Jack O'Brien: G'day, good people. Welcome to the Grow Your Clinic podcast by Clinic Mastery. Here's what's coming up inside of this episode. His highest reaching videos, the ones with the highest views, have generated the least amount of business.

Mic Rizk: It's the really dirty, unpolished content that's actually converting to customers.

Jack O'Brien: And I say this to our clinicians, just because you've got a degree on the wall and you're wearing a name badge, does not mean that people should trust you. You need to earn their trust.

Mic Rizk: More unpolished content and a clear call to action that's niched. So why wait till your back's against the wall?

Jack O'Brien: Like, get amongst it. Well, welcome back to another episode of the Grow Your Clinic Podcast. The band is back together. We've kicked the boss out. Mic, where on earth is Ben Lynch? On leave. I'm still getting the occasional cricket video from him. It's good. The odd cricket memes. I'm waiting for the rugby league reels to come through from Ben. He's abandoned the AFL. I don't know if listeners know this, but Ben has abandoned the AFL for his own private reasons. We're trying to get him over to the dark side, rugby league, the working class blue collar. Mic, you know that this week is the Newcastle Knight I've got to actually stand by. I was going to wear it on the pod, but for those playing along, I've got my jersey here. Mic, this is the jersey that I played in in 2008, I'm going to say. It's so nice. Are you following your own belief at all?

Mic Rizk: Yeah, I love it. I love the Knights and I love Penrith, so I was really torn on the weekend. I support the Dragons, so we got the wooden spoon. Hey, there's hope for you.

Jack O'Brien: If you got the wooden spoon this year, next year's grand final, just like the Knights. Yeah, that's good. It was a great game. It was a cracking game. Speaking of the Knights and Penrith, I texted a mate actually, a member, a clinic owner and member, and I said, it's a podiatrist's content creator's dream.

Mic Rizk: Yeah.

Jack O'Brien: Was it a fractured foot? Yeah. Compound complex, fracture of the lower limb, tib fib, out of the skin. There was an Achilles rupture. Yep. Blazed tongue. There was a PCL.

Mic Rizk: Yeah, Dylan Edwards played 50 minutes with no PCL.

Jack O'Brien: Content creation, all over the place. Actually, tell me, how do you think about, let's go straight into a good segue there. How do you or your team think about that timely content? Are there any triggers that you use or do you reflect back on your day, look back through Cliniko, patients that come to mind or stand out? How do you guys think about that sort of content?

Mic Rizk: Yeah, I think that we just had a team meet on this, but the easiest stuff is a real-life case review. Because likely someone watching will say, oh, that sounds like me. And my feeling when I was looking at our page was there probably wasn't enough of that. It's just like, what's topical? What are you treating? What injuries are you seeing? And they might not be the most popular reels. Like they might not be the reels that go 1,000, 10,000, 20,000. But there might be five people who have that exact thing. and they could turn into a patient. So, I think that's an easy version for most clinicians because you can pull up clinic, go look at the diary and go, oh, that'd be something to talk about.

Jack O'Brien: Yeah. I think about clinic owners or practitioners who think, oh, what am I supposed to post on? Who did you see today? What conversations did you have today? Actually, it's funny you mentioned that. I just watched the Alex Hormozi YouTube clip. I was sitting in my indoor trainer on the bike, getting a sweat up trainer for the Port Macquarie Half Ironman in two weeks. I was watching Hormozi and he said his highest reaching videos, the ones with the highest views, have generated the least amount of business for him. Yeah, they get viral, they get millions of views, blah, blah, blah. And the ones that generate the most revenue are super niche and don't get the views or the viral stats, but they speak to a particular avatar at that moment and it resonates.

Mic Rizk: That's what I'm picking up at the moment from Gary V, from Taki Moore, from Alex Hamosi. It's the really dirty, unpolished content. It's just like this is the content that's actually converting to customers. That's interesting.

Jack O'Brien: Do you see, like in real life, do you see clinics, whether it's yours or clinics that you coach, actually see results from this stuff? Because it's all well and good to say you should post about your day in clinic, but does it translate to inquiries or conversations or what is the outcome?

