A Herbalist’s Journey From Student to Sucess

When I was doing my degree and clinical training in Herbal Medicine, there was a lot of information available on the study of herbal medicine, and many good examples of sucessful herbalists in the form of our tutors and other qualified medical herbalists we encountered.

Yet, when I graduated, I found that jumping from being a student to a practitioner was somewhat of a challenge. There was also little information availible to me beyond the very standard ‘run of the mill’ small business startup sites. While these were useful, they were undifferentiated to the particular quirks of being a self employed therapist with a reasonably complicated and expensive initial start up. Those sites or articles that did mention becoming a private therapist/clinician mainly delat with therapies with a low to moderate start up cost rather than the complexities of setting up one’s own clinic and dispensary.

So far, the list of posts I’ve made that specifically deal with setting up my own herbal medicine practice is as follows:

Banking and Financial Services: The Foundations of a Business – The importance of accounting from day one. An in depth discussion of where I decided to keep my earnings and the ethical considerations of banking, and how I met the ethical challenges of banking.

The Busyness of Starting A Business – Picking a date to start on, and the importance of a set launch date; why I chose to ‘launch’ at a local event.

Good Comms – a Business Essential – Why I didn’t want to use my personal mobile and home phone, email address etc. with the business. And how I got round these issues reasonably cheaply.

Notes on Stocking a Dispensary – How to work out what herb stocks (and in which form) you will need to buy with your first herb order that will be sufficient to get you started.

Publicity: Article Writing & Blogs – So, you want to write or blog about your business (and hopefully passion) – that’s fine, go for it. But don’t just keep it to your own blog/social media accounts, write for other outlets and spread the word! Here’s how I went about it and what I did…

Dreaming What I Do – Making sense of the past three years – Three years since graduating, where have I got to? This post checks in on the past three years and takes some stock of where I’ve come from and where I’ve ended up!