Jack O'Brien: Destroy Your Clinic Reputation To Grow Without Loosing Yourself | GYC Podcast 296

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Timestamps
[01:05] Brand and reputation exercise.

[05:25] Anti-vision exercise 

[10:20] Negative PR exercise insights

[13:06] Legacy statement and aspirations

[19:11] Toxic positivity in healthcare settings.

[24:36] Infinite game of business challenges.

[27:21] Tolerating the truth in business.

[32:43] Control and external influences.

[35:44] Problem-solving in business strategies.

[39:27] Clinic revenue volatility awareness.

[42:44] Financial stewardship in business.

[47:26] Revenue streams and profitability.

[52:57] Strategic decision-making for efficiency.

[54:43] Data-driven clinic performance insights

During a recent Clinic Mastery team retreat in Noosa, a session took place on brand and reputation, inspired by a thought-provoking quote from Warren Buffett: “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” So, what if you intentionally destroyed your reputation? How would facing the worst-case scenario strengthen your business? In this episode we discuss the importance of brand and reputation for health professionals, especially in a remote work environment. Tune in to find out how and why revealing your business blind spots can inspire proactive growth

What You'll Learn:

🌟 Team Retreat Insights: Discover the value of in-person connection and structured sessions for team alignment.
📝 The Anti-Vision Exercise: Learn how to identify potential pitfalls by writing a negative PR piece about your clinic
💡 Positive PR: Flip the script and envision the most glowing review of your clinic.
📊 Understanding Seasonality: Get insights on managing revenue fluctuations and the importance of being proactive.
💰 P&L Analysis: Learn how to break down your income streams and expenses for better decision-making

