The Great Natural Therapies Career Trap

If you are a natural health practitioner of any modality, then this post may well be the most important one you have ever read.

No-one will ever tell you what I’m about to share with you when you first become a natural therapist. In fact, most therapists are only vaguely aware of it, and suffer the lifelong consequences as a result.

Here’s a bullet point summary of how the average career as a therapist currently looks:

• You graduate and get qualified, full of hopes and dreams.
• You land a job and work hard in someone else’s clinic to get a foothold and some experience.
• You take a leap and set up your own practice, so you can “do it your way”. Its more expensive than you thought.
• You then wait for the clients to show up… hopefully some do. You spend some money you don’t really have on marketing, signage and your business cards. You’re not sure if it’s really working, but everyone else seems to be doing it so you do too.
• After a while, you get busy enough to cover your expenses by working long hours and putting everything you have into your clients. Enthusiasm keeps you going. You can afford to keep yourself fed and clothed from week to week.
• You then juggle family life, your patients, running your practice, your social life… and try to fit your health into the equation too. But you are making a living wage and no-one else seems to do it any easier, so you figure things are going OK.
• You then do this year after year after year. You still love being a practitioner but wonder what happened to the financial security that you thought you should be enjoying by now?
• After enough years, you start to feel burnt out and disillusioned. You don’t admit it to your clients, and certainly not to your practitioner colleagues! You pretend you can cope, but secretly put the practice on the market and start planning retirement.
• You speak to a business broker. You discover your practice is basically only worth the value of the fixtures and fittings, and all your goodwill is worth next to nothing.
• You cancel your retirement plans, and stay at work. You pretend you are still enthusiastic.

It’s what I call “The Great Natural Therapies Career Trap”, and it’s based on an erroneous assumption that having good technical skills as a practitioner and “following the herd” in private practice will somehow result in success.

The truth is, even the most successful practitioners in natural health tend to be overworked and under-rewarded, especially when compared with other professions of similar qualifications.

This is not how it has to be. But for you to make your career different, you are going to have to find a different path to tread.

Over the past six years, by working with hundreds of natural health practitioners, I have developed and mapped out an alternative pathway that is may double your income and halve your working hours in under seven months. It’s designed and proven to work specifically with natural health providers like you in mind.

If you want to know more, you are invited to join me for a free online seminar series called the Natural Therapies Business Masterclass.

I look forward to sharing this cutting-edge practice-building information with you. As a committed private natural health practitioner, I believe you owe it to yourself, your family and your clients to do everything you can to make your practice not only busy, but also sustainable.

Regards,

Adam