The Private Practice Success Podcast

63. More Clients, More Team, But Less Freedom? Here's Why...

• Gerda Muller • Episode 63

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In Episode 63, Gerda gets real about a dilemma so many private practice owners face in that is: More Clients, More Team... But Less Freedom.

If you started your practice for flexibility and freedom, but now find yourself with a bigger team, a fuller diary, and even less time and headspace than before, then this episode is for you. 

Gerda unpacks why simply adding more clients and hiring more clinicians doesn’t automatically create the freedom you dreamed of (and why it often does the opposite).

Gerda shares candid stories and real-world examples, revealing how the heart-driven desire to help more people can quietly lead to overwhelm, owner-dependency, and even silent burnout if your business outgrows its systems.

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

  • Why more clients and a bigger team can actually reduce your flexibility and freedom.
  • The difference between 'growth' and 'optimisation' and why you need both for a sustainable, enjoyable practice.
  • The subtle signs your business has outgrown its current systems and how to spot the red flags before burnout hits.
  • How to move from “I have to handle it” to “The system will handle it”  and start building a truly self-running practice.

Who This Episode Is For:

  • Practice owners feeling overwhelmed, bottlenecked, or like their business is running them (instead of the other way around).
  • Clinicians and group practice owners who want real freedom, not just a bigger to-do list.
  • Anyone ready to move from hustle and chaos to clarity, consistency, and genuine flexibility.

Tune in for a practical, honest conversation about what it really takes to create a business that serves your clients, your team, and - most importantly - you. 

Enjoy this essential topic on building 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, spectacular private practice owner. My name is Gerda Muller, and you are listening to the Private Practice Success Podcast, and this is episode number 63.

The title of today's episode is: More Clients, More Team..... But LESS Freedom? and Here's Why…. But let's start at the beginning. 

The Flexibility & Freedom Trap

I suspect that the majority of people decide to go into private practice, whether that is initially as a solo practitioner, and eventually potentially as a group practice owner for one of two reasons, and both of those two reasons start with the letter F, so think about why you decided to go into private practice? Maybe you left public mental health. Maybe you left an NGO. Maybe you left any type of organisation and you went, ‘You know what? I'm going to start my own private practice.’ I don't know about you, but for me it was the first F - Flexibility. 

I started my practice when my daughter had just entered prep at school and I just had my second baby and I was not working, was on maternity leave and I just went, ‘You know what? My kids are incredibly important to me. I want to be there. I want to be able to collect Cassidy from school. I want to be able to go to the tuck shop and help out. I want to be able to go to the swimming carnivals, and all of those things without needing to ask somebody for permission. I want to have flexibility.’ And linked to that was the second F - which is freedom. Time freedom, freedom to set my own work hours. Freedom to book out today if I want to go to that swimming carnival. Freedom, so important. And those two F’s - Flexibility and Freedom are connected, because when you have flexibility, you have freedom. And when you have freedom, you have flexibility. That's why I went into private practice. Maybe that's the same for you. 

But what often happens is that three to six months in, and for some people it might take a bit longer, you realise, ‘Hang on.  I went into this for flexibility and freedom, and it feels like I have none. Because if I don't work, I don't get paid. It's all reliant on me.’ And that is particularly true if you are a solo practice owner. Like you are the one sitting performing the work, and you're the one that bills the money. So if you are not working, there's no money coming into your business and therefore you can't get paid. And before you know it, you feel stuck. And that flexibility and freedom that you wanted becomes more and more elusive. Or some people might go, ‘No, I am going to book out this time. I am going to go to the athletics carnival and swimming and all the other things.’ But whilst you're there, you're feeling guilty because you are now not available for your clients. Or you constantly on your phone checking emails because you don't want to get back into the practice tomorrow and have all this work that is now heaped up because you went there, or phone calls that need to be returned. So there's no real freedom. And that is the trap of business ownership. 

We look at what other people are doing as business owners, and we only see, you know, that top part of the iceberg, you don't see the bottom part of the iceberg, that old iceberg analogy. So we often look at business ownership and think, ‘Oh, you know, I, I want that.’ But it's not always all that it seems to be, there's a lot of sacrifice. Even if you then become a group practice owner, you might go, ‘Okay, I'm done with this. I don't want to be the only one owning the money, I've got all these clients and I feel guilty because I can't see all of them. I have to refer people on. Or they're sitting on a wait list - let's expand. Let's get more clinicians on board because then they can do some of the work taking that off my plate, and they can also be earning money. I will make sure that they also contribute to the bills and the expenses, hopefully even a little bit towards profit, so I'm going to hire clinicians.’ or ‘I'm going to contract contractors to help me,’ and then you hire more clinicians. You might even go, ‘You know what, I'm going to be clever, because if I hire more team, there's going to be more admin. So I'm going to hire a receptionist or an admin person, or somebody in that supportive role, maybe get some VA people to answer the phone to the very least and handle enquiries - and THAT is going to give me more freedom. “ Yes, let's do this!” and then you do that.

