Mentoring: Are you wasting your time?
Excessive time demands are a common gripe in clinical practice. Particularly the non-billable hours spent on admin, social media, research, report writing and other client communication.
Do you know the amount of time spent on tasks outside consultations? Have you considered the return on this investment?
The following mentoring article explores tracking your time to identify the rub points and ways to reduce unnecessary work for both you and your clients.
Before a successful booking is made
The client journey begins long before the initial consultation. A potential client first needs to be aware of your service (aka marketing). It’s important they’re assured you can offer what they are looking for in order to book an appointment and turn up for the consultation.
Is the process straightforward? Do you have FAQs on your website, online booking (and ideally prepayment), automated pre-consultation information and reminders?
If bookings don’t always occur without your involvement, you’re likely wasting time fielding avoidable enquiries that don’t always result in consultations.
Do you track how often potential clients make contact before booking a consultation? This includes questions via social media comments, email, your contact page, phone calls and texts. What time is involved and, more importantly, how frequently does it lead to a ‘sale’?
Look at the frequency and source of enquiries to understand what prompts the contact. (For example regarding a social media post on social media, a referral from another health professional, etc.) Do you spend long replying to a single enquiry and in what level of detail? Is this a single brief reply that results in a booking, no booking or a long interchange? Or does the process feel like a consultation by proxy?
Consider the return on your time investment? When you’re getting messages from a post or other source that doesn’t lead to a booking, consider if the subject or kind of post aligns with the type of clients you want to work with.
Discovery calls
Free ‘15 minute’ chats, aka discovery calls, are sometimes offered as an alternative to this kind of interchange. However if you offer these how long does this unpaid interchange take from first interaction to either no further contact or a paid consultation? How often does it lead to a paid consultation, especially an ideal or ‘golden client’?
Are you aware of when discovery calls attract clients that would not have booked without one? Types of discovery calls often fall into three categories:
- tyre kickers (those who want information but have no intention of booking a paid consultation)
- uncertain clients who have a lot of questions and if they become a client tend to need a lot of assurance and make frequent contact between consults
- people who had essentially decided to see you but chose a discovery call anyway because one was offered.
Track your time and results from discovery calls. What effort does it take to set them up? What’s actual the duration of each call and does the interaction end there or in a paid consultation? When the call results in a consultation, be brave and ask if they’d have booked anyway without a discovery call.
Simplifying the process for your client
Is it easy for clients to book a consultation? Is your booking system fully automated online including sending any pre-consultation information, payment, reminders and enables clients to change the appointment themselves? If not fully automated, note your time involved in the process.
Is the info on your website sufficient to answer possible queries so clients don’t need to contact you? If there’s an FAQ section, make sure it’s easy to find. Ideally when using a booking system, the client knows in advance how to make changes and your cancellation policy. If not, consider the time these issues cost you.
Your time before, during and after the consultation
Before: do you manually need to chase up pre-consultation questionnaires or spend hours preparing for the consultation? Do you ever find yourself making a diagnosis, excessively researching or overthinking the information the client supplies before you see them?
During: are you good at running to time? What’s your approach if a client is late, takes the session off track or has too many issues to address within the booking time? How often do your sessions run over time and by how much?
After: If a treatment plan isn’t created during the consultation, how long does it take to do so afterwards. This may include research, writing up notes, prescribing remedies, sending clients a summary or plan, ordering tests or writing referrals? Set the timer, what’s the average time spent per client?
Read more: Avoiding no shows and cancellations
When you’re in the early years of practice, understandably you don’t know everything. Each client offers a potential opportunity to expand your knowledge. However there may be a tendency to overthink, over-prescribe lifestyle hacks or remedies and overwhelm the client in your quest to give them every possible solution. If that’s sound familiar, read more about the Goldilocks prescription and layering treatment plans. This both saves you time and sets your client up for success.
Your time is important
Why is time such an important issue? From mentoring practitioners for several decades it’s clear that spending more time than necessary on these client related matters is a considerable factor in burnout. Work/life balance is vital for everyone, but when you run your own business happy practitioners are more likely to succeed!
First identify the problem areas by tracking your time. Next try implementing the solutions. If this is not enough, there may be other issues around confidence, gaps in knowledge, boundaries or even self-worth at play. Mentoring can be an effective way to identify and work through these challenges.
Gill works with established health practitioners and business owners, big and small, to create a balanced and sustainable career.
Book your exploratory mentoring session.
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