I heard a statistic recently that the dropout rate in my profession, Podiatry, in Ireland where I live and the UK where I trained back in the day is somewhere near 50% over 10 years from the time that podiatrists qualify. Now, I don't know if this is still correct, or a slight exaggeration, but I do know anecdotally that there does seem to be quite a large dropout rate, certainly in podiatry and I suspect also in similar professions or medical services like physiotherapy. 

Why does this happen? 

I think this is happening for two reasons. The first is the job is not what they expected and they then have two options, they can move into the health service which can be quite a frustrating place to work. The Health Service here in Ireland and the NHS in the UK, is completely free for patient's and that’s brilliant. You cannot necessarily see the patient as often as you might like to do and you've often got to rush that appointment as the case load is so large.

For a lot of clinicians who are independent minded, they feel hamstrung in their ability to progress within the confines of the service and its associated bureaucracy and thus the ability to comprehensively help those patients. 

Secondly, the other option is to move into private practice. This can seem quite daunting. When they look around at other practitioners working in private practice including physiotherapy, podiatry, and so forth, they appear to be doing long hours and have little or no real pay security.  Quite a lot of them seem to be quite stressed and don’t have the reassurance of the public sector pension or holiday pay. 

Why would they give up a job with a pension and a secure wage every week to move into private practice? Indeed, why do people do this at all? I believe they do so because they hope that there is a better way to be fulfilled in their profession.  Many clinic owners feel that by plowing their own furrow they can deliver best practice medical care and still provide themselves with financial independence and a better quality of life that they yearn for. 

This is why they roll the dice, take out that loan, leave that job and open those doors. To those of you thinking of opening your own clinic or have already done so let me say at this point, congratulations, you are the few, the less than 5% of the world's population that will ever do so. It takes great courage to start your own business. The reality of private practice ownership is it can be a tough and lonely enterprise.

I know of  a medic who had been 40 years building his business, and at the end of it couldn't find anyone to take it over and couldn't sell it. Instead, he had to close it down and just rent the rooms. 85% of small businesses never sell. 

Why is this? 

I believe it’s because they're not true businesses. 

What they really are is a job. Sometimes they are a well paid job, but a job all the same where the owner cannot leave the business for any protracted period of time because the business is wholly dependent on them. This was me a number of years ago. Things don't have to be this way though.

At this point, you're probably not sure what a health business coach will do for you. That's fair enough. When I first heard of the idea of a business coach for my clinic I was very unsure if that was right for me. I didn't want it to be commercialized or sold to or worse made into some sleazy sales person doing unethical things in my clinic just to make a quick buck. 

Let's face it, when we go through university, getting our degree pretty much all the emphasis is on us getting to a basic level of clinical competence. During my term time in University in London, I got one hour of business training on how to run a private practice. It was given by one of the only podiatrists who worked in the clinic who also owned a private practice. 

I assume he was chosen because he was wore the sharpest suit and seemed to believe he knew what he was doing. When I look back now, I know that he didn't. 

When I started my own clinic seven years later, I was really clueless on what it took to run a successful podiatry clinic. I'd spent a month doing a 25 page business plan that none of the banks I met bothered to read. I still have it and I take it out every once in a while to remind myself how far I've come. 

I know I am not alone. As medical professionals, we are really well trained and know how to be thorough in patient care, devise a diagnosis of the problems, work out a solution and see the plan through to the end. However when it comes to the business side, we are not at all sure about how to do the same thing.

How do we transfer our clinical skills into enough income to allow us to reach the personal and professional goals we vaguely talked about when we give up our paid job to open our own clinic?

Maybe we are making good money and delivering a really good service but the clinic is too dependent on us, meaning we are tied to the clinic. It dawns on us after a while that really what we have built for ourselves is a really well paid job rather than a proper standalone business. 

Well, this is where a health business coach will come in. They look at your business from a distance and see the opportunities as well as the problems. 

Of course your business has some problems. You're not likely to be reading this if everything was perfect and you reckon, naturally, that any health business coach worth their salt will be able to spot those problems. 

A Health Business Coach should, with you, come up with a plan to work through these problems and as a business coach will also be detached enough from your clinic they will be able to spot the low hanging fruit or opportunities to get quick wins.

