Ben Lynch: 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 be more profitable without losing quality of your client's experience. We're diving into running a clinic with zero admin team members. And trust me, you want to hear Mick's take on how your hiring has led to your current team culture. Plus stick around for when we discuss how therapists can be doing more admin without burning out.

Mic Rizk: I can't believe there's clinics out there doing 500k revenue with 100k in admin sitting at the desk answering phones. That makes no sense to me. There is no one in a front desk capacity at your clinic.

Jack O'Brien: Yeah, 13 years we opened this way and we just kept going that way. It's that pain of status quo. And how many clinic owners do we speak with? Like, oh, I'm making no profit. OK, then something's got to change. If nothing changes, nothing changes.

Ben Lynch: One of the challenges a lot of clinic owners will face is resistance and lack of adoption when they bring in new tools and new tech and change.

Mic Rizk: 99% of the work happens in the interview. All of the challenges we face as clinic owners could have been solved if we were clearer in our interview and our induction.

Ben Lynch: 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 Ally. 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. It is episode 366. My name is Ben Lynch. I'm again joined by Jack O'Brien, former Terrace Physio Plus owner, exited that clinic, and business partner as well. And we've got Michael Riss, Mic owner of iMove and also the Physio Apprenticeship. Good to have you back on the pod. And now as a regular, Mic we asked Bec and we asked Hannah recently, What have you been reading? Jack told us about his war stories that he loves reading at the moment. That was a little bit left of center. What are you reading? What are you into at the moment?

Mic Rizk: My passion for playing poker has been reignited in the last few months. I've been reading how to win poker tournaments.

Jack O'Brien: Great. Well, I've got two comments there. Number one, surely you follow Tim Nacky, the blackjack guy, legendary. Yep. The New Zealander. The New Zealander. And Ben, I'm offended that you would say I'm left of center. I'll take right of center. Thank you. Let's play on. I know how to provoke the bear.

Ben Lynch: You got me. All right, so before we do dive in, a couple of things on the desk. Welcome to those who freshly installed Allie to help with all HR and compliance. This is the true practice management system. You've got your patient management system, but if you think, hey, I'd love to be able to run my practice, all the know-how, support my team, use Allie. Welcome to Mitch, Caitlin, Sarah, and Karina, who recently installed Allie J.O.B, over to you.

Jack O'Brien: Oh, so many clinic owners reaching out to be a part of the community. Yeah, there's opportunity to get help, but ultimately, they want to be around abundant, charging clinic owners. So, welcome to Sam's joined the Business Academy, Jonathan's joined the Business Academy, Manveer in the Business Academy. We've had a couple of ads agency clinics jump in, Sarah and Cameron, just since our last pod. So, it's all happening. If you want to be a part of the CM community or at least find out if there's a good fit and we can help you. Whether you're a small solo startup suitable for Elevate or you're a high-charging clinic, you're running it a couple hundred grand a month in revenue, let's have a conversation. Email me, jack@clinicmastery.com/podcast/podcast/podcast.

Ben Lynch: Perfect. For those members that are tuning into the pod, as you look to reassess your financial year, how things have gone, a great opportunity is to say, how am I going to lean into the support that I have at CM in the new financial year to achieve some of our goals? For those non-members, as you assess the situation of where you finish up at the end of the financial year and go, hey, love to do better next year. So often, you will audit different categories of investments or cost centers One of which is admin. And I thought it'd be a really great conversation for us to talk about a clinic that runs with no admin, which is what you've been able to pull off, Mick. A clinic essentially running at zero admin and what needs to be true in order for you to do that. And also I want you to paint some color and context around performance, some of the standards that you still have and the things that have allowed you, tools, tech, team, to run a clinic with next to no admin and still deliver a great client experience. Because in continuing on this theme, so many of the clinics that do grow add this bloat of admin reception team that's just inefficient. There's a lot of ways. So I'm going to talk more about that. So Mic I thought it'd be interesting to just unpack how you arrived your journey towards no admin or low admin. and how that still allows you to deliver a client experience that's great and a team member experience that's great. So just tear us up. What does it look like at iMove at the moment with no admin?

Mic Rizk: Yeah, we have off-site admin. So that would be the reframe. We use services where every phone call gets answered off-site. There's some really cool companies, Turnkey, Time Well Spent, Holistic HQ, and they will answer your phones, often more available than an in-house admin can. So that's bloody awesome.

Ben Lynch: And you do that through the day, is what I'm understanding as well, and after hours?

