Damien's Advice for Starting the New Year Right: How to Set Up Your Practice for Success in 2026

DAMIEN:

Hello everyone, and welcome to today's webinar: my advice on starting the new year right. This is about how to set up your practice for success in 2026. We're going to cover a bunch of things today that will help get you in the right position, reflect on the year, and make the most of the learnings from the last one so that 2026 is the best year you've had yet.

I know we're towards the end of the year and everyone's short on time, so I'm going to cut straight to the chase.

DAMIEN:

Let's start with tip one: the end-of-year audit. The goal is to check the overall health of your business. Get into the nitty gritty, review your finances, look at your profit and loss, and have a real look at where you're making money and where the opportunity costs are. Things like no-shows and cancellations, where you may not have been able to make full use of your time.

Run some reports on inactive clients. If there are clients who are genuinely inactive, you can remove them and update your database to reflect that. But you can also mark people for follow-up in the new year. Sometimes people have just dropped off, not because they've formally disengaged from treatment. Marking them for follow-up means that in the early months of the new year you can reactivate old clients, and that often helps kick off the year extra strongly. Depending on your region, people often take holidays over the Christmas and new year period, so reactivating old clients lets you start strong.

The idea behind an overall audit is to get a sense of how your business is operating. It's very easy to go week to week, month to month, and get lost in the year. It's important to stop, reflect, and run some reports. If you have an accountant, maybe sit down with them to review how things are going, or do that early in the new year. Just make sure you get a health check on your business.

DAMIEN:

Number two: take a walkthrough of your clinic. I suggest doing this with someone who isn't in and out of your clinic every day. Take a friend or a family member, literally walk through your clinic, and look out for signs of wear and tear.

What happens is that normal wear and tear occurs in any office space, and we get desensitised to it when we're there all day, every day. You just don't notice the scuffs on the wall, the stains on the floors, the mark someone made at one point that never completely came out. We get desensitised, and that means a clinic can go from looking fresh and bright to declining in presentation over time.

So it's really helpful to get some fresh eyes. Go through with a notepad and pen and think of it like you're a new client entering for the first time. I know in our own practice we found exactly the same thing. For those who don't know me, my name is Damien, I'm one of the co-founders of Zanda, but my wife and I also ran a group psychology practice for about 14 or 15 years. We'd have signs stuck up on the window at various times, and there'd be tape marks left there that collected dust and looked old. We had scuff marks where people had walked past and scuffed the skirting along the corridor. Maybe we'd moved furniture and dinged the wall. We even had a child in the waiting room once etch something into the wall with a pen, and you could still see it. These things are just part of the nature of running a practice, but we do get desensitised.

So go through and look at what might need repainting, whether you need specialists in to clean the carpet or lift stains, washing down windows. Spider webs are a great one, look outside your practice, look at the entry, look up at the lights and the roof. Windows viewed from the outside can get quite dirty, and handrails outside collect grime. Take a fresh look, make a quick list, and then depending on where you're positioned, either spend some time over the break sorting it out or make a to-do list for the new year. You can get people in to help, give it a good spring clean, repaint where you need to. Doing this maintenance at the end of the year keeps things fresh, everyone feels good, and you avoid that gentle decline over time.

DAMIEN:

Tip number three: contacting your referrers. This is an opportunity to thank them. Most health businesses run on a healthy network of referral sources, family physicians, general practitioners, other health professionals, and often businesses, depending on what makes sense for you. Spending a little time thanking them goes a long way. Send a season's greetings card, a short letter of thanks, whatever makes sense. Some sort of acknowledgement helps reinforce the relationship and lets them know you appreciate the referrals they've given you over the year.

This is also an opportunity to re-engage inactive referrers. I tend to hold off on this until the new year. Identify them now, but make it one of the jobs for January. Send out a re-engagement letter to any inactive referrers. If you're using Zanda, you can run a report to see inactive referrers, easily pull up a list, and even do a mail-out to them.

