Ep #41 - The Pricing Mistake That’s Quietly Killing Your Clinic

Most clinic owners don’t have a patient problem… they have a pricing problem.

In this episode of the Clinic Accelerator Series, Jody breaks down one of the most overlooked—and most dangerous—mistakes hormone clinic owners make when building their business.

If you’ve ever felt like:

•  You’re busy but not making the money you expected 
•  More patients didn’t actually solve your revenue problem 
•  Pricing feels like a guessing game 

This episode is for you.

Jody walks through the real reason clinics struggle financially—even when everything looks like it’s working—and shares the exact framework for building pricing that actually supports your business.

You’ll learn:

•  Why copying competitor pricing is costing you more than you think 
•  The difference between being busy and being profitable 
•  The real story behind a clinic that doubled patients… but not profit 
•  The 5-part pricing framework every clinic owner needs to understand 
•  How to stop discounting and start leading with confidence 
•  Why pricing is not “set it and forget it” (and what to do instead) 

This isn’t about charging more—it’s about building a business that works.

If you want predictable growth, it starts here.

This podcast is powered by Accelerated Medical Practices, where we believe hormone and wellness care should be both life-changing and profitable.  If you own or run a clinic and are interested in being a guest on the show, please complete the form here and let's connect!  Or email Jody at Jody@AcceleratedMedicalPractices.com.

 🚀 Grow your clinic with proven systems at AcceleratedMedicalPractices.com

For more Insights and Tips on Growing Your Hormone Clinic, subscribe to THE AMP Report sent every other Thursday and follow us on social media for "almost" daily tips! 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:14