Mic Rizk: Clinics that are doing it best are talking about a niche. So it has to be specific, like a specific injury or a specific person with a specific injury. So a nurse with foot pain or a tradie with shoulder pain or a runner with knee pain. The other big shift in socials I'm seeing is even two years ago, it would be like icky to sell in your content. The shift I'm seeing is you should be at least have a call to action in every piece of content. The theory being the 90% of people who aren't engaged or ready to buy the thing are always going to be the 90%. And then there's the 10% who actually wanted the thing and they're really interested in what you're saying, but you've given them no option to go anywhere. So they just scroll past. More unpolished content and a clear call to action that's niched. And the best clinic owners I think are using ManyChat at the moment to say like, so if you have shoulder pain, comment shoulder and we'll give you an offer or we'll get in touch or we'll send you a link.

Jack O'Brien: So just to spell that out for listeners, perhaps you're walking or you're at the gym or you're in the car. When we're talking about these case studies in clinic, we want to mention a specific presentation and a specific patient avatar. So like I said, it's a nurse with foot pain or a footballer with shoulder pain. So it's the patient type and the injury. And the software that Mic referred to is ManyChat, M-A-N-Y, ManyChat. It's like an automation. When you comment a trigger word, it will follow up with a DM conversation. So, really simple though, Mic, right? Like, it's not complicated software.

Mic Rizk: Yeah, super simple. You would have all seen a video where people are commenting the same word. That's because they're using ManyChat. So they might say comment shoulder or comment AI or comment webinar. When a viewer puts in that comment, they'll now get an automated message that you can choose. So you could send them a Cliniko booking link as an example.

Jack O'Brien: You know the other, I think there's… I don't know if we call it intangible or indirect or long-tail benefits of this type of content too, right? Like, I'm going to see a podiatrist this afternoon and I love consuming his content. He hasn't done any content on what I'm presenting with, but I know that he's positioned himself as someone with a special interest to keep the opera gods happy, but he's presented himself as an expert. in foot things in running and triathlon cycling, which is what I do. So, although I'm just interested in consuming experts and their opinions, and I think that's the long tail benefit, right? It positions ourselves in the eyes of the consumer, of the audience, as someone worthy of trust, which I think is huge in an AI world, yeah?

Mic Rizk: Yeah, trust is huge. I've even been thinking, psyching myself out a bit on like how easy I trust someone just because I follow them. So like even if you think about yourself, like there's a few new, like there's some young physios. I've noticed young physios still at uni posting content. And like, they're saying stuff and I'm like, I'm just totally engaged and trusting. I'm like, you don't know anything yet. Okay, so why is that? What is trust? Yeah, yeah. I don't know. What is trust? It sounds like you've got an idea here.

Jack O'Brien: Well, I've been talking about this with my kids on the drive to ballet and to cricket training. It's like we respect people, but we don't trust people. At least when you first meet them, right? So we talk about manners, but trust is believing that people will do what they're going to say, right? It's a belief in the integrity of someone and that has to be earned. You're not entitled to be trusted just because, and I say this to our clinicians, just because you've got a degree on the wall and you're wearing a name badge does not mean that people should trust you. You need to earn their trust. And so, you know, there's things that we, there's things that clinicians do inherently in a console or in a conversation day in, day out that indirectly builds trust. And yet we forget to do these things online. Like it's, it's these trust building behaviours online. Like you think about your, Your trajectory online, your personal brand, if we can call it that, or reputation, you've built that over years and years and now people trust you because they know what they're going to get. Do you think about that or do you teach your practitioners or clinic owners to think about trust building?

Mic Rizk: Specifically related to online, that's what we talk about, that it builds trust, it builds reputation. It can introduce new people to you, but it can also increase the stickiness of people to you. And whether you agree with it or not, we just tend to trust people, or maybe respect people is a better terminology that you said, that we see online. And some of that data about seeing someone, is it like 12 or 13 times, the numbers probably going up. That can't happen any other way before they come into the clinic. So, yeah, we touch on that, that aspect, not in the clinic aspect though.

