The Private Practice Success Podcast

68. The Hidden Revenue Engine in Your Private Practice

• Gerda Muller • Episode 68

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In this episode 68, Gerda challenges one of the most common assumptions in private practice and reveals the often overlooked driver of sustainable growth, profitability, and client experience, being your admin team.

While most practice owners focus on increasing fees, hiring more clinicians, or ramping up marketing, Gerda unpacks why none of these strategies will deliver consistent results without a high-performing front desk team supporting them. Your admin team isn’t just answering phones - they are the engine room of your business, influencing conversions, protecting revenue, and safeguarding compliance.

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

  • The 3 common red flags that signal your admin function is costing you money.
  • How lost revenue opportunities are quietly slipping through the cracks.
  • Why admin overwhelm leads to inefficiency, mistakes, and burnout.
  • A powerful mindset shift to stop seeing admin as “overheads” and start leveraging them as your front desk operating system.

Who This Episode Is For:

  • Practice owners feeling stuck despite investing in marketing, hiring, or pricing strategies.
  • Business owners who are ready to build a more streamlined, scalable, and sustainable practice.
  • Anyone who suspects their admin team could be doing more, but isn’t sure how to unlock it.

If you’re serious about building a Self-Running Practice™ that runs smoothly, delivers exceptional client care, and protects your profit, then this episode is a must-listen, because your admin team isn’t just your admin support, they are your hidden revenue engine allowing you to build a practice you can't stop smiling about 😍

Want more info on The Ultimate Admin Training Course?

Email Gerda at gerdam@private-practice-success.com and she’ll send you all the details. 

Connect with Private Practice Success & Gerda here:

Well, hello there awesome private practice owner. My name is Gerda Muller, and you are listening to the Private Practice Success Podcast, and this is episode number 68.

Today I want to talk to you about The Hidden Revenue Engine in Your Private Practice, and we are going to start this topic of discussion with a one question quiz. This is the question I have for you: Tell me, based on everything that you know right now about your own experience within private practice, what you've heard, what you've read, maybe what you've listened to on my podcast or any other podcast. What do you think is the number one key to growing your practice? I'm going to pause here for a second. The first thing that pops into your mind. What is it? Now, obviously it's going to be different for most people, they’re going to have something else that they're going to think of. But I am going to bet that whatever popped into your mind is one of the following three things, and if there's a fourth or a fifth for something else that I'm not thinking of, please feel free to email me and let me know, my email is in the show notes. 

I'm going to guess that your answer to the question: What is the number one key to growing your private practice, is one of the following three things: You are either thinking I need to increase my fees.  Two, you might be thinking I need to recruit more clinicians. Or three, you might be thinking, I need to do more marketing because I need more clients to fill the books. Was it one, two, or three for you? Or maybe you actually thought of a combination or maybe you thought I need all three. Now you are not wrong.  But while all three of these things are technically true and could be the key growth driver for your practice. What I've learned, unfortunately, working with hundreds of private practice owners by now over the last 10 years, having run my own and still do run my own two group private practices, there is another factor which is very often overlooked. I would say that this is also a key factor to growing your practice. Any ideas of what that is? Because you can do all of those first three things that might've popped into your head. But if you don't have this one, none of that's going to work. You want to know what it is. I've left you in suspense for long enough now. It is your admin team, your front desk team, your receptionist, your admin assistants, your practice manager.

Your admin team is actually the team that determines whether those other things are going to be working. So yes, those other things are key to growing your practice, but if you do not give your admin team the same level of importance and priority, you are going to just be staying stuck in the mud and not growing your practice, and you're going to be pulling your hair out thinking, why? Because I'm doing all these things and it's still not working, and this is why. Let's talk about this. Let's see if you agree. Because like I said, I've seen this. I have seen people with premium pricing. I have seen people have a menu of fees, like, you know, from low to high or scaling fees is a word that a lot of people use. I have seen people run bulk billing solo and group practices. I’ve seen people do all three of those pricing strategies, and they must be all thinking, surely, I'm doing the right thing here, and it's still not enough to get clients to say yes and book in.

Then I speak to other practice owners that go, ‘You know what, Gerda, I am really prioritising my marketing efforts. I am doing all of the things. I've got a big marketing budget. We are consistent with doing all the strategies and still things aren't working.’ And then I have other practice owners that tell me, ‘Gerda, I know how important my team is. I recruit really great people. I prioritise their training and their professional development because they are the people doing the billable work. They're my talent. They're the ones providing the clinical services.’ And people I get that, you need to do all of those things - but you cannot neglect your admin team, because if you don't give them the same level of attention and importance, all that other stuff isn't going to work. Because your admin team is not just the person that answers the phone. They are not just the person that sends off the invoices or does the billing. Your admin team is the engine room of your business, because they control the diary. They control the intake process. They control a significant aspect of the customer experience, and they, very importantly, they influence whether an enquiry and or referral actually becomes a booked client appointment. 

