Why are you doing this?
Every hypnotherapy practice is different, and when it comes to making yours a success, you need to carefully consider and decide on what your success criteria is going to be. Only by deciding ahead of time what you want to get out of running your own practice, will you be able to plan for, and achieve that goal.
The reasons you have for starting your own hypnotherapy practice will play a key part in defining what constitutes success for you personally and professionally. For some it might simply be the pleasure and joy of helping people with their fears, anxieties and habits, whilst others need a main or second income where they can choose their working hours, yet others simply need to be able to work from home. Whatever your own personal reasons are, you need to be honest with yourself and begin to sketch out how you want your hypnotherapy practice to work.
With the customer avatars you’ve created, you’ll have some idea of who it is you want to market your skills and services to, and now you need to weave those customer profiles into the vision of your ideal practice. This is the point in your journey towards a successful practice where you will unearth the obstacles you’ll need to overcome on the way.
Think about how many clients you want to see in a day, how many days in a week you’ll be working, how you’ll manage holidays and sickness etc. Obviously a full-time hypnotherapy practice that’s focused on growth and expansion will have different needs to a small practice operating from home, one day a week.
Do the arithmetic – is there going to be enough work to sustain your income requirements? Will there be so much work that it exceeds your ability to commit time? What other draws on your time could detract from the business? If you needed to, could you find more time to work on your practice by cancelling or postponing other things in your life? What are your ‘deal breakers’ – events or circumstances that could stop you from running your own business? This is your chance to set things up exactly the way you want them, surely one of the great advantages of self-employment.
If you’ve never run a small business before, there are a whole host of excellent internet resources on developing the mindset and expectations you will need to succeed, as well as the more concrete advice on the nuts and bolts of book-keeping, marketing, sales and insurance.
