Ben Lynch: Hey, hey. Hello, Ben. I am two-thirds caffeinated, technically, so I'm good, but I'm not peaking yet.

Bec Clare: When does the other third, as in like you're two-thirds into your current coffee, or you've had two of your three?

Ben Lynch: Two of my three. Okay. It is a little bit late to be finishing my third cup of coffee, so I might not be sleeping early tonight. G'day good people. Welcome to the Grow Your Clinic podcast by Clinic Mastery. Here's what's coming up inside of this episode. What we're looking at here is how do you create momentum in the early new year? A lot of it is around time and money management.

Bec Clare: How much should new grads have in terms of mentoring?

Ben Lynch: What are you seeing clinic owners do when it comes to reactivating patients?

Bec Clare: I have always on my notebook pitch versus listen. What am I trying to achieve out of this?

Ben Lynch: Yes, I don't take meetings on a Monday morning or a Friday afternoon.

Bec Clare: What I'm seeing the very best do is, yes, they've perhaps nurtured relationships through the Christmas period. They might have sent some gifts. But then taking those relationships with referrer partners just that little bit deeper.

Ben Lynch: This is such a key element to filling your books, right, is strong partnerships. This episode will be right up your Allie if you're looking to make this year bigger and brighter than last year. We're diving into trends we're seeing across growing clinics. And trust me, you want to hear Beck's take on how referral partnerships are filling their books. Plus stick around for when we discuss how to get more control over your time and money super fast. Before we dive in, today's episode is brought to you by AllieClinics.com. If you're the kind of clinic owner who loves to feel organized and stay ahead of the chaos, you'll love Allie. Think of it as your digital clone. It's the single source of truth for all your clinic's policies, systems, and training. Test it for free at AllieClinics.com. And in other news, applications are now open to work with us one-on-one at Clinic Mastery. If you want support to grow your clinic and bring your vision to life, just email helloatclinicmastery.com with the subject line podcast, and we'll line up a time to chat. All right, let's get into the episode. Beck, just you and me. Jack's on his family adventure still in Thailand. When's your next holiday? Are you going to Vietnam anytime soon? Yes, we'll be back.

Bec Clare: We'll be back to Vietnam. Second home for us. Yes, we're planning to go in June. Very warm month in Vietnam. We love it. There's this sort of smell as soon as you get off the aircraft and you're just like, oh yes, we're back. So I'm really looking forward to that. And it's not jet fuel. It's not jet fuel.

Ben Lynch: No, no, no. Beautiful smell to Vietnam. Great, great. Well, yes, I live vicariously through your stories of Vietnam. I hear so many friends say it's such a great place to go. One of my good friends is a Vietnamese and he says, yeah, it's just awesome. So one day we'll get there. I think I'll have to piggyback off of your family holiday.

Bec Clare: Oh, for sure. Well, I think we've actually got a, one of the CM coaches is looking to come with us and join us in Vietnam this year. We've got multiple family who are like, we've heard so much about it. We're coming with you. So I think we're going to be like this touring party in 2026 of it. But funny story is that we took Audrey when she was quite young to Vietnam and there's just like most places in Asia, so many motorbikes. And all you hear is beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. And like no one uses a horn like they do here in Australia. And it's like really friendly and a little beep, beep. And so when Audrey wants something moved out of the way or she's dragging, like toddlers do, they drag the chair to the kitchen. If you're in her way, she just says beep, beep. It's just like a little Vietnamese motorbike. It's so cute.

