28. The Stages of Practice Owner Development

In this episode of the Private Practice Success Podcast, Gerda shifts the focus inward to explore you - the practice owner behind the business. 

This episode dives into the personal growth journey that accompanies building and leading a private practice, introducing the Four Stages of Practice Owner Development. 

Gerda offers insights into how your evolution as a Clinician, Business Owner, CEO, and Impact-Entrepreneur shapes the success of your practice and your ability to create a meaningful impact.

In this Episode, you will learn (among others):

• The key differences between the growth of your business and your personal development as a practice owner.
• The Four Stages of Practice Owner Development: Clinician, Business Owner, CEO, and Impact-Entrepreneur.
• Why mindset, mental blocks, and personal growth are critical to achieving business success.
• How to reflect on your current stage and take steps toward the next one.

Who This Episode Is For:

• Clinicians ready to explore their growth beyond client work and into business leadership.
• Practice owners feeling overwhelmed by operations and seeking clarity on their next steps.
• Aspiring impact entrepreneurs looking to create a larger ripple effect in their community and industry.

Gerda’s empowering insights will inspire you to embrace your personal development journey and take intentional steps toward the practice - and life - you’ve always envisioned. 

Tune in and discover where you are on your path and what’s next for you!

Connect with Private Practice Success & Gerda here:

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• Join the Private Practice Success Facebook Group - exclusive to practice owners.
• Email Gerda directly at gerdam@private-practice-success.com
• Order your hard copy of Gerda's book, The 7-Figure Practice HERE.
• Ready to work with Gerda? Send in your details HERE and she will be in touch.

Transcript

Well, hello there amazing private practice owner. My name is Gerda Muller, and you are listening to the Private Practice Success Podcast, and this is episode number 28. 

I am super excited to talk to you about today's topic. Now, this one is a bit different from what we usually discuss. As practice owners we often very much focus on strategies and on tactics, on all those things on your to-do list that we need to implement in order to achieve our goals and our vision for our business. But today I'm going to invite you to take a step back with me and to look at something a little bit different - and that is you.

Today we are going to focus on you, you as the practice owner. I know that this might feel a little bit uncomfortable because it's so much easier to talk about the latest marketing strategies or the latest tactics for recruitment, than it is to reflect on ourselves. But I'm inviting you to go there with me today.

The Four Stages of Practice Owner Development

What we will be diving into is what I call The Stages of Practice Owner Development. Please note that this is different from the stages of practice owner development that you often hear me talk about in my book and in a lot of the training that I've run over the years. If you've been part of any of my programs, you will know that I often discuss The Five Levels of Private Practice Development.

So those five levels focus on your business - the actual legal and financial entity that is your practice.  As a quick refresher, that of course is your Startup Practice, which is your level one practice. Then your level two is your Step-up Practice. Level three is your Expanding Practice. Level four is your Successful AKA Demanding Private Practice. Level five is your Ultimate Private Practice. Once you have that Ultimate Private Practice, then of course that is when you can turn that into what I refer to as The Self-Running Practice. 

Now, along these stages of the development of your business, we of course look at 15 markers - which are like business markers - which we plot, and then it tells us where your business is sitting right now. But today we are not going to talk about your business. We are going to talk about you - the person behind the business. I'm going to walk you through the four stages of practice owner development - which is all about your growth as a clinician, as a business owner, as a CEO and beyond.

Let me tell you this, this journey of personal development is as important as the growth of your business. You cannot have success by only focusing on the business. You have to focus on your own personal growth as the person at the helm of this business. When I reflect on my own journey, I can see how much I've changed since I started my solo practice way back when. I actually started whilst on maternity leave with my second son, who turned 18 last year.

Back then, I worked three days a week initially during school hours, and I slowly built up my practice to five days a week during school hours. I did school hours because I had a relatively young son at the time and my daughter had just started prep. The person I was back then is so different to who I am today.  My values and my core personality traits have stayed the same. But growing a business changes you. And if you do it well, it changes you for the better. It inspires you; it empowers you, and it teaches you. It also challenges you in ways that you just can't imagine when you open your doors on that first day.

