The Clinic

My spouse started to work as a speech therapist in the end of 2021, she wanted to start in a private clinic. Her initial plan was to work in a private clinic for 5-10 years and then start her own clinic after the kids, probably.

She started interviewing and got a job at a private clinic but the clinic was not organized for play-based therapy. She did 1-2 clients and quickly told the owner that it was not going to work.

She then moved to another private clinic with much more tools. It started well. She worked there for a few months. But it didn't work out, mostly due to a lack of clients.

We started to talk about opening a clinic and what it would look like.

She didn't earn a stable and large enough income from the other private clinics. We didn't had a dependency on the income. This freedom became a cornerstone to start the clinic.

How we took the decision?

The worst case scenario: If it's not working, she can go and work for another private clinic or work in a hospital or school.

The best scenario: if it works she will be her own boss. She can also fully control the office setup, tools and schedule.

Planning

I have this old calculator that I've used for most of my high school, cegep and engineering degree. I can compute things on it without even looking.

So naturally, I start computing…

• How many clients do we need per month?
• How much can we spend on an office and tools?
• Minimum number of clients per week to stay neutral on the budget?
• What does it look like with the maximum number of clients?
• How much do you need to keep for the income tax?

At the end, the numbers 💸 should look comfortable enough to that you can survive few months without clients.

Executing

We were in spring 2022, the initial computer number worked out, time to execute!

We listed all the tasks to launch a clinic. We then ranked them by priority.

Here's few tasks we had:

• Find a name for clinic and logo/theme
• Rent an office
• Send notice at the private clinic, she was working
• Buy all the equipments
• Buy the official speech therapy test
• Create a website
• Create a way for customers to register
• Create enterprise emails
• Buy all misc. equipment, desks, tables, chairs…
• Find an internet provider for the office
• Decorate the new office
• Marketing Plan

You want to order tasks and delegate. I was in charge of everything tech. related.

Tech. Choice

We took the domain: https://voixlactee.ca

Once the clinic name and domain was acquired. We needed to look for tools.

I went for MS365 as the main tool. My partner is mostly working MS Word and had a good experience with the tool and its extensions.

The MS365 offering is quite generous for small businesses. You get Teams, the Office Suite, OneDrive, Basic MDM…

The other option was Google Workspace, but since MS Word was the most used software it didn't make any sense and even if I prefer Google Workspace.

Before choosing a tech. you really need to speak with the users/employees. What are they comfortable with? What problem do they need to solve daily? What would they need if they grow?

I also wanted a Low-Code-No-Code website builder for her website. The main idea was that she should be able to change a photo or a title or add a page without my help.

The System

We started to look at clinic software solutions and it felt like it was designed around the secretary driving the actions instead of being optional.

We wanted to set up a system where she could work without a secretary. The margins were simply too low to afford an employee.

We started a very minimal back-end design using a spreadsheet and proceeded to implement the system.

Every step of the process from lead collection, to registration, to service to termination needed to be done with just the speech therapist driving. The main idea: the speech therapist should be autonomous.

This system became the heart of the clinic. It later allowed us to scale without any major effort.

Launching

We officially launched one month before the clinic opened. It was time to collect leads, we needed to post on all the platforms our opening and inform as many potential customers as possible.

The launch is the time to execute the bulk of your marketing plan.

It worked! Her first month was fully booked after two weeks.

Scaling

She worked solo in the clinic for one year and six months. We started to think about scaling during christmas 2022.

When the lease was due, we started to shop for a new office and found two new offices in a town next to where she was.

In April 2023, we started the renovation in the two new offices. New flooring, new painting, a lot of new furniture it was a big expansion.

Friends and family came to help and we've rebuilt the two offices in a few weekends of April.

We decided to go for two different themes but the same format and furniture. We made a full wall of pax.

Hiring

When you have a clinic to grow you need to hire.

Our first hire was in December 2023. It was chaotic. There's always something you didn't think of. You have to roll up your sleeves and fix the issues.

The storm passed and we hired a speech therapist again in February 2024.

The Future

The main goal for the end of year:

• increase the number of leads
• continue the automation of the clinic