Ben Lynch: Very cute. It's amazing what they pick up. My two year old last night, he goes, because I was just flicking through a couple of reels on Instagram. And he says to me, why are you skipping so many? Where did you pick that up from? It's amazing what they pick up. Anyway, I'm excited to speak with you today in particular about starting the new year, some of the trends you're seeing, some of the things clinic owners are installing, some of the things you're doing you feel to create early momentum in the year. Before we do dive in, Just an FYI for folks tuning in, we have a lot of members who are listening in, so thank you and welcome for tuning in in between your consulting sessions to maybe get some inspiration, keep some momentum going. If you are not a member of Clinic Mastery, you can head along to our website and in the menu, there's a tab called Resources. And we've got a bunch of different free resources that you could test out and apply in your clinic to get some traction in different areas. So go check that out, freeresourcesatclinicmastery.com. For those that have installed Allie recently, a warm welcome to you. We've got Brendan, Alex, Brett, Damon, Corinne and Adam. Thanks for using Allie. And also, I thought an interesting little shout out here to the Member Wins channel that we have. It's an opportunity for people to celebrate their success amongst peers who get it. They know the hardships, so we get a small moment to celebrate wins every week. And Darren, Melissa, and Sundas, they're three different clinic owners, but all had a similar win recently. Get this. They've all had new clients be referred by ChatGBT. Yes, you got a shocked face. That was my face when I saw this. So, people interacting with ChatGBT about their health problems have had an answer provided to them from ChatGBT that recommended each one of their clinics in separate conversations. How cool is that? So the work that they're doing digitally and online to have a presence, to put out quality education is now being picked up by ChatGBT and they are getting clients from it. I thought that was really cool. Anyway, shout out to the three of you if you're tuning in and for those members who are tuning in, get across to the WINS channel and share some of the highlights that you're experiencing because we know that there's plenty of tough moments in being a business owner, right? Now, let's tee up this episode, which is you and I are in a very privileged position, and one of the real perks of our job is we get an incredible insight into different clinics, whether it's speech, psych, OT, physio, pod, osteo, EP, medical specialists, and GPs. across Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Canada, and the US, we get to see what are the trends, what's working, what's new, novel ways of approaching traditional problems. And every week we come together as a consulting team to train, debrief, and collaborate, to share these insights with one another. And I thought I'd just share my screen to kick us off here with an high-level overview of one of the recent training sessions that we had. I'm sharing a screenshot from one of our internal Slack channels called CMBA Consultants. Andrew Zachariah is the lead coach of our team. And he set these threads, which we've replied to. So the first thread we're looking at is January focus. And the question that he asked us was, what are we hearing? What are we seeing? The clinics that we're working with and throughout the community, what are they doing to start January and really get some traction and momentum? Which led to several other threads. The next was team, then marketing, then planning. And then we went a little bit deeper on filling your books. And so I thought it'd be really cool to share some of the insights that we got out of these threads. that we're then taking through into our conversations one-on-one with clinic owners to give them the best of the best. Here's what we're saying. And we do this every single week, and I feel really privileged to be in this position to hear and see these things. So, Beck, to maybe kick us off, you were contributing to these threads. What were some of the common themes that came out for you, for the clinic owners that are really hitting their strides in January and February, and building towards February, March, the first quarter, to get the best possible start?

Bec Clare: Absolutely. I love our coaches sessions together. As you say, you get the unique perspective of seeing what the very best clinics are doing. We also get to talk about what we're doing in our own clinics and off the back of all of those sessions, I know that I go away and I implement even more so that I'm pressure testing all of these ideas so that when I'm taking them to business owners in our coaching sessions, our consulting sessions, I have lived experience that this works or here's what I had to tweak in order to get it to work for my audience. Because you might say, look, oh, but my business is different. Okay. There's nuance and you run it through your own filter, but essentially we can plug and play these systems into every one of our businesses and they can succeed. They just need a little tweak, but the overriding principle is there. What the common theme that came out of that session? and definitely what I'm seeing with clinic owners is that those who are really hitting their strides early in the year, they have kept the momentum going. Even if they've had a break and they've had some holidays or the clinic might have been closed, they've been doing the work so that as soon as they reopened, the momentum's there. And if they hadn't done that, that's okay. What they realized was now's the time. That notion of when is the best time to plant a tree? 20 years ago. When is the next best time? Right now. So they realize, okay, momentum's maybe a little bit lacking. Let's get to work. So they've put that in place. So yeah, definitely the planning and then the action taking right at the start of the year.

Ben Lynch: I'd love to unpack a couple of the specific things you've seen people do to get that momentum. A couple that we've covered in recent episodes, we've dedicated whole episodes to them, but also just covered them in passing, include number one, getting their own calendar in order, especially the quote, admin time or business time so that they can work on these projects, all these meaningful changes, or perhaps just get some version of quote, balance or life back into their rhythm, that kind of at the end of the year felt like, I'm exhausted or I don't want to keep repeating this. And so it's like, what does your diary look like? So I think that's one of the most practical changes you can make is, what does your calendar look like next week, next month and into the next year? Specifically looking to consolidate and get things more back to back. So whether that's freeing up a Monday morning so you start the week more on your terms. That's one that I love doing is I don't take meetings on a Monday morning or a Friday afternoon. The reason is I want to bookend my week. I want to make sure that I'm starting as best as I possibly can proactively on something that I choose to do and need to do. and the same on the Friday afternoon. So that's a common one. The next one that I'd say is that they're getting their finances in order. So many clinic owners, maybe they just rely on opening up their bank account, their banking app to see how much money is in there. Maybe they'll look at some of the reports in their patient management system if they're more advanced and want to get a good sense for their numbers or using something like Allie or their own dashboards. Or maybe if you're even more advanced, you're going to say zero your accounting software and doing a monthly review and then some version of budgeting moving forward. That's taking it another step further. And then if you're wanting to manage the cash, Even more clearly, you've set up bank account structures so every dollar has a purpose and is allocated appropriately. I feel like they're getting in control of their time and in control of their money. These things are just about, I think, setting the structure in place for clarity and for the ability to make changes later on. They're not necessarily adding more money. They're not the marketing campaigns or the mentoring side of things. They set the foundations for those things to happen with greater ease. So I would go to time and money as being, you can control these things very quickly. You can action them very quickly. And so you can feel like you're making progress very quickly. some of these other changes that I think will cover you planting the seed and you might not reap the benefits for a month or several. What else have you seen? What else have you done in terms of getting that momentum that you spoke to?

