Season 3: Episode 7 | Walls or Maps? Growing Your Practice Within the Rules

Have you ever had a great idea for your practice and immediately thought: “But am I actually allowed to do that?”

A new service. A different way of marketing. A partnership with a company or school.

For healthcare practitioners, building a business comes with an added layer of complexity: we don’t run ordinary businesses. We run businesses inside a regulated profession.

In Episode 7: Walls or Maps? Growing Your Practice Within the Rules, Phumla is back with another solo episode exploring how the rules and expectations surrounding healthcare can influence the way we make business decisions.

Drawing on ideas from her Master’s studies, Phumla introduces three different pressures that can shape the way we run our practices:

“I have to.”

The formal rules, regulations and compliance requirements we’re expected to follow.

“Others are doing it this way.”

The tendency to look at other practices and practitioners when we’re unsure what to do ourselves.

“This is who we are.”

The professional values we carry with us – patient welfare, integrity and our own understanding of what good healthcare practice should look like.

But the bigger question is this:

Do we experience those boundaries as walls… or as maps?

Two practitioners can operate under exactly the same rules. One sees everything they can’t do. The other understands the boundaries and starts looking for the routes that are available.

In this episode, you’ll hear about:

• Why healthcare practitioners face a unique tension between entrepreneurship and professional responsibility.

• The three types of pressure that can influence the decisions we make in private practice.

• Why it’s important to know the actual rule rather than the rumour.

• How changing the question from “Can I?” to “How can I do this ethically?” can open up a very different conversation.

• Why looking at what other practices are doing isn’t necessarily a bad thing – provided we’re intentional about what we copy.

• Why professional integrity and business growth don’t have to be opposites.

💬 Phumla’s question for you:

Which of the three pressures shapes your business decisions most – the rules, watching what others do, or your professional values?

And does that pressure feel more like a wall or a map?

📅 Join us for our next live Practice Operating System Masterclass

Does running your practice sometimes feel like you’re constantly chasing your tail between patients, admin, people, finances and marketing?

On Tuesday, 20 October at 7:30 pm, Anne and Phumla are hosting another live Practice Operating System Masterclass.

This session is designed to help you step back from the day-to-day demands and get a bird’s-eye view of what’s actually happening inside your practice.

Together, we’ll help you identify where your systems gaps are, work out which areas need your attention first and start focusing on what will actually move your business forward – rather than trying to fix everything at once.

This is a live, practical masterclass, so come with your own practice in mind and be ready to work alongside us.

👉Go save your free seat for the masterclass here: https://thesolutioneersblog.kit.com/856e3afb1f

And make sure you subscribe to the Grow Your Healthcare Practice Podcast so you don’t miss the next episode, where Phumla will be exploring another important part of running a practice:

Confidence – not as a personality trait, but as a business skill.