If you want more profit in your clinic, you need to change this

Treat Your Business EP76

[00:00:00] Katie Bell: How are you doing today, my love listeners? This month, we are going to dig into the actual state of your business. And you cannot bury your head in the sand this month because you’re gonna hear me talk about this. for the next four weeks. But stay with me. I know loads of you are driving when you’re listening to this podcast, so give me a honk on the horn of your car or a hell yes if you are making the money you thought you would be making when you went into business by yourself.

[00:00:31] Katie Bell: That’s what I thought. Give me an extra honk on the horn if your business makes money without you needing to do. Some of the clinical work, or all of the clinical work. And here’s the last one. Give me one long honk on the horn. If you are worried about your company’s financial well being. I know there is now chaos on the roads.

[00:00:53] Katie Bell: Is money or lack of money one of your biggest stresses in your business or in your life? We’re going to talk about this and we’re going to get down and dirty with this because it is something we cannot keep avoiding. This month we’re going to be Talking about and exploring how we can make your clinic, your practice, permanently profitable.

[00:01:13] Katie Bell: So many business owners, before they work with us, I’d like to say, put their clients first, their team first. Finances are difficult and seemingly very unpredictable. Cash flow is slow during holidays and the summer months. They are all investing way too much money on clinical CPD in the hope that’s going to be the thing that makes them more money in their business.

[00:01:35] Katie Bell: If this feels like you, you’re going to want to stay around for this episode and the next few coming in this month. So let’s dive in!

 

[00:01:44] Katie Bell: So money is not good or bad, it just amplifies who we are inside. Money allows you to go out into the world and do the job you were intended to do, you were put on this planet to do. We are playing the long game and that means we can’t run out of cash. Now you probably started this business either as an NHS physio so you were on a steady kind of income, although perhaps not feeling overly fulfilled in your role.

[00:02:14] Katie Bell: Or you were working for somebody else, thinking that if you did this For yourself serve the community, do great work, be somebody of value, then the money would just follow. That’s partly true, but what’s not automatic is profit. Your business must serve you. You need to take care of your clients.

[00:02:35] Katie Bell: You need to take care of your team, but you need to take care of yourself. I want you to imagine that you’re on a plane and that they give the emergency briefing and what do they tell you? They tell you to put your own oxygen mask on first. The same applies for you. If you are burnt out, or your business doesn’t survive, or your business is, not making profit, then you can’t help anyone.

[00:02:59] Katie Bell: Your clients need your business to be profitable, so they can have the very best version of you. In the therapy room. When your business is not profitable, I can promise you they’re not getting the very best version of you or your team. And profit is not an event. How many of you wait for your we are recording this this podcast episode in April.

[00:03:23] Katie Bell: Okay. It depends when you’re listening to it. But for many of us, we have just reached our year end in March. Many of us run off the financial year of April to March. So for many of you listening to this, are you waiting for your year end account? To understand how profitable or not profitable your business has been this year.

[00:03:45] Katie Bell: And when you get your P& L report or your management accounts and it says to you Well done you are left with 25 000 pounds this year or 2 000 pounds or 5 000 pounds and you go. Oh, this is so good Now I can go and spend on something really nice and I can go on holiday and I can buy this handbag and I can Get this new car or I can get the new kitchen that I’ve always needed You And then you look at your account and there isn’t any money there.

[00:04:10] Katie Bell: So profit is not an event and this old way of looking at your account’s transactional accounting is not going to help you bake profit into every transaction. And this is what we’re going to explore together this month. Profit is not something that will happen when you just hire another therapist.

[00:04:28] Katie Bell: Profit is not something that’s going to happen when your revenue gets to that next milestone. Profit should be in every transaction, with every clinician, with every service that you offer, with every appointment that you do. So why do we, as therapists, struggle with this side of things? Like, why do we want to just bury our head in the sand?

[00:04:49] Katie Bell: Why do we struggle with charging what we are actually worth? Why do we struggle charging for cancellations? Or, people that don’t attend? This therapist guilt can push us into undercharging behavior, waiving late cancellations, allowing clients to trample all over those boundaries, and for you to schedule clients in at all times that don’t work for you.

[00:05:16] Katie Bell: Why do I mention this now? It’s because This month we need to look at this big hairy guilt right in the eyes and tell it to fog off. You are a helper. You are a problem solver. You deserve to make a great living. You are talented. You are professional and get paid for the changes you make to people’s lives.

