Guest post by Nathalie Garcia, co-owner of Practice Better Management

Working with clients is without a doubt one of the most rewarding jobs you can have, and it’s also hard work! There are so many moving parts you need to manage to organize and grow your practice.

I remember finishing my own nutrition studies and quickly realizing that I was now expected to not only coach my clients, but also to run a business!

‘What, that’s not what I had signed up for.’ I so clearly remember thinking.

The truth is, if you want to earn a living helping people improve their health then you need to make sure you have a system in place to make sure you’re being as efficient as possible with your time.

Here are two ways to run a more efficient and successful Nutritional Therapy Practice.

#1 Be efficient in your business

Whether you’re currently working with clients or you plan to work with clients in the future as an NTP or NTC, you’re going to be required to wear many hats. Here are just a few of the tasks you’ll be responsible for:

• – Bookings
• – Payments
• – Accounting
• – Forms
• – Reminders
• – Notes & Charting
• – Recommendations
• – Client communication
• – Client accountability

This can all be very overwhelming for one person to handle on an ongoing basis. If you don’t find a way to cut back on the never-ending busy work, you’re going to be working for free, burn out, and most importantly, become unable to show up and support your clients when they need you the most.

Practicing Better

Until the past couple of years, these tasks were typically managed from multiple single-use applications, folders on your computer and emails or by paper and pen. As you can imagine, none of these options really offered a solution for being more efficient.

As a health and wellness practitioner myself, I needed a solution to this problem and created a Practice Management Platform to automate these workflows from day one.

Now, you can create workflows that string together and automate everything from booking and payments, form delivery, reminders, content delivery, client communication, and client accountability.

Just think about how much time you’d save and how much more you’d love your job if your clients could book their sessions online, pay for their session, receive a receipt, receive forms to fill out and sign, and get reminders for upcoming sessions without you having to do a thing. And this is just one example of how you can slash the time you’re spending on busy work.

Here are some key automated tools to consider for better efficiency:

• – Online Scheduling. Eliminate the dreaded back-and-forth that so commonly goes into scheduling an appointment via email, text, phone by allowing clients to book online when they’re ready. Online scheduling systems will also take care of the reminder emails so that’s another thing off your plate.
• – Required Payment. Never chase another payment by making sure you have a system in place that allows you to automatically collect full or partial payment for services when clients book.
• – Online Forms. We all use forms as a regular part of our practice (e.g. initial consultations, liability waivers, detox questionnaires, follow-up forms). Online forms are an easy and user-friendly way of collecting vital information. Require forms to be completed at the time of booking or set up forms to automatically be delivered to clients depending on the service they book.
• – Document & Recommendation Sharing. Crafting emails and sending handouts to clients are other tasks you’re wasting time on. Automatically sending out a notification that lets your client know they have a new resource to review will add up in time saved.

The ability to share these documents with clients with the push of a button will drastically cut down on your busy work.

#2 Be efficient with clients

If you want to create a successful and sustainable practice, you need clients coming back and bringing friends. Word of mouth is gold when clients are praising you. But before you get that rave review, clients first need to get results. Using a management platform like Practice Better helps you support clients as they work through big changes without burning yourself out.

Here are some tools built into Practice Better to help keep your clients on track:

• – Clients can track and share with you what they’re eating and how they’re feeling from our mobile app in real time. Knowing that you can see everything they enter is definitely a motivator to make better choices, but you can also offer direct feedback on their journal entries for additional support.
• – Secure Messaging. Put an end to client communication via text, social media, email, and courier pigeon! It’s hard to keep track of communication when it’s coming from so many different channels and important information can very easily be missed on both ends. Having one designated channel for client correspondence is a great way to keep the lines of communication open, create boundaries, and keep everything on record.
• – Tasks & Goals. Set tasks with reminder dates to help clients keep their eye on the prize.
• – Client portal. Having one place where clients can go to review all documents and notes you’ve shared will help keep them on track. A client portal also means that clients can access their recommendations from anywhere, even the grocery store or on vacation. It eliminates chances of losing handouts, resources, or forms.

As you may have noticed, technology can be such an asset in helping you grow your Nutritional Therapy Practice. We live in a technology-advanced world where there is an app for virtually everything! It only makes sense to leverage technology to improve your efficiency and, in turn, your success.

Nathalie Garcia is the Co-Founder of Practice Better, a Practice Management Platform that allows Health & Wellness Professionals to automate their workflow so they can spend less time on administrative tasks and more time helping clients reach their health goals. If you want to learn more about Nathalie and how to better organize your practice for success, join her and the NTA’s Career Development Course Lead Instructor, Jessica Pantermuehl for a FB Live Interview on Thursday, Nov. 1 and 11 am PST. Learn more and attend this live event.