Have you ever had that moment where you're sitting at your desk surrounded by Post-it notes, printer problems, and unfinished progress notes and thought, "Hang on, this is a lot more than being a therapist"? Yep, me too. In this episode, I take you back to when I first started my practice (hi, baby Ruby in the pram!) and share the very real realisation that we wear way more hats than we ever signed up for.

In this episode, I chat about:

• The funny but accurate concept of an "entrepreneurial seizure" from The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber
• Understanding the three roles every business owner juggles: technician, manager, and entrepreneur
• Why we spend too much time in our safe, comfy clinician zone (and what that costs us)
• What happens when the entrepreneur hat stays hidden in the cupboard
• Practical ways to carve out time and space for managing and growing your practice
• Giving yourself permission to grow (without tying it to being even more busy!)

Reflections & Takeaways:

This episode is all about recognising where you're spending your time, and whether it's where you need to be. Technician, manager, entrepreneur: they’re all crucial roles, but most of us cling to our clinical roots while the business side of things quietly frays around the edges. The moment we start to truly own our business owner identity? That’s when things shift.

Remember: you don’t have to grow a big team. You don’t have to step away from clients entirely. But you do deserve calm, clarity, and support. And that means building systems, carving out CEO time, and embracing all the hats (even if they’re a bit uncomfortable at first).

If you’re feeling like the technician role is taking over your world, I hope this episode gave you some practical ways to step into your manager and entrepreneur shoes a little more often. And if you need help doing that, come join us inside The Connection...it's the place where we work on these things together... Smart with Heart!

You can learn more here: https://theconnectionco.com.au

Foreign.

Welcome to my Good Allied Health Practice, the podcast for allied health business owners who are looking to bring smart and heart together on their journey.

On the podcast, I'll cover things about being vulnerable and brave, pivoting failures, good wins, things that work, things that don't work.

And I'll talk with other practice owners who are doing good in their journeys.

I'm Amy Geach, practice owner and mum, and I'm here because I believe in you.

So let's go forward on this journey together.

Hello and welcome back to today's episode.

It's one that hits close to home for me and it's a goodie.

It's a goodie.

I'm really pleased to be talking about this topic today.

And it's about that moment when you realize that you're not just a therapist anymore.

You've got all these other hats that you're wearing.

You're a business owner, you're a CEO, you're a leader, you're a marketer.

And maybe just quietly, you didn't exactly sign up for that part.

And I still remember when I started my practice, which is a long time ago now, excuse me.

And I was, I had many days of sitting at my clinic desk and I started off just by myself.

I hired a room from a local surgeon and just got started.

I was very naive.

I, I did just have to work things out as I went along.

There was no connection for me back then to help me with what to do.

But I remember many, many days sitting at my computer desk and you know, there would be some half finished progress notes and sticky notes or post it notes, you know, kind of stuck on the screen and stuck in my notebook that said all sorts of things like pay super, chase up the payment from an insurance company right back to the surgeon, put together a marketing letter for the gps.

Like there was just so much going on with all of that.

You've then got printer is jamming and it doesn't want to work and yeah, all the things, all the things, I get it.

And I've been in that trench many, many times and there's that moment where you realize this is way more than just turning up to work as a clinician.

It's way more and I'm drowning a little bit here.

One of the first books I read, actually it was the very, very first business book I read and it was recommended to me by somebody.

And I say somebody because I can't actually remember exactly who it was because it was nearly 20 years ago.

Anyway, it was recommended to me and it's called the E. Myth, the E. Myth Revisited, and it's by Michael Gerbaum.

And honestly, it was the book I didn't know I needed at the time because there's this line in it, and it's one of my favorite lines in any book.

And it says, most people don't start businesses because they're entrepreneurs.

They start them because they're technicians having an entrepreneurial seizure.

It's so funny, but it's so true.

Right?

I didn't start a business because at the time, I identified with myself as being an entrepreneur.

I was a technician who saw a way that I could move out of the city, work in a regional area with an amazing surgeon, keep up my skills, do the work that I had trained to do.

And the way of doing that was to start a business.

