5 Things Costing You Money in Your Business Right Now

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So go get your audiobook now. Www.entremd.com 7Figurebook. And let's rewrite the narrative for physicians starting today. Hi, docs. Welcome to the Entre MD Podcast, where it's all about helping amazing physicians just like you. Embrace entrepreneurship so you can have the freedom to live life and practice medicine on your terms. I'm your host, Dr. Unna. Well, hello. Hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of the Entre MD Podcast. Today we are going to be looking at five things that are costing you money in your business right now. I'm going to start with a full disclaimer. You know, everybody kind of has an area that is their area, the thing that they're good at and things like that and the thing that is necessary when you. But, you know, we don't want to do. And so for me, when it comes to things like looking at the nitty gritty, the profit and loss statement, the analyzing for wasting, you know, for waste and all of that, it's something that I recognize must be done, but it's something that I really don't like to do. So if you're listening to this, I'm like, Ra, Dr. Un, I wish you were talking about something else. I feel you. But this is something that is necessary, okay? Because we don't want to be, you know, like, we're building up these businesses, we're generating a lot of revenue, but our profit margins are even smaller than they need to be because we are not diligent. Right? And so I want us to think about Our businesses, whether you're an intrapreneur and we're talking about your brand or you're in private practice or your coach or a consultant or any of those things, I want you to think about that as a gift, okay? It is a gift. And it's something you can build into an asset. And it's not an end, it's a means to an end. Right? It's your opportunity to help a lot of people. It is your opportunity to create financial freedom for you, for your family and time freedom. And so do you really want to sacrifice that? Because you will not take 20 minutes a month or an hour a month to really sit down and analyze. I am bringing revenue in, but what am I doing to keep more of the revenue? Okay, and now I could easily pull up 20 things, but I want to pull up these five because these are things you can start fixing, like right now. And you know, it may not look like a whole lot, but, you know, part of this is developing a way of recognizing this, and the other is building a muscle, right? So you just become better and better at eliminating waste. Okay? Okay. So five ways we're, we're losing money. The first one I talk about, because we are physicians, we lead with our hearts, we love to serve, even if it's at the expense of earnings. And the first one is working for free. Okay? It's working for free. And there are times when, you know, there are things you could do for free. So for instance, when you look at speaking, for instance, right. If you are starting a business, nobody knows you and you have opportunities to speak for free, you're not going to fight, right, because you're trying to build an audience and all of those kind of things, right? So it's not that there's no place for working for free, but there are these places where we don't, we work for free because it's so much easier than asking people for money and having that conversation. And you know, I had a mentor who said that every adult is a 2 year old. They'll always try to see what they can get away with. And if they figure they can get away with not paying you, guess what they're not going to do. They're not going to pay you. Okay, all right, so working for free, what does that look like? Well, you have, you have a patient and, and they, they say, well, I can't pay and there's nothing critical. This is, you know, routine stuff and all of that. And you know, like, if you're in primary care and stuff, like, it's not critical, but anyway. And you're like, oh, well, let's just see them. Right? Let's just see them. They're here. And I want you to think about what that looks like. That looks like, let's say it's $200 per visit. I'm totally making that up. And you only do that once a day, right? Like you have all these other patients, you saw 21 patients and they paid, but you know, this one you're just like, yeah, whatever. Well, in a week that will put you at $1,000 a week. And in a year that will put you at 52,000. Like 52,000 you gave up. And remember, you've already paid your. The bills are, the bills are stagnant, per se. And so that one person did not, like, you already paid the overhead for that person. And so this is directly to the bottom line. But you gave up $52,000 in a year. Right. And in with 10 years, right. What is that? Over half a million dollars? Right. And so the question is, do you really want to be doing that? Right. It could also look like, well, I didn't, you know, working for free in private practice could also look like, well, I didn't do the notes and I didn't do the billing. You know, I didn't, I didn't do the coding. I didn't send out the bills. So you saw them. You do not get paid for seeing people. You get paid for seeing people