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.

undefined: If you're not achieving your KPIs, I'm not looking at what you're not doing, I'm looking at what we haven't supported you in.

Jack O'Brien: It's not the KPIs that are good or bad, it's how we've used them to lead.

Ben Lynch: You've got a new therapist joining the team, you've got to fill their books, how are you going about thinking about it? Tell me more about social media.

undefined: Our brand is really important and so it's important to feel like they've got a connection with that person.

Ben Lynch: Do you believe every clinic owner should do their own marketing or

Jack O'Brien: That's a very binary question. Sort of thing you'd like, J.O.B Like helping more people is the game. You didn't spend four years, five years of your life studying to sit down, twiddle your thumbs and help as few people as possible. Let's go. Get excited.

Ben Lynch: This episode will be right up your alley if you're looking to attract more new clients and you don't want to blow the budget on marketing and you want to stick around for when Jack goes full spreadsheet nerd, outlining all the numbers and Hannah responds with a surprising take on marketing, even if you have a wait list. Before we dive in, today's episode is brought to you by AliClinics.com. If you're the kind of clinic owner who loves to feel organized and stay ahead of the chaos, you'll love Ali. Think of it as your brain outside your brain, your digital clone. It's the single source of truth for your clinic's policies, systems, and training. It's everything your team needs access to, to grow with you. You can test it out for free at AliClinics.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 at clinicmastery.com with the subject line podcast and we'll line up a time to chat. All right, let's get into the episode. Welcome back to the podcast. Hannah Dunn, Jack O'Brien, great to see you. The last episode was very popular with the audience as we talked about practice managers. Today, a few different items on the docket, specifically around filling your books and some of the finances around it. We've had a bunch of people reach out and say, hey, I've got a new clinic location or a new therapist, new practitioner. I want to go about filling their books. How do I do it? And typically we get this question when it's like they're starting in two weeks, but they're starting in six weeks. So my question to you is, how do you think about filling the books of a new practitioner? JB, kick us off.

Jack O'Brien: OK, I'm going to give you a political response. Maybe political is not the right word. Maybe diplomatics, the better way to put it. I love a good formula. of a good systematic way of approaching things. So for my mind, it comes back to your hiring triggers. What was the formula, the equation that you used to decide that you had to hire and now you've got a new practitioner? We often see clinic owners either hire too late And if you hire too late, typically the symptoms would look like a team that is overutilized, the dreaded BO, swear word, burnout. And your team struggled to rebook effectively and fit new clients in. That's what happens if you hire too late. If you hire too soon, that's when you come with this question of, I need to fill their books. I don't know if I don't have confidence that I can get a return or make break even. So Get your hiring trigger right. Of course, it was the best time to plant a tree 10 years ago. Second best time to plant trees today. So if you don't have a hiring formula, get a hiring formula.

Ben Lynch: What was the original question though? No, it's along the lines of how do you go about thinking about filling the books? We're going to get to some of the strategies of how to do it, tactics. But I actually want to know kind of your mental model, like how do you go about thinking about this for yourself when you're coaching other clinics?

Jack O'Brien: Okay, good. So again, formulas. So every clinician, every practitioner, every therapist will have a baseline new client requirement per week or per month. And when they're starting out, they'll need a bolus of more than their baseline to build their caseload, and then they'll need new clients to sustain their caseload. And so generally speaking, that formula or that rule would be what is your total capacity divided by your PDA, will give you a new client requirement to give you a full and sustainable caseload. So, practically, that might look like your weekly capacity might be 40, let's say. Typically, MSK context, you know, if you work in a billable hours or impact hours context, it more likely might be 25. But let's use MSK. 40 appointments at an assumed or target PVA of eight,

Ben Lynch: Just to clarify what PVA is.

Jack O'Brien: PVA, patient visit average, the number of appointments you would see the average patient for. 40 appointments, PVA of eight means you need five new clients per week to sustain that caseload ongoing. So a new practitioner will need more than five new clients to bolus their caseload. And then from there, five new clients a week will make it sustainable. So it's quite formulaic, Ben, to answer your question.