So, yeah, I had an entrepreneurial seizure.

And what that means is, like, we're good at what we do, right?

I was a really good hand therapist, and we love helping people.

So I could definitely tick that box.

And I absolutely had that thought, I'll start my own practice.

That'll be great.

And then suddenly, I am trying to work out my own payroll, chasing invoices, ordering tape measures and equipment, cleaning the splinting pan at 9pm and, yeah, kind of wondering what happened to my life.

Meanwhile, I've got a newborn at home.

Well, when I started my clinic, I had my newborn beside me in a pram.

Yeah.

Back in the day.

So I want to lean in today a little bit about this E Myth and this entrepreneurial seizure.

And let's talk through it a little bit, because in the book the E Myth Revisited, Michael talks about three roles that we all play in business, and they are the technician, the manager, and the entrepreneur.

Now, in allied health, this makes so much sense.

And when I'm talking to people in mentoring sessions or I'm getting to know people in the membership, I see people sit in that technician space and don't give themselves the opportunity to lean into the manager role or the entrepreneur role early enough in their business.

And it's almost like they know that hat's there, and they kind of doing it in a reactive way, but they're not kind of leaning into it in a proactive way.

So let's break it down a little bit.

First of all, let's talk about the technician that, you know, we get that bit.

It's easy for us, right?

It's our bread and butter.

It's, you know, our identity.

It's the, you know, the work that we have, you know, mastered.

And this is how we got started.

We are a clinician who loves the work, the client wins, the problem solving.

That feeling that you made a difference today, you know, I love that I chased that.

And we're good at it.

And what happens with those feelings over time for us, when that is.

That is our jam and that is something we're really good at, is it starts to feel really safe.

And so it's really easy when we start a practice to put so much effort into that space and time into that space, because it's safe for us, right?

We know we can do that.

We can.

Know we can.

We can do it really well.

Whereas when we have to start putting our manager hat on or our entrepreneur hat on, and likely we've had no training around that, I didn't.

When I started, I had no idea how to manage a business, had no idea how to step into that entrepreneur hat.

And so naturally, I just gravitated to putting more clients in the diary because, one, I had trouble saying no.

2, it made me feel good.

I was good at it.

I was good at it.

So I went home, you know, feeling pretty chuffed.

Okay, let's talk about the manager.

This is the organizer, right?

The manager takes care of the systems, the structure and the processes and the policies, right?

They make lists and they make spreadsheets, and they make sure the technician doesn't drown in the chaos, right?

And so your manager hat is so super important.

We need to be making time for those manager tasks to protect ourselves as a clinician.

So important.

And then we have the entrepreneur, right?

The visionary, the dreamer, the one who sees what is next.

And the entrepreneur is full of ideas, always saying, like, what if we did this?

And the entrepreneur normally scares the manager half to death because the manager's got it all in order and wants, you know, wants it all Mickey Mouse and, you know, tick the boxes and everything's working well.

And the entrepreneur comes in and says, hey, let's disrupt.

What about this?

And, yeah, I feel like we really need to be leaning into these three roles that are really important when we are running a business.

And as I said, I see a lot of practice owners spending so much time just in the technician space, sometimes even up to 95% of their time wearing that technician hat.

And I get it.

I've done it, right?

When you're the sole person, there's no one else to treat the clients.

It's just you.

The referrals are coming in.

You're trying to, you know, appease Everybody, you know that you make money by treating and so you naturally just have a full caseload, over full a lot of the time.

And so I completely get it.

If you're a sole practitioner running your sole business, I get it.

Right.

I absolutely get it.

And in those situations, you need to get admin help much earlier than what you think, because that's your manager hat looking out for your technician and making sure you don't drown in the chaos.

Right.

If you're starting to put on another technician, that can help.

Amazing.

And I see this a lot too, where we.

We put a technician on, but we're still busier than that other technician.

They're not.

They're not quite at capacity, but we're overflowing.

Right.

That still happens as well.

And sometimes that can be an ego thing and not in a bad way.

Like our ego is not.

Not always bad thing.

Of course, you know, if someone says, but I want to see Amy.

