How Top Clinics Predict Profit Before It Happens | GYC Podcast 357

Feeling uncertain about your clinic’s finances and how to plan for growth in 2026?

In this episode of the Grow Your Clinic podcast, we dive into how clinic owners can establish clear financial goals and take control of profitability - even in unpredictable times. We break down how to define success with concrete profit targets, create a “life by design” roadmap, and use the Rolling Break-Even spreadsheet to turn complex numbers into actionable weekly targets. You’ll learn how to manage cash flow with purpose, allocate funds across multiple accounts, and make confident, data-driven decisions instead of guessing. Plus, we explore how to embrace challenges - like rising costs or staffing changes - as opportunities to streamline operations, optimize home visit routes, and innovate for long-term growth.

If you’re ready to step into 2026 with clarity, control, and a clear path to profitability, this episode gives you the toolkit to budget smarter, plan proactively, and navigate uncertainty with confidence.

Need to systemise your clinic? Start your free trial of Allie! 
https://www.allieclinics.com/ 

Mentioned Resources:
GYC Podcast Ep 312: The Clinic Owner's Way to Use Your Profit & Loss

Peter Flynn's Breakdown of the CM Rolling Breakeven Spreadsheet

OptimoRoute Planner

Telehealth Course for CM Members

Finance Module for CM Members 

More Podcast Episodes & Free Resources

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Earlybird tickets are now available (50 already sold):

Next year we’re heading to Adelaide in March for the CM 2027 Summit! 
With the Fringe Festival, LIV Golf and other major events on, it will be an exciting time in the city. If you’re planning to come, it’s worth getting organised early.

In This Episode You'll Learn: 
📊 The importance of scenario planning for profitability 
🤖 How AI can assist or hinder your financial analysis 
📈 Strategies for optimising clinic operations and revenue 
🚗 Tips for managing costs and improving efficiency in home care visits 
📝 The significance of cash flow management and allocation strategies