Ben Lynch: is a great reference point. How do you go about doing that? As Jack pointed out, there are differences between MSK and typically talk of the speech OT psych, where we're looking at billable or impact to hours and caseload being somewhat similar in size. How do you go about thinking about filling the books of a new therapist?

undefined: For us, we've done it a few different ways. The way we are currently doing it is that we really focus on that onboarding and having two-ish clients per day in the first and second week. And so that means the morning is allocated to onboarding and doing policies and all of those things, and some observation of other clinicians, and then looking at two-ish for the first couple of weeks, and then building them out to be about five per day by the end of the third. end of the sixth week, maybe end of the third, towards the three-month point. So it depends on whether they're a new grad or experienced clinician and where that sits. We tend to say, like, in the first couple of weeks, we have the formula on how we build them up in that regard, like two, then three a day, then four a day, or sort of three-ish. And then we sort of talk to them about how they're going and where they feel like that goes. Because we feel like if we're in the beginning, we're doing that, then we get a much better pickup rate quicker. We get them to fuller caseloads quicker than if we start them off with a heavier caseload and are trying to drip feed that information a bit slower.

Ben Lynch: Okay. So you're trying to like gradually build them into the caseload over six or eight weeks. Is that right?

undefined: Yeah. But that's because we're focusing on the policies and procedures. I think it's really important that we don't send a message of we're building you up because it's hard to see five. It's not because it's hard, it's because we're prioritizing, making sure you understand policies, procedures, and the way in which DOTS works. Even if you're an experienced clinician, we may do things differently to how other practices do it. So we just want to make sure those foundations are really right, and then we know that once those foundations are right, you'll be able to continue on with that caseload.

Ben Lynch: Jack, talk to me about how you frame up and setting those expectations for new therapists. Hannah's just touched on it and I'll come back to you on this one, Hannah. We see and hear so many clinic owners who they do want to provide that like easy, nice transition in, but the other side is that they're not clear with their expectations. And all of a sudden, they've got a very underutilized therapist eight to 12 weeks in, and then it's a lot more work to try and build them up because that therapist feels like, you know, an extra patient a day is, you know, I'm burning out. So, Jack, how do you support a clinic owner? who needs to frame up expectations to a new therapist about their caseload?

Jack O'Brien: Yeah, really good question. I think you want to have spoken about it over and over multiple times. This shouldn't be a surprise to your new team member. They should know about this from probably from your job ad listing and definitely through your interview process. We want to be able to screen for therapists who have challenges keeping a sustainable caseload sustainable. We wanna screen that out. In the interview process, in an MSK context, if they're balking at being 85 plus percent utilized, they're probably not a good fit for your clinic now, and you're gonna have to have a difficult HR conversation later. So frame it up in your interview process. You wanna frame it up in your first day, first week, first 100 days. We talk about your zero to 100 induction process. And then helping our team correlate high performance with high output. You can be a great physio. I'm a physio background. You can be a great physio, but if you only help five or six people a week, or 15 or 16 people, or 25 or 26 people a week, you're not a great physio because you're not helping as many people as you could and should. So high performance equals high output. And then I say, thirdly, you want to have those gates or those milestones for your therapist made known. So they need to know what is the break-even number, like how many patients do they need to cover their own wage?

Ben Lynch: You're that transparent, you talk openly with the numbers?

Jack O'Brien: Yeah, absolutely. Here's why. If we don't, that therapist is thinking about the numbers anyway, and they're probably misguided. And that's not their fault necessarily, the nature of what they've been exposed to. So we have a duty of care to help them understand the context of their numbers. And so you want to earn a wage, you got to generate a wage in the first instance with break even. And then you need to generate more than double your wage to make this sustainable. And it's not always about dollars, right? We often talk about the amount of…since we need to help in order to cover your wage, make things sustainable, etc. But they need to know that these are minimum expectations, that this is the game. And if we can't do that, then this doesn't work because it's not a win-win, it's not a sustainable solution.

Ben Lynch: And it's a great point Jack mentions, like starting even from the interview process and clarifying the expectations. Can you share like how you've actually spoken to some of those things specifically? Because I think we all hear most commonly from the speech OT space, burnout more than any other profession, I would say. Do you hear it anywhere else? It's like, the speech OT, it's like to see one extra billable hour a week, it seems like you're breaking the backs of a lot of people. So how have you found it? Sorry, I'll rephrase. What have you found effective in framing up the clinical expectations for a therapist?

undefined: I don't know if you mean Jack or me, but I'm jumping in. I wanted to jump back on that point of Jack's around the interview because it is so important. It's one of the things and giving away my trade secrets that I don't actually bring up in the interview first. I have a couple of points throughout our interview that I'll say to them, oh, have you got any questions for me just while we keep going? And so it is often the first question they bring up to me, because I haven't got there yet. And I will always get there, of course, if they haven't brought it up to me. But I'll say, oh, what are your KPIs? And I'll say, oh, tell me what you're used to. Like, what have you experienced so far? And I want to sort of get a gauge of where they're at, like what they've already experienced before I launch into what ours are. And then the other thing I ask them before I launch into what we do is, and what does that include? Is that just direct face-to-face time or is that all your phone calls, emails, all of those other actionable points that should be invoiced for? And I think that sets me in a good position to know which way to go with the conversation, because I think different people have had different experiences that are going to taint what you're saying if you just launch straight into, our KPIs are five per day or 25 per week or whatever it is. And so I think Jackie made a really good point about needing to make sure right from the start that we're having those conversations.

