The 7 Things I Learned After 200 Episodes [Ep #197]

On this episode of the Profitable Practice Podcast we are kicking off our 200th episode celebration and today I’m talking about the 7 that I’ve learned over those 200 episodes. You don’t want to miss this. 

Oh my gosh guys! I can’t even believe it, but we are going to reach 200 episodes at the end of this month. And so the next 4 episodes including this one are all going to be a tribute to everything that I’ve learned, some of my favorite episodes, some of my favorite guests, my hardest lessons. All of that’s going to come out over the next four episodes. So if you have not been paying attention weekly, I strongly encourage you to make sure that you are downloading this podcast every single week to really get the most out of our celebration for our 200th episode. So this episode is 197 which means we are just around the corner to that big milestone for the profitable practice podcast. Of course I’m so grateful for all of you for listening, for being in my tribe, for engaging with me on Instagram @andreamaximnd, for reaching out to me in my DMs, for emailing me, for being a part of this journey. 

My very first published episode was February 6 2016. So we’ve come a really long way and there’s so much effort, there’s so much time, there’s so much energy that goes into not only starting a podcast but keeping it going. And this is one of those pieces of my business puzzle that I cannot do without. It is the most fun, I get the most reward from it, I love that it’s a way to connect with you audio-visually. It’s like a journal to some extent where I can just be myself and say what’s going on in my life. And you have been all in this journey with me. So to reward everyone who’s been listening, who’s been to the maximizer family. We are hosting a contest all month long, there’s a few things that you can take advantage of; so one, I ask you to go on to my Instagram @andreamaximnd right at the very top of the feed is the 3 titles about how we are celebrating our 200th episode. All I ask you to do is tag a friend below on one of those tiles, get the word out and by tagging a friend you automatically get—excuse me, so there’s one other sec.—so I want you to tag a friend first. The second step is to leave a review on iTunes and quite frankly, I’m comfortable with you leaving a review on any platform that you listen to this podcast on. But I do ask that you take a picture of your review as proof. And oftentimes the reviews don’t actually show up for a couple of days, I know iTunes is a bit delayed so having that video or photo proof is going to be really helpful. And then share that with me in my DMs or email it to me and by doing those 2 steps you automatically get a ticket to our four hour half-day intensive happening in July. This is usually only for our maximized practitioner members but if you do these 2 steps. Again, tag a friend below one of the feed posts about the 200th episode celebration and leave a review on any platform preferably iTunes, take a picture of it, and send it to me. So literally 5 min. worth of work, you’re going to get immediate access to our half-day intensive which is a four hour live coaching, training, strategy session so you can get some insight and some deep dive and some hot seat coaching from me. 

And everyone who enters is also going to get into a draw or not only are they going to get one hour coaching session with me but you all know that we have the elite level member program. Where you hire me and my team to do a whole ton of crap for you in anywhere from 4 weeks to 3 months, to on-going. Because we have it as a sort of renewal program. So if you do both of those steps you were entered into a draw for a one hour coaching session with me and you get my team to work for you for an entire week for free. So the value of that is easily over a thousand dollars considering what I have to pay my team, my time, what we’re going to get done for you and all you have to do is 5 min. worth of works. So it is totally worth it for you to do this and get entered into that draw and you’re automatically a winner as soon as you leave that review and tag a friend. So please do that, this is happening all month long we’re also putting all of our programs on the Maximized Business resource page, the Work with Me page, they’re all on a discount. The biggest discount we’re giving away is 50% off or create your initial funnel program so you can go check that out. The only one that isn’t on discount is the maximized practitioner program because it is such an elite and there’s just so much ongoing value with that. If that is something you want to learn more about, we’ll certainly put the resources into the show notes for you to check that out. But all that’s happening for the month of June. Because we are almost at 200 episodes and again, I could not do this without you, I would not do this if it wasn’t for you. 

