7 Mistakes That Reduce Profits And Create Stress With Paul Wright, PT

Some business owners might think that they have everything under control and they are doing the right things for success. But what if they are wrong? What if they are only creating more stress? In this episode, Paul Wright, PT  of Practiceology , shares the seven things that reduce profits and create more stress, and when corrected, can lead to greater growth and freedom. What are you doing wrong in your business? Paul shares all of these mistakes based on his own experience so that we can learn from them. This is the perfect opportunity to equip your knowledge with strategies to succeed!

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I’ve got a guest from a long time ago. It’s awesome to have you back. This is Paul Wright. He’s a Physical Therapist and former owner of multiple allied healthcare clinics in Australia. He’s the author of an Amazon bestseller, How to Run a One Minute Practice , Founder of Practiceology Health Business Freedom Program . He’s helped thousands of allied health business owners across the world which is pretty amazing. I like to think that I can have a significant impact in the America, but you’re reaching out across the world. Congratulations and thank you.

Business is business regardless of what you’re doing. There are fine differences in your insurances or other things, but people buy the same regardless of where they are in the world and health professionals will have the same struggles. It doesn’t matter where you are. We’ve got the same issues no matter where you are in the world.

I could see that. You had me on your podcast. What was the name of the show that I was on?

It’s the Practiceology “7 Questions in 7 Minutes” Podcast , Nathan. You nailed it in seven minutes.

That’s right. You also do another podcast for paid members that has much more content. First of all, thank you for having me on your podcast. I’m excited to return the favor because you brought up something during the course of our conversations that you could share with my audience. I’m excited to look into it.

For those who haven’t heard your story before, if you could give us a quick synopsis before we get into that. People can go to the previous episode  and find a longer story in regards to your experience as a private practice physical therapist in Australia. Bring us up to speed a little bit about where you came from and what you’re doing now.

I am from Australia. I grew up in a small country town in the Australian Outback, which is about big place, but seven hours or so Northwest of Sydney, Australia. What does a kid do? I liked sport. I thought, “I’ll be a physical education teacher.” That’s all I knew. I went and studied to be a physical education teacher at Newcastle University. We all experienced this. I had an entrepreneurial streak. I realized early in my teaching course that I may have trouble working for myself.

I then met a physio. I didn’t even know what a physio was. I never even heard of a physical therapist. I met a physical therapist at a party. She was telling me about anatomy, physiology, injuries and rehab. I thought, “I’d like to do that.” I applied to Sydney University to be as a mature age student to do their Physiotherapy course.

I remember sitting up sitting on Newcastle Beach. I’ve got the acceptance to Sydney University in front of me and I’m sitting there thinking, “Do I stay down the teaching path? I know I would’ve been a good teacher and it had long holidays. Do I go to Sydney, which I didn’t want to do and study to be a physio?” I took the latter ended up in Sydney. I graduated four years later. The hardest four years of my life. Compared to the Phys Ed course, which was like tennis in the morning and cricket the afternoon.

Off to Sydney University, it was a flog, but I got there. I opened my first practices pretty quickly. I ended up opening six practices at one stage, my claim to fame. I didn’t go to them because I was running them remotely. There are always these turning points. I’m treating patients in my practice and I’m there early and on daylight. You see the sun come up over the horizon, you see the sun go down. That’s what I do. This bus kept going past us. On the side of the bus, it says, “Why most small businesses fail and what to do about it?” This bus must’ve gone past a thousand times.

I’m getting better now picking up the universe. The universe is telling me something I wasn’t good then. The universe must’ve thought, “This guy is thick.” They’ve parked the bus there a thousand times and he hasn’t done anything about it. Finally, I contacted the phone number on the side of the bus and this was in the early ’80s or ’90s. It led me to a Michael Gerber seminar who wrote The E Myth . I started my E Myth journey and that led me to opening the practices.

I sold the businesses. Everything’s for sale. Your job as a business owner is to build and say you can sell it. What do you want to sell that’s a different thing, but getting it ready to sell? I started teaching other owners how I did it and how they can run great businesses. That’s what this whole Practiceology and one minute practice started from. It came from all of that.

It’s cool to hear that you got to such a level and then were able to sell. The thing that excited me about the content we’re talking about is you said, “I’ve got this thing. It’s called Seven Critical Mistakes, which reduce profits and increased stress and chain you to your business.” I thought, “Who doesn’t want to hear about that?”

I said, “Why don’t failures give seminars?” You always hear from successful people, but I want to hear from people that mucked it up. These are the mistakes. You got to learn what people do wrong because you can learn from that.

