Ben Lynch: All right. It's episode, I don't know.

Bec Clare: Hi, Ben. How are you?

Ben Lynch: I just met up with Grant.

Bec Clare: I heard. Yes. I'm helping him be more independent and accountable, Ben. To our working together with your spouse conversation. Yes.

Ben Lynch: Don't come home unless you've done these things. G'day, good people. Welcome to the Grow Your Clinic podcast by Clinic Mastery. Here's what's coming up inside of this episode. Let's go there with benchmarks, because it always comes up. People want to know what is a good utilisation number.

Jack O'Brien: You could have a really high utilisation, but your PVA is locked. What that tells us, as clinic owners, is that you're churning and burning through new clients. You've drunk the Kool-Aid from some Facebook ad.

Bec Clare: Let's get you the tools that you need to be more effective. Do we need some AI note-taking? Because I notice you're spending a lot of time on your notes.

Jack O'Brien: And none of us went to uni to wake up on a Tuesday morning with a diary full of admin tasks.

Ben Lynch: For all the clinic owners that do focus on utilisation, we still notice a lot of them feeling the financial pinch. And today, I think it's worth us unpacking why that is. This episode will be right up your Allie if you're looking to grow more profitably. We're diving into utilisation and trust me, you'll want to hear Beck's take on reducing practitioner resistance to being busier. Plus stick around for when Jack talks through utilisation performance benchmarks. Before we dive in, today's episode is brought to you by AllieClinics.com. If you're the kind of clinic owner who loves to feel organized and stay ahead of the chaos, you'll love Allie. Think of it as your digital clone. It's the single source of truth for all your clinic's policies, systems, and training. Test it for free at AllieClinics.com. And in other news, applications are now open to work with us one-on-one at Clinic Mastery. If you want support to grow your clinic and bring your vision to life, just email helloatclinicmastery.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 another episode of the Grow Your Clinic podcast. My name is Ben Lynch, again joined by Jacobrin. How are you doing, J-O-B? You're smashing some coffees.

Jack O'Brien: I am caffeinated, niconated, I don't know if that's what we call it, but I'm feeling good, feeling charged. Niconated. With nicotine, yes. Yeah, just lasering in. Yeah, come at me in the comments, folks, that I'm all for the supplementation to help us perform at our best.

Ben Lynch: Just channelling you're in a Bradley Cooper in Limitless, you know?

Jack O'Brien: Yeah.

Ben Lynch: Very nice. Okay. You have seemed sharper because you're a bit of a dull boy. No, you've had some play. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Okay. No, no, no. Okay. So I see nicotine helps you when you're not on holidays. Anyway, Beck, good to see you as well. You're just kicking some goals with the launch of the new clinic at The Brickworks. How are things going in your world?

Bec Clare: It's great. It's been really good. Team vibes are high. We're heading into planning our next team day. But I'm just on the waters. So we'll see how we perform V-Jack today. Are we doing any hot seat, Ben, today? I've got my cushion ready for my fence.

Ben Lynch: Oh, you're ready. That's always good. It's the footy cushion, is it? Absolutely. Well, before we dive in, JRB, we've got some really exciting news for folks listening in. This is for members and non-members as well. Do you want to just share some exciting updates?

Jack O'Brien: Yeah, 2026, we've opened up a number of new partnerships. So again, this is for members and also non-members. We know there are so many services that clinic owners need. And so if you need finance, whether it's mortgage for your home, clinic fit out, vehicles, whatever you need, cash flow finance for your business, we've partnered up. We have Lenny Finance with Rainey Financial. That's a great option. Andy Wang, Clarico, is doing a valuation service. So if you're thinking about letting some team members acquire some equity, you're thinking about a sale or an exit, get in touch regarding valuations. We've got a partnership with Income Solutions, who are a financial advice provider. And so, fun fact, If you're starting up a financial advice firm, if you needed any more confirmation, founder of Income Solutions, his name, Dave Ramsey. Brilliant. Brilliant. Perfect. Perfect for financial advice. And finally- Bit less than you earn, folks. That's it. Yeah, that's right. Baby steps. And look, Sarah at The People Plugin is an expert HR consultant and advisor. So all things HR, awards, employment agreements, dispute resolution, performance improvement management, Sarah at The People Plugin. If you need any of those four services, finance, financial planning, valuations or HR, send me an email, jack.clinicmastery.com, no AI bots in this inbox and I'll help connect you with those folks and they'll take care of you as part of the Clinic Mastery community and Those four folks are joining us at the Clinic Mastery Summit in a couple of weeks. Bec and I are hosting, emceeing the event. We'll be interviewing these four folks. We've got a whole bunch of keynotes, summit sessions. It is all happening. That event, the Clinic Mastery Summit, March 21 and 22, is a members-only event. However, I pulled some strings how to chat to a few folks behind the scenes, and I have a literal handful, like four or five tickets for non-members. So if you want one of those folks, if you want to join us, you're not yet a member of Clinic Mastery, but you want to peek behind the curtain, get amongst it, immerse yourself, 300 of the highest performing clinic owners in Australia, let me know. Jack at clinicmastery.com, application only. I'll see if I can share with you one of my handful of tickets.