It's not all about spending lots of money on marketing or getting into the hippest social media craze. Often there is plenty that can be achieved with what you already have before spending any extra money on marketing.

I spent 18 months looking at the opportunities inside my own clinic, doubling my profits for no extra spend before turning to paid marketing.

Health business coach will keep you accountable. 

Having someone you are paying to check up on you and your business is a sure fire way to ensure effective steps are implemented. Having a Business Coach that you  check in with regularly means that you know there is a deadline to get the work you agreed done, delivered on time. 

Us humans are all the same. We will leave it off until tomorrow if we can go off the after shiny objects instead. Just ask my wife what am I like fixing things around the house. Knowing you have a call coming will mean you can't put off the important stuff that will be needed to get your business into shape. 

A health business coach gives you focus so you get the best results from the least effort. All clinic owners are busy. It can be a real juggling act trying to treat patients handle staff, accounts, bills, marketing and day to day running of the clinic. Family is usually the first thing to get jettisoned. A good coach will show you that you can't do it all yourself, teach you what to focus on to get the best bang for your buck and what to delegate. 

A decent  Health Business Coach knows what it takes to turn your clinic into a passive business. At one point I was working well over 40 hours a week treating patients doing accounts, wages etc in evenings and weekends and even making my own insoles in a workshop up to 11pm at night. 

No matter how hard I worked, I still couldn't afford to slow down as the clinic depended on the income I generated so much. When my wife came home with our first child, I took only six hours off. Time I'll never get back. 

I now do four hours clinical a week because I choose to, take four holidays a year away from the business and it runs fine without me with my patients still getting the same quality clinical care. Last summer, I took all of August off logged in twice remotely for 40 minutes to see how things were going and came back to a clinic that had had its highest ever monthly turnover. 

I now have a true business that delivers exceptional customer service and best practice patient care by a well trained team that don't need me there every day to keep things running. 

One of my favorite clients, let's just call him john doe, contacted me initially, because he was having problems with his clinic. On the outside, he looked like he had a very successful clinic he'd been open for over 10 years and seemed quite happy and jolly. 

However this was not the truth. When he reached out to me, he was stressed both financially and emotionally. He couldn't take a holiday for more than seven days because he needed the cash flow to keep the clinic running. He was at breaking point and considering closing up altogether and going back to a secure NHS job. 

After about three months, I remember him saying to me on one of our calls, “For the first time in years, I feel in charge of my own business.” He could see the future. He could see what was possible, and that he would get to the point where he had a true business that provided him with the income he desired to live the life he wanted and make a choice on how hard and how often he would see patient's. ]

When it boils down to it, what most clinic owners really want is to feel fulfilled. 

Money is important, but it is not everything. 

What most clinical owners really want is a clinic that gives them enough money to make it worth the hassle. 

A clinic that's not so dependent on them that they are tied to it all of the time. 

They want a business that delivers them freedom to choose. 

That is what a health business coach will do for you. I help  my clients develop the type of business that delivers you the freedom you choose and reach your life goals.

Whether we ever meet or not my sincere wish for you reading this book is that you start the journey towards moving from a clinic to a true business that still provides best practice medical care, exceptional customer service, and allows you to earn more, work less and live your life to the full. 

This book can be read by reading any chapter you wish at a time. However, I recommend you read it in the order it's written. In all likelihood you will want to go straight to the marketing sections to see how do I get more patients because that's the answer isn't it…..

“I  just more patient's, don’t I” ? 

The truth is it's not the answer. Not the first answer anyway.

Good luck. I hope you enjoy the book

Lorcan Ó Donaile, Podiatrist &

Podiatry & Health Business Mentor

www.morepracticeprofits.com

If you have any questions for me, please don't be afraid to connect with me on Facebook or Linkedin or drop me an email at info@morepracticeprofits.com

So, why did I write this book? 

I wrote this book for you, the clinic owner or potential clinic owner. 

Yes I am a podiatrist, but whether you are a Podiatrist, Physiotherapist, Osteopath, Chiropractor, Speech Therapist, Occupational Therapist, etc. and if you're either thinking about opening your own clinic or have already done so, then this book is 100% for you. 

