This Strategy Alone Got Me Out of Consultation [Ep #180]

In this episode, I’m going to break down the number 1 reason why I was able to completely take myself out of doing office consultations. At the very beginning of this year, and if it wasn’t for the strategy it never would’ve been possible. Stay tuned. 

A lot of times practitioners are saying that they don’t have enough time, they are overwhelmed, they are anxious. They want all of the things, they know what their business to go, and they know what their dream end point looks like. And yet, they don’t get there. They don’t get there at the end of the year, they don’t get there in 2 years, and they don’t get there in 10 years. Sometimes they don’t even get there by the end of their career. And the worst thing that can happen is you look back and you say ‘If only. If only I had done things differently. If only I had managed my time differently. If only I had been braver, if only I had been more fearless.’ And the strategy is out there, people talk about the systems that they use to grow their business as a sole-preneur. To grow their team, to scale, to do all of these things and yet we don’t want to listen. Maybe we’re not ready to listen for it, maybe it just doesn’t make sense. If you’re anything like me, I am not a data or analytics person at all. I hate data, I hate analytics, I hate tracking things even though that’s what everyone tells you that you should be doing. And it was something that I had to get that negative talk out of my brain, walk through the discomfort of doing things that aren’t necessarily in my wheelhouse, are not things that I really enjoy doing but it does make a difference. 

And this strategy is something that we’re constantly reminding our maximized practitioner program students about. We are talking about it on the podcast and this strategy alone singlehandedly was the reason why, as of December 31st I finally stopped doing 1 on 1 consultations. I stopped going into the office, and I just managed my team virtually now, thank goodness! Because we are homeschooling our children which is a whole other issue, stress, whatever you want to call it, all swear words all at once. And we are still making money, I’m still making revenue and I don’t have to do any of the work and I finally feel free. I feel like this weight has been lifted off my shoulders that I have been fighting against for at least 5 years. I can probably think back to when I was in my 3rd year of practice, how I was already starting to think of my exit strategy. How can I get out of doing the day to day, how could I get out of doing this administrative tasks. How could I start to get the patient flow on automate, which is exactly why we created our unique branded solution which is the gap protocol and that’s now where we’re getting known for. Instead of always having to think and research and doing new things; what are the demographics that I wanted to attract, who are the cases that I want to attract, we don’t attract by niche conditions we attract by our niche protocol. And that puts us into a really nice boundary where we can still have some of that uniqueness come through. It’s not totally repetitive but we do stay within a particular wheelhouse. 

All of these things are involved because of this one strategy, and I’m not going to take full credit on it. I have seen other people talk about it in their own language, I learned it from Alec Charfin working with his billionaire code accelerator program which I think is renamed. And now we adopted what we call our 1, 90, 30, 7, 1 program which stand for annual. So every year at the very end of the year our team will create what our annual targets are going to be and that’s going to be a revenue target, and that’s also going to be a numerical target that you can track. We always track revenue of all the clinics; we have 3 clinics that we’re running and we track our new patient numbers. Then at your 30 days, every month we again, go back through or we create what our 30 day targets or goals are going to be to achieve those annual targets. We do that at the beginning of the year and then we do it every single month all year long where we start by reflecting on what did we get done and then we create ‘ok, what are going to do this year?’ I skipped one which is our 90’s, so I went 1-30 but I forgot our 90 which is our quarterly. And the quarterly is the exact same thing. What are we going to do in the quarter, that’s going to get us to our annual and then every quarter we go back through what we did and our monthly is going to get us to everything that we wanted to do and are committed to in our quarterly. And then what we do is every week, we do a weekly huddles—so this is our 7. So we’re at 1, 90, 30, 7—so here’s what we do all of the micro metrics, so we will track revenues for all of the practices. We will track our new patient numbers but then we’re also going to track things like, Likes, Followers, Email open rate. We track podcast download, we track what freebies people are opting into, we are tracking each of our team members have their own google sheet where they’re tracking how many products they sold, how many new patients they sold, how many patients they converted on their own, what was their rebooking rate, how many cancellations they have that week. We do our Facebook Ads spend and how many people we brought in because the Facebook Ad and the revenue that brought in or profits, we track all of the things that we can and we’re even going to be going into detail with our social media post, our lives all of that. 

Now I said at the very beginning of this that I hate tracking, I hate metrics, it is not something that I want to do. So I have a VA in the Philippines who I hired and she will do all of that metric sheet for me, so all I do when I show up on that weekly huddle that we have as an entire team to go through the numbers is I only work on the revenue numbers. That’s my job, that’s what I do, that’s the only part that I fill in and then annual fill in the rest, and then my team members are also responsible for what they did for the week. And then we celebrate the numbers, or we say ‘oh yeah, it was because of x, y, or z.’ but it’s a great way to keep the team motivated and as someone who’s no longer in the office, it’s a great way for me to see how the office is running while I’m not there. 