Ben Lynch: When you spoke with someone, was that just you speaking into the mirror?

Jack O'Brien: No. I had a conversation with my father, with daddy, Daniel Gibbs. Yes. Great. Dad approved. I got permission from dad. Okay.

Ben Lynch: Great.

Bec Clare: Definitely a vent dad. He's onto it.

Ben Lynch: Don't send him into a spiral, please. Anyway, I have AI in my inbox. awesome individual. No, it's not going to get any better than that, I tell you. Well, we're going to talk about utilization today. And specifically, I wanted to propose this thought. What if growing your clinic actually required shrinking first? And I want to unpack the subtleties here of how you might think about growing your clinic because naturally, Well, perhaps obviously our whole brand, the name of the podcast is around Grow Your Clinic and we want to add subtleties to that. It doesn't mean to have 10,000 sites and a massive team. We want to add the nuance here to how you might think about growth. Specifically, a lot of clinic owners will track utilization. This is perhaps one of the first numbers that we learn to watch and monitor in our scoreboards or in a platform like A11y. It feels perhaps like a really clean way to manage or understand performance. And it's a very time-based metric. We're essentially asking how much of the therapist's time over the week was used. You know, I employed you full-time. How much time was spent doing billable services appointments is a typical reference point. For all the clinic owners that do focus on utilization, we still notice a lot of them feeling the financial pinch. And today, I think it's worth us unpacking why that is, because in many cases, it comes down to them creating a false ceiling for growth. And this is where we get to the perhaps growing your clinic might actually require shrinking first. And I think what that really helps us do is define what growth means for you in this period of your journey right now. I found it a confronting question when a mentor once asked me, when you say you want to grow, what specifically do you mean? How are you trying to grow? There's many ways to measure this. There's many reference points that we could use. It was one of those points that I'll never forget in my growth journey and I want to share how we might unpack it for clinic owners to find the meaning in their growth journey as well moving forward. So JOB, to start with, you're the numbers guru here. Perhaps let's get clear on some version of a definition or an anchor point to utilization. What do we mean when we talk about utilization and what versions of utilization might there be that a clinic owner should think about or consider adding?

Jack O'Brien: Yeah, I think it's a ratio or a percentage and so in simple terms, it's often how many available hours are there and that could be employed hours or available for consulting hours and you divide that by how many hours were spent actually consulting patients generally. If you're in a billable time context, it might be how many available hours and how many billable hours. So that's the simple definition, what's available and what's being used, and we express that as a percentage. So if you've got, round figures, 40 hours available and you spend 30 hours billable or with patients, that's a 75% utilization.

Ben Lynch: Yep. And so what I've noticed is that clinic owners like to break this down into a few different ways. There's employment utilization, we might call it, maybe the simplest version, maybe the bluntest version, the most accurate version. is how many hours were you at work during the week and then how many of those were used for billable services. I think that's the one you're referring to most specifically. But you mentioned something quite interesting that is around the available hours and what was used of them. This is where I find the slippery slope of massaging goes on, where We say, well, you weren't available for 40 hours. You were available for some version of that 40 hours, some reduction of that 40 hours. And then we want to measure what billable hours you had as a percentage of the available hours. So Beck, when it comes to getting clear on the available hours, how do you do it in a way that you don't create a false ceiling for growth in a clinic?

Bec Clare: The available hours is the real distinction here and where we see mentoring gets layered in or you've got senior clinicians who are then having more time off the tools, if you like, or not consulting. Then, as you say, Ben, it becomes this really slippery slope that you might have senior mentors or senior clinicians who your clients and community want to see, except they're not very available. When they are available, they're quite heavily booked. So in theory, their utilization is quite high, but when we compare it to their employed hours, it's really, really low. And that's where that ceiling for growth really does happen. And I think it's really about analysing what's in our diary And how do we keep them as open as possible? We're here to serve the community, and yes, we want our team to have pathways and to have roles, but outside of those really specific things that they must be present for at that time, what are we doing with the rest of the vacant time? A nice subtle distinction, and I learnt this one from Mick Risk, was for actions that need to be completed sometime in the week, what process? Do we pre-book them in our diary and does that then come out of available time? Or do we perhaps put them as a marker somewhere and then when time becomes available, we place it in? I think that's a really nice way of ensuring that our diary is as open as possible. And even when it comes down to whether you rule off your team for admin time, for us as a clinic, that is considered available time. Because there's AI and things available to us now, we want to be as open as possible. So there's some really, as you say, there's ways of massaging it, but for us, it's what are the non-negotiable things that have to be there at that specific time? That then comes out as they're available time and sort of minused out, if you like. But anything else that's negotiable, we prefer it to be open.