Obviously I'm a podiatrist and it's written from a podiatrist perspective, but the concepts I talk about throughout this book can be transferred to any sort of health professionals clinic.

I got up every morning for longer than I wanted to at 5 am to type some more words in the hope that I could help you avoid the mistakes I made. Mistakes that meant that I only took one foreign holiday in the first 10 years of opening my business. Mistakes that meant that I never had enough to buy a home or get a pension for longer than that.  

Mistakes that made me question why I ever chose the path I did. Why didn't I do something else altogether in college?

I wrote this book to show you that there is another way, a way that means that you do not have to be the first to arrive if you own your own clinic and the last to leave. 

I wrote this book to show you that you do not have to be the last to get paid, to show you that you don't have to be tied to that clinic forever. 

You can pick and choose when you want to want to see patients, and yet still make a good income and provide you and your loved ones with the lifestyle you seek. 

When I first started my clinic I assumed that all I needed to do was to be good at clinical work and as I was good at clinical work my lifestyle would be rewarded. 

This was not the case. 

It took me a long time to realise that patients don't really care how well qualified you are or how many courses you've gone on. They really don’t care whether you've done your CPD or not.

Now I'm not saying you shouldn't do these things, but to patient's they’re not really that interested. 

Why should they care? 

All they really care about is can you help them get them better and are you going to deliver on that promise of getting them better. 

It took me a long time to realise that customer service, pricing, key performance indicators(KPI’s), knowing your numbers, marketing (both internal and external) and how to handle staff were all necessary for me to be able to scale up my business to the point where I didn't need to work there all of the time.

I could still earn more, work less and provide an even better quality service to my patients for longer hours, than happened when I was on my own. 

I wish I had read a book like this when I first started my clinic or even three or four years in but the kind of I wanted to read,a book like this for podiatrists in particular, did not exist. 

So when I set up my Podiatry Business Mentorship programme I promised myself that I would write the kind of book I would have wanted to read. 

Before I get on to the rest of the book I want to just tell you a little about my journey so you can see that I too have been in the trenches of owning and running a small clinic with little or no profit and have overcome these difficulties. You can do it too. I should know…. I have. Here’s how….

My Story. 

I grew up in the countryside, on the west coast of Ireland with two older brothers and two older sisters. When I came to finishing my secondary level education I wasn't too sure what I wanted to do.  I ended up drifting into podiatry as my brother in law was a podiatrist as I liked the idea of doing something to do with science and I wanted to be able to finish work at five o'clock. Saying I was naive would be an understatement.

When I was 18 I moved to London & I went to college in London Foot Hospital and University College London. I completed a degree and Podiatric Medicine and qualified in 1998. 

Back then, there weren't too many jobs for podiatrists in Ireland and I wanted to move home. My brother in law offered me a job as he was getting very busy and wanted to expand his clinic. I took the position and worked for him for seven years. I learned a lot in that clinic, but felt a lot of frustration at the same time, especially in the final years. This is no fault of his but more mine, my personality is one where I don't like to be told what to do.

My wife says I'm very stubborn. She's probably right, in fact I know she's right. I was offered a partnership in the clinic, but decided instead that I needed to leave. I wanted to set out on my own path and felt as the clinic I was working in had all of that money coming in that if I could do that then when opened my own clinic it would surely be fine except i would get to keep the profits for myself. Like I said I was very naive. 

This is what most of us new comers do. We work for someone else and then we think well I can do all the clinical work, why not keep all the money. So we open a clinic. And after a number of years we realise it's not as simple as that. 

The money's coming in but just as quickly it's going out. In some cases it's going out faster than it's coming in. We run out of cash flow and we close the clinic.

Anyway I quit my full time job having been offered a partnership. My parents thought I was crazy. I decided to convince my then girlfriend, now wife, to quit her full time pensionable job too and we both went travelling.

I don't regret this. I would hate to be nearing retirement haven't been afraid to take the chance. Even knowing the stress and trauma that was to follow I would still do it again but with some changes to how I did it of course.