Mic Rizk: Yeah. A lot of the offsite admin teams will have an international team. And so they cover a greater span of time zones from like 6 AM to 10 PM. And a lot of them now are actually using AI as a bolt-on to their service so that when they're not there, the AI will pick up as well, which is really cool that they're innovating in that way. The other thing I think about with offsite admin is, I've been thinking a lot about this lately, training admin is a whole other hat for owners. It requires a whole set of meetings, a whole set of investment, a whole set of training. And the companies that I mentioned before, that's a hundred percent of what they do. Their job is to train great admin. And I was just thinking in my journey, how thankful I am to not have to train admin because it's hard. And a lot of our coaching calls are with clinic owners who I would say 30% of our calls are to do with admin or admin systems or training admin or HR and admin. So, that's the offsite answering service.

Jack O'Brien: To that question or to that point, Mic though, it's not that your admin team that you engage are not being trained. It's just that you're not doing the training. You're effectively paying a third party to train them as specialists, right?

Mic Rizk: Absolutely. At a cheaper rate and better training than anything I could do, which makes sense to me.

Ben Lynch: So you have zero admin reception humans on a front desk that would be quite classical of a clinic. There is no one in a front desk capacity at your clinic. Is that correct? No, that's right.

Jack O'Brien: And this has been the way for 10 years, right?

Mic Rizk: Yeah. 13 years we opened this way and we just kept going that way.

Jack O'Brien: Yeah, which is, I think, an important distinction because it's, I'd say, far more common in 2026 to maybe start a clinic with no admin. But you've been in the trenches for 13 years learning what doesn't work, what does work, tested all the techs and all the services. Which is pretty impressive.

Ben Lynch: On that point, JB, like what are some of the key lessons that you've learned or mistakes that you've made, Mic in taking this path over the last 13 years that maybe you did as a word of caution for those clinic owners that are considering it or making the transition at the moment?

Mic Rizk: It's the little things around the clinic that will break and fall apart that a wonderful in-house admin team will do. And that stuff needs to be picked up by the team. So it's not, it's not all like stock control. I didn't know what reconciling was until seven years into the journey. And I had some members ask me, but what do you do for end of day reconciling? I'm like, what's end of day reconciling? Like I didn't know what that was. Yeah. All those little things you have to develop a separate system for, and it comes back to. We're really transparent with our model, so we tell our team, we don't have in-house admin. This is what it looks like when you join. That 10% we save goes back into team member development and team member wages. There's a huge pro in that, and there's a con in that as well. The con is once a week, you might have to drop the towels off. Right. So it's like, it's also a bit of a filtering process because in our, we, we talk about this stuff in our interview, there's going to be some team members who are like, I don't want to do that. Um, and maybe they've come from a more traditional clinic and there's other team members who are like, oh, that extra 10% that goes into my CPD budget or the extra 10% that goes into my wages. Absolutely happy to do a couple of those things around the clinic.

Ben Lynch: And the 10% you're talking about, just to clarify, especially for the non-members, typically when we do look at your profit and loss and we've categorized the different expenses or investment centers, we've got an admin section that's typically going to be around 10% of all of your income goes towards that function of the business. So what you're saying, Nick, is to a large degree, you're reallocating that 10% to therapist wages, CBD, and some tools and tech that you then use. Joby?

Jack O'Brien: Yeah, I think this is a really important conversation because I'm, as much as anyone, interested in Mic your personal story and your personally owned clinic. But more broadly, when we think about these concepts, we're in a space where practitioners, particularly physios, but all allied health practitioners are Demand is perhaps a bit strong, but requesting increased salaries. How many clinic owners are pulling their hair out thinking, I don't have a spare two cents to rub together. I'd love to increase their salaries, but I just don't know how. This is possibly a solution, but it doesn't come without consideration or consequence. there's some discretionary effort required, pick up the towels, replace the toilet paper, pick up a vacuum from time to time. And there might be some clinicians who would rather say, no, I would be happy to work at 90, 95% clinical utilization. I don't want to do those discretionary or non-clinical tasks. But this is a creative way of how we can help practitioners earn 100, 120, 140 grand a year, essentially reallocating some of that admin budget. Right, Mick?

Mic Rizk: Yeah, 100%. It's worth pre-framing where you are in your journey. I think if you're startup, you probably would start without admin. Most do. If you already have an amazing admin team, I'm not an advocate for getting rid of your amazing admin team. And when you walk into a clinic and there's an amazing front desk admin team, it feels completely different and it feels welcoming and it feels like you're coming home. At least that's the feeling a good admin team should give you. I don't advocate that you listen to this and then start culling your admin, but I think you can reallocate some of their hours as well to get a bit smarter around your P&L.

Ben Lynch: What's interesting because, Jack, to that point of Well, if we have a therapist and we take them offline doing billable activities, it's kind of like only they can do that. Like an admin can't do the billable activities for the therapist. And that therapist could bring in, you know, 200 ish dollars per hour. And we're going to substitute them to do what is maybe a $20 an hour task. You know, how do you reconcile making those investment decisions? I take your point is not to go, if you've got a big admin team, go to zero. But how have you thought about that over time, Nick, in making that trade-off and going, yeah, you can do the TAOs, but we could have otherwise got someone to do that at a lower investment. Just talk us through how you've come to terms with reconciling that and not going to an admin team over time, especially from the financial piece of it all.