I tell people if I do ever get to meet them or talk to them via email, the people I’m talking to and interviewing on my show are successful owners. A lot of times we don’t cover are the failures that got them to that point. They weren’t born successful business owners and not everything went honky-dory the entire time to the point where they are. That’s the reason why I bring them on the show. People like you and everyone else that I’ve had, they have some successful actions that they’re willing to share with you because they’ve been through it before. That’s why people like you are such vital resources.

I’ve got a classic for you. I’ll get to it in the first mistake because it’s a gem. It’s a world beta. Mistake number one, this is one of the classics. It’s failing to understand the true role of your business. You think about why we started our businesses like for health businesses, “Why did you start it?” I started mine because I wanted freedom and I wasn’t a great employee.

I’m chronically unemployed as a lot of owners are. I don’t like following other people’s systems well. I argue with that word work. You’re going to be in charge of your own business, but then like most people and as good of point out in the book, you get to the stage where you’re doing all the business stuff, but you’re also still seeing the patients. When you add those two things together, there’s no time.

You then end up where your team members are making more money than you and your life’s nightmare. What we look at is the role of your business is to give you more life. The job of it is to give you the decisions and the ability to make choices regarding your own destiny. One of the things you should do first or I suggest you do is do what we call the freedoms score.

The freedom score is simply look at a typical week in your practice. How many hours do you physically have to be there treating clients? That’s your freedom score, 70 hours per week. We ask people in our seminars, “What’s your freedom score?” They’ll say 60. I had one guy that was over 80 in a seminar. Think about how many team members they’ve got. If you’re doing 30, 40, 50 hours a week with patients, there’s no time left to run the business to grow it. This is the classic problem.

That freedom score, the higher, the worst. The lower, better.

I got down to zero. This is my personal preference. My preference was to be zero. I wanted everyone else to be busy and me doing nothing. My freedom score, I want it to be zero. What that gave me is the chance to decide what I did any day. I could go to the office, if I wanted to. I could go to work. I could play with the kids, but I was still making money regardless.

Most people don’t think like that. The job of my business was to give me a low freedom score, so I could do what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it. Could I have made more money? Probably, I could have consulted more, but I didn’t want to. What we then get caught up is the idea of the real nature of our business. The biggest mistake I continue here is by not understanding this, I got caught up in a business or practice that was pumping. This was a fantastic practice.

I was a subtenant of a fitness center. I had my practice inside a great gym in Sydney. It was going gangbusters. I was making 300,000, 400,000 a year out of this practice. It was good. I got a phone call from a client, patient of mine. He said, “Paul, I’ve got some news for you. I’ve heard on the grapevine that the owner of the gym hasn’t paid rent for three months to his landlord.” I spoke to the gym owner, my mate. He said, “I’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

I come into the clinic the next day. I had my rent check in written checks. I had my rent check for him for the month. I’m about to hand him the check. He said, “Hold on to that check.” This is going south. I said, “This is not good.” I hired a truck. I canceled all patients for the day. I packed everything into the truck. This is the day after. About 5:00 Friday, everything’s in the truck. Everyone is saying to me, “Paul, what are you doing? We’re going to be open again Monday. The gym’s going to be open. There’s a new buyer that’s going to take over.” I said, “When they had bought it. I’ll bring everything back.”

I drive off 5:00 that afternoon. I never once again set foot inside that practice. It shut. Within 24 hours, I’d lost a business. What’s the lesson? I was relying on someone else to provide for my lease. I did, but I had other practices outside gyms that I was the landlord. I bought my premise, so I didn’t have a middleman in the middle.

What’s the lesson? The true reality business is to sell it. Don’t rely on someone else to make sure your business is going to survive. The other thing I learned is a concept in business called current bank and future bank. Current bank businesses are ones where let’s say, I rent a space inside a medical center. It might do well like this business was a current bank business that I had. It’s a lot of money, good business, but because I was reliant on someone else’s tenancy, it would have been hard to sell it. It didn’t have a great future bank. It didn’t have a longevity. Be careful about your business model.

You can go into a medical center and test the water or go into a gym and test the market, build a database, but that’s a current bank business model. You’re going to have trouble selling that, so look at the longer-term options and move out of that to your own premise, because otherwise you might get stuck like I was. The true reality of business gives you more life and be careful about someone else’s tenancy.

I talked about it a number of times with Eric Miller , a financial advisor I have on the show. The way he describes it. I don’t think it’s much different than what you’re saying, but the role of your business is to support the household. You’re saying the role of business is to support you, your life. If you look on the organizational chart, you would put the household or yourself at the top and the business feeds up into it.