Take a look at potential new referrers who have moved into the area, too. Spend a bit of time on Google or whatever search engine you use and see whether there are new practices that have opened that you haven't paid attention to. It's good to do this a couple of times a year, and the end of the year is a good time. If there are new ones, send them an introductory letter welcoming them to the neighbourhood, or just introducing what you do. We have blog articles on our website about what to include in those introductory letters. This is really about doing a little bit of maintenance with your referral sources and showing your appreciation.

DAMIEN:

Tip four: update your forms and templates. Sometimes we build up a collection of templates that don't get much love. We wrote them once and we keep using them without stopping to think about whether they still make sense. Get rid of old templates you don't need that are cluttering things up. You might have been running programs or providing services you no longer offer. Go through your template list in your practice management system, remove the ones you don't need, and update the ones that do need updating. Maybe you've changed policies, or changed terms around payment. Just make sure they still look fresh.

Make sure you update any dates. Sometimes people have dates written into a template rather than using a merge field. Check that your documents still have the right tone and that they're aligned with your brand. Sometimes we write an email or a template when we're in a bit of a mood. Often we write new policies when something has happened that isn't so good. Maybe we've had an issue with someone not paying outstanding invoices and thought, right, I'm going to make this wording stronger. And maybe that doesn't align with how we want the tone and voice of our practice to sound. So it's a good opportunity, when you're in a fairly neutral state of mind, to have a look and make sure they still make sense.

Talking about dates reminds me of another thing that irks me when I see it: make sure your website copyright date is current. It's often in the footer. Just make sure it doesn't say something like 2019. Ideally you put a merge field in there so it shows the current year automatically. Sometimes you see websites that look really nice but have things in them that date the site badly. If you don't manage your own website, ask whoever does to update it, and ideally get them to make it update automatically.

DAMIEN:

Tip five: maximise your use of automations. If you're using Zanda, you have a bunch of automations available to you. There are the appointment reminders, which we've always had, but also the automations tool, you can have new client forms go out, pre-appointment and post-appointment communications, forms being sent, and you can automate a lot of invoicing, recalls and so forth.

If you're not using automations, it's a great time to jump in and start with one or two. You don't need to build out every automation in one sitting. Just pick a process you'd like to improve, or something you're currently doing manually, use an automation to replace it, and build out from there.

If you are already using them, spend five minutes looking over them and make sure they still suit your needs. Check there aren't manual processes that have crept in alongside what you've automated. Sometimes we see people with a bunch of things automated who are still doing other manual tasks they don't realise can now be done automatically. Free up 2026 and get your system doing as much as possible for you on its own.

DAMIEN:

Tip six: use BizzyAI. There are two components to BizzyAI, and we have more AI features coming out very soon, but two things will make an enormous difference to your time if you're not doing them already.

The first is BizzyAI Scribe. You click on Scribe and it securely and compliantly transcribes the session content, in all the regions we operate in, and then writes the notes for you using whatever template you've set. You can still use your normal custom templates in Zanda, and it will complete them in the style you like. This has been amazing. We released this feature earlier this year and the uptake has been unbelievable. People are saving hours. As a psychologist myself, writing notes was my least favourite part of the job. It takes up a lot of time and of course we're not paid for it, so automating it is unbelievable. If you haven't used Scribe before, you can test it by creating a fake client, starting a new note, and dictating your thoughts. It will write out the note for you, so you can try it before using it with a real client.

The second is Refine, which helps you improve what you write. You put in the core points you want to make and it refines and writes it for you, so you can develop your content without sitting there manually typing everything. Even if you don't use Scribe, you can still use Refine to get your core thoughts out and have the system write them up in a professional way appropriate for your profession. Again, it saves a lot of time. We're seeing AI adoption increasing across all industries, which is what you'd expect, anything that saves a lot of time and makes life easier gets a good adoption rate, and we're certainly seeing that with our BizzyAI products.

