Growth is rarely the smooth climb it looks like from the outside. Sometimes a clinic has to nearly break before it learns how to scale.
Geoff Gamble co-founded NHRC in 2012 with four practitioners and about 4,000 square feet of space. It is now a 7,000 square foot multidisciplinary clinic in Canada with around 27 staff, and Coherent's first Canadian partner. On paper it reads like a clean growth story; in practice, as Geoff admits, it has been anything but a straight line.
For the first seven years the clinic grew steadily and Geoff assumed he had it worked out. Then he and his business partner started taking their hands off the wheel, and within 18 months they had lost most of their staff, watched growth flatline, and begun weighing up whether to close. The recovery started with an uncomfortable admission: they did not actually know how to run the business.
Coaching, learning to read a P&L, tracking the numbers weekly rather than monthly, and hiring for attitude over CV all followed. Geoff is candid about the habits that held them back, from decisions made on napkin maths to a control freak's reluctance to delegate, through to a costly expansion built on a hunch and reactivating a dormant patient list as much for good care as for revenue.
“We undervalue how important our admin team is. They are the lowest paid people in the clinic, yet they see every single person who comes through the door, and they are the first and last person that patient sees.”— Geoff Gamble
Coherent gives private clinics one patient relationship engine, recovering revenue lost at enquiry, recall and billing.