Alternatively, whether that enquiry and referral just disappear into the void. So do not make this mistake, because if you fail to give your admin team the attention it deserves, one of the following three things are going to happen. So as we go through this, I want you to also assess, is this happening in my business? Because this is going to be your red flags to tell you that you might have been neglecting your admin team. Because I'm pretty sure none of us are going to go, ‘Yeah, I'm neglecting my admin team.’ No, we are all doing the very best we can. I know you are. You are doing the very best you can with your current constraints that you have, but it's really important for us to become aware if there's something that we aren't doing.  And therefore I want to help you here, connect the dots. I want you to connect the dots between the problems you might be having right now and what the solution to that is. So I'm going to talk about three specific problems that I see that often pop up as a result of the admin team not getting that attention and importance that they deserve. So let's go through this. Make mental notes or even written notes if you are at the desk as we go through this.

Red Flag #1: Lost Revenue Opportunities 

Remember I said I want to talk to you today about the hidden revenue engine in your practice? Hmm, we are starting to connect the dots here, right? Recently, have you noticed lost revenue opportunities within your business? This could look like the following: Maybe you've got a cancellation policy, but admin never charges cancellation fees and like there's always a reason, there's always an excuse why it's not happening. Maybe there's referrals coming in. That email inbox or that fax or however you get your referrals is running hot, but it's like, it's not translating into bookings. Maybe you charge after hours rates, but your admin team keeps on forgetting to charge it.  Maybe there's some billing mistakes - those are all examples of lost revenue opportunities, and there's many, many more where that came from.  

Lost revenue opportunities happen when your admin team don't understand the commercial realities of running a private practice. The commercial realities of running something that's an actual business. Because we're not an NGO, and we are not a charity. Yes, we work in the health, allied health and mental health field. But when you work at a private practice, revenue is what pays our bills and what pays our wages. And the admin team needs to understand that when they decide that they're not going to charge that cancellation fee or they're just going to waive it, that that impacts the bottom line, and they need to understand those things. So is that happening in your practice? Yes or no?

Red Flag #2: An Overwhelmed and Unproductive Admin Team

In other words, they're constantly coming to you saying, we are overwhelmed. Maybe they're just straight up being honest and saying, ‘I'm overwhelmed. I can't do more.’ Maybe they're saying, ‘We need more hours, we need more admin shifts, we need additional admin resources.’ Maybe they're dropping the ball and making mistakes and they're telling you that they're feeling overwhelmed and burned out. And then you go, Oh okay, then I'm going to back off, and, you know, not put more pressure on them. And sometimes this happens for various different reasons. Sometimes the admin team just gets thrown into the deep end. Sometimes they aren't really formally trained properly. Yes, they get training, but it's not what I would define as proper front desk training. Or maybe they're given no clear structure and frameworks to follow in order to do their job, and that will lead to overwhelm. Maybe they've got no idea what their priorities are at the front desk or how to prioritise, how to set boundaries with requests that come to them. 

All of that stuff will be leading to them dropping those balls left, right and centre, as I said, and then they stay stuck in overwhelm. And we know that when you are overwhelmed, that's not good for your mental health, it's not good for your self-esteem, and it's really hard to step out of it unless you do something concrete about it. Your team cannot be productive, and they cannot be efficient when they're overwhelmed.

Red Flag #3: Non-Compliance

This is a big one within allied health, because let's face it, we've got a lot more compliance issues than most other industries out there. And maybe every industry thinks that, right? They think like we've got the most rules and regulations, but I know that we've got a shit ton of them, so it is so important for admin to know what the compliance standards, rules and regulations that their role is governed by, but also the whole of practice is governed by.

So ask yourself this: How is your admin team going when it comes to knowing the privacy legislation, knowing processes and procedures around, you know, file requests and parental consent and all that stuff, that's all compliance stuff. How confident are they in dealing with funding bodies, understanding the different rules and regulations that go with each of the different funding streams that are out there? Because if your admin team doesn't know how to operate compliantly, they are putting your entire business at risk. One person. That person answering the phone, welcoming your clients. That person can put the entire business at risk. That's why I'm saying their role is just as important as any other role within the business.

