The Lifecycle of a Healing Arts Business
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Today I want to talk about the lifecycle of a healing arts business. I have been working on figuring this out for, oh… almost 24 years now. Both in navigating my own healing arts businesses (which have spanned many different business models, aka ways of delivering the service), and in helping many many other people to do the same thing.
It’s kind of like I have been staring at one of those magic eye images for decades, and only in recent months has the image popped out at me. I’ve been talking around the lifecycle of a healing arts business for a long time, but I’ve never put it together into one coherent essay.
If that sounds like a snoozefest, the reason why it’s useful to connect all the dots in one place is that once you see the patterns, you can spot where you are within them (within your own business). And from there you can do a lot of things! Things like:
Understanding what are “normal” ups and downs, and what might be cause for recalibrating things.
Assessing current challenges and knowing what will actually help to alleviate them rather than throwing everything at the wall and hoping something sticks.
Saving you from spending tons of time and money on things that will not help you because they are not oriented towards a tiny healing arts business, or because they are just not the right tool at the right time.
Feeling much more comfortable in your own skin, and in your own business, based on living up to the values and desires that you have for your work, rather than all the “supposed-tos” that float around. Basically, feeling less like you are “doing it wrong” in your business, and knowing that some amount of consternation is just normal when you are self-employed.
So hopefully this mapping of the lifecycle of a healing arts business will help you to more quickly and easily alleviate unnecessary stress!
What are the stages in the lifecycle of a healing arts business? Let’s hop into it:
Stage 1: THE CALLING AND SOLO PRIVATE PRACTICE
I would say it is extremely rare that someone trains in a healing art because they were told they are “supposed to” do that for their career. Or because it seemed like a fast track to riches or fame or any of the other things that late capitalism values.
People are usually called to do their work in our fields. Maybe it’s because they found that particular modality when they needed some support and it really helped them, and so they decided to train in it. Or maybe they were simply intrigued enough by something that they jumped right into an immersion or a training and ultimately decided to make it their life’s work. (I know several of these stories!)
Once people are all trained up in their new skill- meaning, after they follow the calling- their first stop in connecting the great work that they believe so deeply in is usually through starting up a private practice. AKA: self-employment. Of course some people take a job after their training rather than striking out on their own, but most people don’t.
So most people are navigating being a new practitioner at the same time that they are discovering that they need yet another skill set- the skill set of being self-employed.
"But! " Many of us think, "No big deal. This is a teeny tiny business. It’s just me, seeing my clients. I don’t have a massive office building overhead. I don’t have employees who I need to make sure I can pay every month. I don’t have unpredictable surprises that come with a product line- like sudden manufacturing or shipping snags. It’s just me! Seeing my clients. No biggie."
And in some ways, we’re right! In many, many ways we are right. We don’t need an MBA. We don’t need to learn complex accounting practices or hire fancy lawyers- we don’t need all of the complexity of stuff that so called “small businesses” need.
I say so-called because, bear in mind that the definition of a small business is a business that has fewer than 100 employees and less than 10 million in annual revenue. Unrelatable much!?
We are businesses of 1, usually with the goal of getting to lower 6-figures, or between 100K and 300K in annual revenue.
And because we are so much different than what the textbook definition of a small business is, and also because we didn’t get into this work for the money or the fame- we followed a calling- that makes it all the easier to ignore learning anything about being a small business owner and to just take it one day and one client at a time.
Until… you hit a wall. Here are common walls that pop up in stage 1: the calling and solo private practice
You are living the self-employed version of paycheck to paycheck. You have little to no wiggle room to take care of yourself if you get sick, want to take a vacation, or everyone else takes a vacation (like over the holiday season) and your practice gets slow.
You get hit with a very unpleasant tax bill at the end of the year and you don't have money set aside to pay it.
Or, whether consciously or unconsciously, you deliberately under-earn so that your tax bill is either low or non-existent, and then you don’t have to worry about those confusing tax surprises.
But then you’re under-earning and struggling to take care of yourself!
You don’t know how to grow your practice, and you don’t want to seem salesy and weird, so you sit in your office and hope that the universe will miraculously provide for you. But because growth requires some action and visibility on your part, it’s either tumbleweeds or a trickle of clients.
Obviously, these kinds of walls are unsustainable. If you go on like this, you will, at some point, decide to give up and close your practice. And what a bummer! You were called to do this work! And you know it helps people!
