A London physiotherapist on the three years it took him to ask for help, the mindset work that finally moved the numbers, and why he believes most clinic owners are more frightened of succeeding than of failing.
“Most people, they don't have fear of failure. They have fear of being successful.”— Bruno de Jongh
Bruno de Jongh qualified as a physiotherapist in 2003 and opened CBR Clinics in 2007 as a sole trader, with, in his words, no clue what he was doing, because university teaches you to be a physio and not to run a business. He built a team around him and it worked for years, until COVID tested whether the model underneath was sound. His was not. The clinic was still turning a profit but had no real system behind it, and it crumbled. It then took another three years before he asked anyone for help, by which point he believed the business was going to crash.
The honest centre of the episode is what those years felt like from the inside. Constant anxiety, poor sleep, and a video gaming habit he had carried for four decades and now names as an addiction, eight hours at a stretch before his children were born, used to soothe his brain and to avoid looking at what was happening in the business or in his marriage. When he finally joined Thrive Business Coaching, the tactical checklist came first and changed little. Eight months in he emailed to leave, because getting close to a breakthrough was too frightening, and the programme talked him out of it. The turn came from a single exercise set by his coach: ten things he was grateful for, every day, for seven days, with no repeats. On day one he could find three. By day seven something had shifted, and the self-worth problem sitting underneath everything else had started to move.
Three years on, Bruno coaches for Thrive himself, and the clinic has just posted its highest ever revenue and, the month after, its highest ever profit. He argues that mindset belongs alongside operations and clinical skill as a third pillar of running a practice, and that most owners are held back less by a fear of failure than by a fear of success, often because succeeding means contradicting what they grew up hearing about money and wealthy people. The rest of the conversation is practical: rebuilding a team until only one of the original eight remained, screening suppliers on transparency and core values rather than on the pitch, moving patient recalls off therapists who were never wired for that work, and a flagship London site opening in January with a Pilates studio attached, which he expects to triple the size of the business and which exists in service of a simpler aim, helping people live well for longer.
Coherent gives private clinics one patient relationship engine, recovering revenue lost at enquiry, recall and billing.