The Real Reason You Aren't Helping More People

Why don't you have as many clients as you want?

Most practitioners answer that question with a marketing excuse. Not enough visibility, not enough consistency, not enough leads. Ricky argues the real answer is a lot more uncomfortable: somewhere along the way, you became interchangeable. If a client can't tell the difference between you and the practitioner down the street, the only thing left to compare is price and availability, and that's not a marketing problem, it's a positioning problem.

In this episode, Ricky unpacks why so many clinically brilliant practitioners still struggle to grow, using an unexpected source of inspiration. He connects the reasons why the absence of play in both practitioners' lives and their programs is quietly costing them clients, retention, and referrals.

The episode closes with what this means for the way you structure your own practice and why the shift from delivering appointments to creating a signature experience might be the single biggest lever you're not pulling.

In this episode:

• Why being a great practitioner isn't enough to stop you from being treated like a commodity
• The real reason play drives client adherence, retention, and referrals
• How CrossFit, F45, and Hyrox turned the same boring workouts everyone already had access to into movements people pay to be part of
• Examples outside fitness, including coffee, eyewear, hospitality, and beauty retail, that reveal the same pattern
• The questions to ask yourself to find out if your practice is a commodity or an experience
• What it actually looks like to start building a signature experience instead of another appointment slot

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:32

Hey, welcome back to the show. I'm your host, Ricky, and today we got a special and very practical episode for you. And we're going to kick it off by asking a question that might make you a little bit uncomfortable, but it's one that we must answer if our dreams are to impact more people and build a fulfilling practice. So I really want you to think about this question. I want you to answer this question. So please don't just nod along. Uh, don't just listen to the rest of the episode. Take a second to actually answer this. The question is: why don't you have as many clients as you want right now? So go ahead, sit with that for a second, pause it for 15, 30 seconds if you need to. If you have your answer, we can move forward here. So, in my experience working with practitioners, most practitioners they'll answer this roughly the same way. It'll be something along the lines of I need more visibility, I need to post more, my marketing isn't consistent enough, I need a better funnel, I need a better lead magnet, I need to hire someone new, an ads person or a new creative person. And all of these things, they might have some truth to them. So I don't want to say they're just completely made up, but the real answer for the majority of the practitioners I talk to, it's actually a lot more uncomfortable. And it's one that doesn't sit well with them. So the big, big reason for a lot of practitioners actually is because somewhere along the way, somehow, some way, you became interchangeable. So if a potential client or patient pulls up three practitioners in your city right now, yours included, could they really tell the difference? Or would it just come down to whoever has an opening this week or whoever's the cheapest? If you're really honest with yourself, unfortunately, for a lot of you, it's the second one. And that's not necessarily a marketing problem. That's a positioning problem. You're not struggling to get clients because you're not good enough. You're actually struggling because there's nothing making you unforgettable once someone finds you. So your price, like everyone else, you have now become a commodity. And that's a powerful term. And it's something that you really want to avoid because it actually hurts both sides of the table. On your side, you have to compete on price. And sometimes the value you bring to the table might be significantly higher and should be significantly higher than that brand new practitioner who just finished school and has never worked with a soul, and maybe you've been in the game for 10, 20 plus years. So this is where people unfortunately get stuck in this loop and they're a commodity. So you're always going to be compared there. And then the other side of the table suffers as well because what ends up happening with a lot of practitioners is they start lacking fulfillment. They don't show up the same way and they start to actually water down their services to meet meet the price, meet that cost that has unfortunately come down too far. So I really want to get into why this happens today and more importantly, what the fix is. And I promise you, the fix has almost nothing to do with your certifications, your protocols, or how smart you are. And here's where it gets interesting. I found the answer in a place I did not expect. So if you follow my newsletter a couple of weeks ago, I gave a shout out to a book I'm reading. And the book is called Life at the Speed of Play by Mark Pincus. And if you don't know him, he's the founder of Zynga. So he's the guy behind some really popular mobile games, Farmwell, uh, Words with