Jack O'Brien: There's all these trust-building behaviours that we need to exhibit as practitioners and as clinic owners. And so, some of the things that are coming to mind, right? Because people can see through facades and see through scripts and pretentiousness. So, even things like how we respond to Google reviews. builds trust with people watching, right? How we handle stuff ups in the clinic. You know, I know there's been times where we've made errors on payroll, for instance. We've all probably done that from time to time. And it's how we handle those situations that then build trust with our team. Are there any other situations that you can think of that clinic owners sometimes need to drop the mask? and build trust with their practitioners or with their teams?

Mic Rizk: I feel like I'm going to vulnerability is like that I think the owners that – I think I've always been big on this. I think the owners that share what's actually happening, what's not working well, and how that relates to the solution. Maybe sometimes clinic owners are just, this is what we're doing, this is the solution. They haven't really presented the problem and then even before that, the vulnerability. And it's usually our journey as a clinic owner, right? Like, I didn't know this. I've done it wrong for this long. I now know this. I'm sorry. This is why we need to change this part. And that could be for everything. That could be the model. It could be your admin team. It could pay run. It could be how you do reviews. It could be the contracts. I think maybe the trust trigger that's been strongest for me is the vulnerability, sometimes too much. I think clinic owners in general could be better at that.

Jack O'Brien: And vulnerability as in owning mistakes and then executing on the corrections, right?

Mic Rizk: Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Owning the mistakes. I think we would want our therapist to say, I don't know this. Maybe I'm not as good at this. I need your help with this. I would like to be better at this. Most clinic owners would say, if a therapist said those things, I'd be really happy. I wonder how much owners are doing that.

Jack O'Brien: Why don't we?

Mic Rizk: I think it's perception like when you're the boss or CEO or you're in charge, you're supposed to have all the answers. And then I think most of us on a superficial level have read the books or watched the reels or seen the TED talks from Brené and Simon Sinek and all the great leadership people of our time. But then there's a long period between reading the stuff and then actually practicing it and then getting it right. And then you need shit to happen to practice it, right? You need big stuff to happen to go, well, how am I going to respond after I read the Brené book? And did I actually get it right? Yeah. What I see in the clinic owners I coach is they're often not, they're just not saying what's actually happening to the team. They want it to be a bit more polished. I understand why. And maybe some team members actually prefer that. They don't want the stuff. They just want solutions. But by and large, I've felt better leading, telling what's actually happening.

Jack O'Brien: Yeah, I think there's a lot of masking that goes on, right? And what I mean by that is we put on a facade or we be who we think we're supposed to be in a given scenario rather than just being ourselves or being authentic. And you're right, there are these unspoken hierarchies and we worked really diligently at trying to combat these unspoken hierarchies in our clinic. For instance, Yeah, sure. Someone who's got more years of clinical experience may have something to offer a, say, new grad. But a new grad has recency of study that they can offer someone who's been out for 10 or 12 years. And so we really want to create more of a flat hierarchy or organizational structure where it's not guru and apprentice, but it's more a case of peer-to-peer. And the same is true for me or us as clinic owners, right, that we are part of the team. Sure, someone's got to flip the coin and call the toss. Someone's got to approve the bank transactions and someone's got to steer the ship. But ultimately, we've all got a part to play. And, and creating that space in your team, I think is a really important consideration for clinic owners to go, yeah, we can all learn from each other here. We're going to make mistakes. It's what we do when we make mistakes that matter. Do we try and hide it and cover it up? Do we just own it straight up? And I think we see that in a lot of the good sports teams too, right? They expect to fail and when they make a mistake, they step up, they own it and they fix it together. And clinics can learn a lot from that. Are there any particular sports teams or coaches, like, yeah, team cultures that come to mind for you on that front?

Mic Rizk: Yeah, I've been so enamoured with the Penrith Panthers' success. I read Ivan Cleary's book and that's why I was a bit upset that they were knocked out. But Newcastle is good.

Jack O'Brien: I was hoping you'd say the Panthers. Newcastle is good.