Mic Rizk: I've never thought that deeply into it. I've just always appreciated, I know our therapists are paid more as a percentage than their peers, and I know the investment we can put into our CPD, and I know we've got a really long tenure. I'm putting those things together and accepting there would be losses, that each of those therapists could have seen an extra one or two patients. But there's an acceptance because I look at the greater costs and maybe I need to go into more detail. But to me, if I can keep therapists for four, five, seven, nine years, we see so many clinics out there struggling to do that and so many clinicians struggling with their pay. So whilst I haven't gone into detail, my gut or my energy or my feeling tells me that the way we're going seems to be the option.

Jack O'Brien: I think a good way to think about it too is no clinician is 100% utilized. That's the reality. And so there is gaps in their day, whether it's because we haven't filled their books or cancellations, DNAs happen. And so in some regards, clinics without admin are capitalizing on that time, putting that dead time to use. Perhaps another way to think about it and we ran a hybrid model at our practice. We had five locations, two of the key ones had admin and three had zero admin, perhaps not to the same extent as mixed clinics, but that's how we functioned. And for part of the recruitment or part of the attraction conversation with team members was, you know, there's an ability to earn a little bit more in this space because we are minimizing our admin costs. But it's an opportunity for a bit of a brain break for you in your day. There are plenty of clinicians who, I'll tread carefully with how I use quotation marks or otherwise, but this perception of burnout when my full week is spent seeing clients, Well, there's a way that a portion of your week can be non-client facing in this capacity. I'll say brain break. The ability to do non-clinical tasks for some personality types or some ways of thinking is a really great gear shift for them in their week.

Ben Lynch: Wouldn't you want them doing a little bit more activities that generate future clients? As an example, we've talked about writing blogs or doing content, you know, think partnership stuff that is the variety on that maybe face-to-face clinical work that, again, maybe pretty much only a therapist can do instead of doing some of the admin functions.

Jack O'Brien: I'll let Mick speak to the partner, but my quick response to that is who said admin and client experience work isn't revenue generating? There's a limiting belief in clinic owners to think, oh, the admin work or creating a great experience or nurturing my client base, doing some recalls, that that's experience generating, that increases PVA and rapport. It improves rebooking rates. So this stuff is valuable in a commercial sense.

Ben Lynch: Well, it's a good point. You're essentially going, what does the admin function do? What are the tasks and responsibilities? And definitely there's a section of that that would be attributable to NPS, customer satisfaction, client satisfaction, rapport, etc. And then there's a bunch that are just like, as you said, So I jumped in there, Nick, but what's your take on all of that? I love your point, sorry, by the way, around the principles behind your decision, which we want to come back to, because that was essentially the theme of my previous question.

Mic Rizk: Yeah, I think Jack hits on it. There's just not many MSK clinicians now that want to see 70 clients a week, which would be a fully utilized week. So I'm still at the 10,000 foot view of What if we can see between 45 and 55? What if we can charge more for our high value service? And in charging more and not having admin, we can pay 45% instead of 38%. So now the clinician has a higher percentage, a higher revenue, a higher billing, they're seeing less clients and they have these brain breaks. So again, I think of it more at that level than the micro and it's been successful so far.

Ben Lynch: It's super interesting because like the three of us have discussed and debated different things at various times, especially around the length of stay, length of tenure of team, the exiting of team members and It seems as though all the things that we hear, whether it's like the APA workforce report and similar comments and posts around, often point to people leaving the profession. due to being burnt out or having too much workload, at least that comes up as a key reason, as well as not being paid particularly well, at least in their minds, for the work that they do. I realize there isn't a silver bullet, but just talk us through at least your experience, Nick, with being able to keep teams so long in their career whilst managing quite a varied caseload slash workload when they've got admin stuff, you don't find the team coming to you saying, we don't want to do this. Is that just because you've pre-framed it at the beginning? They know what they're getting into.

Mic Rizk: Yeah. I think there's a lot of things the team over time have come to us and said, I don't want to do this, but that to us has just been an opportunity to refine the model. There's almost any service you can pay for, pick up, drop off, delivery, ordering, automation, Woolies orders. So yeah, there's certainly been a lot of that stuff that happens over time, but it's just a way to refine the model.

Jack O'Brien: Like what? What have you changed over time specifically? Is there a new tech, AI or software or ordering process? Yeah. What's evolved?