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If the business isn’t feeding into your personal role and purpose and your family and your household’s role and purpose, then it’s not serving its purpose. It’s needs to be reconsidered. That’s where a lot of owners get stuck, is they think that the business is the overarching owning entity and you’re a slave to the business. You work the business, so that it is a slave to you and your family.

The business’s job is to give you the funds and the quality of life that you and your family want. That’s its job. If you get more into it than that, you lose out. What happens is burnout and stress, and other things. That come a lot because you’ve got a certain purpose or vision for your life, your own aspirations and what father do you want to be? What mother you want to be? Your business then takes you away from all that. If it dominates you and doesn’t let you do that, that’s where you get burnt out because you have this conflict. I never did that. The business’s job is to serve me. As a result, the family. That’s what it did.

To go into number two, how do you keep from falling in love with that? How do you keep from saying, “I love treating patients and I want to be here. I’m think I’m fulfilling my role as a technician and as a physical therapist doing the hardcore physical therapy?”

I don’t mind doing that, but provided it’s your choice. You have freedom to choose if you go or not. You rush to your time off, your schedule your diary, if your daughter got something on, you cancel the list, as long as you can do that. If it’s dominating, “I can’t do this because I’ve missed patients or something,” then you’ve got a problem.

That falls into our second mistake, which is falling in love with your product. What do I mean by that? Why did you become a therapist? Usually because you wanted to help people or you wanted to be a physical therapist, you wanted to do it. There’s a fundamental mistake with that and I fell into it. How do we know the market even wants that? I fell in love with the idea of being a physio, but I didn’t do any research, whether there was a demand for it, whether there was a possibility of a future. I liked it so I wanted to do it. The market doesn’t care what we want to do.

There are two drivers in any business. There’s available market, meaning you’ve got enough people that need your service, and there’s available labor supply. Are there enough people that can deliver the service? If you haven’t got those two things, you’re going to be chained to your business. I’m using a strategy example. Someone decides to open a practice in the middle of the Outback in Australia. There might have a town and some people. There might be a need for that service. There’s available market possibly.

Starting that business with available labor supply, you’re going to have trouble getting therapists that want to cover the middle of the Outback to do the service. You’re going to be chained to that business. You got to make sure with those two things. The market doesn’t care what you want. Your job as a therapist is to find out what the market wants and then provide the service that does it. I love Shark Tank. Entrepreneurs love Shark Tank because they get the idea of a business model. You see the problem there all the time.

My favorite Shark Tank episode, the guy turns up. He built a product and he pitched it to the sharks and they asked him all about it. They said, “How long are you doing it for?” “About ten years.” “How many have you sold?” “A couple of thousand.” Over the course of ten years, he sold a couple of thousand. The sharks wouldn’t touch it. I don’t think the market wants it. They don’t want it.

The guy at the back after they knocked him back. They said, “What are you going to do now?” “I’m going to stick with this. I believe in the product.” That’s an example. He’d fall in love with his product, but at no time do you think, what the market wants. Your job is to find out what the market wants. You might love treating elbow pain in one-armed golfers. That might be your passion and you love it. That’s your goal, but there’s not enough one-arm golfers out there. You’re not going to do any good. Don’t fall in love with your product. Don’t fall in love with physical therapy.

Fall in love with the market. What’s their desperate problem? What do they need? Do they need migraine services? Do they need elbow pain? Hopefully it marries up with what you want to do. I was lucky, my passion for business education and teaching health business owners matched up with a need for that service when I started years ago. It married beautifully. If I’d run some early seminars in health businesses and no one came, I did some podcasts and I would listen. If the market didn’t want it, I wouldn’t have done it.

You got to be flexible in that regard and also survey the market.

Your job is to find out what the market wants and fill it. That’s the role of your business. The market doesn’t care what you want to do. A guy come up to a seminar once, he says, “Paul, I want to open six practices in the Northern suburbs of Sydney.” He came to me. I said, “Is there a market for that?” “I’m pretty sure they’d need that.”

No research. He just wanted to do it. I said, “How are you going to staff it?” “What do you mean?” I said, “How are you going to find the available labor?” “I’ll advertise.” Key words, “I want to.” The market doesn’t care what you want to do, fill the market. Don’t fall in love with your product, fall in love with the market because the market doesn’t care what you want. It’s a big mistake.

It’s something that a lot of people have to get over. I noticed it as well and I have to tell myself, “It doesn’t have to be exactly correct. If even 80% to 90% of what I’m expecting gets rolled out, that’s enough.” Tell us a little bit about number three.

