After coaching several hundred health practitioners over the past few years, it has become quite clear to me what prevents them from achieving the level of success that they desire. As with most small businesses, the odds are stacked against the average practice owner. It is said that about 80% of small businesses fail within the first 5 years.. and 96% will perish within 10 years.
In my experience, this statistic rings true for holistic practitioners and other service-based businesses. It’s easy to look at this number and feel discouraged about your future. The good news is that once you identify the main obstacles to getting in that 5% that are doing very well, you’ll come to realize that there are tangible and distinct reasons why so many businesses fail. Then, you can commit to overcoming these weak links, which will put you on the path to long-term sustainability.
Most practices never take the time to really think about these issues. They assume that having a passion for their work and offering their best to each and every client will be all they need to rely on for their long-term success. While these qualities can take you very far in practice, they simply aren’t enough to sustain you in a way that creates ease and freedom in your practice.
Let’s take a quick look at the 3 big blocks to your practice success. I’ll also share some resources about how you can overcome those blocks.
1. Being attached to limiting beliefs around money
I truly believe this issue lies at the core of so many other pitfalls in private practice. While holistic practitioners tend to be very bright and committed people, they also tend to view money with a certain degree of pessimism, aversion, or cynicism. In fact, I think a lot of people go into the healing arts so they can bypass all of the conventional stuff that our society has to face on a daily basis. When I went to acupuncture school, I really think that was a primary motivation. I didn’t want to face financial responsibility– all I really wanted was to immerse myself in the esoteric world of energy healing and personal development. Can you relate to this?
Well, in my own experience, I know for a fact that I NEVER could have created a full private practice while holding on to this block. I had to let it go.. and in fact, I had to radically reverse my orientation around money so that I started to perceive it as a source of joy, freedom, and generosity in my life. I had to energetically welcome it into my reality, instead of always pushing it away.
How about you? Do you subconsciously push money away from your life? Be honest. Where and how does this show up? Here are a few of the limiting beliefs that can easily undermine your practice potential:
- It’s unspiritual or unethical to make a lot of money
- I would be fulfilled/happy in life if it wasn’t for money

- There’s no way I can succeed in this crappy economy
- There’s too much competition
- Money is the root of all evil/doesn’t grow on trees/ is in scarce supply
- I have to give everything I have in my practice (work way too hard) to make the money I do make.. and it’s never enough
- I just wish I could heal people and not have to worry about money
I could go on, but I think you get the drift. All of these beliefs energetically block money from showing up in your life. They keep you stuck where you are, making as much as you make year after year. This is why the average income does not change much for most people throughout their life. If they make $50k per year in 2011, there’s a good chance they’ll be making a similar amount next year, and for many years to come. We all have a financial set point or comfort zone that we fall into. To expand this, we have to expand our belief system and be willing to let go of harmful beliefs that no longer serve us.
2. Inconsistent front-end marketing systems
This issue really ties into the first one. After all, how motivated are you going to be to develop your marketing skills if money isn’t a welcome force in your life? marketing leads to money. Many practitioners perceive marketing as a scary, inauthentic, or intimidating process that doesn’t align with their values. If you think about it, this is a perfect belief system to shield oneself from a lot more money showing up in life.
You see, once you start to energetically welcome money into your life, you’ll naturally want to market and promote your work. You’ll treat it as a top priority. Your mind will always be playing with ideas of how you can get more exposure and help more people. As much as you focus on developing your clinical skills, you’ll want to develop your marketing skills because you see these 2 skill sets as inseparable. After all, you can’t really refine your clinical skills if you’re not getting enough new clients in the door, right?
There are so many creative, fun, and genuine ways to market your private practice. Most practitioners never allow themselves to tap into how fun marketing can actually be. They perceive marketing as a burden. This is sad, because this belief makes practice-building so much harder than it needs to be. By letting go of the resistance to marketing, there is a sense of ease that starts to show up– both in terms of how you attract patients and in terms of the actual work you do for them.
A lot of the resistance to marketing and money comes from a place of low self-worth. Along these lines, the more patients you get, the more drained you feel… because you are convinced that you have to give, give, give everything you have to help people. This belief is operating from a place of never feeling like you’re enough, so you have to use tremendous will power to help people. This can be quite an insidious and subtle issue, one that becomes more magnified the more patients you see and the longer you are in practice. It’s a primary source of burn out and struggle for any service-based business owner.
If you want more ease in your marketing, doing this inner work is of course a key issue. On an outer level, I have seen time and again that having a professional website that positions you as the ‘go to’ expert in your local area, then having a number of lead generation tools in place to drive traffic to that website, is the most efficient, automated, and easy way to sustain a practice.
There’s obviously a lot more I could say about this, but I just want to get you thinking in this direction:
Build a lead generation website–> Drive traffic to the site –> Generate leads –> Educate those leads using online technology
That’s pretty much the core strategy that I embrace, and it works like a charm when implemented the right way.
3. Poor contact management and follow up
It’s amazing– I have worked with so many practices that have been established for 10-15 years and they still don’t have a system in place to stay in touch with everyone who has ever expressed interest in their work. This is one of the biggest marketing mistakes possible! If your practice feels like a roller coaster month in and month out, like you have to rely heavily on your front-end marketing to keep things moving, it means that you’re not staying in touch with your current database of past, current, and prospective clients well enough.
The best way to do this is to use an email marketing system — I think Aweber is the best– and create a lead generation system from your website so that you can store all contacts in a central online database.
It’s cheap to use, easy to set up, and highly effective for stabilizing a practice. 
How to stay in touch with people is a big subject that I have talked about in my blogging course and will be diving into in some depth in the Create Your Own Economy coaching program that just got underway.
Once again, I just want to get you thinking in this direction.. because there’s a good chance that you’re not capitalizing on the tremendous benefits an online contact management system such as Aweber can offer your practice.
We set up Aweber on almost all the websites we build. I think it’s mandatory for any serious practice owner. I’ll probably be doing one of my monthly webinars on the best way to use this system. If this would be of interest to you, leave me a comment below.
I want to wrap this up by saying that even though the economy DOES stink right now.. and even though so many businesses fail and will continue to do so, building a practice can actually be effortless when you do the inner work and have the right outer systems in place. Now, that doesn’t mean that you don’t have to expend energy– of course you do. But it does mean that there is no struggle, will power, or fighting with yourself to make it happen. It just flows naturally because you have created the right inner and outer framework to make it so. When you accomplish this, it’s a beautiful feeling.. and it becomes evident why so many businesses and practices struggle (and why you don’t).
If this info is helpful to you, please take a moment to click the twitter and facebook buttons at the top of the post so we can spread the word! If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below.
all the best,
Kevin