And I’m just so thrilled that I get to be in your ear buds for a little bit of time once a week and you get inspired or inspire you to take action or it motivates you. Because again, as practitioners we are not trained how to be business owners at all in school. We are in fact misled as to what the success rate looks like once we graduate and what it actually takes to be a successful practitioner. And I’m hoping to really help bridge that gap from graduation to starting up your own business or practice.

So today’s episode, what I was inspired to talk about are the 7 things that I have taken away over the past 197 episodes. So I’m going to go over each one of those things that I can certainly recommend to you to be very mindful of, to be thinking about, and to be really honing (7:35-7:45) any answer, any guru and I feel like they all come down to be about the same things, there’s a reason for that. Right? Your journey is your journey, but eventually we want you to be on a very similar journey as ours to get to that multi-six figures perhaps 7-figure level, or at least to that place where you feel calm, confident, systemized, the tactical stuff starting to get minimized. You’re deep into the creative strategy, the healing, the magic, and whatever price point that comes with that doesn’t really matter to me, but you have that lifestyle that allows you any freedom that you want to. So I’m going to talk about the top 7 things. 

The first one that I’ve certainly been working on for the past 6 months myself and every time I tap into this, I find the outcome is exactly what I wanted to be. The universe has always been watching over me since the very beginning of my career. I’ve just been very open to the signs, open to listening but every single time I made a huge leap in my business it always came from doing the inner work. It always came from reflection, it always came from really being intuitive, going with my gut feeling, sitting in the silence, starting to practice meditation, which I am not great at, like calming my mind is still a chore but I’m working on it with my muse headband. But every time I’ve stopped trying to feel like the tactical stopped feeling out the done for you templates, trying to rinse and repeat what other people were doing and really leaned into what I wanted to do, what I wanted to create, what my audience was asking for where are the gaps to my delivery, where the gaps in our industry. What is something unique that I can provide that no other practitioners doing? All of those big business leaps, came from inner work not external work and I see this every single time and based on what your questions are when you’re talking to a mentor, when you are listening to some go live and you’re asking about their strategy. If you’re always super focused on the tactical items, the strategy. What are the templates? Could you give me a copy? Could you design the perfect roadmap for X, Y, or Z? 

And you just literally want to download what somebody else’s doing upload into your business and you expect it to work? You are 100% missing the point. Running a business is so fun if you let it be fun, running a business is so carved out to exactly how you want it to be, if you are open to relinquishing some of that chaos, some of that anxiety, some of that control issue and allowing things to just fall into place. So if you are constantly always striving for Instagram programs; how do I make better reels? How do I do all the tactical work? How do I write better emails? All of that stuff is Important but it should not be the number 1 thing that you are grasping to learn. There should be a really beautiful blend of learning tactics while also deep diving into the inner strategy work. Into the rest, into the calm, into the retrospection, into the calming of the mind, sitting in silence as I said. Every single time I turned off my brain and just did the work, and just executed it and just said stop thinking and just left. The most amazing and profound leaps in my business happened. And as we become better at leaping into the business sphere, it’s amazing how it also trickles into our personal lives, into our relationships, into our marriage. I don’t think I would be the mom that I am if it wasn’t for all of these business leaps that I made all of this inner work that I did. I don’t think that I would be the wife that I am, and especially if you go back to listen to some of those previous episodes this year. Profound leaps and bounds in my marriage that I had to discover and let go and how quickly when you do this once it transforms and it ripples into the rest of your business career. Because all of the sudden these stories, these obstacles, these things none truths that you’re telling yourself and believing to be true, because it happened in your past or because someone indoctrinated it into your brain or because you heard a story from somebody else getting trolled and then X, Y, or Z happened or whatever. 