Mic Rizk: Self check-ins evolved immensely, digital payments have evolved. So now when someone walks into the clinic, I'll go before that, your confirmation and text reminder now has a video saying what to expect when you walk into the clinic. And that's something we didn't have 12 years ago, but now a patient knows exactly what to expect when they walk in the clinic. So we say, you know, thank you for choosing us for your health. We don't have a traditional admin. When you come in, you'll see the iPad. You can check in, fill out your patient form. It saves time and paper, and then take a seat. Your physio won't be long. So patients know exactly what to do. They come in, we use Finger Ink, so they go to the iPad. And what that does, this is a way that our therapists get more time back. Finger Ink is a wonderful digital form. It almost does the whole subjective part of the consult for you. So now the clinician's consult becomes more efficient as well. So they get more treatment in. So it's an even better client experience because a lot of the patient feedback now for physio is they just talked at me and gave me exercises. Now we've got the 15 minute subjective history out of the way with Finger Ink. So, the clinicians are happier, the patients are happier. What else can I think of? I think of Cardly. We use Cardly. Each therapist picks four patients they were proud of in the month gone by, and we have handwritten cards that go out to patients every month saying, hey, Ben, just wanted to acknowledge how hard you worked to get your knee right and back on the soccer field again. All of these automations can beef up the client experience in place of having smiley face at the front desk.

Ben Lynch: What's your process then, Mick? What are some of the systems that you've set up to make this feedback reach you or the relevant decision makers in the clinic to find the improvements? Is it just Slack channels? Is it meetings? Is it all async? How do people in the team actually bring problems to you and propose solutions or at least give you then the opportunity to go research and find solutions?

Mic Rizk: I think we adopt radical candor, right? Like we want to know as soon as you know, as soon as you feel it, tell us. So our psych channels are pretty active. Our quarterly or thirdly's forms have a space for the admin processes where we want to know anything that's come up for you in the last quarter.

Ben Lynch: And just, can I double click on that? Channel some Chamath there. Tell me more, like how do you actually frame that without it becoming a whinging fest? And maybe there's a whole bunch of cultural stuff that you've done, as you said, on radical candor, et cetera. Are you pretty intentional about the wording of that? The framing? Like, yeah, just how do you do that?

Mic Rizk: Some of the questions in our thirdly form will explicitly say, what are your solutions to said proposed problem? So we're trying to teach the team that they have to come with the solutions. And we're always pretty clear after our quarterlies or thirdlies if there's been a batch of feedback that's similar. that we can only focus on one or two things a quarter. So like we've heard you, we love it. We're going to focus on these two things. I think that's important as an owner, acknowledging there's lots of feedback, letting the team know there's lots of feedback. We're going to tackle these two things first. And the last part is induction. Whenever we induct a team member, that's, I've found that's a great time to get feedback on your systems and rhythms and particularly in a no admin or a low admin clinic. that can feel like a lot for a new team member, especially if they've come from a clinic with admin. So they'll often identify some opportunities for us where we can make things efficient and have a better system.

Ben Lynch: Again, how do you do that? Is it just a case of, hey, we run things like this. Let us know when there's a problem. Here's the Slack channel for where you send it. Do you have more structure or, I don't know, rigor around that? That might be enough to do the job, but how do you do that with a new team member?

Mic Rizk: Our communication rhythm is pretty frequent, so I'm still chatting to most team members every fortnight. And then every fortnight we have a systems all in team meeting where we're talking about what we're rolling out. So we're rolling out finger ink this week. This is what it looks like. This is how it works. We're rolling out health this week. This is what it looks like. This is how it works. So yeah, there's a lot of communication rhythms where this comes through.

Jack O'Brien: But that's a really key takeaway I think for clinic owners listening along. We sometimes have this limiting belief that only our meetings with clinicians should be clinical or professional development oriented. But you said there, Mic if I heard correctly, you've got a standing systems meeting that touches on systems with clinicians.

Mic Rizk: Yeah. We have a standing systems meeting. We have a standing partner work and community meeting. Just going back to your point of our clinicians are nowhere near 100% client-facing utilized because we think all these things are high value.

Jack O'Brien: A really interesting reframe for clinic owners thinking how do I not get the most out of is perhaps the wrong way of thinking, but optimize the output of my clinicians. It's not just that necessarily not just the face-to-face client-facing work, but we can get the most out of them in a broad domain.

Mic Rizk: Yeah, I can double-click for you, Ben. We have about three to four hours in the diary time-blocked to non-patient tasks. which would represent six to eight half an hour time blocks. And in each of those half an hour time blocks is a specific task with a specific list of things that the clinicians will do. And those have changed and molded to the business needs over the 12 years. So really our therapists only have 34 hours. Let's take away some cancellations. Let's say it's only 32 hours, but even if they were completely full in 32 hours, 64 patients, that's enough. In my business model, 64 patients a week per clinician is more than enough. And it's enough because we don't have 10% admin fee. So, we can sustain that model.