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Transcript

Speaker: 0:01

G'day, good people. Welcome to the Grow Your Clinic podcast by Clinic Mastery. Here's what's coming up inside of this episode. This episode will be right up your Allie if you're looking to grow your clinic profitably. We're diving into how to budget when the future is uncertain. And trust me, you want to hear Beck's take on calculating a range of scenarios so there's peace of mind. Plus stick around for when we explore how AI can help or hinder your financial analysis. Where do you think clinic owners kind of get stuck or go wrong when it comes to Yeah, we have our rolling break-even tab, almost now our apocalypse tab, which is worst case scenario, what do we need to see in Here's what's important for clinic owners to pay attention to, the voices and the So we're leaving essentially money on the table, so we should be optimising and So here's what clinic owners need to know about the rolling break-even tool. It is a scenario builder and a forecasting tool to help give you And she says the problem is the math doesn't math. Anyway, hopefully I slayed that. Before we dive in, today's episode is brought to you by AllieClinics.com. If you're the kind of clinic owner who loves to feel organized and stay ahead of the chaos, you'll love Allie. Think of it as your digital clone. It's the single source of truth for all your clinic's policies, systems, and training. Test it for free at AllieClinics.com. And in other news, applications are now open to work with us one-on-one at Clinic Mastery. If you want support to grow your clinic and bring your vision to life, just email hello@clinicmastery.com with the subject line podcast, and we'll line up a time to chat. All right, let's get into the episode. My name is Ben Lynch. I'm again joined by Bec Clare, Director-Owner of Physio West, two locations here in Adelaide, team in the headcount of 30s, and Jack O'Brien, former physiotherapist, owner of Terrace Physio Plus and business partner here, Jacobren. And Bec, welcome to you both. Welcome to you, Ben. Oh, thank you. Thank you. I am partially caffeinated. I don't know about you folks, but Is it really double? If you're from Adelaide, you're listening along, join us in the Spotify comments and let us know. If you're watching the YouTube, you can see if you're listening, I got an espresso in each, I got two espressos, one in each hand. What do you call that in South Australia? So There must be a certain pocket of South Australia, though, that this comes from because I've looked like a fool in calling it what I thought it was called, but I've since learned double parked is Are they double expressos expressos? Well, no, they're two doubles, but I just need to clarify one thing. Two doubles! How's your heart? The podcast is a priority. This is what I do for you, listeners. This is the extent I will go to. These Muppets just roll on in, here I am. Partially caffeinated. I just need to clarify. Can you restate what An espresso? Oh, Look with your Italian roots, I would have thought. And get Play on, play on. Play on. Well, a warm welcome to folks that have installed Allie. If you want to support practitioners to improve their performance, you've got to use Allie, especially if you're on Cliniko, Halaxy, Nucle, or Splose. Welcome to Bruno, Bex, Josiah – good name, they're Jack O'Brien – Linda, Chris, and Sam. Thanks so much for installing Allie into your clinics. J.O.B., before I throw to you for Academy or Elevate, folks, get your tickets for 2027, the Grow Your Clinic Summit in Adelaide. We mentioned this before, but it will be an incredible weekend. It is also an incredible weekend in Adelaide. There's the Live Golf Tournament. There's the end of the Fringe Festival. Adelaide is alive for about four to six weeks a year, and it just happens to be then, so it's the best time Well, yes, if you want to come, this is a members-only event that we are opening up to the broader health clinic community and so you need to email me, jack@clinicmastery.com. It is a private link and I will put you in the right direction. Also, I want to welcome, joining us for some Google Ads. Help. We have a done for you Google ads agency. We help dozens of clinics and so I want to welcome Mike along for that. Dozens. It's nearly a, it's like a hundred clinics. Can Well, I guess that's kind of. I guess that's dozens. Mike is kind of like underselling it, but Pete's doing a ripping job. It's the CMY. Ellie and Kayla joining us in the Academy. We've had a number of graduations, Ben and Bec, and I just want to highlight clinic owners that come to us in their early stages, solo startups or scaling. and they've grown through some of those barriers that we see. So it's Justin, a podiatrist, Caleb, a physio. We've got Sharon, OT. So there's Blake, a podiatrist. Huge kudos for them for growing their clinic and it just shows me that's in the last month alone. And so there are huge numbers of clinic owners who are literally growing their clinic. It doesn't just say it on the label or the book cover. It's what we do, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You want to grow your clinic, fill your books, grow your team, optimize your operations, and ultimately build a clinic for good? Again, email me, jack@clinicmastery.com. Zero AI in my email inbox. and we Well, let me share my screen here, JB. Hopefully this comes through right on your end. Can you see our podcast page for folks that are tuning in? You might be listening on the treadmill, doing the dishes, you're on the commute, whatever it may be, come over to our website, clinicmastery.com forward slash podcast for all the previous episodes that are here. The show notes, the references that we include are all here. It's free. Now we start the podcast with a couple of announcements because we put this out for free. This is incredible value straight to your pocket. We want to make it known some of the things that we do. And for the members that are listening in, we're going to make sure you understand exactly what's inside the learning portal and in Slack to complement and really go a lot deeper than the podcast episodes. One of the recent episodes that we did, this is August of Oh gee whiz, it's August of 2025 is the clinic owner's way to use your profit and loss and today we're going to extend on that. But go check it out and if anything this is an episode to watch because we screen shared and walked through an example of a profit and loss so you can actually see how it is structured. So I'd strongly encourage you to check that out. Now, This is a perfect little dovetail here. I opened up LinkedIn. A day ago. Ooh. Yes. Ooh. And Anna Walton, shout out to you, Director and Principal Advanced Pediatric Osteopath, had this post. I commented on it. Looks like 12 other people have, 16 other people reacted to it. I want to share with you this message, especially for those listening in. I'm sharing my screen. Anna said, I caught up with a friend recently who owns an allied health clinic. and they're breaking even, hoping things will get better. Charging more isn't an option. They don't want to raise their fees. And she says, the problem is the math doesn't math. I hear that's like a take of the younger generation at the moment. Is that correct? That's Anyway, hopefully I slayed that. I think that's also one of the sayings. Anyway, she says, the more allied health business owners I talk to about finances, the more I'm wondering how many of us are actually running a