August is a notoriously rubbish month to run an MSK clinic.
Patients disappear on holiday. Schools are out. Half the team are in Greece and the other half are looking at flights to Greece. The rent, rates and salaries remain stubbornly uninterested in the school holidays.
There are sensible things you can do. Coordinate the leave, get the training done, sort the dreaded notes audit. And I'm sure any clinic leader worth their salt has an automated email poised to tell someone they haven't seen for 14 months that now might be the perfect time to buy a bundle of six sessions.
I never really saw August like that. For me it was ideas month.
When things went quieter my brain did the opposite. I gave myself permission to think about things that had nothing to do with physio and to go and watch other businesses instead. Restaurants, hotels, shops, airlines, bars. I became slightly obsessed with the little things they did brilliantly.
Years ago I was flown out to Monaco to see a patient and put up in a very swish hotel. The thing I remember most is the smell. Not strong, not floral, not really anything you could name. Just there in every corridor and every lift like a subtle tap on the shoulder.
The place smelt expensive.
Naturally I had to try it. Found a company who would pump scent through the clinic HVAC, for a price, and off we went.
Turns out there is no middle ground.
You either spend ten times what you budgeted, or your clinic smells like the deodorant of a 14-year-old boy with spots.
We stopped.
But I never forgot what the hotel was doing. It was quietly managing something you couldn't see and doing it so well you only noticed how it made you feel.
That was worth stealing. The diffuser was not.
Nick the thinking, not the thing itself.
Some ideas were good. Some were ridiculous. Quite a few were both. And yes, I was occasionally reined in back when we were building the thing. Probably correctly.
But the danger in physio is we all end up offering broadly the same thing, in broadly the same rooms, with broadly the same language, while telling ourselves how different we are.
Never be bland. When everyone else zigs, zag.
People remember experiences far more easily than they remember your values written on a wall.
August might be a terrible month for utilisation. It's a bloody good month for imagination.