I get it…
When it comes to fixing back and necks you are on it! No problem!
But you would like to crack getting a reliable supply of new patients into your practice… even if it's for your team, so you could afford to reduce your clinical hours.... And you know - enjoy life a bit more??
I get it .... and have been there myself!
I graduated as a Registered Osteopath in 2002. I jumped straight into setting up my own practice and a year later got a loan and bought a list from one of my principal's that was retiring.
I got involved with sports injuries and absolutely loved it and got very busy very quickly. I decided to take on an associate, because that's what busy clinics do right? I took on a great candidate, put him in the diary and couldn't figure out why his list never really took off and why he left within a year.
I decided it must be because patients only wanted to see me, so the answer was to just work longer hours. Trouble was, the more I extended my diary, the more booked up I became, and of course I was returning patient calls, cleaning the clinic, doing the laundry and the accounts and administration myself.
A few years later, I was working with patients until 9pm four nights a week and I was miserable. This wasn't fun anymore and I was starting to resent all these patients with their bloody aches and pains and then decided I must just be turning into a bad person for thinking that way.
I then discovered 2 things:
1) Burnout - relief, I wasn't a bad person, I was getting burnt out from long hours, squeezing too many patients into a day and putting my patient's well being before my own.
2) My clinic wasn't a business - every aspect of my clinic relied on me, so my clinic was my "job", only my job offered no sick or holiday pay and required long anti-social working hours.
These two things added up to really awful stress - medication for migraines, rushing back to clinic after a family funeral to treat patients, not sleeping, celebrating a patient cancelling with a nap on my treatment couch and being incredibly short tempered with loved ones because I was miserable and tired all the time.
I made it my mission to figure out how to build the clinic up, reduce my hours and learn how to properly take advantage of digital marketing. I invested thousands of hours, learning about creating systems, time management, Google Ads, clinical systems and most importantly implementing what I learnt. I spent more than I was paying on my mortgage on courses, programs and coaching.
Result? - I sold my clinic for more than 10 times what I paid for it.
Since selling my practice, I trained and certified to become a business coach and developed a unique program to help other clinic owners do the same…Earn More, Work Less and Live Life.