sustainably profitable business. It doesn't seem like the norm, that's for sure. She says, I'm not talking about wildly profitable, retire early, buy a sports car profitable. I'm talking about being able to pay yourself for the admin hours or the business owner operation side, as well as your treating hours, perhaps as a market rate. And maybe, just maybe, profitable enough that someone someday might look at your business as something worth buying. And I thought, what an important post. Thank you, Anna. I'm going to piggyback off the back of that because at the moment, the sentiment is something of fear or concern with higher interest rates, fuel costs and fuel crisis sort of happening and not looking like getting better anytime soon. If you're in the NDIS space, you're considering perhaps that fees or funding are going to get reduced or reallocated and in a disruptive way, the cost of living crisis, team members wanting to earn more, and at the end of the day, business owners feeling the pinch and the squeeze. Now there are these seasons that happen and they make it really critical for you to manage your money well and know the financial state of your business. But a lot of the fundamentals are true and have been true for a long period of time. So no matter whether you feel particularly advanced in this area or you stick your head in the sand, you're like, trust my accountant's telling me everything I need to know or somewhere in between, We want to unpack some of the rhythms you should have in place, how you should look at your profit and loss and revisit it because it's something you should do regularly. And so if you're advanced, I want you to maybe pay attention to some of the subtleties that we cover in this conversation, but more importantly, take action of the back of this conversation so you're planning to be profitable moving forward. J.O.B., you and I have talked about this at length over time. Where do you think clinic owners kind of get stuck or go wrong when it comes to planning for profitability? And then Beck, we're going to cover, because this is particularly topical for you, some of the things you're literally working through at the moment. But J.O.B., where do people get stuck and why is I mean, there's a number of places where people get stuck. So, this is where I would see clinic owners getting stuck when it comes to planning for profitability. They don't know what profits they want, dollar figure. They might be thinking about a percentage or maybe they haven't thought about it at all. Yes. And so, I'd encourage clinic owners to think, have I done my personal desire statement and planning? Do I know what life I am designing for myself and my family or I'm just a passenger to the circumstances of the day. So design your life. We call it a design statement or life by design. And then from there we'll go, okay, well, what do I need to make from both my income and my profit? Let's use some round figures. Let's say that you want to earn, I'll say $300,000. It's a nice milestone for many people can relate to it across the spectrum. of income. You might think, well, what do I need my income to be from my job? Let's say it's $150,000. Maybe you pay yourself as a clinician most of the week, general manager, CEO of a scaling clinic, pay yourself $150,000. In order to make the $300,000, you need a clinic that provides $150,000 of profit in simple mathematic terms. What does a clinic that makes $150,000 profit need to look like? what margin is possible or achievable in a growth stage, maybe it's 15%. And so for the quick maths again, I need a million-dollar revenue clinic. Okay, what does that look like? That looks like maybe four FTE clinicians. It looks like Now maybe 15 to 20 new clients a week if you're in the MSK acute space. It might look like four to six new clients if you're in the NDIS or Thriving Kids space. It looks like having a space of three or four consulting rooms. And Jim, it looks like 1 to 1.5 FTE admin. It looks like 5% of your revenue invested in support services. That's 50 grand. So how can you allocate 50 grand to your coach, your accountant, your legal fees, HR? It looks like making sure I keep my therapist costs to 50% or less where possible. We start with a big picture and then we zoom in, but we've got to have a guiding It's a really great point, JB, around anchoring to what we call a desire statement. What do you want to be earning? And typically that's future paced, somewhere in the two to three year range. So we've got some runway and we can make some investment decisions to grow to that point. Bec, you were nodding your head along the way. What part of that resonates most with I think it's around starting with the goals and zooming out and going, what could be possible? And then anchoring it back to being able to zoom back in. And I was just actually, while you were chatting, Jack, I was looking at how we do this. And we use the Clinic Mastery rolling break-even or forecasting spreadsheet. And along the bottom, I was actually going through and looking at all the iterations that we've had. And we've got our current March, not even current. March. We've got our BHAG on there. We've got November last year. We've got each change as we bring therapists in and out and we layer in more support for our team. And so being able to play with those numbers and seeing what it spits out at the end. And also then I guess the way we've seen it is controlling and having a sense of control rather over what what the outcome's going to be week on week. We know we're really clear what that number has to be in the book. It's not left to chance. It's not left to, oh, did we make profit this week? Did we not? We know exactly what we're driving for and what result that's going to have. And we've already factored in things like public holidays, annual leave. We've already taken out those things that might elevate things to look better than they actually are. Um, so What I love with the rolling break even, and it's a bit of a proxy, right, for a budget in a way. It's a, it's a quick way to get some directional clarity. It's available to members. So if you're in the Academy or Elevate, just go into the learning portal and search rolling break even. Make sure you've got the latest version of it as well. We make periodic adjustments and updates to that, so make sure you've got the most recent one. And what I love, Bec, if I'm understanding you correctly, is it distills it down into appointments per week, which is a really good just anchor point or proxy, if you would, that we need 127 appointments this week, and that's our break-even Or, you know, it gives you, and you can run scenarios. Essentially, that's what it is. It's a scenario planning tool to say, Hey, if we hit 150, we're actually achieving to Jack's point, the How we used it then over time was we did use it as our rolling break even, and that is all that we used it for was to know that figure. Yes. And then something clicked and changed with our coaching, which was, we weren't put on the planet to run a clinic that Well, that's what Anna's coach was about, right? Yeah. We have our rolling breakeven tab and that's almost now our apocalypse tab, which is worst case scenario. What do we need to see in order to open the doors? Yeah. But then we always have that as our very last tab. We've then got all these other scenarios. Okay. If we did this, if we did this, if we increased our fee, if we brought on a new clinician, we were better utilized, what would that look like? Yes. So