Mic Rizk: Well, I think I presented this to my team two retreats ago after I read Ivan Cleary's book. And he was talking about what the teams do behind the goalposts when they've just conceded a try. And he was saying how he can totally tell the result just by looking at how the team is interacting. And I see this in my team, the Dragons, who got the wooden spoon this year. When we concede a try, they go behind the posts. They stand kind of in a line. They're not talking to each other. Someone's a bit aggro. Or, like, the center's blowing up at the winger, and they're angry at each other, and the rest of the team's going over there. When I watch the Penrith Panthers, they're in a circle. There's two or three people speaking. They're talking directly to people, and they're usually figuring out what happened and giving advice to each other. in a very heated moment but actually seems quite calm for the middle of a rugby league field. And so they're giving effectively radical or compassionate candour at the time it happens to quickly improve and no one's getting upset about that. So, that's an example that stands out to me what great teams do.

Jack O'Brien: Okay, question for you. What do you do or what do you see clinic owners do when they onboard a new grad? So, many of us listening along have probably hired or in the thick of recruiting a new team member for next year, potentially a new grad or a recent graduate or just having someone start next year. And put yourself in these shoes, Mic. You've hired someone, they come in and they're not gelling in that culture. Like they're not embracing rad-can, they're not owning their mistakes, they find it, they get offended quite easily when we highlight opportunities for growth. They're sticking out, right? It's the outlier. What do we do in that kind of scenario?

Mic Rizk: It's probably one of the hardest, isn't it? The hardest things that we commonly face as owners. I think I've been practicing getting more frank, more direct, but still keeping my candour, kindness and humour. It's a hard balance to strike. But I've been trying to diligently include phrases like, these are our standards. These are our expectations. They're high expectations, but I think you can do it. I want to help you get there. And so I've been trying to include this more in my induction in each week of the induction and giving good examples of team members to do it and giving coaching on how to do it. And I've been a lot stronger in this last round with probation periods and mentioning that. So, we will have a three-month milestone in both of our calendars and a six-month milestone and we'll talk about all these standards and how you're going. It was interesting because I think my experience of my leadership there and other clinic owners is that we dance around the standards a little bit, or we're just not as direct. We might mention it once, but we're not direct in saying, this is the standard, this is the expectation. And if we do that part, the second thing I notice is we don't actually come back to it, measure it, and say, did you succeed? Did you fail?

Jack O'Brien: It's interesting, you're reminding me of a new feature that we've added in Allie. I might just share my screen now. If you're listening along, please make sure you join us on the YouTubes and you'll see here I'm sharing my screen inside Allie. And when you come into Allie, you come to the homepage and then you've got your playbooks. And what we've done is we've created a bunch of templatized playbooks full of resources. And so what we're talking about really here is like practitioner onboarding, right? And so when we install this playbook straight up out of the gate, it gives us things like, uh, you know, what are our culture and values and how will things work organizationally around here? Or you add in like the, um, the supporting your performance playbook here. And it talks about what is our approach to performance. Usually it's about metrics and support. What is our cadence for monthly check-ins? Do we do an annual performance review? So, what I'm probably trying to get at here, Mic, is these conversations shouldn't be surprising for new team members, right? Now, you can install all of that from our listeners. It's all part of your membership. They're free templates, all good to go. But the point is, accountability conversations, honest conversations, radcan, comcan, whatever we want to call it, should not be surprising to a new team member. In fact, I would go so far as to say we should screen for it in our interviews or trials or pre-hire conversations. We should be exposing them to these types of environments because this is the work environment. And some people are going to love it and thrive and some people aren't. And we want to make sure that that's really clear from the get-go. Because what we don't want, I think it might have interest in white from the physio co but what we don't want is to go through a hiring process where we are pretending as a clinic that we're perfect and the applicant is pretending that they're perfect and we're all just doing this show and none of it's real. And so the question here that I have for clinic owners is how can you show more of yourself, show more of your clinic, show more of what makes you you so that you get the best applicants. So I've got two questions for you, Mic. Let's tie all this back to the social content side of things. How do you show what is authentically iMove publicly? for your clinic or clinics that you coach. You don't have to speak to iMove necessarily. How do we show that publicly and how do we screen for good fit privately?