Jack O'Brien: And that's still 80% of their week, right? Yeah. And so, they're not going to get, quote, burnt out because they're not overburdened. 64 might sound like a lot to some or not many to others, but the point is that we're managing utilization in a sustainable way while still making sure our business needs are taken care of and are sustainable also.

Ben Lynch: I think you've probably done a heap of stuff, Mic on the cultural piece and getting people aligned on their attitudes towards change and tech and your model. But I'm interested in maybe some of the things you feel have been most impactful in creating an environment where your team are really open to change. And correct me if I'm wrong, if they're not, but one of the challenges a lot of clinic owners will face is resistance. and lack of adoption when they bring in new tools and new tech and change. So I'm interested in some of the things you feel have been really impactful in allowing your team to embrace change so regularly.

Mic Rizk: The older I get in business, the more I'm realizing that 99% of the work happens in the interview. and the induction and all of the challenges we face as clinic owners could have been solved if we were clearer in our interview and our induction. Rebooking, introducing new rebooking standards to a fifth year clinician is impossible. But if you've, if you've said, this is how we do it from the interview to the induction, the resistance melts away because you've been clear with your standards. And most of the time when our team's resistant, it's because we've moved the goalposts as owners. We've gone to the CM summit and seen how good Marcio is. And then we come back to our clinics and we're like, cool, we're going to do it this way now. And our team's like, what just happened? That's really hard for any human to change behavior mid-tenure. So the admin pre-framing and constant change is in our interview and our induction. There's a wonderful video by Simon Sinek where he says innovation is not efficient, if you put that into YouTube. And he says, CEOs come to Simon and they say, I want to be innovative and I want to be efficient. And he laughs at them and says, they are two completely polarizing and opposite goals. If you want to be efficient, you do the same thing over and over and over again for year and year and year, and you never change the process. If you want to be innovative, you're going to be changing things every two weeks. You're going to be breaking things. You're going to find out things don't work and then you have to move to another thing. So innovation is one of our core values and that comes up in interview and it comes up in induction. And I, I speak to the pros and cons of innovation. We've got the latest tech. We move fast. We use finger ink. We changed from Medipass to Tyro to health in six months. Um, we're trying new social media every two weeks. That's fun. It's innovative, but. It's also tricky. You have to change. The only constant is constant change. But that's going to speak to a certain clinician and it's going to deselect another clinician. That sounds like hard work for a lot of people, but people who like innovating and moving fast and like tech will be attracted to that. How many does it deselect? I think most, I think we have a unique high performance culture. We have quite an innovative culture and we've attracted our tribe. But I'm envious of clinics that have, we always, the grass is greener. I look at clinics like my wife's are younger. old-school clinic. All the clinicians do see 70 patients a week. They have front-facing admin. They don't do any of this innovative stuff. And I'm like, why am I doing all this innovative stuff? That's just a great clinic that's working. So, yeah, there's pros and cons to every model.

Jack O'Brien: You would lose your mind in a clinic like that, if I know you correctly. And this is the point, right, is that clinic owners design something that is in alignment with their expression of how healthcare should be.

Mic Rizk: Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I love that. That speaks to who you are. It speaks to your soul. If that's what lights you up, you should be building your business that way.

Jack O'Brien: And there's many ways to be right. This is, I think admin-less clinic is one way to be right. And old school paper notes, you know, 20 minute appointments with interferential can be right. Well, maybe not interferential, but the point is that there are many ways to be right. Absolutely.

Ben Lynch: It's a great framing. And I think probably the thing I was interested most to talk with you about today, Mic was that extreme version of pretty much no admin. Of course, you've got the offsite admin answering the phones, helping with bookings and perhaps billings. But for so many, the opposite is true. They have probably bigger than they need to admin teams that are inefficient, they're bloated, and they feel like they've grown, but there's all this added weight and complexity in their business. And it's an area, of course, you could look at it as a cost and an investment to say, Actually, what if we entertain going to no admin, even if it was just for the mental exercise, to stress test your current business? What would need to change? What would need to be true in order for us to have the iMove model? I think that just gets you starting to think about what things maybe am I settling for at the moment that I just, to your point, Jeremy, it's just like, well, this is just the way it is. And what I love is we've all commented on, notably around practice managers, but this extends into reception team members, Mic you put it beautifully, that feeling of coming home. When you truly have. and have invested in a quality admin team, it really does change the game of how your clinic operates and runs. But we know that's not true for so many clinics. It's almost like I'm just filling a position because I need someone on the front desk. And even to your point of recruitment, maybe it was more in the vein of therapists, but same is true for admin. I love that it's another one in the bucket of your recruitment is one of the most valuable things you can do as a clinic owner. The rigor that you have around your recruitment solves so many of the second and third order problems that you have with your existing team. That's why we keep harping on about what's part of your recruitment ecosystem. What is your screening? What is your structure around recruitment? I think most people will just go, we have a need for a therapist or an admin, put up a job ad, find who might be the best in that moment, and then we go from there. So I love the fact that you're stressing that once again.

