A few weeks ago, one of my clients – a successful entrepreneur – took me aside. “You should scale Banter Speech,” he said. “Open more branches. Franchise!”
He wasn’t the first person to give us that advice. From a business perspective, the suggestion made sense. We’ve invested a lot of time and energy over the years in training, building quality systems, and creating resources to help people with speech, language, stuttering, literacy and other communication challenges. With work, we could probably double or triple our size pretty quickly.
But, something about the idea didn’t sit right with me.
Cut to yesterday. As I cleaned up my man cave, looking for our battered Christmas Tree box, I came across a classic: “A Pattern Language”, by Christopher Alexander and colleagues. It’s a book about planning ideal towns, buildings and services for people and communities.
As I flicked through it (procrastinating), I came across this great quote:
“Services don’t work if they are too large. When they are large, their human qualities vanish; they become bureaucratic; red tape takes over.”
If you are providing quality care to real people with challenges, there are big benefits to staying small:
“We have concluded that no service should have more than 12 persons total…the largest number of people that can sit down in a face-to-face discussion.”
So – although we are grateful for the support – we’re not looking to scale or franchise our clinic. We love our small, but talented team. Our independence. Our active relationships with our clients, their families and our local communities.
We revel in the absence of red tape and the freedom it gives us to try new things, to improve our client care, and to create useful resources.
Speaking of resources, Teachers Pay Teachers is throwing a huge cyber sale on 2 and 3 December!
All of our 188 resources are discounted by up to 25%!
To inspire you, here are some of our most popular resources. But check out the terrific resources of other speech pathologists, too!
Hi there, I’m David Kinnane.
Principal Speech Pathologist, Banter Speech & Language
Our talented team of certified practising speech pathologists provide unhurried, personalised and evidence-based speech pathology care to children and adults in the Inner West of Sydney and beyond, both in our clinic and via telehealth.