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Transcript

0:02

This is the Grow Your Clinic podcast from Clinic Mastery. We help progressive health professionals to lead inspired teams, transform client experiences, and build clinics for good. Now, So, Jack, in our Noosa team retreat, we had a great run sheet of different activities to connect with one another because we're so remote. We don't often get this quality time in person. So there's a lot of organic time for conversation, but there's also a couple of structured sessions that we run. Things like, where have we been? Where are we going? Perhaps a focus that we've got internally for the subsequent months or year. One of the sessions that I got to run, much to the amazement or disgust of people, was around brand and reputation. So much of what we do is around how do we show up for the people that we serve and how do they understand what we do and whether we're right for them in their journey at some point. This is an exercise that every clinic owner can do as well. So I thought I might just frame it up because I think your jaw hit the ground when I started talking about this in NUSA, or at least I got a few scoffs when I did this. Because no one actually knew what the session was about. So let me just tee it up. I'm going to share my screen because here's a couple of So there's this famous quote from Warren Buffett, one of the most successful investors in the world. And he says, it takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. So what I got people on the team to think about is our vision for the future and running it through the filter of our core purpose. which we can talk to a little bit today is to support clinic owners to amplify their impact. And each one of those words very purposefully chosen so that we can look at, well, how do we do that? Probably that's a good little practical step for a lot of clinic owners is when you look at your core purpose. break it down even further and say, well, specifically, what do we do to make that happen? So in this case, what does support mean and how do we do it? and get a report that outlines detailed action steps for how you should sustainably grow based on the findings. Just send an email to hello at clinicmastery.com and we'll organize a time with one of our growth specialists to review your clinic and outline the path to sustainable growth. Right back to the episode. So we skipped along and I set the frame up as one of the first ever quote culture days, that's sort of our language for like a team day, an alignment day, was actually with a clinic in Melbourne called the Upwell Health Collective. And so often when we find people doing a value session, like what are our values at the clinic? It becomes like integrity, honesty, you know, like it's just some like really superficial words. So And I get it, I've done, I've been part of those sessions before. So what we asked was a different question, the opposite question. What are the anti values that you have? What are the things that annoy you, that irritate you? And normally it's a family member. Well, at least I was able to figure out which family member it was for me. And like, you got that, You got that characteristic or that behavior that really irritates you. I'll give you the example. I won't shame and name my family member, but it was stubbornness. Just grates on me massively. And so then we ask, OK, well, what's the opposite of stubbornness? I'm sure there's a variety of those, but I chose open mindedness. And so, that was something that I really valued was the ability to be open-minded or be creative or innovative. So, you sort of explore then. I'm definitely shortening a lot here, but that's how you do it. So, we said, well, what about creating an anti-vision? Whenever you create a vision, it's like, All grandiose. Everything works perfectly. You know, the team's amazing. Financially, the business is amazing. Clients are awesome. But what if we did the opposite? And so I came back to this quote and I said, it takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. So in this room, what we're going to do now is we've got five minutes to ruin our reputation. what we're going to do is we are gonna write a hit piece, a scathing hit piece, a negative PR piece on our company, as if it's written by, you know, our worst enemy, someone who's out to get us. And everyone felt, I think, viscerally ill. I got a lot of scoffs. I'm interested, before I go into some of the instructions here, Do you recall when we started here, what Yeah, certainly there was, there was the feeling of dread of like, this could happen. And I'm going to have to imagine this happening. It's like imagining a loved one, you know, being in a car crash or dying. You don't even want to entertain those thoughts. So to have five minutes of effective silence pondering our demise. it is, it's an uncomfortable place to be. Now it's probably been said on podcasts before, like O'Brien's do hard things. So once I got over that initial, like, Oh, this is uncomfortable. I'm like, okay, this is probably going to be good, but I don't know where he's going with this. I don't understand. And, uh, and sort of watching the discomfort of the rest of our team, try and put pen to paper or thumb to keyboard, as it were, uh, It was it was hard. Like it was very manual, mechanistic. I have to force this out and sit in those thoughts. And that's Do you remember where you sort of started with the thought process? Because I noticed a lot of people like I don't even know where to begin, like maybe because it seemed like such a big task. Do you remember kind of where you started or at least the angle that you took to write I think, I don't recall specifically necessarily, but you're writing it as if it's a news article. So, you start with a headline of like, well, you know, Clinic Mastery's demise, right? And what led to this? And you're sort of going, well, Was it an individual? Was it a sensational public demise? Was it a gradual decline over time? I think we ended up settling on something that was quite a gradual, or I settled on what was a gradual decline over time, a drift away from what really mattered that eventually ended in catastrophe publicly. But it's hard to imagine if this thing's going to go south, how's it going to go south? But, you know, it's It was uncomfortable. Terrible. It was uncomfortable to do because... I mean, the nature of our team and part of the way we go about doing things is often so optimistic, so positive, always looking at where's the opportunity, reframing challenges into opportunities. So