Mistake number three, it follows on your training. If you muck up a manipulation suddenly, you’re going to hurt someone. Mistake number three is falling victim to perfectionist syndrome. That manifest itself in a lot of health business owners and a lot of different ways. One of my mentors told me once, “Paul, it’s better to be 80% and out the door rather than 100% and in the drawer.” What he’s saying is we’re better off putting an 80% product out there, at least it’s out there rather than mucking around with that last 20% and it sits in a drawer and no one sees it. You see it all the time.

Let’s say I’m producing a knee rehab program. I’ve packaged a great knee rehab program. A lot of us will be worried about launching it or promoting it or putting it out there that I want to fine tune it, but I want to tweak it. There’s a couple of things I want to finish on it. By the time they do that, someone else has done it or the moments passed. Let’s say you’re going to do this knee program, but up the road from you is the superstar of knee programs, this therapist up the road wrote the book on knee problems. “I can’t put that out there because Brian up the road, they will see and it’s got to be as good as Brian’s because what’ll Brian think.”

We don’t do it. Another mentor told me, “Paul, you don’t have to be the best in the world. You’ve got to be the best in their world.” They might not even know who Brian is. My client lists, my people coming to my seminar, or reading my eBook, or watching my YouTube video, they might never know who Brian is. I can be the best in their world.

The other expression I love is, “To the blind man, the one-eyed man is king.” You don’t have to be a superstar. You got to be okay. My favorite example of that, I did a lot of lecturing in the fitness industry back in my early days. Part of it was an Anatomy course. I’m the speaker and their mentor in this Anatomy course from the teacher. Lo and behold, in my Anatomy course, who should be in the audience, but my Physiotherapy Anatomy guru was doing the fitness course. She comes along to do the fitness course.

Here I am up front. I see her in the audience and I go, “No.” You second guess everything you say, every attachment, everything was wrong, I’m sure I was saying everything wrong. I’m thinking about it. As I went further into that course, no one asked her any questions. No one worried about her. I was the king of the road. It was instructive for me that they didn’t care. I was the king because they were the one that I’ll admit, or I was the one to admit.

The other thing with perfectionism, don’t wait for your association to anoint you as the knee specialist or the back specialist. There are in some countries to be careful the word specialist, but you can be the expert in whatever you market yourself to be the expert in. Don’t wait for your association to anoint you as the migraine guru in physical therapy. Anoint yourself, position yourself as that person. You can do the videos, write the eBook, do the seminars, do the work and you can position yourself as the expert. Don’t wait for the association to anoint you. It’s too slow.

A phrase that we commonly use between my partner and I was, “Done is better than perfect.”

It’s so right. Reid Hoffman, one of the Founders of LinkedIn, one of his quotes, “If you aren’t embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” That means put something out there and see if it gets any attraction, see if anyone wants to do it. If it does get some traction, then fix it up. To hold off a launch of something for two years to get it right? No.

There’s a concept in business. They’re all MVP, Minimal Viable Product. What’s the minimum viable thing you can put out in the marketplace to see if it’s got some traction and to see if anyone wants it? We did it. We’ve got programs for front desk training and referrals, all these different things. When we started doing them, let’s say the front desk program, if we weren’t sure if that was going to sell before we went and produced the whole program, we did a seminar.

We did a one-day event that was front desk training for health professions. We put that on. If we got lots of registrations, “This has got some legs.” We hired the video guy. We video that down and produced that program because there was enough market for it. We knew that if we did the seminar, no one registered, cancel the video guy, cancel the program. Test that minimal viable product. I hope that gets your head around this perfectionist thing.

The fourth one is the next step. If you have read The E Myth Revisited , this is where it starts.

You’ve got to have tight internal systems. That was how the whole one-minute practice book started. It came about from a spreadsheet. When I started my businesses, I wanted certain things to happen in a certain order. If I wasn’t there, I needed a way to know they’re all happening. I started producing what I call the new patient register.

One of the classics was the written report, which is talked about in the previous episode of the show. The written report that every new patient gets that recommends how many consults they’re going to have and make sure those are booked at the same time. If you need to see me once a week for four weeks, that was going to be four.

That plan had four concepts on it. Did they book all four? I wanted some way to track that and that became a new patient register. What you need to think of it in your business are what are the systems, what are the things that have to happen in specific order in your business for it to be successful. Not only that, how can you check and measure that it’s done, even if you’re not there?

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That’s the missing link. Let’s say you hire a new therapist. They get lots of new assessments, but then you look at their diary and a month or later, their diary is still patchy or empty. You think, “I got twenty new patients, where have they all gone?” Unless you saw that they were, “Did I do a report? Yes or no. How many consults were they recommending?” That therapist might’ve been same to people.