and Right. And so that like, you know, I didn't do the note, I didn't charge them, and it's okay, you know, I'm tired, I'm stressed out, I'm burned out. Again, 52 grand a year. If you only do it once a day, if you only do it once a day, it could look like their co pays and deductible. And I know I'm leaning towards private practice, but just work with me here and yeah, that's okay. Right? Again, so much money being left on the table. It could be that maybe you are a coach and you have a membership style program or you have a monthly coaching thing where people pay you monthly and they just decide, well, I can't, I can't pay this month. And you're just like, okay, they can't pay this month. And that's just money that's being left. Right. It could look like people that you've already sent to collections, but you're still seeing them. I mean, like, you know what I mean? Like, and so I want you to think about working for free. And I want you to calculate that, and I want you to truly be okay with that if that's what you choose to do, right? Like, because sometimes people say, well, it's just one. I'm okay with it. Are you okay with it if you know it's $52,000 a year, if you're not okay, then it's time to do something about it, right? Like when we say it's okay, we need to see what is the opportunity cost of me just working for free, right? Because a lot of times people say, well, that's what I really want to do. But then they're also annoyed on the other side that they don't have financial freedom. And I'm like, this is an equation. You can't. If you pick working for free, that is. That is zero, right? That. That is. There's a zero you've added to that equation. You have to also be okay when this shows up in your bank account. When it shows up, right? Or the lack of it thereof. So working for free, something that is costing us money in our businesses every single day. And so when you think of the fact that, well, I wouldn't have put away enough for college for my kids, I would not be able to take them on the vacation I want to take them on, I would not be able to pay the bills comfortably the way I need to. I would have to do a second job because I'm doing all this free stuff. Then, you know, take a look at it and say, is this what I really want to do? And if it's not, then it's time to start getting comfortable having those conversations, putting in accountability, putting in stops, putting in boundaries and all of those things because you want to practice medicine on your terms and. And you want to live life on your terms, right? So that's number one. Number two is unused subscriptions, okay? Unused subscriptions. And many, many, many businesses. I mean, like, I want you to do an audit. I hope you're doing an audit, right? Like, give me the first one. You're like, okay, where am I working for free? So you can stop it. And this second one, where. Where do I have all these subscriptions that I'm not using, right? So we even had a time, like, we. When we started using a voiceover Internet phone. We started with a company. I won't say what name it is. I'm not trying to ding them or anything like that. And then we switched over to Ringcentral. Will you know that their monthly fee was coming out of Our account for almost six months before we caught it, right? Because we had called and we had canceled and we thought like, when you call and you cancel, that's it, right? But no, you know, it kept going and all that kind of stuff. So, so, so that's, that's waste. That's again, that's straight to the bottom line because, you know, like that, that's being thrown away. Maybe you're a coach and in the beginning you're like, oh, I'm going to use kajabi and I'm going to do this. Nothing against Kajabi, right? I use Kajabi and nothing has kajabi. And you're going to use that as your platform to host your podcast, to host your courses, to host all these things. And then you went in a different direction and you decided, I'm going to do something different. I mean, like I have clients who said I want to be a coach. And they're like, no. What I really, like, I've experimented with all these things. I realized what I really want to be as a speaker, right? And stuff like that. But you have this, you know, $200 a month coming out of your account every single month, like clockwork. Use subscription. You know, you have monthly services, like monthly service for your ads or monthly services for your social media and stuff like this. And you're not using them monthly services because you have someone writing a blog for you and you're not using them. Like those are all areas where we throw away money, like costing us money. And so this is a simple look through audit of your profit and loss statement or, you know, your accounting, QuickBooks or whatever. But just looking through that and going like, okay, what is here that is not being used? I need to put the tech stuff is really sneaky. Really, really sneaky. Like, you know, Google Workspace is that, that, you know, zapier. There's so many of them. The question is, which ones are you actually using? Right. The third one is inefficient processes. Now remember, when our processes are inefficient, we have to use