we're actually using it in a forecasting way now versus just relying on it to know that breakeven figure. you That's a really great point. JB, how do you then sort of reconcile slash advise clinics on the rolling breakeven is a great quick way to get some clarity. There's a number of assumptions that are made, perhaps the difference between going deep on a model and a budget and putting that into say zero and using that. How do you sort of help clinic owners make that progression toward more So, here's what clinic owners need to know about the rolling break-even tool. It is a scenario builder and a forecasting tool to help give you confidence to be able to budget. And so, what that means is particularly in these times, like we're recording this on the 31st of March and there is, if you open up the weather app, there's some volatility forecasted. Do we trust the meteorologists and the weather app? No. And do we trust the economic forecasters? Probably not, but it's prudent is the point. It's prudent to start to forecast what might happen. And I remember in the COVID times, March 2020, in that first iteration, And clinic owners who were proactive, weren't just putting their head in the sands, but are proactively pulling up their rolling brake even, and going, well, if scenario A happens, what does that do? Or what do I need to do, rather, what's in my control? If scenario B happens, what is in my control? What levers do I have available? I know there are clinic owners, even today at the time of recording, starting to pull levers already. And to call that explicitly what we're talking about here, there's concern in the air and we are not fueling hysteria. That is the antithesis of clinic mastery. We feel a responsibility to support clinic owners through every season. And so the prudent thing to go, well, there's a bit of a talk in the media of a fuel crisis, so to speak. What might happen if cost of living continues to increase and maybe our clients are slightly more sensitive to investing in their health. What if our team are encouraged to work from home? What if patients are looking more to telehealth? I know that I've been speaking with clinic owners already about something that we have ready to go and clinic owners can jump straight into this. We have a telehealth mastery course ready to go rolled out showing you exactly with 29 lessons how to quickly transform your practice into a telehealth ready practice. We've got the landing pages drafted up, the scripts in terms of communicating with clients and you can wait until the government tells you what to do or we can be ahead of the curve so that We aren't just blown to and fro by the circumstances, we are proactively ready And Joby, that's available to Business Academy and Elevate members, All Clinic Mastery members have access to that. And if you need that, if you're a clinic owner listening, fledgling, going, how do I get on top of it? Again, email me, jack@clinicmastery.com, we'll make sure there's a good fit. But that's a Beck, Jack brings up a really interesting point that relates a lot to you and that is around the fuel side of things. You run a home care visit model and have done for many years. How are you thinking about this at the moment, perhaps more importantly, how Yeah, there's been a couple of key things. It's been a very warm topic for us in the clinic over the past couple of weeks. And there's a part of it that we do need to sit and wait and see what happens and unfolds, but we've got a plan in place to trigger certain things to be able to move quite quickly. Some of the things we're thinking about, should we be changing our fleet over to EV? And what does that look like? So we've had conversations with Andy Wang from Clarico about what that looks like from a tax perspective. Are there any benefits for us? Can then team members take home a vehicle in our fleet? Does that then help a team member with their cost of living crisis as well that's happening? Does it provide us a strategic advantage where other providers in the market might be going, well, in order to maintain providing home visits, I need to keep increasing my prices. Does that mean we can go to the market and go, we're actually staying as is because we're moving to EV? We're also looking at route optimization. So really leaning into some software, leaning into something like Claude, that's been amazing for us. It's just more intuitive, but also looking at, and we're trialing, I think it's called Optimo route at the moment, where we can put our client's address is in and it plots the routes in the most effective way for us. One example that we ran and a scenario we ran, we saved 20 kilometres by optimising a therapist route on one day last week. Which is huge. And also, the therapist comes back without having zigzagged and traversed Adelaide, being frustrated with traffic because it's pretty hectic out there. So, it's time, it's less frustrating for the therapist, and it's also money and fuel. So, we were leaving essentially money on the table when we didn't need to be. So, we should be optimizing and thinking about this as an opportunity that's being pointed out to us and how can we make our businesses more efficient, but it's like we're in a crisis. How can we lean into this and be more effective at what we do? That's how we've tried to embrace it almost from a mindset perspective of let's use this to control the controllables that we can and go to work on that versus feeling as Jack said that you're just being thrown about by external factors you can't control. Jack, I think you've quoted someone very notable before, don't let a crisis go to waste. Is that Churchill? Maybe someone like that. Notable historical figure. Let's go with it. You can fact check me in the comments. There's this real forcing function, like when times are good and abundance is there, we can be a little bit sloppy. Jack, you and I have often talked about success creates inefficiency. And so whether it's this or something else, it gets you to go back to, well, route optimization, we didn't need to wait necessarily for this to happen. That's just a good thing to do, but it forces us to do it. So I love the fact that to a degree, Bec, even though you said we're not waiting around for things to happen, like maybe you're waiting for some news and how do we adjust, but you're already getting to action, We've already got everything lined up. We've spoken to Andy about what it looks like to change over our fleet. We've spoken to Dan Rainey. Is the money available for us? We've picked the cars. It's a matter of, right, that thing has happened. We pull the lever and we're done. Like, we've done the thinking and the work behind it. So, if something was to escalate, we I really like that, Bec, because it's to that point of not letting a crisis go to waste. It's like, well, there's a lot in a situation like we're in that is outside of our control and it's really easy to be fixated on what's out of our control. But the reality is, and I often come back, actually a great member of ours, Richard, reminded me again of Viktor Frankl's book, Man's Search for Meaning. And there is always something within your control. There is how you respond and how you react. And so we can be consumed by what's out of our control and you can flap and post on social media all you like, but you won't change what the number is of the price of fuel at the Bowser. but what you can control is how you react, respond, and make the most of the circumstances. I wouldn't say take