Oh, do you?

Well, I love that.

Well, yes, come on in, let me help you out.

You know, of course, we definitely can fall victim to our ego and that safe space.

It's much easier often to turn up and treat the clients than it is to now manage the new technician that we've put on.

So let's talk about all this time we spend with our technician hat on when we're still in the treatment room, still doing all the doing and maybe just squeezing in a bit of manager time at night.

And what about the entrepreneur hat that's often still in the cupboard?

Sometimes we're not even putting that on when we're 95% full wearing the technician hat.

And the situation then unfolds where we're really not balancing out those three hats.

And I'm not saying you have to have equal time time in all of those three hats, because we definitely need to be in technician mode to make.

To make our income for sure.

But if you stay in technician mode forever, like, you will burn out because you'll be doing the management stuff at night time and it will feel reactive and it will feel stressful and that's not great.

That's not great.

That's not what we want.

Because then you become resentful and you fall out of love with your business.

It's not a nice feeling.

If you don't do technician work, though, and you only manage and you don't enjoy it as much, you're at risk of losing your spark.

And if you only dream, if you're only in that entrepreneur space, you won't be sending out invoices.

And you won't be focused on the day to day detail that is needed to run your clinic.

So we need to have all of these hats in play.

Do they need to have equal time?

No, you've got to find the right, the right gel for you, the right way of working those out.

So if you're like me, you'll have that moment and it might be quiet.

It's not going to, you're not probably not going to sit at your desk one day and go, oh my goodness, I'm not using all the hats properly.

It's quiet.

It's so quiet it's probably whispering to you, but you're so busy you can't hear it.

But once you realize that moment where the technician hat is too great, it changes everything.

It's the day you realize I'm not just that treating therapist anymore.

I'm someone's employer.

I'm someone's paycheck.

I'm my own paycheck.

I am the risk manager here.

I am the marketer.

I am responsible for the clients coming in and out of that door.

I'm responsible for maintaining their privacy and developing their trust and all of the things, you are the one steering the ship.

And that moment that kind of quietly envelops around you, that gives you a sense of having an absolute huge responsibility.

And it can feel weird.

You can start to feel guilt.

And I think that guilt comes from stepping back from, from client work.

Guilt for spending time on strategy instead of putting someone in the diary who's absolutely pleading their case to you and are so desperate to get in to see someone and get started on their goals.

Right.

There's a lot of guilt there.

And you worry if you've got a team, you worry that your team will think you've gone corporate or, you know, you're not there as much, or you're, you're just there doing things to make more money, to feather your own nest.

Or you might feel lonely because no one quite understands what's on your shoulders anymore.

It's different.

When I first started and I didn't have a space like the connection to be in, you know, there wasn't a membership around, you know, there are, there were a couple of business coaches, no females that I could find actually, but there wasn't, there wasn't this kind of community feel around helping one another run a business.

It was, I'm not going to share with you, it was a different landscape back then, 19, 20 years ago for sure.

And I was very lucky to have a beautiful woman called Judith, who invited me into her practice, showed me so many things.

And this is the form you need your clients to fill in when they first come to see you.

I had not even thought of that.

So I've always been so grateful to Judith.

That's one of the reasons I started the connection, so I could take that angst and uncertainty and unknown away from other people in practice.

And when I first started, all my friends were still in public health.

They were still working at the hospitals because that's where I had been working.

So that's where my mates were.

And I did feel quite lonely because I felt like I was supposed to know and have it all together way back when.

But, yeah, just was finding my way.

I really felt like the moment I read the E Myth book and realized that the manager hat and the entrepreneur hat are so important to the success of the business, but the protection of me, that was the moment my business started to grow up.

And it's when I stopped just building a job for myself and I started building something that could run without me if it needed to.

And it was that moment when I started looking at putting on an admin person to help me.

I didn't know how to do that.

And I went.

There was nothing really around to help practice owners know how to do that at that time.

There is now here in the connection, we will help you with that.

So back then I went to TAFE at nighttime.

I did a nighttime TAFE course, Cert 4 in human resources, so I could work out how to employ my first person.