Now, if you are listening to this and you're thinking, well, thank goodness I don't have these issues within my business, it's actually good when you're listening to a podcast episode and you're going, yeah, we've got that. You need to celebrate that because it's hard running a business. And I don't know if you are like me, I'm a bit of a fault finder because I'm a problem solver inherently, so I always see the gaps first. I see the missing parts and the missing pieces. So I've had to train myself over the years to see the good stuff. To see the wins and the celebrations and the, yeah, that bit we've got. So if that is, you sit in that space as well of going, ‘Yeah, that part. I've worked hard at establishing it and I've got this.’ But I also want to ask you, could there be a next level? Because what I also know is that every system that you have can be optimised. And I've actually done a previous podcast episode on optimisation. I think I'm just checking you on my Excel document in my Google Drive. I think it was episode 63 and that episode title was More clients, More team, but Less Freedom, and Here's Why, and that was all about optimisation. Because I can tell you now, even though you might have a high functioning admin team, I'm pretty sure. That I can share something with you that we can optimise, because we never know everything and you don't know what you don't know until you know what you don't know.  I love that saying. I so love it. 

On the other hand, you might be thinking, ‘Okay, I am starting to connect some dots here. Maybe I've got one, maybe I've got two. Maybe I've got three of those freaking red flags.’ You know what, now you know, now you know this red flag, can be solved and now I know that it can be done and now I need to figure out how to do that.

Admin as a Fixed Overhead

Before I share some thoughts on that, I just want to come back to another thought that I'm having, because I think it's really important for me to make this point. This is that I often hear practice owners referring to the admin team as being part of their overheads. Now that is accurate, 100%. Your admin team, if they are employed. So you're not contracting a VA service, you don't have somebody that's a contractor for you, and I generally don't recommend having an admin person on as a contractor. . When they are permanent part-time or full-time employees, they most certainly meet the definition of being an overhead.

If we had to define your business overheads, those are considered ongoing indirect costs required to operate your company, which is your practice, that are not directly tied to producing your specific product or the actual service. If we wanted to take it a step deeper, there's different types of overhead. You have your fixed overheads and then you've got your variable overheads. So, if we look in terms of our fixed overheads, examples of that are like your rent you pay that every month. Whether you use the space or not, doesn't matter how many clients we see. The rent is the same.  Same with your insurance. If you've got insurance for your business, whether there's one client coming through the doors, none or a hundred, it's the same day in and day out. Then the other one is of course, salaries.  Salaries and wages of your permanent employees. Which means that your admin team will be part of your fixed overheads because their salaries or wages are the same week in week out.

Now the same could hold true of your clinical team. Now, your clinical team, when they are permanently employed, are also considered part of your fixed overheads. Because whether they see one client or 10 clients a week or 20 clients a week, you need to pay them the same amount of money, so that part of the set salaries and wages are considered part of your fixed overheads. However, and this is the point I want to make, I find that practice owners are very often happy to, in inverted commerce, ‘tolerate’ clinician wages as an expense line on their profit and loss statement because the clinicians are billing. They are the talent providing the actual service, and they are there for a revenue generating service. Although they're part of those fixed overheads, they are bringing in money ,and we can draw like a direct line between the work that they do and the revenue coming in.

So as a practice owner, they feel they've got more control over making sure that revenue still comes in - which is your job, because if revenue isn’t coming in, you can't pay anybody there, and we all need to close the doors and start from scratch, and we are all out of a job. So that needs to happen. So in the mind of the practice owner, it's like we tolerate clinician wages when they're employees, more easily than admin. And sometimes therefore we also settle, and it's almost like we are stuck, for lack of a better word, because that's not what it is. But it's almost like I can't do anything about this, it is what it is. Once they're permanent, I'm stuck with this expense. And this type of thinking normally comes up when there's cashflow issues, when the profit margins have been declining and declining, when there might have been a drop in revenue, or maybe the revenues just stayed the same or even increased, but expenses have just gone up and up and up. So the margins have gone down, and then people start to think about these teams in those terms.

However, there's a really important mindset shift that you are able to make here, and this is what sets the really successful practice owner apart from the one that just continues to do the same thing, day in, day out, week in, week out, month in, month out, year in, year out out. And they come to me and they tell me, I've tried everything. I've been doing this for years. This is just how business is in our industry. And they've really started to settle. It's like, this is just how it is. Then I look underneath the hood of their business and I'm thinking, no, it's not. This is what you think it is. I've got the privilege to see within a lot of businesses, and I can tell you now that it doesn't have to be like this. This level of performance, of productivity, of efficiency, of delivery, there is a lot more juice that you can squeeze out of this orange without ruining the orange. Now, this is probably not the best analogy that I could have come up with, but I do hope that you get what I'm saying here - and that is, by actually starting to change how you look at your admin team,

Reframe your Admin Team as being your Front Desk Operating System

Yes, your accountant will say that you are permanently employed admin team as part of your overheads. But for you as the business owner, I really want you to work on reframing them as being part of your front desk operating system. They are the front desk and or frontline operating system of your business. So, if you've actually properly trained them, they become not just reception or admin officers or those traditional titles, they become client experience managers. They become your revenue protectors. They become your compliance guardians. They should be the eyes and ears picking up on stuff when it comes to compliance. They will become your operational coordinators. Now, imagine having an admin team that can do all of that for you. Don't you want that? Just imagine what your business can achieve if that is the admin team that you have. And I want that for each and every one of you.  