Mic Rizk: I think one does the other in a strange way. What we've publicly shown on our physio page at iMove and what I've publicly shown on my platform, which has become a recruitment funnel, are the vulnerabilities and transparencies of everyday life as a physio, of everyday life in our clinic, of everyday life as a clinic mastery consultant. And I talk about the real issues with vulnerability, which creates trust, which creates exposure. I feel like that actually forms the in private conversations and it serves as a filtering mechanism because inevitably the people who come to consult with me in CM have said, oh, I've seen your content on XYZ. That's great. I have that same challenge. Can you help me with it? And same with physios. I've seen that every Wednesday you guys are all in the room and you do this type of CPD and I love that. Or I've seen that you talk about how to be a high-performing clinician and generate $350,000 a year so I can be paid $150,000 a year. So that's the other benefit of the content. It almost has shaped the private standards conversation by itself or maybe it just attracts the people that have those standards automatically. And so in a strange way, I'm less likely to hire someone if they've had no exposure to any of my pages. And it's been a – we have noticed that people that have followed, say, I Move You and private practice apprenticeship from the very early days have turned out to be our best therapists because there's philosophical alignment. And the team members who hadn't really had exposure to that, they're just like, well, I'm just kind of doing my own thing and they've been much harder to shape. It's almost like I've been mentoring people for five years. It's like a five-year induction before they've started at the clinic. That's the other advantage of content.

Jack O'Brien: Right. And you didn't set out five years or probably more, five years ago to curate a recruitment platform, but you just, but you started is the point. Yeah. And if I, I'll share my screen again for those listening, uh, for those watching along, uh, or come and join us over on, over on the YouTubes, but looking at the iMove Physiotherapy Instagram page here, it's very clear, you know, here's a hiring post that we can see. You know, this carousel is really clear of like, okay, cool. If I'm joining this team, they look like they're an active young bunch. They got some tech. They talk about their pathways. You get a feel, if you watch the video of what it looks like to partner, you get a feel of what this clinic is like. You can see this and the partnerships and the types of patients they work with. You're speaking here or Gabby's speaking here about how to plan out your week. You know, you get a really strong feel and you have to create this content. And so the point then for listeners is, well, what you create, you attract. And whether that's patient wise or applicant therapist wise, you get what you attract. And so, absolutely share behind the scenes. I think it's really critical. Again, don't just do what we say, do what we do. And you can see it in Mic's content, but you can see it in our content. And I can't tell you how many clinic owners that I get the privilege of having a conversation with. Let's say, I know who CM is. I know what clinic mastery stands for. I know what all the others stand for. I don't want the others. I want clinic mastery because that's what vibes with me. That's where I fit. These are my people. These are my values. These are the principles that I want to grow my clinic by. So clinic owners, just create and let your clinicians create what they see in their diaries on a day-to-day basis. As an owner, create. If you're planning out your next team meeting, create some content around that. If you're planning your next culture day or you're thinking about how we have mentoring conversations or you're looking at pay reviews or we're all updating our award in 36 hours time at the time of recording, the award changes. Document some of that stuff and how we're going to be vulnerable and you will attract those kinds of people.

Mic Rizk: Does that make sense, Mic? Yeah, that's great. That's great.

Jack O'Brien: Okay. Well, let's shift gears. What else are you seeing? What are you seeing in the landscape? Are people hiring for new grads? What's working from a hiring space? Are people panicking about the economy? What are associations doing well or poorly? Careful who we throw under the bus here that you and I are part of a DM group. laughing, really, at the pathetic attempt of one association and their advertising. Maybe we won't name that one. We'll just keep the props and name them publicly. What are you seeing, mate? What's going on in allied health world?