DAMIEN:

Number seven: update your practice operations manual. If you don't have one, this is a good opportunity to create one. In fact, if you haven't looked in your Zanda account, there's a practice operations manual built in and we've pre-populated it with over 100 policies, so you don't have to write one from scratch. You can just edit it. If you don't see it, it's possible it's been toggled off, if you're the account owner or an admin, you can toggle it back on.

If you do have one, make sure your policies and procedures are still up to date. Review them and add any new ones you need. When you're reflecting on the year, what went well, what didn't, what you had to pull people up on if you work in a team, what improvements you made, often that improvement happens through experience. To make sure that information isn't lost to time, capture it. We forget as much as we learn as time goes on. We find better ways to do things, sometimes we drop off, we learn new things. But if we don't capture that and turn it into a routine procedure, it isn't there for training new people who come on board. If a new admin person comes in and we haven't captured everything the last person learned, all of that walks out the door and you start again.

So make sure your policies and procedures are up to date and write any new ones you need. The reason we built the operations manual directly into Zanda is that it's the best way to get consistency and capture learning as you go. I've been there myself running a practice with my wife. It's amazing how easy it is to learn and forget, or have a team member leave and suddenly there's no recorded way of doing things. You end up reteaching everything you can remember, which, as I said, may not be everything.

Capturing policies and procedures makes it easier to onboard people and easier to provide a consistent service. It also makes it easier when you're providing supervision or management guidance, because you can point to them. If you do end up with performance concerns, you're able to say, look, these are the standards we're aiming for, this is the expectation. That makes it a lot clearer and puts you in a much more solid position to manage any issues that come up. Any way you look at it, it's worth the time, particularly as we've made it easier by pre-writing a whole lot of them for you.

DAMIEN:

Tip number eight: optimise your team's work. Make sure your team is working on high-value tasks and automate the rest. You can do this in different ways, but check in with them about what's working, what's not, what they enjoy and don't enjoy, and prioritise for the new year.

Think about every person in your team, even if it's a team of one. If it's just you and you're a solo practitioner, that's absolutely fine, what's the best use of your time? Generally it's going to be seeing clients, because that generates revenue, or building out processes to help things operate more smoothly. The flip side, the worst use of your time, is things you're doing manually that are time-consuming and that a system can easily automate, or that you can delegate to someone else.

A good example: in the early days of running our practice, my wife and I would go down and do all the cleaning and maintenance. I'd mow lawns, I'd de-cobweb the front of the place. That's fine early on. But as you grow, you don't want to be doing those tasks, because they don't deliver as much value. It's much more efficient and economically sensible to outsource them and spend your time on the things that deliver the most value to your business or to you personally.

That applies across the board. It makes sense to have your practitioners seeing more clients and doing less paperwork and admin. But it also applies to your admin team. Having them do all the admin tasks isn't necessarily the best use of their time either. Very often you can have your admin team automate as many admin tasks as possible, then use the same admin resources for higher-value activities: improving how you use your practice management system, writing brochures, assisting practitioners in different ways. In our practice, our admin team would go out and visit businesses and referral sources, GP practices, and deliver physical brochures and make connections.

So when you're optimising your team's work, it's not just about practitioners. It's about the whole ecosystem of your practice, making sure everyone is doing the highest-value work they can for their role and their skills.

There are less obvious benefits too. You get a much happier team who enjoy their work and are more likely to want to stay. If your practitioners can do more of the work they enjoy (usually seeing clients) and less of the admin, chasing outstanding invoices and dealing with no-shows, they're happier and you're more likely to retain them long term. The same goes for other team members. It's much better to have your admin team doing things that are interesting and use their full skill set, which may mean it still makes sense to have other people doing the cleaning and day-to-day maintenance, so your admin team can focus on client-facing work.

There's no right or wrong way here. I'm not saying you should do it this way or that way. What I'm encouraging you to do is take a moment to think about it, talk to your team members, and see whether what they're doing makes sense or whether there are improvements to be made.