The good news is that, honestly, you don’t need to do a ton of things, and certainly they are not unpleasant or complicated things, to get your business sustainable in stage 1.
Here’s what you need to focus on at this stage:
Know what you need to earn.
Know what that means in terms of how many clients you need to see and what you need to charge them.
Know how to grow your practice to reach that goal- in a way that feels nourishing and sustainable and authentic to you.
So the real compass points at this stage are really around money- which, if we’re struggling with the financial piece our impulse is to just put our heads in the sand and get by, but I can assure you you will run out of road on that eventually! So it’s best to just do the math- it’s so much more relieving than just getting by, I promise!
And the other big compass point is learning how to be visible in authentic ways that will grow your referral base.
I want to be really super clear here before I move on to the next stage in the lifecycle of a healing arts business: many happy and successful healing arts providers stay at this stage, of solo private practice, forever. There is no required progression through the stages. It's about what you want and what works for you, not about climbing a pre-ordained ladder.
Nothing about how I’m talking about the lifecycle of a healing arts business is about a prescribed journey you have to take, it’s more about mapping the territory more broadly. You might find yourself in only some, or maybe in all, points on the map- but there is no “good” or right way for that to show up for you.
Stage 2: THE CRISIS
The crisis does come after some amount of time in solo private practice. And the crisis happens when either an Income or interest ceiling is hit, or both. This is obviously a stage of discomfort. It is the felt experience that something isn’t working for you.
Therefore, it should not be a stage to stay at indefinitely! What we’re hoping for is that when we do go into this stage of the crisis- and we often will do this periodically throughout our years in business- that we can diagnose what is out of place and strategically make the changes we need to get back to thriving asap.
The barriers we hit at this stage, as I mentioned, are the earning or interest ceiling- or both!
When the income ceiling is hit people feel that they are not earning enough in solo private practice, and they are well aware that they are only earning when they trade time for money, i.e. provide a client session. And they realize that there are only so many sessions they can provide in any given week. So it feels like they hit a ceiling with their ability to earn more.
The interest ceiling is when people start to get bored with their work for any number of reasons. But the short version is, what once was a passionate calling starts to feel either lackluster or, in more rare cases, misinformed. Misinformed meaning that we no longer feel that the thing we studied actually solves the problem we wanted to help people with.
For example: maybe you started out in nutrition but want to talk with people about more than food and be able to order lab tests, etc, so you decide to become a Naturopath. Or maybe you started out in movement somatics and you see how impactful this is on people's mental health, and you realize you want that to be your focus so you decide to become a therapist…
The thing that assists us the most to get us out of the crisis stage is thoughtful evaluation. But because we weren’t taught those small business skills we often don’t know how to do that! So we get captivated by pondering other certifications, locations, offerings... Or we start pondering business models that will expand us beyond private practice.
The crisis is normal. Expect it. Changes are normal. Expect those too. But what is less than helpful is the throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach to evaluating your way out of the crisis.
So what to do?
Again, and yes you will hear me say it over and over again, do the math. I mean really do the math: If you’ve hit an income ceiling, what are you charging? Does your rate need to increase? Do you need to stop filing your weeks with so many trades or lowest rate on the sliding scale clients? How many clients are you actually seeing in a week (look backwards in your calendar and count)?
And if it’s fewer weekly clients than you thought, how can you grow your practice to more consistently stay at the number of clients a week you need to support yourself?
Second, do the research. If you are thinking about changing your model, for example moving from solo private practice to a group practice with employees, or a studio or wellness center model with other freelance practitioners, or creating a signature online course or membership program, or what have you… learn about these models.
Ideally, learn about them without paying someone a lot of money who teaches people the one true model. Or, if they don't teach it as the one true model, it's just that they have an offering that teaches only one specific business model. For example, the $2000 online course about how to make online courses. The problem is not that this training won’t give you skills, the problem is that it has already settled on a right answer, in this example, that online courses will solve everything! Maybe that’s not true for you. An online course business model is a very specific vibe. You will be doing much more marketing and much less client care. That might be for you, and it might not be for you.
Instead of committing resources to one solution right up front, it’s best in the “sniffing it out” stage to talk to people who have worked within the models you and considering so that you can hear from the inside what worked well and what went poorly within those businesses. Most importantly try to get a sense of what it feels like to run this type of business model. What does a typical workweek or month entail?
In short, talk to people who are working within the model you are considering, not gurus who teach the model. Side note: if you do decide on a specific model, learning from people who teach them can be very helpful!