to sit in a headspace, I really brought down the mood of the team day. And I love your point there, Rand. You're not sure, like, where's this going? I find that often all of us as health professionals have this need for knowing, and especially in a room of business owners as well. It's like, where is this going to end up? Which only probably added to the heightened emotion of the moment. So we had five minutes to work through this negative PR example. I think you teed it up beautifully. I had a couple of... prompts on the screen. And for those tuning in, you can jump over to YouTube and watch the video here where we walk through some of the slides. You'll see how we kind of teed this up. But there were some prompts around, you know, our service and our products, our team and our culture, our client relationships and our operational sort of efficiency as well and business performance. So to your point, Jack, like looking at it from a number of different perspectives, where could this fall apart? And then I love that point around, is it a slow demise? Is it something that happens overnight? And of course, this exercise doesn't completely mitigate that risk. But the intention behind it is that perhaps by looking at some of the uglier parts of what we do, that we're able to proactively and thoughtfully do something about it, you know, into the future. So five minutes of total discomfort. This episode is brought to you by AliClinics.com. If you want a single place for all of your policies, procedures, and training, Ali is where to go. You can test it for free. You can download our library of policies, procedures, and training in three clicks of a button, immediately share it with your team and see whether they've read it using the custom acknowledgements function. This is great for compliance purposes. You can also upload police checks, working with children, CPR and first aid, professional indemnity insurance, and make sure that you have all the compliance docs that you need to run a good business in one place, not scattered systems, making sure everything's efficient and you never have to answer the same question twice. This is the brain outside of your brain, a key tool in helping you grow your clinic that's less reliant on you. You can test it for free. Go check out alieclinics.com. All right, back to the episode. Now, I'm skipping a few slides here because I took a little bit of a detour to help calm everyone and talked about how have we gone over the last year and put that into perspective from the COVID years. Then we went into what does the future look like? Who are the people that we're serving in the different professions and the market, so to speak? Now, of course, this is different for a clinic owner, but I want to give you some pointers as to how we pulled off this exercise. And maybe you'd entertain doing a version of this at your next team day. And then we we sort of weaved our way into celebrating the progress that we had made to try and sort of ride ourselves out of the emotional trough that we're in. OK, so we're looking at what we've done well, what we're proud of, what we want to acknowledge ourselves for. And then we got back to. The exercise, which was. Now we want to write the opposite of this, right? So to go back to the example of the anti-values and then finding our values, we essentially wanted to flip the script. What if this was the most glowing PR piece ever written about our business, our company, our team, our impact? What would that look like? Now, maybe a few people just simply substituted a few words and it flipped the script, but it was an opportunity to When you got to this part, Um, yeah. What was, what was your recollection of the experience either for It was really, really aspirational. It was almost like writing your own eulogy in a really positive sense. Like what's your legacy statement. What do you want to be known for? What, you know, what could the, what's the brightest version of the future look like if, uh, if this was being shouted from the rooftops and So I recall that being my feeling and the emotion. If I, if I remember correctly, there were one or two in the team who sneakily used chat GPT to assist. And this was before the days of getting chat GPT to do roasts, you know, if you're on that trend. Um, yes. So anyway, they use chat GPT and, and. It put it in language that is otherwise really hard to. maybe conceptualize, you know, thinking so aspirationally is sometimes difficult to wrap language around. So ChatGPT was able to do that in a really creative, you know, AI sense. You can tell when something's written by AI generally. But yeah, I remember for me, it was like, what would make me so proud to be an owner of this business and this team? What would I hope that our clients and community would say about us? What do we want to be known for? What's the legacy? And once you've clicked into that mindset, and then also, of course, having the subconscious thoughts of what we do not want to be known for, what's the negative now. I loved it. I really enjoyed it. And you get to put it in language that's really timely and current. I've Well, I said that Clinic Mastery is a bastion of hope for growing a great business full of good people. Clinic Mastery has mastered the art of remaining relevant and in touch with the average clinic owner. The presence of Clinic Mastery in the clinic owner community for decades now has been about staying immersed in the realities of clinic ownership while shining a light on what is possible for healthcare clinics to thrive. And then I'll summarize a bit. They organically attracted values aligned clinic owners to their community. who chose to stay without being locked in because of the abundance mindset and abundance of resources. Clinic Mastery have remained true to their word, continuing to give and be generous to make the world a better place, and they haven't caved to the social pressures of wokeness and virtue signaling. They've remained grounded and relevant without being caught up in their own press, The Clinic Mastery story is one of impact, honesty, trustworthiness, and simply doing what they say they'll do, supporting average clinic owners and amplifying impact Very nice. I have that thread up and would love to revisit it with the team sometime soon. And this is somewhat therapeutic, at least going over the positive version right now. I've got a favour to ask. Would you mind reviewing and rating this podcast, please? It helps us attract great guests and partnerships from companies who want to do business with you, and we can negotiate the best possible