It is a journey, and yes, I know a lot of people hate the word journey - but that is the best description that I have for it, because it truly is a journey. And journeys have ups and downs. It has detours, it has flat tires, and sometimes you run out of fuel - but it also has the most beautiful scenery and experiences and joys along the way - and that is the stuff that shapes who you become as you embark and continue on that journey.

That is why this is so important to acknowledge that personal growth that happens when you build - and also very importantly - lead a business which involves leading people, right? By stepping back and reflecting on where you are as a practice owner, you can then identify the mindset challenges you need to overcome. The mental blocks you need to address, and then also the strategies that will help move you forward.

But the one thing I can tell you is that the strategies and the tactics - even if you have the best, most up to date detailed strategies and tactics - it will not work if you've not looked at the mindset challenges, and the mental blocks that you need to overcome. So I want to invite you today to listen with an open mind - and most importantly - a nonjudgmental mind, because I know that we are our own worst critics.

This isn't about comparing yourself to others, or feeling like you are behind other people. This is all about understanding where you are at right now, and using that knowledge to inform the next step of your personal journey - in building your business and embracing the practice owner, the human behind that business. Are you with me? Are you excited? Alright. Let's dive into the Four Stages of Practice Owner Development.  The first stage is what I call The Clinician Stage.

Stage 1: The Clinician Stage

This is where most of us start from. This is you in your role as a clinician, regardless of your discipline - whether you are a psychologist, occupational therapist, speech pathologist, social worker, physio, dietician, et cetera, et cetera - and at this stage, your focus is on doing the clinical work.

In other words, being on the tools of allied health and helping your clients. You are the one at the core phase in the sessions doing the work. You might be doing this in public health, you might be doing this working in an NGO, or even in somebody else's private practice. Or you might already have started your own private practice - whether that is solo and or group - but you are spending most of your time seeing clients.

For the group practice owners, really think about your five day working week. If you are spending most of your time doing clinical work, you are probably still in the clinician stage. Now for the purpose of this framework that I'm using, being a clinician is about doing the work of the clients. It is not about running a business.

Now, you can absolutely choose to wear your clinician hat throughout all four stages of development, but the key here is the amount of clinical work that you are doing - and then very importantly - also having the freedom to choose how much clinical work you do.

Do you have the choice to do lots of clinical work because you can, because you've built the business to a place where it can run without you, that you're not needed. And if clinical work is at the heart of what you love, you might want to spend time doing clinical work, and that's perfectly okay. But you need to ask yourself why are you doing the clinical work? Whether that is no clients once a week or full caseload, it really is up to you at the end of the day. 

For many clinicians, the dream is to move into private practice ownership, and that dream is often fuelled by wanting freedom of time - and really at the core of that is flexibility - because the majority of people in the allied health professions are female still to this day. The majority of the people I work with are female practice owners, and we want flexibility. We want to have more control over our time, and that is a major contributing or motivating factor for why people go into private practice.  And that then brings us to that second stage, which is The Business Owner Stage.

Stage 2: The Business Owner Stage

This is where you take that leap from working in a public mental health NGO or maybe in somebody else's private practice. You register your own ABN, and you start trading under your ABN.  Now, for most of us, this begins in solo private practice, and it is a very exciting time - but it can also be really overwhelming. 

You are now wearing all of the hats. Not only are you the primary clinician - you are also the front desk, reception a lot of the time, and the bookkeeper a lot of the time. You also now need to be the marketer all of the time because now you need to start getting referrals, and you need to do all of these business functions that you've never been trained to do. But you do it within the business owner stage, and at some point, you might start to see that your business grows. You might find yourself with a wait list, and you decide to hire your first team member. Maybe you bring on a second clinician or some admin support, and before you know it, you have a team and you have stepped into the role of manager and leader. 