Same thing goes for debating a new qualification: Talk to people who work within that field. See if getting that new certification or going back to school entirely will actually get you closer to a business you want, or if it is just wallpapering over a different problem.
If you’re considering opening up a new location I would say that, more often than not, the solution is to focus on the location you already have. Unless you are moving from a low population, low income area to a high population, high income area, which does make life easier for practice building.
When I do this evaluation work of combing through the options with clients one-on-one in my strategy intensive, which is essentially a focused day of coaching with me, they often discover that they don’t need to take such big swings to get out of the crisis. It’s more like tiny tweaks that massive changes.
But remember when you’re in a stage that is uncomfortable your impulse will probably be to do something big: To make a big change to your work, your model, your location, etc. But sometimes that’s just piling new burnout inducing work on top of old burnout inducing work.
Any change takes time energy and attention, so if you have evaluated the change you want to make and done some homework on it, as you proceed forward with the change, it will feel less stressful, because you have some ground under your feet about what you want to do based on the conversations you have had with people who have made a choice that you are considering.
Which brings us to stage 3: EXPERIMENTATION:
Stage 2 was the crisis: It is a decision point- do you want to shore up your private practice so that it works better for you? Or do you actually want to make a change?
If you decide to make a change, you are experimenting with shifting your business model, your mix of offerings, changing your job description. Basically, you are experimenting with growth beyond private practice.
If you are shoring up your private practice so that it works better for you, the experimentation is less about a total makeover for your business, and is more about those tiny tweaks I mentioned. That get you to a profitable private practice that makes you happy.
Whether you are shoring up your private practice, or making a change to your business model, stage 3 is a stage of experimentation which means that it is filled with potential. Which is a great feeling. And can be super fun! But if it isn’t grounded, you can wind up running short lived experiments on repeat.
What we need to effectively utilize this exploratory time is clarity. Frame for yourself as you enter a stage of experimentation: What are you hoping for? What brought you to the need to experiment in the first place, and so what will guide you out of the crisis stage? In other words, be really clear for yourself, about where are you headed and why. Write it down.
Once you answer those questions for yourself, then you can actually keep track of how the experiments are going. Rather than it just being about “vibes”, it is about watching to see if any given experiment gets you to where you wanted to be. And once you’re there you can be more consciously aware of how it's going.
Which brings us to stage 4- THE SHIFT:
This is the leap from no longer running a sole proprietor private practice in the healing arts to a different model. Not everyone will decide to make a shift from a sole proprietorship- aka solo private practice- to running a different kind of business. A reminder that I think a solo private practice is a great way to make a living in the healing arts.
But for those who do decide to change their business model, the shift is its own stage: Your business has changed. And so your job description has changed. Your marketing (and sales) strategies will have to change. You might have more responsibilities, for example to a brick and mortar space that is larger or more expensive, or to paying employees or providing work for freelancers.
Or your business model may have new demands. Maybe you do much less direct client care, but much more marketing or management, etc.
The tasks at this stage are both exploration and acceptance of what the new job description- or descriptions- are.
A somewhat common example is someone who worked solo, and then decided to start a studio or a center. And they thought of it as working solo plus other people! Which means they are focused on keeping their private practice going, and so they experience a lot of frustration about how much time it takes to run the studio. Time to help out practitioners, do customer service, marketing, etc. This work all becomes framed as if it’s getting in the way of their private practice/client time. This means they are trying to straddle both worlds which will be frustrating!
Running a studio or a center will require a lot more of your time and attention away from your clients and on your providers. So you’ll have to accept the new job description you have given yourself.
You’ll also have to do the math, always do the math! This way, you can anticipate that the time you spend running the business is able to pay you what you need. If you are relying on your private practice work to pay your bills and then you’ll spend your "extra" time on the studio or center you are likely to wind up resenting how hard it is to pay yourself for all the love and care you pour into the business.
Or maybe you are growing something that does not require any employees, but that has a totally different model- like a signature online course. This model requires a new dedication to marketing and list building. It will be the bulk of your job. So if you go into it with clarity around that, not only will you be set up for better success, but you will also be less likely to resent your new job activities.
That’s the start of taking a peek at the lifecycle of a healing arts business. In order to help you all take a peek behind the curtain of other people’s businesses, I will be talking with many providers in upcoming episodes about what model they work in and how it’s going: the good, the bad and the ugly.