Let’s say, “Give me a call in a month. We’ll check in.” That’s not uncommon, but if you don’t know what’s happening and that person’s not coming back and they disappear. You’ve got to have a way to track it. That’s how we started the one-minute practice platform was what are we going to measure? Was it done? Did I book all four?

How many were recommended? That’s part of the foundation of this whole thing, but if you’re going to get with everything in your business, follow-up phone calls, cancellation policy, product sales, even to the point of this is how you apply for leave. This is how this is what happens if you’re sick, but the internal systems in the business.

It goes back to all the material that you’re talking about here. That it helps increase your profits and reduces stress when you have those systems in place. When the systems aren’t codified and they’re not established and well done, then all the stresses on the owner to come up with all the answers. You become the answer man or the answer woman and that leads to a lot of stress.

One of the keys too, this is a good reason, remove discretion at the operating level of your business. It’s one of the keys of business, removing discretion. Let’s say like this written action plan that the patient gets at the end of the assessment. How many consults they’re going to take? That’s a written piece of paper. If you’re doing this, that’s not negotiable. You’re removing the number of non-negotiable and non-discretionary steps. That happens to every new patient, no exceptions.

I mentioned the last episode, but it’s worth telling again. What I would do with my teams, every new patient gets this sheet, not negotiable, because I’m removing the number of negotiable steps. This is not discretionary. Everyone gets it. I said to them, “Can anyone give me an example where a patient wouldn’t get this sheet?” It’s the summary of what they’ve got, what they’re going to do, the treatments, or the plan.

They’re saying, “What if they’ve got to go and see a specialist?” “No, that’s still on the plan. Their plan is to go and see the specialist.” “What if we can’t help them?” You say you can’t help them. No future bookings required. That’s still there. They couldn’t come up with one. I said, “I’ll give you one. There’s only one time I’ll allow this.” They said, “What is it?” “The patient dies during the consultation.” The only time I’ll accept it.

I’d got a laugh and I wanted it to get a laugh. I have a new patient register set up from then. Not a few days later, I see a new patient’s name in there and an action plan, yes or no, was on our register. There was a no on it. Mrs. Johnson didn’t get an action plan. From a hundred and something miles away, I see this. It’s like a red flag to me.

I contact the therapist. “Brian, sad news about Mrs. Johnson yesterday.” “What do you mean?” “I saw the register. She obviously died during the consultation. That’s tragic.” “My bad, I ran out of time.” “Did some part of our discussion last week not make sense?” This is the most important. You don’t have a choice about doing this.

This is non-discretionary. “Sorry, it won’t happen again.” If it did happen again, we’d be having other conversation. “Is there something we haven’t understood about this?” If it happened a third time, the therapist would be gone. If I can’t get them to do that, what chances have I got to get them doing anything else.

I love what you’re talking about leaving things non-negotiable because it reduces the stress again. This person is doing the job or not. The conversation is, “You didn’t do the job.” It’s very objective. “I have to let you go and we’ll find someone else who can.” That objectivity eliminates emotion. It’s very clear. It’s not, “Maybe we should give them another try and train them better.” The training happened and the expectation was set that they made their decision.

You still have to earn the right to sack people. I’m not ruthless. If you put up with that, you’ll start putting up with everything. My favorite, I’m stickler for name badges. I’m a name badge freak. It was part of my system for this is not negotiable. Every time you come into the practice, you have your name badge on, not negotiable. There are some non-negotiable things, that was one of them. I said to them, “If you ever catch me without my name badge on, I’ll give you all $20.” Over the years I had the practice, it never happened. I always have my name badge.

I turn up there one day and one of my senior managers, he’d forgotten his name badge, and he walks past. He’s trying to turn side on so that I couldn’t see. I knew what I saw it earlier. I didn’t say anything. I’d have to sit on this. Just as I was about to leave for the day, his name badge had appeared. It was on. “Well done. Good stuff. By the way, I noticed how you fix your name badge. Good on you. Well done.” I left. There was a couple of subliminal things there. I brought he doesn’t miss much for a start. I want him to know that I knew, but I appreciated what he did. I liked the fact that he knew he had to find it and get it fixed, because it meant my systems were working.

Was it Norman Schwarzkopf that said, “Shiny shoes save lives?” If you can’t get your soldiers to shine their shoes, what chance have you got to get him to hold a rifle and do these serious things? My name badges were my shiny shoes. If I can do that, I can get them to do an action plan, follow-up phone call, and say the right things in a consultation.