Those are not necessarily true, hard truths are totally different from fictional truths but we love to hold onto our fictional truths. We love to hold on to our stories. And sometimes we love to hold unto our victimhood of ‘I can’t do this because I’m shy. Or I can’t go live because I’m such an introvert.’ These are not necessarily binary facts, they’re just stories that we really like to cling onto because it takes a little bit of the pressure off. Or it takes a little bit of the blame off of ourselves because of an external factor that happened to us or could happen to us or whatever. Like the biggest leaps that I took without thinking were some major investments into some mentorship and coaching. Like we’re talking tens of thousands of US dollars barf, when you’re in Canada, US exchange is just so awful. Where I just need to know what they know. Hiring my first salary employee and then doing it again in the same year, and now we’re actually on route to triple our team again within the next month or two. These things are incredibly scary and bring up a lot of anxiety and a lot of ego where the ego’s like ‘nope this is a bad idea. Alarm, alarm, alarm. Stop what you’re doing, revert back to safety.’ 

A lot of the things that I had to personally work through and learn to shut out of my brain. A lot of these things came from the inner work, from just quieting the mind and just moving forward. And every time I’ve bet on myself, I’ve always won and that’s something that I carry with me very strongly is I know when I need to do something, when I need to bet big on myself I can do it. And the more you do it, the better you get at gambling on yourself. So that’s number 1, the biggest leaps in business for me always came from the inner work, not the external work. Stop getting super focused on the strategy, the templates, and the done for you courses. It all has to be so authentically yours and so connected with you that when you just take other people’s work and just plunk it into your business, there’s a reason why it’s not working for you. Right? 

Number 2. Stop chasing the right now and lean into the building for later. So my mentality from the very beginning of starting my business is every brick that I put into my business was something that was going to create a solid foundation that was going to pay off later. Every investment I made early on to my business, when I didn’t have the money. I knew I had 10, 15, 20 years to pay it off, that was always how I looked at it. I never looked at anything as right now, it has to happen right now, I need this to happen right now, I was like you know what? I have my career to pay this off if the worst case scenario was a complete bust, and I was so okay with that. I have always approached my business as a marathon, never as a sprint and there’s so many and I’m sure it’s coming from fear. I’m sure it’s coming from real places if I need to pay my bills and I totally get that. But when you are always living in this reactive place where I need to book up my calendar today, I need to make that extra sale, I need to do a launch and it needs to do really well. Guess what happens energetically? If you actually start repelling all of what it is that you’re asking for. Because you are just so focused on today, like the next 24 hours have to be amazing, the next week has to be amazing. And I encourage you to reframe that thinking, reframe that reactive place and stop chasing the money, stop pacing the leads and be inspired by the process. One of the rules we say inside the maximized practitioner program is you must be committed to the actions you take and not the results. It’s the actions that you are taking that are going to create a successful business. It’s never the results that you get in the next 24 hours, the next 72 hour, the next week and the next month. All the actions are building you to become a better person, a better CEO of your business and that’s where people that are just flying past you, they’re just like taking action all day and they don’t care. They do look at the data, they do look at the results, they make better decisions but they don’t let those results define them. They don’t let those results become their next story for why webinars don’t work, why launching doesn’t work, why doing social media doesn’t work. 

It’s not that it doesn’t work but you just didn’t find the right way to message yourself, to market yourself, you may not be comfortable with selling, you may not be bringing what they say on camera is a 100% you. Because 100% you look like a regular you on camera, you have to bring this energy which may just be a skill. You haven’t learned yet, you haven’t honed in yet. And so, when I started this business 10 years ago, that was always my mindset. Whatever I do now, I will for sure get it paid off by the end of my life. It’s not going to be money that I’m never going to see again because I knew what my potential was. I had my mindset right, I knew exactly that this was a long haul, this is not a sprint. And I always love the example of when people are trying to learn music for instance, it would be so irrational for me to buy you a guitar, give it to you and be like ‘ok play me your favorite Queen Song perfectly. Like Brian May does it.’ You’re going to be like ‘no, that’s ridiculous. I’m going to have to practice this for years.’ Well, if that logic applies for music, how can it not apply to a new skill that you are learning which is running a business and being an entrepreneur? 