Welcome to Beyond Hormones, the Business of Wellness, the podcast for hormone and functional medicine providers who want a thriving, predictably profitable practice, and maybe a little less stress along the way. Hi, I'm your host, Jody Lane, and I've worked with lots of clinics in marketing, sales, and business development, and I have seen what works and what doesn't. And here's what I believe. Hormone and wellness care should be available to everyone who wants it. And while providers know the medicine, many struggle with the business side of their cash practice. And that's where I come in. See, this podcast is here to share real strategies, real stories, things you can implement in your practice right away. So I am so glad you're here. Come on, let's go. Hey everybody, welcome back to the Clinic Accelerator Series here on the Beyond Hormones, the Business of Wellness podcast. Today we're going to talk about something that is one of my favorite topics, but for most clinic owners, they don't spend nearly enough time thinking about it. Although it is something that impacts everything in your business, and that's your pricing. Now, before you check out mentally, because this feels like one of those I'll deal with it later topics, I want you to stay with me for a minute because what I'm about to walk you through is one of the biggest hidden reasons that clinics struggle, even when everything else looks like it's working. Let me start with a simple question. How did you come up with your pricing? Think about it. I want you to really think about that moment at the very beginning when you decided what you were going to charge your patients. Because for most people, it wasn't based off strategy or math. It was just that moment. You looked around other clinics, maybe you made a few phone calls, you saw other people were charging, and then you said, Yeah, okay, that sounds good. I think I'll charge the same because it felt good in your gut. And then you moved on to other things because, of course, there are about a hundred other things that you need to do to grow your business. And I get it, because pricing feels overwhelming. It's not why you started your clinic in the first place. You didn't go to school to learn how to create overhead spreadsheets and build profit margins. You went to figure out how to help people. So pricing just feels like one of those things you just got to do and move on, check off your list, not something that you really spend time building with intention. But here is where that becomes a problem. See, when you build your pricing that way, what you're really doing is just guessing. You're copying the market. You're assuming that if somebody else is charging, it must be correct. But what you don't see and what you don't know is what's happening behind the scenes of those clinics. You don't know what their expenses are. You don't know what their margins are. You don't know if they're struggling. So now you're building your business on numbers that may not even work for them, let alone work for you. And that's where things start to really break down. Because pricing isn't just about patients, what patients will pay. It's about what you need to charge in order to support your business for it to survive and then grow. And when that part gets missed, you end up in a situation that I see all too often. The clinic is busy. Patients are coming in, the schedule is full, the team is working hard. From the outside, it looks successful. But inside, the owner is always stressed out. Cash flow is tight. There's never quite enough left over at the end of the month for themselves or to do things to grow the practice. And the assumption just becomes I just need more patience. That makes sense, right? So they push harder on marketing, they invest more money, they bring in more leads, more consults, more paying patients. But the pressure doesn't go away. They're just busier. And this is the moment where it really starts to hit because it doesn't make any sense. More patients should mean more money. But what if the problem was never the number of patients? What if the problem was what you were charging them? Let me illustrate this by telling you a story about a provider that I worked with. Her name was Amy. She has the perfect example of this. See, Amy is a nurse practitioner and she owns a gorgeous clinic. She is incredible at what she does. Her patients love her, she loves her patients, and she's built something that on paper looks like a dream clinic. But financially, she had been struggling for a while. So she came to me thinking she had a marketing problem. So that's what we went to work on her marketing. And we did a decent job. She doubled her patient volume within a year. She had more leads coming in every month. She had more consults on the books, and more patients were buying. The clinic got busier, but when I checked back with her after just four months, she was still struggling financially. She had the same stress, the same frustration. And that's when we decided to take a look at her pricing. And what we found was simple but powerful. Her pricing wasn't built to support the business she was running. It was built the way most clinics do it, based on the market, based on what felt reasonable when she opened her doors without actually accounting for what her profit needed to carry. So we went back to the drawing board and we rebuilt her pricing. We looked at her expenses, we calculated her overhead, we factored in all of her costs, and we figured out what profit margin she wanted to be at. And for the first time, she had pricing that actually made sense for her clinic. She was so excited. She felt confident. She was relieved. I went away, and then something happened that I really want you to pay attention to because this is where even the best strategies can fall apart. As she introduced her new pricing, patients pushed back. They hesitated. They said, that's more than I expected. And in the moment, Amy did what so many caring providers do because she wanted to help. She adjusted the price. Just a little and then a little bit more. And long before we knew about it, all of her patients were paying different prices for the same service. Her team didn't know what to say. She couldn't predict her revenue. And the system we had built started to completely unravel. Not because it wasn't built to work, but because it wasn't being held consistently. And this is the part that a lot of people miss because pricing is not just the math. After that part is over, it's then the behavior. It's deciding that the business you're building deserves to be supported with the pricing you came up with. Because here's the thing: if your pricing is wrong, it doesn't really matter how great your marketing is, how talented your providers are, or how much your patients love you, because the business will always feel harder than it should. But when your pricing is right, everything starts to work. You stop guessing, you stop reacting, you start making decisions from a place of clarity because you know your numbers, you know what it costs to run your clinic, you know what you need to charge to be profitable, and you can finally, finally grow with confidence instead. So let's actually talk about what it takes to fix this. Because I don't want this to just be one of those podcasts where you have this incredible realization. I want you to walk away with something you can act on and really make a difference in your clinic. So the first step is understanding your fixed expenses. That is, what does it cost to run your clinic every single month, whether you see one patient or a hundred patients? These are things like your rent and your staff, your software, your marketing expenses, everything you pay consistently on a monthly basis. And that is your baseline. That's what your business has to carry before you make a dollar in profit. Now the second step is understanding your overhead percentage. It's how much of every dollar that comes in goes toward those fixed expenses running your business. Because this is where things start to get really clear. Because now you're not just looking at numbers, you're understanding how your business operates. Then you got to look at your cost of goods sold. What does it actually cost you to deliver your service? Pellets, supplements, labs, supplies, things you have to purchase in order to give back to your patients. These are the costs that show up every time you make a sale. And then comes the part that a lot of people hesitate on. But it's the most important piece. You have to build in profit. Not what's left over, not what you hope is there, but what you intentionally designed in your pricing. I like to call this an admin fee because it's not just profit. It's what allows your business to grow. It's what allows you to reinvest in your team, in the patient experience, and in your future. And then finally, then look at the market. Because sometimes the number you calculate is actually lower than what people are already paying. And if that's the case, I'm not suggesting that you undercharge. You step into the value that you're providing. And when you put all of that together, you no longer have guesswork. You have built a pricing system. But there's one more piece that matters just as much as everything we've talked about today, and that's consistency over time. Because pricing is not something you do once and then forget. Your expenses are going to change, your costs are going to shift, the marketing will evolve, and if you're not paying attention, you can slowly drift right back into the same problem without even realizing it. So here's what I always recommend: it's treating your pricing like an annual checkup for your business. Once a year, sit down, review your numbers, look at your expenses, your costs, your margins, and make adjustments if needed. Not constantly, not every month, not every quarter, not reactively, but intentionally. Because when you stay connected to your numbers, you stay in control of your business. So if you are listening to this and realizing that your pricing might not be built as intentionally as it could be, I want you to hear this without judgment. This is not something you were taught. No one handed you this when you graduated from college and opened your clinic, but it is something that you can fix. And when you do it, it will change your trajectory, not just your revenue, but how you feel about your business, the confidence you have in the decisions that you make moving forward, the way you lead your team, and the way you think about growth. And that's really what this is all about. It's not just about pricing, it's about building a business that can actually support the life you wanted when you started it. And that's all I want for you. Now, if today's episode got you thinking about your numbers, I want to invite you to go a little bit deeper than just today's podcast. This episode is actually pulled from a full course that we created called The Formula for Pricing: How to Price Your Services with Confidence and Profitability, which lives inside our training platform for clinic owners called the Accelerator. Now, inside this course, we will talk deeper about why market matching is not a price strategy, how wrong pricing could be quietly draining your profits. I will give you my step-by-step formula to build pricings that I do one-on-one with my paying clients, and you will learn how to grow your clinic and your revenue with confidence using the tools, real clinic examples, and downloadable spreadsheets that I make available inside these trainings. And you're going to be able to download these things and use them again and again. Now, if you'd like to check it out, you can create a free account at accelerator.acceleratedmedicalpractices.com. When you sign up, you'll find a few free courses waiting for you. And then from there, you can either purchase individual trainings if there's something specific that you want to learn. Or what many of our clinic owners do is they choose the PowerPass, which is a$99 a month cost, which gives you access to everything we have inside the accelerator. Oh, and one more quick thing before we wrap up. For the next few months, our Thursday Fiverr episodes, which are a little bit longer than five minutes these days, are a part of this series that we're calling the Clinic Accelerator. Each week, I'm going to share one practical idea to help you grow your hormone and wellness clinic. And every episode connects to a deeper training that you can explore inside that accelerator membership e-learning system. And one last favor before I let you go. Look, our industry is a community. We all learn from each other. So if you know another provider or clinic owner that you think could benefit from learning how to build their pricing accurately, please share this episode with them. I thank you so much for listening, and I will see you on the next podcast. Thank you for listening to Beyond Hormones, the business of wellness. I hope that you're walking away with fresh ideas and real strategies you can use to grow your practice with profit and purpose. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to follow the show so you never miss a conversation. And if something you heard today resonated with you, do me a favor, share this episode with a friend or a colleague. It's one of the best ways you can support the show, and it might be exactly what they need to hear right now. If you want even more tools and support, go ahead and head over to accelerated medical practices.com. Until next time, keep doing the work that matters. Your patients need you, and I am cheering you along every step of the way.