Jack O'Brien: So there's an interesting thread here that's worth pulling together and tying into a bow is that when clinics are starting out, maybe you're solo or you're starting to scale up and you're thinking, how do I continue my clinic as an admin-less clinic? That's one consideration. But even to your point then, Ben, maybe you've got some admin team or a practice manager. Thinking about how we perhaps reduce the admin burden is quite a nuanced conversation to have from a leadership perspective. To make your point, maybe we're changing the goalposts a little bit. Maybe we're like, where do we start? And it reminded me of a comment that Shane Bennett made in one of our coach trainings. We train our coaches every week. We learn from what the best are doing. And his commentary was around integrating AI into their admin processes and had to really intentionally lead with, I'm not here to sack you, right? Because to that point, how do we get ideas from our admin team of, putting them out of their own jobs. You know, it's a little bit psychologically counterproductive. So we need to help our admin teams feel that security and safety that this isn't about necessarily doing you out of a job, but rather improving your productivity, putting your focus back on client experiences, or perhaps keeping our headcount and admin overhead the same as we double, triple, and scale our clinical output. It's quite a nuanced conversation and different from starting up Adminless and staying Adminless to perhaps going Adminless, very different, right? Mic when you think about the clinics that you coach around their admin burden, how do you nuance some of those leadership conversations?

Mic Rizk: I love it. A lot of the team, a lot of the CM members I'm coaching now are tackling this and it's a fun, I think it's fun. Here's what happens. Your admin calls in sick and the whole clinic falls apart because no one knows how to answer the phone and do payments. So I would actually start with that. Can your whole clinic answer the phone or do you have a backup system where you can divert the phone calls somewhere and do your clinicians know how to do payments? Because that's the first test case. If you can divert phone calls and your team members know how to do payments or you have digital payments, then that's 90% of the admins day freed up. At that point, my question would be what else could your amazing admin team members do? And I, I think about what if you made just one day a week, what if you made it Fridays, Fridays, we divert the phone. So the phone isn't ringing every 10 minutes and Fridays our therapists do the payments. And now you've got an admin team member who's got a whole day to do anything that your clinic might need. What's on your priority list? Is it to meet the GPs? Is it to get more collateral? Is it to do a flyer drop? Is it to set up some partner work? Is it to set up some filming? Is it, can they go and do a $99 Facebook ads course and launch your first batch of Facebook ads? So I wonder if your admin can be revenue producing. The second thought we've had, we've just hired a COO. So technically our first admin person, this was our massage therapist of nine years. We were looking for someone. We wrote a position description who who's innovative, who knows tech, who knows health, and who knows our business back to front more than we do. And it came from inside. We interviewed all these people and they're like, what about Mike, our massage therapist? So he's now our COO. I think if you diverted phone calls and got payments sorted, could your admin act like a COO? And what Mike is doing for us now is he's rolling out other clinics. Like Mike has been our expansion plan. Your PM or admin knows so much about your clinic. I wonder if they could roll out a clinic. Could they have a profit share in another clinic? So that was really wild, big picture thinking, but starting with what happens if you turn the phones off on Friday? I think, yeah, it's fun. That's a world of possibilities.

Jack O'Brien: Oh, that reframe of fun. It's true because business is a game. It's the great game of business. Yeah, there's serious things that we need to be serious about. But it's also experimenting and innovating and testing and measuring. We're all scientists by very nature. We're running experiments and hypotheses. I'll throw out a few shameless plugs here, nothing in it for us. Ava comes to mind, the AI phone reception. How many clinics are talking about AI phone reception and have not got the gumption to press the button or pull the trigger? Maybe just do it for Fridays. Or maybe you're thinking about health and how do I integrate in payment systems? Well, maybe you could do it for Fridays. Maybe we just test it in one clinic or for a couple of hours. Play the game because there's asymmetrical risk and reward here. There's a good chance it will work. But it's unlikely that it's going to be catastrophic. So give it a go and break some things that aren't mission critical.