But then another three to six months in, you realise, Geez, Louise, what just happened? I have even more freaking work now. More and more decisions are landing on my desk. More people are now coming to me for decisions for input - they've got questions, they've got concerns - I need to now look after all these people. So my energetic drain has not only doubled, it has by 10 times, and it doesn't feel like flexibility, and it doesn't feel like freedom. Instead, I feel more chained to this business than ever.  

Has this been the case for you? Is this maybe how you're feeling right now? The things and the people that you thought are going to help you move towards flexibility and freedom have actually had the opposite effect. And I want to be clear here, that if this is what you are experiencing right now, please know that this is not a growth problem, because I don't want to stop you from growing. Growth is amazing. Growth is how we increase our impact as allied health professionals. 

The Real Problem

This isn't a growth problem. This is an optimisation problem. And at a high level, that is what we are actually going to be talking about today, because that is the answer to this question of:  I've got more clients, more team, but I've got less freedom. Why is that? How do we fix that?

Let's start by looking at and also acknowledging that inherently as allied health professionals, AKA, helping professionals, we are inherently heart driven. It's a big part of what we bring into our businesses. We genuinely care about our clients, and as a result of that, we want to help more people, which is why we go from solo to group practice ownership. It's why we grow our group practice. It's why we might add additional services. It is why we might add additional locations - because we care. We want to help, we want to have an impact. And as a result of that, we keep saying yes, so that we can help. And there's nothing wrong with that. I've done that many times over. I'm actually in the process of doing that right now and expanding my own group of private practice. 

But if it's not done in the right way, it will break your business. But your business doesn't break because you don't care enough about people, it breaks because it grows without the necessary frameworks to support it. And when I say frameworks, people just think of systems, right? But you can have systems, but if your systems aren't optimised, it's not going to work. And when I say the word optimisation, that's not about being like a corporate business, right? I don't expect you to be Westpac here. Optimising in terms of a small business and allied health business. So it's not about adding more red tape or bureaucracy. That's why I love being a small business owner. There isn’t any red tape and bureaucracy, right? I would be so frustrated working for the government because I couldn't tolerate red tape and bureaucracy. It's just not who I am. I'm not a good fit. They should never hire me. Not that they would have that option because I won't be applying. And it's also not about stripping that care factor, that heart factor, that humanity out of your care and out of your systems… know that that is not what I mean when I say optimisation. 

When I refer to the word optimisation in Allied health private practice, it is about an intentional refinement, so that your practice can grow without consuming you - the human behind it all in the process. Because if you, as the practice owner is consumed, everything falls apart, and I don't want that. A lot of practice owners I talk to, more and more these days say things along the lines of the following to me, and let's see if one of these is true for you as well. They say things like, ‘Gerda, everything comes back to me. I can't properly step away. I can't even have a weekend without having to do something on the business or in the business.’  ‘Gerda, I've got a great team, but I am a constant bottleneck and it causes me such guilt. Guilt because I feel like I'm letting my team down - and some people say I'm the bottleneck and causes me not guilt, but resentment, because I'm having to do all this work, and my pay check is less than that of my clinical team, and that doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel fair for all the time and effort I'm putting in and the energy.’

Practice owners are saying, ‘Gerda, are we busy? But there's just no freaking profit. The profit and the financial outcomes just do not match the effort and the work that's being put in, and that is so freaking discouraging. I don’t know how long I can go on like this.’ And another one which I can actually relate to from the early years , when I didn't know anything about business was when they tell me, ‘Gerda, I feel like I am the one responsible for holding everything together, and that pressure is immense. I feel like I've got this big weight upon my shoulders and it's always there, I cannot escape from it. It feels like if I just wobble, things are going to come crashing down, and I don't know what to do about it.’ 