After six months travelling and running up a bit of debt I came back home  and moved to Cork city on the south coast of Ireland. I decided to write a business plan and this took about a month to do as I was doing what all the books say to do.  To say the business plan was a waste of time wouldn't be quite fair, but it wasn't a lot of help either and I now take it out every once in a while for the laugh. 

I opened the doors in 2005, and grew to capacity within about 18 to 24 months. I was flat out so I took on a part time receptionist to begin with, but I had no idea how to train her really. 

I was running a typical one clinician business. 

It was all on me. 

I had no wages if I took a holiday. 

I never took a holiday beyond seven days.

I worked really long hours. It was not unusual for me to work 60 to 70 hours a week.

I never knew my numbers. 

For example with regards to tax I had zero planning in place.  I would get a tax bill in September due in October for the Calendar year before and have to figure out in a rush how to pay it. 

I freely admit, I had no clue what I was doing in regards to the business.

I was good clinically.  I was getting really good clinical outcomes and patients were happy. This is why I had grown the clinic so fast.

There seemed to be a lot of money coming in. But there was never enough. Not enough to pay the wages or to make the receptionist go full time. Never enough to pay the rent, and still have some left over for me to live off, and to try and build a life. 

I really didn't know my numbers, and I was living beyond my means as a result. Like most business owners, I was afraid to know the truth, and I never really questioned my accountant. I was afraid to know what he would say. 

This went on for about eight to nine years. I was really stressed out with anxiety my constant companion and didn't know what I to do to get myself out of the hole I found myself in. 

By lucky chance I used to listen to a lot of podcasts and one time I heard a podcast about a running a healthcare business and heard mention of a book, a business book about scaling up your business called the E-myth by Michael Gerber. I quickly bought the book on Amazon and decided, having read it that I would scale up.

However, what I would do is do it on the cheap, doing it all by myself to avoid the cost of a mentor. This was a huge mistake, but understandable as I couldn't justify to myself spending more money on a mentor, when I already didn't have enough money. 

Again, not knowing what I was doing I took on a physiotherapist and followed this with another podiatrist and paid them a percentage of wage, another huge mistake.

I did some marketing, well basically I did whatever marketing someone came in and asked me to buy, but I was not sure what I was doing. 

Again, I didn't want to spend any money on some professional help, so did it all myself. 

I never measured my outcomes and I had no idea how successful or otherwise my marketing was, just like most clinic owners I meet now. When I  was asked, what was marketing like I would say it was nearly all word of mouth, meaning I didn’t have any marketing, or I didn't know how I got new patients.  

To the outsider it looked great. I had five staff, I was able to take an unpaid holiday every year. I seem to have a successful business. I was all smiles. But inside, I was crumbling.

By now wife was questioning why we'd ever done this to begin with and I had at this point three children that depended on me with no sign of us ever being able to buy a house even with a drop in house prices of 33% during that time in Ireland. I was living with a non secure tenancy and stresses were building and building. 

At one point I came back from a holiday with my family to find a staff threatening me with employer tribunal because I did not know my responsibilities. When I look back on it now I realise that I was completely clueless and deserving of their wrath. 

I was extremely anxious all of the time and in big trouble financially. I had a big lease I couldn't afford and I couldn't afford to scale a business any further, because I couldn't afford the wages. I had a large tax bill, bigger even than my entire years profit and no way to pay it.

As I didn't know what I was doing and when it came to my accounts, banks would not help me and I was facing down a tax audit. I would regularly go to sleep wondering how I was going to pay the wages and the tax that week. 

I was the worst paid in the clinic and for 4 Christmases in a row, did not pay myself any wage as the clinic was closed. There was inconsistent cash flow and I couldn't afford to pay myself and the staff therefore, the staff got paid first. 

This also affected my marriage, as I was extremely stressed and my home life was poor due to my mood swings. I have a very patient wife. I remember driving home from work on Friday crying, wishing I could crawl into bed and not have to wake up again, as it couldn't face what I had to deal with the following week.

How did I arrive at this place I asked myself? 

I had thought all I needed was Clinical Excellence and I did not want to pay for any help as I was so broke. 

Obviously as you're reading this book you realise that things did change. But how did I change things around? 

