Ep 34 - How To Get Rich Owning A Medical Practice

All right, good afternoon everybody. This is episode 34 of the Practice Profit System. I am your host, Matthew Gillogly, and today we're going to talk about how to get rich owning a medical practice. Yeah, good topic, huh? Um, so here's the thing. I have, in all my time working with practice owners, everybody wants to work less and make more. The problem is, is how they go about doing that, and they go about doing it based on a lot of old principles and old belief systems that frankly just are not true. I don't know if they ever were true, but I can tell you they don't have to be true today. And so that's what we're going to be talking about today. So let me, you know, just kind of nod or whatever if you've ever heard these statements when you're starting a business. You're not going to pay yourself for 3 years. You need to pay yourself last. You're gonna have to work endless hours the first 3 to 5 years in order to get it up and running. You're gonna have to do all the work. One of my other favorite ones is if you want it done right, you gotta do it yourself. That's a lie. I could tell you that right now. So after 5 different startups, and I've been an entrepreneur officially where it's my only income since 2001, I can tell you, none of those are true. In fact, I'd like to meet the person that created them and give them a piece of my mind, because there's just nothing that's true about them at all. And so I want to debunk that. And I want to show you how to go about doing that in today's podcast and video podcast. So before I go any further, I do want to remind you, if you would like a copy of my book, The Anatomy of a 7-Figure Medical Practice. Well, I just dropped it. Here we go. The Anatomy of a 7-Figure Medical Practice right there. All you have to do is— and get it for free— just pay $7.95 in shipping and handling. Along with, uh, you'll also get $1,197 worth of free bonuses. Go to srpmedicalmarketing.com/book. That's srpmedicalmarketing.com/book. Now let's talk about how to get rich owning a medical practice. So you are not— you're gonna— here's, here's my— this is what all my startups have taught me, and I'm working with literally thousands and thousands of entrepreneurs. One, you're gonna pay yourself first. The whole purpose of a practice, the whole purpose of you owning your own business, is not just to serve the patients but to serve your bank account. So you're gonna pay yourself first. I do not believe in paying yourself last. Second, you are not going to work endless hours. Yes, you're gonna have a window in a period of time where, yes, you are gonna be working quite a bit, but I'm gonna show you very quickly how to move. And it's not as simple as just delegating, okay, and dumping a bunch of stuff on somebody else's desk or hiring an office manager and hope they figure it out. That's, that's not what you want to do. Um, and the other one, let's see, um, you know, you're gonna have— you're not gonna do all the work. So here's a couple of principles that you need to put into place. All right, so this is, uh, this is the first principle. You have to have a 24-hour period every single week where you do no work. Now, if you want to work in the yard, that's one thing. You want to go play a round of golf, for some of you that's work. But you want to have a 24-hour period where you have no work. No work email, no work reading, no, no checking in in the office. And, you know, I recommend that you make this a Saturday or a Sunday. You know, generally, I like to see people— I have some friends of mine that they'll get up, they like to get up on Saturday morning. Finish a little bit of work, work like to like 10 o'clock, and then they go from 10 o'clock AM on Saturday all the way to 10 AM on Sunday, no work. Okay, I have other friends of mine that shut it down at 5 o'clock on Friday, and then they don't do anything until Sunday morning. That's what they do. I have others that take Sunday off. It doesn't matter, but you need a 24-hour period where you have no work. Okay, your brain needs to shut down. As a doctor, you should understand the power of rest. So you're— you have to shut things down. Okay, so that's the first one, first principle. The second is, this is gonna be really radical. I need you to block out a half a day every single week on your calendar in the office and see zero patients. Now, ideally, when you first are up and running, you'll be working with the staff on specific things. Put the phones to voicemail, close the door, see no patients. I don't care. Oh, Mrs. Mrs. Franklin is in the neighborhood. Oh, just tell her to come on by. No. You can make it Tuesday afternoons, you can make it Wednesday mornings. We used to make it Wednesday mornings in our practice, and that's when the whole staff got together and we worked on things. We saw no patients on Wednesday morning until 12 o'clock. Okay, so that gave us a 3.5-hour window to get