How to Scale Your Business Without More Clients or Staff

Eventually, every business hits the moment of deciding how they will scale. What that typically means is acquiring more clients and, in turn, acquiring more staff. At least, that’s how it works in service-based businesses that coaches and rehab professionals work in. But what if there was an option that allowed you to generate more with LESS of these things? 

A third scaling mechanism is what I like to call process efficiency. This requires reimagining the way we currently do things to all one person to potentially manage many. If you look at how traditional physical therapy use this mechanism, you'll see clinics that bring on PT techs to manage the exercise and client flow throughout the day of patients. This is an example of combining staff and process efficiency. This model took the portions of treatment that did not require a licensed PT and replaced them with a staff member who could be brought on for considerably less wage, typically around 1/5th of what it would cost to use the PT in this scenario. 

In the fitness industry, you’ve seen this implemented with a group class model. The change in process and operations allows for one coach to manage many clients. 

Now when we look at high-value coaching and rehab professional treatment processes, they are typically marketed as 1:1 (meaning the person providing the service is directly involved in the management of the entire client session) and often sold for an hour. You see this model regularly used in personal training and cash-based physical therapy/sports chiro services. Ironically, the thing that broke us out of the traditional rehab model also ended up being one of the biggest scale constraints in the new and improved cash-based model. We can admit that we basically traded a macro problem for a micro problem. Same problem, but on a lower scale.

To break out of this problem, we need to figure out a solution that allows us to deliver a solution-based mechanism that can still solve the problem in a high-level way but does not cost us the same 1:1 time, and, thus, allows us to scale.

Thanks to the internet, this solution exists. By leveraging digital delivery mechanisms in your process, you can sell your expertise without selling your time.

Reimagining the exercise portion of your visits, we can elevate the marketing message around this experience by referring to it as a Prescriptive Exercise Program. This nomenclature gives it value and differentiates it from standard procedures like home exercise programs, therapeutic exercise, and general fitness programming. 

Here’s how it works: 

As the provider, you can pitch an experience that extends beyond your facility walls - the Prescriptive Exercise Program. You write the program, and your clients implement it alongside their standard strength and conditioning work, in their own facilities or gyms. One day per week, you spend a few allocated hours writing the weekly programs for your clients and interpreting their feedback so you can make the appropriate adjustments to the next batch of work.

Here’s the math:

Let’s say you currently charge $200/hour for in-person services and only see one client at a time. That means the earning potential for that hour is $200. 

Now, let’s say you have five clients on a monthly recurring Prescriptive Exercise Program at $300/client per month. If we use the same hour to manage those five clients - $1,500 in revenue divided by 4.3 (the average number of weeks in a month) = $348/hour… Almost 150% increase in revenue potential. 

It’s not unheard of to manage six clients per hour in this management model, which would then net you $418/hour. Over double your current in-person hourly rate. 

Don’t believe this is possible? At my peak of managing clients remotely, I had a 56-client roster and used 8 hours per week to manage them. That's about seven clients per hour of management time. This efficiency is around $488/hour. 

Imagine adding this process to your existing operations. What would you do with your newly acquired time? Less burnout, more family time, self-care time, less acquisition stress. Why wouldn’t you act!?

It’s time to reimagine what you believe to be the norm! You’ve broken out once, time to do it again!