180 The Illusion of “More" in your business

Welcome

Welcome back to the Treat Your Business podcast. I’m Katie Bell, and today I’m talking about the illusion of more. If you’ve been telling yourself you just need more money, more enquiries, more staff, or more sessions, this episode is your reminder to pause and look at what’s actually happening inside your clinic.

Episode Summary

Most clinic owners assume they have a growth problem, but often the real issue is hidden in the numbers. It might be conversion, retention, pricing, capacity, utilisation, or the way your diary is structured.

In this quick fire episode, I share why guessing is costing you control, and the five numbers I believe every clinic owner needs to know. I also tell you how getting clear on my own numbers from month one helped me build a consistently profitable clinic, pay myself every month, and make decisions with confidence.

Key Takeaways

• If you do not know your numbers, you are always guessing.
• “More” can be a distraction from fixing what is actually broken.
• A clinic can feel busy and still leak revenue through gaps, churn, poor conversion, or inefficient diary management.
• Your business is talking to you all the time, and it speaks through numbers.
• Clarity creates control. Once you see the truth in the data, you cannot unsee it.

The five numbers I want every clinic owner to know

1. How many enquiries you get each week
2. Your conversion rate from enquiry to new patient booking, and from new patient to ongoing treatment
3. Your average visits per client
4. Your average revenue per session
5. Your utilisation, how full your diary actually is and how effectively hours turn into revenue

If you are listening and thinking, I do not really know those numbers and I am guessing, then take this as your sign to pull yourself out of the weeds and get a grip on what is actually going on in your clinic.

You deserve a clinic that works well for you, and you deserve to make a fantastic living from the business you are building. That starts with knowing your numbers.

Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you again next week.

Treat Your Business podcast is proudly sponsored by MBST, the groundbreaking technology revolutionising recovery and rehabilitation. Offering a non-invasive, drug-free solution for musculoskeletal conditions and nerve injuries, MBST works at a cellular level to stimulate regeneration. Expand your services and deliver long-term patient improvements without increasing your workload.

Learn more at mbstmedical.co.uk. 

Resources & Links:

Subscribe to our Channel on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@thrivebizcoach?sub_confirmation=1

Website: https://Thrive-businesscoaching.com  

Transcript

[00:00:00] Katie Bell: Most clinic owners think that they'll have a growth problem. But what if I told you, I don't think you actually know that for sure. You might well have a growth problem. You might have a conversion problem, you might have a retention problem. It. Might be that your pricing is never gonna serve you in the way that it needs to, or it might be a capacity problem.

[00:00:24] The truth is, if you don't know your numbers, you are [00:00:30] always just guessing.

[00:00:31] Welcome to the Treat Your Business podcast, the show for clinic owners who want real, honest advice and tried and tested ways of doing things. I'm Katie Bell, and this is the new era of bigger insights and bolder conversations to help you grow a clinic and a life you love. Let's dive in.

[00:00:49] I wanna talk about the illusion of more because often I hear clinic owners say that we just need. To make more money, we just [00:01:00] need to sell more, do more, treat more. I need more inquiries. I need, maybe I need more staff members. We just need more people to come through the door. But what if actually you are converting 60% of those clients into ongoing treatment?

[00:01:18] Or what if you are losing people after session two? So your follow up rate, your patient value average, whatever word you use is really low and not serving you. So your [00:01:30] churn rate is high. What if your diary isn't actually full? I hear this all the time. Yeah, we're really busy.

[00:01:37] We're really full. But actually when we look at it. We're losing so much downtime to gaps between appointments, like little gaps that don't look obvious on the diary, but actually build up to quite a lot of time over the weeks and the months. What if we've got an imbalance of how much administration time that we are giving our employee team?

[00:01:56] So actually their ability to generate revenue for the clinic [00:02:00] isn't. What it needs to be. What if you are running domiciliary visits and home visits, but you're not actually running an efficient diary and an efficient route so that you are just not able to make any more out of those hours because you're just not getting enough appointments booked in.

[00:02:17] So more is often a distraction from fixing what is actually broken.

[00:02:24] It's the go-to. It's the easy answer. It feels productive, doesn't it? But here's the truth. You [00:02:30] often don't just need more. It's, we've got to look at what's actually happening inside your business. And, you can employ a great marketing agency. You can get some AI to answer your calls.

[00:02:45] You can recruit another member of staff, you can. Bring in a new service. You can optimize various things, but unless you actually have a real handle of what is going on and what the data is telling you, how do you make these [00:03:00] decisions? How do you know where to spend your time? Now there are many numbers that I think clinic owners should know.

[00:03:08] And in fact, I think there's probably levels of numbers. And as your business grows there's more things that you just need to know and you need to have a handle on. If I was to choose five numbers that every single clinic owner should know, it's number one, how many inquiries are you getting each week?

[00:03:26] Number two, what's your conversion from [00:03:30] a inquiry to new patient booking and new patient booking to ongoing treatment? Ideally, I'd love to know. From new patient to ongoing treatment, whether that's into a package or into just another session. Number three, your average visits per client. Really important.

[00:03:51] Always one of the biggest gaps that we see. Number four, therefore your average revenue per session. Like how much do [00:04:00] we if you look at all of your pricing on average what is it that we are charging out? And number five, your utilization, how full your diary actually is and understanding.

[00:04:12] People's ability to generate revenue based on the number of hours they have available. So if you are listening to this right now, thinking, oh, I don't actually know those and I don't like really know those, I'm guessing, then you are not in control of your business. And I don't say that to make you feel bad.[00:04:30]

[00:04:30] I say that because it's just what is. So when you don't know your numbers, you start making decisions based on guesswork. And this can feel like you are on this hamster wheel. You are super busy, but you're possibly not that effective. Maybe your business has hit a ceiling or it's stagnated and you're struggling to get to that next level.

