From Referrals to Revenue Strategy: How Beyond Touch Business Coaching Helped a Physiotherapy Practice Plan for Growth

Background

When this physiotherapy practice owner approached Beyond Touch through a regional business support programme, the situation looked straightforward at first. A highly experienced musculoskeletal physiotherapist with more than 15 years of clinical experience had recently left NHS employment to go fully self-employed. The practice was attracting patients, word of mouth was starting to work, and the foundations appeared solid.

But the commercial side of the business was far less developed than the clinical side. Like many healthcare professionals, the founder had spent an entire career working within systems where referrals, visibility, and patient flow were largely handled elsewhere. NHS experience had built deep clinical confidence, but it had not prepared the founder for questions around marketing, growth, pricing, or operational scaling.

The practice operated from a private room inside a local gym in the South East, with free parking, relatively low overheads, and a growing reputation. The gym owners had already raised the possibility of expansion into other sites. The demand signals were positive. What was missing was a practical commercial roadmap for how to grow without losing control.

The Challenge

Clinical Expertise Without Commercial Training

The founder was strong clinically but had little experience of actively marketing a service. That is common across professional services, and particularly visible in healthcare. Patients had historically arrived through institutional pathways or professional referrals. Building a business around direct visibility, pricing confidence, and strategic growth was a different discipline entirely.

The contrast with competitors was uncomfortable. A nearby practice was charging substantially more despite offering less experience, largely because it had invested in visibility and promotion. The founder found that style of commercial activity uncomfortable, which created a tension between maintaining professional values and charging what the market would support.

Underused Software and Missed Retention Opportunities

The practice already used WriteUP for clinical notes, bookings, reminders, and intake forms. Core functionality was in place. But important retention features were sitting unused. There were no automated prompts for patients who had not booked again after discharge, no routine follow-up reminders, and no structured reactivation process even though the founder already knew, from personal experience as a consumer, that this kind of communication could influence repeat bookings.

The issue was not a lack of awareness. It was that the platform had never been explored deeply enough to turn that awareness into a working system.

Growth Ambition Without a Scaling Framework

The founder already had clear signals that the business could grow. The gym had offered other sites. Professional contacts had shown interest in joining. Demand was there. But the structure was not. Questions around self-employed practitioners, revenue split, qualifications, insurance, and available hours were all present, but still floating around as ideas rather than decisions.

Until those questions were pinned down, growth remained abstract.

Word of Mouth Alone in a Competitive Market

Referral pathways and professional reputation were helping the business grow, but they were not enough to function as a complete commercial strategy. In a market where other practices were investing in paid ads and stronger digital visibility, relying only on word of mouth created risk. Reputation was an asset, but it needed better infrastructure around it.

How Beyond Touch Helped

Live AI Research into Existing Software Capabilities

Grae at Beyond Touch opened the session by demonstrating Perplexity AI as a live research tool. Using the founder’s own website and software setup as context, the session explored a specific practical question: could WriteUP send automated follow-up reminders to patients who had not returned after a certain period?

The answer was yes. Perplexity identified the relevant feature within the platform and outlined where it could be configured. This was significant because it showed that a valuable retention tool was already available inside the founder’s existing subscription. Beyond Touch’s approach here was to optimise what the business already had before suggesting additional tools or costs.

The research link was then shared directly with the founder, making it possible to continue exploring independently after the session.

Social Proof Strategy Using Free Tools

The practice was already collecting Google reviews and responding to them, which meant the raw ingredients for social proof were already there. What was missing was visibility on the website itself. Beyond Touch recommended using Elfsight, a free widget that could pull Google reviews directly onto the site and display them in a more prominent, trustworthy way.

The tool was demonstrated live using the Beyond Touch website as an example, which made the implementation path clear. Instead of a theoretical suggestion, the founder could see exactly how the result would look to a prospective patient.

Reframing Client Retention as Automated Follow-Up

Beyond Touch also highlighted an overlooked gap in the patient journey. Many patients improved after only a small number of sessions and were then discharged with advice to return if symptoms reappeared. In reality, many people forgot the business name, misplaced previous communications, or simply delayed booking until the problem became worse again.

The proposed solution was straightforward: use WriteUP to send an automated message after a defined period since the last appointment, prompting the patient to book again if they needed follow-up care. This reframed retention from a manual task that never happened into an automated process that could quietly support repeat business over time.

Building a Practitioner Recruitment Framework

This became the most strategic part of the session. Beyond Touch mapped the founder’s current operating pattern against the gym’s full opening capacity. The founder worked roughly 28 hours across four days. The gym could support physiotherapy presence across a much larger operating window, creating a substantial amount of unused time.