Friends, Cityville, games that reach literally like I want to say a billion plus people in about four years. And here's the crazy part about this story: he wasn't a game developer by trade. He was actually a business guy who figured out something that most companies, and as crazy as this sounds, most practitioners don't find out. They completely miss this. He figured out that people don't just want results, they want to feel something while they're getting them. And I couldn't stop thinking about how directly that applies to us and our practices. And this is the big reason I feel why some practitioners are booked out for months and others are sitting there wondering why they can't seem to grow past a certain point, uh, why they have no clients sometimes, even though they're clinically brilliant. And I know that they would crush it with anybody that they're able to work with. So here's what we're gonna be covering today. We're gonna talk about the trap of becoming a commodity, we're gonna talk about play and why the absence of it might be killing your growth. And I'm going to give you a ton of examples from fitness to coffee to hotels and beauty and of companies who took something boring and turned it into something that people can't stop talking about. And my goal today is by the end of this episode, I want you thinking differently about what you're actually building. So let's jump into it. We're gonna start with something uncomfortable. And right now in your city, there's another clinic down the street. Let's say Jack owns this clinic. And I don't mean the literal Jack. This is a practitioner, maybe a few offering something that looks a lot like what you offer. So, same modality, similar credentials, similar, let's say, hour-long appointment. And if a potential client can't tell the difference between you and Jack, guess what they're going to compare? Price. That's the top one. Maybe location, right? Maybe availability, whoever has an opening this week. And I would actually argue that's probably a bit of a uh hierarchy there as well. People will decide price first because if you are a commodity, why not go with the cheapest? They'll decide location second. So as long as you're not really far for this individual, they're probably gonna seek the closest person out to them. And then opening a lot of people want results quickly. And this is what we call the commodity trap. It's what happens when your offer is structurally identical to everyone else's. And even if your knowledge and the heart and soul you pour into your work is not, you could literally be the most gifted practitioner in your city city and you'll still get treated like a fungible good because on paper, an appointment is still an appointment, right? This is where most practitioners they they unfortunately don't want to hear this, but the market doesn't reward how good you are in isolation. It rewards how different you are in context. And most practitioners, they're running the exact same delivery model they were trained to run. Maybe it's book a consult, run some labs, hand over a protocol, book a follow-up. So it's clinically sound. And if somebody goes through it, they would most likely get better, they would get results from you as well. But it is also from the outside looking in, indistinguishable from hundreds, if not thousands, of other practitioners very near to you who are doing the same thing. Now, if you have a virtual practice, this applies even more because now you're being looped in not just with local individuals, but the entire internet. So we're talking tens of thousands, if not a hundred thousand plus practitioners you're being compared to if you have similar offers. So when you wonder why you don't have many clients as you want, the on the honest answer usually isn't uh I need to get better at my craft. It's I haven't given people a reason to choose me specifically and remember me specifically once they do. And that's where play comes in. So the next big thing we definitely want to talk about, and this is the idea from Pincus' book that stopped me in my tracks. He talks about building things people love and not just things people need. And when you study what actually made his game spread to a billion people, it wasn't that they solved a massive pain point, it's that they were fun. I still personally remember playing words with friends in undergrad when it came out, and that was something that uh you would add people in, you would kind of be able to like interact with them. And I wanted to go back. It was very addictive as well. And it wasn't because they had to go back, it's because they wanted to go back, right? So now sit with that for a second in the context of someone's healing journey. We are in an industry that treats seriousness as kind of a proxy for credibility. The more clinical, the more sterile, the more serious, the more legitimate we assume it looks. Uh, that's usually what we base our success on and how successful somebody else is. But something that's happened along the way is I think we've kind of confused seriousness with rigor. You can be rigorous and still be fun. You can be evidence-based and still make someone smile during the process of getting better. So here's what I believe, and I'll say it plainly: practitioners don't have enough play in their own lives. And then they build almost