Bec Clare: The control element is really important here. Almost that notion, if you don't plan your time, someone else will waste it. The same goes for your team. In and around control and time, is ensuring that they have all of their mentoring in the diary. It is certain. It is locked away. How much mentoring and development? I know that there's forums and platforms at the moment that they're talking about how much should new grads have in terms of mentoring. Have we got lots in the bank? Have we not got quite enough or have we hit that sweet spot?

Ben Lynch: Just go there just for a moment. What are you, what's your sense for where people are landing or where have you landed on that? Because this is something you've been very deliberate about. You've invested a lot in it as well. I think of the partnership you have with James. So just talk me through where have you landed with it? That's new graduate development specifically.

Bec Clare: We've probably tended to have a younger team, a fresher team if you like, fresh out of uni from time to time and so that does mean that there's a greater level of investment. there. We've also used it at a point of recruitment so that we're recruiting the very best. The balance now for us is that we're wanting to ensure that our clinicians still have that urge and desire to go and have external professional development and that ownership over their own professional development versus having everything handed to them. It can feel like that sometimes as the business owner, that you are providing all of the education and that you almost become an education institution. Um, right. And so we want to get that balance right where, and where we've hit the sweet spot now is the contribution that team make, whether that be in the dollar for dollar towards their external courses so that they're feeling like they're bought into that process or that they're helping present at Team PD or helping at least facilitate PD versus relying on, you know, coming to a session and the business owner or your senior mentor is running all of these sessions. Having the team take some ownership of that provides really nice camaraderie and we get different voices. That's probably been the biggest change up for us. Um, and just, yeah, that contribution element versus the take all the time, which I think- Yeah, nice. It can get really tricky in terms of your mindset as a business owner wanting to provide these. I want to give without expectation as well. I don't see this as being something I give and I'm locking in team members because we're so good at this. I'm wanting them to enjoy this program and also see the benefits of it and continue to value add to themselves and their peers. That's great.

Ben Lynch: And the dollar for dollar is our framing of saying, we put up a dollar worth of investment into this course, workshop, conference, seminar, whatever it is. And we expect you to match that dollar for dollar. And in a way, you're paying half is another way to cut to the chase. But it's a nice framing. It's an elegant framing around it of them also investing dollar for dollar. So, I love that. So, mentoring sessions locked in. and into the diary specifically, and team members contributing to that as well. I broke your flow there, but just go back to, you were going to mention maybe a couple of other things you're seeing clinic owners do to get that momentum.

Bec Clare: team days. So understanding, and when we plan our team days, we're actually looking at the fluctuation of the calendar. I know that Daniel Gibbs has shared a really great snapshot of a year where we can see the ebb and flow that happens, potentially, but from external factors that we can't control. But we also know- Like public holidays and- Holidays or school holidays or- Bank holidays. Exactly, bank holidays. And so, what we want to do is then pick our team days. So, if we looked at our revenue across a year, we can also see we compare revenue across a year. When are we seeing any trending in sick leave as well? So, are our team hitting any sort of flat spots? And we try and edge our team days right when we just start to see things dip so that we can maintain a really consistent level of energy across the group. So ensuring that you're understanding when your team might need that little pick-me-up and that little pep and bit of connection and when you need to drive for some new solutions together.

Ben Lynch: And the team day is, you're seeing that as kind of putting back into the team members to re-energize them, support them so they can go again. Yeah, re-energize so they can't, yeah, absolutely. And approximately that works out to be how often, like quarterly, is it more frequent?

Bec Clare: We're running on the four-month cadence as a clinic, so we run three of those a year. So we run the ASAP model, which is a letter for each month. And so we try and place our team days, which is in the P month for play, so that we are not introducing new systems necessarily, but we're really using that as a point of connection and to celebrate what we have achieved over the previous three.

