The Private Practice Success Podcast

42. The 2025 Business Intensive Debrief

• Gerda Muller • Episode 42

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In episode 42, Gerda takes you behind the scenes of the Private Practice Success Academy’s Annual Business Intensive - a transformative two-and-a-half-day event designed to empower practice owners to elevate their business, build meaningful connections, and achieve lasting growth.

This episode is packed with practical insights and honest stories about what it really takes to run (and enjoy!) a thriving private practice. Plus, Gerda shares the magic of community, celebration and, yes, a little bit of well-deserved “mucking around.”

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

  • Why having a clear, documented organisational structure is essential for scaling your practice and supporting your team.
  • How to use psychometrics for culture cultivation and talent retention as you create a thriving workplace for you and your team.
  • Practical approaches to smart delegation and time management.
  • The importance of crafting an irresistible service offer in changing market conditions.

Who This Episode Is For:

  • Allied health practice owners who are ready to move beyond survival mode and build a thriving, values-driven business that supports their team, clients, and lifestyle goals.
  • Practice owners striving for sustainable growth, meaningful impact, and a business that doesn’t run them into the ground.

Tune in for a motivating debrief that will leave you inspired to build a practice you can’t stop smiling about!

Want Gerda's Help with your Business?

Gerda helps allied health group practice owners go from overwhelmed, overworked, and underpaid to fully empowered and financially thriving. If this is you, then make today the day you reach out. Complete this super short Triage Form here bit.ly/triageformpps and Gerda will personally reach out to you. 

Here to help you build a practice you can't stop smiling about :)

Connect with Private Practice Success & Gerda here:

Well hello there, brilliant private practice owner. My name is Gerda Muller and you are listening to the Private Practice Success Podcast, and this is episode number 42.  Yes, I am back. I do hope you've missed me.  It has now been about four weeks since the last episode was published. And I, for one, am not too happy about that. Because it has always been my intention to give you an episode every week, like every seven days on a Monday.

And it hasn't happened. Why? Because I have been head down, bum up, working very, very hard long hours to get ready for the Private Practice Success Academy's annual Business Intensive that happened last week. So needless to say, today's podcast episode is a debrief on that event. Hence, I've called it: The 2025 Business Intensive Debrief.

Breaking the Rules

But you know what I want to make here is the following, because I had to remind myself of this when I had those moments of guilt around not publishing an episode. Because in my mind and in my head, and in my heart, I committed to you - my community - to publish a weekly episode.

I made that rule for myself that I wanted to stick to. But you know the beauty is about having your own business. It is that you get to make the rules, which also means that you get to break the rules every now and then. And maybe not break them - maybe just amend, change, shift, adapt. So that is what I did.

I had to reprioritise my world over the last four weeks. I put an incredible amount of pressure on myself to make this once-a-year event fairly awesome, right! And therefore, I have to put in the time, and that means that I need to drop other balls in my world in order to achieve that.

So I had to reprioritise, and unfortunately, the podcast episodes were one of those balls that I dropped. And guess what? I have just picked up that ball again and I've restarted the juggle, and I cannot wait to keep on gifting you weekly podcast episodes into the foreseeable future. So thank you so much for bearing with me and yeah, let's get stuck into episode number 42.

As I said, this is 2025. Business intensive Debrief. So, the business intensive is a two-and-a-half-day annual event. I've run it twice now. Last year we went to Hepburn Springs in Melbourne, and last week we were in the most beautiful area of the Gold Coast Hinterland called Mount Tamborine. And it was like this amazing lush rainforest experience.

So, it was a pretty cool event, and right before I started this podcast episode, I was actually looking through the final videos and photos that my videographer and photographer sent through. One of the things he did for me was a short, like two-to-three-minute video that I can use as I promote next year's event.

And I was actually sitting on my bed just watching the video and my 18-year-old son walked in and I said, “Hey, you need to come watch this video,” because you know, he's always showing me videos on TikTok and Instagram. So I thought for once I've got a video to show to him. So I said, “Come Heno, you need to watch this.” And he sat down with me and it started playing, and he had three comments for me. 

The first comment was he was looking at a section where I was talking, so I was standing in the front of the room with a microphone in my hand and talking, and he looked at me and he said, “What are you even telling them, Mum? You've never studied business?” And I'm like looking at him going, “Um hmm. Have I studied business?  Probably not what and how you would expect… but guess what? I have studied business from the day I started my practice. I learned business in the trenches Henno. And I have made it my job to study business as it relates to allied health professionals, particularly over the last 10 to 12 years. So I do think I've studied it, but I don't have an MBA, but I definitely have the knowledge.”