So if any of those things are present for you right now, I don't want to say, you know, it feels like such a cliche these days, everybody's saying, ‘You're not alone in this.’ But it's true - you're not alone. People just don't say the stuff outright, okay. They don't say it in Facebook groups and in things like that. I have been to so many networking events in the last 20 years, and only once, I clearly remember it because I was so flabbergasted. You know when people say: Hey, how are you? How are you going? Everybody says Good, thank you. How are you? How's the practice going? Oh, fabulous. It's great. It's amazing. In those 20 years, I only once went to a networking event where somebody told me it was not going well. And I think what made it stand out really was this wasn't a big networking event and it wasn't a one-to-one conversation. We actually went to an event and, we were sitting in, in my mind, I can see the image - we were like around a boardroom table and we were all these practice owners sitting, and somebody asked this lady, ‘How's your practice going?’ And I think we were waiting for some, the facilitator or coordinator to come in that was going to facilitate this meeting. And she just went, ‘So bad. Business is so bad. What about you guys? Is the same happening for you?’ 

There was just this silence. I think everybody was just going, hang on, that's not socially appropriate. You're not allowed to say that business is shit. You mean to say no, it's all good. So yeah, you actually are not alone. There is a lot of, I think, shame around when things aren't going well. There's a lot of masking from a business perspective to use that term, in terms of showing that, you know, I've got this all, all together. Most people don't. And I am yet to meet a practice owner that has a perfect practice. Guess what? Even my practice isn't perfect. Yes. After how many years? I started it in 2007, still not freaking perfect. And you know what? If it was perfect, that would be a big freaking red flag.  And you know why that is? Because a business operates within a larger macro system. Business is impacted by what's happening in the markets, the economic markets. It's impacted by what happens in the political markets. It's not a stagnant organism. It has to constantly adjust to what is happening. It's why it's so fun, because it's not boring. 

The goal is to make business as boring as possible by optimising, by having great frameworks in place. But even if you do all those things, shit still happens. Just looking at the NDIS contexts right now in Australia, you know, the changes of thriving kids, all of those are variables is going to impact a lot of businesses in the industry. If there's changes to Medicare, anything can happen and we need a clear framework so that when the government, politically or the economic markets throws something at us, we can actually absorb that, because we've got that optimised framework and system around our business. If you don't have that, that's when everything just implodes on itself. Because now you need to hold all of this shit together anyway, and deal with this political grenade that has been tossed at you.

So coming back to what practice owners tell me, if any of those things are true for, know that this is not a personal failing. What it is a signal. It is a red flag signal to say, ‘Hey, your business has most probably outgrown its current systems.’ Now if you are listening to this and you going, ‘Oh, geez, thank you very much, Gerda. I was planning on expanding or growing and now you've taken the wind out of my sails because this does not sound like freaking fun.’ That's not the purpose here, okay? Because the thing is, growth is not the problem. It's not the growth and or expansion that is creating the chaos. When you expand and when you grow, you know what happens - the growth is just exposing what was already missing - - t was already missing, you just didn't know it. Because when you are operating on a smaller scale, it's easier to hold all those pieces together as one person, as one business owner, right? It's just easier. And it's like everything expands when the business expands, your time needs to expand with it - if you haven't optimised your frameworks. So when a practice therefore grows faster than the framework grows, that's when inconsistency starts to occur, and that always leads to problems, that's when inefficiency shows up - again, leads to problems. Decision fatigue sets in, again, leads to problems.

You can't make good decisions when you suffer from decision fatigue - that's when you say yes, when you should say no, and you say no when you should say yes. And the problems that it causes down the track is huge. I know because I help practice owners fix those every day. And I love being able to help them fix it, but I can see the toll it takes on people. And the other one - owner dependency, because it becomes more and more dependent on you. And when all of these things happen, the eventual outcome, for a lot of practice owners, is burnout - and a lot of times it is silent burnout - they suffer in silence, and they feel like there is nobody that can help. But when you do prioritise optimising your frameworks, that will allow your growth and the expansion that you want, because you want to have more impact. That's when it becomes sustainable. 

The Solution: Intentional Optimisation 

Okay, so let's agree on a working definition of what optimisation actually is within allied health private practice. This is my definition that I share with my Private Practice Success Academy - To optimise your Allied Health Private practice means to: intentionally refine, streamline, and enhance every aspect of your business. Whether that is clinical, administrative, or operational. So that you can achieve the best possible outcomes for your clients, your team, your business, and yourself. It's about making the most of your resources, reducing inefficiencies and continuously improving your systems and processes. 

I want to be clear here, optimisation is not about doing more. It is about designing the business, so that it can function without constant business owner intervention. This is why frameworks matter. And optimisation happens through frameworks. So it's the frameworks that creates the clarity, the consistency, the repeatability, and therefore the confidence - not only for yourself, but also for the team and the people that's working within those frameworks - and it turns the thinking of, I'll just handle it to The system will handle it. Just imagine the freedom that comes with that. Being able to move from, I have to handle it to The system will handle it, because now there's frameworks in place. And this is where optimisation becomes the bridge to something way bigger, the bridge to something that a lot of practice owners are really secretly wanting. 