Jack O'Brien: And so what you would do, Bec, is like, for example, we did this in our clinic, I assume is similar for you. If there is some flexi things that need to be done, we might put them in the clinical diary at like 4 a.m., right? Now, we're not expecting anyone to do it. at 4am, but the point is it exists somewhere and then if, you know, it's Tuesday at 12.30, you've got an unfortunate cancellation occurs, you can drag that thing down from 4am down to 12.30 when I'm going to do it now, but I'm not going to block off 12.30 in case someone yesterday wanted to book in.

Bec Clare: Absolutely. That's exactly right. Whether it lives outside of hours on a particular day, if it's a little bit more time sensitive. If it's not time sensitive at all for the week, they live on a Sunday and we drag and drop as is required. As you say, a last minute cancellation that's unfortunate. A patient fails to attend their appointment. We can then utilize that time really nicely versus sitting there in our consult room being like, oh, what am I going to do with this spare 20 minutes? Let's be really purposeful.

Ben Lynch: So you're using the diary there, the appointment diary in the patient management system as a way to sort of put these little tasks that they need to do during the week and then just sort of drag and drop them into available spaces when they become available rather than proactively blocking out the week and, you know, the receptionist can't book the patient or the online booking can't be done because there's something in its place.

Bec Clare: The only distinction there, Ben, I would make is around revenue-generating tasks. They may well be booked into the diary, particularly if they're time-sensitive. So, say you've got a GIS report that needs to be done, that could well be booked. Again, it's booked in what we call a non-prime time spot so that we're still available and open for when clients typically want to see us. And the other distinction I make is where our clinicians then get to a really high utilisation rate and they're finding they can't do these items that are needed to be what's considered a high performer in our clinic. then we will proactively manage their diary to ensure that they're able to do all of the other things that make them full, right? If they're nurturing clients and sending the handwritten card every week, that's helping them to stay at that utilization rate. They're all the little things, but we only do that when we're getting a clinician sort of hit 95% plus. that we have to start managing.

Ben Lynch: I'll come back to benchmarks because so often I get the question, I'm sure you do too, what's a quote good level of utilization in quotations? And you can already see with some of the calculations here how nuanced it can be per clinic. We'll come back to that in a moment. I know J.I.B. loves to say benchmark against yourself. So we're going to explore it more. But I just want to come to the clinic owner. So if the action is, hey, currently in our diary, we do allow practitioners to block these points out in their calendar, in their week and effectively take themselves offline or not allow enough time for bookings to be added in. I've now heard your point. I agree with it and I'm willing to make the change. How do I approach this conversation with my team who've had this habit? How would you approach it J-O-B in making the transition?

Jack O'Brien: So it's more a question of them having space in memory, right? These folks have plenty of time to see their patients that are booked and do their admin tasks and still have white space. So what we're doing here is we're not taking away time for you to do these things. We're just making sure we keep the main thing, the main thing. And none of us went to uni to wake up on a Tuesday morning with a diary full of admin tasks. We all studied what we studied and have joyfully accepted the role we are in because we want to help as many people as possible with healthcare appointments. And if that's what we truly believe, if that's our core value, then we're going to reflect those values in our diary management. what that looks like is keeping as much white space available for patients as possible. And if you've got some white space that you can spontaneously allocate to these tasks, then we can absolutely do that. We want to get to the end of the week having a clear to-do list and see the unicorns in the treatment note section of Clinica or whatever you use when it's empty. So it's not about not doing the tasks. It's about making sure that the space is available for patients and then getting the tasks done if and when there's no patients there.

Ben Lynch: Becky, I think you've managed this transition before yourself internally. I know you've supported a lot of clinic owners doing it. Just talk us through some of the specifics. How do you go from making a change, sorry, having this way of using your diary to put it full of these admin tasks and then transition it to maximizing it for billable or client facing support services?

Bec Clare: As you say, Ben, we've done the transition ourselves. We continue to have the conversations in our clinic. It's not a one and done type conversation. It continues to be one that evolves either for each individual practitioner or as we grow as a team. And I was actually helping just last week an Elevate member with exactly this challenge in the clinic. And so that was a really nice reflection for me, but also to help empower that member to go about making this change. The way that it's worked for us is we literally sit with the clinician and we look at their diary and we go, okay, what vacant time have you got outside of seeing clients? And where we can say you've had eight hours out of your 38 hours, they've just been in little bits and pieces, you can actually see that there's a full eight hours for you to do your admin. And that's on top of all the stuff that's already booked in there. that you might have already allocated to admin. So let's actually do some real calculations because we can see it unfolding on the diary and we have the stats in front of us to say that someone's X utilized and should be Y, but the team member looks at their diary and goes, it's really full. because they're seeing the little bits of vacant time. They're not seeing the overall picture. So let us help them see a week or two weeks or a month as a more broader outlook. And we can start to point out that there's plenty, as Jack said, plenty of time to be doing what we need to do outside of seeing clients.