But here's the thing - this exciting growth process often comes with a downside. Without realising it, many business owners then are actually stepping onto the hamster wheel of operations. You are running that wheel nonstop, doing everything yourself and feeling like the survival of your business depends entirely on you.

It is exhausting. Not only that, it actually keeps you stuck. You are in the survival trap, and a lot of people within the business owner stage tell me that this is the experience they have. Now, moving on from the business owner stage to the next one, which is The CEO Stage.

Stage 3: The CEO Stage

In order to move from the business owner into the CEO stage, it will require a very conscious decision on your part to step off that hamster wheel. This is where things get challenging -because it takes a lot of courage, it takes a lot of effort and a humongous willingness to let go of control, and a lot of people get stuck in the business owner stage. So many. Because there's a lot of fear. There's a lot of fear of what will happen if I stop running on this wheel?

What are all those balls that are just going to fall on the floor? What is going to happen if I stop doing all these things? As a result of that fear, people just keep running on the hamster wheel. Sometimes it takes them years and years - like literally years - before they reach what I like to refer to as business owner rock bottom. They realise that I can't continue like this. I need to consciously take this risk and go if I want to step into the CEO stage. I'm going to have to just do it. I'm going to have to just leap. I'm going to have to stop waiting for myself to be ready. I need to stop waiting for all the stars to align, for all the ducks to be in the row, because we all know that that's never going to happen. But we are so hopeful that it's going to happen.  Then it's another 12 months later - and nothing has happened. Actually, more shit has happened, and we are actually further behind that we thought we would be 12 months ago. 

So as a CEO, when you actually make that shift, your focus will move from doing all the work to now focusing on leading your team, building systems that allow your business to run smoothly without you doing everything. You know that hamster wheel analogy? This is where you are no longer required to be running on it - because you've put the proper systems in place. A lot of people talk to me about systems that they've put in place, but it's like the systems aren’t working because putting it in place is only phase one of that process, and then they forget about phase 2, 3, 4, and 5 to make sure that it works properly.

It is about working smarter, not harder. It’s also about asking the right questions when you are in the CEO stage. Questions such as: How can this be done better? How can this be done more effectively? How can this be done more efficiently? But you know what? When you stay in that business owner stage - running on the hamster wheel - you are too freaking out of breath to even think about asking these questions. And because you are so exhausted, you never get to ask it. You might have this random flashing thought of, ‘There must be a better way,’ but then you just keep on running.

When you are in the CEO stage, this is where you are actually working on the business. You have stepped out of the weeds of operations - you're sitting at the top of the private practice mountain, and you are able to ask questions that are actually going to be moving the needle of progress and growth of your business forward.

But let's be honest. For many practice owners, this transition is particularly tough because it does require a mindset shift. It requires you to set boundaries. It requires you to delegate effectively and make decisions that prioritise the long-term health of your business. When you are in the CEO stage, you can no longer manage and lead your team from a people pleasing perspective. 

This is not about being less empathetic or less caring or less compassionate - this is about balancing all of that with logic and making decisions that will benefit your team, your clients, and the business. That is very, very important. Whenever you are making decisions in your business, you need to consider the impact of that decision on all three of those parties - team, clients and the business. Finally, we come to the fourth stage, and this is what I like to refer to as The Impact Entrepreneur Stage.

Stage 4: The Impact-Entrepreneur Stage

This is where you scale your impact. This is about creating ripple effects. This is about helping more people in better and more efficient ways.

As an impact entrepreneur, you might expand your practice. This could look like starting a second location. This could look like creating programs and resources that you are selling. This could look like solving problems and creating opportunities - not just for your clients, but for your community and your industry as a whole. This is where you get to double your impact as a result of having created a business that can run in your absence.  