Once that gap was visualised properly, the conversation moved into what would actually be required to fill it. Beyond Touch helped define practical recruitment parameters including level of post-graduate experience, musculoskeletal specialism, HCPC registration, professional insurance, ability to travel to the site, and willingness to work on a self-employed revenue-share basis. That shifted the discussion away from “it would be good to grow” and toward something much closer to a usable recruitment brief.

Competitive Positioning Through Honest Differentiation

Beyond Touch also helped the founder articulate a stronger market position. The real differentiator was not price. It was depth of clinical experience. With 15 years of specialist background, including work with orthopaedic consultants and the development of junior clinicians, the practice had a level of credibility that many local competitors could not match.

That insight mattered because it gave the founder a more honest way to think about marketing. The strategy did not need to be built around salesmanship. It could be built around demonstrated expertise, supported by better systems and clearer communication.

Timeline

Pre-Session: Founder completed an earlier business fundamentals course through a funded programme and was referred into one-to-one support with Beyond Touch. Priority areas identified included online presence, advertising, and business presentation.

Session 1: Beyond Touch Power Hour: Perplexity AI demonstrated live for software research, Elfsight reviews widget recommended and shown in practice, WriteUP patient follow-up automation identified, competitive differentiation discussed, full operational hours mapped, and practitioner recruitment framework outlined.

Immediately After the Session: Founder received the Fathom AI recording with transcript and action items, along with a Perplexity research link and an AI-generated capacity analysis showing available hours and likely practitioner needs.

Following Week: Additional business support session scheduled through the regional programme, focused on marketing strategy.

Outcomes

Immediate Capability Gains

The founder left the session with several actions that could be implemented immediately: configure WriteUP follow-up reminders, add the Elfsight review widget to the website, and begin using Perplexity AI as a practical research assistant for business decisions. None of those actions required new spending.

Operational Clarity

For the first time, the practice had a clear view of its operating reality. The unused capacity inside the gym partnership stopped being a vague sense that more could be done and became a measurable growth gap. That turned growth from an intuition into something that could actually be planned.

Strategic Growth Framework

The recruitment framework created during the session gave the founder something concrete to work with in future conversations with potential colleagues. Instead of just hoping to bring someone in eventually, the business now had clearer requirements around hours, qualifications, insurance, and commercial structure.

Confidence Shift

The founder came into the session with limited commercial confidence and a strong sense of being clinically capable but commercially underprepared. By the end of the conversation, they had identified their strongest point of difference, seen how existing tools could be used better, and could picture a path to growth that did not depend on becoming a completely different kind of person.

Client Reflections

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How can Beyond Touch business coaching help a healthcare practitioner who has never had to market themselves?

A: Beyond Touch starts with what is already working. In this case, that meant building around strong clinical outcomes, existing reviews, and a valuable gym partnership rather than trying to turn the founder into a traditional salesperson. The focus was on systems, visibility, and structure.

Q: What AI tools were demonstrated during this session?

A: Perplexity AI was demonstrated live as a free research tool and used to investigate the capabilities of the practice’s existing software. Elfsight was also recommended as a free way to bring Google reviews onto the website. The key principle was to use free or already-paid-for tools before introducing extra cost.

Q: Can Beyond Touch help with operational growth planning for a solo practitioner?

A: Yes. In this case, a single session identified a substantial capacity gap and converted it into a practical practitioner recruitment framework. The outcome was not just insight, but a clearer structure for growth conversations and future expansion.

Q: How does Beyond Touch’s coaching differ from traditional consultancy for SMEs?

A: The emphasis is on capability transfer. The client leaves with tools, structures, and ways of thinking they can continue using independently. In this example, the founder gained a repeatable research tool, a software optimisation path, and a recruitment framework they could build on without relying on ongoing outside input.

Q: What does a Beyond Touch Power Hour involve?

A: A Power Hour is a focused one-to-one session built around diagnosis, live problem-solving, and actionable outputs. In this case, the session covered AI tool use, software optimisation, social proof, growth capacity, and recruitment planning within one hour.

Q: Does Beyond Touch work with healthcare professionals who have no business training?

A: Yes. This case is a good example. The founder had deep clinical expertise but no formal business background. The support was designed to build on existing strengths while making growth strategy practical and understandable.

Q: What was the cost of the tools recommended in this session?

A: Everything recommended in the session was free or already included in the founder’s existing subscriptions. That was deliberate. The priority was to maximise value from current systems before introducing new spend.

Ready to Build Your Growth Strategy?

If your practice or professional services business is growing through reputation but lacks the systems and structure to scale confidently, a Beyond Touch Power Hour can help turn that uncertainty into a practical growth framework. The aim is not generic business advice. It is a clear next step built around how your business actually works.