When you start your practice your biggest job is pretty clear–not easy, perhaps, but it’s clear: you need to find clients for the things you offer. You’re trained, tested, licensed, insured, stocked, prepped and ready to go–you just need someone for your stuff.

In The Practitioner’s Journey, we call this The River. It’s one of four challenges every practitioner faces.

There comes a turning point in practice, however, where that shifts. You have a client base. They’re referring. New clients are more abundant than they once were. They come easier. And now you have a new opportunity:

Instead of spending all your time looking for patients for your things, you can start to think about looking for things for your patients.

Once you have a client base, adding new things can really pay off. The audience for that new treatment tool or technique is already there. You just need to tell them about it.

The trick, of course, is that we often get this backwards. In the initial days of practice we don’t have enough patients, so we go find more things. We take a course. Get a new machine or treatment tool. Learn a new technique. Sometimes it helps, but often the same problem is still hanging around–we don’t have any people for our things.

Similarly, later in practice we sometimes forget–about the audience for new things that’s just there waiting. About the power in all that momentum we’ve built. We overlook the value of adding things for our people.

The question, then, is which do you need most right now? Patients for things, or things for patients?