And then finally, so we did 1, 90, 30, 7, 1; the 1 is every single day. So I have an action planner that I literally have 7 on my shelf right now that I could show you. And I am so one of those people that buys the action planners because you’re so in those zone of wanting to do all of the reflection and the ‘my top 3 goals’ and ‘this is my to-do list’ and etc. So this year being that it’s a new year, I promised myself that I would absolutely do it. I have been 6 days strong, yay me, and still working a way at it. But that is the final piece that is now showing up at every single week. So before I had the planner we run all of this, our 1, 90, 30, 7, 1 plan on our air table. Air table free and so when at the beginning of the week, when we’re getting ready for our weekly huddle. Everyone will put their commitments for the week, at every single stage that we talk about we are aiming for 80% completion. So we’re not asking for perfection, we’re not asking anybody to get all of the things done. Because life happens, but at least we want to be hitting 80%. And I can tell you, every single week we’ve gotten to 80%, every single month we’ve gotten to 80%, every single quarter we’ve gotten to 80%. And at the very end of our targets we got more than 80%. So imagine what it would be like for you if you could get 80% or more of your to-do list done on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, on a monthly basis, on a quarterly basis and crush your annual targets that you want to achieve. Because everything is feeding into each other as we go up the line. And that is exactly why every time I go live with our MPP members, I’m reminding them ‘ok it’s the end of the month, make sure that you’re doing your monthly, make sure that you’re setting up your weeklies with yourself.’ That’s how it was for me before I hired my team. I had to learn all of the metrics for myself, I had to be committed to doing it and it took me a solid 3 weeks to wrap my head around it. To fight through it I would have it in front of me day in and day out, just setting it all up. And it was a struggle, it was not something that I wanted to do; it was not enjoyable for me, I hated it, I caused a lot of noise and pressure. But I sailed through it and I got to the other end. 

Now, my Sundays are geared to do all of my revenue tracking which means my books are up to date every single week, which was never something that I had ever accomplished before. And then I set up my weekly accomplishments or things that I want to do, and so now my action plan is just a physical version of that. But without having that sort of strategy, without knowing what it is that you’re trying to achieve on a weekly basis, without knowing what it is that you’re ultimate super bowl goal it is. There’s no way that you’re going to get into a place where your business is 1, you are getting things done. Because we all know the difference between where you are now and what I have achieved, or what somebody else has achieved that you’re following or aspired to become is the speed to which we take action. That is always going to be the difference between you getting what you want and not getting it. Is how quickly you are willing to take action and it’s not that I’m doing this fearlessly, it’s not that I’m doing this without anxiety or sleepless nights or anything like that hiring team members is hell a scary. It is hell a scary because it is an expense that you don’t know if it’s actually going to work out for you. 

But when I, on board my team members, show them our schedule strategy and show them how often we have this touch points and they know the goals, and what we’re trying to achieve. And they’re brought into how this 1, 90, 30, 7, 1 framework looks, they just ease into the role. They know exactly where we’re going as a team, they know exactly what the courses of our ship so to speak. It’s way easier to on board people when they know what the vision is as opposed to just sitting them out on the desk and saying ‘this is what I want you to do.’ But it also holds them accountable, and I think whenever somebody is enrolled there is a level of autonomy that we all want. But there’s also a level of responsibility that we want to have and something that we are owning and something that we’re doing and that is also very motivating for a team. 

If I did not put the strategy together, I would not have the confidence to hire anyone other than reception. I would not have the confidence to hire salary employees to take over my practices, like my babies I built both of them up from nothing. And to step away and just give people free reign and just be like ‘take care of my patients, follow our protocols etc.’ that was tough. It was really tough. And even now as I’m shutting that last practice I’m having to let go a lot of the worry, a lot of the ego, a lot of the concerns that I have ‘is this going well? Are people going on board? Are they going to love my new employee?’ And it’s been sailing, and it even unites us as a team every time we have these meetings. So again, we’re having meetings every single day on our daily huddles. We are having—except for Friday. We’re taking Friday off as a team, we do our monthly meetings, we do our quarterly meetings and we have an annual meeting. And so, what is that? 52 plus a whole bunch. So that’s a lot of meetings, but they’re all micro meetings because we know exactly what we’re going through. We know exactly how we viewed the previous whatever, we know exactly what our tasks for the month are because we did our quarterly. All of these things are just fed into each other. And again, meetings are not just something that I enjoy. Right before meeting I have to mentally prepare and be like ‘ok we’re going into a meeting, you are the CEO, you have to bring the energy.’ And it’s tough some days, and there’s some days that I don’t want to do it but I have to. That is what your role is as a maximized practitioner, as that business CEO person. 

So even if you are still a person of one this strategy which I know you have heard from so many other people that they’re doing something very similar, it works. But it sucks at the beginning if you are not someone that likes to track or hold yourself accountable on a daily basis or learn how to commit to the goals that you set up every quarter and only those. That was probably the biggest thing that I have to fight against is we love shiny objects. We love being distracted, we love doing all of the things that aren’t on our to-do list, because the things that are on our to-do list are the hardest. Or we create them out to be the hardest and we like to put them off as the very last thing ‘oh check my emails, for sure I’d do that before working on my program.’ And yet those things that you want to commit to are the things that are actually going to grow your business and grow your revenue, and grow those critical numbers that you put at the beginning of the year when you set out your intentions for the year. And so when our biggest rule is, until you’ve gotten your weekly commitments done, you can’t do anything else. Until we’ve gotten all of our monthly things done, you can’t do anything else. Until we’ve gotten all of our quarterly projects done, we can’t add anything new the entire quarter. And so this is again staying high branded, this is why staying so committed to the process, so hyper focused on your goals; it allows you to be actionable, it allows you to get things done that you’ve been putting off forever. We accomplished what I had been wanting to do in 2 years. We did it in a quarter, it was insane but we did it. 

So then I ask you, what would that look like for you and your business to get to years’ worth of work done in three months? That is why this strategy is so powerful and it is also why we’ve been able to achieve so much and such a quick period of time as me doing it myself and on boarding my team. And so if you know your time is more valuable than anything else right now, and you want to get some extra support I would love for you to book in that strategy call. The link is on the show notes and definitely go watch our video training. It’s a replay from a webinar master class we did about how you can start to merge your practice online. But why I think it’s important is because I break down the top 3 goal blockers that practitioners tend to have when it comes to just running their business in general especially in 2021. So either or both, book that call with me, let’s get strategizing together. Go watch that training and of course we have a ton of free resources on our website maximizebusiness.ca So hopefully this was an inspiration for you, thank you so much for listening. I’m Andrea Maxim, and I’m out.