deals and discounts so that you can grow your clinic sustainably into the future. Just open up your podcast player and hit the review. It looks like 70% of you use the Apple podcast player to listen into this show. So next time you open up the show, can you give us a review and rating? Every single review counts and we are so grateful for it. All right, let's head back to the episode. How do you think about this? I'm not sure we've spoken about this, but how do you think about that positive version? when there is a challenge and maybe there's something specifically in what you've been working on recently where you can think of this, whether it's a clinic owner that hasn't had the best experience or there's been a real challenge and it goes against that opposite version, perhaps it's some element of the negative version. How do you react and respond to Hmm. I think it's really helpful to think of both positives and negatives. And, you know, we live in a world where we talk very much abundance mindset towards positive language. It's also at times helpful to think of a way from negative language as well. And, you know, I give you the example of in a healthcare setting, we want to do things that are not harmful and we want to do things that are helpful. And they're two different things, right? Without getting into the specifics of hands-on therapy or whatever modality, they might not be harmful, but are they helpful? And so I think that's helpful in a business context. We want to not lose money. But we also want to make an impact. And so holding those two things in tension, I think can be really helpful and getting explicitly clear on what you do not want or what you do not want to do, particularly as a clinic owner. And maybe that pertains to being on or off the tools. The specifics of that enable us to then make deliberate and intentional choices moving forwards. Otherwise, we sort of haphazardly aim towards positive without being explicit of what we do want or do not want. you and I have had our fair share of robust discussions. In particular, I think we've noted so many times on the pod of our differences and also similarities. But I definitely remember several years ago, I probably came from a place much more of over positive, over optimistic, borderline toxic positivity. And maybe you could expand on that because I live so much on that end of like, see the good, it's positive, we'll find a way optimistic. And I'll circle back in a moment to where I am now, but just can Yeah, it's a tricky concept to crystallize, but I think, I'm not saying this about you specifically, but the concept generally that has a complete disregard for reality is probably toxic. So the, you know, positivity is really important and that's something that I've, you know, maybe I've shifted one way and you've shifted the other way and found a nice and healthy balance. To simply dwell only on the positives and have a disregard for reality or the possible negatives is probably toxic in exactly the same way that focusing entirely on the negatives with a disregard for possibility is also toxic. And, you know, in some ways we see it from both ends when it comes to clinic owners in a part of our community, they'll, and you can taste it, right? When you step into a coaching or consulting session, some clinic owners will walk in and go, everything's terrible. And, you know, for those who have been around us for a little while, we always, always start any session, team session, coaching session with a moment of gratitude and wins. And someone, a clinic owner will walk into a coaching session and they'll just, you know, verbal diarrhea, everything that's going wrong. And it'd be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, time out. Let's focus on what is working just for a minute, just for a minute to get the positive juices flowing. What's working? What are you grateful for? What's happening well? Where are you making progress? And some of them will just be silence and crickets. because it's such an unnatural thought process for them. And what a shame that is. And the same can be true on the opposite end, where it's all rosy and everything's going well. I can't find any problems. There's no concerns in my clinic. It's all roses. It's all up and to the right. And I'm like, Are you sure? Like this side of heaven, nothing's perfect. Like, you know, you might've just solved a bunch of problems, but every problem solved is another problem created. And we must be. And so this is probably what I've learned, Ben, from both yours and my journeys and from the hundreds of thousands of clinic owners we've now supported is that the best leaders have a really wide lens. They are absolutely able to be very clear and specific on what's going well and the positives and the opportunities and the, you know, where are we going and what can we do here? And they don't put their head in the sand and they're very cognizant of their own shortfalls, of the weaknesses of their clinic, of the problems that need solving. It's a wide aperture. That is a part of the definition It's a great point. The thing that came to mind as you're talking about that is that willful blindness of, you know, not wanting to look at the thing over there that Willful blindness or willful ignorance is a I want to interrupt you for a moment because you just said something that I think was quite important and profound, just given the patterns that we've seen with clinic owners over the decade, we can say. And that was along the lines of this sort of roller coaster of up and down and not seeing things as bad as they could be or as good as they could be, but some version of, I don't know, a tempered version, maybe a more stoic version of it. You said it more specifically, when I solve this problem, it creates almost another set of problems or challenges. And I've heard it said in different ways over time from clinic owners, where it's like, once I get this new recruit, it'll mean X, Y, and Z. Actually, we wrote in the book, the if this, then that. that kind of conditional logic. If this happens, then that'll mean X. And you kind of live in this perpetual sprint almost, because now in that example, you hire the person and the next challenge is onboarding them or dealing with their sickness in their first few weeks or whatever the case may be. And it just keeps happening. Probably the thing I've observed from the clinic owners who are more stable in their journey is that they know that this sort of cyclical, seasonal pattern happens. They're not getting too burnt out in the moment with any one thing. Is that what you've