more manpower. And when we use more manpower, that's more payroll. And the biggest expense for almost every business is payroll, right? So inefficient processes. So I'll give you a few examples. You know, as, as a pediatrician, one of the services that we offer is ear piercings. In my practice, and we would have the phone ring nonstop, people calling, asking questions about ear piercing. What kind of earrings do you use? Are you going to numb it? And all the Things like it's the same questions, but over and over and over again. And so here I am, I have somebody on my team who should be doing other things and they just answering all these questions about ear piercings. And I was like, okay, this is what we're going to do. I thought of the questions that people would ask me. So I pulled out those commonly asked questions. I went to my front desk, I'm like, what are the questions people are asking you? I took all those questions, answered all of them, gave it to my website guy, put it on there. So where they go to find out that we do ear piercings, all those questions are answered there. And guess what happened? Our phone calls went from a gazillion to zero, right? And so what did I do? I saved all this time that this team member can then use to do things that are more important than for me, right? And then so that's my way of quote, unquote, saving money. Because the other way I was just throwing it away. It wasn't obvious because it was staff time, but I paid the staff, right? And they would have to give up revenue generating activities to do that. Right. Another example is again in, you know, in private practice, I have, you know, well, checks and you know, like a two month old, I mean, is the same questions, right? There's, there's certain questions we ask everybody, you know, how much, how much, you know, formula, breast milk is the child getting? How. And do they poop? I do this and that. And you know, and sometimes what would happen is, is like, you know, how much milk are we getting? It's like, well, you know, so I get back from work at midnight and usually the baby will wake up then and do, Babe, is it 2 ounces or 3 ounces? Yeah, yeah, about 2 ounces at that time. And then we'll go to bed and then, you know, the baby will wake up about this time. So they're like working the entire mass while I'm there and I'm like, oh my goodness. Like, no. Right? Because that's time I could use to actually address problems that they have. Do it my anticipatory, anticipatory guidance, maybe spend less time and all of that. And I'm like, oh my goodness, no. Like no. And so we created, you know, forms of all the questions that we're going to ask, right? And we're like, okay. So when they check in or before they come in, they have all these things they can answer. And so the things that are issues are immediately apparent. And I can Go over like, okay, he's getting, Johnny's getting this much milk. This is amazing. We like the range to be between this and this. He's pooping this number of times a day. And you may wondering compared to other kids, but this is actually normal. You know what I mean? Like, so all that think time, I eliminated all that think time in the exam room because it was creating inefficiency, was using up more of my time. And of course, I'm the most expensive person on my team, okay? So think about inefficient processes that way. I had a coach client who had this process of seeing the, her, her coaching clients. And then she would go on and create all these notes and create the assignment and create all this. So it's taking her four hours to do the back work of the client that she saw for an hour. And I'm like, well, I can only imagine that even though you're showing up on social media, even though you're doing all these things, you secretly don't want your business to work, right? Because of the amount of time. And she's. How did you know? I'm like, because this is so inefficient, right? So because it's taking five hours to see one client, right? Like it's so inefficient. And so we work through that. But imagine that she was stifling her own growth, right? Stifling her own growth because of this very inefficient process. So think of how much. So let's even do the math. I don't remember how much, you know, but. And I wouldn't say either way, but let's just say she was doing $1,000 a month for coaching, okay? And so she had this one client, I was costing her five hours each time she would talk to the person. And so because of that, she was giving up growth. Now what if she did in such a way that all the work was done at the same time, right? And maybe there was like, like it was all done. So maybe an hour, maybe an hour half. But because of that, the four or five hours it was taking her to do all the extra work, she could see four other clients there. That's an extra $4,000 a month. That's an extra 48 grand a year that thrown away because of inefficient processes. You see? Okay, so that's number three. Number four is ignoring second generation revenue. And that would look like clients or patients choosing to work with you again. So they've worked with you before. They want to work with you again, or they're sending you referrals