Episode 48 · With Teresa Harvey · 27 Jul 2026 · 47 min

    The Human Side of Scale

    An osteopath of thirty years on scaling a four-clinic group without losing the human relationship, and what it really felt like to sell.

    Featured guest

    Teresa Harvey

    Osteopath and founder of a four-clinic Glasgow group
    Teresa Harvey is an osteopath of thirty years based in Glasgow. She began her career in neuro and spinal nursing before moving into osteopathy, and built a four-clinic group in the southwest of Scotland which she recently sold to join a larger MSK group. She still practises clinically alongside running the business.

    Show notes

    Teresa Harvey trained first in neuro and spinal nursing, working in neurosurgery at Addenbrooke's, before moving into osteopathy in her mid-twenties, drawn to a more holistic, root-cause approach to care. Over thirty years she built a four-clinic osteopathy group in the southwest of Scotland, which she has just sold to join a larger MSK group.

    She and Jared dig into how she kept care personal as the group grew: auditing returns, new patients and cancellations every week, training new graduates to set short, medium and long-term goals, and framing the patient journey as a two-way contract with clear functional milestones. She also describes how a trusted MSK clinic increasingly acts as primary-care triage, catching red flags like fractures, cord compression and secondaries before a GP appointment.

    On technology she is pragmatic: an AI phone service answers around the clock and an AI scribe lets clinicians make eye contact instead of typing, but the human relationship stays the point. She closes on the sale itself, why she chose to join a group rather than be acquired, how systemising early made due diligence painless, and the one thing she believes will never change in healthcare: face-to-face, hands-on, human care.

    Key takeaways

    • Go slow to go fast: an unhurried first assessment that finds the root cause resolves patients faster than a reflexive problem-then-solution loop.
    • Audit every week. Track returns, new patients and cancellations without a rebook, and have new grads call the patients who dropped off; it is uncomfortable, but it trains honest, expectation-setting communication.
    • Manage patients, don't just treat them. Set quantifiable functional milestones and frame care as a two-way contract the patient opts into with informed consent.
    • Give every patient-facing role a script to start from, then let staff make it their own, so the whole clinic reads from one consistent, authentic voice rather than a robotic one.
    • A trusted MSK clinic becomes primary-care triage. Give clinicians the time and skills to screen and they will catch serious red flags before the GP does.
    • Use AI where it enhances care, like around-the-clock phone answering and note-taking that frees up eye contact, not where it removes the human. Systemising early also made the sale's due diligence straightforward.
    “Looking into someone's eyes and having that honesty and authenticity from a practitioner is something that is going to be really invaluable.”
    — Teresa Harvey
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