Rarely do any health and wellness practitioners start off with an entrepreneurial mindset. Some of us have that gifts, some of us find it easier. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a learned skill, that doesn’t mean it was a learned thing that we had to get over. A learned ego quieting that we had to accomplish in order to drive our business. Some people just do it faster than others, some people pick up music faster than others. It doesn’t mean that you can’t learn it, but it is such a long game, social media is a long game, building up your email list is a long game. Sure, there are shortcuts to everything but you are not going to start your business tomorrow with a hundred thousand emails from scratch without any history of talking to a hundred thousand people. Right? There are some people that really over embellish their overnight success and I say that in quotations. But there’s always a back history to how these people launched the product for the first time and made a million dollars in the first year. There’s usually some history that they had in other businesses with other coaches that allowed them to create this sort of breakthrough in their business. So I’m not talking about those people, I’m talking about the average practitioner who quite frankly is absolutely struggling upon graduation. And it is because we are misled, the reality is misrepresented as to what success looks like. And we’re just kind of like ‘ok we did our job to give you all the skills that you need. See you later. You look just like all the other students we graduated, you know, good luck.’ And that’s a huge aspect of the business that I want to create, that I am creating that I have created to help people really maximize their messaging. 

So stop chasing the right now, stop being a reactive business owner, stop being a needy business owner. That energy is very repellant. Everything that you do today, every action that you take today is just another brick in your business that is going to create that foundation that will carry you well into your career. And that was my mindset from the very beginning, I knew kids were going to happen, I knew family was going to happen, I knew my time was going to become a commodity more so than it was when I started. So I was like, I’m going to hustle, hustle for the first four years until that family starts to materialize. And if I do everything right, I will have given myself a lot more time, leverage, and freedom which is exactly what happened. So stop chasing the right now and lean into the building for later. 

Number 3. Create your own lane and stay in it. Create your lane and stay in it, meaning, don’t worry about what other practitioners are doing. Please don’t fall into the trap of being a practitioner that shares posts on all of the health conditions all of the time or falls into these themes of ‘ok, February is cardiovascular month so I’m going to then post all about heart disease’ when it really has nothing to do with how you’re actually treating people in your practice or in your business. Create your own lane, create your own ecosystem of people who will love you. Who will do anything you ask them to do that will be loyal throughout your entire career. This is why it is so vitally important to create a unique branded methodology, something that we teach to all of our students, and something I build with all of our elite level members. When you do this, when you pick a lane it doesn’t mean you have to pick a niche because basically when you create a methodology you created a niche. But I think when people think of the term niche, they always think custom avatar worksheet, pick my demographic, pick like women’s health or PCOS, or whatever. Which is cool, it works for some but a lot of us don’t want to close that many doors, a lot of us aren’t that excited about one particular health condition. That when you create a methodology, you allow any framework, any process, any condition to fall onto that methodology so long as it’s in alignment with you which is why we have the GAT protocol. 

With our clinic, we’ve now launched that all year and we have 10 active members in the biggest protocol that we’ve ever created inside of our business. And people are starting to get to know us because of the GAT protocol and that’s all we talk about. So when you create this unique methodology, you immediately provide clarity to yourself with regards to where you want your business to go. When you provide clarity to yourself, guess what happens? The chaos, the anxiety, the overwhelm all goes away, the busyness doesn’t but the chaos, the overwhelm, the anxiety, the brain fog all goes away because now you have a clear direction on what your business is going to stand for and who you are going to reach out to. Who you want to treat and what you’re going to stand for. And within that lane, comes you being authentically you, your own beliefs, your own values, your own story, and you bring that to the limelight and those people that are connecting with you, your personality, your story are going to be in your ecosystem and they’re going to stay in that lane with you. Because you don’t need to be a small fish in a huge pond which I think a lot of practitioners strive to be because they’re chasing what other influencers and what other online people are doing. I am so happy to be a big fish in a small pond. Staying within my province, helping all the people that are close to me in my community. I would love to be just a local celebrity and that is good enough for me because there’s still a ton of money and a ton of opportunity here. 