Well I am very stubborn. I admit it freely. I wouldn't give in. I decided I was going to have to get some help, no matter how broke I was. I got some really good help including changing my accountant who went into forensic detail with my living expenses and costs associated with the business.

I paid for a business coach and business mentoring expert help and  decided I would apply the same approach as I would in clinical learning to my business. 

What I mean by this is we clinicians are trained to do best medical practice using research and to apply that best practice and research in our clinical reasoning. I used this process in my business.

I read everything I could that was relevant. 

I studied. 

I attended courses.

I listened to experts, and I was willing to pay for this education and help just like I would be willing to pay a good quality Podiatry CPD course up until then.

I continue to do this throughout my career. And as I write this still have two paid mentors that I talked to every single month. 

Don't let me pretend that this was easy. It was not easy. This was the hardest thing I've done in a long, long time. 

But it has paid off. 

I now have a clinic, a true business, that provides 500% more treatments to patients than it did when I worked on my own.

My profits have gone up 400% and are still climbing and I personally can pick and choose who I want to treat and when I’m available to do so.  

Right now, I treat patients for 4- 5 hours a week and I am in the clinic for approximately two hours per day, and spend the rest of my time educating other clinic owners, on how to do the same in their clinic.

I show them how to get out of the position where you can’t afford to take a break, because the clinic is depending on you. 

I show them how to earn more, work less and start to live your life. 

When you first begin this journey to improving your clinic and your quality of life it can seem like a mammoth task.

One of my favourite sayings is how to eat an elephant? One bite at a time. 

It's a process. One step at a time working through the system. Over time, we change your clinic into a business that is relatively independent of you and that will continue to provide you with an income, whether you're there or not. 

You can do this and make sure your clinic still provides the same excellent quality customer service and clinical outcomes to your patients as it would if you were seeing them yourself. 

I've broken this book down into a number of chapters including mindset, customer service, Key Performance Indicators(KPI’s) and marketing. 

Now I know we all want to jump straight into the marketing, because we think the answer is just more patients, but it's not.

Take your time, go through the basics. 

When a patient comes into you, you don't start treating them straight away. First you do your subjective, then you do your objective. It's the same with this process.  

You need to know how your business is functioning from day to day first. Where is the low hanging fruit first. 

The secret to having a podiatry clinic that allows you to grows and delivers a great service even when you are on holiday is realising that having great clinical skills is simply not enough, you need great business skills too.

The very first thing I work on with my private coaching clients is their mindset. The correct mindset is the key to unlocking a profitable clinic that delivers for both you,  your staff, your patients and your suppliers. 

We medical clinicians been conditioned to work in the health service. This is certainly true with regard to Podiatrists. Our role is to help patients with their health, which is admirable and is the whole purpose of our career and life long education.

However public health services often train us to treat that patient as quickly as possible and get them back out the door as we have a list of other patients waiting in the waiting room. We get no training on how to run a profitable business or how to charge patient's money for the services we provide.

Indeed I have met many public service based clinicians who suggest that we shouldn't be charging patients at all as money is an evil in medicine. Often Medical clinicians, having gone 3, 4 or 5 years through college will get their qualifications believing that it's immoral, or unethical to take money off of our patient's. Yet somehow we expect to run a business, pay for our lifestyle, our  staff and our suppliers without taking enough money from patient's to make this happen. 

We are extremely uncomfortable with asking patients for payments at the end of treatment, and we have no idea how to set our prices. Often we look around the locality, see what all the other clinics are charging and take an average price for fear or “charging too much”. These same clinic owners never put their prices up, even though our costs are continually rising,citing that patient's in their area simply wouldn’t pay anymore.

This University training, while excellent at on a clinical level is letting us down when it comes to actually making a profitable career outside of the health service were we would have the safety net of a wage every week and a pension. This is despite significant numbers of podiatrist working in private practice.

This is why we have such a high stress rate in the allied health professionals and a large dropout rate, certainly in my profession podiatry much higher than most would expect. Our education does not equip us to know how to handle staff or how to hold them accountable for their job. 

Unbelievably we are often conditioned to believe that marketing is unethical. Indeed I remember going to a weekend CPD course a number of years ago and sitting around a table with a bunch of physiotherapists, all of whom were in private practice and the general agreement among them all was that there was no need for a website that marketing was held in contempt.