Ben Lynch: for folks listening in that are non-CM members, you can go get a copy of our book, Grow Your Clinic, and it details that planning methodology if you want to adopt it. There are many. It's just one way. Great to hear how you're using it and making it meaningful. So we've got time management for the clinic owner themselves and leaders to make sure they've allocated or got that time available to work on all of these exciting projects that they hear about, you know, tuning into the podcast. We get feedback every week and it's so awesome to hear people emailing through. and feel welcome to do so. Ben at clinicmastery.com, Jack at clinicmastery.com, Beck at clinicmastery.com. Share your feedback. It's awesome to hear. I got one from Chris the other day saying loving listening into the podcast regularly. We all get these bits of inspiration or ideas how to add new things or refine things that we're doing. But if you don't have the time and space, physically in your diary, it's hard to get it mentally to then think it through and then prepare for it, plan it, roll it out and do it well. So get your time right, get the money right as well. And so much of this is if you're like, yeah, money's a big stress for me right now. How well are you allocating it? and managing it. There's always room for better clarity. And from that, we can make better decisions. Then you're looking at the mentoring structure. How do we support the humans on our team that are really driving commercial success? And then the team days overall, how do we invest meaningfully back into them so that they feel a sense of alignment and their cup is filled? Beautiful. So both of those also relate to diary management as well. Have we got things booked in? Anything else before we continue down perhaps more of the fill your books angle and some of the things that were discussed as part of that training that we did as a CM consulting team?

Bec Clare: I'd go to diary hygiene, like we've just talked about the diary hygiene of our own diaries as clinic leaders and directors, but also just looking across your diary for your clinic. Like, is there anything that could just be tidied up? It was very 2025, it's maybe not relevant now. And how are we spacing things out? We want to ensure that our team members, we're talking about our own flow, right? And getting into flow state. Are our team members getting into flow? I had a really great example of this the other day. place in our diary for particularly our early career therapists, what we call nurture and notes. It's essentially a little admin break after a certain number of clients. One of our therapists who's coming probably out of that early career therapist and more into that sort of mid-range mode, he had a day yesterday where he was back-to-back with clients. He was really in flow and then suddenly someone dropped out last minute. And he said, wow, I was like gaining momentum. I was so in flow and bang, that happened. It threw me and then we had a discussion even then about how many nurtures and notes sessions he's gotten. He's like, take them out. I want them out of the diary. I want to get into this flow stage because it was so helpful to him and he was super energized by it. So yeah, having a review of your diary and a bit of hygiene, having some conversations about what gets each team member in flow and how can you help them get there.

Ben Lynch: It's really interesting. Yesterday, I was preparing and writing some things around utilization and specifically around how a poor diary structure can really kill utilization and momentum and actually how it can lead to more burnout. I have this sort of model or title of why increasing utilization often reduces burnout and not the other way around. And it can be multifactorial burnout, but I think often the assumption is if I add more service hours, billable hours, appointments to a therapist, they're going to burn out, especially if they're saying that maybe they're not dealing so well with what is. But I've actually found, personally in my own experience as a podiatrist, and also hearing thousands of clinic owners and by extension practitioners say this over a decade, When you have these back-to-back appointments, you can get into a flow and the cancellations or the breaks can actually really make this fractured day that is more exhausting. I felt that, absolutely. It's much easier to stay in this flow. So it's a great challenge for people in how they think about the diary structure of a team member. And perhaps having more back-to-back is actually going to unlock more flow, more momentum. So I would just challenge anyone listening in, whether you're a senior therapist, mentoring other therapists, that actually this could be the unlock. It's the opposite of the default action, which is to give you more time and space between appointments and take things away. And I'm sure there's a time for that. But often, you could actually increase and people feel a greater sense of flow.

Bec Clare: We refer to it in clinic as task shifting and it's that notion of stop-start that actually becomes the trigger as we found for burnout versus getting into that flow state and then being like, okay, now is my time booked for this thing? So it's the task shifting that we talk about. We run a clinic and we run our home visit model as well. We've also found that where clinicians are out on the road and then they come back in even for PD and then they go back out on the road, you see them at the end of the day and they're like, oh. They've just got this look of exhaustion on their face. So really trying to get diary hygiene around, create states of flow for our team. And that's controlling time, but it's also controlling money.

Ben Lynch: Yeah, great point. Great point of when you keep taking them offline and they're not able to serve patients. We did an episode with Sean Goldberg, clinical psychologist member of Clinic Mastery, who spoke about burnout in a different lens, more around values and values alignment, misalignment. So go check out that previous episode around managing practitioner burnout. He offers employee assistance programs as well. And so I realized that there's a number of different ways we can look at it. Just offer one way that is often the default that is, well, let's take more away from them when actually giving them more helps them. So that's a really interesting distinction. So what we're looking at here is how do you create momentum in the early new year? A lot of it is around time and money management. They're kind of key things. Okay. What else? We got to look at filling the books in a moment. Is there anything else there on the time or the team or the finance stuff?