The second thing he said, and this was like 20, 30 seconds later, he then looked at me and said, “But you know what? There are some people that teach business Mum and they've never even run a real business.” And I went, “Yeah I know, I know, right?” And I'm not saying that people like that can't be helpful - they most surely can. But I do think having been in the trenches, having taken concepts, theories, frameworks, models and having had to put it through a filter that allows you to use it in a highly regulated industry, such as Allied Health and being in a position where you've seen what works and what doesn't, makes a humongous difference.

And then the third comment he made was during one of the clips - it actually was a clip of a movement break. So we had a movement break on each of the two days. We were standing doing all these movements and he looked at me and he goes, “Seems like all you guys did was muck around the whole time.”  And I had to laugh. And I just said, “Well, you know what? Business can be fun. Business should be fun.  And when you do a business event, you want to have fun as well. It's part of that experience - the connections - because business in and of itself is freaking hard work. There are challenges most days; there's at least one crisis a week no matter how hard you plan it, something happens, right? So we have to bring in some fun - AKA, some mucking around.”

So I took it as a really big compliment that both me and the business attendees did some fabulous mucking around. Then I did wonder -  like I'm not sure, maybe there's too much mucking around in this promotional video. Maybe people are going to think that's all we do at the business intensive, which is not the case. But anyway, it was just interesting to see his reaction to my future promotional video.

So let's get stuck into it. If you are listening to this and you actually did attend the Business Intensive, I'm really hopeful that this is going to take you a bit down memory lane. And if you weren't there, hopefully this will give you some insight into what happens at this once-a-year event.

So, we start the business intensive with a Welcome Dinner that happens on Tuesday night, and that is really for everybody just to get to know one another so that when the actual day starts the next day, there's none of that uncomfortableness about having to meet new people and that type of stuff, right? So it's just a wonderful three course dinner. Very nice casual meeting people that are all there. 

And then we do two full days of business, which involves learning new things, but also implementing. We actually significantly changed the structure of the two days after last year's event. So every year I do send out a feedback survey, and it was really interesting the feedback that people gave last year. It was really amazing. 

But one of the things, well the thing they said was that they would love to hear more from was me - AKA Gerda. I initially thought that people weren’t coming for me, they're coming for all the experts that I'm putting together to talk to them. So this year I actually did more skill sessions than I did last year, and there were a lot of implementations connected to those skill sessions - so that was the big thing we changed from last year to this year. I'm not going to go into each and every session that we run, but I'm going to take you through the main ones.

Crafting your Ideal Organisational Structure

On Wednesday the first session that I ran was on Crafting the Ideal Organisational Structure. That is basically, you know, what should your structure look like and how is that visually represented in an organisational chart.

And I want you to really think about this: do you have an organisational chart in your business - yes or no? Is that chart actually written down, like documented? Has your team seen it? Do they understand it? Because your org chart is really the blueprint of your business. It sets out who reports to who? What are the lines of communication? What are those career pathways available to your team? It really provides an immense level of clarity, which is really important for your team to have. 

If you do a deep dive into organisational structures, you might be surprised like I was, that there are so many different types of organisational structures out there. And some of them are freaking complicated, right? So what I did was a lot of research into all of those. I looked at what I've seen amongst practice owners across the levels of private practice development, as well as across various different disciplines, and I came up with three recommended organisational structures. 

I also selected one that was particularly suitable for level one and level two private practice, one that was suitable for level three and four practice, and then one that was suitable for level five and beyond group private practice. And we went through all of that.  

We also did a really great self-assessment exercise where I asked everybody 18 very specific questions related to their business operations, which really indicated some important red flags that would need to be addressed. So the higher your score out of 18, the more red flags you had that your organisational structure was not what it was meant to be. The majority of the people actually had some really interesting results and there was a very big range. But that assessment really helped them to see what is the stuff that can go wrong when I don't have an org structure.

So to just give you an idea of some of these, one of those were: 

Are some team members wearing too many hats or juggling roles that aren't clearly defined? Do you find that communication breaks down between different roles or teams?  Are they bottlenecks and decision making with issues getting stuck at a particular point?  Do you find onboarding new team members takes longer than expected due to unclear reporting lines? 

So we really looked at 18 of these really highly important questions that could be indicating red flags when it comes to each and every one of their organisational structures. Then of course, all of that informs the right structure for each of the attendees' businesses.

