And then someone else says, no, no, you need an evergreen that leads to a signature program. And then you hear someone else saying the only way to make money in this market is a membership. And all of a sudden, you're jumping like a clown in a circus through brightly colored hoops, chasing the next idea, the next trend. None of that is going to start bringing you in clients. You need to focus on what your core business is and build from there. It's interesting right now how many practitioners come to me and I'm getting lots of messages as well going, Cass, what's the best revenue stream in this market? And the interesting answer to that is there isn't one. And that doesn't mean that nothing is selling, but this market is more unique than it has ever been before. Some practitioners are still doing really well with signature programs. Some are doing gangbusters with memberships. Some of them, those two things are tanking. Some of them, it's one-to-one. It's going gangbusters in one-to-one. It comes down to you, the clients that you serve, the niche that you have, and how you help them. And building from that, we want to start looking at the offers that work, okay, and stop looking for the next shiny object or the low-hanging fruit. It's not about having multiple offers. The more offers you have, the more confused your audience or your clients or patients are going to be as to which one is the right one for me. You've got 12 different things here. Which one is the right one for me? I also would implore you to please stop constantly changing direction. The amount of practitioners I see online who six months ago were a different niche or a different name or a different brand. People need time. It takes time for things to build. And in this market, I really think you need to give things two years. If you started a retail business, you would have plans in place, you would have projections in place, you'd have capital behind you ready to move forward because you don't expect to break even in a retail business till year one or year two. Yet we seem to expect we can come into these businesses with no capital behind us, start up and start making money and hit six figures and off we go. The constantly changing direction is not helping you. You need to stay the course, which is why I always say you've got to find the purpose and the passion. You've got to love it because you have to stick this out long term. It's not enough to sit there and go, hmm, gee, I'm seeing that there's a lot of people online talking about autoimmune conditions, and that looks like a really lucrative place to be, if you actually can't stand dealing with those sort of conditions. You need to do something you love because you need to stick it long enough to see results. The one thing that I've said, and I've said it so many times, is I don't believe that businesses fail. I don't. I think there is always a way to make a business work. You just have to have the tenacity to see it through. You have to have the patience to put in the work. The only time businesses fail is when the practitioners give up, close the doors, and walk away. And nine times out of ten, that's it. Actually, I'm gonna I'm gonna change that. It's not even nine times out of ten. I can't think of one instance in all the years I've done this work where I've seen a practitioner whose business has failed and they've had to leave it. It's always their choice. No, this isn't working for me. I'm I don't see enough clients, don't know how to make it work, I'm gonna have to leave, I'm gonna work in a health food shop, I'm gonna become a receptionist, I'm gonna go back to accounting. That's when these businesses fail. The other thing I would love for you to stop right now, please, is stop overconsuming business content. Stop doing all the free webinars, stop doing all the free trainings. None of that is going to be this the golden ticket that helps you. And the time that you're spending on those is much better spent right now working on your own business and bringing in your own clients. You might feel like you're doing something productive and you are. There's gold nuggets in everything. Believe me, I'm an avid learner. But when business is slow, you will not find me looking at the next training. You won't find me signing up for the next course. What you will find me doing is deep diving into my marketing and squeezing it like a sponge. How can I get more clients in the door? So, right now in this market, what do we want to keep? I've told you what to stop doing, I've told you what to give up. But what are you actually going to keep doing? You are going to keep clarity in your offers. So if you're one of these people with too many offers, I want you to stop those. What is actually selling, or in the past, what has sold? Bring it right back to brass tacks and keep it really, really simple. Even in my practice, the previous iteration of it when I was focused on gut health, I had a one-to-one consultation, you had an initial, and there was a review for new clients and existing. That's it, that's your choice. From there, I had a DIY program called gut reset. I had a signature program called gut recovery, and I had a high-level one-to-one journey that was called elite health. That is it. That is it. And with that, I hit multi-six figures. So you don't need to have a convoluted system of offers to be able to make decent money in a business. Thing is, I know it's really exciting, isn't it? And I love business model mapping myself. The creativity, and I could do this, and I could do that. One of the things I'm well known for saying is just because you can doesn't mean you should. And again, that's probably another thing I should get printed on t-shirts. One of these days, people, you're going to see a merchandise store and it's going to have all of these ridiculous things I say printed on t-shirts. But it's about choosing the things that make sense. One clear offer. So right now, if you are struggling for clients, have a look at your offers and have a look at your initial consultation and make sure it's really clear. Who is it for? What does it do? What are the results we're going to get? Make it clear as you can. So it's I excuse the word, but I'm