Bec Clare: I think that's covered really that sort of zoomed out version of what are the key things that you can do. Because it's often, you don't need to be doing lots of different things. It's almost like pick one key lever that you can pull and that will unlock other things for you. I think when it comes to filling the books. What I'm seeing the very best do is, yes, they've perhaps nurtured relationships through the Christmas period. They might have sent some gifts. They might have done all of that towards the back end of the year. But then taking those relationships with referrer partners just that little bit deeper. Like, as an example, if you've got, say, your referrer partners and you're offering services, if you're speech and OT as an example, this referrer you might be offering speech to and that one OT, how can you offer both services to both referrers? Like, can we take that relationship another level? You've put the groundwork in, how can you now take it deeper?

Ben Lynch: How do you go about doing that? You're the systems instructor, Wiz. What have you set up to make that happen, especially in your absence?

Bec Clare: So, we have a team member who's helping take care of that for us. I realized I can provide the structure and the system, but am I the best person to go ahead and actually do that? Perhaps not. I'm very mechanic in terms of the way that I like to look at these things, and it just simply didn't energize me. I had to find someone that this set their world on fire, and I absolutely love it. But by way of structure, it was around reaching out to yourself, Ben, saying, Hey, Ben, I hope 2026 is off to a great start. Look, we've just been reflecting on our partnership for 2025, and I'd love to meet with you about, you know, your feedback and anything you think we could improve, anything that you think we've done really well. And I'd love to share with you some updates about what else we've got on offer at the clinic.

Ben Lynch: Yes.

Bec Clare: So you're giving them an opportunity and a platform. Not often do we ask our referrer partners for feedback. We might shy away from it and go, I actually don't really want to know what they think. But using the framework as feedback being a gift and that being the thing that opens the door for us to say, oh, thank you for that. Let's tweak these things, but also can I help you with something else?

Ben Lynch: Probably the thing I've made mistakes on a lot over time. And having seen some people who do it really well, I've learned that I think a couple of things need to be true. One is that we're trying to genuinely add value to them in a sustainable way. It's not like we're trying to get 10 new clients referred from them next week. You need to go into it with a long-term horizon. But two, I think people get caught up, how am I going to pitch myself? I'm going to tell them all about the techniques and tools and equipment and client experience that we have. And again, depending on who it is, I'll just run with it's another health professional to begin with. Are you referring to them? I think that opens things up very easily. If I'm a podiatrist referring to a physiotherapist, it becomes very easy then to have that conversation about when they see someone with a foot or leg issue that they could refer back. If I'm speech or OT and they're not in the same clinic or building, but we're referring to one another, that makes it a lot easier. And I'll make the distinction between, say, the speech pathologist that's working with the kindergarten. They're not necessarily going to be referring kids to go there for kindergarten, right? So, it's going to be different depending on the other person. But what we're trying to do is understand the problems they're trying to solve and how can we help them do that. I think you touched on a really important question there, as I interpreted it. I find it useful to ask that potential referral partner, have they referred to people like us before? And if so, what have they found that really works and what doesn't? And in that, you find opportunities to be more valuable to them. For instance, it might be that they've had and given referrals but never heard back. How did that client go? They're not kept in the loop with progress notes. Or they've given a lot of referrals and received none back in return. And so you just learn from their experience about what are the things that they value, find important, that I could tailor the way this relationship works for them. So I love your approach there of like you're trying to understand what matters to them, get feedback about if this is an existing relationship, what's working. What else do you find useful in uncovering how to personalize these partnerships? Because I don't think you need to have 57 of these things. You might have seven great partnerships that work really well back and forth. So how do you make sure that you deepen it? Now with your words, how do I deepen these relationships?

Bec Clare: what I've come to learn is that often we look at these referrer meetings as an opportunity to pitch. And so we go in, even whether it's new or existing, we go in trying to talk about what we can offer and how special we are. We just fail to listen. So I have always on my notebook pitch versus listen, which what am I trying to achieve out of this? You've already articulated there, Ben, is really trying to ascertain what, what has worked for that person? What makes them tick? What do they value?

Ben Lynch: Yes.

Bec Clare: And then if you can find the values alignment and then being able to go to that.

Ben Lynch: Yeah.

Bec Clare: Huge. Yeah. Done, right? People want to work with like-minded businesses. They get it. It's also then much more harmonious and I think much more fun, right? To then work with people that share those values with you.

Ben Lynch: Totally.

Bec Clare: So it comes from listening.