seen? It is, for sure. Business is an infinite game, as Simon Sinek would describe it as, in the sense that it always goes on. There's always something to do. There's always something to fix. There's no fixed, finite state of utopia. you know, sorry, that doesn't exist. Or to put another way, we never arrive at a fixed destination. Business is a journey. It is a perpetual journey. And that's the joy of it. That's what we've signed up for. And I know sometimes we've helped clinic owners early in their clinic ownership journey come to that realization that this train never stops. That again, that's the game that we've signed up for. And if you don't want to play that game, that's okay. It's neither superior nor inferior. It just is. And so having that in your consciousness, being cognizant that this is a game that is perpetual, that the challenges just get not bigger or smaller, but different. They evolve over time. There's a phrase that you and I got stuck on actually, Ben, at one point, and I think it went something along the lines of me saying, we've got to be honest here. Do you recall us having a conversation like that? Tell me more, but yes, that sounds like something you would tell me. Exactly. So Ben's off on some positivity rant. And I'd say we've got to be honest with ourselves. Let's be honest here. We've got to be honest with ourselves. Yeah. And if, as I recall, that was received as me saying you're lying or you're being dishonest. And what I actually meant was we've got to be more totally honest. We've got to address those perhaps areas of accidental ignorance or perhaps willful blindness. And to that point of like what defines great leaders, a wide aperture. I think another trait that perhaps defines exceptional clinic owners is their ability to tolerate the truth. Tell me more. It sounds so obvious, right? Our ability to tolerate the truth, our ability to look objectively at the totality of reality. is a key trait and not, you know, it's so easy to cherry pick statistics or highlight this KPI at the expense of that KPI. And I've described numerous times that, you know, we can get our numbers to tell whatever narrative we want. You can get real creative with a business that is quickly going down the gurgler to present financials that look appealing. However, the ability of a clinic owner to tolerate the truth objectively, and here's the kicker, independent of yourself and your identity. Because you are not your clinic. How many of us, and I'll put my end up at various times, have struggled with being honest about the state of our business because we take it as a reflection on our identity. We take it as personal criticism, or it's a hit to our ego, whatever language you want to wrap around it. And we can't handle the truth, you know, insert the meme of the film, you can't handle the truth. And so it's, it's a really interesting trait that I've worked really hard to develop. And I know you've worked really hard to develop. And when I see clinic owners lean into the discomfort of being comfortable with the honest, truthful reality, they're far more better positioned to solve it, to make wise, objective, clear decisions that move the needle forward. It's a great point in my own experience, I think. And I see this in a lot of clinic owners, because as health professionals, we're taught to really know the answer, like know the diagnosis, know the best evidence to treat this condition. in business is such a humbling experience of learning all these things typically on the fly and going, I'm out of my depth, or maybe not even realizing that, what is it, the Dunning-Kruger effect of your experience and what you feel you're competent in doing. one of the things that I've found, I don't know, solace in has been, yes, I wanna be outcome focused, but also I wanna focus on building sustainable processes or habits that allow me to adjust and adapt when the outcome doesn't work. Otherwise it can kind of feel like a failure. And I think more recently over the previous, call it two years or so, I've had more of a scientific version of looking at business. It's not super rigorous, so if there's any PhDs listening into this, it is definitely not that rigorous. But in the sense of I've got an assumption about this thing, some version of a hypothesis or test experiment that I want to run. And then I'm going to see whether it worked or didn't work and learn quickly to formulate the next one. And to that version of a game of like seeing it as little problems to solve and less about, oh, it didn't get that outcome that we're intending to do. how can I come back to the formulaic almost version of thinking about things that is fun to refine over time and then keep running little tests and experiments. And realizing as well, There's so much outside of your control, outside of your awareness, that is an influence on what you do that maybe you'll never understand or appreciate. I'll give maybe a specific example, which was reasonably confronting. If you've been in the NDIS space since what, 2013, 14-ish, it's been pretty easy to grow a business because there's been funds like you wouldn't believe. Growing the trees. A wait list has just been, that's our biggest problem. And now you might say, well, we're really great at growing a business. Look how easy it is. We've been able to grow, you know, three to $5 million revenue business. Meanwhile, this clinic over here, that's not part of that scheme, as an example, has battled their ass off and like is struggling to get clients. And, you know, they're sitting at, you know, less than that amount. Not that that's the objective, just to clarify. Sure. More so the principle of there were massive economic tailwinds that made it so easy that we could otherwise think it's our own doing. You know what I mean? Or, you know, the economic environment means that there's low interest rates and there's money aplenty for people to be allocating and spending. And all of a sudden it gets hard and humbling. And you go, oh, things aren't coming as easy as they once were. But it's not all on you either. Like there's some factors outside of it that are just playing a hand in the state of your business. That's not to throw your hands up and say, well, I can't do anything about it. But I just wanted to give a specific example to say that there's so much that actually is not, you know, a direct reflection of what you do. And so that's almost the humbling side of when I get the results or the outcomes, it's not all on me. And then when things don't go well, it's not all on someone else or something else. Right, right. It's