What Can Mary Portas Teach You About Running A Therapy Business?

My TV isn’t working and frankly I can’t be bothered to prioritize a call to Virgin Media to have them come out and fix it, but that’s a rant for another blog post…anyway – I am enjoying the fabulous BBC iplayer service in lieu of thousands of channels and nothing to watch.

Last week I caught the repeat of Mary Portas trying to encourage Mrs Maher to refresh her Wimbledon bakery, and failing miserably. Angela Maher reminded us constantly throughout the programme she’d been in business for 36 years and that alone qualified her to know more about retail than Mary, who does retail for a living.

But lessons were there in the programme for us therapists?

Firsty – my favourite topic, finding a niche. Maher’s bakery has a baker on site. A talented baker who can (or could if he were allowed) make artisan breads that the local yummy mummies would pay over the odds for. Mary spent the entire, toe curling programme trying to encourage Angela to leverage the expertise of this hidden gem so that her bakery would become known locally for doing one thing exceptionally well.

Here’s the thing, when you focus your time, energy and attention on doing one thing in particular really, really, really well you become perceived as an expert. And once you’re perceived as an expert you can confidently charge expert prices. Angela was astonished in the programme when Mary took a tray of artisan breads out to a local play group for a taste test with the local mums. Most of them said they’d pay £3 for the loaves they were tasting without batting an eyelid. Angela doesn’t charge anything like that for the breads she sells in the shop.

Secondly – sell the way your customers want to buy. Angela was selling cream buns, cakes and biscuits plus masses of white bread that the modern mum (and more to the point, her local customers) don’t want to feed their children all within the hideous confines of more orangey pine wood than you could shake a stick at. Mary took great pains to point out that the local population care about organic, natural, unprocessed food. Those types of foods are what they are shopping for. So why not sell it to them?

Just because you’ve been in business for 36 years, it still doesn’t mean that you’re plugged into what your customers want. Doing market research means you’re plugged into what your customers want.

How does this translate to therapy? Just like Angela’s customers aren’t buying her 36 years in business, neither are your clients. They aren’t all that interested in how long you’ve been in practice, what your methodology is and that you work with children, adolescents, adults, couples and early onset Alzheimer’s (ie: everyone). They want to know categorically that you can help with their problem and that you can help with it now.

Given too many choices, customers (and that includes your clients) get analysis paralysis. They don’t know what to do unless you tell them very clearly. Speak to their need, speak to the problem that wakes them up at 3am in a panic, make it clear you know what ails them and that you know how to help them fix it. And, unlike Angela, be ready and willing to change!