When Your Entire Team Shuts Down Due to COVID-19 [Ep #179]

Our entire team had to shut down on a dime and we still managed to have the highest-grossing month of the entire year. Listen up because this is a very important story, stay tuned. 

Hey! Hey everyone! Welcome to another episode of the podcast and this was the one that I promised about a month ago based on all the things that went down at the end of 2020. So at this point in November, we had just started to onboard our new employee to take over the Oakville practice. And the plan was to come January 1st I was going to step away from doing all in-office consultation patients. And just allow my team to start managing the schedule. 

So everything was going great in November, it wasn’t a super busy month. I think the universe provided that to us, Caledonia was great, Oakville was quieter but I was also training someone so I think the universe is always watching out for me and always making sure that I don’t bite off more than I can chew. But around the weekend leading into December’s first week, Jackie started developing symptoms. She started developing some fever symptoms, she has a really bad cold and called in sick that week. We were seeing patients on Monday and Thursday and it was getting to that point where it was starting to ramp up. December being the end of the year, this is when we have our busiest revenue-generating year because everyone is trying to use up all of their benefits before they refresh in January. So I was like ‘Okey, obviously don’t come in if you’re not feeling well, especially with what’s going on right now’. Everyone is super sensitive and by the end of that week we found out that she was positive for COVID. I then got tested the next day because I had developed a mild head cold and started to shift all of my patients in to virtual. Anyway for the same reasons, just being sensitive to the climate, and even a sniffle or cough people tend to get their back up. So Thursday, I went and got the test done and you can imagine if you’ve had it done, it is you know what I’m talking about. I heard ‘ok, no swab. Cool, uncomfortable, got it.’ I had heard of kids getting it done without problems so I really had no idea what to expect. I show up at the testing center Thursday morning and get it done, and I couldn’t believe how uncomfortable it was. Like they’re just ramming this plastic sweeper, sticking up your nose, and rotating it multiple times. And it took me probably 5 min afterward to recover. Anyways, from that point on they give you an app that you can be tracking the COVID results from. So I downloaded the app, and like anybody else, you frantically start refreshing that app every hour for that first day. 

And then come Saturday morning, I still hadn’t received any results. Now, Saturday was a fully booked day on the calendar. We had easily a thousand to 2 thousand dollars’ worth of revenue on that day. I had toyed with the idea of going in any way despite that I was still feeling sick, knowing that wasn’t the right decision. And I still hadn’t received my results yet, so I wasn’t sure we weren’t going to reschedule anybody until I knew exactly what the game plan was. A lot of the was B12, some needed support and set me to come into the office. Come 8:05 am, I get, I refreshed the app and there it is in big, bold, red letters POSITIVE. So this is when the bleep storms start just to not get this podcast to be explicit, and my heart just sank. I figured that’s what’s going to happen just based on everything that I got on the previous week. And then you go into total crisis mode, right? So with that result, of course, we rebooked everybody to the following Saturday. ‘EVERYONE’ was more than happy to reschedule. And I hope that other people had noticed this too. We just found–and I’ll talk about the rest of the story in a second, but we just found any time we needed to reschedule anybody for whatever reason not necessarily disposing of the full reason why everyone was so gracious and so open and so kind about it. And a lot of people, in the end, gave us tremendous positive feedback, just saying ‘thank you so much for taking my health into consideration with you not feeling well and everything that’s going on right now.’ So that was amazing, that was probably one of the best silver linings that came out of all of this. 

We had this fully booked, 20 people on the schedule that had to be moved and we just opened up a Saturday that we wouldn’t have otherwise opened, and moved everybody there. So at this point in time, Jackie is the only one that’s in quarantine and that’s coming out of quarantine the next Thursday. So then, I had to let my entire Caledonia team know that I had tested positive. Unfortunately, we had just had our Christmas party for 3 days prior where we had done an escape room and dinner. So they were essentially exposed, or possibly exposed. Now, not only did I have to shut down my days that I had booked for the next ten days. I had to let my entire team know that my test came back positive, and they all had to self-isolate. So now, Megan is out; the Caledonia practice, all of the in-office appointments had to be rescheduled as many that we could, we turned virtual. The entire reception team just stayed home in quarantine for the next 14 days. Our live blood analyst and contractors, all had to stay home and quarantine. And then of course, my family, I had 2 girls that were going to school and they both had to stay home and self-isolate, my husband had to stay home and self-isolate. It just became such a massive spider web of crap so quickly. And the hardest part for me during all of this was the tremendous amount of guilt that I felt and I don’t think people have talked about this yet. They just say ‘yep, this person was positive for COVID, or this is the story, or this is what they’re doing.’ But there is such a massive ripple effect that happens when you are the person that tests positive. So Jackie tested first, she had to let me know, and then she also exposed herself to other people and had to let them all know that I had to let all of these people know. It immediately affected where the business was operating and I just felt so dirty and I felt like such a leper, and I felt like I was just completely halting everybody’s lives that I had touched in that 72 hour period that I felt broken. By the end of the weekend, rescheduling all of these people, emailing all of these people, we didn’t fully disclose why we were rescheduling them. We didn’t think that was necessary because the clinics were never exposed, patients were never exposed. Luckily the timing just worked out that way after the Christmas party, nobody saw patients. 