And that was all from reading that book and really sitting back and thinking, oh, wow, you know, I've got to get out of this kind of chaos and reactiveness.

So how do you make that shift from technician to CEO?

Here are a couple of things that definitely helped me.

The first one is I changed my title.

I always called myself the director or senior clinician or senior occupational therapist.

I hadn't really lent into the fact that I was the business owner.

And I think I did that because I didn't really feel qualified enough or probably because I didn't feel like I knew what I was doing.

From a manager and entrepreneur point of view, I didn't feel I was worthy of that title, but I was like, I was the CEO of my business.

And so I really lent into that CEO title.

And I started putting that on my business cards and on the bio, you know, on my website when I developed that.

And I really tried to lean into the fact that I was a business owner.

And once I started taking on that as part of my identity, it was so much easier because it took away that feeling of not being a fraud, that that's not what I felt, but that I wasn't ready to run a business.

It took that feeling away, and it put me in the present and it put me in the.

It's here now.

It's go time.

I'm not waiting to be a business owner.

I already am a business owner.

Like, it's.

It's game on.

Let's get cracking.

So it really helped me kind of go forward with that.

One of the other things that was really helpful for me was making sure I put time into the diary in work time, not at nighttime, not on the weekend, when my husband had Ruby and, you know, took her for a walk in the pram and I'd kind of cram something in, but in work time.

Time for thinking, reviewing, planning.

That can change so much.

It's not wasted time.

It's the space where better decisions happen, for sure.

Absolutely.

You make all sorts of wonderful changes that then can make the rest of your week feel so much easier and better.

And you can just start with an hour or two hours.

And if you're listening and thinking, yep.

Nice one, Amy.

Well, my diary's full.

You've got a choice.

You can choose whether you give yourself that time or not.

And, yeah, might involve wrangling the diary a little bit and changing some things and saying no to some things, but you've got that choice.

And I think it's really important that you lean into that and create that time for yourself, because it's hard to proactively wear the manager hat and the entrepreneur hat just in, like, small moments of time where a client might cancel, or my baby goes to sleep a little bit earlier than expected, and I've got this extra half an hour that's not ideal.

So you need to create and design time for manager and entrepreneur hats.

The other thing that definitely helped me not burn out as a technician is looking at my systems, because when I first started and I was working solo and I was trying to be a new mom, and all the things, a lot of tasks happened when I remembered to do them.

Now, that is not a system.

That is a ticking time bomb.

Systems will create calm and consistency in your practice, and they kind of free you up from the bottleneck.

And so one of the very first systems I remember putting in place was sending my invoices out on time, because otherwise it was just ad hoc.

When I remembered to sit down and do the invoices for that week.

And yeah, that wasn't great because then it was a long time until money came in and sometimes a workcover case might have closed.

I didn't get my invoices in on time and I didn't get paid.

So that system was one of the first ones I developed.

And it wasn't an easy one because I didn't know how to.

I've never had to do a system before around invoicing.

And so I had things down pat like ordering in, you know, splinting material, because I knew how to do that.

So I did the easy systems first.

But this was one of the first kind of management systems that I did.

And then from doing that and getting into a routine around it, I then also cottoned onto the fact that I don't have a good system at the end of the week for remembering what I gave the clients and what I need to actually invoice.

So then I fix that system.

And so it's so important to just continually work through the systems that you need and that are missing.

Now you might not feel as elementary as that.

You might be thinking, well, you know, I've had the business for a little while now, I've already got some systems in place.

Amazing, right?

Keep reviewing them, keep looking at them, keep working out what is missing and just make sure that your systems are working easily.

They're designed to help you manage your practice more efficiently and more calmly.

So if they're not doing that, then have a look at them.

And then the last thing I wanted to talk to you about was giving yourself permission to grow.

And that really helped me move from that technician hat to manager and entrepreneurial hat as well, and bringing those into my practice.

Because initially I just felt like I was abandoning my clinical roots if I wasn't, you know, didn't have a full day of treating.

I was so used to having a full day of treating that it felt a bit strange to not do that.