Some people say, “Paul, you’re micro-managing.” Yes, I’m micromanaging certain processes, but everything else, they can do whatever they like. They organize the treatments. They do what they do their own stuff, but there are these fundamental things that have to happen if they do that. I know everything else will be okay. Internal systems are highly important.

Number five is something that I learned over time. It took me about at least 8 to 10 years before I finally walked into step number five, finally.

Mistake is using your accountant to tell you your business P&L. No disrespect to accountants. You’ve got to have an accountant and they’re going to be good. The job of your accountant is to make sure you stay out of jail and a compliant. That’s what my accountant does. Their job is not to give me a down and dirty profit loss for my business. Their job is to reduce my tax and keep me out of jail. That’s not their job. You see it all the time, when your accountant does your tax for you, they’ll do a great job.

You might’ve gone to the conference in Australia, you pack up and do the Australian conference, the accountant will write the whole thing off, but that was a guise for a two-week holiday in Australia where you surf your heart out and had a great time away from the Alaskan sun. That goes into your P&L. There’s a lot of things in your panel that aren’t down and dirty business expenses. They’re deductible, but they’re not the real deal.

The other problem is they rarely take into account your personal contribution to consulting. How do you determine the wage you get? Most times, the accountant will determine what wage you should draw out of the business from a tax perspective. It’s not a reflection of how much consulting work you’re doing. What we’d like our clients to do is to look at their freedom score. How many hours are they consulting each week in the practice as a therapist? Multiply that number by a replacement cost. Let’s say it cost you $50 an hour to get another therapist to do that work. You use that figure in your down and dirty P&L because it reflects then your consulting wage.

When you say consulting, do you mean the patient care that they provide?

Your physical care with patient. If I’m spending ten hours a week with patients, it costs me $50 an hour to replace me as a therapist, then in my down and dirty P&L, I’ve got $500 a week is my own consulting wage. What you’re paying yourself, it’s the arbitrary reflection of your consulting because where that came from. It was the only way we could show an owner of a practice, a down and dirty profit-loss. It’s the only way we could show them that if we drop their consulting, we dropped their owner consulting wage, we could still increase or maintain their profit.

Otherwise, they wouldn’t drop their hours. They’d be too reluctant. I said, “If we drop ten hours a week, we can still look at the profit we’ve got. We can drop at twenty hours a week.” Look what it does now. Do you want to make this amount of money and do 60 hours work a week with patients or do you want to make the exact same amount of money and do no patients getting another couple of therapists on? What would you like to do? It’s a different P&L. It’s not the same as your accountant’s version.

It’s important to look through those numbers because that’s a very common stressor for PT owners. You’ve dealt with it thousands of times to get out of the patient care because they fear that they are going to lose money on the backend of that transition. You’ve had more experience than I have consulting healthcare professionals, but have you ever seen that go wrong?

We’ve sent clients back to work. I’ve got a client and he’s got six therapists in his practice and three of them resigned in a one-week period. That’s not good. We look at the P&L, he could have decided to take his revenue back to here and accept that not seeing any patients, but we decided, “Let’s put you back to work here.” We put him back on a 30-hour week roster. While we balanced the ship again, we then recruited and pulling out again. The problem is if you’re doing 30, 40 hours a week consulting already with patients. You’ve got no freedom and coverage.

In my business, I sometimes went back and did locums, I’d come back and do a two-week if someone was sick. One of my favorites, the time one of our therapists fell off an elephant in Thailand. He fell off and broke his arm. He messaged me, “I fell off an elephant in Thailand. I can’t work.” I went back and did a month for him because I could. I don’t go back as a therapist.

I am seeing patients and I’m technically a therapist, but while I’m there, I’m fixing systems on developing relationships on fine tuning things. I might have not heard because I was away a little bit. I have a different mentality when it went back into the practice consulting. I went in as a research student as much as a therapist. If you’re doing 40-hours a week consulting and you’ve got a sick therapist, something happens to your child, you’ve got nowhere to go.

Part of that goes into number six, with the stories that you shared is the only way to keep and maintain yourself out of a situation like the ones that you shared is to have consistent recruiting the systems in place.

You’ve got to always be recruiting. We’ve learned that certainly the last couple of years. One of my good mates uses the analogy of the airplane and the airport. He wants therapists circling around his practice. He’s ready to call him in whenever he needs it. He’s building a database at therapists. He’s got people that might be coming out of university soon or who are might be moving into state, or they want an opportunity. They’re not happy where they are, but when something comes up, they wanted have the opportunity.