Jack O'Brien: I think, you know, when someone says like, what are your KPIs, for me, I'm interested in definitions always, but in this case, I'm like, what do you mean by KPI? Are we talking about numbers on a spreadsheet? But more specifically, I actually want to understand their thinking about what is a KPI? Fundamentally, definitionally, it is an indicator of performance. It's an indicator of key performance. And so, I'll flip it back to them and say, well, define performance. Like what is good physio, bad physio, good OT, bad OT? And how do we know you're good? For me, as an employer, as a leader, I want to be able to recognize when you're performing well and celebrate and acknowledge that. Primarily, that is the goal of KPIs, is so that I can quantify and objectify a performance and celebrate it and champion it. Job well done, high five. That's what we're here for, helping more people. That's why we have KPIs. And so, we need to be able to have indicators of performance. And so, like, we're trying…and they're approximate. We're trying to approximate good clinical care into numbers. They don't perfectly match, but we're indicating. And so, you know, I'll often explain that type of a definitional approach. And usually people don't like KPIs because of the way KPIs have been done to them previously. That's usually the case. So when we can understand their trauma, which is effectively what it is, we can reframe it as what will be a positive celebrating experience.

Ben Lynch: It sounds like that's the question you're asking, Hannah, either explicitly or implicitly when you put it back to that person in the job interview process is essentially tell me your experience of having KPIs in the past. What do you understand?

undefined: Yeah, absolutely. And I think also one thing I will commonly say is if you're not achieving your KPIs, I'm not looking at what you're not doing. I'm looking at what we haven't supported you in. So, where have we not provided you with support? So, for example, have we not shown you and supported you to be able to write your session notes within a session that's then dragging out and taking up what you're then not billing for? So, where are those, I guess, holes in the bucket that are taking up time that we're not invoicing for that allows that to feel harder than it is? And you often find that those newer team members who feel like that they really could not possibly see another client, when you've fixed all those holes, they're seeing way more and saying, this actually feels so much easier than it did when I was seeing less.

Jack O'Brien: It's interesting. You mentioned, Ben, that we often hear the BO word burnout from the speech psych OT world. It comes up, I'd say, more frequently in physio land or some of the touching professions more these days. actually received a text message. You can see it but I won't. I'll keep it anonymous for privacy reasons. But this physio who I've known for over 10 years now, we were texting actually just this morning and they said, I'm looking for something without KPIs based around my occupancy. I'm so burned out. And I thought that's so interesting because I know that this physio performed exceptionally well when I was mentoring them. With dashboards, and we call them clinical excellence indicators in our clinic, we would often talk about occupancy and KPIs. And they were a very high-performing physio, high caseload, high patient satisfaction, you know, creating clinical niche and interest, et cetera. And now I know this physio is, you know, working as part of a different team, not my team at the moment. And so I'd say, Ben, it all comes back to leadership. Hannah, I know the way you're talking about it and framing it up is super healthy. It's not the KPIs that are good or bad. It's how we've used them to lead. And so that is a skill and a practice that every clinic owner can get better at.

undefined: Yes. And I think, Jack, with that text and something I say in my clinic, but actually thinking back to where I first heard this, it might have actually been at a Mastery Summit from you, Jack. to say, like, if you're in an interview and they say, oh, we don't have KPIs, like, then they are absolutely lying. Like, it's just they're not transparent with their KPIs. Because if you said, okay, my KPI will be zero then or one, would that be okay with the practice? And the answer to that is clearly not.

Jack O'Brien: Exactly. You know, Maybe we see this on the last episode, Ben, but I don't think there's any health professional in the world that wakes up and says, I can't wait to help as few people as possible today. Can't wait to get to work to an empty diary, be able to scroll Instagram and have to empty the bins because I don't have any patients. So what we actually want is the opposite. And sometimes it's on the other side of growth or challenge, getting outside the comfort zone. But high capacity, high output and performance and helping more people is a skill that we can all get better at. I know for me personally, As my caseload grew as an early stage, early career therapist, I was going, whatever the opposite of burnout is, I was uber fulfilled. Like the more people I can see, the happier I am, the greater impact I have, the more reps you'd get in. Again, if you're mentoring and nurturing young professionals, it's like you got to get to 10,000 hours as quickly as possible. This might take typically five years, 10,000 hours. What if we could do it in three years? What if you could get the reps and become an expert faster than the average? Now, think of the people you'd be able to help, the career satisfaction, career opportunities, like helping more people is the game. Let's go. You didn't spend 50 grand and four years of your life on a degree. I assume they're 50 grand. I mean, mine was 50 grand. They're probably 100 grand. I don't know. What's the price of milk, Ben? You didn't spend four years, five years of your life studying to sit down, twiddle your thumbs and help as few people as possible. Let's go. Get excited.

