The "Clinic Burnout" Trap
Chris Chippendale surveys UK healthcare clinics and finds a hidden trap: practices that grow enough to hire staff but still depend on the owner's clinical work see income rise but happiness plummet. Early systematization of patient experience is key to escape this burnout stage and build a business that doesn't rely on you.
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If you either own a practice or you'd like to have your own practice one day, this is a trap that you really, really need to avoid. Now, a report was put out recently, um, looking at chiropractic clinic owners and basically looking at what the realities were like. What is it like being a practice owner in 2026 in the UK? And what they found was quite surprising. So it was a survey across a couple of different professions, basically small private practice healthcare clinics, many of which were owned by chiropractors. Others might have been osteopaths or physios. And one of the things they looked at was essentially how happy the clinic owners were and how much income they generated from the business versus seeing their own patients. And what they found was quite surprising. What a lot of people do is they, they start their career, you go and you're an associate for somebody and you learn your clinical skills and, you know, you build up and up and up. And many people get to the point where they think, I'd like to have my own thing now. And so they leave, they go and they set up their own thing. That's the kind of stage one, that's the solopreneur. And you assume that, okay, I'm going to build this practice and over time my income is going to go up and, you know, things are going to be happier, I'm going to be enjoying it, I'm going to enjoy this whole path of becoming a business owner, learning to be an entrepreneur. The report shows it's not actually as clear-cut as that, and actually there's a big, big problem in the middle. What they found was that, yes, going from being your own person with no employees to hiring a couple of, you know, reception team to hiring maybe a massage therapist, to having associates, to having a few. Yes, the income does go up. It does not, for many people in the UK, go up as high as you would think, but it does go up there until you reach the point what they in the report called CEO level. CEO level basically just means that less than 10% of the practice's income is generated by you seeing patients. So essentially, if you stop seeing patients tomorrow, you'd see less than a 10% hit in terms of the income there. That's what they call that CEO level there. Now, when you get to CEO level, yes, the income is higher than anybody else. You will make more doing that than anyone else, and generally you're more satisfied than anybody else as well. Okay, but what happened to go from the, the solopreneur people, they were already pretty happy, not as happy as the, as the CEO level, but they were pretty happy. While income kind of does this, it's not massive, what happens to actual enjoyment and fulfillment is it drops. And especially when you get to this point, when you have associates but you don't have enough that you're the one still having to earn most of the income, that's what they call the burnout stage. Because you have all the responsibility of keeping a practice going like the solopreneur does, but you now have way more complexity, you have way more challenges in there. If you can get through that and build it to the point where it's not relying on you, then yes, this is quite steep uptick there. But that middle point is really difficult. And I've spoken to so many clinic owners in the last 2-3 years who are really in that kind of final, what they call the burnout range, where there's a risk of burning out if you don't grow past that. And I've seen some who over the years have actually gone backwards. They've gone, you know what, it's not worth it. It's not worth the stress. It's not worth the hassle. So the reason I wanted to share this is first of all to say, if you are looking to have your own thing one day, you probably want to decide, do you want to have your own thing and just have that be you? Or do you want to have a bigger business where you are not the main one earning the income? Now the advantage of being a solopreneur is it's a little responsibility. It's just you, you can do what you want, you've got total flexibility. The downside is you do not have a saleable business, okay? When you work on your own, you might think one day when I retire I'll sell the practice. You're selling a business where the only employee is quitting. That's just selling a patient list. It's not worth a huge amount. So if you do that, you really need to think carefully about retirement and pensions and that sort of thing. Or if you go to the CEO level, it takes a fair bit more work and it's a longer path, The research shows it's generally more rewarding, but that's the point where at the end when you want to retire, you can sell that business because that business does not depend on you. Okay, so that's what you want to think about, is this, this kind of middle stage is really not that great. Now, if you're in there and it's working for you, great. They didn't say that everybody in these middle stages is unhappy. They just found the happiness on average is a fair bit lower. There are some people in that who are loving it and doing well. Great. The thing that you really need to think about though, whether you want to be a solopreneur whether you want to have that CEO level, you really, really have to think about the experience of your patients coming through the doors. Because if it's just you, you have complete control over that, but that is your entire business. And if you want that CEO level, you need to standardize and systematize that to a point where it is self-sustaining and it happens without you having to do it. And it's too late once you have a big practice to try and do that. I've seen kind of, kind of the big practices try to change this stuff. It's really, really difficult. It works far better when they get embedded early on, and as you're growing the practice, This idea of what the patient experience is for you is growing throughout there. So it's not something you want to wait around. Now, one of the reasons I'm showing this now is this report just came out and it matches a lot of the difficult conversations I've been seeing people having in the profession. It fits with what I'm seeing with a lot of practice owners who are struggling and a lot of people who are looking to start their own practice who really, in all honesty, have no idea what they're getting themselves into. So I wanted to mention that because it seems quite timely. The other thing is, if you want some help with this, if you want a really, really valuable investment that is going to pay off very, very quickly and pay off the rest of your career for relatively little, for much lower than, you know, a 4 or 5-figure mastermind group that you join where you're paying 30 grand a year, um, to basically give everyone else each other ideas and not get a huge amount yourself, then myself and Kevin Christie are running the Patient Experience Masterclass on June 20th in London, in Stratford. It's a one-day event. It's not that where you come along and we just try to upsell you stuff all the time. You'll be leaving with real value, real tangible things that you can do to help grow your practice, whatever stage in that career path you are. If you want to just make it a really, really great solo practice, this will help you. If you want to help grow it, it's even more important that you get this stuff embedded in now and you get it right. So I'll be talking about things from the patient experience itself, the kind of things that you can do that help turn, you know, patients into raving fans who refer friends and family, who leave reviews, all this stuff without you having to ask. Kevin Christie is going to be showing you the actual systems that you need in place in the business to help make that work and help it to be automated. Because one of the big reasons people burn out in practice is because it's all on their shoulders. They don't have things systematized to a point where it happens without them being there. That's what the CEO-level people do. The only reason they've been able to get there is because they've got it systematized. So however you want to practice, whatever your idea of your dream practice is, you really don't want to miss this out. The early bird expires at the end of the month, so it's not that long until that goes now. And I'll leave the link below for that. It's a one-day event. There's going to be some amazing practitioners there, amazing clinic owners. We're all going to learn from each other as well. But come along to that. We're going to have a great time, and I promise you it will help you leave with a real game plan for how you're going to build the practice you would love to build throughout 2026. So check the details below and ask me if you've got any questions.