Now you might be thinking, ‘Well, that's all good and well Gerda, but how do I make sure that this is what happens for my team and within my business.’ What I can say is that I, as a very long-standing practice owner, like next year, it will be freaking 20 years, that is two decades. Next year, my business will be 20 years old. So when I say he's a longstanding practice owner, I mean longstanding. I know how hard it is because I've searched up and down, left, right and centre everywhere over the years and especially in those early years, and it's really hard to find allied health specific and particularly mental health specific practice management training. Yes, there are practice management trainings out there, but it's very generalised and a lot of them have got more of a medical focus. Whereas, as a business owner, I want something specific to allied health and particularly mental health in my instance. So I know it's hard to find that. 

I've also experienced firsthand what an empowered admin team can accomplish when they actually get the training that they need. I feel very privileged and very blessed that I've got an admin team, that are client experience managers that are revenue protectors, that are compliance guardians, that are operational coordinators, who consistently evolves and grows with the business. People who get those commercial realities of running an allied health practice, whether they're with me every step of the way. I often hear stories from practice owners where it feels like they either need to constantly convince their team to follow processes and procedures, or that they get constant resistance from their team about imposing policies and processes at the front desk. It's like, that's not what it should be like, your admin team should be there by your side walking this road with you - and that is what I want for each and every one of you. That empowered admin team that can accomplish. Whatever the goals are that you have for your business. 

So what I decided to do last year is I launched a training that was called The Ultimate Admin Training Course, and this was a result of me and Ash Davison putting our heads together and really going, what is it that we have taught our admin team over the years. Now, if you are wondering who Ash is, Ash actually started working with me as a receptionist back in the day. Interesting thought, those days, we were advertising for receptionists on a platform called Gumtree. Remember that? So Ash found me on Gumtree and started as a receptionist. She worked her way up to a practice manager and for the last almost 18 months. She's been my director of strategy and operations for my group private practice. So we put our heads together and we really unpacked what it is that we do, and we also unpacked what is the stuff that we teach to the members within our Private Practice Success Academy, and we extracted practice management specific content in order to share within this program. And it was a huge success. It was a live program last year that went for three months. And it was such fun. Such fun. So needless to say, we've decided to do it again in April, 2026. We only did it once last year, and we are only going to do it once this year. Because it does take a full 12 weeks out of our calendar. But we are definitely committed to doing it live, because we found last here that a lot of the gold was in the live Q&A’s, where people could show up and ask any and all questions that they wanted to. But anyway, I'm jumping the gun. So let me start at the beginning.

The 2026 Ultimate Admin Training Course

This is your formal invitation to enrol your admin team into the 2026 Ultimate Admin Training course. Doors open to the Facebook group on the 20th of April, and the course officially starts on the 27th of April, 2026. This, just like last year, will be a 12 week live admin and practice management training that has been specifically designed for allied health and mental health administrative team members, and this is irrespective of their level of experience. Whether they started as your receptionist yesterday, or they've been in your business as practice manager for the last 10 years, they will find value from this program. They don't have to find value from every sentence we share with them. Sometimes it's that one thing that can make a hundred thousand dollars difference in your business, and every team member that does this training is going to look at it through a different filter. They're going to take something different away. I can tell you, if I were to take the entire cohort that we had last here and put them through this training again, they will get value, because it's almost 12 months later.  Last year we ran it in September, so even less than 12 months. But because time has passed, they'll be looking at all the content, the training, even if it's exactly the same, and they will be taking something different away from it. This is just how that works. Irrespective of their level of experience, this is for them. 

We've divided it into three parts, and those parts contain the 12 modules. So Part One is going to be all about Compliance and Best Practice. I'm just going to run through this very, very briefly because I'll tell you where to get more information if you are interested. So Module One is going to be Understanding Confidentiality and Privacy in Allied Health. Module Two is going to be Theoretical Basics. Module Three is Customer Service. Module Four is Medicare Compliance. Module Five is Navigating Risk. So that is part one all about compliance and best practice. By completing part one, your entire admin team will now be able to confidently operate within those legal funding and ethical frameworks, so that they can protect your business and the clinical team and the clients.