trying to have that balance to kind of, as you said, seek truth and understand what To, I think, draw that parallel back to us as clinicians. My assumption is that most people, most clinic owners listening to this are or have been a clinician at some point in their life. And we certainly are not suggesting that it's nihilistic, that nothing is in your control and it just all happens, nor is everything totally in your control and you are not solely responsible for the good or bad that happens in your clinic. It's somewhere in the middle. in the same way that when we're treating a client or a patient in front of us, and I'll use a musculoskeletal example because that's my background, the same is true for some of the talking therapies or others, that if I have a purely biomedical or mechanistic approach to a presentation, With no regard for the biopsychosocial elements to the feelings and emotions or the central nervous system of the patient in front of me, I can do all the mobilizations, stretching and strengthening I like. There is a myriad of factors either outside of my consciousness or outside of my control that impacts the patient in front of me. And so that's really what you're describing in that context is having a complete view of what we're dealing with. I think to your point of the scientific approach to business, again, let's think about our behaviors as health professionals, and sometimes there's cognitive dissonance with how we approach clinical work to how we approach business work. When we're clinicians, we spend a lot of time through, let's say, an assessment and diagnostic process. The best clinicians we know are really thorough and really skilled in the art of history taking, the art of data interpretation, assessment, diagnostic, which then guides their therapeutic approach and how they deliver therapy. We also know that perhaps some clinicians that are dogmatic about their therapy, And they're like that old analogy, when you've got a hammer, everything looks like a nail and they've got a solution and they go to solution mode and they try and use their solution on everything that's in front of them. That's not a good clinical approach. I think we'd all agree on that. If you've just got one therapy and that's all you deliver. The same is true in business. And how often do we see then in our business and in the clinics that we work with, the people come to us and like, I want to do X. I want to implement this system. I want to do this type of marketing. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, just chill out for a minute. Go make yourself a cup of tea and let's work out what problem we are actually trying to solve. And then we can, then we can decide what will be the best, you I think that's been one of the great prompts and questions that I've found we've used internally and then by extension with the clinic owners that we're supporting is what is the problem we're trying to solve truly? What is the problem? And I think once you get super clear on that, I love that point. One of the extensions of that I've often found clinic owners wanting to prioritize projects over progress. I need to, I've seen someone else's installed this system or this tech or this thing How am I gonna know that I've made progress, I've improved the team engagement, I've improved the client experience, I've improved the profitability? So having that outcome mindset, I think is really important, just like you would clinically, you're trying to get outcomes. It's not about which intervention perhaps that you use, rather, are we able to sustainably get a good outcome? One of the other ones that I want to get your opinion on here, J.R.B., is to this point of almost zooming out, widening the aperture, realizing that we can't control everything, perhaps at least knowing or observing some of those other external forces, though they're probably reasonably infinite and complex, But one of those that we spoke to on a very recent podcast episode with Dan Gibbs was the seasonal trends in revenue, as an example. And I'm going to share my screen again. We collect a lot of data from the community who tell us what their experience is like on any given month or quarter. We can break it down by profession or size and stage of business. And this is a report that we published about a year or so ago called the Clinic Mastery Benchmark Report. And on a recent episode, we spoke about number of trading days. So I just want to speak to that as one example of sort of zooming out and going that clinic owner that gets to the end of April, freaking out because their bank account is like down to zero. and their team are on leave, and they're kind of looking at the next payroll, freaking out how I'm going to do this in May. And yet, these seasonal trends are somewhat always there. And practically it's like how many trading days and how many team members have I got, you know, operating on those days to be able to see this, this one in particular, I'll come over to the revenue one, sorry. We can see these seasonal trends. We've got March here where my cursor is, and then a massive dip in, in April before it shoots up in May. This is taken from, I'd have to just fact check how many clinics this is, but I think it's probably in the range of close to 50 to 100 clinics we've got this data from. How do you support, especially those early stage clinics in their journey? You know, maybe they've got one, two, three team members. They're still working a lot clinically. They've got a lot to do on the business side of things as well. How do you help them sort of think through the seasonality and some of these lessons that you've learned and observed through experience, but also helping thousands of clinic owners over the years? So for the smaller clinics and to define small, say 50 K or less a month, uh, things feel a lot more volatile. So volatility is a key principle that clinicals just need to be aware of. Again, we're not taught these things at university. You need to invest in your learning to understand that volatility is real and it's coming. And when you live, I'll say a lot closer to the bread line, or let's say you're doing 50 K a month. When you live there, a dip in revenue of 10 to $20,000 is, you know, that's often the difference between life and death in a business sense. If you're doing say 300K a month, then a dip of 50 grand is a bigger dip, but it doesn't necessarily put you closer to life and death. So what I'm trying to say there, particularly to the early stage clinic owners, somewhere between five to 10K a month and 50K a month, is the volatility is real and