undefined: Yeah, and I think, yeah, from a leadership perspective, it's also, yeah, as you said, like that piece of having that support in place so that they aren't just these numbers that people are feeling like they have to hit without knowing how to hit them.

Ben Lynch: Those are great. reframe that you had in a previous episode, Hannah, around billable hours versus impact hours and really strongly using that lens of client outcomes and our experience in talking about these KPIs that really puts the human at the forefront. And these are really just, as you said, Jack, an indicator for how well you're performing your role. And I think if you're choosing to be in private practice, not in community health or working for, you know, the local hospital, this is a reality of it. It's got to be sustainable. We can't say three patients in a day and have the government, you know, fund it all. Like, there is a commercial sustainable reality to being in private practice. That is true for obviously the clinic owners therefore needs to carry through in their comms with their team. So where we started this conversation was essentially you got a new therapist joining the team, you got to fill their books. How are you going about thinking about it? What I'm hearing is a lot to do with even the hiring process and their onboarding process of setting the expectations really clearly as to what quote good looks like. so that they're able to gradually build up that caseload, manage it and work towards an outcome rather than just, we know it as the business owner, but we're not sharing it with them openly. So that transparency being on the same page is key.

Jack O'Brien: Yeah, if I may, I'll just add a little asterisk to the formula that I added before. In that example, we need maybe five to seven new clients. We want to actually create a window of new clients. So it's not that I'm going to fill the diary with 40 hours of new clients, because that wouldn't teach you how to deliver management plans and rebook effectively and structure care. So I would say, Benny, that you want to be thinking for your new practitioners, your new team members, we're going to aim for a window of maybe it's five to eight or six to nine new clients per week for the next X number of weeks, maybe four weeks. And then we're going to review it. And so we've always got windows that we're looking to hit of new clients.

undefined: And I think it's also important that they have visibility over what they're achieving each week as well, that that is often a missing aspect that creates this dependency on the owner or the director to come and say to them, you've done this. And it's all retrospectively instead of looking forward at what we've got. Coming up and being able to have opportunities to fill in any gaps that are there as well.

Ben Lynch: So, as part of filling the books, there's going to be an element, perhaps of the existing database of clients that you already serve that you might be looking to recall or reactivate. be nurtured from a really busy practitioner or someone that's transitioning in their role to the new therapist. But let's go specifically to the new patient side of things that you've got to drive new patients to a new therapist or a new clinical location that you've opened up. How do you go about thinking about a marketing budget? Specifically, where do you start knowing what your budget should be And then how do you go about allocating that budget? Jack, you and I have talked about this for a long period of time. You love the numbers. You love the formulas. So how do you think about a marketing budget? or attracting new patients to the clinic?

Jack O'Brien: Okay. So in the first instance, we want to attract new clients for as cheaply as possible, right? Free new clients are great as long as they're good quality. So that's a first guiding principle. Let's say heuristic, I think is your little buzzword. So the second heuristic that we want to think about is how does our marketing budget fit in the context of our overall P&L and to cut hours worth of training modules in our learning portal down to a couple of seconds. Broadly speaking, your marketing budget would be about 3 to 5% of your P&L or of your revenue. 3 to 5%. That will be higher for some clinics, particularly those in startup mode. and potentially lower for those who don't have a high new client demand. It might be 1% or it could be 10%, but roughly 3% or 5%. Then you want to think about how much am I willing to spend to acquire a new client. That's often known as your customer acquisition cost or CAC. And what is that as the percentage of the lifetime value of a patient? Now, I know patients are worth more than the dollars, but we're talking maths. And so what is the lifetime value or LTV of a patient? And that would be your… I know I'm talking a lot of acronyms here. Your PVA times your average consult fee.

Ben Lynch: And so let's… You used eight before. Let's take that. Eight is the patient visit average.