[00:04:51] So we spend some money on marketing when you don't actually need to. We undercharge because you don't actually understand your margins or you put a price increase, but actually it [00:05:00] makes no difference to the bottom line because the way that your model works, that your staff instantly get a percentage of that price rise.

[00:05:08] You burn out just trying to do more. We often see people hiring at the wrong time, not having the right structures in place for hiring or hiring when we haven't got the cash behind us to do that. Or you actually don't hire when you should. So we are then reactively hiring and it's all happening too fast and then you stay stuck.

[00:05:28] So even though you are working [00:05:30] really hard, this is what we see all the time. Like busy clinics, full diaries. But not any clarity and therefore not having that feeling of control about what levers we need to pull. So here's the shift that I really want you to make, and it's like understanding that your business is talking to you all the time and it's talking to you all the time through numbers.

[00:05:55] I used to, I remember when I first opened my clinic nearly 12 years ago [00:06:00] now I used to tell myself this is a limiting belief that I was rubbish at math. And mainly my experience of that was having a really weird maths teacher at high school. I was like, I was in the top set. I was obviously not shit at maths, but I just, I used to just graft.

[00:06:15] I used to just work really hard to be good at what I was doing. And it, because I was in the top set and I wasn't like and somebody who's got that math brain, I always felt like I was failing and I wasn't not good enough. And I ended up [00:06:30] having to get math tutor to get me through my was it like the higher paper or whatever used to sit at GCSEs?

[00:06:35] My god, share my age now. And I had to like, have a tutor to get me through that. And I came out with a B in GCSE great, fine, did what I needed to do to get me into the next stage of doing A levels. But this experience of like always feeling like I was struggling to achieve at the higher level in maths meant that I went into running a business.

[00:06:55] And I used to say all the time, I'm just rub at numbers, I'm rub at baths, I rubbish at numbers. And [00:07:00] this is gonna be my biggest downfall. And I actually had a patient who I used to see for his knees, and he'd been seeing me for a few years prior to that where I previously worked. And he decided he he found me when I'd moved and and set up my own business and he was unbelievable at running and making spreadsheets like, just somebody who has that ability to.

[00:07:23] Do things on Excel that I just don't even, couldn't even tell you how to do and what was possible. But he said to me, we have to get clear [00:07:30] on your numbers from day one. And I remember saying to Terry, but I'm rubbish at numbers, can't do maths. And then he built out these spreadsheets for me. We spent lots of lunchtimes around his kitchen table.

[00:07:41] He used to make his own ice cream as well, so he used to get ice cream, which was absolutely amazing. And he used to make me a sandwich. He was so kind. And this, these spreadsheets really talk to me. I very quickly from literally month one had everything nailed down and. I didn't know it to the level of [00:08:00] detail and knowledge that I do now, of course, 'cause I didn't know what I didn't know.

[00:08:03] But I had a lot of numbers and that meant that we were profitable from day one. It meant I paid myself a decent wage from day one. Like I remember setting up my business and in, in month one, I paid myself 3000 pounds. And obviously it's never got any less than that. So I have paid myself every single month from my business for nearly 12 years.

[00:08:24] I've never missed a month. We have made profit every single [00:08:30] month in varying degrees, but we've never been in the red. Because I had a handle on the numbers. I, my business was talking to me. Your numbers are feedback, they're truth, they're data. They're telling you exactly what's working and what isn't.

[00:08:46] And often, we can spend a lot of time getting lost in spreadsheets and we don't really know how to read them. So we guess, and we react and we stay in this cycle of uncertainty.

[00:08:58] This, I [00:09:00] guess a part of why I'm telling you this is because so many of us try to fix so many different things, but this is if we don't have this in place, nothing else can we can't make the right decisions and one of the key foundations to every business being successful at whatever level that you are, is that you absolutely have to know your numbers.

[00:09:21] And I wanna be really honest here. We've had clients come to us who are doing like 40, 50 grand a month. And they don't know this stuff and they pretend that [00:09:30] they know it. And I say this with the most amount of respect and love, but they don't know it. And they don't know it when we question them.

[00:09:36] But they try and convince me that they have stuff and they have their numbers. And when we dig, because funnily enough, we know what we're talking about, they actually don't have the clarity. But it's about sitting down and actually understanding what your numbers are, what they mean, and therefore what you need to do next.

[00:09:53] Because once you then see it, you can't unsee it. And most clinic owners never get to that level of clarity by themselves. They [00:10:00] get stuck in the guessing, they get stuck in there. I just need to do more, and they never actually fix the thing that's holding them back. So I hope that this, again, really quick fire episode this month you can, it's a reflection of where I'm at right now.

[00:10:14] There's so many things going on. I have literally 25 days until Alpha goes to nursery and then she's back baby. But until then I literally have 11 minutes to record a podcast. And I always like to deliver value and I don't like to let you down and I don't [00:10:30] want to miss a week, and I haven't missed a week now for four years.

[00:10:32] So here we are. I want you to feel uncomfortable and know that this is your sign, that if you are not clear on your numbers and you don't know how to get them weekly, monthly, or you are burying your head in the sand, then this is your sign to pull yourself out of the weeds and really get the grip of your clinic because.

[00:10:56] You deserve to have a clinic that works well for you. You [00:11:00] deserve to make a really fantastic living as a result of owning and running a business, but you can't do that if you bury your head in the sand around your numbers. So I hope you've enjoyed this very quick episode, and I'll see you again next week.

[00:11:15] Thanks for listening to the Treat Your Business podcast. Hit subscribe now and keep joining me for bigger insights, older conversations to help you build a clinic and a life you [00:11:30] love.