The Key Business Systems and Strategies Needed to See Your Business Thrive [Ep #206]

In this episode, we are going to have a real talk on the key business systems and strategies you need to have in your business. If you want to have more revenue, more bookings, and see your business thrive in the next couple of years, because if you don’t implement these things, you may not be around much longer. Stay tuned.

I’m Andrew Maxim. And this is the profitable practice podcast made for practitioners who are ready to build a six-figure practice with a million-dollar impact that also lets you close your laptop and be present with your family anytime you want to. Together, we will challenge the antiquated ways of running a practice, we will merge our brick and mortar online and build systemize and grow as maximized, practitioners. Welcome to the podcast.

Hey, everyone, you’re here for another amazing episode of the podcast. And I am so grateful to all of you who continue to listen, who continue to share with me your feedback, your stories, who are booking the call, so I can get to know you more intimately. I just love it.

So, we’re going to have a bit of truth talk today, something that I have been seeing in and amongst my new team members, which we’re going to talk about a little thing called Business Essentials. Inside the maximize practitioner method, we have three pillars that I firmly believe you need to have complete control over and kind of go through graduate from to achieve the business practice of your dreams. And notice, I didn’t say it had to be a six-figure practice or a seven-figure practice, the business of your dreams could be having time freedom and showing up when you want to it could be having a huge profit margin. Whatever your business looks like, whatever you want it to look like, is what I want for you. But it still doesn’t mean that there are some fundamental pillars that you need to learn to master and graduate from as a maximized practitioner.

So, the three pillars that we talked about in our program, first are foundational experience. Everyone needs to create their own experiences, to build the confidence to be a solid practitioner. That means trying all the social media strategies. That means trying all the different tactics. That means treating all the people, that means getting yourself in front of as many people as you can to give yourself the data to firmly say, I love this, I don’t love this, I want more of this in my business, and I want less of this in my business. No one can tell you how to set up your practice except for you. There are going to be lots of people that give advice, but you need to travel your own path. You need to create your own experiences, you need to have your own flubs here own mistakes, you need to lose some money to know where to put your money. All of that is something that’s a learned thing, something that my mentor says there’s something about knowledge and knowing and the knowing allows you to step up and be the type of practitioner that you want to be. The second is Business Essentials, which we are absolutely going to be mastering in this episode. And then the final one is modernized marketing. And that’s where we’re really leveraging our message, we’re really creating that ecosystem, we’re leaning into advertising, we’re leaning into more of the organic reach, we’re leaning into more of what we love that is going to help to scale our business.

But for today, we’re going to talk about Business Essentials. Now inside the Business Essentials pillar will be all of the things that kind of create your house of cards. And I’m saying that very loosely because we don’t want you to build a business on a house of cards that can fall apart at any moment. We want you to build a house of bricks. So, these are kind of all the bricks that you need to build your Lego house, let’s say because I love Lego.

So, the Business Essentials is going to be the kind of your internal funnels that you put your patients through, it’s going to be starting to really lean into your branding, your branded protocol, your messaging, creating your niche ecosystem. But there’s a huge part that unfortunately, I worry for you especially if you’re in the first three years of your business. That if you don’t have full control over where the money is coming and going in your business, then you can’t be upset that your business is not growing or making the revenues that you want it to, and I am going to explain.

So, we’ve brought on two new team members inside of our team. And the biggest source of anxiety for them is the biggest source of overwhelming for both of them being that they’re relatively new graduates being that they came from practices that do all of the things for them. Whereas in my practice, in the way I’ve always been, is, I need to know where that money is coming and going, I need to know what’s going on with my schedule, I need to know what’s going on with direct billing, I need to know do we have any outstanding invoices. So if you’re coming from a clinic that is catering to you or you’re coming from some sort of a contract where they collect all the payments, and you think it’s a great idea because it saves you time and money, then again, you can’t complain, when you find out that you are owed over $1,000 of unfound revenue from people that just weren’t followed up with people that had partial payments on their visits and weren’t followed up with for the remaining balance. Because the clinic, honestly, if the clinic owners, a practitioner, they’re only going to be focusing and putting their energy on their money that they’re bringing in the money that they get to take home 100%, they’re not going to have the time to chase after every single independent contractor, schedule, outstanding payments, direct billing, and all those other things unless they have like an office administrator who just does that. And not many practices are set up that way. They’re usually all run by practitioners.

So, when we were onboarding our team members and teaching them the whole gap protocol way in the maxim movement way, the part that was really tripping them up and really scaring them was learning how to invoice, learning how to use e-claims, and doing direct billing, chasing people for outstanding balances. And that was scary to me. And I know that they are not the only two people that are experiencing that I know, they’re not the only practitioners that are coming from clinics that do all the things for them, therefore they don’t learn those skills.

