There’s a point, once you’ve been formulating for a while, where you start growing a regular, client-facing practice, with people who trust your work, come back to you, and recommend you to others.
A Client Formulation Plan is one of the key steps that quietly gets you there.
At its simplest, it’s a record of a person’s needs and the core thinking behind the product you made for them:
- what they were looking for,
- what you chose, why you chose it,
- and how it’s meant to be used.
That sounds modest. What it does to your practice is fundamental.
Why we don’t call it a “treatment plan”
In many therapy settings, the equivalent document is called a treatment plan, and that can be confusing for practitioners and clients alike. We call ours a Client Formulation Plan, and it isn’t just a change of words. It’s a shift to language that better represents the work an ITF practitioner does.
What you’re keeping is a plan for a formulation: a product, and how to use it, made for a particular client.
“Treatment plan” carries a clinical, medical meaning that doesn’t fit a non-medical formulation practice, whereas “formulation plan” says plainly what the thing actually is.
Naming it accurately keeps your language clear and honest, without you having to think about it.
What goes into a Client Formulation Plan
There’s no rigid format, but a good Client Formulation Plan holds a few things together:
- The person. What they need and prefer, as you understood it with them during the consultation. Everything else follows from this.
- The formulation. The materials and amounts, with the reason for each, so that every ingredient is accounted for.
- How it’s used. How and when to apply it, and any sensible cautions.
- How it went. Room to note how it actually suited them, so you can make adjustments if needed.
Put those together, and what first seems a one-off act of making a product becomes a proper, documented piece of work.
The part that’s easy to miss
Here’s why it’s worth taking the time to consult properly and create a Client Formulation Plan. Because you make each product for a person, a Client Formulation Plan isn’t something you file and forget.
You come back to it. You refine the formulation, the person’s needs shift, and you update the plan, and over time it becomes a record of how your work grew for that individual.
Kept for a while, across many people, these plans quietly become something valuable: a body of work. A history of your thinking, evidence that your work was considered and responsible, and something you can genuinely be proud to stand behind.
It’s the difference between someone who makes nice things now and then, and someone with a real practice.
Part of working properly
The Client Formulation Plan is one of the ways Integrative Therapeutic Formulation turns making into a practice: your thinking written down, your decisions recorded, your work easy to improve and to trust. Keeping one well is part of becoming the formulator you want to be.
If you’d like to learn the whole approach, you can find out more on the Integrative Therapeutic Formulation course page.