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You build your database of potentials. We’ve got a Practiceology client at the moment who is running monthly mentor sessions for the local university students. They’re not doing lots of hands on. He gets them in once a month, they come in do his practice and he happily mentors them and teaches them. No money changes hands. He gets their details and a day. When they graduate, they want to work there.

My business partner did something very similar in that he offered to the PT students to do mock interviews. He would say, “I’ll sit down with you and let’s go through an interview session. I’ll share with you maybe how you should word things a little bit differently, how to present yourself better, what your strengths and weaknesses look like as someone who’s looking for physical therapists.” Inevitably, he’s going to find the rock stars amongst that kind of exercise.

We’ve had a whole recruitment program for this. I interviewed one of our leading educators in Physiotherapy in Australia. I loved it when he said, “I didn’t do the lecturing for the courses. I did it for the exposure to physiotherapists.” He’d do his course and he’d be the expert at the front. “We have a vacancy by the way. If anyone’s interested, let us know.” He never had to advertise because he always wanted people to work for him.

The other thing is never think that people are irreplaceable. Everyone’s going to leave at some stage. I remember one of my mentors told me about the train journey analogy. You’re on the train. This is your train. You’ve got the train of your business. People will get on it at certain stops. They’ll get off at certain stops. They’re not going to stay the whole journey. You’re running the train and your job is to get them where they want to go and then they get off. Put the next people on. You’re always going to be doing that.

One of the problems that we have with recruitment, health business owners often want to be liked. They want to be popular. I’m not saying you’d be unlikeable, but you’ve got to work out. Do you want to be liked or do you want to be respected? Whilst I didn’t like me pushing the name badges, that was the way it was. They respected my decisions and my ability to make those choices if they want to work in the organization. Don’t kill yourself trying to be liked because it’s not worth it. It’s impossible. How can you always be liked when you’re the one determining their wages, their holidays, and their uniforms?

It’s what you signed up for once you became an owner.

The trade-off for that, if you don’t want those choices, then you should be an employee because it’s much easier. I was only challenged once. I was at a staff meeting once in my practices. I was telling them all what they got to do. I know most of the stuff. I was making plans. One of them said, “Paul, while we’re doing all this, what are you going to be doing?” It was a straight play on the fact that I wasn’t seeing any patients. I thought that’s a good question. I said, “I’m going to be doing whatever I want to be doing. If I decide to come back as a therapist, whose job am I going to take?” He goes, “Fair.” He got the message. No one’s irreplaceable. That’s the play.

If you are in a position where you are held hostage by someone, let’s say you’ve got an admin person who knows everything and you know nothing. If something happened to Mary, I’m a dead dock. You ring up Mary tomorrow and you say, “Mary, everything you need at front desk tomorrow. I’m going to come in with a video camera. I’m going to stand behind you. You’re going to show me everything.”

I did more practices. I got so reliant on a front desk team member. For one day, I got her out the back with an old Handycam. “In lots of 1 and 2-minute videos, show me how you do this and that.” By the end of the day, I knew everything. Anyway, even if I’ve never used the footage, it didn’t matter, I had it. Everything can be systemized.

Tell me about number seven here, the last one in your list. What is that?

The mistake we make is not packaging our product or our services. We deliver physical therapy sessions, chiropractic sessions, sessions and treatments. People don’t buy treatments. They buy an outcome. Let’s say I’ve got some doing an Achilles tendon program for runners. You can call it The Pain-Free Runners’ Program, so you package what you’re doing as a program. It’s five weeks and has many sessions. You’re doing the same thing possibly by doing it in sessions and saying, “You need this number of treatments,” but once you name it something and package it and call it something, you’re the only people that had that. You all of a sudden stopped being compared to other people based on a service.

We had core program for gym. We had the Better Back Program. All the different programs, name it whatever you like, but once you start doing that, price becomes hard to compare because you’re not doing apples to apples comparison anymore. If I’ve got the XYZ and migraine program guaranteed to reduce your migraine by 50% in a month or it’s free, or we stop it whatever you decided to do, you’re the people that have got that. This is the price for the program or you can go up the road and see Brian, who’s got more calls than me possibly, but he does session by session migraines.

I’m going to do the migraine-free program because it’s an outcome-based program. The other thing packaging does is it stops you relying on therapist to deliver it. Anyone can deliver the migraine program and the package. It’s not Brian up the road. It’s the practice. You also know if someone leaves, they can’t take the name of the program with them. You’re protecting your turf in case they do leave.

