Stop Putting Your Eggs in One Basket [Ep #162]

In this episode, I’m going to break down why, at any point in time, your business– if you’re only putting your eggs in one basket can crumble and fall. Stay tuned. 

Hey everyone! Welcome to another episode of the profitable practice podcast. I am of course your host, Andrea Maxim. And what I wanted to talk about today was something that I thought was really important. Based on a conversation that I had with another practitioner. Now, I think this is something that you all can relate to. And this should have already happened if you’ve been listening to any of the other episodes that we recorded during the shutdown and shortly after we started to reopen our business. But I thought that this was a kind of an eye opening even for me, but also allowed me to reflect on how we’ve put together our practice and what helped us stay in the black during the entire shutdown. And that is, no matter if you are one year out in practice, five years out in practice, ten years out in practice, or ten plus years out in practice you are always susceptible to any change that happens in the economy. You’re always susceptible to any change that happens with your demographic, any change that happens with certain things that are completely outside of our control. Like pandemics, environmental things that we just have no control over. There could even be a fire that happens, God forbid! And everything that you’ve built in the office is gone! And it can happen overnight, just like the shutdown happened in an email, in a statement and everything shut down so quickly. And so the point is, we need to be making sure that you are re-evaluating how your business structure is. To prevent any surprises from happening. And so based on this conversation that I had with a practitioner who’s been out for over fifteen years and grew a very successful practice. But her practice success was highly dependent on in-office-services like IV therapy. And I know there’s a lot of practitioners that are offering IV therapy as a huge chunk of their revenue. But I could still be talking to the osteopaths that are listening in the chiropractors and the massage therapists that are listening all of which are completely in-office based. And that is the only model that they have been taught as a way to create their business structure. 

So here’s the time for us to be reassessing ‘am I putting all of my eggs into one basket? Am I literally writing my entire career in the hopes that in-office and the antiquated way that I have been taught to run my practice is the only way that I should be running my practice?’ And the answer of course is a glaringly obvious ‘no’. And that we need to be adopting these online tools and services and things that we can create that allow us to bridge this gap between just doing online and just doing in-office. I am going to put my stake in the ground but a Brick and Mortar practice is 100% here to stay and our patients are relying on more one-on-one interaction. The more things go virtual, I think the more physical interaction people are craving. So please don’t give up on that. However, don’t go all in on that either. Because if you have all of your hands in one basket and that basket breaks, then you’re going to be scrambling. And that is the last thing that I want for you. 

So this is kind of like that do or die conversation that we have been having over and over again and on plenty of podcast episodes already. We have been talking about the importance of online, but I wanted to give a real life example of how this can happen to anybody in any journey that they have in practice. And if you look at a lot of restaurants, if you look at a lot of the positive stories that came out of the pandemic. People that moved very quickly online and ended up doing better than they ever thought. A lot of the business owners that I know that merged online sailed through the pandemic, we stayed in the black the entire time and it was because we made very fast decisions. So some of the options that you have is yes, maybe your practice is reliant on a lot of in-office services. But that does not mean you can’t leverage that knowledge into an online program of some sort, an online membership, an online virtual group, something or other. Where even you’re meeting up once a month as a group and that is the sort of monthly membership for twelve months that you’re offering to your pained patients or clients. Yes, it is creating an extra branch of the tree of your business and yes it is going to require a hell a lot of energy that you will need to put into this to make it viable. But I am imploring you if you are listening to this that if you aren’t using everything that’s happened so far as a wake-up call that you are not merging your practice online, that you are not leveraging these online tools in the way that you can. Please listen and please start taking some action on this. And I’m going to be recording an entire other podcast on online programs. Because I know a lot of people want to create an online program and I have some hesitation around what that would actually look like. But that’s a whole another episode. 

The point of this episode today is for you to be making sure that you are putting your hands in as many buckets as you can. To make sure that if one bucket fails you have these other ones as security blankets. So if you are someone who’s relying on physical touch therapy, IV services, in-office injections things like that. Is there not a way that you could also create something to offer these exact same patients, something that they can be doing at home through online means either a course or an online service or membership that will give them value. That will allow them to still get the same benefit that you would be offering them in-office but just in a different way. And the thing that I always come back to with IV therapy and a huge reason why I have never put it into my practice is because the old school naturopaths didn’t have IV therapy and they are still making abundant impacts in their patients’ lives. I could say that for just about all the unique therapies that exist now. So pro low therapy, and mesotherapy, and prp, and Botox, and all of these things. Yes, they do provide a tremendous outcome for patients when they can get it done. But it wasn’t something that our medicine was built off of. So I don’t think that it is an absolute necessity for you to be leveraging your entire career. 