Ben Lynch: Great point around the great Ryan McCarthy quote, Show Me Your Diary. where we're doing an audit, maybe looking back over the last few weeks and saying, here's what's reality, because maybe if you're forecasting the future, they're like, ah, to your point, Jack, we hear that line so often, you're taking away this time from me. So actually to put it in context is a really beautiful point, Beck of, well, you've actually had that time and likely more in the past. It's just maybe been a little in between appointments, et cetera.

Bec Clare: Absolutely. Ben, there's probably a couple of other things I'd layer in there as well, depending on how the conversation progresses. Say someone is quite challenged by this, we might go, okay, well, let's start to track how many appointments you start the week with and then where you end. Because often we've got those invariable cancellations and a couple of non-attendance, so we need to, in fact, pitch a little higher to land where we want to and where our goals are. And so, let's start to track that. We might look at next week and it looks really full. And we're starting to panic about where is all the other admin stuff going to go. But let's track that end of week figure. That then helps us with cancellation percentage. Jack, you've got your hand raised there.

Jack O'Brien: I'm interested because I wonder if it's, at least in my observation with my clinic and with dozens of clinic owners, is it, and this is a question for you guys, is it a clinician that's worried that we're taking away their admin time or is it actually more about a fear of having to work harder or be, quote, busier with patients and they just don't want to do it?

Bec Clare: I think that's reality. Yeah, highly likely.

Jack O'Brien: It may change their income if they've got a remuneration rewards type structure, but sometimes it might not. Or there's this fear, this glass ceiling, this perception of, quote, burn out. Let me tell you, you're not being burned out with 30 hours a week. you'll be okay. And so how do we help clinicians realize that they've got more in them, realize that their capacity can in fact grow, realize that overcoming inefficiency and becoming a productive person who makes a difference in the lives of the people we work with and the clinic we work in is very fulfilling and very energizing. It's this weird kind of fear. Am I right about that?

Bec Clare: You're spot on, Jack, and I think we've spoken on a couple of episodes about creating the workflow, but I think this is where we really need to tap into team members' desire statements and why they chose to become a healthcare professional. Jack, you just mentioned before, I'm sure we didn't go to uni to sit there and do reports or to do paperwork or to catch up on our notes. We became healthcare professionals to make a meaningful impact on the lives of people around us. And it may well be some tricky conversations that we need to have with people about, well, this is what that actually looks like.

Jack O'Brien: Beck, it's the art of being a clinical mentor or clinical lead, whatever label we want to give ourselves. Are we solving the right problem for our team members with our team members, not for them, with them? Is it an efficiency problem that we're trying to solve or actually is it a mindset problem that we need to get past and break that glass ceiling? And one of the practical ways that I think about it is if it truly is a clinician's fear about being more busy or more productive, How can we prove to them that they've done it before or that others like them have done it before? So, you know, if we think about some clinics that work in the impact hour space, Hannah would be really interesting to consider here, there's often this glass ceiling perception of five billable hours a day. If, you know, out of the 7.6 hours, 65%, you know, that five impact hours a day, any more than that, guaranteed burnout. It's like, probably not. Let me show you a day where you've been able to do it. And so how about we work towards stacking two days a week where we're able to hit that. Or let me introduce you to this clinician who is consistently hitting 28 to 30 impact hours a week, isn't trapped at that 24, 25 magic number that seems very common in speech OT psych land. In a physio context, it's like you can see 60 appointments per week. I did it for years and years, week on week, month on month. There are dozens of others. You can go from 45 to 40 minute initials. It feels difficult because it's not. So, I'm ranting, ding, ding, ding, ring me out, but there's ways that we as clinic owners can lead through this.

Bec Clare: And Jack, I think as well, the systems part of it is actually quite simple to resolve or to change. We move some bits in the diary, make some things more efficient, but it's those conversations. Sometimes it can be helpful with those conversations. Let's get you the tools that you need to be more effective. Do we need some AI note-taking? Because I noticed you're spending a lot of time on your notes. All these letters and reports are becoming really quite time-consuming. We allocate, say, an hour for this report and it's taking you two? Well, let's see if we can get that down. What tools can we be using to help our team members become more effective and help that conversation to happen so that we're aiding the process?