Anyway, that was a huge positive, because I worried about that tremendously if we had to now shut down the clinic and make the clinic be a possible exposure site. So we dodged that bullet which was great. But I felt so utterly responsible for ruining people’s lives. That’s how I’ve felt for ruining people’s lives for 2 weeks because I didn’t think that there was anything big going on. But I just had just a sinus cold, those really only symptoms that I had. Was I congested? I had a headache because I had congestion, no fever, no loss of taste or smell, no lung issues, no shortness of breath issues. It was all just congestion in my head. To me I was just well, it was the cold and flu season. So anyway, everything came to a grinding halt and that was when, and interestingly I found out about this, but that was when I started developing massive hip pains. To the point where I wasn’t sleeping. For three days I could not get comfortable, I could not sleep, because my hip right down to where my hamstring inserts on the back of my legs were on fire. I had to take sleeping pills just so I could get, or basically be knocked out for at least four hours to feel somewhat rested. Later I found out that for women when they carry a lot of emotional baggage or grief or whatever, they tend to carry it in their hips. So I found that interesting after the fact. 

And the cortisol was like up, it was sky high managing, figuring out where all these people are going to go. Thank goodness for my team, and this was really the main story, the main takeaway of today’s’ episode. Is with regards to sole-preneurs, with regards to practitioners that everything revolves around you and your schedule when life happens if you do not create some backup plan or create a system that can easily fit you when you aren’t able to come into the office. It is immediate revenue that is gone that hopefully, you can recoup when you’re able to come back. No consider it to be your children get sick, consider it to be a personal injury, consider you needing to quarantine. That would be 2 weeks’ worth of revenue that you would lose. And I find this coming up on threats all the time, where practitioners are asking ‘what do I do? I was injured or my kids are really sick or I have to take care of my family members and I’m not able to come into the office. What do I do about this lost revenue?’ Because in a lot of cases, every dollar counts. And at the end of all of this, because December again being one of our highest revenue-generating months of the entire year I refuse to lose anything. So being the quick action taker that I am, we opened up that day that would have otherwise been closed, moving everybody to that day. Jackie’s release from quarantine was staggered to mine and to the Caledonia team. So Jackie actually filled in one day in Caledonia and then took over for the 2 days that I wasn’t able to come into Oakville and did all of those patients’ visits. Then I came out and took over the following week in Caledonia while Jackie was doing Oakville. And then finally everybody was out, no one in the Caledonia team was positive, or tested positive so at the end that was a huge sigh of relief and I felt so grateful for that. But I still harbored so much guilt and basically, by the end of it I just had to tell Scott ‘here’s my phone, I can’t be answering calls from public health, I don’t want to be responsible for making any more decisions until we’re fully all out of quarantine.’ Because even my family symptoms were staggered by 5 days at a pop. So Scott is developing symptoms 5 days so then his time starts 2 weeks after that. The girls developed symptoms 5 days after that so then their timer started 2 weeks after that time period. So it was just like we were basically in COVID jail for 20 some odd days collectively. And during that time I wasn’t even able to recover because I wanted to serve all of these people on the schedule and not lose any of that revenue and keep things flowing as regularly as humanly possible. I just switched as many people as I could do virtually. And I was doing virtual consults from my home while nursing this massive head cold. And again, everything worked out beautifully, I know we lost 1 initial patient visit and maybe two 15 min visits of the fifty visits that we have to reschedule and move around and shift around. It was just amazing.

And by the end of December, we still grossed one of our highest grossing months of the entire year. It matched the O-tip campaign that we did for our teachers back in July and August. So we had a 40k month, and I just would not have been able to survive any of that if it wasn’t for building a team. So the take away here again that I want you to reflect on is; you don’t need to necessarily hire a team, you don’t necessarily need to have independent contractors in place. But you do need to be able to find a way to keep your patient flow as consistent as humanly possible if your in-office practice is not available. And we’re still in a pandemic, things are still shutting down. In our area, we are getting to more extreme lockdowns for the next month, probably 2 months. Because the numbers are continuing to go up. And if you don’t have these items in place yet, I just don’t know what you’re waiting for. If you need to be making every single dollar humanly possible to keep your business afloat, keep your personal bills paid. And you haven’t built out a system or strategy that allows you to do that. When you need to tap into it on a dime, then I just don’t know what it is that you’re waiting for. 

This entire shutdown period was a massive wake up call for everyone to say ‘look, you need to be merging your practice online, you need to be beefing up your systems. You need to be simplifying your business flow so that you can start to create the dream practice that you want. So you can start to leverage time freedom, so you can start to have all of these things that you want and when life happens because it always will. You need to be able to pin it and shift and still find ways of making that revenue even if it’s creating an online program and launching that during your down period where you can still be making some passive income. Whatever that is, if you haven’t built it out yet you really need to be thinking about it. And if this is something that I and my team can support you with, I would be more than happy to chat with you. We’re going to be chatting with you with the game plan call link in the show notes. And I also encourage you to go check out our 60 min virtual video training on how to merge your practice online and the three biggest mistakes that most practitioners are making when they’re trying to do more social selling. Create more of that online presents and build things out virtually and then the four steps that we took to create a perfectly balanced online and offline practice. That link is also going to be in the show notes, so do not hesitate. Take this as an example that leap does happen and building out a backup plan is so essential. And using your resources will help you keep the patient flow good, customer service is always the number 1 tenant that we have within our company. And therefore, keeping the revenues very consistent. Reach out to me, don’t do this alone, let me pave that path that is going to work for you, your family, your business, and all you have to do is a book that calls. I look forward to chatting with you soon, I’m Andrea Maxim and I’m out.