How to Manage a Full Practice

Today’s topic is something that people ask me about all the time. What do you do when all this stuff that I’ve been teaching works and you get to full practice capacity? You can’t take on any more clients without pulling your hair out and there’s just no more ‘you’ to go around.

The first thing you can do is create a waiting list. That’s good for the short term but it doesn’t really do much because you still have them waiting for you.

Second, you can raise your rates. You can decide to either raise your rates just for your new clients or to raise your rates with all of your clients. You may be saying (because I’ve heard this for the last 12 years of coaching people), “Oh, but they won’t pay for that.” Sure, some of your existing clients will fall off, but yes—some of them will pay for that, especially if you have a waiting list. It’s been my experience that in the past when I would raise my rates every three or four or six months, people would just gladly pay for it. If you give good value, people will pay for it. And even though others fell off, you will end up making more money because you have all these new clients paying the new rate.

The next steps to take once you’ve filled your practice are to learn to clone and leverage yourself. This is where you have to start thinking about what you can do with your intellectual property—all of that knowledge that’s in your head. Consider creating a product where you teach people what you do with private clients and you put it in a box. This is big in the information marketing business, which is really the advice-giving business. You can put all of your knowledge in a box and sell that box.

You can also begin to work with groups. Many years ago when I had a full practice of clients, I decided to create a group program, which allowed me to teach this information to a group of 12 to 20 people at the same time, but at a reduced cost for them. So I actually made more per hour tha
I did with private clients, but individually they paying less.

You can also teach this as a seminar. Take all of your knowledge, teach it as a two or three day seminar and charge $1,000, $2,000, $3,000—whatever you want to charge.

Lastly, begin to bring on associates. These are people who you can train to work with you to teach all of the surplus clients. (We don’t like to think of them as surplus clients. Everybody is significant and important but you know what I mean, the ones that you can’t handle.)

So those are some of the things you can do when your practice fills to capacity. It’s all about leveraging and really getting to that next level by cloning yourself through team, systems and technology. This is a really important theme that you must think about when you get to about $75,000 or $100,000 in your business and you don’t have any more room for clients and no more time to spare.

Your Client Attraction Assignment

Even if you’re not yet at full practice capacity, start thinking about what you will do once you get to that place. Create a plan for the future. And if you’re at full capacity now, start leveraging and cloning yourself by implementing some of these suggestions.