advantage of the circumstances, but how can we make the most of the circumstances we're in? The reality is, if you think back to, I mean, GFC, if you were alive at that time, there'll be a few Gen Alphas listening along here who might not have been alive, but GFC or even COVID times, unfortunately, there was a lot of people who lost in those seasons. But it was a lot of people who did really, really well. And so it's not to say that everyone's going to do well out of a fuel crisis, but there may be opportunities to pivot and find ways to make the most of this circumstance. We can blame everything around us, or we can lean in and go, I don't want to take advantage, but I want to make the most of There's a couple of other considerations here, Jabej, as you pointed out. And that is, how many hours are you not consulting slash your senior therapists? And perhaps this is a period, obviously you need to weigh up the balance of how much support your team need, but maybe it's a season where actually we need more, quote, boots on the ground in the sense of like, we actually need more therapist hours available to help with patients or the emphasis is on, can we get more billables you know, this week, next week, the week after, to perhaps bolster some of the bank accounts. We don't need all this other discretionary project work about our ecological plan in our clinic, you know, and waste management. As just one example, it's like at the moment, we want to make sure we're serving patients. If there's a wait list, how can we support those people? Maybe the director has some ability to be on the tools. I know that's to some degree counters to a lot of the stuff that we talk about creating a sustainable business. It doesn't rely clinically on you initially, then operationally, but there's always seasons to actually adjust some of the setup of your clinic, right? So, it might be coming back online and making yourself available for a couple of hours, or removing some of those quote, leadership hours that your team are doing these projects that aren't really commercial. So, I guess it's rather blunt. If it's about getting the profitability of your business to navigate this choppy waters over the next few months potentially, there's some I like that. Decisions you should consider. We're not necessarily telling folks to pull the trigger, but you want to have options up your sleeve so that even when the time comes, we don't want to be making decisions out of emotion or this sympathetic reactive state. Now, we need to control ourselves and our feelings and emotions of the circumstances are valid, but we don't want to be led by them. They're great at informing us, but we don't want to be led. So how can we make plans and make decisions from a place of abundance and confidence and calm so that when the time comes where we have to make a call, we've already That was Melinda's point in her talk at the Greer Clinic Summit, right? So that scenario, if we had a 20% drop or a 50% drop in the client funding coming through specifically in an NDIS case, but insert whatever, it could be related to your private paying clients or your home visits. What are some of the things that we would look to do? And I think it's worthwhile to give yourself optionality, right? These are some of the extremes. We hope we never have to get to here, but I've explored that before I've needed to. So, getting out a pen and paper and writing down a whole bunch of these options, getting your team to do it as well, is really useful. Bec, You spoke about root optimization or route optimization, route optimization. You said you're using Claude, the AI tool, Yeah, we've just started using it as a free trial. We're just seeing where it goes. We're running it in parallel to our manual process at the moment just to see what it does for us. But so far, it's We were looking at these, even prior to the fuel crisis, we were looking at these routes going seems to be too much travel between these clients. What is going on here? We knew it was a problem. It was just that, like with everything else, what do you prioritize? It's now become a priority, and so It's a great forcing function. Let's go to bank accounts and the management of your money. We've talked about this before on the pod. There's some great episodes if you want to go back, but if it's been a while since you've done it or looked at it, How do you manage the money? J.I.B., you have a great quote along the lines of every dollar has a purpose and we should allocate it accordingly. Do you want to just expand on that and then we'll throw to you, Beck, around how you're doing some of this and preparing things so you're looking at the money, not for it, especially if you're in a bit of a bind. But J.I.B., just extend on managing I think a lot of what we do, particularly on the expense side of our profit and loss, is fairly predictable. And so, what we want is to get to the end of the month and there still be money left over. We don't want to get to the end of our money and have months left over. That's not a pleasurable place to be. And so that's where we want to be intentional. How much do we need to generate to cover these costs or investments? What is an investment that generates revenue and what is a cost to be managed? What is discretionary? Discretionary as in optional, could take it or leave it. And what is mission critical? And it's really important to maintain a dual focus of right here, right now, and this isn't going to last forever. This might last a couple of weeks or a couple of months. COVID lasted a couple of years. And so how do you want to come out of these scenarios is a really important function. Again, we want to be ahead of the curve and making the most of our circumstances, not just being a passive victim. When it comes to cash flow, cash flow really matters. We don't want to be stagnant, so let's not let our accounts receivable get out of control. Let's not let our accounts payable bank up too much because we put our head in the sand and all of a sudden we've got a really big lump sum that has to come from somewhere managing that cash flow, managing our utilization of therapists, ensuring we've got good patient flow. All of these are elements that I was looking for in for members, we have the cash allocation strategy that is available to you inside the learning portal just to help with this. And always work in combination with your accountant, right, Beck? You've done that really well with Andy to set up things with your personal circumstances considered. But there's a couple of things that are really practical and easy to set up, right? which is don't just have the one bank account, the one account in your bank account, which is typically the trading account where the client's fees come into. So, I'm sharing screen now. We've got here the business trading account, your everyday business transactional account, the cash reserves account, just to make sure you do have a buffer. Putting aside your taxes and the liabilities that you have, the PAYG, Bass Tax Reserve account, we have entitlements and super. account as well to make sure we've got leave set aside and then there are some other accounts that you can also set up on the personal side of things as well just to make sure that you've allocated it because how many times have we seen clinic owners get the money in their account and then spend it and then realize, oh, I don't have that available for insert whatever scenario. So, how can you make sure that it's very clear, almost