it perhaps stings a little more at your stage of business. And so your answer to that is to be aware of it and to be proactive against it. However, volatility doesn't go away. If you're watching this, you can see here that the volatility for April is by orders of magnitude larger for the larger clinics than the smaller clinics. Again, round figures in, let's say April in this example, smaller clinics maybe see a dip of $10,000 in that month. For the larger clinics, they're seeing 50, 60, $70,000 dip. through some of those trickier seasons. So volatility doesn't go away. It's perhaps easier to manage as you get bigger. And so probably the key mindsets and principles to think about is number one, be aware of it and be proactive. And number two, know that it gets easier to manage once you get bigger. So get bigger. Do the things that break you through that ceiling. We know through the hundreds and hundreds of clinic owners that that 40K a month, 50K a month is a glass ceiling that you really need to shatter and break through as quickly as you possibly can. It's quite an inefficient stage of business, that 40 to 50K a month. Get through that, get up to, you know, as much as it's in your control, get through to 70, 80, 100K a month. I can confirm there are still problems, but it's a different set of problems at that point. And you're perhaps less in life and death mode. But for a clinic in the earlier stages, it can mean the difference between needing to dip into your savings and dip into your overdraft or And so that's a real consideration, hopefully a real motivation to do the right things. Don't just do anything, but do the right things under the right guidance with the right expertise to get you through this season and Another one of those practical things, Jack, is the setup of your bank account and making sure one of the great lines that you shared on a podcast way back was around every dollar has a purpose and being able to allocate that in your bank account appropriately. Because how many times do we see you come off a really great month, you know, you kind of flushed with some cash, you think, righto, I'm going to buy that new piece of equipment or sign up my whole team to this CPD workshop. And then the next month is a lower month, as an example. So I think it's so worthwhile looking at understanding some of the principles at play and then what are the practical things you're doing to be a good steward and good decision maker about these things. Decision maker, right back at the top of this conversation, using values as a really important sustainable filter. And then also, what are you doing to make decisions, say on a daily, weekly or monthly basis around the sustainability of your business financially? Because if you're not in business, you can't help anyone. So it's really important I think so. You know, we talk about 120-day plans, which in our language is March, April, May, June. So we're just about to embark on the next 120 days being March, April, May, June. Or if you live in quarterly 90-day land, you would think about April, May, June. April doesn't need to define you. April should not define you. If you use 120 day focus, March and May are two of the best months of the year. This period of March, April, May, June, it's, you know, it's autumn in most of, uh, in the Southern hemisphere, at least it's autumn. It's a great time. Winter sports are coming online. Your, uh, your team members that you recruited at the start of the year are just settling in. And so don't let April define you. Let the period define you. And with the right focus, the right perspective, watch this period be the period that you thrive despite April. Let March, let May sustain you so that you can soar into the next 120 days, which is typically the second best. 120 days, July, August, September, October. There's one public holiday in there, which is news to business owners ears. It's like, you get this 120 days right, March to June, you set up your whole year. So, you know, this is the time to double down and get it right. Don't just want to, you know, as a mentor of ours once said, you don't just want to live on hopium and hope that things go well. You need to be deliberate in making things With that, JB, I feel like we've started in the clouds and going down into the dirt quite nicely. Hopefully a good mix for folks listening and watching in here. As we talk about some of the systems, processes and rhythms you should look to set up or continually refine. I mean, how often are you and I refining things internally here at CM, right? We've got a great cadence. after making many mistakes over the years and trying to minimize the frequency and magnitude of those mistakes. One of the things that is quite useful to flow on from those seasonal trends, and we're typically here talking about revenue, But as it flows down, so often people open up their accounting software, pretty much everyone's on Xero, right? Great product. You look at the bottom line, often we'll ask a clinic, hey, when you open up Xero, what do you do? Maybe it's a version of, I do some of the reconciling myself, or I go to P&L and I look at the bottom right-hand corner. I go, what is it? But there's so much opportunity for better decision-making the whole way through. This is, if you're viewing our screen, we have the breakdown of a P&L and some guidance that we give, because it depends on the stage of business you're in, the profession you're in, the location you're in, but some guidance of benchmarks around your P&L. JB, this is your domain. You own this and have added so much value to clinic owners over time, especially in-house here. Do you want to just talk us through this example? I'll just expand my screen a little bit so we can see it. Can you just tee up how you start to introduce the idea of a purposeful layout of your P&L and the analysis of it and some of the key things that you think clinic owners should install to Great. So getting clear on your income streams or your revenue streams, as you can see here in this example, consulting product and other revenue. The reason that's important is we want to know which is generating revenue for us, which is the opportunity for it. So rather than just have one line of like sales revenue, we've got to break it down into the different streams and each stream of revenue will have a cost of service or cost of goods sold. You might be familiar with the term COGS. And these are our direct costs. What are the specific costs incurred in delivering or generating the revenue? And so we can look here, and even in this example of product revenue