going to use the word idiot proof, because that's what we need it to be in this market. In a market where people are a bit worried about their money, you've got clients out there who are looking for the best place to invest their money and they're being cautious about investing their money. Your clarity is going to help give them the trust and the certainty in your offer. So go back, have a look at your main offer, make sure it's really, really clear. Right now, I would also keep one primary platform. Now, I know I say all the time social media is not your traffic driver. I'm going to caveat that because I do know one practitioner who gets all of her clients pretty much off Instagram and another who gets a lot of clients off TikTok. It does happen, but the volume of content that those people are putting out and they have such a clear niche and such a clear message that they cannot help but be seen. Most practitioners that I know of are a bit what I call middle of the road. Pretty much will help anyone. We don't really have a really clear niche. We're good at pretty much everything. That is not going to be a business that you can build on a social media platform. You've really got to stand for something. You've got to be on your soapbox. So unless you can be on your soapbox, those probably aren't your platforms right now. What I would suggest you go and have a look at is your emails. Okay, email is always a great conversion, and I've been I've been rabbiting on about email marketing for the last five years. Nothing has changed other than email marketing is getting better instead of worse. So you will get, you know, 25 to 35% open rate on an email when you get 0.01% of your followers off Instagram coming to your website. So pick a primary platform, primary channel, primary activity, whatever you want to call it. I think email marketing's great, and I also love a good blog, and you know that too. Pick one thing and get good at it. Okay. Get really, really good at it and be consistent with it. And this is the biggest problem with most practitioners. You guys struggle with consistency and pot call the kettle black because I haven't been here for three weeks. Sorry. But what I will say is, okay, I haven't posted an episode for three weeks. But apart from that, for the last two years, I have dropped at least one episode here every single week. Every single week for the past two years, you had an episode here. You've also had every single week a new video on YouTube. And I did stop YouTube at the start of this year because the views weren't high enough to keep going. There is a new blog every week. There is a new email every week. So if nothing else, friends, learn from that to be consistent. You don't have to be on multiple channels, but you've got to be consistent. Now, the one thing that I want to leave you with here is what I call my MVM, my minimal viable marketing concept. We're going to make it as simple as possible, okay, for you to market your business in a way that works. Right now, for my practice, I'm doing this, as is all of my clients, and we are all getting new clients into our practices. Minimal viable marketing. It's about what's the smallest amount we can do for the biggest impact. And in this market, it's email marketing and a blog. That is it. I would recommend you start writing one weekly blog about a topic that is really related to your clients. Because how are we getting clients right now? They're Googling their symptoms. They're sitting up at midnight because their symptoms are keeping them awake and they're Googling how can I fix my XYZ? How can I decrease the ABC? What natural alternatives are there for me with my whatever's wrong with me? They're Googling these things. So you need to start writing a blog. Once you've got that blog, you have something to send on an email and go, hey, look, I've got this thing and it's got tips, and here's a link and come and have a look. And in the middle of that email, you can also say, hey, here's a link to book an appointment. But you've got new news to come back and share with them. If you want to spread it a little bit more widely, take 10 minutes, pop it on social media. Hey, I've got this new blog I just dropped today. I'd love for you to come have a read. You're going to learn XYZ. Can you see how simple that is? But if nothing else, one blog, one email a week, that will start to get you traction. If you have a physical practice, adding in Google Business Profile is a really good idea. Not saying it doesn't work for online businesses, but it doesn't work as well as it does right now for physical businesses. If you are purely online, stick to the email and the blog. Alright, friends, so that is your minimal viable marketing, and that is going to be one of your actions from today. So the other thing I want you to do is have a look at everything that I've said. Have you got too many offers, too many platforms? Is your message scattered? Are you constantly on the stress of trying to put out marketing that's not actually getting results? I want you to go through all of that and I want you to cut out something that is diluting your results. I'm not saying you're going to give up on these things forever, but if it's offers, write the things you'd love to do on a spreadsheet. Take them off your website menu. They're not a coming soon. It's just confusing people. Take them off and get clarity around your one offer. If it's platforms, it doesn't matter if you disappear from Facebook. Who's going to know? No one. No one is going to know if you're not posting on Facebook because nothing comes up in front of people anyway. So you don't have to worry about that. If your message is really scattered, maybe you can start to dial that in a little bit. What do you really want to do? Who do you want to help? Okay, so I'm going to leave it there. I hope that's been really helpful and given you a few things to go and work on. And I look forward to seeing you for next week's session. I will also do a little mini episode to follow this one with a little bit of an update for you about my practice and the setting up of the clinic. Have a great week, everyone, and I hope everything's going fantastic in your practices. Bye for now.