Mic Rizk: Well, I thought about that. You touched on the standards and the flat hierarchy. I think that was really relevant. We could go back to that. The book that changed a lot for me was the Reinventing Organizations, which spoke about teal leadership. which is red being old factory worker style. There's a boss, there's managers, all the team members are underneath the triangle. And then amber is somewhere in the middle. Teal is what you were describing, Jack, where we can all learn from each other. I've been noticing the more we speak to that and the more clinic owners speak to that early, the better the culture is early, so it's being intentional. And that your example of the seniors are going to learn from you grads, I think that's really important. And no matter what title anyone has in the clinic, we're all learning from each other. And as I've also seen a discomfort around comparison. I don't know if you see this, but there's a, I would say there's a percentage of the population that doesn't like being compared because they might have stories around, but that's not me. I'm not that person. And we've been speaking a lot about unhealthy comparison and healthy comparison. Healthy comparison is I look at a situation, there's three or four people doing something different to me. What are they doing better than me? Is there an upward spiral here for me? Like what can I learn from them, which comes from curiosity. But a lot of the time, and I would say particularly for young allied health professionals, they would get really uncomfortable if you said, Here's XYZ's numbers. Here's your numbers. A comparison may be created that creates a downward spiral. I'm not good enough. Of course, I'm not at their level yet. A lot of rumination. It's something we've been talking a lot about is how to create healthy comparison and upward spiral, which also comes from the book Reinventing Organizations. So, that was just something that triggered for me when you were talking about flatter structures. Any thoughts?

Jack O'Brien: Yeah. Like that, I think, Brené, apologies if I'm mis-attributing it, but the story we tell ourselves, right, of like a comparison. Comparison is neither healthy nor toxic. It's the story that you tell yourself around such comparison. And, you know, something that motivates me a lot and particularly in practice, I would reflect after a consult and then I'd sit there and go, I wonder what, if it was an ACL presentation, I wonder what Mic Hughes would do in this case.

Mic Rizk: Yeah.

Jack O'Brien: Yeah, like what is world class here and how can I, what did I do differently and how can I gravitate more towards that? So I think about some of the ways that, you know, let's put Benny Lynch on the spotlight here. Like he's such a wizard with his words and guiding and steering a consult. It's like, how can I be more like that? Not, woe is me, I'm terrible, I'm never going to be that good, but how can I? I mean, so much of this stuff is we teach our kids, right? It's not, I can't, it's how can I? And like, let's be people who grow and tell ourselves the story that we can get better. And we are on this journey of never ending improvement. Because if we don't compare, like, how do we expect to get better? You know, because everything is relative, right? Like, are you good? Well, it depends who you're comparing to. Yeah.

Mic Rizk: It's all relative.

Mic Rizk: That's huge. I would advocate strongly to put that, what you just said, a description of that in your induction. How do we respond to comparison? How do we create upward spiral? And even the actions of a high-performing team member, they would ask the questions that you just went through. What does world class look like? How can I be better in these areas? If that was in your induction, that's a very clear standard that a lot of owners struggle with is when it gets to the point of giving a feedback or comparison, it feels really negative. There's like a negative connotation to a review.

Jack O'Brien: I think it's a Tony Robbins quote, right? Can I, as in constant and never-ending improvement. And we must have this core belief that we can all get better and that we must get better for the good of our patients, for the good of ourselves. This is the journey of life, right? And so we don't want to look at situations and go, oh, that was terrible. It's like every situation can be better. How can I improve? And what is this lifelong improvement pursuit? So yes, I absolutely agree. We need to foster this in our teams. We need to foster it in our applicants and we need to foster it specifically in our induction. And you mentioned something earlier that maybe it was around standards. Clinic owners aren't explicit and plain with their standards or they forget to come back to their standards. When I think about induction, it's like it's first impressions, right? This is the only chance to make a first impression. Set the bar high. Set the standard high. Let's do some comparison. Let's do some reflection. And yes, it feels uncomfortable, but here's the thing. So here's something I've observed. This is maybe a little bit esoteric. But those who do well, and you can define that however you like in whatever domain or field you like, they get increasingly better at handling greater degrees of discomfort. And we don't like comparison because it's uncomfortable. And we don't like owning our mistakes because it's uncomfortable. And so we live in a world that has convinced us that we must pursue comfort and happiness at all costs. And that is a tough taskmaster. We must pursue discomfort because that's where growth happens. Now, we don't want to stretch the rubber band so far that it snaps, but I often reflect and think, if I'm comfortable, that is the most dangerous place for me to be. Because it doesn't require anything on me. It doesn't require faith. It doesn't require learning. It doesn't require a stretch. So, clinic owners, if it's uncomfortable, good. That's where you should be. You know, don't make it so uncomfortable that you're going to break, but get used to being uncomfortable and teach your team. Teach your team, hold their hand, walk with them shoulder to shoulder. It's hard, especially the first couple of times. And I have full consideration and compassion for folks that maybe had a challenging upbringing and didn't have a parental figure walking alongside them or they haven't had a community or they just, for whatever reason, they haven't had uncomfortable situations. Get uncomfortable.