[00:05:35] Katie Bell: I can tell you now, you do not see a spinal surgeon reducing their rate. You do not see a spinal surgeon working over their hours, or you don’t see a vet reducing their fees. I remember, I’m going to tell you a little story, because I know you’ll love them. I was in the Cotswolds, it’s one of my very favourite places, and we were away, me and my husband, and my dog Toby, as you’ve all seen on Instagram.

[00:05:58] Katie Bell: And we were in the garden, in the sunshine, laying on picnic blankets, having a gin and tonic, and something made the dog jump, and he whacked the gin and tonic glass, it smashed, he, it sliced his paw, and then You can imagine the carnage. So we have to in my best physio skills, bandages pour up, get him to the emergency vet.

[00:06:23] Katie Bell: So we ring round and then, you go and see this vet and they were amazing. He had to be put to sleep, he had to have stitches, blah blah blah. And this all comes at a cost. So I think he was asleep for approximately eight or nine minutes. By the time they, stitched them up, it wasn’t loads of stitches but it was enough.

[00:06:44] Katie Bell: And our bill was something like 837. For nine minutes of work. Now, I tell you that because there was no like, Oh, does that work for you? Or should we give you a reduced rate? Or how do you feel about that? It was just like This is the cost and you’re just gonna have to pay it.

[00:07:03] Katie Bell: It was just an expectation and clearly I would have paid Whatever it costs. For any of you listening to this who are pet owners you get me here. You would do that for your dogs, for your cats, etc. For But when it comes to us, we feel embarrassed to charge actually what we’re worth and in relation to the problems that we’ve solved and the value that we deliver.

[00:07:26] Katie Bell: We feel bad charging more money for an emergency appointment. My vets did not, and I definitely didn’t get that back on insurance because That, funnily enough, on the policy is if you go to out of hours, you then don’t get that part back.

[00:07:39] Katie Bell: So we as an industry, we’ve got to go somewhere. We’ve got to up level our self belief, our self worth, and really get clear and get okay with the transformations that we create in people’s lives. I change people’s lives. So do you, and so do you, and so do you. Now, you may have already done some work on this.

[00:08:01] Katie Bell: You may have done some work on your money mindset, and I really commend you. But I know that there are many of you who struggle with this daily. Money problems tend to occur in a business when one of two things happen. When the number of sessions drops, Or the number of sessions lift because you then have a cost increase.

[00:08:22] Katie Bell: So as your business grows, it’s normal for expenses to grow as well, especially in a service delivery business because you need the people to deliver the service. But when things are out of control, expenses grow faster than income. Now I’m pretty sure you have never taken an accounting course in your life.

[00:08:43] Katie Bell: You have not learned how to manage the money in your business. But let me tell you this, you cannot outgrow money problems. Being bigger is not always better. Being bigger does not make you gonna, does not mean you’re gonna make more profit. Go into a second clinic and a third clinic if your first clinic is not making the profit it needs.

[00:09:04] Katie Bell: Doesn’t mean it’s going to solve the problem. Your top line figure is not the only thing that matters. It’s a vanity metric. Great. If you come on a call with me and tell me that you want to be a million pound clinic great, whatever. I’m more interested in what profit is that going to bring you?

[00:09:20] Katie Bell: What does that mean? You can take as the business owner. How does that impact your life? Because running a million pound clinic, let me tell you, it’s not that easy because you have relatively a million pound more problems.

[00:09:34] Katie Bell: So the old way of accounting was income minus all your expenses. That gives you profit and then you pay yourself and then you pay some tax. Another method is that we look at your P& L statement. If any of you have one of those, then I commend you because it’s a start, but that shows that we’ve made some profit, but it doesn’t necessarily mean there’s any cash in the bank.

[00:09:56] Katie Bell: And if you’re doing bank balance accounting, come on, hold your hands up for those of you who are listening, who look at your bank as a measure of how well your business is doing. You’re not getting any scope of what is going on in your business. So we’ve got to flip the equation and this is where the profit first model comes in.

[00:10:13] Katie Bell: Income minus profit equals your expenses. So this tells us what percentage of money we have to be able to spend to create the profit that we want from the revenue that we bring in. This is Profit First Accounting System. It’s what we teach all our members in Thrive. And it means you will instantly know how your business is really doing.