“Why would I need to tell my patient what I do?” Patient's would just come to them by word of mouth. 

I kept quiet but in my head I thought this was total bull. What use was an unprofitable clinic to anyone? What use is it to a patient coming in to see an overworked clinician who stressed out because of money, wages, not being able to take a holiday because every depending on them. 

You are no longer just a clinician if you own your own clinic.

The key thing to know at this point to this is you need to get your mindset right first before you proceed any further in the journey of opening and owning your own profitable clinic. 

If you either have your own clinic now or you're considering opening one you must remember that you are in business now. You are no longer just a clinician, you are no longer just that podiatrist,physiotherapist, osteopath that you were when you left college.

You are more than that now. Yes you are that clinician but you are also a business person. You are a marketer. You are a boss to your staff and you have responsibilities to all of those people. 

What is the purpose of your business?

The purpose of your business is to provide you with the lifestyle that you want. Too often we leave a secure job working in another clinic or in the public health services thinking that when we open our own clinic we will be able to do things our way and make a great income too. Instead after a number of years we realise that we're stressed out, losing empathy for our patient's and it has just not turned out as we expected it would.

Let me repeat it again ... the purpose of your business is to provide you with the lifestyle that you set out to achieve when you opened your doors. 

It also is there to provide your staff with the working environment where they are encouraged to be the best they can be and be protected by knowing that have a secure job. They need to know they work for an owner who's not stressed and is in charge of their destiny and the destiny of their business, allowing them to concentrate on providing for your patient's. 

The purpose of your business is to provide for your patients and to make sure that they reached their goals and outcomes that they wish to achieve when they initially contact you.  Over and over again I've met clinicians who feel that should only see the patient once or twice.

I would argue that by doing so, as it is unlikely that they have not fixed that chronic condition in one or two appointments that that patient has therefore wasted their money by coming to you in the first place, and will continue to do so as they move from clinic to clinic only having one two or three appointments and never getting 100% better. 

The purpose of your business is to make sure that your suppliers are looked after that they don't have to wait for you to pay them. That you are not trying to dodge that next phone call from them because you haven't got the money to settle your bill. 

All of this is your responsibility as the clinic owner. I know it's a lot to have on your shoulders, but this is what owning a business and  running a profitable clinic is all about.  

You have 2 options.

The way I see it, this can be done in two ways. It can be done the way that most clinics do it, which is following the University/Health Service model, where you work all the hours you can, you charge the same as your competitors and just keep your head above water. You carry on for 40 years and then you retire with very little. In almost all cases these clinic owners are  unable to sell their business when the time comes as nobody wants to take on that lifestyle. 

The alternative option is you change your mindset. You realise you are in business and that it is okay and ethical to do so. Millions of businesses around the world open their doors every single day and charge a price to ensure that they deliver a profit which in turn will deliver for the business owners, the business’s staff, the business’s customers and its suppliers.

Paradoxically, in most cases we look on this as perfectly normal and perfectly ethical yet when it comes to health care we seem to have a barrier to charging and believe that  we should not charge our patient's “too much” or try and make a profit. Somehow we view it as immoral to make a decent profit. 

The funny thing is your patients don't see it like this. Patients expect and indeed want you to make a profit. Otherwise you won't be open. You won't be there when they need you.

If I look at my own clinic for a moment. I used to work 40-50 hours a week, stressed out, couldn't take a holiday or a break. Since I changed my mindset my clinic is now open 500% more hours per week, allowing us to help even more patients while delivering a better quality service with less stress in the clinic. 

We're open 12 hours a day, every day and Saturdays. This means our patients have the ability to come both before  and after work and the extra profits allows us to invest in the latest technology and training, making sure that our patients get the best quality outcomes. 

So, how do we work on mindset?

When I start working with a private client, in my coaching/mentoring business the first thing we look at is their systems or their lack thereof. Most of us have these structures and systems in our clinic we just don't know we have them. 

We've never written them down.

We've never thought about the fact that we have any systems. 