Jack O'Brien: Yep. And let's say $100 is the average fee at your physio clinic. And so your lifetime value average is $800. Your CAC, customer acquisition cost, as a percentage of your lifetime value should be ideally the same as your marketing budget, 3% to 5%. That's effectively what a marketing budget is. It's a percentage of your revenue, CAC to LTV, percentage of revenue. 3% to 5%, but in the early stages of filling a new therapist, you might allow up to 10%. So in that example, PVA of $8, average cost $100, lifetime value of $800. You'll be willing to spend up to $80 to acquire that client, but ideally, $30 to $40 is more of a target range. And so, That can then help you determine your marketing budget. If I need to acquire for this new therapist, five new clients per week, and my maximum spend to acquire those clients is $80, eight times five is $400 per week in marketing spend. Ideally less, but up to $400. Hannah, does that apply in your context as well or the context that you coach and mentor?

undefined: I don't do, like a lot of the clinics that I'm with are established and have a lot of established relationships, so we do a lot of free marketing in regards to reaching out to refer us to let them know and remind them that we now have availability, maybe introducing that clinician and what areas they can support in, and a lot of social media.

Jack O'Brien: Okay, so tell me more. Tell me more about social media. What does that mean?

undefined: I'm not doing paid stuff at the moment, but I like just posting. So, for example, we're looking to open up in another area, being in Geelong, and we've got a post about to come out to say something exciting is coming. And so starting to really drum up that interest and seeing where we can build connections, reaching out to kinders, childcare schools, not offering, again, those free consultations, but offering group observations of the classrooms or different things that we may not have availability for when people have a full caseload, but we've got flexibility with a new clinician starting out. So just getting them a bit more out in the community.

Jack O'Brien: What do you say specifically about the new clinician? You mentioned promoting to like referrers and partners, you mentioned social media. How important to you is getting your new team members visible?

undefined: are really important because I think our families are often like our brand is really important and so I think sometimes it's a bit like when you book an appointment online for the hairdresser or whoever and it says do you want a specific hairdresser or are you happy with anyone I'm sure it's the same with physio and everyone else and you're just like oh sometimes people are like yeah anyone but other times they're like no I specifically have looked on the website and I want this person So I think it's important to feel like they've got a connection with that person. They already feel like they've got a connection with the clinic, but if we can strengthen that connection with the individual.

Jack O'Brien: Right, it's both and, right? We want our prospective clients to have strong affinity with the clinic, the business, and with the clinician. Ben, in terms of low-hanging fruit for listeners, if you've got a new team member and their face, their story, their interests, their personality isn't plastered all over the internet and you've got empty books, what are you doing? It's not my nature. It's not my style. It's not my personality. Well, is empty books your style? You can't have one without the other. Here's a great story, a great example. We as clinic owners sometimes forget that our patients are humans. It's really obvious. Hannah, to your point, I today saw a physio and a dentist before we recorded this podcast. This middle-aged body is clearly breaking down. I The amount of research that went into finding the clinician that resonated with my personality, my style. Did I feel comfortable with them? Do I like them? Do I trust them? That's what I'm looking for. And I can tell you that there were clinics that I was referred to, their socials were outdated. their profiles. I couldn't see their team on their socials. I went to the website and there was nothing about the clinicians. They studied physiotherapy, uniting, whatever. I don't care when they got their degree. I want to know what they do on the weekend and tell me about the family and their kids and what footy team do they go for and some stories of patients they've helped. So that's really long-winded. that would make sure our new team, if you want to fill the books of a new team member, get them visible. Ben?

Ben Lynch: Yeah, it's really, really interesting. I think we hear a lot of clinic owners ask that question, you know, well, what if then all of that brand equity goes to the therapist and not back to the clinic? And, you know, it makes me feel vulnerable that the relationship is there and not with me as the clinic owner or the clinic itself. So What I'm hearing you say is you really want to create that profile for each of the therapists so that anyone that's booked in with them or looking to book in with them can understand who this person is, develop some affinity for them prior to coming in. The other part is I feel like a lot of clinic owners feel they need to do the marketing themselves. More often say, I'm not very good at it, don't understand it. Do you believe every clinic owner should do their own marketing? That's a very binary question. The sort of thing you'd like, Jobe.

undefined: We just allocated a marketing portfolio in our clinic to one of our clinicians.

Ben Lynch: So you do spend on marketing. Well, there we go.

undefined: Internally, yes.

Jack O'Brien: I'll answer the question. Yes.

Ben Lynch: And what?

undefined: Tell me more.

Jack O'Brien: Right. Yes, clinic owners should do some of their marketing to begin with. You need to know. how this works. Firstly, no one knows your clinic like you. No one can tell the story like you can. No one understands the commerciality of your clinic like you do. And you need to at least have a grasp of the principles and you have to have dirt under your fingernails, like marketing dirt under your fingernails, so that if and when we trust a team member, in your case, Hannah, or engage an agency or external support, you know that the wool isn't being pulled over your eyes because as a clinic coach, we see this far too often that clinic owners just hand over the dollars because they don't want to or they don't believe in themselves enough and they get fleeced from these agencies because the clinic owner hasn't got the dirt under the fingernails.