[00:10:38] Katie Bell: It will show you how much you can spend in each area of your business. It will show you how much money is reserved for taxes and for yourself. And it allows you to set a budget. But the first thing that we have to do is shift your mindset around profit. Profit is a word that I want you to love. It is not a dirty word.

[00:10:59] Katie Bell: You started your business because you love what you do. And you want to make a positive impact on your community. Not necessarily to make the money. There has never been one business owner who has told me clear financial goals when I get on a call. They all tell me they’re not motivated or driven by money, and I say bulls t, I nearly swore.

[00:11:19] Katie Bell: Sometimes I know there’s kids in the car.

[00:11:21] Katie Bell: You don’t have to be motivated by money, being motivated to have freedom, flexibility, opportunities means that you need to make profit. So therefore, you have to be driven by the money. The realization that having a profitable practice, I’ve said it so many times now that I can’t speak, allows you to have a greater impact on that community.

[00:11:43] Katie Bell: It means you can achieve your life and your family goals, and that you can feel really good.

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[00:11:54] Katie Bell: I have got something really important to tell you. You have just been listening about the importance of your clinic being profitable, and one of the important factors in that is if you are a clinic owner with a team, you maybe have self employed therapists or employed therapists working for you, they must be performing.

[00:12:13] Katie Bell: They must be performing at a level that is ensuring your business is profitable and upholding your amazing reputation. Do you struggle with having these open, direct, honest conversations within your team about their performance, about their retention, about their conversion? And do you never ever seem to make the time because you’re always so busy seeing clients and you just slot it in between client appointments?

[00:12:38] Katie Bell: It’s an okay meeting, there aren’t really any direct actions as a result of it, and nothing really changes. Just listen to me for the next two minutes, if that is the case. We are running our next Therapist Transformation course on the 13th of June, 2024, depending on when you’re listening to this.

[00:12:54] Katie Bell: So if you are a clinic owner that wants to send a member of your On our Therapist Transformation course, they will spend a whole day on Zoom with me, where I get to perform and manage them. I will work with them on shifting their limiting beliefs, up leveling their money mindset, getting themselves out of their own way, and understanding the importance, understanding the numbers, the real numbers in your business that you often don’t feel like you can discuss as the business owner, but getting them to see that the money that the client pays is not what you put in your back pocket and drive home in your Lamborghini.

[00:13:31] Katie Bell: We want to be clear with your therapist on what it takes to run a business. And you can’t often talk to them about that, but I can from a place of full integrity, but openness and honesty about. The importance of protecting your reputation as a clinic. So they get the whole day with me on zoom.

[00:13:48] Katie Bell: We see instant results like the day after you start to see an improvement in conversion and retention and confidence. And the main result that we see is that they feel more fulfilled in. their work. They love what they do because they’ve got themselves out their own way. They are now just able to clearly have a conversation with a client about what is best for them.

[00:14:11] Katie Bell: What is going to get them the results and the achieve the goals that they have set out to achieve. It is a win. The next three weeks, they get accountability calls with me to keep them on track, to really cement that new habit and to optimize those results and the performance. So you’re going to see an increase in your profits.

[00:14:31] Katie Bell: Day one. Immediately. Now, the most important thing that I have to tell you is that I am celebrating a 10 year birthday in our clinic this year and to celebrate my amazing team of really high performing therapists, I would like to pay this back to you and I would like to give you the opportunity to have me manage your team and get them all high performing as well.

[00:14:55] Katie Bell: So to celebrate 10 years, I’m giving the opportunity. To save 500. Yes, 500 off the course on June the 13th. That means that you, it is super accessible for you to be able to send your team, employed or self employed, onto this course and start seeing the difference straight away in your bottom line profits.

[00:15:19] Katie Bell: Good or good? Click the link below in the show notes where you will be able to register for a place. They are super limited because they need all of me to get the very best results. So we don’t have a huge number come onto this course. And this is the only opportunity you are going to get this year to save a whole 500 pounds off the course fee.

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[00:15:48] Katie Bell: Being a burnt out therapist will mean people leave this industry quicker. We are seeing it. We have seen it since COVID. It will mean people leave the industry quicker than they are joining it. Doing our work comes at a really high emotional cost, doesn’t it? How many of you get to a Friday and feel absolutely like you have been dragged through a bush backwards and you have been wrung out?

[00:16:11] Katie Bell: It comes at high emotional cost, but it doesn’t need to come at a high financial cost as well. You shouldn’t need to carry a caseload of 50 clients a week, manage all the business sides of things, employ a team, and make just enough to survive. Stay safe.

