Sole Trader Courses Ltd trading as GROW · Company No. 16406138 · England & Wales
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Evidence
Foundations
Get Clients · Relationships · Wealth
Human capital and social capital theory, entrepreneurial learning, and the empirical literature on what determines survival and growth in micro enterprises. This is where the Formula's premise comes from: capability, not effort, separates practices that last from those that fail.
Aldrich & Zimmer, Anderson, Park & Jack, human and social capital theory
All four domains
Self-efficacy and action initiation, self-regulation and boundary control, habit formation, trust formation, and decision-making under uncertainty. This is what makes the programme a behaviour change intervention rather than an information product.
Bandura, prospect theory, habit and self-regulation research
Get Clients
Services marketing models, customer journey mapping, service experience design, and trust formation in high-involvement, credence-good service relationships, which is precisely what a therapeutic practice is.
Hierarchy-of-effects models, journey mapping, service trust literature
Ourselves
Job Demands-Resources, emotional labour in service work, conservation of resources, and autonomy-supportive work design. Solo practice concentrates emotional demand and removes the organisational buffers that salaried clinicians rely on.
Job Demands-Resources, emotional labour, resilience and COR theory
Wealth
Financial literacy and decision quality, cashflow management as a determinant of microbusiness survival, cognitive bias in financial decisions, and cognitive load reduction through systemisation.
Financial literacy research, cashflow survival studies, behavioural finance
The full synthesis, with all 87 references, is published in The GROW Formula®: Academic Foundations and Evidence Base, free to download and written so that curriculum committees and validation panels can assess it directly.
Method
Years of mentoring, peer networks and reflective groups with CAM practitioners surfaced recurring patterns in who sustained a practice and who did not.
An integrative narrative review across five fields, prioritising well-established frameworks, research relevant to micro enterprises, and mechanisms that map onto solo practice.
Each observed challenge was mapped to a competency, and each competency located within a recognised scholarly tradition. The result is the four-domain structure.
Domain content reviewed by subject specialists, including chartered accountancy review of the Wealth module.
Authorship
BSc, LicAc, MBAcC
Originator of the GROW Formula®
Over a decade in solo acupuncture practice while teaching at the College of Integrated Chinese Medicine, External Examiner for The Acupuncture Academy, and Chair of the British Acupuncture Council's Governing Board. Earlier career in Learning and Development specialising in behaviour change, experiential learning and professional competency frameworks.
Contribution: Framework architecture, pedagogy, regulatory and professional standards perspective
MBA, Henley Business School
Marketing and client acquisition
More than 20 years in strategic marketing and business development, specialising in service differentiation, client acquisition systems and sustainable growth strategies, at a level normally accessible only to corporate and blue-chip organisations.
Contribution: Get Clients and Relationships domains
Growth strategist
Strategy and growth systems
Over 15 years analysing what makes early-stage ventures succeed, including a Rocket Internet venture, a global streaming competitor to Netflix, the Naspers/Prosus portfolio, and work as Entrepreneur in Residence with Seedstars diagnosing root-cause growth problems for founders.
Contribution: Get Clients, Relationships and Wealth domains
Chartered Accountant
Founder, Bee-Accountable
Specialist in microbusiness finance and self-employed accounting. Reviewed and validated the Wealth module against the real tax, record-keeping and cashflow realities of UK sole traders.
Contribution: Validation of the Wealth domain
Pedagogy
| Theoretical framework | How it shapes the programme | |
|---|---|---|
| Adult learning theory (andragogy)Knowles; Merriam; Tough | Knowles; Merriam; Tough | Adults learn what they have an immediate reason to use. Learning is problem-centred rather than subject-centred, and every module attaches to a live challenge in the practitioner's own practice. |
| Experiential learningKolb; Yardley, Teunissen & Dornan | Kolb; Yardley, Teunissen & Dornan | Learning is structured as cycles of action, reflection, conceptualisation and experimentation, the pattern associated with retention, adaptive problem-solving and transfer into complex practice environments. |
| Reflective practiceSchön; Mann, Gordon & MacLeod | Schön; Mann, Gordon & MacLeod | Guided reflection prompts and evaluation activities develop judgement, self-awareness and emotional regulation, and support the formation of a professional business identity alongside a clinical one. |
| Situated and practice-based learningLave & Wenger; Billett; Eraut; Ericsson | Lave & Wenger; Billett; Eraut; Ericsson | Authentic task engagement in the learner's own practice, with real clients, real financial decisions and real operational constraints, plus deliberate, iterative refinement rather than one-pass instruction. |
| Social learning and communities of practiceBandura; Vygotsky; Wenger; Laurillard | Bandura; Vygotsky; Wenger; Laurillard | Facilitated discussion and peer exchange enable knowledge co-construction and the transmission of tacit practice knowledge that formal instruction cannot carry. |
| Coaching theoryGrant; Cox, Bachkirova & Clutterbuck; Theeboom et al. | Grant; Cox, Bachkirova & Clutterbuck; Theeboom et al. | Structured, learner-centred dialogue turns insight into action, with accountability structures drawn from implementation-intention and behaviour change research (Gollwitzer & Sheeran; Michie et al.). |
Assessment and activity are set in the learner's own practice, so competence is demonstrated in the environment where it has to work.
Tasks mirror the ambiguity of real practice, following the transfer-of-learning literature (Bransford & Schwartz; Lobato) rather than assuming transfer happens on its own.
Feedback is tied to what the learner actually did in their practice that week, consistent with Hattie and Timperley's conditions for feedback to improve performance.
Peer structures provide the normalising, motivating support that salaried clinicians get from colleagues and solo practitioners do not, associated with persistence and reduced burnout risk.
The pedagogical rationale is set out in full in Section 4 of the Academic Foundations paper, including a summary table of frameworks, scholars and applied relevance. It is written to sit alongside your own learning and teaching strategy: competency-structured, constructively aligned, and complementary to modality-specific clinical curricula rather than duplicating them.
Position
Generic small business training assumes a product, a team and a growth motive. Clinical CPD assumes the client is already in the room. The gap between the two is where practitioners actually fail, and it is the only thing the GROW Formula® addresses.
If you are aware of comparable evidence-informed provision, we would genuinely like to see it. Tell us.
Working with an academic partner on evaluation? We would like to hear from you.
Participant feedback
Published accounts from practitioners in eight modalities. They describe individual experience and are not a measured outcome or an evaluation of effectiveness.
