In the past 2 weeks I have spoken to 15 awesome and very diverse clinic owners about how to improve their practices. following are my major learnings (warning: some owners may find the following material confronting!)
1 – most clinic owners suffer from superwoman/man syndrome. you work 50+ hours a week, treat loads of patients, train your team, do the marketing, meet referrers, recruit, do the numbers etc. next step is burnout illness or disillusionment
2 – most clinic owners have poorly performing teams. your people have so much stuff going on in their heads preventing them from succeeding. this manifests as an unwillingness to rebook clients or market themselves
3- most clinic owners see this problem and believe they can fix it with “systems”. treatment plans, block booking, fill in the blank templates etc. guess what? this ties a massive rock to the ankle of our already drowning team members. we get the shits when they dont do the systems, we work harder, and the situation gets worse
4- most clinic owners have no idea how to harness the potential in your teams. hint – its a little thing called leadership and we suck at it. how about we learn to lead and inspire them rather than imposing gestapo like procedures on them and expecting them to love and adore us and suddenly perform better.
5- the physio business model is busted. the only way you can have a profitable clinic is to deliver a remarkable and different type of physio from your competition or to have enormous well established clinics with heaps of goodwill. most of us dont have this and would have to work like slaves our whole lives to get it. From a numbers perspective physio has the highest wages to gross revenue percentage of any profession I have come across. Ive come across many clinic owners paying subcontractors 50% of what they bring in, this scares me!
I am in a business group and the other business owners are PTs, electricians, plumbers, accountants, various trades and financial advisors. A general rule in many businesses is an income producing team member needs to bring in 3x what you pay them. This is really hard in physio. What this means is profit is very skinny in our profession and we MUST get more out of our staff for the high wages they earn. If your physios are not being billed out at $200 per hour plus you are simply not earning enough to pay them! If you pay a physio 80 grand they need to be bringing in 200 plus per year for you to have a profitable business.
there is a second way to have a profitable business. learn how to lead and inspire your team. help them grow and be the best they can be. help them with their challenges. be their mentor. They will perform better, without the need for such rigid systems. This is called leadership.
i enjoyed doing these 15 minute business diagnostics so much that i want to keep it rolling. the 15 proactive owners i spoke to last week all have some cool stuff to work on from our discussions to take this next step. Email me at Nick@ultimatephysio.com.au if you want to book in 15 min call with me and we can open the pandora’s box!