You would've heard me talk about the self-running practice. Now the self-running practice only exists if you have self-running practice systems. And I want to be clear, a self-running practice doesn't mean that you as the owner just poof, disappears, okay? This is not a magic trick. What it does mean is that the practice and the team is no longer dependent on you for day-to-day functioning. This is why I live six hours drive on a good day, but with the traffic around Brisbane, it's probably closer to seven and a half hours drive. That's how far away I live from my practice. I spend roughly 45 minutes a week mentoring the person that runs my practice. So I've not totally disappeared, I still know what's happening on the ground. I provide a mentoring, coaching, and consulting role to that person to support them to execute the vision that I have for my business. And it's not because I'm special or anything that I get to have that, every one of you listening to this episode can have this if you decide to install what I refer to as self-running practice systems. It didn't happen by accident for me, I had to consciously plan it, and I did it through optimisation.

I hear a lot of people talk about - I'm working on my systems, I don't want to grow, I'm in consolidation, I'm working on my systems. And I think working on your systems is fabulous, it's what you should do, this is what this episode is all about, okay. But here's the part that people often miss - you can Google systems, you can ask in Facebook groups, you can copy bits and pieces from other practices, you can even ask chat GPT for input. But when systems aren't designed for allied health, for compliance, for your specific business model, and for your stage of growth or like what I like to call your Level of Private Practice Development -  it just won't stick. And guess what? You can't just consider one of those things, you need to consider all of them, in optimising the systems that's right for you. And what ends up happening, people do little bits and pieces, and a lot of times give up halfway through the process, so there's half-built processes. Which means that there's team confusion, there's constant re-explaining, and you are still exactly where you were back in the centre, being the person holding it all together, with everything coming to you, and that is not optimisation, that is just rearranging the chaos - just rearranging it. You felt like you were doing something about it, but nah, you just rearranged the pieces on the board, but all the pieces are freaking still there, and that is freaking exhausting to feel like you've put in an effort - just to get the exact same result. 

I see it so often, when there is an answer to it, and that is often when people finally decide to reach out to me and come and work with me within the Private Practice Success Academy, because first and foremost, they don't have to start from scratch. They get proven frameworks, tested policies, very clear guardrails.  I don't say you must do it this way. I go - These are the guardrails in order for this process policy framework to work, and I recommend you don't go outside these guardrails. How you operate within these guardrails, let's align that to your model to your stage of business, to your vision for your individual practice. But having those guardrails are incredibly important, and guardrails from somebody that's been there, done that made every freaking mistake in the book - and not only that - has also had the absolute privilege of other practice owners letting me in into their mistakes. Letting me into their business, into their learnings, which I can then all pull together in setting those guardrails, right, so that we can have frameworks and systems that's specifically designed for Allied Health, high compliance, highly regulated industry, so that we are not reinventing the wheel, we are installing what already works. 

When you can do that, that's when optimisation becomes faster, cleaner, and far less exhausting. So, if right now your practice feels like it's growing really quickly, amazing, I love that. But if it is simultaneously feeling heavier, instead of lighter, relying on you more than you'd like, or limiting your ability to step back, then I want you to consider - maybe the next level of growth for you shouldn't be to put in more effort. It should be about optimised frameworks, and installing the systems that allows your practice to truly run with or without you - whatever you choose, and that is the freedom bit coming in there for why people started. A lot of people tell me, Gerda, I don't want to not do clinical work, I love clinical work, great - but having the freedom to do as much with little clinical work as you want is flexibility and freedom, that's what I want for us as business owners. 

Achieving this is one of the big reasons why a lot of people do decide to jump in and join me in the Private Practice Success Academy, because one of the essential three phases that we go through when people become part of the mastermind is what I refer to as the SRP system installation.  So SRP is a self-running practice system installation, because the goal here is to optimise your frameworks, so it can free up your time, reduce your mental load, and bring you closer to a business that actually supports you, and we do it one framework at a time - that's how you get it done. I think a lot of times people just go, ‘I want to do it all right now, all at the same time.’ No, that's when you set yourself up for failure. One of my biggest jobs as the person that facilitates the PPS Academy is to keep people accountable to doing just one thing at a time - one thing at a time. 

Of course, as always, there's an open standing invitation for you to reach out if you want my help and support in getting it done - I'm going to be honest with you here, it's not an easy process, and there are no shortcuts. However, when you work with somebody like myself, we can fast track the process, because you don't have to reinvent the wheel.  Alright, so you know where to find me. Hop on over to the show notes, and if you are interested in how I can help, there is a triage form, just complete it, and I will be in touch. 

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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