none of it into their practices. And both of these things are quietly costing you clients, retention, referrals, all of the above. Think about your own client experience for a second. Is there a single moment in your program where someone would say, Wow, that was fun? Not just like that was helpful or hey, I did feel different, not that made sense, but actually like, whoa, that was fun. That this was a great call, this was a great interaction. Like, I couldn't believe that I was actually laughing during that part, right? So if you can't answer that quickly, it's actually not a small gap. That's kind of the whole game that we're talking about here today, right? So here's what actual play does. And this isn't just fluff, this is behavior. Play increases engagement, it increases adherence. People who enjoy a process stick with the process. People who stick with the process get results. And people who get results while enjoying themselves become your loudest referral source because they're not just telling people at work, though they're actually telling people you have to try this, right? So, compliance in healthcare is one of the biggest predictors of outcome. And one of the biggest predictors of compliance is whether the experience feels worth returning to. So, oftentimes, we as practitioners and your clients, we get obsessed over the protocol. We rarely obsess over the experience of following it. So, this is crazy to say, but other industries have actually lapped us in terms of figuring this out. So, you've probably already seen this play out, not just in healthcare, but other places as well. And once you kind of see this pattern, you can't really unsee it. So, when we look at fitness first, because it's the the clearest one, 20 years ago, a workout was a workout. You walked into a gym, you did your own thing on machines, nobody explained to you, and then you left, right? So it was boring, forgettable. And then these programs came along and these brands came along, right? Think about CrossFit. It came along and it did something crazy wild. They didn't just invent new exercises, they took the same exercises, so the same squats, deadlifts, same basic movements that everybody already knew, and they wrapped them in community, competition, a shared language, and a scoreboard. Suddenly a workout wasn't a workout anymore. It was a WOD award, right? Workout of the day. It had a name, it had a leaderboard. People wore the t-shirt. So recently, F-45 did the same thing, right? Circuit training has existed forever, but F-45 turned it into a 45-minute experience with music, energy, and a format so specific you could walk into any F-45 in any country and you'd know exactly what you were getting and still have it feel exciting every single time. More recently, we have HIROX, right? So this is kind of the craziest one right now. Everyone's doing HYROCs and it seems very difficult, but guess what? They're having fun. So they keep returning, right? HIROX introduced a structured and scalable approach to competitive fitness, and it takes something that already existed in CrossFit competitions and it turned it into something that's more accessible and more of a global event. So it started with a small pilot and it's literally a genuine movement. So if you haven't heard of HIROX, definitely go check it out. But people are bonding over it because they're shared experience and it's a big achievement. It doesn't feel like a chore, right? So none of these companies invented new physiology. They didn't discover a new muscle, they didn't discover a brand new exercise. They took the same boring inputs everybody already had access to and packaged them as an experience worth showing up for, worth posting about, worth paying a premium for. Now, if we go outside fitness, because I don't want you thinking this is only applicable to gyms, coffee used to be commoditized down to the penny. And it still is a it trades like a crop, right? There's actually coffee indexes and futures and all of that. But then a certain coffee chain decided a cup of coffee wasn't just a product. The third place was the product, the ritual, the music, the name written on your cup, the customization. People will pay five times more for the exact same beans because of the experience wrapped around it. So eyewear used to be dull, overpriced, clinical transaction at the optometrist counter, pretty much, right? And then a company came along, made the process feel like styling instead of shopping, let you try frames at home, gave it personality, and completely reshaped how an entire generation buys glasses. Hospitality, right? A hotel room is a hotel room. It's four walls with a bed, sometimes a desk and a bathroom, right? But staying in someone's actual home with their story, their neighborhood, their personality woven into this day, it basically turned lodging from a commodity into an experience people actively seek out and pay for more, even when the cheaper hotel is sitting right next door. Right. So I hope some of these brands, I didn't say them on purpose, you're probably already hitting them right on the nail. Uh, Beauty did this as well. So used to walk into a big box pharmacy to buy makeup, and that used to just be a transaction. And then walking into a store that's built around trying things on, getting a consultation, being part of a