What Do You Really, Really Want?
a list of business-coach-adjacent classes at our acupuncture school
This post is a follow up to last week’s about how we teach small business for acupuncturists at POCA Tech/ORCCA. My own schooling was sorely lacking in this department; after I graduated, though, I’ve gotten a lot out of business coaching. (See Intention + Container, for a description of the business coaching that led to this Substack.) What I’m trying to do for our students is to pass along applicable bits of what I’ve learned. In other words, I’m doing my best impression of a small business coach! One of my goals for 2026 is to get more systematic about that process and I’m hoping some of you can help?
To start, I’m making a list of the business-coach-adjacent topics I try to cover with every cohort of students. Let me know if you see anything that I’m missing, or say what you’d like to hear more about? The list has three categories: introduction to small business in general (including leadership and entrepreneurship); introduction to key aspects of community acupuncture small business, in particular; and finally, classes on specific topics. Those look more like what’s typically covered in other acupuncture schools’ “practice management” classes.
Intro to Small Business
As I said in last week’s post, the first weekend of school is all about our small business context. We also get started on our Leadership Practicum right away.
Once we’ve established the context of small business and the need for leadership development, we move on to the next hurdle. Every coaching process I’ve ever engaged in has included an uncomfortable bit, usually right at the beginning, where the coach asked me, What are you here to work on and what do you want to accomplish? And once I answered, they would tactfully (or not so tactfully, depending on the coach) respond, Okay, so why haven’t you done that thing already? What’s stopping you?
Part of a business coach’s job is to identify obstacles. Something I’ve learned over and over, with different coaches, is that one of the obstacles is always me. Every time, if I wanted to move toward a goal, I had to face some self-imposed limit. Often I needed the coach’s help to see the limit and recognize that it was self-imposed.
I’ve written elsewhere that we try to be careful about therapy-adjacent topics at school. The challenge is that we need some way of addressing how small business — and micro business even more — reliably offers up an unflattering mirror of your personality. If you’re in small business for the long haul, you’re going to have to grapple with yourself at some point.
Our imperfect compromise is to teach a couple of classes on the Enneagram in the first term of the program. The Enneagram has many possible uses; for us, it’s a tool for self-reflection about your strengths and weaknesses in a business context. We lean on Mario Sikora’s executive-coaching version of the Enneagram for these classes. Some students resonate deeply with the Enneagram, others not so much, but overall it’s a fairly neutral way of introducing the idea that many of the problems you face in small business will be you-problems, as well as providing one possible way to unpack them. I’m an Enneagram nerd and I’ve found it amazingly helpful for identifying self-generated business difficulties.1
This goes right into the next class I teach in the first term: introduction to entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship. A major goal for this class is to get everyone’s preconceptions about entrepreneurship out in the open. Most students are ambivalent (at least!) about entrepreneurship, with good reason. Even though the stereotype of an entrepreneur in the US is a wealthy white tech bro, someone at the top of the pecking order, in reality many entrepreneurs are anything but. Plenty of people become entrepreneurs because they have no choice, or all their other choices are worse. Consider: immigrants, people with histories of incarceration, people who aren’t good candidates for employment, people who have to work from home because they’re also caregivers. These are called necessity entrepreneurs, and they’re good role models for acupuncturists.
This class is also when I introduce the question: what do you really, really want? Executive coach (and entrepreneurship professor), Shep Boyle wrote a great short piece about how the most important business questions are who are you and what do you really, really want:
Clarity isn’t a nice-to-have in entrepreneurship. It’s the foundation of everything: your focus, your energy, your decisions, your culture, your resilience.
Clarity is what separates momentum from motion, and it’s what keeps you moving when the world gets messy (which, by the way, it always does).
I keep asking the question what do you really, really want? throughout the program, until students are thoroughly tired of it, but it’s unavoidable. If it’s hard to build any business (and it is!) it’s virtually impossible to build one that you don’t really want.