It is a business essential for you to know how every single aspect of your business is being run, it is a business essential that you remember that you are an independent contractor in somebody else’s location, but it is your business within their business. And again, you cannot relinquish control of your business in any way, shape or form, unless you’ve built a solid system and structure and reporting system around it. So even once a month, you can see clearly Okay, who still owes? Was this all followed up with, you know, where did my cancellations come from what percentage of my patients are not rebooking that is all on you. And I know I’m getting I’m kind of up on my soapbox here. But it is the money. This is the whole reason why we are in the business; we are in the business to make an impact. And we are in the business to give ourselves a lifestyle that we crave that we deserve, after all the education after jumping through all the hoops after dealing with all the resentment towards the fact that we are service providers who are thrust into becoming entrepreneurs, and we didn’t sign up for that. So, you are an entrepreneur, you are running a business, and it does come down to revenues in the end. Unless it doesn’t, and then, you know, you’re just you don’t need to listen to the rest of this. But I’m going to say for 99% of us that are listening to this right now. And you know who you need to share this content with as well. Revenues are a big reason for why we either think our business is thriving or failing, why our lifestyle is not where we want it to be, and why our time freedom is so locked up in doing all the admin work, and the tactical work and not the strategy work that allows us to grow and scale.

You need to learn and if, if now you’re like, oh crap, Andrea is so right. I don’t know where my invoices are coming from. I don’t know if this money is being followed up with, I don’t know how much direct billing is being done it. This is kind of like your wakeup call that I strongly encourage you to have an appointment, set up a meeting time with the clinic owner or reception, and figure out a strategy that’s going to work for you so that you have a lot more control over this and you have to learn these skills. Even inside my clinics where I am an independent contractor. We do all of our invoicing except for what the clinic claims to put through on their POS system, which means I’m paying for an invoicing software, we also have the ability to take payment through our invoicing software or with a mobile app. So, I’m paying those POS expenses, which you’re paying for anyway, in your contract. We do all of our own direct billing. So, we are constantly on top of how much people’s insurances cover, how much do they owe us, we have a system every single week to notify our lead reception, who kind of manages the three offices, who you need to follow up with. And following up with people is a pain in the butt. So please start collecting credit card information on people’s files, we use the EMR Jane now. Huge learning curve. For me, that was a huge shift me, because I’ve been paper files this whole time. So, we just started using Jane, I think at the end of June or July, and you can create a form in Jane, that you can ask for their credit card information and get them to fill it in after the initial visit. If you don’t feel comfortable doing it before you actually meet the person. This has to be a mandatory part of the business because too often, you have so much money in accounts receivable that you may never get if you don’t have a system in place to chase after it. If you just met the person, you don’t know what kind of person they are, and some people will cheat you out of that money. And some people will not resonate with you and won’t build that relationship and they won’t care. So, you have to have to be tracking that money. And outside of that, you have to be tracking your cancellations. You have to see how many people are canceling and not rebooking. What is my cancellation rate? What is my retention rate? How many appointments are these patients actually staying on with me for before they never come back again, these are all parts of Business Essentials? This is all part of that funnel that you need to be working on internally, to make sure that your business is running efficiently. And we can absolutely support you with that if you’re just like, Oh my gosh, I know nothing. Then reach out to me, the maximize practitioner program may be the right step for you. That program is really built out for people within the first five years of their business, who want systems and strategies. And they want to step up to their business and a much more authoritative way while simultaneously creating a relatively simplified business. Or what we’ve done with our elite level members as well. This is the kind of hybrid of mentorship and my team actually doing the work for you. Because we all know that you don’t need more coaching, a bigger to-do list, and more things on your plate because you’re maxed out. So, the elite-level membership, we’ve actually created stats boards for our elite-level members that we fill in every single week for them. So, they can start tracking revenue before split revenue after expenses, new patients’ IV patients supplements sold lab sold, we’re doing all of that for them if that is something that they need. And we had our latest elite level member be like damn like since I started looking at the numbers and tracking things and really solidifying those Business Essentials, more people are booking in my business is starting to really grow like energetically quick shift happened for this individual. And he was just like, damn, like now that I’m showing up in a more authoritative way now that I’m showing up in a more confident way, my energy and what I’m putting out to the universe has completely changed. And it’s starting to impact bookings and revenue. And I’m starting to get to the goals that I want to.

So if you need support in any way to get this done, I am here for you 100%. So book that 30-minute business strategy call with me the link is in the show notes. Reach out to me over dm at @AndreaMaximND  if you’re like oh my god, Andrea, you have scared the bejesus out of me. I need support, what is my next step. And then we do have a free training basically a replay training of our entire strategy, our maximized practitioner method in the webinar, and the title is how to merge your practice online and it’s really showing you everything that we talked about inside the maximize practitioner program, as well as some strategies that you can start taking away right away. So go out and check those free resources reach out to me, but please, please do not let one more day go by where you do not have 100% have complete control over every aspect of how your business is running. Please do not be lazy and let somebody else put your business’s fate in their hands because they don’t have your best interest at heart. They will not put you first over themselves. That’s just the nature of the business. I’m a business owner, clinic owner, I get it, I totally get where the energy comes from compared to me versus my independent contractors versus my employees. There’s a totally different energetic dynamic there is the reality of the situation. So put yourself into the conversation, schedule the meetings, create the systems, reach out for help when you need it from me or someone with who you align with. And let’s get this done. Let’s make sure that the rest of your business is built off those Lego bricks, and not cards. I’m Andrew Maxim. And I’m out. If you liked this episode, be sure to subscribe so you are notified when a new episode is posted. leave a review and drop me a message on Instagram @AndreaMaximND , as I love hearing from you. Just so you know we also host a video version of most of our episodes on https://maximizedbusiness.ca thank you so much for listening, and I will see you on the next episode.