Who You're Not for Matters as Much as Who You Are
Naming who you don't treat fills the calendar faster than naming who you do.
Naming who you don't treat fills the calendar faster than naming who you do.
running a practice that treats everyone Your homepage welcomes weekend athletes, office workers, bad backs, the lot. It reads less like a welcome mat and more like a shrug from a receptionist who hasn't decided anything yet. Name the one client you enjoy treating and your enquiries get sharper by return of post.
Your "who we treat" section currently reads like a school register. Weekend athletes, office workers, bad backs, dodgy knees, the lot.
That isn't a welcome. It's a shrug in bullet points.
Pick the client you'd choose again on a wet Tuesday and say only their name. Everyone else will still ring, but the right ones will ring first, and say so.
Wellness marketing guides: practical guidance on this topic:
Resonant issues: challenges nearby to this:
A shrug fills a diary. A clear preference fills the right one.
A physio in Leeds stopped taking Sunday football injuries. No drama, no announcement, just a line removed from her booking form.
Her Saturday clinic filled inside a month.
Mostly people who'd been waiting for a physio, any physio, to say no to something.
You don't need to close a day. You need one decision that sticks, the way binning the good biscuits for visitors only sticks.
Saying no to one thing said yes to another. The whole mechanism, and it needed no marketing budget at all.
Turning people away can make the phone ring more. This offends common sense, like finding the good scissors in the cutlery drawer where they belong.
A clear "not for you" travels further than a vague "maybe come in and we'll see."
People repeat sharp edges over supper. Nobody repeats a blur.
Your precise refusal becomes the thing your patients tell their sister about. Your soft, accommodating maybe gets forgotten by Wednesday.
The average UK physio owner takes home £52,596, running a practice that might turn over anywhere between £35,000 and £300,000 or more.
The difference between the top and bottom of that range isn't about who worked the longer Saturday. It's about who's booking in the first place.
Two clinics, same hours, same kettle in the staff room. Takings wildly apart, because one of them decided who they weren't for.
Your boundaries aren't a personality trait. They're a line item, whether you've written them down or not.
Try this on your site this week, ideally with a biscuit, sitting down properly.
Read your "who we treat" section pretending you're entirely wrong for it. Bad hip, no interest in yoga, allergic to the word wellness.
Front of mind: some of our thinking on this topic:
A page that welcomes everyone convinces nobody at all. You want the wrong reader to feel gently, politely excused.
Word of mouth already knows who you're not for. It has just never told your booking page.
Your regulars refer people like themselves. They organise your calendar without asking your permission, the way a mother-in-law reorganises your cupboards while you're at the shop.
Your website should catch up with what your patients worked out months ago over coffee. They've done the client fit assessment for you, free of charge, and never sent an invoice.
Writing a proper boundary into your site takes real attention.
New conditions arrive. New clinics open down the road. The phrasing that worked last spring sounds tired by autumn.
Some practices manage this themselves, checking the site the way you'd check a smoke alarm, on purpose, twice a year.
Other practices hand it to a specialist whose whole week is built around noticing when it's gone off, not unlike the one person in every family who checks the dates on the yoghurt.
Either way, a boundary written once in 2019 is doing nothing for you now.
A client once chose her physio because the website said plainly: we don't treat marathon training injuries.
She wasn't a runner. She had a bad shoulder from carrying shopping on the same side every day for a decade.
She trusted the clinic anyway, because it was willing to lose business on purpose.
A practice that says no in public gets trusted to say yes properly, in private, to you.
That's the whole trick. Refusal, done with a straight face, reads as competence.
Get boundaries that read like conviction, not a shrug, and fill your calendar accordingly. Sort your boundaries
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