And sometimes we get so blinded by the possibility, the grass must be greener outside of my tiny little spot on this earth that I have to reach out to the masses in order to be successful. I haven’t been able to do that successfully, I find it way harder because now I’m competing against way more people so I love keeping my business simple, I love keeping my strategy simple and that’s why we just stick within Ontario even with our online program. Cool if we sell it to other people outside of the province, awesome, but we will only work with patients one on one if they live in Ontario. There’s it, wrapped on people that lived in Ontario. 

So when you do this, when you stay in your own lane it doesn’t minimize how busy you are as I said. You know collectively our entire team is putting in over a hundred hours a week. Every single person on my team, so we have 2 people at 20 hours a week, I’m easily working 20-40 hours a week depending on the week and what’s going on. We have reception working. So we are easily putting in a ton of hours, but we’re doing it by staying in our lane, and by fixing our lane, and by filling in the holes, sealing up the cracks, and making tweaks, and making our system better, making our offer better and making our delivery better. And we are still making multi-six figures. Create your own lane, don’t worry about what other people are doing, don’t worry about how many followers people have because you can buy those. Don’t worry about how many publications people are on because you can buy those. The reality is a lot of the success you are seeing from the majority of the people was purchased with money. It wasn’t handed to them, it wasn’t that they became hella famous and Forbes reached out to them. You can buy those publications a hundred percent, you can go to any digital marketing firm and ask them to find you followers even if they’re from the Philippines which is what loads up the follower list. Just stay in your own lane, followers, likes, engagement, it helps but I promise you that those metrics aren’t going to be the driving force to how amazing your business is. 

Our Facebook page now has 17 hundred followers and we’re a multi-six figure business. Right? So we just stay in our lane, we do our own thing but we make our lane look amazing. We make our road like the slickest gold paved road that any patient would crave to be on and we continue to nurture it. We continue to make it better, we continue to make it more desirable and we don’t worry about what everybody else is doing. We don’t worry about all the other health conditions, we could be treating whatever falls within the GAT protocol and is in alignment with our vision that is what we are doing. And leaning into that and being comfortable with that is very hard for practitioners. We love to make things complicated, we love to make things harder. If things are getting too easy, we like to spice it up and do a complete 180 pivot and then wonder why our life is crazy. Again, you don’t have to do that. 

Number 4. Big one; stop making assumptions about your audience and what they can afford. We did an entire podcast episode on this about the top 5 assumptions you are making and should not be. This provided me with the most freedom and this was the turning point with my team members as I was entering them within our systems in the GAT protocol that I could see the stress and the worry just from being released from their shoulders and the next thing that went up is all of our upsell revenue went up huge. We need to stop making assumptions that our patients don’t want to know what all of the lab tests are. They don’t want to know what all of the supplements are, it is our job to lay out every single option that they have and let them choose. And let it them be their choice and from a review perspective, if you’re worried about a bad review, I will tell you every single time if someone finds out that you could have done a test earlier on and they just wasted six months with you, that’s going to get you a bad review instead of just telling them what was in the beginning. If someone finds out that you took it way too easy, way too cautious they got no improvement and they went to somebody else who was not making these assumptions and just laid it all out. They paid more in the beginning but got the results they wanted to, that’s going to cause a bad review. 

We are very transparent, we are not sneaky about prices, we don’t have a huge mark-up, stay within the guidelines but we aren’t afraid to put it all out there and say this is what I think you need, here’s what is going to cost you, what do you think? Yey or ney? If it’s a ney? Cool. We’ll readdress this later if it’s a yey, then let’s do it. Right? Stop making assumptions about your audience and I will link to that previous episode in the show notes. You can listen to those top 5 assumptions that you need to stop making, please stop making them. 