For me, this stage is where I personally found the most fulfillment.  I built two group private practices that were able to run in my absence. And then I thought to myself, “Oh, what am I going to do with the time that I now have?” And I went, “I'll complete the Pinnacle of Academia to get your PhD.” I thought, I've got time on my hands. I'm going to enroll into a PhD, and I did enroll and my topic of interest was Psychologists as Practice Owners: Current Coping, Challenges & Success Predictors. I specifically chose that topic of interest because I wanted to do something that's going to be really motivating for me.

As I was going through the literature review part of my PhD process, I realised that there was this immense knowledge gap for allied health practice owners going into business. It's like we go to university, like I spent 3, 4, 5, 6 years at university learning how to be a psychologist.

I can tell you, and I know this was quite some time ago that I was at university, but there was zero learning about how to run a business. The closest stuff was probably a professional ethics course that came to touch on business related issues - but I was never taught how to run a business.

I actually did a - on a side note, before I studied psychology. I did a three-year travel and tourism degree - I actually had one subject in marketing, and one subject in human relations in that course. So I actually learned more business related content in my travel and tourism degree, than I did in my psychology degree.

But then you go into private practice and you expect yourself to know all these things or to figure it all out - because you know - if you can do a master's, you can learn how to run a business. No, actually, that is two totally different things. But I digress. I realise that there are so many other people, like myself, having to learn through trial and error. And I knew how hard it was for me to work through those four stages to get to stage number four.

Then I just went, “Okay, I'm going to start telling people what I've learned,” and that is how I then started to not only double, but probably quadruple ten times, a hundred times my impact. I started my group private practice to help more people and better and more effective ways. That sentence is what has driven each and every step of expansion in my own business growth.

And also, that is what drove me to start Private Practice Success Australia. Where I can now serve practice owners like yourself - and help you to get and grow your very own self-running practice, however that is going to look like for you, however big that is going to be for you. And that's just where I then realised that my true passion lies in helping other practice owners achieve their goals - supporting people like yourself to move from clinician into business ownership, into a CEO, and ultimately into the stage of impact entrepreneur.  

Seeing the ripple effects of this work is incredibly rewarding. There's nothing more that I wish for each and every one of you to be able to get to this place where you can have that type of impact - whatever that looks like for you. For me, it was doing business consulting, coaching, and mentoring to other allied health professionals. For you, it could be anything really, because that's the thing. When you get to the stage, you can do anything that you are passionate about doing that you are called to do. 

Wrapping Up: Where Are You on Your Journey?

I want you to take a moment to reflect - where are you on your journey of practice owner development? Are you in the clinician stage? Are you in the business owner stage? Are you in the CEO stage? Or are you in the impact entrepreneur stage? And most importantly, are you happy with where you are?

There is no right or wrong answer here, okay. All of us are choosing a different pathway for each of us. But I do want you to know that where you are is a choice, and it's about understanding that you are making the choice for yourself and for your business - and only you know what the true answer is here.

If you are feeling stuck, that is just - I don't want to call it a red flag, let's call it a green flag - a green flag to tell you that you are stuck and you now have permission to move forward. You now have permission to move from clinician to business owner. You now have permission to move from business owner AKA - step off the freaking hamster wheel, risk all that stuff that you fear is going to happen. Because I can tell you now, most of it isn’t going to happen, okay? Most of it isn’t going to happen. And if something happens, that's just going to be that thing that tells you it needs attention - and then you're going to fix that. 

So this is your permission to move from business owner into CEO. And when I say the word CEO - that is an energetic shift. Yes, it's also a shift of what you spend your time on. But you're not all of a sudden, the CEO of Westpac or the Commonwealth Bank, that's not the type of CEO we are talking about here.

This is the CEO of your small business. Whether you've got two employees, 12, 20, 42 or a hundred – it doesn't matter. This is also your permission to move from CEO into impact entrepreneur, and to really start having that impact that you are here to have in this world.

Alrighty, thank you so very much for spending this time with me today.  I hope this episode has given you some great food for thought, some valuable insights, and has inspired you to think about your own journey as a practice owner.

Until next time, remember that I am here to help you build a practice you can't stop smiling about  😊