Escape the Trap: 3 Steps to Freedom for Overworked Practice Owners
Are you feeling burned out and overwhelmed by your own success? I have worked with over a thousand practices, and in my own experience, I remember the days of being so busy that I never had a minute to myself.
Do you ever feel like you're stuck in a whirlwind? Long patient lines, your team running around the practice with their hair on fire, and that surreal moment where you're like, "When am I ever going to have time for the things I want to do??"
For me, at the time, nothing was worse than being a newlywed young father who wanted to attend his kids’ activities but never had time. I couldn't step away from the practice, which was getting so busy that I was drowning in my own success.
If that's you, I'm going to give you three steps that, if you follow them, will help you regain your freedom in life.
If you're a practice owner with no experience making data-driven decisions, don't worry. You're in the right place. I'm going to share a formula that's going to help you double your profits. I’ll also discuss three types of practices to help you determine which one you are, where you want to be, and what kind of practice you want to scale and grow.
But that’s not all. I'm also going to give you a killer strategy for freeing yourself from this crazy grind and buying back your time.
Tip No. 1: The Double Your Profits Formula
The Double Your Profits Formula applies to every practice. I don't care if you're a straight chiropractic practice, an integrated practice, a small practice, or have multiple locations. This formula will change your life.
We start the formula with the end of the formula, which is equal profits. You've got to sit down and intentionally set the volume of profits that you want to generate from this practice.
We work backward in the formula by starting with that because you're building a vehicle that generates profits.
It's like gas in the tank. If you're going on a trip to the moon, you don't just jump in a rocket and head off. You sit down and calculate how much fuel you need to make it to the moon. You need to know what those profits are, both short-term and long-term.
We then work backward on the formula, where we go back to the beginning, which is patient visits. Your patient visits have value, and a practice has different types of patient visits, from new patient visits to report of findings, to patient treatments and re-exams, and progress exams and conversion visits, where we're now trying to move a patient through their programs.
There are two different models within that practice around visits: low value, high volume, or high value, low volume. What kind of practice are you? What services are being delivered on each visit to make those visits the most valuable they can be?
Imagine a restaurant – each dish has a price. Would they be happy if you paid less than the price they’re offering? So why do we sometimes offer services without clearly explaining their value and charging accordingly?
Discounts and insurance can impact the value of a visit, so we need to adjust the production per visit to reflect the actual value delivered. This adjusted production per visit is the true worth of your services.
That's the number that we want to know. We want to know to the penny what you should be collecting for each of those visits and, on average, what you’re also collecting per visit.
How do we move that up by focusing back on what type of visits we're seeing the most of? How do we increase the most valuable visits in the practice?
We now multiply that toward the third component of the Double Your Profits formula, which is the percentage of that adjusted production per visit we’re collecting. We're chasing that number. We either collect that money upfront from the patient or have a billing cycle.
So, what percent of that are you collecting? Healthy practices collect 96% up to 100% of that adjusted production. If you're only collecting 70% - 80%, your team is doing all this work, but you're not collecting enough for everybody to get paid fairly. So we have this gap of “work value return” to feed the fuel of the profits, and now your profit margins are so small.
No wonder you can't afford to hire and scale. You try to grow, but there's no money to reinforce the team to grow. That's why you keep hitting your head.
The fourth component of the formula is now deducting your actual overhead. Do you even know your overhead, and are you analyzing that? This is where the power of a profit dashboard comes in handy.
We build dashboards for practices that pull in your Quickbooks data and display your exact overhead in real-time. How cool is it to see your expenditures, DME, purchases, supplements, and supplies all in one beautiful dashboard?
When you can ensure that each payroll category in these different categories is within the proper margins, we know we're moving overhead into a healthy place. We now have enough profits to scale and reinvest in the practice.
So, to recap, the formula is:
Visits
x
Adjusted Production per Visit
x
Percentage of that Adjusted Production we are Collecting
-
The Overhead
=
PROFITS
You become a data-driven doc when you get laser-focused and intentional about moving each lever of this formula.
Tip No. 2: Be Clear On What Type Of Practice You’re Building
Here at The Data Driven Practice, we've built a community of thousands of practices passionate about running their practice by the numbers, and they fall into these three categories.
Cashflow Practice
A cashflow practice is where the practice owner is typically the doctor or the provider providing the services. They're able to keep their overhead pretty low because they're doing most of the work. But we find that with these practices, if the doc leaves the practice, the cash flow stops.
Scale it and Sell it
A “scale it and sell it” type of practice is where we have entrepreneur doctors who like to start a practice cycle but don't want to run a long-term practice. They like growing value, turning around and selling that value, and having a chunk of money to go wash, rinse, and repeat and do that multiple times.
These docs definitely need to know their numbers, and they’re using our systems to create the most value within these practices.
The Dominator
The Dominator is a practice that wants to become a brand. It’s a practice driven by a team where data is automated, and they have intentional reinvestment into the practice to grow and become the number one practice within their community. They want to either grow multiple providers or multiple locations.
This type of practice also has to know their numbers. You cannot scale a practice and dominate a market without knowing your numbers. You must be clear on the levers and specific margins that have to be in place to scale that practice. That's why dominators grow fast. This is a group of doctors who are very clear on the impact they want to make within their community and our profession.
Tip No. 3: Free Yourself From The Success Of Your Practice
To do this, you must build a brand. But how do we really do that? I want to give you a strategy that will literally change everything in your practice.
Most of your patient testimonials probably talk about you and the difference you made in their lives. They're talking about how grateful they are for you. And I get that it feels good. You feel significant because you’re changing lives. But the problem is that your patients’ friends, their community, and their families will want to come in and see you.
Instead of doing that, I want you to work with your patients in delivering their testimonials. Ask them to intentionally switch your name with your brand name, your practice name, or the method you've created that positively impacted their lives. This is the unique selling proposition (USP) your practice offers that can't be accessed in the community other than by coming to your practice.
With your patients confident in the practice brand, swapping providers or team members doesn't break the system. The confidence is built into your practice or health care system's name. That's what we want to develop in the community.
This simple tweak will change your messaging in your community, and patients will seek out your brand rather than you as a provider.
This frees you. This now means that you don't have to be the treating physician. You can start building other providers and confidence in these providers to your patient base, which means you can shift to work more on the practice rather than in the practice. Becoming a dominator is freedom.
If you're ready to dominate your community and become the premier brand within your community, the number one resource for holistic healthcare, then take this tip and implement it. You will immediately see incredible results with this messaging change.
And if you're ready to get serious about this, I want you to sign up for the “Practice Profits Challenge”. It's a 3-day challenge where you have the opportunity to join live sessions with me where I will answer all of your questions on how to leverage artificial intelligence (AI), what numbers you should be tracking, how you can use organic traffic to scale your practice to become the dominator, how you can test your messaging and improve that messaging where you are creating attraction for your ideal new patients, and so much more. So click here to join today, and I'll see you inside!