I had Tom Dalonzo-Baker  on as a guest. He recognized that same thing that referring physicians to his practice were referring to him specifically and not to the other therapist. When a patient came, they wanted to see him specifically. He found that one way to combat that was to get his therapist together and say, “What can we agree on as far as certain diagnoses or certain joints, with body parts, how can we treat them and agree to a commonality? You can do other things here and there off to the side, but what’s the common core of our treatment for XYZ problem?”

As they worked with those over months and years, it helped to create programs that they are seeing certain results by certain time periods. If a patient wasn’t, then there was something wrong with them and not necessarily the care that they were providing. It also allowed him to say, “You’re going to get the same care from me at our clinic, as you would from Joe or Mary. We have the better shoulder program. This is the program that you’re going to be in and it’s a twelve-week program, it’s two times a week.” Having some structure like that helped him become more free and get consistent results in this patient care.

You systemize the routine and humanize the exception. A lot of businesses, the same thing happens. People say to therapist, “I don’t like being structured. I don’t like scripts or whatever else.” If you listen to them in a clinic situation, they’re saying the same thing over and over again. They’ve got scripts that might be rubbish. Same thing.

That was number seven. Anything else you want to add before we wrap things up?

That’s a good list. I could talk a long time about all these things. The only thing I’d leave you with out of all is be careful. One of the big mistakes we make as owners, as we put a monetary value on our family time. I could see an afternoon of patients and make $2,000 or I can go to my daughter’s swimming carnival. We do a monetary equation on our family time.   It’s a ridiculous analysis. Don’t even do it. It’s pointless.

There are always more patients and things to do. Don’t start doing that. That doesn’t make any sense. One of my best mates is one of Australia’s leading sports physicians. Every year, I go away with my mates. Jamie comes along with me and my mates. We’d go to the something every year. He contacts me a day before we were going. He says, “I can’t make it. I’ve got to do this list of clients. I’ve got this important thing.” I said, “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re coming.” He said, “I can’t,” I said, “You’re coming.” I pushed him.

I said, “What are you going to remember? Are you going to remember the patients or you’re going to remember what we did?” He came, by the way. We’d laugh about it now. I’d say, “Remember the that time I told you what are you going to remember? Would you remember the patients you saw or would you remember seeing and go over the handlebars of his quad bike into the river? What are you going to remember?” It brings home. You can’t put a monetary value on a family time. It’s a bad analysis. It’s a mistake.

If people want to get ahold of you, Paul, we mentioned your book, how else could they get ahold of you?

If you’re interested in Practiceology, we do a demonstration every month on the Practiceology Program. It’s a free webinar. You can turn up and have a listen to what we’re doing. I’ve got a special page for Nathan. Go to MyPracticeology.com/shields . That’ll take you to our page. You can register for the presentation. We talk a lot about owning consulting wage and how we structure our systems. If you want to get more information and get a copy of the book, we’ve got a great package of over $500 worth of business building resources for less than $20, go to PaulsIncredibleGift.com .

If you want to get a copy of it, simple read, it won’t take you more than an hour to read it. I didn’t want a One Minute Practice  book to take four days to read. It doesn’t make any sense. Go to OneMinutePractice.com/booksales . If you use the code SHIELDSOS, it’ll take $15 off the price. For $4.95 Australian, we’ll post you a copy of the book. My platform of choice is LinkedIn. If you want to get in contact with me, Paul Wright , Newcastle, Australia. I love to chat on LinkedIn.

Thanks for taking the time, Paul. I appreciate it.

I love what you guys are doing.

Take care.

Thanks for that.

My business goal is very simple – to enable all health professionals to operate a successful health business that gives them an outstanding quality of life, immense job satisfaction and an excellent income.

Having owned and operated multiple health practiced over more than twenty years I am acutely aware of the many issues all health business owners face – including:

– Being frustrated by having to be at their health business for countless hours each week
– Feeling drained by their business and sick of feeling their business is controlling them
– Worried that their team are not able to keep their appointment books full – yet they have a waiting list of people wanting to see them?
– Feeling trapped because they can’t take holidays for fear of missing out on potential income

BUT there is a better way – I can show you how to create a “turn-key” health business that makes money for you while you’re at home, on holidays, or spending time with your family…just like I did in my businesses.

You see for more than 20 years I owned multiple successful health clinics- yet still spent more time at home than my wife preferred, never missed a school concert or sports carnival, and visited my clinics for only a few hours each week.

Having now sold my businesses – for great prices – I am now focused on sharing my experience and knowledge with fellow health professionals in my mentor program, packages and live presentations.

http://oneminutepractice.com/booklinkedinpdf.php
To get FREE and instant access to all sessions from my “World Physiotherapy and Physical Therapy Business Success Summit” – then click on the link below:

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