Now I'm going to guess that some of you might think, I don't really like an org chart. It feels very corporate. It feels very top down - and that's not aligned. And I totally get it. But the fact of the matter is,  if your people - your team - do not know who's who in the zoo, it's going to be complete chaos. Let me just say that.

You cannot scale a business without a clear visual representation of who's who in the zoo. It's so important. Your org structure's going to clarify the roles and responsibilities of each person. It's going to identify inefficiencies and bottlenecks. You shouldn't just be hiring because you think you're ready for your next person. Your org chart and structure should inform who you are hiring next. It really identifies gaps in your structure. It improves communication, it improves collaboration, and it supports decision making and problem solving. So why wouldn't you have one?

At the end of that presentation, I got each attendee to start crafting out their ideal organisational structure in order for them to see where they're at right now and what it is that they are working towards into the future.

Psychometrics for Talent Retention & Culture Cultivation 

The second skill session on day one was presented by Chelsea Knight, who is my practice principal. She's been working at my practice for many years now, and I have 100% indoctrinated her into the Private Practice Success model and methodology. 

Chelsea took all attendees through the process that we went through at my own group private practice. This was particularly for an employee model practice where we used a very carefully selected, reliable and valid psychometric assessment measure to craft and cultivate the ideal team culture and team dynamics that we want at our practice.

This specific intervention has been an absolute game changer for us in terms of retaining our team, and having clear, transparent feedback loops and open communication between all our team members. And when we link this to that whole discussion of organisational structures - if you were somebody that's gone, Oh, I don't like the idea of an org chart, it feels very top down to me - that's why this second piece of the puzzle was so important for everybody including management (AKA leadership) and the team, both clinicians and support staff to understand what each and every person's communication style is like, what their personality type is like. 

And I'm not talking about the DISC and stuff like that. It's something totally different, much more high level than the DISC and It worked really, really well. And this presentation was very well received by all the attendees.

So I'm super excited to see what my Academy Members are going to find as they start to implement this with their teams over the next couple of months.

So those two skill sessions covered about three hours of our Day 1 program. And we had quite a lot of other stuff built into it, such as mastermind tables, implementation, expert panel discussion, and all that good stuff. 

Then on Thursday we had another two skill sessions.

Maximise your Time: Unlock Business Efficiency Through Smart Delegation

The first one was very early in the morning and it was all about Maximising Your Time in Order to Create Business Efficiency through Smart Delegation.

Now, we were meant to have a guest speaker come in to present that one in person. Now listen to this story of what happened to me. So this topic was on Thursday. A week prior - exactly a week prior - was a Thursday afternoon, I was sitting at the hairdressers getting my hair done, as you do before you run a big event. I was having my colour topped up, right? Getting the head full of foils, and the phone rang.

I didn't recognise the number, so I didn't answer. I'm one of those people - if I don't know what number it is, who it is that's calling me, I just don't answer the phone. Interesting fact, I have had the exact same mobile number since I arrived in Australia back in 2005 - one number. When I started my private practice, I used my mobile number on all my client and appointment cards. So a lot of people have my mobile number, so I don't answer if I don't know the number. If there's somebody who I want to know when they call me, I put them in my contact list. 

That being said, if the call goes to voice message, my voice message actually says, Please don't leave a message because I don't check it, can you please send me a text and let me know how I can help and where I need to call you back.

So I received a text and it was from the guest speaker that said, Hey, Gerda, I'm so freaking sorry, but I'm going to have to cancel. Can you please call me urgently? Now, I couldn't call at that point in time, but as you can imagine, I'm thinking, Oh, what's going on? And it's very noisy in the salon, and I'm thinking, I don't know what to do here. So I'm just waiting, waiting. They finish my hair, I go out into the public outside because it's quiet outside so that I can give her a call. 

Long story short, she had to go in for urgent surgery - and you know what? Your health always comes first. Always! Make this a lesson for you.  And she was so apologetic. The guest speaker said, Gerda, in all the years, I've never had to cancel on anybody. I've known this person for almost 10 years now. We met when we were both on the same book writing retreat back in 2016? Well that's  nine years. It will be 10 years next year. So I know she's such a person of great integrity, and I knew that she wouldn't cancel me unless she absolutely had to. And she had to. I said, Don't worry about it. It's perfectly fine. Let's make a plan. 

First thing I do is I call the printers, because I had just paid $2,000 to have my workbooks printed, and they asked me to pay before they start the print run. I call them and go, Have you started printing? They go, Yes, we're already halfway through. I went, Okay. That is perfectly fine. I put the phone down. All right. Because I thought maybe I can get another guest speaker. I know it's very short notice to do that in seven days. Even if I need to do another talk - I mean, I can talk about private practice and the business of private practice all day long.