Ben Lynch: It's really interesting because I keep coming back to this, like, what's at the kernel of this that is also true in a number of different areas that keeps coming back and presenting itself to us, which is the ask questions to diagnose the problem and then provide a solution or treatment. It's the very simple model that we use clinically is assess, diagnose, treat. And you can use that model in your mentoring of therapists, in your therapy with clients, in your partnerships with referrers, in so many different areas. And what I see is that just having that awareness often unlocks for people the anxiety or the stress of, how do I navigate partnerships? It doesn't feel natural for me to do this or, you know, I'm just a therapist or I'm a clinic owner. and actually go, oh yeah, I've got that skill set to ask a whole bunch of questions to figure out what's going on, diagnose what the problem is or how I could help, and then create a plan that allows us to collaborate and get some outcomes together. It just releases that stress of, am I going to say the right thing? Am I going to pitch our services clearly? And it just becomes a word vomit rather than just, actually, let's maybe intentionally this year with all our referral partners or people in our partnership network, let's actually deepen the relationship and understand more about them and add more value. The other side of this is, I remember referring to a therapist. Never actually doing it to get anything back, but because when I sent people to them, they got great results and all I heard were positive things. And it made me look good because it would be an issue that was out of my scope, wasn't in my expertise. And I'm like, great, you got to go and see this person. They'd go there and they'd come back. Oh my God, thank you so much for referring me to that person. And it felt good and I was very happy just to do that because it was a skill set I wasn't going to have and we could do it. I wasn't looking for anything back. So I think it's also useful to say there are probably partnerships where you're happy to just give, give, give, give, as you said before, without expectation actually of anything back. Perhaps in that as even being clear on. Why are we doing this? What's the purpose of this partnership specifically? Are we trying to get new clients from the kindergarten, the school, the sports club, the GP, the specialist, whatever? Or are we looking to add more value to our clients and we need a better suite of therapists or businesses or services to send them so they get complete and remarkable solutions? I think even just having that intentionality of what we want here is a good starting point. How do you think about that, yeah, diverse range of partners that you do have? And I don't know, do you categorize them? How do you think about them?

Bec Clare: Yeah, absolutely. All kind of, I'm systems Ben. Of course they're all categorized. My wardrobe is categorized. Yes, our referral partners are categorized.

Ben Lynch: And yeah, give us an insight into how do you do that now? Maybe it's changed over time. How do you think about it?

Bec Clare: Currently, it's as simple as a spreadsheet. We're looking at different CRMs to help make it a little bit more sophisticated. But really, it's categorized into some of those two-way partnerships where we can refer to one another. We view anyone that we interact with from a business perspective as being a partner. So it comes down to all of the businesses that help support us to open the doors every day. They're a partner. We're engaging them to come in and we want them to also continue to help uphold our experiences and our values. Everyone is part of sort of turning the clocks, right, to get you to be who you are. We've then got the referrer partners that help us shine. So where we want to send our clients, so we're musculoskeletal, so we have partnerships with psychologists to ensure that our clients also have their mental health. sort of taken care of and looked after. And we've got a couple of different options there as well. So it's not just about necessarily having one option for our clients. It's whether it be location specific or we do a fair bit in the workers comp model. So having someone who understands that. model of care, and we can refer those clients there, and then perhaps someone who's more in the private space. So really trying to categorize them out that way, but essentially, two-way partnerships, our sporting clubs and our gyms, our suppliers that help us open the doors, really, how do you interact with them? What's the intention? behind that.

Ben Lynch: It's a great point. Even just in the subtle language distinction of referral partners is the assumption that this is a referral-based partnership, where it might not actually be because you just mentioned suppliers. So, I like your sort of framing of We're looking at our partnership network, the people we partner with, and that means different things. One of those commonly is referrals, whether it's from you to them, them to you, or a mixture of both. I really like that distinction that you're looking at partners.

Bec Clare: And the interesting thing there, Ben, is even just this week, we've gone and deepened our relationship with our uniform supplier, and now they're placing our information into the bags of all of the sports clubs that they provide uniforms to, and their team are now coming into us. So just because You have maybe have a supplier that helps you operate day to day. They can also be championing your message too. And so that's why we refer to everyone as a partner because you simply don't know where that next referral might come from. That's really still special from that connection.

Ben Lynch: Yes, yes. Often when I've thought about partnerships and going back to when you look at the best partnerships or a partnership that you've got, whether it's a friend or a business associate or colleague, what are some of the key characteristics that have allowed that to flourish? And I'm sure there's many, but a couple that come to mind are frequent and regular communication, alignment on values. I'll say, connecting personally or digitally, whether it's via Zoom or phone or FaceTime or whatever the case may be. And that kind of bleeds into integrated, like, of course, you're going to be super connected if you play in the same sports team as them or go to the same church or golf club or whatever it is. You probably got a great deal of frequent connection. And often there's low barriers or no barriers to that interaction happening. So I often think if we want these to flourish, how do we lower some of those barriers that might be that really practical example? if you're using a tool like Slack in your workspace to communicate with your team, does that partner also use Slack and can come in as a connected channel or a connected guest? And then it avoids email, which everyone's always delayed on getting back to. That's just one example, but the starting principle is how do we lower some of the barriers or friction points for this to flourish and the communication piece to happen just with ease. Perhaps even as you go back and you look at your partnerships and you go, why hasn't this worked as well as we'd hoped? There's often a couple of those elements there that are not working as well as they could. Frequency of communication, understanding of values, and I'll say face-to-face time perhaps. Are there any other things that you find really useful for lowering the friction, lowering some of the barriers for this exchange to happen, whether it doesn't have to be referrals coming back to you, but how do you lower some of those friction points so that it can flourish?