being $100,000 and product expenses being$60,000, we can see that our products are profitable. There is a gross profit margin on our products. And we can see similarly with consulting, what are our direct consulting expenses? And in a clinic, it's typically your therapists, but their salaries, rewards, and superannuation. If we don't have a sustainable gross margin in our business, we're gonna really struggle. And often we see that with clinics where the cost of services, the therapists, are, is just way too high. Either they're spending too much and they've overhired, they're underutilized, or they're not generating enough income. Those therapists don't need to be chopped. They just need to be helped to be more productive. And that could be things like Ally And to extend on that as well, typically you would see it in contractor arrangements where it's like 70% is Yeah, so being aware of your revenue streams. Then we look at some of these expenses. Now, some of these are what we'd maybe traditionally be called overhead expenses and others are investments. And when we talk about an investment with a P&L mindset saying, what are the things that when we spend, we get a return? When we invest, we get a return. Now, when you look, you can misconstrue everything if you particularly want to, but I'd suggest when you spend money on electricity, that doesn't generate a return. Sure, it facilitates you to be able to generate revenue, but you're getting too creative. Electricity is an overhead, folks. Keeping the lights on is keeping the lights on. But things like marketing and things like support services are investments. When you spend, you should expect to make a return. Now, often that's a monetary return. Other times it might be a non-monetary return, like freedom, like peace of mind, like team satisfaction and happiness. So some of these things are a non-monetary return, but often the investments generate a monetary return. And if you're not spending in those areas, it's going to be really difficult to generate additional revenue. So if your marketing or your support services is too low, sure, you've cut costs in inverted commas, but you're cutting off your nose to spite your face. You need to, if you want to grow your business, you need to invest in marketing. You need to invest in support services. The best do that and the best keep doing that over time. That said, we want to see those percentages improve over time. So typically things like your support services. And when we say support services, we're talking about your business coaching and mentoring, your legal costs, your accounting costs. These things are typically fixed. And so as they're fixed costs that may be increased with inflation, but they don't go anywhere, but your revenue increases. Therefore the percentage comes down over time. That's really what we want to look towards. And the same is true often of your occupancy and your admin expenses. You can either cut those costs. and make life really difficult, or you can just grow your revenue and make those percentages decrease relatively. And, you know, particularly this example that we've got on the screen, Ben, a small but substantial shift, an incremental shift can have monumental progress. I was coaching a clinic only just earlier this week. And we're saying, if we can just shift your admin expenses by 1%, That's$20,000 additional profit for you. And that means you get to take your family on another holiday because it's profit. It goes to your family. What sort of holiday would $20,000 look like? If holidays are important to you, let's use that example. You know, I can take my kids to the theme park that they've never been to, or we can go on an overseas trip rather than just, you know, around the corner in the caravan park. And it's like, oh, right. So. P&Ls like this and numbers bring so much context to the, the friction and the challenge of admin efficiency, which like I'd rather pull my fingernails out than think about admin efficiency. But when I think about, you know, blessing my family with a holiday or putting an extra 20 K off my mortgage and shrinking my mortgage, I can pay my mortgage off five years earlier. It makes the rollout of A11y or of AI or other tech or scripting or role-playing, makes these things make so much more context in the light of a P&L, a That's a great point. I think the regular review of this, which we do monthly, sit down and look at how does that compare ideally to a budget? We spoke previously with Shane Bennett about budgets on the podcast. But even if you're just reviewing this and looking for some of those marginal gains over time, that that can lead to really meaningful outcomes, as you said, and you're really making strategic decisions. This comes back, in my mind, to rather than, I want to install this new piece of tech or new system as the starting point for the thinking, it's like looking at the outcomes we want to generate and then going, what change What system or tech could we install to gain that efficiency or improve that outcome? So that's that's a really great distinction you've got there around continuing to review it. J.O.B., we have covered a lot of turf here on this episode, which is really fantastic because I think it's about making better decisions over the long term, but also having a framework for how you make decisions so that you can improve that, again, to try and decrease the frequency of those learnings or mistakes which are going to happen and the magnitude of them. and amplify the impact of the positive changes you're trying to make by using values as a strong filter, the reputation, and also using some data and outcomes to really hone it in and get super practical, as you said, not having that willful blindness, but seeing the honest truth of how things are actually performing. And nothing speaks that more than getting to the heart of some of the numbers that make up your clinic. Well, we might put a bow on this episode and see you again very soon. Thank you for all the insights. And are there any parting words for folks Do the thinking, do it well, and then execute like a mad person. Just Love it. It is the time. Thank you for listening in or watching us come over to YouTube. Check out, we're doing a lot more screen sharing so you can see some of the practical examples and reference points that we talk to. We'll see you on another Thanks for tuning in to the Grow Your Clinic podcast. To find out more about past episodes or how we can help you, head to www.clinicmastery.com/podcast And please remember to rate and review us on your podcast player of choice. See