The other point I'd make, before people write in and tell me: different things make sense at different times for your practice. As I said, when we first started we did literally everything. It soon became apparent that wasn't sensible, but very early on, before we even knew whether the practice was going to work and generate a profit, we didn't want to outsource everything, because we had more time initially given we didn't have a full caseload. So different things make sense at different times. I'm not lecturing you or saying there's inherently anything wrong with people doing different elements of a role. Just do it thoughtfully. Are you optimising your team, having them do the highest-value work? Engage them in the process, too, because they'll appreciate it, everyone likes making their job more interesting and engaging.

DAMIEN:

Tip nine: review your rates and your market positioning. Set your rate increase if you haven't already, and decide when to implement it in the new year. There are lots of different views about when to set your rates, I've heard arguments for the start of the year, mid-year, at random. There are valid arguments for all of them. But the biggest risk I see, and the most common thing I see working with practices around the world, is people not doing it at all: leaving it, delaying it, avoiding it, and missing the opportunity to bring rates in line with inflation or with changes in their cost base.

So I'm not going to get too far into the argument about exact timing. I think there are natural times to do it, and the start of a new year is a good one. But if you haven't already and you need to give more notice, given we're in mid-December now, that's fine. As part of this review, decide what your new rates will be. If you've missed the boat on giving people enough notice for the new year, don't worry. Just set the time when you're going to implement them and take the action now to advertise it and let people know the new rates kick in at a certain time. Taking action now makes all the difference. The biggest risk is not doing it.

Also review your website and make sure there's nothing dated on it. Check the team members listed are current. And there's the copyright date again, I'd forgotten I'd included it on this slide. Make sure your copyright dates are current and accurate, then update anything else that dates your website.

If you've got old blog articles or content that looks dated, sometimes it's better to remove it. If you got excited about blogging four years ago and wrote "The best way to start 2021", and that's your only blog post, I'd argue you're much better off removing it than having something that dated on your site. Alternatively, update and refresh it and change the date. But what you don't want is old, stale content being the primary thing people see. If a potential new client or referral source looks at your practice and sees stale content, it makes them wonder whether your business is even still functioning. It shows you haven't maintained the discipline of posting content. That's totally fine: we all have different levels of enthusiasm at different times and we don't always maintain things. The main thing is to get rid of the evidence of the things you decided not to maintain, so your website isn't detracting from you. It's better to have a simple website with current content than lots of half-finished projects you started over the years and dropped.

The same goes for your socials. If you decided to focus on social media a few years ago and then dropped off, decide whether you want to keep that content up and the account active, or put a post on there directing people to your website to say you're no longer using that account. That's a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It shows you're still active and you don't have old content dragging down the impression of your practice.

People can get a little complacent with this, because they might have strong referrals coming in from known sources and think, well, people know me, my business is well known. What that misses is that referral sources change over time. People retire, new practitioners who refer to you come and go. You've got to constantly think about keeping a new flow of referral sources coming into your practice. If a new doctor moves into the area and is trying to get oriented to their new town, and they find an old website with old content, the impression for someone with no history with you is that this practice may not still be open, or at best that you're not maintaining things, which doesn't give them confidence in referring.

Just as I said about having a friend walk through your clinic, sometimes get a friend to go through your website and your digital presence and make observations. Things we think don't need to be said, because we know our space so well, or things we think are clearly expressed, don't always make sense to fresh eyes, which is exactly what our clients and referrers are. So having someone look and say, hey, I don't understand what you're saying about billing and insurance, is genuinely helpful, because those of us who wrote the content are going to be blind to it.

DAMIEN:

Tip number ten: update your business and personal profiles. If you use places like Psychology Today or other health platforms where you have a business profile, update them. If you're registered with different organisations, whether you're a physiotherapist, a massage therapist, a dietitian, a personal trainer, and you've got a profile listed on their websites, this is a good time to go through and make sure all the correct information is still there. If you advertise your clinic opening hours, check they're still right. Maybe you've started seeing people on Saturdays, or stopped. Maybe your office hours have changed or you've got a different phone number.

