A single-site practice, twenty years running, built almost entirely on market-stall relationship selling and a refusal to stay inside its own four walls.
“You've gotta go where the buffalo are.”— Jonathan Shearer
Jonathan Shearer qualified as a podiatrist from Southampton in 1999 and spent seven years in the NHS before setting up his own private practice in Tamworth, Staffordshire in 2006, starting with just a home-visit round of around fifty patients and a first newspaper advert that cost him £1,000. Twenty years on, the practice has grown into a multi-practitioner podiatry and sports therapy clinic, but Jonathan has deliberately kept it to one site, having already tried and sold a second location that drifted away from podiatry into beauty and aesthetics.
Long before he had a website, Jonathan built the practice through old-fashioned relationship selling learned on a market stall as a teenager, connecting with local shopkeepers, sports clubs and even a PTA night where he coined his own rule, "No One Gets Out Alive," to make sure nobody left the room without a leaflet. His guiding principle throughout has been to give first and build trust before ever asking for anything in return, from sponsoring Tamworth Football Club for two decades to sending referrals to a local running shop long before it sent any back.
The conversation also covers how Jonathan runs the practice day to day: shifting associates onto an employed model around three years ago to build a more cohesive team, recording weekly training sessions with the AI note-taker Plaud so new hires can learn from them later, and having candidates "test drive" the clinic for a full day before he'll offer them a job. He is candid about the mistakes along the way, including the second site he ultimately sold, and about why he has chosen depth over expansion for two decades.
Coherent gives private clinics one patient relationship engine, recovering revenue lost at enquiry, recall and billing.