An example is how we answer the phone. We tend to say the same thing over and over again. We just don't realise that we do so and perhaps if we sat down and thought about it we could improve it. I try to instil into my clients that these structures and systems if improved and implemented throughout the business would allow them to get their staff to provide the treatment and service that they would do themselves if they were treating that patient. This gives them free time to start to develop and work on the business itself. 

The truly successful successful clinic owners, realise that they cannot see all patients all of the time. By implementing good quality structures good quality systems and training their staff on those systems and then holding them accountable to these systems are we able to scale up their business, see even more patients and give better quality care. 

Like I said earlier, the purpose of your business is primarily to provide you the owner with the lifestyle that you wanted. If you look at your local shop owner down the road or the guy who owns the car garage or the newsagent next door you wouldn't expect him to go to work for free or at no profit. 

It's a given that he's doing it to provide himself with the lifestyle that he wants. This can certainly be done ethically and there's no need to assume that doing so means you are trying to fleece your patient's. In Western society we understand that hard work, owning a business and all the stresses that go with it deserves to be rewarded. 

Mindset is something that will continue to evolve for you as a business owner. When first I started to get to work with coaches for myself, my mindset was focused on simply having enough to pay the bills from week to week. 

Now my mindset has changed to a point where I want to help other clinic owners who are struggling like I was. Hence I'm writing this book, and hence you are reading it.

So to begin, I'm going to give you some homework. 

I want you to write out, and if you wish (in fact i would strongly recommend) show your significant other your answers. 

Step 1; 

Write out who do you like to be with most outside of work and why?

Life can't all the all about work. Personally, I like to spend time with my wife and kids. It gives me the most joy in my day. 

Step 2;

What 3 things do you like to do most outside of work and how does it make you feel when you do these things? 

Step 3;

What would it take to make you truly fulfilled personally?

I'm going to pause here and say to that I would recommend that you take your time at this even if it takes you a few days that's okay.

The answers to these 3 questions will change as you develop and get older and your life changes. That's okay too. The answers you have now don't have to be those that you keep for the rest of your life. 

This is a process whereby you understand what your business is there for. 

Step 4;

Once you have the answer to these and you know what you want out of life, then you work out how much money do you need to achieve these goals. Be as accurate as you can. Don't just throw a figure down on a piece of paper because this is important. 

Step 5; 

I then want you to write out what kind of business you would like to have and what you see yourself doing in the business in ...

A. 90 days, 

B. 1 year,

C. 5 years and 

D. What's your big, hairy, audacious goal. 

Your big hairy audacious goal is a goal that you think you'd love to have if there were no limits to what you could do in your business. It doesn't mean you're going to get there but if you don't have a goal, how can you strive towards that goal. 

I like to cycle, but I find if I haven't put my name down for a sportive I don't train half as hard and I don't get as much out of my cycling. Similarly by writing down you goals and working towards those goals you are far more likely to achieve those goals.

The purpose of all of this, is it let you know what you want your life to look like? What do you want your business to provide you with. Then you know what kind of business you need and how much you need financially to make, allowing you structure your business and your lifestyle around this. 

You'd be surprised how many businesses out there never do this sort of stuff. They just go in every day. Park in the same place. Open the door. Do the same thing all day, every day ….. for 40 years. 

It’s no wonder 85% of small businesses, including small medical clinics, never sell. Wouldn’t it be great when retirement comes along that you can sell on your business for a great price?

Once you have completed these steps, share these business goals with your significant other. 

Indeed, send them on to me at info@morepracticeprofits.com .

If you're stuck or you're not sure how to do this drop me an email or connect with me on Facebook or Linkedin

So start the process of Earning More, Working Less & Living Life by working on your mindset and remember to keep doing so throughout your business life.

It's your responsibility to yourself, your staff, your patients your suppliers and most especially your family, that you build a business that provides you with the lifestyle that you want. 

Didn’t you quit that job and start your clinic to build a business that gives you the financial and personal freedom you desire?

The secret to having the podiatry clinic you always wanted is to have the right mindset. 

The right mindset will ensure you begin to  develop a clinic and business that delivers the financial and personal freedom we all want and ensures that your patients get the best quality care and achieve their health outcomes. 

Isn’t this exactly why you started to your clinic to begin with?