Part Two is where we're going to crush that overwhelm I spoke about earlier, so that we can increase productivity. Part Two has got three modules. Module Six is going to be about Dealing with Difficult Clients. Module Seven is what we call The Rules of the Game, which is all about their role and their boundaries of their role. Module Eight is going to be all about Prioritisation and Task Management.  So the result of completing Part Two will be that your admin team will feel more in control, better supported, and a heck of a lot more capable in managing all the demands of their role. That's a really important one, because there's so much stuff that they need to do at the front desk. 

Then Part Three is going to be about driving revenue and profit, and there's four modules here. Module Nine is going to be on the topic of Dynamic Diary Management. Module 10 is going to be Converting with Compassion. So that's all about how do we engage in that in inverted commas ‘Sales Process Within Allied Health.’ Module 11 is entitled Golden Opportunities - Making Every Referral Count. Module 12 is about Finance and Commercial Judgment. So as a result of completing Part Three, your admin staff will now become a key part of your revenue engine. They're not just going to be keeping the front desk and the diary running. They're going to now actually, be in a position to actively contribute to profitability. Because yes, when you think billable KPIs, you're probably thinking clinicians, they are the team that generates the revenue. Guess what? Your admin team also generates revenue, and you are leaving money on the table if you do not empower them in understanding the important role that they play.

So that's just a bit of a course outline. Of course, with every module, there's a recorded training. Every week there's a one-hour Q&A. Every training will come with slides, depending on the topic. There might be templates, outlines, checklists, scripts. We give you whatever you need to implement the training that we give you. Now if the sounds of interest to you and you would like more information, hop on over to the show notes and I will pop in there for you a link to the program outline. Check it out, and if you've got any additional questions, just flick me an email and ask, it's what I am here for. The one thing I would say that is very different from my program that a lot of other programs out there is that there is no pressure to complete the training within that 12-week period. Because I know how business works, I know how life works, and I know that shit happens. And even though you've got all your ducks in a row, even though this might be the perfect time for you to do this, let's face it, there's no perfect time to do anything in life. Stuff's going to happen, and I do not want to put more pressure on you. I know there's also a different school of thought that says that, well, if you don't give people a deadline, they're never going to do it. But it's like, I get that. I get that, but you know what? The overwhelm is real. The pressure is real. The burnout is real. I will not be contributing to that. So what we do is, yes, we deliver the content to you on a week-to-week basis, but at the end, you will have access to a Google Drive folder with all the training in it. So you can download it, pop it onto your laptop, onto your computer, and you can use it in the future. So as long as you keep it on your computer, you won't lose access to it. 

There isn't a member's portal or anything like that. I specifically design it in a manner that this becomes yours to use at your practice. Obviously, you can't share it with other people, because the rights that I'm going to give you as part of being an attendee is to use everything I give you, but within your own practice.  Which means that if you put your admin team member into this course and they go for maternity leave, or they resign for whatever, because they're moving away to the other side of the country, then you don't have to pay again. All you need to do is go, okay, there's this Google Drive; Here's the links to the videos. Here's the resources. I want you to work through this as part of your onboarding so you can make these training sessions as part of your onboarding assets within your business. I give you full rights to do that, but I give you all of that information as well in the program outline, because I want to empower as many of your team members as possible because if I can empower your admin team, I'm empowering you - so that you can get help, so that you can focus your time on this bigger picture stuff, more strategy related things, so that you can help more people in better and more effective ways. This is why I'm doing it in this manner. 

Now, of course, if we decide to run this again in the future, and you want your future team members to have the live element access, you know that option might be there, but I'm not committing to running it again live in the future. What I am doing is committing to running it live in 2026, and it's only happening once this year, so I would be jumping in if I were you. I do want to, however, add one final but really important point, and this is that this training was specifically written with your admin team members in mind as the audience that we are talking to.   So Ash is not talking to the practice owner in there. Obviously if you're a practice owner, you can do that as well, right? I actually think you should be in it. But we are talking to admin team members because we want you to be able to take this or make it part of the training that you're going to give to all your admin team members over the next, how many years that you are going to have your business.

Alright to conclude, if you are serious about building a practice that runs smoothly, delivers exceptional client experience, and operates as a true business, maybe even become what I like to call a self-running practice, then investing in your admin team is one of the freaking smartest business decisions that you will make in 2026. I'm going to say this part again: Your admin team is way more than just the people answering the phones. They are the engine room of your practice. They are the hidden revenue engine within your business.

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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