Bec Clare: I think I love that notion of lowering the friction points. almost create an environment where casual conversation happens, right? Some of the best stuff and connection happens by casually talking, whether it be over dinner or over a coffee. But more so, what do really good friends do, right? If you think about that, really good friends might see something somewhere and maybe flick it to you. Send it to you. Your friends, your DMs might be a whole bunch of reels or memes or whatever it might be, but almost create a relationship where if you see a great article or you see a great new initiative or something, you just send it to that person when you think of them and you go, this is really relevant to them. I wonder if they've seen it. Why don't you send it to them? Like, hey, I saw this and I thought of you.

Ben Lynch: Yeah.

Bec Clare: What that does is that person goes, oh, well, that's really thoughtful, and they've not come asking for something from me.

Ben Lynch: Yes. It's a good distinction about the asking and the giving side of things. If you looked at that as a transaction, perhaps that's holding back. Perhaps that's the friction is you're expecting too much, maybe having given enough. It reminds me, we created this document called 29 ways to add value to partnerships. Often we go straight to referrals and it's like, did they refer a client to me? Did I refer a client to them? So I think it's essentially 28 ways that are not referring clients to add value. We did, we did this as pre COVID because we'd often get this question. It was just a little bit of dynamic thinking of how could we see this as something we wanted to build over the long term, make it sustainable rather than I'm going to try and make this meeting be the best pitch possible and hope that there's a flood of new clients that come through to me, which is I don't think that's ever happened to anyone. I've never heard that story. But I think we go into it thinking and hoping this might be the case, or it's two or three meetings and all of a sudden the floodgates open. So I'm not sure if that's publicly available. It's definitely available to members, 29 Ways to Strengthen Partnerships, I think's the official title. So go check that out. What's really useful about that is sharing it with your team who often have this stress or anxiety about, oh, I've got to get clients from this or I'm being paid to commute to this café to meet with this person for an hour and commute back. How can I make sure that this gets a return on that time and effort? Here are some other ways that you could think about adding value perhaps before you do that meeting or after it that aren't just client transactions. I like it. I think this is such a key element to filling your books, right, is strong partnerships. that don't have to rely on client referrals just yet but can do it over time. So the other one that we spoke a lot about in this training session was reactivating patients. Now this isn't appropriate for everyone. My classic case goes to psychologists who might have discharged a client after they've gone through care and it's often much more sensitive topic than a sprained ankle for a pod or a physio as an example. But reactivation so often is part of the client journey and checking in. Hey, have you still got a great outcome from the care plan that we delivered or is there a new issue or is that issue coming back to nag you? And having that ability to check in with email, SMS, phone call is a great way because so often people go, You know, I've been thinking about booking in, I just never got around to it, but I got the SMS and it was a perfect prompt for me to book back in. So just talk to me about what are you seeing clinic owners do when it comes to reactivating patients?

Bec Clare: When we talk about partnerships, your patients are your partnerships too, your clients rather. They're some of the best partnerships. You've made a huge impact in their life and you've had rapport that's been built. they may be also raving fans for you, so whether they've got something that they need to come back in for or they know someone that can be pointed in your direction, just popping back up in their inbox or by phone call or by text, it is about starting somewhere. And often we hold back on these reactivations because we're like, oh, but what do I say? That needs to be perfect. I don't want to nag them. I've also seen some of the funniest stories as well in coaching where you've gone to set up a campaign. You wanted to only go to this segment of the database and it goes to everyone. We've done it.

Ben Lynch: We've all done it.

Bec Clare: We've all done it. And you think for this moment of horror.

Ben Lynch: Yes.

Bec Clare: And you think, oh my goodness, how foolish. The amount of reactivation that just comes off of that can also be really quite incredible. Reactivating and touching base with anyone who has cancelled and not rebooked their care when they had a treatment plan in place, that's a really great one. A lot of people will elect, you might have had a drop in numbers over that Christmas period because everyone got busy or they didn't rebook. So really trying to go back to those clients who have treatment plans in place, who have not yet followed through. Now's a great time. They're past all the silly season. Kids are almost back at school. They're ready to sort of restart their normal life, if you like. And as Ben said, setting up campaigns that can be reoccurring that can follow up clients after they've been discharged or haven't continued care. So you might pick a time frame. Usually three months is around the sweet spot for us in MSK. That's a really nice spot. And just have that reoccurring. Um, it's discharged three months ago. It's now going out, but in three months time, you've just got it going out in a really automated way. And there's some really great platforms that you can use to automate all of that. So it's really a set it up and get it going and let the automation take care of the nurturing for you.