Try Googling your own name and your own business and see what comes up. Make sure it's accurate and fresh. It doesn't take long. You could do this in 30 minutes, even while watching TV. Check your Google Business Profile, sometimes called Places, and check your LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and so forth. It's very easy for things to get out of date.

Sometimes (and this is annoying) you'll see new companies create directories by scraping data off existing websites, then publishing a directory of all the health practitioners of a certain type in an area. Because you didn't create it in the first place, that information gets old: they scrape it once and leave it. Even though it's annoying, you have to deal with it. If that's what comes up on Google, you need to contact them and ask them to update it, because that's what clients and referral sources are going to see.

DAMIEN:

Tip eleven is really about defining your goals for the coming year. Think about what you want to do next year based on your end-of-year audit and reflection. When you're looking at the numbers, look at which services generated the most money, whether there were client groups you or your team particularly enjoyed working with, and whether there were any that weren't aligned with the direction you want to take your practice. Spend a bit of time thinking about what you want next year to look like, set some goals, and write them down in whatever format you prefer. Record it, so you've got something to help inform decisions and actions for next year.

But it's not all about practice goals. Think about your personal goals, and whether your practice is giving you what you want. Happy practitioners and happy practice owners have a balance. They're getting professionally rewarding work and rewarding feedback, but they're also achieving their personal goals. That might be travelling, having time to spend with family, taking up new hobbies, focusing on fitness.

The reason it's relevant is that the two are intertwined. If someone is working so much in their practice that they're overrun with clients, that might be great through one lens, from a financial point of view. But if it means their personal goals aren't being met, there's a risk of burnout and a risk of feeling unsatisfied. The two interact, because we can then reprioritise what we do in the practice to achieve those personal goals.

I've worked with lots of people who've had exactly this scenario, where their practice is running away from them. It's successful, and that's almost the problem. We've had to sit down and look at what they really want. Often they want some non-clinical days, they want to be able to travel, they want the practice to run more automatically without them being the central figure in it. Then you can structure the practice and take steps next year to facilitate that. It might mean outsourcing more, employing more people, diversifying. But if we don't stop and think about the professional, the practice and the personal, often we don't do it and the year just disappears. I'm sure most people watching this are surprised that we're in mid-December 2025 already, it's happened so fast.

And finally, create an action plan. It doesn't have to be complicated and you don't have to use a certain template. Just work out the key things you need to do to take you towards your goals. If you don't define all the steps, just define the next few, you'll start getting some momentum and you're much more likely to hit the ground running in the right direction for 2026.

DAMIEN:

That's it from me in terms of things to do to get yourself in a great position for next year. Some quick announcements. If you haven't already, we have an ideas board in Zanda, go into your account, go to Help, and submit an idea. If there are features that would make life easier for you, you can put ideas in there and vote on ideas other people have submitted.

We also have the Zanda Academy, which is great if you're newer to Zanda or you've got team members joining you. They can learn everything you could possibly want to know about how to use Zanda, and can even earn certificates for completing certain classes.

And finally, we have a book. We released it this year and it became an Amazon bestseller in its category, which is amazing, The Nine Secrets of Successful Health Practices. If you'd like a copy, go to zandahealth.com/secrets and we can help you out, or you can grab one on Amazon. If there's anything else we can help with, please reach out, you can even jump on a Zoom call with our team to get the most out of your Zanda account.

One of the things I always say when I'm throwing a lot of information at you is that you don't need to do it all. The idea is to get you thinking and to get different ideas popping off in your head, and then you choose the things that have the most salience for you and make the biggest difference. So don't feel you need to go and do all of these things, just pick the ones that will make the biggest difference for you.

Once again, thank you very much for all the support over 2025. Have a very good Christmas and holiday season, and all the best for the new year. We look forward to next year and to bringing you lots of great things within Zanda, as well as some wonderful webinars we've got lined up that we think will help. All the best. Thank you very much.