foolproof that when you log into your bank account that you can see the money allocated appropriately even if you're starting very, very small with We maybe come back to some of the simpler or fundamental advice, but maybe for the more sophisticated who are playing along here today. You want to think about how can I, again I'm mindful of the language and the semantics, but how can I take advantage where other people are shrinking and really having to cut costs. If you've been prudent and got some reserves, maybe it's time to double down on your branding. Maybe there's a recruitment opportunity from around your local area like there is upside in some of these scenarios. So thinking about where can I capitalize on client market? Where can I capitalize on the recruitment market? And also thinking now about some cash flow strategies because you might have a very healthy business on a great trajectory but often in growth times cash is tricky. That's where a great finance person in your corner or finance team is super helpful. Obviously not financial advice, talk to your accountant, blah, blah. But we work with Dan at Rainey Financial. We've got a great partnership there and I know he's helped so many clinics with short cashflow solutions. If you're like, ah, I just got to get through this squeeze and then we'll be good, then there are cashflow options. You don't have to pull money out of your own personal offset or redraw. You don't have to lean into an overdraft account necessarily. other faster, cheaper options that you probably just don't know what you don't know. So again, get in touch. More than happy to make an introduction. We're relevant. But how can the astute clinic owners think about client acquisition, recruitment, and cash flow to make the most of And also looking forward, like we know there's some writing on the wall, right, with NDIS. So being ready for those changes and starting to get your team ready, starting to optimize your services in preparation, not letting it happen to you once those decisions and the framework rolls out. Like, how can we be one of those clinics that's already known for being able to provide these alternative services so we've already got that slice of the market and we can leverage? I think it's about how do we best control those controllables. And coming to the cash allocations, you're wanting to be looking at the money, not looking for it. So even if it's little pockets of money in these bank accounts, It's a sense of, I can just sit a little bit taller, I can breathe, so we're less emotive about the decisions that we're making when the world's in perhaps a little bit of a state of flux. Because we're emotionally attached to our money. It's taken us, you know, maybe some hard-earned sweat and tears to get it to where it's at. So we feel really protective of it. But when it's got a purpose and every dollar is allocated, there's a sense of real power and ownership and calm. Because I think that's what our clients need from us. That's what our team need from us. And we're essentially better leaders and better humans when we can approach these from a Oh, it's okay. I've got this. And Jack, you put out a post more recently around Control Influence Accept, CIA. And I did a similar post out to our team just yesterday because there's a lot of chatter. But how can we almost help our team and how can we, in order to help our team, we're going to need to be calm leaders. We're going to need to be leaders who are in control of our own mindset when we walk into the clinic and our own presence. And that comes from all of these little things. Have a little bit of money, cash allocation. Be looking at it, not for it. Have your strategy in place that's not a motive for when things do happen, you know, which leave it a pull. It's just, yeah, it's a sense of grounding, I think, for us. That is definitely a learning I took out of COVID, because COVID, I was chaos leader. This time And I think, Bec, you're pointing out something important, which is allowing the time and space actually to do the reflection and understanding or the analysis. That's something that's just not so commonly in someone's diary. sort of the default behavior is just to open your mobile banking app and see how much money's in there, or to open up the appointment diary and visually scan how much white space there is, or maybe look at some of the spreadsheets you've got. Hopefully, you're using something like Allie, which gives you a picture But to actually carve out one to three hours at the end of each month and do a proper analysis of the past month in preparation for the next one to three months, to really actually take some considered time. Jack, you and I have been on Zoom for about two hours this morning thinking about the next quarter as we transition to the next quarter, looking at What are some of the things that have changed? What are some of the new learnings and insights? Where did we miss? Where did we hit? What assumptions did we have that were wrong? Assumptions need to serve us. None of us have the crystal ball, but you're going to make these assumptions and then learn, okay, what do we change moving forward so that we're closer to some of those projections that we've got? JB, as part of that process, what do you think is important for clinic owners as here's what's important for clinic owners to pay attention to, the voices and the sources of your information. And so if you're spending your days immersed on social media and watching the latest hysterical posts about the crises or you're trying to ask generic AI rappers for their information, they'll tell you what your ears want to hear. Or they'll just spit back some slop that is meaningful. And so you must pay attention to the voices that you trust, not just some muppet on Instagram with an opinion or a Facebook group. The people who post ... Anyway, get where I'm going. Jack Soddy's throat box. Give that Every few episodes, Beck, we get this version of Jack and we just give him the space for him to I can get fired up, but where it actually comes from, and clinic owners, listen to me, this comes from a place of genuine care from us because we see folks who have been burned because they trusted what Claude or ChatGPT told them, and it wasn't bad, but it was too vanilla. trusted someone who hasn't been in the trenches as a clinic owner, who understands what it's like, who has walked hundreds of clinics through the COVID season, this is what we do. And so, if you're listening to generic advice or you're listening to the next social media pundit, then you're going to get those types of results. Pay attention to where you get your source. And to Beck's point, lead from a sense of calm. We can't control everything, but we do have more influence than we give ourselves credit, and we can make the most of the circumstances that come our So Jack, if I am sort of a little bit concerned, I am freaking out a little bit, the thing that I'd be jumping to, and literally this is kind of what we're doing this morning, is over the next one to three months, what do I know And that is like if I've approved leave for my therapist, I know that time is offline. There's no billable hours, but I'm still paying that therapist. So, I can project what that's going to be over the next period of time. I can also make some reasonable assumptions based off of their historical performance how busy they might be, within a relatively accurate band. So I should be able to know approximately how much income they might be