Divide and conquer: managing the work around your sports practice

You’ve finished your last appointment or coaching session for the day, but the working day isn’t quite over. There’s correspondence with private medical insurance companies to chase up, a website page to update, an email newsletter you meant to send and a growing list of small jobs waiting for your attention.

If you’re an independent sports therapist, physiotherapist or coach, you may recognise that second working day: the one that starts when the client-facing work finishes. Finding reliable admin support for your sports therapy business could help you spend less time on paperwork and more time doing the work you’re trained to do.

Your training and experience have equipped you to assess, treat, teach or coach. Running a business also asks you to become an administrator, credit controller, website editor and marketing department. Some of those jobs may come naturally. Others take longer because they sit outside your main skillset or simply aren’t work you enjoy.

The difficulty isn’t necessarily knowing how to do them. It’s finding the time and attention to do them consistently.

The work around the work

An appointment or coaching session occupies a clear space in the diary. The tasks supporting it are often less visible.

There are enquiries to answer, payments to check, information to update and arrangements to confirm. A workshop needs a venue, joining instructions and booking information. A change in working hours needs to appear everywhere clients might look.

Individually, these jobs can seem too small to justify asking for help. Together, they can take over an evening or the weekend.

A useful first step is to notice where your time goes. For one working week, keep a simple list of the tasks you do outside appointments and sessions. Mark those that require your professional judgement, those that follow a repeatable process and those that keep getting postponed.

That gives you a clearer picture of what genuinely needs you—and where support might be useful.

Keeping on top of private medical insurance correspondence

For practitioners who work with private medical insurers, there can be another layer of administration between delivering a service and receiving payment.

Depending on the insurer and your arrangements, that might include checking invoicing requirements, following up an outstanding payment, resolving an administrative query or finding out what is holding up a response.

The time-consuming part is often the follow-up. You send an email, wait for a reply, make a call, discover something else is needed and add another reminder to the diary.

A consistent process can make this easier to manage:

• Keep the insurer’s current contact details and administrative requirements in one place.
• Record when correspondence was sent, what response is outstanding and when to follow up.
• After a call, note the agreed next step and who is responsible for it.
• Separate straightforward administrative questions from matters requiring your clinical input.
• Set aside regular time to review outstanding items, rather than relying on memory.

Where appropriate, some of that tracking and routine liaison may be suitable to delegate. Anything involving patient information needs appropriate authority, confidentiality arrangements and secure access agreed first. Clinical explanations, treatment decisions and professional sign-off remain with the practitioner.

The aim is to give each outstanding item a clear next action, so it doesn’t keep returning to the bottom of the list.

Keeping your website useful

A website is easy to overlook when the diary is full. Yet it may be the first place a prospective client checks your services, location and availability.

Small inconsistencies can create unnecessary questions. Your website might show an old timetable, a service you no longer offer or booking instructions that have changed.

You don’t need to rewrite everything at once. A regular check of a few essentials is a sensible starting point:

• Are your services, prices and working hours current?
• Are the location and contact details easy to find and correct?
• Do booking links work?
• Are qualifications and professional descriptions accurate?
• Have old events and announcements been removed or updated?
• Can someone using a phone find the information they need?

For WordPress users, there is also the ongoing care of the site: updates, backups and checking that forms still work. These tasks benefit from a clear routine and knowing someone is responsible for them.

Content updates are often straightforward to hand over when the approved wording, images and deadline are available. Professional claims and treatment information still need your review.

Sometimes an existing website simply needs a little attention. There’s more on this in this article about updating rather than rebuilding a website.

Staying in touch without creating another big job

Email marketing can become one of those tasks that is always planned for a quieter week.

Perhaps you want to announce a new class, share a workshop date or let subscribers know about a change in your services. The idea is clear, but turning it into a finished email involves several smaller jobs.

There’s the wording, layout, image selection, links, test email and final check. If each stage has to wait for a gap between appointments, a short newsletter can take weeks to finish.

A simpler approach is to give each email one main purpose. Decide who it is for, what they need to know and what you would like them to do next.

For a new course, that might mean including:

• Who the course is suitable for.
• The dates, location and cost.
• What participants can expect.
• How to ask a question or book.

Once those details are agreed, formatting and preparing the email can be treated as a separate task. Use an appropriately permissioned mailing list, respect unsubscribe choices and review any professional advice before it is sent.

A useful, timely email doesn’t have to be elaborate.

The paperwork behind classes, courses and events

A successful session can make the organisation behind it look effortless. Usually, it isn’t.

There may have been venue enquiries, supplier quotes, booking arrangements, equipment lists and several versions of the joining instructions before anyone arrived.

Templates and checklists can reduce how much has to be recreated each time. Useful examples include:

• A course-launch checklist with dates and responsibilities.
• A standard venue-enquiry email.
• A clear joining-instructions template.
• An equipment and preparation list.
• A simple record of costs and outstanding supplier payments.
• A follow-up email ready to adapt after the event.

The most useful template is one that reflects how you actually work. Start with something you already use, improve it as you go and keep the current version somewhere easy to find.

Decide what needs your expertise

“Divide and conquer” starts with making a distinction between professional judgement and the process surrounding it.

You may need to decide what a new service includes. Someone else could put the approved details on your website.

You may need to answer a clinical question from an insurer. Someone else could track the correspondence and remind you when a response is due.

You may have the knowledge for a useful newsletter. Someone else could organise your notes, format the email and prepare it for approval.

Before handing over a task, ask:

• Does this require my qualifications or judgement?
• Can I describe what a satisfactory result looks like?
• What information and access would another person need?
• What must come back to me for approval?
• Would handing it over save enough time or effort to justify the cost?

Not every task is worth delegating. An occasional two-minute job may be quicker to do yourself. A recurring job that interrupts your concentration, waits unfinished for weeks or repeatedly takes up your evening deserves a closer look.

Start with one manageable task

You don’t need to reorganise the whole business to find out whether a different approach would help.

Choose one task with a clear result and deadline. It might be bringing a services page on your website up to date, preparing the next newsletter or establishing a reliable follow-up process for outstanding business correspondence.

Agree the scope, budget, access and approval points before starting. Then review the result. Was the work completed properly? How much input did it need from you? Did it free up useful time?

Keep information access proportionate to the job. Many website, document and marketing tasks can begin without sharing patient records or opening up an entire inbox.

The point is to make the work around your practice more manageable, leaving you with more time for the parts that depend on your skills.

A little about me

I’m Sandy Nash, and I help with business administration, WordPress websites and email marketing. In my earlier financial-services career, I regularly liaised with financial services companies, so I’m familiar with the persistence, accurate records and follow-through that business correspondence can require. Alongside that background, I’m a table tennis coach, run my own coaching business, with first-hand experience of the planning and administration behind sporting activities. If there’s a task taking up too much of your time, please get in touch and we can explore whether I could help.