Ben Lynch: It's a really great distinction you're making here, because there's a number of different ways to think about it. And often for those that are new to this, or maybe they've done a light version of it, they're somewhat afraid to nag their database of clients that they've seen before or seen currently. And there's probably at least two dimensions you could think about. This is seasonal. reactivations and communication, and evergreen as well. So some version of the evergreen or trigger-based is, as you're explaining, it's been three months since your last appointment and you don't have a future one, so we're going to be checking in. It might be around that they cancelled and we didn't book them in, as you said. Sort of similar there, but finding ways in your client relationship management tool, the emails and SMS tool, whatever you use, and there's a variety of great ones out there, to have these based on behaviours or criteria that a client meets so that it's just happening there in the background as evergreen. You don't need to think about doing it. It's almost set and forget. You set it up once and it's there. You can definitely refine it over time and add to it. Then there's the seasonal ones, which you could quite literally do this as seasons, like summer and winter and autumn and spring, depending on the type of clients that you see. A classic one in the musculoskeletal world is, for summer sports, we're going to make sure we have various promotions, deals, or offers, whatever it might be. Or you could think of it as each month has a specific focus. One of the interesting distinctions that I think we had in that conversation, or perhaps it was the one after, was this notion of having an offer for your clients and database every single month. Here's the distinction. Naturally, people think an offer is a discount, but all we were talking about was how do we package up, meaning how do we communicate the things that we have for a specific client type. Some examples that came through were like the back pain package or the knee pain package. Insert your profession for whatever it might be and the relevant problems that you see. the school holidays intensive for speech and OT or psych. We know these things are going to happen at certain months or periods of the year. They're seasonal. How can we start the new year having prepared and planned for those, scheduled those even, right now? Could you take a day offline and prepare the next three to six months worth of these things? Again, it doesn't have to be a discount. Though it could include some lowering of the friction for people to get in with a different initial assessment or maybe there's a product that you've just added to the suite that you could include. There are a number of different ways and we can cover this at a different point, right, in compelling offers, but it doesn't need to be a discount. It's just packaging up services, products that we have that could help someone get an outcome with their healthcare. How are you thinking about this in 2026 and getting this on the radar of your clients and client base? Or what have you seen some of the clinic owners that you're working with do regarding this?

Bec Clare: I love watching other clinics go about this and seeing them package up what they have to offer the community. And I love taking inspiration from that and seeing what the very best paediatric clinics are doing, the very best site clinics, what are they doing and how are they communicating what they can do for their clients and how they can impact their lives. I actually have this time blocked. no kidding, in my diary for tomorrow morning. And Ben, you said, set aside a day and go about doing your next three or six months. I, it's not going to take me a day because I'm going to use things like ChatGPT to help me craft the emails. Um, and I'm going to help have ChatGPT help me segment my database into what are some of the seasonal things. I've allocated two hours for six months worth of our campaigns. I'm going to pressure test it and see whether it's doable and I'm really looking forward to it. If you are a Practice Leaders member or you have your team in the Practice Leaders program, which is a program that's available to all of our members for your admin leadership group, we are actually workshopping this and I will be showing live on our next session. What we have done in clinic, as will Sammy from PhysioFit, we'll be showing live what we're doing, what's working in the clinic to reactivate. Our whole next month in the Practice Leaders program is doing this email nurturing, SMS nurturing, and been to the point of, oh, I don't want to nag my clients. Andrew Zachariah once coached me about an ad that I wanted to put up for a therapist. And he said, how many times, Becky, are you going to post this? I said, well, I don't want to be annoying. He said, what do you mean annoying? You need to get in front of people. And he asked me the question, well, how many times would be annoying? And I said, oh, I reckon maybe two or three posts. And he said, do four. He said, go one more than you think is annoying because it's still not very annoying to the public. You're just being conservative about your view.

Ben Lynch: So go one more. Very reasonable point. And I think it's to be expected that you're going to have some people opt out of your database and your client list. And that's okay. I think if it's done in a really thoughtful way as you're doing, and you're trying to articulate the value that you could provide folks, educating them, that's okay. It's not for everyone. Beck, I'm looking forward to collabing on that as well. I'm going to follow with close interest how those PLP sessions go. And as we move forward, We're going to cover a number of different topics around how to fill your books this year. It's such a key focus for a lot of clinic owners. How do I get new clients, whether it's digital ads, Facebook and Google, or Instagram as well. Whether it's partnership nurturing, whether it's how do I use the tools and tech or the team and the pathways for them to help us attract clients. This is something that we're leaning into massively. Beck, thank you for your insights as always, and we'll catch you on another episode very soon.

Bec Clare: Thanks, Ben.

Ben Lynch: Bye-bye.