And then 5. Never ever put your business growth into someone else’s hands. Big big one. Too often I’ve heard the horror stories of independent contractors, thinking reception has their back. Thinking all of their direct billing was going through and collected, thinking that all of their no-shows, their cancellations are being followed up with. And then finding out that they lost thousands upon thousands of dollars of revenue because the clinic wasn’t doing what they thought or assumed that they were doing. As an independent contractor, you are only renting a room and I don’t care what the business owner’s promising you, I don’t care what they say they are going to do for you, I don’t even care if it’s in your contract. Because actions of course speak louder than words. You are a sole proprietor, you are an independent contractor, and you are renting out a room. If it’s in a multi-disciplinary clinic and there’s a ton of traffic, cool, you’re going to grow faster. If it’s a random building that has a room, fine you have to work a little bit harder. But you should be controlling every aspect of your business regardless of whether they have reception or not. Regardless of whether they have a website or not, regardless of whether they have their own Facebook page or not. It is your business, you run it because you need to be able to sever ties from them any time you need to, to do whatever you want to with your business. And if you put too much into their business and too much into their growth and not yours, you will be the one who loses every single time. Because the clinic owner will always try to get—the whole reason you’re there is to make revenue from you; it’s a business relationship. So you also need to defend your business and be very careful about letting go too much. 

So I have done this and have been very wrong, where I have jumped into a new clinic as a new grad where they told me there were eleven other MD’s and they’re going to feed you etc. and lost money every single month by seeing literally one or two patients a month. It was abysmal because the height that they delivered being so naïve was absolutely not what translated in real life. I have been in practices where I let reception control everything and slowly but surely my bookings were getting less and less. There was no follow up and then they jacked up my rent like a thousand percent, so I was paying a split 60-40 and they’re like you know what? We’re going to make it a flat 3k after a year of trying to build up their business. Going to the trade shows doing all these things and I laughed. You know, in tears, in shock that transpired and I had to start all over again. So I’ve been there, where I learned the most is I need to do my own reception as much as humanly possible. I do all my own direct billing as much as humanly possible, I do all of my invoicing as much as humanly possible. And they can write me a check for what I owe them, happy to pay them but I will control as much of the booking as much of that revenue, as much of that pipe flow into my business as I can. To the point where we’re even having patients say please don’t even go through reception anymore, if you need to make an appointment, change an appointment please go directly through our team because I just don’t believe in the competence of people that are getting paid minimum wage and they have no skin in the game. So please do not put your hands into someone else or please don’t put your business into someone else’s hands. We have quite a few episodes on that which I will link to the show notes. Please just control every single aspect of your business. 

And if they are telling you that you have to use their logo, that you have to use their website, that you have to use their Facebook page. Those are alarm bells that they’re in it for them and they’re not in it to support you, you just don’t sign that contract. Right? You build your own business simultaneously, sure be a team player but you build your own site, your own social media, all of those things every single employee that I have are building their brand, their business alongside of working for me, and that’s great. Please do that, right? I’m not expecting them to give all of their time to me and have nothing to show for it in the end. You just need to take responsibility over all of that and then don’t be shocked if in the end you get burned because you didn’t. Right? And I’m saying this a little bit more bluntly than the other numbers that we were going over because it’s a very important conversation. It’s only coming from what I’ve seen happen, what I personally experienced and I don’t want that to happen for you. 