generating. It doesn't consider that the world shuts down. Hopefully that's a low probability. But there are some things with a reasonable degree of accuracy that I could project one to three months into the future and document them on a spreadsheet. And our process is literally, we've got a Google sheet. You put in a bunch of different variables. You understand, typically, this is how many billable hours will be done by this therapist. This is typically the dollar value per hour. And I know what I pay them. So I can start to get a map, as you said, back of using the rolling breakeven tool. of the income that we're likely to bring in, there's school holidays, there's a number of public holidays or bank holidays perhaps in April and in May. How do we start to factor those things in and start to get some degree of certainty over what's to come and the financial impacts of those things in the coming four weeks to 12 weeks? If you know what, we often sort of have a bit of a joke around our varying degrees of interest and competency in numbers. And I'm probably on the lower end, but if you want certainty, you can't put your head in the sand, right? You should have some degree of forecasting here that you're going to update as new insights and new details become clear and apparent to you. So I would just encourage those. Jack, obviously, you live and breathe this. Beck, you've got some incredible competency in this now as well with the operation side of things and how practice managers run a number of the finances, the rostering of admin, the accounts receivable, etc. But just for those clinic owners that are feeling a little like finances and numbers aren't my thing, I am scared of it. Perhaps I'm the voice for you, which is Let's just start with what we do know and get clearer day by day. But that's the only way you're going to navigate it with any degree of confidence is actually getting across some of those numbers. And I think the advice from a good accountant, hopefully you've got a good accountant as well, to help you through this season is absolutely worth it. If that means ramping up how much time you spend with them and or your coach and consultant, it's just so worth it for that peace of mind and that sort of flexibility in making these decisions Ben, you make a really good point there for the clinic owners who are like, oh, gee, numbers are really maybe not my forte or I don't perhaps enjoy them or I'd really prefer not to look at them. I was that clinic owner. We knew we weren't doing very well, but I really didn't want to look at it on paper. That just made it actually real and made me actually have to own it. Oh, God, I don't want to do that. That was a number of years ago and we worked with Clinic Mastery and we became more literate with our numbers and now we can confidently look through them, even when they perhaps don't look as rosy as we would like them to, we now know what we need to do in order to change that. And so the power in that. And it really, it started from actually in our coaching sessions, having some accountability that at the start of the new month and middle of the month, we'd actually have our coach say, okay, let's look at your zero file. Let's look at how things are going. Let's look at your budget. And so we actually were walked through these things because Ben, you talk about yourself and Jack meeting today for a couple of hours and what are you looking at from a numbers perspective? Some of us don't know what we should be looking at, right? And so using the coaching team, particularly here at Clinic Mastery, who are so skilled at it, to help walk through those numbers, help get more familiar with it and hold some level of accountability that you are actually looking at it, that's also important. And I think for a lot of folks who are like, I'm not comfortable with my numbers or I'm not really that good with it, just start really simple. You've got income and you get that from services, from clients. How much have you been earning over the last few weeks? Maybe you could just start with that and use that as some projection. And how much are you paying? How much are you paying these people? And it becomes clearer and clearer the more you get into it. None of us kind of rock up to a spreadsheet and just magically pour out this 100% accuracy of what's to come. You're always iterating and getting clearer and clearer, just like with patient care. It's not as if perhaps you know exactly how this patient, maybe even what their diagnosis is on their first visit, and you know exactly the interventions you're going to do at exactly the right times with 100% certainty of the outcome. Do you know what I mean? You learn the next appointment reveals how they went between the first appointment and this appointment. You get new insights. You see how they responded and reacted and you update your sort of treatment plan. The same is true with the numbers. Is the next session with the coach, the next session with your accountant, the next session with yourself sitting down with a cup of coffee and working through these numbers all get you clearer and clearer. And if you're following the screen share that I've got here, especially for members who are in the learning portal, there is an abundance of really practical tools that can help you calculate that clarity and a number of sessions that walk you through understanding what those numbers mean so you can make good sustainable decisions. And I'm in the finance section of the learning portal. We go through the balance sheet, profit and loss, setting budgets, cashflow statements. We've got how to work with your accountant. Perhaps allocate some of your time this week and next to going through these over the next month and you'll have radically better insights about how to manage your money and finances so that you feel I think, Ben, what I have seen clinic owners do is they go, oh, there's something external to me, there's pressure arising, I need to go through my profit and loss report and I just need to start slashing expenses. That's our most common reaction to tightening of the belt. But there might be more opportunities to be perhaps better utilized. There's other ways to get the number to add up. But what I do see from reactive clinic owners is that they go, got a slash, got a slash, got a slash. What I'd encourage you to do is go through your P&L and go, what are my non-negotiables that I have to have? I have a series of non-negotiable item lines that are on our profit and loss. I don't really care how bad things are It's a good point. I think part of that is what is the return on investment I get for this spend or this investment? And then there's some degree of judgment about that. Is it good? Is it bad? That's very simple. But then I would say, how do I increase or improve the return on investment in this area? So you might look at your accounting and go, well, it's a spend. It's a necessary spend. The question is, how do I improve? the return on my investment in my accounting services as one example. It might be, I really don't know how to allocate the funds or how to navigate or how to do some budgeting and they can help you. Or how do I increase the investment of my coaching right now? What do I need more of? Rather than just slashing because you're right, Bec, it's a very simplistic approach. It's just like, let's clean it all out without saying, oh, Maybe short-term gain, really not like long-term. How are you going to be supported? And some of the item lines like