Jack O'Brien: Okay. Forgive me, Ben, for grabbing the reins. What do we do? We talk about having to shrink before we grow. At what point is there a practitioner whose utilization isn't getting anywhere, is anchoring back the clinic, and if we were to help that clinician find a more suitable work environment, the rest of our team's utilization would pick up the caseload and increase. Maybe that's an example of the gotta shrink to be able to grow. It is, it's a great point. You probably find your revenues capped, but all of a sudden your profitability and utilization goes up and it's a win for everyone, right?

Ben Lynch: Good point. It's like clinic owners that are looking to hire and recruit and bring in and their current team really, if they're honest, aren't that well utilized that they need extra folks on the team or they're looking at creating another satellite clinic or another location, or they've got one already in store. And it's like, actually, if you consolidated back, maybe you had less sites, less headcount, you'd actually be able to find that you're more profitable. There isn't this culture tax from a massive headcount, but not many full-time hours that you could actually Be more purposeful, be deeper with the mentoring, training, support of those team members. And that's really the point of shrinking to grow, is that you might have 30 headcount practitioners, but really 10 FTE hours over the course of the week. It's like, well, think of the admin burden for managing that many people when really you've got 10 practitioners. We're not going to go and just remove a whole bunch of people. It's not that brutal, but I think it's worth considering how much of this is a tax and a drag actually on your clinic growth. You said culture tax. What do you mean culture tax? Well, I think if you've got someone that's working a day a week, two days a week, three days a week, compared to someone working full-time and their immersion into the clinic, they're spending all of their time operating, showing up in a way that is truly and hopefully reflective of your culture, the behaviours, the attitudes, the outputs and the outcomes that we've spoken to before, the Uber methodology, which we'll have Sarah come and talk about. If you're only part-time there, can you really do it with a level of mastery or commitment? You're sort of often out of the loop or you're at two different places and so maybe you bring this awkward blend or you're not fully invested in it. So many of the problems that clinic owners share with us are HR and people related. And so, to what degree is there this drag, this inefficiency, this tax? Because you don't really have a full-time team. Now, I'm not saying that that's the only way to do it and you would only ever have a full-time team. It's just something to consider for those clinics that we've seen that are set up in this fashion. Especially when we also hear, gee, I'd like to be more profitable, yet they've set up these standards of a lower ceiling for utilization, which right out of the gate affects profitability. And then they say, well, you're only available for X amount of hours. And then they don't ever expect them to work 100% of that, let's say 60 or 70% of that lower ceiling. So they're just setting this incredibly low ceiling. No wonder they can never get profitable. And they think that growing typically to generate more profitability means just adding more headcount and they just add this culture complexity and tax. So, it's just an interesting thing to come back to, I think, around what is the definition of growth for you in this period of time. And it looks like different things and means different things depending on where you're trying to get to. Does that answer the question? I don't know. That was a long-winded way to say, be thoughtful about how you consider growth and what the definition of growth is at this point. There's a couple of ways I would think about utilization that this we're only talking about one. I think it's the default one, which is practitioners. I'm going to use a couple of extreme examples here to illustrate the point. The first is the space utilization, literally the square feet that we operate within. And how well utilized is that space? Because we might have a massive gym area as an example. Potentially, if we added another consulting room, we could utilize that space and it could lead to better outcomes for clients in the clinic. I'll come to you in a second, JRB, let me set this, is time within the space. I'll use an extreme example here is McDonald's 24-7, right? They're using all the time in the space to be available. We're not going to do that, but I just want to illustrate the point. We've seen some clinics do like a shift model, 7 a.m. to 1 p.m., then 1 p.m. to 7 p.m., and they're able to maximize the time in the space. Then we go to the actual therapists themselves based on their shift, the 7 to 1 example. How many of those hours are used? That's the one that we've been referencing and I think it's the default that a lot of people go to is how much time is used. I'll say there's three and a half bits of utilization I think of. The half point is, because it's very different per profession, it's a little cheeky, is around billable items and the billable codes that you're able to use or charge for. Of course, we want to charge for the things that we actually do. You want to do right by the book. Often we hear people say, we're delivering these services, but we're not billing for them. So it's almost like of the available suite of things we can bill for, how well utilized are those list items? I realize physios stitch themselves up with not many, and you've spoken to that before, J-O-B, quite classically. But that's not true for some of the other professions and looking at the suite of things that they could build for. So, I think of how are we utilizing each of those things and could we make subtle shifts in a day or in a week that really compound over the course of the year. That's the end of the point.

Jack O'Brien: Oh, thank you for the full stop. I thought your internet was glitching again for a second. Yes. And if we were to wrap some metrics around this, I'm thinking about the clinic owners are like, yeah, great. Sounds good. What do I look at? How do I know? So to your point then of the product inclusions, a key one that we're looking at is your average revenue per consult. And so that should encapsulate all of your revenue divided by all of your consults. And it's very interesting to see discrepancies between practitioners often. So I'd say that's number one to think about.