And so I really had to give myself permission to step back off the clinical tools a little bit because I needed that time to plan out how I was going to grow this business so I could start to build a team that could help me, could help me not be tied to the business all the time.

And so it's okay to pull back from some clinical work.

It's okay to look at putting people on, to help you with your.

With your business journey.

You've got permission to do that, and it doesn't have to be Done in a way that just makes you even busier than you currently are.

And I think that's a mistake a lot of practitioners make, is we see growth and we tie it with a little rope to our capacity.

And we think that whenever we are going to grow, that's just naturally going to equal more work we have to do.

And so we shy away from growth.

We shy away and we think, oh, if I, you know, if I put a therapist on, well, then I've got to manage them.

That's more work.

I don't have time for that.

So I'm not.

I'm not going to grow.

And we kind of keep in the same pattern.

Now, I'm, I'm not saying there by any means that if you're a solo therapist and you're just doing your thing and you love it like that, amazing.

Not everybody has to grow.

And I want to debunk that myth that we're not all here to have a team.

And that's okay.

I wanted to have a team because that meant I didn't have to be treating as much and I could work on other things.

And I quite like running the business side of things.

Like, I really enjoy that.

And so I wanted to be able to go away on a family holiday and know that my clients were still being seen because I had a team there to help me do that.

And so that's the reason that I.

That I grew and put team members on.

But that's not for everybody.

And if that doesn't float your boat and you want to just stay solo, that's awesome.

That's awesome, too.

We've all got our own visions and journeys, and they're all just as important as one another.

So I've got a team, but that doesn't mean my practice or the way I do things is any more important than somebody who's running a solo operation.

Even though if you're listening and you're thinking, yeah, I'm solo, you're still running a business, you are still an entrepreneur, you are still a CEO, you know, so these things are still just as important for you as well.

Okay.

So I want you to kind of have a bit of reflection.

Sorry, my voice is a bit croaky today.

Don't know why.

I want you to just be thinking about which hat are you wearing most right now?

Technician, manager, or entrepreneur?

And maybe even more importantly, I want you thinking about which hat do you need to start wearing a little bit more often?

Because you didn't start your practice to drown in admin.

Or live a life of chaos.

I didn't, but it happened pretty quickly.

I went from, oh, yeah, I might run a private practice to, oh, my goodness, this is chaos.

It starts because you deeply care about people and you want to make a difference.

And owning a business doesn't take away from that is how you expand it.

And so you take all of that goodness and use that.

But it's important that you identify with yourself, who you are now.

You're not just a therapist anymore.

You're a business owner.

You're a leader, you're a builder.

You are the heart behind something pretty incredible.

And if you need a little bit of help finding your CEO feet or put in your CEO hat on, I'm here to help.

I'm here to help.

You can come over and join us in the connection.

It's where we do this kind of thing together.

I hope that's just given you some.

Just a bit of reflection today.

That was my goal, is to just get you thinking about those hats.

They're all really important and I want to make sure you're thinking about them in a proactive way and you're doing some work in your business in a proactive way and not feeling reactive.

And I think when we get stuck in that technician mode, we do get reactive.

And so one of the things we need to do is own the fact that we're a business owner and lean into that more.

And those ways that I mentioned are easy ways that you can start to do that.

The first one is identify with who you are.

Now the second one is to create that time in the diary to work on manager and entrepreneur space.

The next one was to build some systems, right.

And not just have things there for when you remember to do them.

I have so many systems.

On Fridays, I have a list of things I need to do.

On Monday, I have a list of things to do.

Every single Friday and Monday, same list.

I pull it out, I work through it, right?

Systems help me stay calm as a business owner and as a CEO and then just giving yourself permission to grow.

And it doesn't have to be putting on more technicians.

It can be growing in the areas that feel important to you and that are aligned to you.

So I hope that's been helpful and thanks for listening and I will talk to you next time.

Thank you for being here.

I am incredibly grateful.

If you have a friend that would find this helpful, please go ahead and share it with than to you can learn more about me and how to be part of my allied health connection.

Community over@theconnectionco.com au.