Intro to Community Acupuncture Small Business
A transition class from “business in general” to “this business in particular” is the class about entrepreneurial trade-offs, which a Cohort 3 student nicknamed the “Why We Can’t Have Nice Things Class”. It’s one of my favorite classes to teach in first year, because it’s essentially just a series of questions that the class answers, so it’s a little different every time. The first question is: What’s the going rate for private room acupuncture? Once we have an answer for that — usually in the neighborhood of $100 — the next ones are: What do you get, and what do you give up, if instead of charging $100 per treatment, you decide to charge $25? And then we make a list of all the tangible and intangible consequences of the community acupuncture model.2
In second year, we have a couple of classes on what we call “holding space”. When I talk with acupuncturists who didn’t go to our school, who are struggling with their practices, a common theme is that while they might have had classes on things like insurance billing, marketing techniques, and acupuncturists’ professional responsibilities, nobody ever told them explicitly: your practice is made up of relationships, and it’s your job to build those relationships. So I try to be very specific about this.
A community acupuncturist’s job is to make connections — with lots of different people in lots of different ways. That’s the central task of building a patient base. And with each individual patient, it’s about facilitating the person’s connection to their own healing process — to their bodies, to their experiences in the clinic, and to hope. This is a specific kind of work that you can practice and get better at, but you have to do it intentionally; it’s not an automatic consequence of learning how to practice acupuncture itself. There’s a lot more detail in the post On Big Numbers about building a patient base.
On the theme of specificity, I also try to unpack real world events at WCA for students — for example, what happened last year when a patient had a medical emergency during a busy shift — or the scary entrepreneurial leap of moving our classroom in 2024.
WCA and the school itself reliably provide teachable moments, so I try to make the most of them.
Finally, we have a couple of second-year classes on what we call “the social container” that utilize this ebook (which includes a sample business plan for a community acupuncture clinic):
Business Classes on Specific Topics
Third year students get a class on budgets and the process of starting up a clinic, from Sara Biegelsen who started WCA North in 2023:
They also get a class on marketing from my co-director Jersey Rivers, who started their clinic Quad Cities Community Acupuncture in 2022.
Other specific topics for third year students include: emergency management, outreach to biomedical providers, how and why to set up a 501c3 nonprofit, basic Board training so that you can be a Board member for your friends’ nonprofits, and understanding the business realities of being an employer and/or an employee in a community acupuncture setting.
Third year Capstones are also a chance for students to flex some entrepreneurial muscles. The goal of a Capstone project is for students to identify a topic that they’re personally interested in and motivated to pursue, that will also contribute to the practice of Liberation Acupuncture in some tangible way. Producing a Capstone at our school typically involves trial and error, running into dead ends and figuring out how to get out of them, and organizing information so that other people can understand and use it. Cohort 9 provided an excellent example of what we want to see in a Capstone:
Okay, that’s my list! One of my favorite pieces of feedback about our business curriculum came from a Cohort 9 student who said, “I came into the program not knowing much about small business, but now I feel more prepared, I feel like I have the tools. I feel like I could have any business really." Whether or not they choose to follow through with starting a business, I hope all our graduates feel like that.
Beatrice Chestnut’s Nine Types of Leadership is concrete and practical. And for any other Enneagram nerds out there who might be wondering, I’m a Type 8, Social (Countertype) “Solidarity”. File under “painfully accurate”.
Entrepreneurship is an endless exercise in trade-offs; it’s important to accept that early on. Otherwise you will end up like the acupuncturists who want to have their cake and eat it too.
It sounds like you've got it well covered - even 15 years in I wish I could come sit in on your biz classes! The one life changing book I read before opening Stillpoint was 'The E-myth' and it made me realize how many mistakes I was about to make. I scrapped my plan and rewrote it from the ground up, thank goodness! Something I often come back to is 'if you find yourself dropping balls, don't stop to try and pick them up. Stop and figure how your systems are failing you.'