Number 6. Lead from the back. When I was first contemplating hiring a project manager and an employee to take over my first clinic. I loved what I heard at a mentorship live event where if you think about a wolf pack. Wolf packs, wolves for me I get this excitement I’m immediately drawn to them there’s something about wolves that I love. I’m not an animal from a homeopathic perspective, I’m very much a mineral but there’s something about the beauty, the grace the ferociousness of a wolf that I just am so attracted to and I see that a lot in my German Shepherd King who’s a king shepherd, mixed, and I just love that he has this wolf-like look to him and I really resonate with that energy. So what does a leader of a wolf pack do? If they have the entire tribe and they never go in the front, the older dogs of the tribe are at the very front lines as they’re traveling. So let’s say they’re travelling to a different den, so the older pups, the wounded pups and those dogs are always at the front. The teenage-like 20 year old dogs if you’re getting it that energy, that spunk, that vitality, they stay in the middle. And then the leader of the pack always stays at the back. And the reason why he does that is because he wants to be able to see his entire pack always and make sure that no one gets left behind, that everybody is in their place where they’re supposed to be, everybody is doing the job that they’re supposed to be. And if not, he can then come and pick up the slack or guide that dog that’s gone astray back into the pack. 

And that really resonates with me as a leader. So I didn’t put hiring and delegating in this list because you just know that that’s something you need to do, you’re going to hear that from everyone. It’s going to be on everyone’s list but I thought talking about leadership was more important. Because as you start to hire people, even reception administrative assistance, social media managers, virtual assistance, and then employees, dare I say even contractors could be part of your pack that you need to lead if you want to have a successful business and a united family. Leadership is going to be where you have the least amount of turn over, where you have the most amount of productivity, where you create a culture that’s built on positivity, on driving forward, on ideas, on creativity, on growth, on scaling. That comes from leadership. So if you’re micromanaging, if you’re like ‘I’ll just do it myself.’ If you are taking over for reprimanding, then you are no longer leading, you’re just being a really bad boss. And that is not someone anybody wants to work for. When you lead from the back, you are allowing your team to make mistakes and then you have a conversation with them and say ‘ok we made that mistake, here’s how we won’t make that again, here’s how we move forward.’ If you see that there are aspects of your business that are falling apart, it is not your team’s fault, it’s that you haven’t built the right process or the right system to support that person. 

And then the final thing about leadership is making sure that you only attract the right people into your team. And if there is someone standing out like a sore thumb because they are not the right fit and you’re either afraid to fire them or you’re like ‘oh no, who’s going to fill their spot or how much money are we going to lose or whatever.’ And you keep them on, slowly but surely that is going to create this toxicity within everybody else and you need to also then stand up as a leader and get that person out of there as quickly as you can. We had one receptionist who I kept on for probably 10 months too long, she was on a 12th month contract and I knew in my gut that she was bad. She did good work, she was fast but she was toxic, she was gossipy, she was taking up the practitioner’s time by just chatting about random things. She basically missed like 75% of her shifts within the first 4 months and I still kept her on because I just didn’t have that confidence to fire her and I just said you know what? She challenged me for a raise, I said there’s no way you’re going to get a raise. You’re basically doing the bare minimum things that I needed you to do and you’re not good for—I didn’t say all of this, but in my head I’m like you’re not good for this clinic but I just haven’t found your replacement yet. And she challenged me and said you know what? I’m just going to look for another job and immediately trust was broken. Luckily she did that the day before her contract ended which I wouldn’t even have looked at. Had she not confronted me and then I just fired her. The contract was over, she was shocked that I did that and I was like well, what do you expect? And that is the one instance that I was to go back to about not firing someone sooner. And we didn’t have reception for months, it took me probably four months to find her replacement and that just meant I had to show up and do reception. My contractors had to do their own reception, I didn’t care, and that was just what we had to do and wasn’t just going to put a bum in the seat to fill the job. I was always going to look for that right person. 

So lead from the back as you are growing your team, as you are starting to hire people remember that you lead from the back, you don’t lead from the front and do all the work for people and you allow them to make mistakes. And you allow them to grow on their own, because when you do that, when you allow people to grow and you show them how much you respect them your business will flourish. In the hugest shutdown lockdown pandemic that we’ve ever experienced, we have grown every single year. In team members and in revenues so it doesn’t matter what’s going on in the world, if you have collected the right people and you’re leading them correctly, you will grow. 