Mic Rizk: It's where growth happens. What do you think to that, mate? Yeah, I agree.

Mic Rizk: It's really hard when you're in it, isn't it? Like when you're in a challenging time, it's very hard to identify it and pull yourself out of it and see the good in it. That's a practice I'm still getting better at. I say you need multiple challenging episodes to happen over a period of time before you really know how you're handling it. So, yeah, the challenge is probably when you're in it, can you have that mindset that there's something good here, I can keep going, and maybe that's where, you know, a third party or a friend or a coach or a consultant, that's where that can really help. But all of the – I see it so clearly now being a clinic owner on 15 years and now consulting people for maybe seven years. You almost see clinic owners going through hard times or finding out something that they didn't know. And I'm almost looking at this going like, this is good. This is what needed to happen for you to go to the next level. And the idea would be to try and stop that from happening for everyone. But you need those challenges. Every significant challenge I've faced in business ownership has made the next clinic significantly easier.

Jack O'Brien: And again, it's the story that you tell yourself around it all, right? Uh, I'm going to butcher the quote that, you know, ship isn't made for the harbour, a ship is made for rough seas. And it's, it's the story we tell ourselves. We teach our kids and I'm sure you do a version of it as well. It's like, we do hard things. We can get through this. This too shall pass. We will get better and stronger and more capable and more resilient. I often think about those principles of the story that we tell ourselves in the thick of it. To your point, it's really hard. when you're in the midst of a discomfort to tell yourself that this is a good thing. And so you sometimes need a third party external view to remind you that this is going to be okay or help remind you your commitments to navigate through it. But that grit, you know, I'm actually reading Angela Duckworth's latest book, but her original book, Grit, was all about perseverance. And sometimes if you just stick around and stick through something difficult for long enough, You will get through it. And that's what builds grit. And you end up reinforcing this positive spiral of getting better. Her latest book, Mic, is called Situated. And I'm about a third of the way through it. Wonderful book. It's all about how our environments dictate the performance. And our environments often dictate outcomes. And we get to choose our environments often. And we get to choose our thoughts that then lead to our feelings. It's a wonderful book. I love Angela Duckworth. Fantastic author. John, this is a bit of a gear shift. Have you got any reads on the go at the moment?

Mic Rizk: No, I've been reading a lot about the economy, which is where I'm going to take it what clinic owners are feeling. That's what I've been – that's the other thing that was coming up for clinic owners is like worried about interest rate rises, worried about the award changing, worried about patients dropping off. They're starting to feel that patients can no longer afford the service or as frequently. So, yeah, I've been quite deep into some of those economic YouTube channels and how it relates to clinic owners.

Jack O'Brien: Interesting.

Mic Rizk: Anything practical?

Mic Rizk: I think it's a real good test of, let's say that there is a harder financial period coming. than the last 10 or 15 years, taking out COVID, which I know it's interesting. COVID destroyed some clinics and it made others. Some others got a huge cash flow boost and still operated and all sorts of things in between and others had to completely close. So, it's probably hard to speak to that as a good or a bad. But I've just been thinking a lot about, okay, what does it look like if we have a recession for 10 years? What does it look like if property doesn't grow for 10 years? What does it look like if you've got shares and they're going down? What does it look like if the average punter can only come for three or four visits and not eight? What does that look like if the patients, employees, and business owners are all paying 1% more on their mortgages? I've been thinking a lot about that. I don't know if I have anything concrete. I've been thinking how would I change the service? How would I change the business model? Would there be an online offering? Would we go more volume, lower price point? We spoke about this in the pod two weeks ago. I think it's that I've been doing the fear setting. It's like, okay, what does it look like if $150 is too much for a physio consult or what does it look like if instead of coming eight times, people can only come four times? So, I'm very early in my journey of mapping that out and maybe it's a complete waste of time or maybe it's a healthy preparation. What do you think?