Ben Lynch: And then it's really helpful to think about your quick, of course, just briefly, because this all comes back to you. Look at a quote, busy practitioner. That's quote, highly utilized. but he's not of the same dollar value, commercial value, as someone that might be less utilized but bills higher. This is a highly commercial lens to take. Of course, if you've been around us for a while, you know we're all about the team member experience and the client experience, and that is super important. But just to give a commercial lens for the moment, that's why utilization is so misleading so often, especially when it's given this weighting by a lot of clinic owners. Continue with your second point, J.B.

Jack O'Brien: If we're thinking about numbers or metrics to look at, you can look at your revenue generated divided by the rent that you pay. And so, we're looking at, again, a ratio or a percentage, same thing expressed a different way. And so, if your rent is 25% of your revenue, you're not very well utilized is the short version. You're either over leveraged when it comes to rent or you're not using your space efficiently. And so you could look at a shift model. You could look at what's the makeup or shape of our consult rooms or how much do we have dedicated to gym space or therapy rooms. I know famously, Shane Davis helped a clinic to knock down the Pilates studio and put in two more consulting rooms. because that's how we best utilize the space. We look at rent as a percentage of revenue and we need to see that percentage continually trending down over time.

Ben Lynch: great metric to be able to use. Let's go there with benchmarks because it always comes up. People want to know what is a good utilization number. And I often come back to, look, we can give you some guidance here on some norms or typicals that we might see. But I often reference that point of JAB, like you're saying, someone could be highly utilized, but not billing the same amount. And also, depending on what they're being paid, they're not of the same profitability either. So, it's important to just know that even if you want to use it, be aware of that point.

Jack O'Brien: Yeah. Bec, I'll let you speak to maybe percentages and times and things of that nature. If I speak to dollars and back to that point of scalability, one way to think about utilization is revenue and salary. And what do those ratios look like? That is a reflection of financial utilization. And really what that is, is gross profitability. So if a therapist can generate $200,000 and their salary is $100,000, when I say salary, including super and CPD and what is their salary package, that means your gross profit is 50%. And as your clinic grows in revenue, your gross profit should improve or at least stay stable. If your revenue increases and your gross profit decreases, that is a serious yellow flag that you need to look at because you have a real scale problem there if your gross profit is going down as your revenue is going up. So that's a key one when it comes to financial as a clinic looking at your gross profit and then per practitioner effectively what percentage does the therapist get and what percentage does the clinic get and it might mean that salary doesn't change maybe that same therapist is on $100,000 and we help them to 20K, 235K, the rate shares are getting better. So that's how you can think about it from a dollar's perspective. Bec, any insights on time percentages?

Bec Clare: I'll come to the dollars percentage as well because sometimes clinicians might say, hey, I'd like a remuneration update. And having these conversations with our team, we actively share numbers with our team. And to some clinic owners, that seems like a really scary proposition. We frame it in the way of, yes, we can look at gross profit from each team member, but also what we're looking at is contribution. back into the overall bucket, if you like, or the clinic budget. So, yes, they might take 50% of what they bill in terms of their package, and as you say, including super and including their CPD. But the other 50%, they're like, well, why can't I have more of that? Why can't my wage be higher? It's helping them understand that these funds, in fact, go to a percentage of rent marketing to help keep their books full, whether you've got an admin team that makes their life a whole lot easier, like what are some of the benefits that they actually need to actively, we all need to actively contribute towards as a clinic. And I think that's how we frame up that conversation with team members.

Jack O'Brien: So whether it be- I've heard it put that way, that's really good.

Bec Clare: Thank you. It's been something that's actually been really well received with the team because they actually go, I can see where this is then going. We've got some member resources as well to run an exercise for your team on this where we lay out some coins and we actually demonstrate where funds go and how they then get reallocated by just some subtle shifts in the clinic and how we can be healthy in that space. I had this exact conversation with a team member this week who was like, look, I'm the busiest in the clinic. Yeah, I'm not reaching rewards. How is that possible? It's like, okay, well, let's look at your average fee. We have the mechanism to be on a tiered fee structure as well in the clinic. So if that's something that's available to you, if someone's in high demand, do you place their fees at a slightly higher rate? Does that then help them in terms of generating the revenue to support their package? So there's some really subtle ways that you can make changes to really impact both top and bottom line.

Ben Lynch: How else did you continue that conversation, Beck? You looked at average fee, average revenue per appointment for that practitioner, and you can put it into context with others. It's a metric that we gather in Allie, it's all automated for you so you can easily compare. What else did you do from there? Was it the case of, okay, let's consider rolling out a tiered fee structure so that, you know, for a patient to see them, it's maybe a higher fee than one of their peers. Did you do anything else or are you planning to do anything else?