Ben Lynch: What I love as well about that is the constraint-based thinking because so often people are like, Maybe I do need to let go of half the admin team and that's going to cause a lot of challenges and you know, so on and so forth. And this is a big project. But actually the answers come from asking good questions. And that is a constraint based question. To your point, Nick, even if it was part of the mental exercise and it was like, what if we turned off the phones on Friday? What could our admin otherwise do? Or what if we did decrease the admin by half or half the team quit if you want to reframe it in a different light? What if half the admin team quit? What would we do? How would we use this opportunity to be more efficient? I found more and more a reasonable frame of reference is my default assumption is you're inefficient in your job. I think if I stood over your shoulder, you stood over mine for a week, you would go, why on earth are you doing it like that? Whatever that is. And you've figured out something useful. So my default assumption is And that's not to unfairly judge someone or say, you suck. It's like, it's likely you've just developed a bunch of patterns and habits that are actually inefficient that if someone else jumped in your seat, they would do it differently and probably do it better. My job is to find out where you're inefficient. and figure out, okay, to your point, Nick, coming back to the systems, is this something we need to do at all? If yes, okay, then look to optimize it or be efficient or, in your case, innovate and add something different or something new into the fold. And I think coming back to outcomes is perhaps the most Useful anchor point is like, are we trying to improve the show up rate of our new clients? Because I don't know, our instructions are pretty poor. Like you said, we've got the video and the SMS, et cetera, or they show up late all the time. Are we trying to improve the net promoter score post visit one? Okay. What would we need to do? What is the least amount of things we need to do? Are we trying to improve our rebooking rate? Okay. Then what do we do? I think so much of the admin bloat comes from, we need a system for this. Why? Oh, because it's taking us too long. Okay. And then we just add these things without actually knowing what are we trying to affect? What are we trying to change? And we like, this is part of what I spoke about at the summit, like we just try and bolt on all these tools and tech without actually knowing what problem are we trying to solve. There's that great quote, you know, problem well articulated is half solved. So I think for a lot of admin teams and owners, part of that role and responsibility that you've spoken a lot about, Mic around the CEO type role is actually being the one to articulate or clarify what problem are we trying to solve here. And then we can work as a team to figure out what are some of the solutions, J.O.B. I thought you were going to quote a tech fascist there for a minute.

Jack O'Brien: So here's how Do you disagree? Here's a reframe for clinic owners to think about. So many of us get a bit uncomfortable when it comes to reducing headcount or removing admin team. But the mental exercise we want to think about is how can we grow? How can we double our output or revenue and keep our cost base the same? Because in that sense, you've effectively halved your admin. And so maybe we're a little bit averse to laying people off. I bet you're not averse to doubling your growth. And there's a double-edged leadership challenge here because one of the tendencies or the temptations is to increase expenses as we increase revenue. Can you be disciplined and controlled and use that surgical precision of no more expense but double revenue? And you then have to think about, well, what's the marketing activities to attract more clients and improve my clinician's productivity and generate more revenue? I'm convinced that you would have been tempted to add in admin or add in additional subscriptions or add in things as you grow. What have you said no to or how have you navigated that constant magnetism to add more bloat?

Mic Rizk: I haven't felt that at all. Might be the old immigrant background, but I'm just like, we're not, that's a waste of money. I'm not spending on that. There's a software that can do that. Yeah.

Jack O'Brien: Okay. So because there's that default mindset of no, like unless there's a compelling case otherwise, we're going to, we're going to bootstrap this thing on the smell of an oily rag.

Mic Rizk: Yeah. Yeah. I've had that as we've scaled and as we've gotten bigger and I, yeah, resourcefulness. It's how resourceful you are.

Jack O'Brien: How do you keep resourcefulness when maybe there's more cash surplus, you know, the old adage of success breeds inefficiency. How do you keep that, you know, to quote Hamilton, young, scrappy and hungry kind of vibes?

Mic Rizk: Yeah. I love that. I love it. It's in our induction, the quote from Tony Robbins, it's not your resources, it's how resourceful you are. So that again, in our induction and our interview, my first question is, is it producing revenue? I can't believe there's clinics out there doing 500k revenue with 100k in admin sitting at the desk answering phones. That makes no sense to me. We spent 40k on Facebook ads last year and we got 7-10 new clients every single week for every one of our clinics. and someone else out there is struggling to feed their family because they've got a 100K admin bill on 500K rev and they're not doing Facebook ads. That's not a magnetism to what's out there. That's just like, that's not even a question in my brain that comes up.

Jack O'Brien: Because maybe there's clinic owners who just went, oh, he's talking about me, but I can't see a way through. How can you help them see a way through?

Mic Rizk: It's got to be pull motivation towards the thing that you most want as a clinic owner. Like what's the thing you most want right now? And it will come down to one of those goals. Do we need more new clients? Do we need more revenue? Do we need to reduce expenses? If that problem is big enough, painful enough. You need to either do what you said, Jack, which is cut your admin team in half, which we're not going to do it. I don't encourage or figure out a way how we can keep all those amazing humans in the team, but double our revenue. And that's totally possible. Enroll your admin into a Facebook ads course and a Google ads course and an SEO course and an email and texting course and a many chat course and get them to do that.

Jack O'Brien: It's that pain of status quo. And how many clinic owners do we speak with like, Oh, I'm making no profit. Okay. Then something's got to change. If nothing changes, nothing changes.