rewards community, this is an experience. So you might get the same lipstick from the big box pharmacy, but guess where you're going to go, even if it costs more? You're going to go to the place where it's fun and you get an experience out of it, right? So here's one thing I think is the most relevant to all of us. Wellness itself is going through the shift right now in real time. You're seeing the rise of social wellness clubs, places built around cold plunges, saunas, community, and ritual. It's dressed up as an experience instead of a treatment or some sort of exercise you do. So people are lining up, they're paying premium memberships for things practitioners have been quietly talking about and offering as clinical afterthought for years, right? So contrast therapy, breath work, community, recovery. We've had the ingredients the whole time, but somebody else just wrapped them up better. So I hope you're starting to see a pattern now and hope your own practice is kind of starting to come to the forefront here for you. But every single one of these examples, they took something that already existed, something pretty ordinary, and something that used to be a commodity, and they wrapped it in identity, ritual, community, and fun. They didn't cut out the clinical, they they just increased uh the experience side of things for everyone. And that's made all the difference overall. So let's bring it home. What does this actually mean for you? If your practice is still structured as a series of interchangeable appointments, you are, whether you like it or not, playing the same losing game as the old boring gym down the street. You are one of many. You are comparison shopped, you are unfortunately considered replaceable. And the practitioners who are fully booked, who have wait lists, who get referred to constantly, they didn't just get better at their clinical work. At some point, consciously or not, they built something that felt less like an appointment and more like an experience, a signature process, a name for what they do, a framework they can use with their clients and can point to. And the client can then say, I'm doing this program, not I'm going to my appointment. And that's a huge shift. It sounds so minor, but I can't understate that enough. In my career, I've had the pleasure of running different programs. And these programs had an entire identity with them as well. And that's what made them successful overall. So this is such an important shift overall, moving from being just a simple provider of appointments to being the creator of an experience nobody else offers in quite the same way. And we're all different people. So this is where your personality makes it that way as well. So I want to be really clear though about one thing. I don't want you to have this as a takeaway. This isn't about adding gimmicks or turning your clinic into a theme park, right? You don't want to have a roller coaster in your parking lot. Sure, people are going to talk about it. They're probably going to come to go on the roller coaster, but that's not going to really change things for you. It's about asking yourself some honest questions. Does your program have its own identity? Is it similar to how CrossFit had workout of the day? And that was the identity? Is there some sort of shared language with your clients and the way that they talk to each other, the way CrossFit members talk to each other? Is there a moment of genuine enjoyment built into the process, not just pure information delivery and learning out of a fire hose? Does your work have a name? Is there a structure? Is there a signature? Is there something the client could describe to a friend in one sentence, the way someone can literally describe doing an F45 class or a HIROX race? If the answer is no, it's not a failure. It's just the next stage of your growth as a practitioner. We found the gap. This is the gap. This is the exact gap between staying a commodity and being priced and comparison shop like one and becoming known for a specific transformation delivered through a specific ownable experience. So one of these pats gets you undercut by whoever's cheapest in the month, and the other gets you a wait list. So here's what I want you to take from today. You don't have as many clients as you want, not because you're not skilled enough, because right now there's very little separating you from every other option in a client search results. And you're also competing with people who are paying thousands of dollars in ad costs every month and have more exposure. So the fix isn't to compete with them. The fix isn't working harder inside the same commodity structure. It's actually building something that has its own identity, own signature, own moment of play built in so that people don't just get results with you. They enjoy the process and they can't stop telling other people about it. So if this got you thinking about creating your own signature program and what that signature experience could look like, I'd love to help you build it. Reach out to me directly, send me a message, and let's talk through what a real signature program could look like for you and your practice. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. So stay fulfilled, stay inspired, and keep doing the work that lights you up. I'll see you in the next episode.