Bec Clare: We are planning the bump in terms of where they sit in our fee structure. We also analysed a little bit deeper about the types of clients this person is seeing. Jack, I know that you say that the physio world has stitched ourselves up in terms of the other other things that we can generate revenue from. However, it is also about really being across those fee schedules. And fortunately here in South Australia, Return to Work have a number of different item codes that we can use for things that we're doing for a client and adding value. And it was really a matter of ensuring that that clinician knew that their time is valuable and then starting to value that. So if they're writing a letter or they're on the phone to a case manager or they're following up a gym membership for a client, these are all billable items and they hadn't realized just the extent of which you could actually generate revenue from adding more value and caring for someone. And it was that subtle distinction of am I just billing for generating billing or I'm actually adding value to a client's journey. I'm helping them progress to the next stage. Therefore, I should value my time in order to do that.

Jack O'Brien: Yeah, I love that. So good. And I think about, you know, your question bends around benchmarks. So, again, it'll vary profession, vary clinic size, vary clinic style. There are some clinics who can have their practitioners be 90 plus percent utilized from a time perspective because they've got strong admin structures. There are other clinics that run zero admin, therefore zero admin cost, and their therapists can never be more than 75 percent utilized and both are as equally profitable as the other. I think, though, to maybe just subtly reframe the consideration around benchmarks. How about this benchmark? Who's the best performer in your clinic and how can we leverage that from a positive cultural perspective? Can we foster an environment in our team where sometimes our CPD is around diagnostic skills, therapy skills, and oftentimes our professional development is how we can continue to be more productive and help more people. Can we take those who are really highly utilized, highly productive, highly efficient and have them run some professional development on their workflows and maybe what their emotional regulation strategies are? How do they ensure that their consult has momentum and isn't stalled or taken off the rails? What are some of the cultural ways that we can model and reinforce high performance because I noticed in our notes before this session we talked about how we don't want underperformers becoming an anchor to high performers. Yes. We need to model what high performance looks like.

Ben Lynch: So, Beck, just quickly, you mentioned a resource for members listening in. It's called the $200 activity. You can check that out inside of the learning portal. It's a great way for you to understand how to roll out this conversation with your team. how to frame it properly so that they get on board or at least you give yourself the best chance of them being on board. Perhaps around the benchmarks, Joby, as you say, that I really love the anchoring to the high performer. And making that clear, I think all the clinics that we work with that have progressed through some of this HR side of things, specifically around pay or reward structures, end up creating a version of this sort of matrix that shows what high performance looks like and the relevant KPIs associated with that as well and some of the behaviours as well that they do in their role. So I think that's a brilliant way to do it, that sort of internal benchmarking against the best. Perhaps if someone is really looking for utilization, the best one is what we would term and what Allie tracks is employment utilization. How many hours of the week are you here? How many paid hours are you working? And how many of those are billable service items? So whether that's face-to-face with clients or whether you're able to bill for letters and reports and assessments, etc. It's different maybe in the speech psych OT world. Perhaps that's the most comparable stat. I think once you get into this version of clinical utilization, the numbers are so massaged and different and nuanced. And some of those other benchmarks you've got, Jack, around rent and revenue and the salary or remuneration package and the revenue generated by that team member are really great benchmarks as well. We have that exercise looking at the practitioner year in review that Andrew Zachariah had done a podcast on that, I think a few episodes ago, just talking about how you can put your team members in comparison, essentially everything that we've paid them and what they've generated in to just nuance that story a little bit more beyond just time. I think perhaps The default to use utilization comes from, as health professionals, we're very time anchored, if that makes sense. We often think of the initial appointments, 60 minutes, the subsequent appointments, 30 minutes. And so much of what we're doing is time. You know, I work full time. And so we anchor to time. I think there's also the element of A lot of clinic owners not wanting to talk money, and so they use utilization as some sort of proxy for money. And I think what we're uncovering in this conversation is how that can be a little bit misleading for the clinic owner as well, especially when they go, I feel like the clinic's busy, but my finances aren't improving, or the finances aren't improving. And so this sort of artificial roof or ceiling you've created, and some of the benchmarks, maybe just nuance the understanding there to go, is this a metric that we want to keep emphasizing and adding weight to? Internally, maybe behind the scenes in management, or even to our team. Hannah brings up a really good point of impact hours or service hours. Maybe the blind test version is billable hours. Perhaps that's the better version of this because it's straight to the point. It's literally saying how many hours of the week were billable. Jack, would you use that as a reference point and start talking about billable hours instead of using this other reference point of how many hours were available or not available and just say, this is how many were billable and we have a target for how many billable hours you should do.