having a good accountant, that's an item line that I invest in. I've also had to lean in and be proactive in that relationship. So often getting a better return on investment is ourselves investing more of our time in that process. It's not just someone else giving you more. Item lines I don't even look at to be fair for Clinic Mastery is just there. Our HR support is just there. They are non-negotiable item lines because I know that this too shall pass and I need those support people in my corner for the It's interesting when you see clinicals in particular just sort of cut their marketing spend, like, oh, we're not going to do that at the moment, rather than getting clear on how effective is this spend at the moment, if it's through Google ads or Facebook ads, and actually trying to work out, to your point, right at the top, JB, what are some of our goals? And to your point, Beck, of how many appointments a week do we need to break even or be on track for our goal? Therefore, how many new clients would we need coming in per week or per month to satisfy that number or get us close to that number? And going, how can we better allocate this spend or better use this spend at the moment? Just makes so much more sense. I've had this Must be numbers. But in particular for a lot of clinics, I could say, and this would be maybe not ideal for the practice leaders. There's a lot of clinics that are kind of, quote, overstaffed in an admin function. They're just inefficient. And there's a number of ways you can look at that, whether it's over allocation, misallocation of hours, you know, too much sort of headcount, as an example, or just people that aren't really driving business outcomes as well as they possibly could. And they're spending too much of their revenue, you know, as a percentage, too much of their income on the admin function. With a number of tools now, you can be certainly a lot leaner. But I do wonder, especially for those clinics where, perhaps call it in the NDIS space, where they might actually be able to decrease more aggressively their quote to traditional admin spend and replace it with marketing. In most other businesses, you're going to have someone that is a marketing specialist to help you attract new clients. I just wonder where you might actually reallocate an over-staffing of admin to someone because so many of these clinics have kind of part-time like, oh, so-and-so does marketing for four hours a week and so-and-so does it for two and you get this basically no one actually masters it. That's kind of like a brutal look at some considerations that you might want to have medium to longer term. Happy for you both to disagree with me here. But if you find most other businesses, they're going to have someone sitting in a marketing seat that's relatively full-time and is actually a specialist or has a background in that area, rather than just some admin that's been thrown a Canva login and some budget, which I'm being facetious tongue-in-cheek, but it's kind of reality, right? This is what we see. It's like someone with admin, hey, can you take over marketing? And if you're not getting the traction in marketing, my challenge would be, if I'm advising you, is get someone who actually knows how to do marketing in your business if you're going to allocate to it. Or outsource it and get someone who's going to do it really properly. None of this sort of half-in, half-out business. Because I reckon it's strangling the growth of your business. So I would just put it to a challenge. Again, it's always nuanced. This is not true for every clinic. But I would challenge you, if you actually need more new clients and you're freaking out about it, I think the word there is optimize, right? We're looking at route optimization for us, but it's about how do you optimize your admin team? So it may be that there's a reduction in hours for support, or it might be the optimize what tasks they're actually working on that can help drive. Are your conversion scripts working? You can have the greatest marketing specialists there, if you still rely on your admin team to convert those into products in the book. Well, marketing can only go so far, right? Or you can have AI do it for you because there's a whole bunch of new initiatives out there that can help you convert, but really it's optimizing. So optimizing scripts, optimizing time, optimizing efficiencies. Are they working on hundred dollar and thousand dollar an hour tasks? Reduce and eliminate anything My advice would be just because someone has a marketing degree or marketing specialist on their resume from previous doesn't mean they're any chop. And so I would say we want to work with people who are good at attracting ideal clients in a healthcare specific landscape and might not necessarily need someone who's also highly qualified but is teachable. And that's where as a clinic owner, you can share with them your learning portal. We're talking through clinics how to grow their clinic and attract new clients all the time. Maybe this is a time when you're like, oh, I've been putting off helping one of my team members to create another stream of income. So right, let's help them double down on telehealth mastery. Maybe you're like, oh, I've been thinking about doing content. Now's the time to go hard on content. I've been thinking about learning how to use AI, not just generically like a boomer does with Google, but how can I really grab a hold and harness it? roll into the business academy and elevate where we train you how to use these things and not just take them off the shelf. We don't just want people with resume skills, but people with real skills. It's a great point. Obviously, there's the nuance and you want to have someone who can get those outcomes and results. It almost feels like, does your action match your ambition? That's the quote that Andrew used from Gary Vaynerchuk. It's like, you might be happy with where your clinic's at at the moment, you just want the marginal gains, or you're actually really trying to grow. So it's nuanced in that case, right, of whatever your ambition, Jack, you open with your desire statement that is a version of your ambition, right? Well, just are you backing it up with the relevant action? And if you're kind of like freaking out about these things, it's like, well, That's kind of the point, isn't it? It's like if you're, oh, we need new patients, but you're ad hoc spending on it. You've kind of given it to these people on your team who are kind of learning it on the job. It's like, are you giving your business the best chance of succeeding by doing it that way? Probably not. So it's kind of like shape up and get serious about whatever that means to And find the opportunities, right? If you are admin heavy on your P&L, that's okay. You've been thinking about rolling out maybe health as a payment gateway to minimize the friction on your admin team or rolling out some of the voice AIs, maybe it's Lingo, Ava or what clinic apps can do now at the time to roll these things out and be proactive. Find the opportunities here I think is the key because there's opportunities everywhere, beyond the hysteria, get ahead of Nice. Well, we might put a wrap on this episode. If folks have joined us this far, thank you so much. Hey, would you mind giving us a review on your podcast play? It looks like most people use either Apple Podcasts or Spotify to listen to the episodes, so give us a review. We'd love to hear from you, and we'll catch you on another episode very soon.