Ben Lynch: But what I love about this conversation in particular, and we said, you said, J.R.B., there's many ways to be right, which is really quite true. I think probably the thing that we notice is that often clinic owners don't spend enough time actually thinking through some of these decisions in a way that aligns with their principles or their view of the type of clinic that they want to build. And so, what I love about a number of these questions that we're asking and provoking, whether it's, you know, what would need to be true if we kept the admin dollar spend the same but doubled revenue? Or what if we cut our admin team in half? These are all questions that I would encourage, if I'm working with the clinic owner, actually to think through, perhaps, if you want to do it rigorously, right through and actually explore the decisions with a level of rigor. Because I think they just sort of default into doing something or knee-jerking and going, oh, yeah, maybe I could have predicted that second and third order outcome or consequence if I had taken it a little bit slower and actually thought through this.

Jack O'Brien: Double-click on that. By all means, clinic owners, we encourage you to write these questions down and think it through. But that is limited because we have our own blind spots and biases. And if you do this with some generic AI, it's going to tell you what your ears want to be tickled by. This is the value of community and coaching. Someone who can ask the right questions and challenge your thinking and share their experience and expertise. Do it yourself. Try it with an AI. Knock yourself out all the best. But invest in people who can get you there faster and have learned.

Ben Lynch: Add to the question you put to Mick as well. I think for a lot of clinic owners, they can take more time in the sense or actually if they play it out, it might take more time than they realize to your point of If they go, yeah, actually we're overspending a lot in the admin function, I think to a lot of the NDIS clinics who are kind of freaking out about a number of things, but broadly it relates to funding cuts and reduced revenue and them going, I got team members, especially therapists that are paid quite highly. I'm getting squeezed as an owner in terms of the profitability. Where do I find some efficiencies? broadly in a lot of observations of these types of clinics, they're quite admin heavy. So I think it's quite notable for them in the coming months to actually explore some of these questions. Even if it's for the mental exercise, if I halved my admin team, what changes would I need to consider? How would I do that? Or if they became more revenue producing or supported more of the revenue, what would need to change about the expectations that I have of them? I think it's really worthwhile exploring these and then going, you know what, some of these changes are probably going to take several months to play out. But the thinking can be done pretty quickly if you actually grab a cup of coffee, sit down and explore it. And as you said, JB, best to have someone who actually challenges you and perhaps spots the obvious thing or the thing that you have some willful blindness about. And a good coach or advisor should do that. Mic for those clinics that maybe are on the bigger size, they do have this bloat in their admin team. Are there any sort of areas that you would suggest that they start with? They go, you know what, I hear what you're saying. I'm not going to go to zero, effectively zero like you, but I hear your challenge to me that I'm probably letting some bloat play out in this category, admin. What do you think I should do? You're coaching me, how should I get some clarity on to what degree there's bloat or what are the actions that I should prioritize in this area?

Mic Rizk: Actions are figure out the number first, what percentage of your revenue are you putting towards admin and if it's within that benchmark of 8 to 10% of your rev, I think knowing that number first is a helpful starting point. And the action here to be clear is I would not encourage you to reduce your admin hours. I'm encouraging you to say your admin person is the most important person in your business. And that can be like another owner. Your admin person can be your marketing agency. Your admin person can be your referral source. So how I would start is carve out three to five hours for them where they're not doing traditional phones and payments. and give them a task from your top three priority list. And it's usually something to do with referrers, something to do with community, something to do with new clients. Maybe it's a training or a system that's missing. Maybe they can design part of your induction or do an induction for you. There will be a big ticket item on your owner's CEO list that you know you need to do. Well, now you've got a second you. That admin person can do that. with you and for you. So it's an extension of you. That's really powerful. I don't want anyone to misinterpret in saying that I'm saying get rid of your admin. I'm saying it's like doubling you. That's exciting.

Ben Lynch: Dad, as we look to wrap here, any notable actions for folks tuning in?

Jack O'Brien: You've got to challenge your thinking and don't just do things because it's what you think you're supposed to do. The best clinic owners are innovating and in an uncertain climate, challenge some of those beliefs, challenge your thinking, get out, test and play, scientist, experiment, learn with different tools. You've got to get a feel for it.

Ben Lynch: What I love is there are many ways to be right, as you said, Jack O'Brien, perhaps carving out the time for the owners to think more purposefully about what are the things that matter to them, the principles that guide their decisions. Because as you said, Mic you had a very personalized, refined, unique especially in context of the community, view on how you run your clinic, but it's truly you and by extension your team. So I think folks need to just be really intentional in this next season about the type of clinic that they're trying to grow. As we've always said, there's no cookie cutter version of a clinic here. It's about what is your version of success and what is your version of healthcare, as you said, Jadabae. Well, we might put a wrap on that. Real excited to go further and double-click on a few threads that have come out of this conversation and future conversations. For those tuning in, you can go to clinicmastery.com/podcast for all the show notes and previous episodes. We'll catch you on another episode very soon. Jack, Nick, thank you so much. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.