The seduction of shiny objects
I want to tell you about the worst business advice I ever followed.
It came from a podcast. The host was charismatic, successful, and absolutely certain that what my practice needed was a bold move. A rebrand. A new offer. A pivot. Something exciting.
So I made the bold move. I launched a group program I wasn't ready for. I redesigned my website (again). I chased a referral partnership that ate up three months and produced exactly zero clients.
Meanwhile, my billing was still a mess. I was still personally chasing down every late payment. I still didn't have a real onboarding system.
The exciting stuff felt productive. The boring stuff felt like admitting I didn't have it together.
Guess which one actually moved the needle.
If you've been running a practice for more than a year, you know the feeling. You're scrolling through LinkedIn or listening to a business podcast, and someone's talking about their latest win. A new revenue stream. A viral marketing strategy. A partnership that doubled their client base overnight.
And you think: That's what I'm missing.
It's not your fault. We're wired to notice novelty. Our brains literally reward us with dopamine when we encounter something new. And the entire online business world is optimized to exploit this—serving up an endless stream of "game-changing" tactics, "revolutionary" frameworks, and "secrets" that promise transformation.
But here's what nobody talks about on those podcasts: the boring work that made those wins possible in the first place.
That viral launch? It worked because they'd spent two years building an email list, one subscriber at a time. That overnight partnership? It happened because they had clean books, clear service descriptions, and capacity to actually deliver. That revenue explosion? It came after they finally fixed their collections process and stopped leaving $30,000 a year on the table.
The shiny object gets the headline. The boring foundation makes it possible.
What compound growth actually looks like
Let me describe a month in the life of a practice that's growing the boring way.
Week one: You finally document your intake process. Nothing fancy—just a checklist and a few templated emails. Takes maybe three hours.
Week two: You set up automatic payment reminders. Another two hours. You feel like you should be doing something more important.
Week three: You create a simple tracking sheet for your referral sources. One hour. Nobody congratulates you.
Week four: You review your numbers and notice you collected 94% of outstanding invoices instead of your usual 78%. You realize three referral sources have sent you five clients each this quarter.
None of this is exciting. None of it will make a good Instagram post. And yet—
Six months from now, that intake checklist has saved you 10 hours and eliminated the "wait, did I send them the forms?" panic. Those payment reminders have recovered $8,000 you would have written off. That referral tracking revealed that one relationship deserves way more attention than the others—so you took that person to lunch, and they've since sent you twelve more clients.
This is compound growth. Small improvements, consistently applied, creating results that multiply over time.
It's not glamorous. It won't get you podcast invitations. But it's the only thing that actually works.
Why we resist it
I've worked with enough practice owners to know the objections by heart. Let me address them directly.
"But I need to grow faster." I hear you. But fast growth on a shaky foundation isn't growth—it's a future crisis. I've watched practices double their client load before they had systems to handle it. Within six months, they were burning out, dropping balls, and losing the clients they'd worked so hard to get. Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.
"This stuff feels beneath me." You spent years mastering your craft. You have advanced degrees. And now you're supposed to get excited about... a billing checklist? I get it. But here's the truth: your expertise is only as valuable as your ability to deliver it consistently. The backend isn't beneath you. It's what lets you do your real work.
"I don't have time for this." You don't have time because of this. Every hour you spend chasing down a late payment, recreating a document you've made ten times before, or manually scheduling something that could be automated—that's an hour you're borrowing from your future self. The boring work isn't taking time. It's buying it back.
"What if I do all this and it doesn't work?" Here's the thing about compound growth: it's not a gamble. You're not betting on a launch or hoping a partnership pans out. You're making small, low-risk improvements that each deliver their own modest return. Even if any single change barely moves the needle, the combination of twenty small changes absolutely will.
The practice owner's unfair advantage
Here's something I don't think gets said enough: private practice owners are uniquely positioned for compound growth.
Unlike a tech startup chasing venture capital or a retail business fighting for shelf space, you're not playing a winner-take-all game. You don't need to 10x your revenue to succeed. You don't need to dominate your market.
You need a sustainable practice that serves your clients well and gives you the life you want.
That's an achievable goal. And it's achieved through boring, consistent, compound improvements—not moonshots.
The practice owner who spends an hour a week making their backend slightly better will, over time, absolutely crush the one who's constantly chasing the next big thing. It's not even close.
Where to start
If you're convinced (or at least curious), here's my honest advice: start with whatever's annoying you the most.
Seriously. Think about the last time you felt frustrated with your practice. Not a client issue—a systems issue. The thing that made you think "why is this so hard?" or "I can't believe I'm doing this again."
That's your starting point.
Maybe it's the intake process. Maybe it's scheduling. Maybe it's the way you handle insurance verification or the fact that you still don't have a clear cancellation policy.
Don't try to fix everything. Pick one thing. Spend an hour or two making it slightly better. Document what you did. Move on.
Then next week, pick another thing.
This is the whole strategy. There's no secret beyond this. The magic is in the consistency, not the tactics.
The unsexy truth
A year from now, you could have a practice that runs noticeably smoother. Better collections. Less chaos. More time. Clients who feel well taken care of because nothing falls through the cracks.
Or you could have a practice that looks exactly like it does today, except you've tried three more "game-changing" strategies that didn't pan out.
The first path is boring. The second path is exciting.
Choose boring.
Your future self will thank you.