[00:16:25] Katie Bell: When I introduced the Profit First model, I was like you 10 years ago. I didn’t even know about the Profit First model. I had no idea. And I was running the old transactional accounting system and I used to get to the end of every month and think, Oh I’ll just pay myself the scraps that’s left.

[00:16:45] Katie Bell: And I don’t really know if I can predict month in and month out, but you have bills every month and I’m guessing for most of you they are pretty set. You always have to pay your mortgage every month or your rent every month. You know roughly what your expenditure is to live, and if you’re anything like me, I like to spend money.

[00:17:03] Katie Bell: I have to be making sure my business is profitable so I can do the things I want to do in my life. It means I can look after the people around me. I can take my friends on great experiences. I can take my family away. We can do great, exciting things with it. So this month, we are dedicating it to money.

[00:17:23] Katie Bell: All things money. And this week, we’ve got to start to shift your mindset around it.

[00:17:30] Katie Bell: I want you to start to think about when I say profit, you say, what instantly comes up for you when I talk about the word profit? Do you start thinking to yourself it’s something that we don’t have enough of. We never make any profit. Profit feels really hard to come by. I have to wait till the end of the year to see what profit I’ve made.

[00:17:51] Katie Bell: Profit sounds like something that big corporations are just talking about all the time. If that is the energy you have around profit, then that is the results that you are going to produce.

[00:18:04] Katie Bell: We need to know per service, per appointment, per practitioner, what is making profit and what is not. It allows you to manage your team better. It allows you to performance manage and have open and honest conversations with people when they want a pay rise. It allows you to predict your income so that your partner doesn’t have to say to you, when are we maybe going to see a bit of return for all of this work that you seem to be doing?

[00:18:36] Katie Bell: When is it going to change? I can tell you by waiting just for the next client or for the next contract or for the next medical legal contract or waiting forever for Bupa to put their rates up, by the way, they’re probably never going to, it doesn’t mean that you’re going to make more profit.

[00:18:53] Katie Bell: So first of all, we’ve got to shift how we feel around profit. I want you to be excited by it. I want you to be ready for it. I want you to understand. That everything that you do is about making profits so that you can make a positive impact on your community. And then you as a business owner, get what you deserve.

[00:19:12] Katie Bell: So join me next week, where we take the profit first model to the next level. And we start to talk about some of these profit first principles and things that you can do in your business. To start to make more profit, like today. You don’t have to wait for this to happen. We can start setting profit money aside today.

[00:19:37] Katie Bell: Now, if this sounds good and you’re excited by all things money and all things profit, because we are having a mindset shift, then I would love you to join me for my upcoming masterclass in May. Now, for those of you who have not been on one of my masterclasses before, where on earth have you been? These are free masterclasses that appear every month within the Treat Your Business Facebook group.

[00:20:01] Katie Bell: There is a link to register in the show notes. If you can’t make it, register anyway, because then you will get sent the recording and it’s always useful to have them in your bank of, I will listen to this when I’ve got a minute, when I’m sat on the plane, when I am somewhere that’s going to allow me some time to listen to Katie.

[00:20:19] Katie Bell: Now my masterclass in May, 22nd of May, four o’clock. Okay. This is a date for your diary. If you are serious about making more money in your business, we are going to talk about how you can pay yourself first. And not last and not just what’s left. So if you’re ready to reclaim time and bruise your profits, it’s time for the spring clean.

[00:20:42] Katie Bell: If you find yourself lacking boundaries, constantly saying yes, spending valuable time on tasks that aren’t driving profits, then this is the event you have been waiting for. Please come and join me, learn these strategies to establish boundaries, prioritize profitability, streamline operations. Whilst gaining the time back you deserve and what you will see at the bottom is more profit.

[00:21:03] Katie Bell: Sign up by heading to the link in the show notes. Register anyway and then you will get the recording. And only do this if you are Really goddamn serious about things needing to change in your business. I can’t wait to see you there. We go live on Zoom. You get me, high energy state me. I know it’s slightly crazy, but we also then give you the opportunity of one to one direct coaching.

[00:21:27] Katie Bell: Like you can ask me very specific questions and I will talk to you on a one to one basis. So make sure that date is in your diary. Thank you for joining me on this week’s episode. Make sure you tune in again next week for our Profit First principles.