So all her slides are in the workbook. What do I do now? Long story short, what we did is she sent me a recording of a presentation that she did previously. So what I did is I went through that presentation and edited it and took out the most important stuff that my people need. And then I put in reflection sheets - slides basically as a prompt for me to stop the recording and facilitate a discussion and application of her learnings.

And you know what? It was the best thing ever. I will say initially I was really stressed because - and this is the lesson for you, and why I'm sharing this story for you here on the podcast - because sometimes we've got all our ducks in a freaking row. They're like lined up, they're polished, and that's how I felt going into the Business Intensive seven days out. It's like, I'm just doing those, you know, self-care things now, like the hair and stuff like that. Everything's in place. It's going to be cool. I'm so happy how everything is turning out. And then this happens. 

So I want you to know that a lot of times in business, things happen outside of your control. And yes, you can be disappointed, you can be a little bit upset, you can be maybe frustrated at it happening. But you know what? If it's something outside of your control, your job is to roll with the punches. Your job is to make lemons out of lemonade. 

And a lot of people actually told me afterwards that that was a great session - even though she wasn't there-  because something was delivered, and I immediately was able to help them apply it to their businesses, to their lives. And a lot of this was about delegation and support for them as business owners. So. It actually, I think, made the day and that presentation even better. 

So sometimes you also just need to trust in your own abilities to manage things when it goes wrong. It's hard in the process, but trust me when I say: trust thyself. As long as you know that you are doing the best that you can with the time, the information, the money, and the energy that you have, that you need to be really proud of yourself when you are managing challenges within your business. 

So that was that first skill session of Day 2.

Service Offer Mastery: Fill your Calendar in any Market 

The second skill session of Day 2 was called Service Offer Mastery: How to Fill Your Calendar in Any Market.

And this was a skill session that I was particularly excited about. Because I don't know about you, but I have heard a lot of practices reporting less extensive wait lists - even the absence of wait lists. A reduction in front desk conversions, more clients experiencing financial distress. So they call up and they go, Oh, I want to be bulk billed, or, Oh, I can't afford that. Practices reporting finding it harder to fill calendars of both current and new clinicians. Also, a big one is increased reschedules in cancellations, falling outside of cancellation periods - which is extremely frustrating because it's like, no, you can't charge for it.

Now, if you've not been subject to any of those, count yourself lucky because a lot of people are going through this. And if you have not been experiencing this, it probably tells me - and you - that you've done an amazing job at insulating your brand and your reputation from these market forces that's currently at play. And I would expect an established business to be more insulated from these things. And I would expect newer, smaller practices that are not as established to probably be going through more of these. 

But needless to say, it could be impacting anyone out there, which means that we need to think about our service offer differently. Doing the exact same thing that everybody else is doing, isn’t working. So I really spent a lot of time talking to the attendees and participants about the risks and the rewards that your potential and current clients are probably thinking about when they're making their buying decision. And then I took the attendees through three keys of what we can do as business owners to manage those potential risks and rewards? And that was a pretty kick ass session even if I do say so myself.

The rest of Thursday - also, again, just like the previous day - had a lot of implementation and expert panel discussions built into it.  Oh, I also forgot: across both days we had admin breakouts where people had practice management and admin specific sessions. We also had a deep rest and restore session both days, really making sure that people know how to do that. How do you engage in deep rest and restoration in the middle of your workday, right? In a time efficient manner. That sounds so contradictory, but I know you are going, I don't have time for that. I'll do that when I'm on holiday. Like when does that come?  And do you actually have time on your holidays?

So we need to be building those things. Into our day-to-day work as a practice owner, and so that we can also teach that to our clinicians, right? We have to have a proactive approach to burnout prevention by doing things like that rather than waiting until it is too late.

So, as you might have gathered, the Business Intensive really had a lot of facets to it, and I'm finding it hard to go - What was my favourite part of it? But if I really have to decide, it is just being in the room. I can put on paper everything that I taught the people there, but unless you are in the room and you get to engage, and you get to ask questions, you get to have those discussions - It's just not the same.

And the people that were in that room were just so generous with their energy, with their knowledge, and with who they are. And it does feel a bit corny to say this, but there was magic in that room. It felt magical. It felt safe, it felt secure. There was no competitiveness. There was no like withholding. Everybody was just there connecting with everybody else. 