Perhaps even writing a book is a great stepping stone for you to again take all of your knowledge, put it together in a seventy page book. Because again, people have no time to be reading 200 paged books. Especially if it’s a jammed pack with data and science and etc. They just want an easy read, something that gives them incentive and hope to make these better changes with their health. And then you can start selling your book as a residual income piece. Often, from a book, comes a lot of other wonderful opportunities for you, like leveraging your ability as an author now to get on a podcast, to get on an online summit, to do talks in office locations. Not in-office but Brick and Mortar locations, like health food stores. Or get on Facebook lives, Instagram lives, like all of these things. Books are a phenomenal way to give you that extra piece of authority. But you could also create a methodology, a protocol, a sort of method-protocol-strategy, something that is self-branded. And start leveraging those things online. 

And that’s exactly what we did during the pandemic. I have always wanted to create an online curriculum for my patients to adopt and purchase as I started working with us. But also as a way for people who couldn’t work with us for legal, or distance, or financial reasons and they can still get all of the philosophies, all of the methodology, everything that we like to walk our patients through. And it’s a beautiful, and creative, and cathartic thing. Now, it took me ten years to create that online program. So it wasn’t built out of necessity, it wasn’t built out of ‘I should just be doing this because everybody else is doing it’. This was something that was always in our game plan that we knew we wanted to create. But it took me eight years of putting the methodology and practice before I knew exactly how I wanted to execute on the program. And so during the shutdown, we launched it, we sold it, we did a phenomenal beta launch. And just like things happen it starts to trickle out. That new excitement that happens when you launch something you get a tremendous amount of success, and that is going to take a lot more time and effort to constantly be putting this out there in front of people to continue to sell it. And that’s why in another episode, we’ll talk all about the pros and cons of creating an online course. 

But again I wasn’t relying on this course for all of my revenue, this was a bonus offer that allowed us to get through the shutdown while we weren’t able to see patients in office. Although we did set up telemedicine for sure and we’re continuing to run that. But it was still something that I knew that I had to create and it’s always been my methodology with our business to make sure that we are bridging that gap between offline and online. That’s exactly why I created the three-step framework to merging your practice online. And you can go watch that hour-long training. The link is in the show notes and learn more about that. And then get back to me and ask me any questions that you have that come up as you’re going through that training. Because it is the most important thing for you to be doing, especially if you want to have your business lasting for the next 10, 20, 30 years. Because we don’t know when the next pandemic is going to happen. We don’t know when the next economic breakdown is going to happen. And we need to be making sure that we’re covering all of our bases. 

So if this is something that you know that you need to be doing and you want to get some extra eyes on your idea. You want to walk through what this could potentially look like for you. I want you to reach out to me, book a game-plan call, that link is also in the show notes. And we can go through this together and make sure that you are on the right track. And make sure that you’re not making a lot of the mistakes that I find a lot of practitioners make when it comes to creating an online program. Again, that will be in next weeks’ episode when I go over just all the things online program. But just like restaurants have done, just like people that were down and their back was against the wall, they found a way to create something, go all in on it and make sure that it kept their business afloat while their Brick and Mortar wasn’t doing well. You need to be doing the exact same thing. That is exactly why Zoom went up like a thousand percent. That’s why places like Apple and Amazon just crashed during this is because they had these things in place. Even though Apple has in-office locations, they have the online store. Every restaurant that had that online capability while they may not have soared through this. They were at least able to continue to pay their bills and make sure that everything was still able to function until the door started to open again. 

Everybody who got through this pandemic fairly well, had their hands in this online marketing bucket. And you need to be doing the exact same thing. And I don’t care if you were taught this antiquated way of Brick and Mortar, one-on-one consultation only, and only doing things by touch. That is totally outdated and it is unfortunate that schools are not also adopting this online approach to help serve you and your business for the long haul. But that’s why I am stepping up and trying to show you that the online space is a viable way for you to be spending 50% of your time, 25% of your time. Just put time into that. Now it is a whole other beast to learn about, and I’m not asking you to drop everything that you’ve built and go all in online. But I am asking you to look at what you don’t have with regards to your business structure. And start to make those things plugged up, so that you are solid. And I would love to be a support system for you. So if you want to get more of that one-on-one approach with me, book the game-plan call. If you want to learn our three-step framework for merging your business online, then I want you to go and watch my one hour training online and then just drop me questions as they come up. So please, I beg of you, start really thinking about how you’re structuring your business now. And how you can start to make it more solid and step into that maximized practitioner rule; who does the modernized marketing, who has the business systems in place and is building on that foundational experience to keep your business running. I will see you next week or you’ll at least hear me next week on the profitable practice podcast. I’m Andrea Maxim, and I’m out.