Ben Lynch: And do you agree with Jack?

undefined: Yeah, I do. I'm 13 years old, Dot's 13 years old, and we started Georgia doing our social media maybe six months ago. And Georgia's feedback is that she really wants more opportunity to be able to create those videos where she's just uploading the current team's videos. It's a long winded way to say that Georgia needs more time to support the growth. She's passionate about it. She loves it. I'm definitely overseeing it, but I'm keen to hear she's way more, has way more knowledge in that area and keen to see what she does. So, but I think I needed to know what I wanted first and where dots needed to be and to be able to understand it myself. so that I can support her in where we're going and that we're not going totally rogue or missing the point. I think we talk a lot about our marketing online being aligned with what our goals are at the moment. Sometimes we're going to be targeting clients, sometimes we're going to be targeting clinicians, sometimes it might be a specific group or something that you've got going. And so important to have all that understanding so you know that what is happening is what is needed at the time.

Ben Lynch: It's a great point around marketing and knowing who you're trying to reach, what you're trying to generate in terms of an outcome, just that distinction between clients and therapists, meaning you're trying to recruit new therapists. Typically, we'd see an under allocation. for marketing to recruit new therapists. So I think the opportunity, as you said, hey, maybe we don't do a lot in the digital space or clinics with big wait lists of clients don't need to do so much in this client space. But they're also under investing on a recruitment side as well in terms of their marketing. And so, J.B., how would you do this? We can do a bit of a screen share here for those folks watching in on elements of a profit and loss that you spoke to, Jack, and the allocations of the budget in those areas, specifically around marketing for recruitment as distinct from marketing to attract clients. Where do you want to go with this, J.B.??

Jack O'Brien: Yeah. Well, clinic owners should always be investing in marketing, either attracting new clients or if you've got enough new clients, you need more therapists. And so, you know, and back to the point about social media and plastering faces everywhere, some clinic owners resist that and go, oh, yeah, but like, You know, I don't want to put my job ad on my Instagram. Patients don't want to see a job ad. Well, if you don't need patients, patients probably aren't looking at your Instagram, but I absolutely guarantee you, your recruit, your applicants, your prospective applicants are looking at your social media. So we're always marketing somewhere. And so, the point is, it just depends on where it sits in the P&L. So, if you're listening, you can watch this over on YouTube where currently sharing a screen and document is typically reserved for our Business Academy and Elevate Learning Portal. If you're listening, head over to YouTube, search Clinic Mastery, Grow Your Clinic Podcast, you'll find this and other episodes with all the screen shares. What we're looking at here is benchmarks at on a P&L of a clinic with both target ratios and example dollars. So the clinic we're looking at here generates $2 million a year split across 90% which is consulting revenue, the bread and butter of a clinic, 90% from consulting, 5% from products and 5% from other revenue. Maybe there's a rental income stream or something along those lines. So we're looking at revenue streams, we're looking at direct cost of services, typically that would be your therapist wages and your direct product costs, and then categories for other expenses. So in this example that we're looking at, we've got 3% there for marketing expenses. And what I would suggest is depending on the season of your clinic, that 3% will either be on client acquisition or therapist acquisition. But we want to be consistently spending that allocation towards that investment. We want to be actively recruiting, even if you don't necessarily need an applicant today. We still want to be participating in some recruitment activities. Again, we don't leave it too late and be desperate and scrambling and looking for them. We want to be looking at them, as the great man says. Not Daryl Broman, for those in New South Wales Rugby League background, but Shane Davis, the great man. And if we don't need clinicians, then we want to be attracting more clients and filling our books. So that 3% there that you can see in this P&L example should be spent. Not just spent, but invested. Now, the counter argument might be, well, I don't need new clients. I don't need new therapists. My net profit in this example we're looking at could be 25%. So yeah, you're right. You could cut corners. I mean, cut costs. and make 25% this year, but what's the chances that next year you'll have a therapist shortage and your net profit becomes 20%? Oh, we've got some white space in the diary and all of a sudden our therapists are underutilized and your net profit's 20% next year. Because you decided to cut corners last year, are investments. A marketing investment, a new client investment, a new therapist investment means future growth and future sustainability. So don't cut off your nose to spite your face. That was far too long a monologue. Someone should have rang the bell to stop me talking.