Jack O'Brien: It's okay to think, right? There's plenty of times where it's like, right, think and take action or take action and think later. But there are also times to let things mellow, sleep on it, let the neurons kind of marinate a little bit and just expose yourself to different thought experiments. I really like it. So there's a place for it. You know, I think the advice I'd have for clinic owners is create the space for it and delineate, right? What do I need to take action on today? What do I need to decide and take action on? Versus where do I need to expose myself to more contemplation? An exercise like fear setting, which is Tim Ferriss' TED talk from years ago now, or even just like hypotheticals. Uh, uh, you know, constraint based thinking is something that we often talk about. And what would we do if something was, if we were squeezed, you know, what would happen if X, Y, Z. And, you know, I often find myself contemplating if I was to, uh, start a clinic tomorrow, or if I was to purchase and acquire a clinic tomorrow. What would I do? Yeah. Or if I came into some cash or we, we invested $20,000, $50,000 into a clinic and we said, right, you have to spend this in the next month. What are you going to spend it on? To get a good return. I play those games a lot mentally. And you know, some of the things that come to mind is I would look at the softwares that people sit on the fence about, and I just go like, seriously, clinic owners, if you're listening, Preve, Ava, Health, Just get into it. What are you waiting for? What is the worst that can happen? You'll make money. That's the worst that'll happen and you can undo it. Seriously, get into it. We talk about creating content. Just do it. That's what you do if your back was against the wall. So why wait till your back's against the wall? Like, get amongst it. But yes, certainly I really like those ideas of pondering. It's really helpful, Mic. I reckon we've sparked a few neurons here today.

Mic Rizk: Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's one more thought we could tie it up with is I've been thinking a lot about niche. So to give you a real practical example is iMove's very niche into the active population and the running population. And then some of the fear-setting I'm doing is, okay, what if they stop coming? What if runners just stopped coming for whatever reason? Maybe a new trend takes over. Pickleball takes over running and people stop running. So I've been thinking about this. And then I've been thinking about this interplay of being niche and being omnipresent. And it's almost coming back to building a motor around your business is we're very niche, but we're also omnipresent. We still go and visit the GPs. We still have a little bit of input with EPCs and work cover. So it's interesting because I would say that the quote, the riches is in the niches. And like that's worked really well for us. But in times like this or uncertain times, the game I like to play is, are we still omnipresent? We don't just ignore the doctors now because we're so strong into running. And we don't just say no to work cover and NDIS because we're built on runners. So, I've also been thinking about being omnipresent and I think business owners could potentially take something from that. And that's why I bring it back to even higher level thinking of thinking as your year in cycles. Are we spending three months on GPs? Are we then spending three months on nailing our niche populations? Are we spending three months with clubs and community? So, I still think there's a place for clinics to be, I think you can simultaneously be omnipresent and niche. What are your thoughts on that? It's very McRizk.

Jack O'Brien: I think we spoke in the last episode with you or two episodes ago of like, you're sometimes perceived as risky, like high risk tolerance, but you do the fundamentals and you kind of risk what you're willing to lose from a financial sense. The same is true in a clinic sense. We do the fundamentals. Like a clinic is a clinic is a clinic and that is the healthcare system that we're in. Do the partner work, do the letters, you know, do these fundamentals and play the niche game. We have this, you know, this floor of humanity of falling into myopism, right? Like we just go, we go myopic and it doesn't have to be one or the other. It can be both. Sometimes that's hard and I get the tension, right, of capacity and execution. But do both clinical do both. It's, it's, it's an 80, 20 rule in practice really, isn't it? Yeah. There you go. Well, let's land the plane there, Mic. We missed all the formalities of thanking the new members that have joined the Academy and Allie and all those things, but clinic owners, if you're listening, head over to clinicmastery.com/podcast for the show notes, timestamps, links, all those things. And if you want help, if you want help to grow your clinic, you need to fill your books, grow your team, optimize your operations, send me an email, jack@clinicmastery.com. No AI in this inbox. And let's have a conversation. I'll point you in the right direction. We just love helping people. So there you go, Mic. Thanks for joining us. Go the Knights. Go the Knights.