And then the final one, number 7. Always be ready to do the dirty work, which is the perfect segway from number 6. You should, even if there is reception at your business, learn every single aspect of the job. Every time I’ve worked for a business I have always wanted to be trained on how I could at least do the bare minimum; take payment, re-book, cancel. At least the bare minimum and then eventually you get comfortable with the systems and you can start pulling reports and things like that. You need to learn how to do all of the reception work, you need to be comfortable with cleaning the floors, cleaning the clinic, we’ve had patients refused to come back into an office that I don’t own but because reception isn’t making the time or isn’t trained properly, the clinic was starting to look really dirty and we’ve had patients say ‘well I’m never coming back there again, so long as this is dirty, I’m never coming back.’ You just don’t know why patients aren’t returning and most of the time they’re not going to tell you. So be ready to clean. I went in and did an entire day of steam cleaning my one clinic. I could’ve hired out. I was like you know what? It would just be faster if I just do it, it’s going to take me a couple of hours and I did it. We do it once a year and I’m fine with doing that, I’m fine with getting down on my hands and knees and doing the dirty work. 

You need to know how to do bookings and if you don’t trust your clinic to do the bookings for you, buy your own booking system. In every single clinic I’ve been a contractor in, I’m still using my Acuti booking system and then let the clinic know when somebody booked online. In the one office, we don’t have that capability and it really is a hindrance. And we haven’t figured out the work around for it which is another reason we just have people filter right in directly to us. But knowing the dirty work, knowing all of those pieces, getting comfortable with every aspect of how the business runs even if you are an independent contractor will make you run your business better, will make you more humble about all of the work that is going into running your business. And therefore will make you a better business owner in the long run. What’s wonderful about our systems is I am so on top of them, I know exactly what the systems are because I have a hand in creating them even if reception is doing it, even if the employees are doing it, I have a hand in every single one of what the changes are. How can we make things better that if reception ever had to bail on a day and we needed them, I can hop in and it’s like nothing has changed. I know exactly where they left off, I know exactly what I need to do and the day goes smoothly. And if you can do that, if reception is gone and you’re not like ‘oh well, I don’t know how to run this system I don’t know how to rebook, so we are just going to have to call you back. No.’ Learn it, learn how to do all of those things and if you can’t do it through your clinic, do it with your own stuff. Even if it means doing it on your own Google Calendar and then relay it back to the clinic later, find ways of working around things if they shut down. Because that is all revenue that you are losing, it has nothing to do with the clinic, right? You have to be able to make the systems, you have to be able to have back-ups. Yes, it’s going to cost you a little bit more, this is your livelihood. This is your business, if it cost you $20 a month to have your own booking system, do that. If it costs you an extra hundred dollars a month to have your own invoicing platform that does emails and all of those things, get it. That is what is going to help you grow fast. 

So I’m going to repeat the 7 things that I’ve learned in the past 200 episodes and I would love to hear your feedback on this. One; the biggest leaps in business come from the inner work not from the external work. Two; stop chasing the right now and lean into building for later. Marathon not a sprint. Three; create your own lane and stay in it. Four; stop making assumptions about what your audience and your patients and customers can afford. Number five, never put your business growth into someone else’s hands, something I cannot ask you to do more. Six, lead from the back and seven, always be ready to do the dirty work. Those are the 7 things that I’ve learned and have held with me for the past 200 episodes the past decade and I’m passing them on to you. So please write a review on iTunes or wherever it is that you are listening to this episode, tag a friend under one of the tiles in Instagram @andreamaximnd you’ll automatically get a free seat inside our four hour half day strategy intensive in July and entered into a draw for hiring me and my team for an entire week to do whatever we can get done for you in that week and I’m telling you it’s pretty much whatever we can get done in that week. Plus a one hour mentorship session with me. Thank you guys so much for listening. I cannot wait for the next 3 episodes, we are heading for a major milestone and I’m so thrilled that you are along for a ride. I’m Andrea Maxim and I’m out.