Ben Lynch: It was great. We'll cut it all out. We'll have a separate episode, Jack on a rant. No, it's a really good context. I do want to go back to you just for one moment, Jack, before I get you in here, Hannah. The marketing expenses, to clarify, in Hannah's situation, got a team member that is doing this. Something you and I've talked a little bit about in terms of apportioning wages to that category. Is that something that you'd advocate for? And maybe you want to add a little bit of color to that.

Jack O'Brien: Yeah, absolutely. Any investment that is going towards client attraction. So if there's, I won't ask Hannah to speak to specifics, I'll speak to hypotheticals. If you're paying a clinician four days a week to be a clinician and one day a week to oversee marketing, that one day a week's component of the salary argument sake, let's call it $20,000. It won't be that high. Let's call it $15,000 just to set clear expectations. That $15,000 component of her or his overall salary, that component should be apportioned to marketing expenses and the other $60,000-odd grand of the base salary should be up in the consulting expenses line. So the salary is apportioned out according to how much time is spent on those activities. Do you like that, Hannah? I kind of anchored the salary nice and low. Is that a good thing? Yeah, absolutely.

undefined: I also think there's some really easy, quick wins that people can do. Like people spend money on CCADs, for example, but then they don't put them anywhere else. They just sit them there and then they're not really getting much value for the $400 that a basic CCAD is now, just sitting there. So we need to make sure we're linking those in with socials and all those other places. And then the other really easy, quick place to fix is the website. Like when someone goes to your website and they go to have a look at your clinicians and they can't see who they are or they can't find an inquire now button, people are doing, parents in particular, when you're working at a paeds clinic, we're doing things at 10pm at night and we know we can't call the clinic. We want to send an inquiry so someone calls us back or whatever it is that is needed. So when those things are clunky, you're losing them to the next site that came up on Google.

Jack O'Brien: Yeah, real quick too, real quick. Like you lose them, they're gone. They're not coming back.

Ben Lynch: Exactly. People want convenience, right? And ease. The other one there to add to that, Hannah, is the Google listing, your Google business listings. Super easy to be able to get a couple of really polished pictures up on your listing, make it informative, have all the right details, easy inquiry, opening hours, etc. So those things just add to your ability to make it frictionless. Well as we sort of work our way into the back end of this episode another thing that we were going to discuss is 20 ways to find a hundred K in your clinic that's currently the name of the internal Immersion we're doing here at CM just to help people think more in terms of outcomes because so often we've talked about this on previous episodes where a they're just jumping to the next project or policy or system to do and they're focusing on a to-do list that only gets bigger without actually anchoring it to what are the outcomes I'm trying to achieve here that go back to the start of today's cover around KPIs. What business or commercial outcomes am I trying to influence and then what might be the highest value thing for me to work on. This is really an immersion where we're exploring all different ways because everyone's at different stages but to find just a couple that you go, hey, if we make some subtle changes here, it's going to lead to some commercial results for the clinic over time. I'm going to ask you guys, what would you do if you're working with a clinic? It's the first time you start having a conversation. You're looking to get some relatively quick wins or at least quick actions. They could make a change in the next one to four weeks and they could start to see these outcomes in the subsequent weeks and months appear. in their bank account. Anna, how would you go about helping someone find some tangible commercial wins in their clinic?

undefined: Yeah, when you asked that question, I felt like Jack and I were both ready to just buzz in. I think one of the things that's been a game changer for us is just, as I said before, closing those gaps on time wasting. But we used to accept emails from families and now if a family emails us, we've got an auto reply that says, please call the clinic to book in a session and your clinician will talk to you. Alternatively, this email will be uploaded to the client's file and we can discuss it in session. So we're revenue generating or we're billing for the time in which we're seeing clients and setting that expectation the whole time, because it just can drain so much of that non-productive time. So in summary, that's one example, but there's many examples like that to really audit your clinic about what is not being billed and why is it not being billed. Because often when you sit down and your client, your team say, we did admin tasks, then when you break the admin tasks down, you actually work out that they're actually billable activities, particularly the way the NDIS is training us.

Ben Lynch: Yeah, great point around auditing the current allocation of time and finding where you're doing billable tasks but not billing for them. Jack, what would be your go-to to help a clinic in this situation? Sell product.

