SLP practice owners: now the election’s over, it’s time to rethink your business

The big picture:

In Australia, speech pathology private practice is changing before our eyes due to NDIS reforms, proposed Foundational Supports, primary health care changes, AI and other innovations, ongoing financial pressures, increased regulatory and business risks, and global economic stresses.

Wait and see? 

Not a good strategy. Nor is sitting in a room for months planning and researching your next business model with 5-year projections. Uncertainty abounds, and all we have is good guesses about what might come next. 

What to do:

You’re in business. But you’re also a scientist:

• Summarise your best hypotheses about where you think things are heading, and sketch out how your practice will create value for you, your team, and your clients if your guesses turn out to be true.
• Test your hypotheses with:
  • incremental, real world changes to existing service design, mix and delivery; and
  • lots of small experiments, doing new things in new ways.
• Gather early and frequent feedback from clients on your experiments so you can iterate and refine service features and delivery incrementally based on real data. 
• As things happen, create new hypotheses, keep testing your ideas, and be prepared to roll back experiments that fail.

More theory?

None of this is new. Many of these principles stem from Steve Blank’s Lean Start-Up movement, which kicked off more than a decade ago. (Google him if you want more information about his research.)

First step:

Summarise your best guesses using a lean start-up framework for speech pathologists, like mine (see below). Then start experimenting, and getting real world feedback from clients.

Ready to go?

Click to download our Private Practice Business Planning Kit, including our handy One-Page Business Plan Template built on lean start-up principles, as they apply to Australian Speech Language Pathologists.