Jack O'Brien: I think it's absolutely entirely reasonable for some clinics or for most clinics, particularly if your revenue is tied to time. And so, you know, I think you're right that so many clinic owners struggle talking about finances. I know I, when I'm talking with therapists, it is. It's not common. So I guess I want to ensure that listeners hear the empathy in our tone or compassion that these conversations take time to get to. It takes time for you first to rip your head, to wrap your head around. And then it takes more time to establish healthy rapport with your team. So no one's suggesting that this is easy, but we are suggesting it's worth it. So yes, impact hours, service hours, billable hours is a great way to think about it. But that's on the assumption that all of our team are doing the same type of work as well. I think about in my clinic, we had, I can think of two practitioners that were effectively the same utilization. good utilisation, full. But one has a diary majority filled with DVA patients and one has a diary majority filled with workers' comp patients. And I can guarantee you, one's more profitable than the other. One's unprofitable. Unfortunately, if the Minister for Defence or DVA Veterans Affairs is listening, fix your prices now. Put them up, please. So there are certain revenue types that are not sustainable. And just because someone's 85% utilized doesn't mean they're financially well utilized.

Ben Lynch: That's just the nuance and subtlety to bring to this. And I know there are folks that really dive into utilization and measure it from all different things. I just can't help but see this complexity when they're trying to track it and understand it. I'm not saying it's not relevant. It is, but this weighting that's put on it and this complexity of measuring it as accurately as they want to, I feel just misses the bigger point. of trying to find a profitable, sustainable version of growth, especially we champion that you do provide a progression, an actual progression for team members. We're so often talking about reward structures. And so often the narrative is the team members come and they want a pay progression. They're kind of like, well, where do I go from here? And if you don't have a way for them to earn more when they are more productive, it's very hard for you to navigate that conversation. So removing some of this emphasis on time and actually finding a way to emphasize money in the way that you can, the way that feels right for you and your team member can help unlock some growth for them in their productivity and their remuneration and ultimately for the clinic.

Jack O'Brien: I think so. And it's all things in context, right? We do ourselves, our team and our patients a disservice when you just look at utilization in isolation. For example, you could be 80% utilized on appointment structures that are 60 and 30 minutes. You could be the same time utilization on a 45, 20-minute appointment structure, 40, 20-minute structure, and you've instantly helped 50% more people. You have made a difference in 50% more lives by changing your appointment structure. The same time utilization helped more people, and you've become more sustainable from a profitability perspective. So I think that's a key one to think about. It is.

Ben Lynch: I just feel like I'm starting to get a bit of a urine infection here, JB, of hearing so many people talk about utilization and battling with all these other things because they're focusing on utilization. I feel passionate about offering an alternative perspective to emphasizing this so much in your growth journey.

Jack O'Brien: And I think finally, the thought came back to me, if you're watching the YouTubes, you could probably hear the cogs turning in my brain. I'd had it and I lost it and it's back again. And when we say thinking about all things in context, you could have a really high utilization but your PVA is low. What that tells us as clinic owners is that you're churning and burning through new clients. You've drunk the Kool-Aid from some Facebook ad that says you can have a billion-dollar practice and run all sorts of new client whiz-bang thingos. But if it isn't underpinned with a client experience manifesto and core values and belief that says we care about these clients to help them through their journey and beyond for their lifetime, Your high utilization counts for naught because you're churning, burning. There's not a lifetime value there. There's not client outcomes there. Maybe your cancellation is through the roof. You can be utilized, but how much of your admin team is churned and burned for managing these cancellations and client communications and sloppiness behind the scenes? Good clinic owners, what do we see the best do? They sign up for Allie. period. It's 30-day free trial. Do it. It's now paid on a per practitioner basis. There's so many great options there. Immerse yourself in the numbers, learn what the best do, understand it all in context, and lead from a place of compassion and passion for your team and your community.

Ben Lynch: Good point, Joby. I like it. Always adding the context. It's your love language. Becky told me the other day, context is my love language. I haven't heard that one before. It might be easier if it was gift, right? Yeah, just like that. Easy to buy for. Great. Well, this has been really awesome to hear some of the reference points and practical insights that you've got here. We're going to go deeper on this because there's so many practical things that we could also share beyond what we've already shared today. over the next few episodes around how to think about utilization, how to plan for it, how to really think about growth in a deeper, meaningful way than just add more people or add more locations and how to add the meaning ultimately to that so that you create a business that brings you some degree of joy or meaning as well. JB, Beck, any final remarks before we sign off? Get busy. Get busy, help more people, help them more often and add more value. That was a little sign off, right? You can head over to clinicmastery.com forward slash podcast for this episode and more. Immerse yourself and you find a little button underneath the episode on our website that says book a time with us, come and have a chat about the specific episode that you've watched or listened to and the problem that we unpacked because we can help you in a very structured way using our operating model. All right, we'll catch you on another episode very soon. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.