Jack O'Brien: Sell products, you know, we have access to hundreds of zero accounts of clinics and that demo P&L that we just showed, the target should be around 5% of your revenue should come from products. Most clinics are nowhere near that. And so, you could probably sell 10, 20, 30 grand additional worth of products in your clinic and typically, those products are at a 50% margin. We help our clients for 20, 30, 60 minutes a week. What about the other 167 hours of their week? Is there a therapy resource in an OT or speech context? Is there an app from a Slack perspective? Is there a physical tool, a fascial release tool or an exercise band or something along those lines that we can provide them? to enhance as an adjunct to their therapy. They're going to get better outcomes. Primarily, that's what this is about. Clinical outcomes. They're going to create a stronger affinity with you as a therapist and you at the clinic. Oh, when I went there, they helped me reach my goals. And so just sell more product. Find a product that every client probably can benefit from. And let's be super practical. Sorry, Hannah. Let's be super practical. Every single one of your patients goes to sleep. and they could probably do with a new pillow. If you've read the Barefoot Investor, it's like, invest in your underwear and your pillows. And so, can we sell pillows? People spend a third of their life on a pillow. As a clinic, we can sell them for, you know, ballpark $150. You can make at least $50 profits, sell a couple of those a week and you've helped a whole bunch of people and you can probably take a holiday.

undefined: I was just going to say on that, like linking that back to when you've got white space in the diary for those new clinicians, just having a list of product resources that you need developed so that you can sell them on your website. And that that might not be directly billable time at that moment, but will translate into sales on the website at a later date.

Ben Lynch: I remember in grade A, we've got a Slack thread in our community and it's titled something like, what your therapist can do in their white space instead of twiddling their thumbs, something like that. And it's a priority list BidLyndon had put sort of in these high value, medium value, low value. They're not all necessarily directly tied to financial value, but value to the clinic so that when there is that white space, they're not literally, you know, opening Instagram, scrolling through there. They've got a checklist that they could work their way through I think a couple of ones, depending on the size and stage of the clinic, always go straight to like accounts receivable, it's stuff you've already done, that's money owed to you, can you get it in your bank account quicker? Always like to bring that down really quick. Number one is fee adjustments where appropriate and available, like when's the last time you did an adjustment to your fees? The next one is to be able to reactivate a whole bunch of patients that haven't been in for a long period of time and likely their life, their activities, their problems or challenges have evolved and there's an opportunity for you to be able to support them and for the cost of maybe a couple of SMSs and some emails, it's quite high leverage on your time. So they're just a couple, but we're going through, Dan set this up really well, going through the P&L that we just showed on screen, Jack and Hannah, in those categories, essentially looking at what are 20 ways within each of these categories that you could pull some levers. He often talks about, you know, small cogs turning big wheels. There might be just small decisions, small changes, like rostering of casual admin. So, over the year, you save 10 to 20 grand. they all compound quite nicely in your favour. So I think this is a great reference point for clinic owners when they're thinking through what should I prioritise, what should I work on this quarter, this month.

undefined: Yes. And another one on that rostering and scheduling is clinics who do leave without pay, like the cost to a clinic is massive. So really looking at, because it's not just paying the not paying the wages, it's also about the revenue that's lost that day as well, which is significantly higher. So there's looking at a team and how they're working

Ben Lynch: Great point, Hannah. Great to have some leave policies in place and a process for how you manage leave and look at that. Well, we covered a lot of ground from new patients to filling the books of a new therapist, a new clinic, how we look at getting financial outcomes, how we look at the P&L to make decisions. a number of really practical pieces here. If there's a takeaway message for those listening or watching in, Hannah and then Jack, what would you want them to take action on to create progress and sustainably grow their clinic?

Jack O'Brien: I'll go first. You're welcome. I would say Maybe rewind. I think my point was one of the best ones. Rewind back to some of those formulas and start to craft your own formulas. Think about how much you're willing to spend on a new client. Think about your hiring triggers and formulas. We have specific formulas that we use particularly for our Elevate members, those clinics who would start up solos doing 10 to 40k a month in revenue. We've got a really unique formula that we use reserved for our members, but we help you craft that specifically for your clinic. But find those formulas, find those triggers, start to make some data-driven decisions in your clinic as it pertains to new clients. Hannah?

undefined: Yeah, so Jax has spoken about really getting to know your numbers and knowing where they are. I'd say to do the same thing with the time that is being spent in your clinic. So really look at where the time is going in your clinic and seeing where you can fill those holes or close gaps.

Ben Lynch: Agreed. Very nice. Michael, the action is think in terms of outcomes before you jump to solutions and pieces of work, systems, policies, whatever it is, be clear on the outcome you're trying to achieve. And then it makes it easier for you to decide on the high value work to pursue. And also, if you could jump over to clinkmastery.com forward slash podcast, you get all the show notes, the video recording and everything there. If you're on YouTube, make sure you like and subscribe to the channel, publishing content regularly each week with practical tips on how to grow your clinic sustainably. Jack, Hannah, thank you once again. We'll see you on another episode very soon.

Hannah Dunn: Thank you. Bye.