And one of the attendees actually said afterwards that they thought that this event was the actual perfect size, because there was an opportunity to talk to every other person in the room, to connect with every other person in the room. And that is what I really love about the PPS Academy. I don't want it to be those huge rooms where there's 200-300 people in it. Sometimes I think that's just ego for the business coach. That's not what the Academy is about. The Academy is about like-minded practice owners that love what they do, that want to create an impact, but who knows that they want to create a business that's going to have an impact - and that are there to cheerlead one another. Those are the people. And you don't have to be a certain size practice. You don't have to be huge. Any size practice can join The Academy. 

And of course, we had people that weren't in The Academy.  Every year we open up only 10 guest tickets to come and join us. And even the guests were freaking amazing. They were super cool. They were so good, and they just seamlessly blended in with my Academy Community. And again, that is who The Academy is. They didn't go, oh, you are a public person. You're not a member. We are not going to interact with you. No, they enveloped them and brought them into the energy that is The Academy and that is the people that are part of that community. And I will keep it as small as it needs to be to protect that. 

Yeah, so Business Intensive was pretty cool.

Celebration & Awards

On the last night we had our celebrations and awards night. No, this is not a gala event. This is an Oodies and Uggs event. So we don't dress up in The Academy, we dress down. Because after two days of learning and doing and implementing, you want to let your hair down. So that's what we do. We still have a three-course meal - because I love to eat and I love good food - but that happens on Thursday night.

We also presented 10 awards to Academy members for very specific achievements, and then we presented a level five awards. So that is for practice owners that have achieved level five status on the Levels of Private Practice Development. And then the final award of the night is our extraction award, and that is for a practice owner that has made big steps towards and or has achieved extraction status. In other words, they're able to take themselves out of their practice - which means that they have created a Self-Running Practice.

Because ultimately, that is what I want to help each and every practice owner achieve. Some people come into The Academy at a level one with that goal. Sometimes people come in and they already have like 20-30 team members and they can't fathom taking themselves out of the business because they are still such an integral part of it. So everybody can work towards that, and it can look different for each and every one of us - but it is possible. But what I will say is that it doesn't happen overnight.

I have actually previously recorded a podcast called How Long Does it Take to Run a Self-Running Practice. I believe it was episode number three. So I did that pretty early on because this is episode 42. So if that is of interest to you, please go and have a listen. But it is most certainly doable. But the sooner you start, of course, the sooner you can get there.  So that was a Thursday night. 

Friday morning most people left. We all went to have some breakfast. Myself and my EA, the lovely Kelley - we then went on a lovely walk down to a gorgeous waterfall. We came back, hopped in the car, then we went to the skywalk, which is like this big ramp in the sky, and both of us have a fear of heights, but we tested ourselves. So we did that. We went up to the gallery walk and we visited all the little shops. We actually put more than 10,000 steps on my Apple Watch that day. But it was just a day of holiday for me and Kelley after having worked really hard at getting everything tiptop ready for Business Intensive. 

Then on Saturday, we checked out the two of us, and I went to watch my son's rugby game in Brisbane - he was playing there. And after that I started the big track back home to Agnes Water. And it all feels so surreal. I can't believe that I just had the business intensive. You know, you snap back to reality so quickly. It's like, Oh, okay, it's done for another year. But we are already starting to plan for 2026. We are thinking of locations. Because the location is so important. 

I do not want to do the Business Intensive in a corporate space. I don't want to do it at a fancy hotel in the CBD area, I've done enough of those types of CBD events over the years. We like to go into places that are really within nature, where you can combine relaxation with work - because that is what business should be like.

We want to make business as easy as possible, as simple as possible, as sustainable as possible, as profitable as possible. And very importantly, as fun as possible. There should be a lot of mucking around in business. Otherwise, how are you going to stay motivated? How are you going to prevent yourself from burning out? You need to build all of that stuff into running a business.

Okay, I think I'm going to leave my 2025 Business Intensive debrief right there. It was an amazing event. I loved connecting with everybody there. And even I left having learned a couple of things - having been reminded of a couple of things that I've always wanted to do in my business and that I probably should be doing.

So you know what? We are always learning. That's probably the big thing I've learned. That doesn't matter how long you are in business - there's always something new and there's always something you didn't think of, just because you didn't know what you didn't know. And sometimes you're just too close to your own business to see what it needs.

Anyway, we are going to leave it there. Thank you so very much for tuning in. And as always, remember that I am here to help you build a practice you can't stop smiling about. 🙂

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Gerda Muller

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