so they know like and trust you. They've worked with you, they've had amazing results. So they bringing you more clients or they worked with you in one capacity and they decided, I want to go even further, right? I want you to think of all those scenarios. Those are so much easier than acquiring new clients. The most expensive way to get more revenue in is by getting new clients. And I'm not saying you won't get new ones, but your second generation is so much easier. And so when you ignore that, you're not asking for referrals, you're not asking people who worked with you before to work with you. You're not asking people who you've helped get big wins work with you in even higher capacity. When you're not doing that, your throat, like, throwing away money. Think about the time you went to a restaurant, you looked on Google and saw their reviews and all that stuff by your friends. Like, oh, my goodness, I was there last week. It is the best. You should go there. That's the end. You're like, yeah, my friend said. And I went like, so imagine how much work the owner will have to do to get them to that level of confidence in their restaurant, right? And so when we give up on that, we're giving up on too much. Like, we're giving up on what is, you know, like to acquire a new client or a new patient. So much easier with second generation. So think about it that way, right? Like, if you're not doing that, you're leaving so much money on the table. Like, so much. And let me tell you this. When you do a good job, a lot of times the people think that you are so busy. So when they don't refer people to you, they think you're doing them. They think they're doing your favor. I've had this happen in private practice. I've had this happen as a coach. So, like, in private practice, people are like, oh, man. I had this friend, she was looking for a pediatrician, and I was like, man, I wish Dr. Una wasn't so busy and she was accepting new patients. I was like, hold up. What? Right? What? And this is someone who loves me. This is someone who's worked with me for a while. This is someone who sent me a ton of patients, and she thought she was doing me a favor by not referring to me. Okay? Sometimes in Entre MD people, oh, I see all the stuff you're doing on social media and all that stuff, like, there's no way you're looking for more people. Let me say this to you listening to me right now, okay? If you have, you've been like, man, I want to be in the business school. I don't know if it's open, I don't know if they'll accept me and all of this, let me tell you, okay, we want you in the school. If you have a goal of building a six mult, six, seven, multiple, seven figure business, okay? So you want growth. You're after growth. You're committed to your goals, you are coachable. Means you want to learn things, learn new things, learn new ways of doing things, open to, you know, feedback in all those things and accountability. And you're willing to stay in conversation. Which means if you're struggling, you're like, okay, I'm struggling with this. How can I get help? If you're getting wins, you're sharing them like you state you want, you want a partner, you want to be, you want to co create with someone if that is you, we have a spot for you in the Entremd Business School, okay? So go turn your application entremd.com forward/business. Okay, we have a spot for you. Okay? So don't think that. All right? And if you've, you're listening and you're in the business school. Yeah, we, we want your. We love the doctors in the entrepreneur business school. And I would love to have more doctors just like you. So you have friends and you're like, this would be a great space for them. Invite them to join us. Okay? All right. So don't ignore second generation revenue when you do that. You're leaving so much money on the table. So much because you have all these people who love you. Like, you would tell everybody about you, but they think they're doing you a favor. So make it clear that the favor is for them to refer or to renew or to, you know, continue to work with you. Okay? Number five. Number five is not routinely asking people to work with you. So asking is something that as a human race, we're pretty uncomfortable doing. And so you might even be here and you're on social media and you're speaking on events and you're doing all these things, but you're networking, but you're never actually making an ask. So you have an audience. Your audience is growing. People know you, people like you, but you're not asking. So they're not saying yes. Nothing shocked me. Like this was a year or two ago when I asked two people. This was in the same week, two people. I was like, why did you join the entrepreneur business school? They're like, oh, because I listened to the podcast and you asked. So all this time, they had been thinking about it, they've been getting wins from the podcast, all of those things, and they never. They never joined the school. They never did anything. And then at the season, I was like, listen, if you're thinking about it, there's a place for you go turn your application. And they joined, right? Like, and so this is not about asking when you feel like asking when you're motivated, asking when you're inspired. This is asking routinely, right? Like, you're like, two times a week on social media, I make a direct ask. When I show up at events, I make a direct ask. When I show up at networking events, I make a direct ask for the people who've worked with me before. Periodically, I make a direct ask. Like, you want to keep that asking going? You're in private practice. Every time someone leaves, I make an ask for them to make their next appointment. Every time someone says, thank you, you're an amazing doc, I ask for the referral. Like, you want to have all these triggers, right? You want to have these triggers. I want to have these things that are scheduled. So you're routinely asking them. It's a numbers game. The more you ask, the more people say yes. It's just the way it works. Okay, but if we're not asking, think about this, right? If, you know, like, if the lifetime. Not lifetime, if the annual VAT value of a patient was a thousand dollars, right? And you're not asking, but if you asked, you would get 10, 20 more patients a month. I want you to think about that. I want you to think about how much that is. I want you to think about, you know, you're a coach, and people pay ten grand a year to work with you. Or. Or they pay, you know, five grand for three months or whatever number that is, you start asking, think about what that does to your bottom line, right? And so we are literally throwing away money, throwing away so much money. This is costing us. Asking, not asking is costing us so much money. So much. Okay, so look at these five areas, and these are five things that you can fix in your business today, like, stop working for free. Go look at all your subscriptions. Look at the ones that need to be canceled. Look at your processes. And it's not all of them. There's no way to look at all of them, but look at the ones that are creating the most chaos. Right. And start looking for simple ways to tweak it so you can buy the time of your team back and make the customer experience so much better. Stop ignoring second generation revenue. You can send an email right now and say, hey, you know, I've loved working with you. I love referral from some. You know, we connect with someone just like you would benefit from a service like this or invite them to continue to work with you or whatever, right? And then, you know, get to this point where you ask, ask, ask, you ask on a schedule. You ask routinely, ask all the time. Because, you know, maybe you're hearing, you're like, man, I don't want to bother people, but the truth of the matter is the best, I mean, the highest value people get from you is when they actually work with you. And so when you ask your serving, right? When you, When I. When I ask you to join the entrepreneur business school, I'm very clear on what I'm asking, right? Because there are doctors in the school who are building their dream lives and their dream businesses concurrently. There are doctors making statement, oh my goodness, I'm making more by working less. There are doctors who in Q1 of 2023 are like, my goodness, I made more in Q1 of 2023 that I made in all of 2022. There are people who are like, oh, my goodness, like, I had these goals for Q1, but it's January, I think I'm done. So I need to reset my goals for the year because I am on track, right? There are people who are like, I crossed my first six figures, my first seven figures, my first multiple seven figures, speaking on the most prestigious stages, saying things like, I don't recognize myself. So when I'm asking you to come work with me, I'm asking you to come get results just like that. You see? So it's not about manipulation, it's not about money grabs. It's not about anything. It's like, oh, my goodness, the transformation of a lifetime is one application away. So I want you to do this audit and do it. You know, remember, in entrepreneur, we don't learn to learn or learn to know. We learn to do. I want you to take this, I want you to implement it, and I want you to save yourselves tens, hundreds of thousands of dollars, right? Just by doing this. Okay? Just by doing this. And you can go on to create a bonus in your business just by plugging some places where we're having some leaps, some leaks, and how beautiful would that be? Okay? So do the work. Stop throwing away money, okay? Get rid of these things that are costing you money. And I can't wait to celebrate the wins with you, okay? Because now you increase your profit margin. Who knows? Maybe give yourself a raise, maybe give yourself an extra vacation, maybe give yourself some time off. Whatever that is. Whatever works for you. Okay? All right. So don't forget to share this episode with the other doctors in your life, and I'll see you on the next episode of the entremdy Podcast. Hey, if you love listening to the entremdy podcast, I want to invite you to join Entre MD On Demand. It is my signature subscription program that gives you access to a library of business courses designed to help you do one thing as a physician entrepreneur, and that is to thrive. Just head out to entre.comonDemand and I'd love to have you join us. See you on the inside.