stuff done. Okay? But here's the second component of that, is as this goes along, You will be the one that leaves the practice during that timeframe. It's very important that you have a half a day once a week for you to shut everything down, not work on any patient files, not, you know, where you leave the practice, go to the coffee shop, work on creating content or writing an article or thinking about your business, but you have to take a half hour, half a day. Every single week where you are not in the office. Okay, you might think, but Matt, I'm so busy, I'm the only one that can do it. That is the problem. All right, you need to get away from that so that you can take some time to start thinking about how to get yourself out of doing all of the work. Okay, then the next one, this is going to be like the most, probably the most radical one for everybody listening to this, but Here is the biggest, the one of the biggest ahas that you may have in your business. So I have a client of mine who has been open 4 months, 5 months. I have 2 clients that have been open 4 or 5 months, and our conversation, my conversations with them over the last couple of weeks has been, okay, it's time to start zeroing in on the thing that makes the money. Let me explain. If you've been a longtime listener to this podcast or watching any of my stuff, you'll understand that I'm a big believer in what's called the Pareto principle. Okay, so the Pareto principle is in the concept of 80/20. 20% of the people control 80% of the wealth. 20% of the roads get 80% of the traffic. 20% of your patients take up 80% of your time, get 80% of the prescriptions, right? So the 80/20 principle is a scientific principle that is proven by an Italian economist, and since Subsequently reproven numerous times. It's a scientific thing. I mean, you can look at the, the sunflower, the number of seeds on a sunflower head. 80% of the seeds in a sunflower head are congregated in 20% of the area. Okay, so this is a scientific thing, and it's really important to understand because it also is at play in your business. So what you're going to find, 20% of your patients make you 80% of your revenue. And the flip side is true, by the way. 80% of your patients are gonna make you 20% of your revenue. 20% of your procedures make you 80% of your revenue and profits. 20% of your time generates 80% of your revenue. One of the things is that you want to start identifying all of those things. Now, the first thing that you do is you need to go through what you sell, what you provide to your patients, and what is it that generates the vast majority of your revenue and profits? Because not all revenue is created equal. In fact, most revenue is not equal. And if you can focus your time and energy on the 20% that makes you 80% of your revenue, and eventually eliminating that 80% of that doesn't make anything for you, the 80% of the things you do that only generates 20% of your income, you will find that you will sell infinitely more of the thing that's— that makes you the most amount of money. Okay, so how you do this is really, really simple. I did this in my clinics. I wish I still— somewhere I still have that sheet in my files. As you can see, I'm a little bit of a packrat, but not too bad. I'm actually pretty organized, or I should say not organized, but I'm actually— my desk, my office is fairly straightened up and clean. But anyway, I digress. So what— it was really interesting what we discovered. Was that we looked at all the different things that we did, and, you know, we did P-Shots, we did testosterone, we did trimix, and the number one thing that generated the most amount of revenue was us selling our mid-tier to slightly above mid-tier plan. Okay, so that plan— I think that plan went for about $3,500 to $4,000. Okay, it was a combination of trimix and And HRT. And so we found that that was the combination that sold the most. And what sold the least, by the way, and what we found created a huge problem in our office, is for the longest time— so we used to sell 50-dose, 100-dose, and 200-dose plans in a year, injections for trimix. And what we found We started doing this thing where we offered a 25-dose plan because it was less expensive, right? Thinking people would buy it. And then we started doing like a 15-dose plan because, you know, we figured we would get— we would convert a bunch of people. Well, we converted people. The problem was, is it was— it started becoming a larger percentage of our transactions and a lower percentage of our profit and revenue— profit and revenues. So we were eating up all this time in resources. We started doing the research and we realized we were spending 2 to 3 times more with the lower-end people, buyers, and dealing with a lot of chasing them for money if they're on payment plans and they're not following protocols on how to inject the medication, missing appointments, scheduling, rescheduling, versus the people that were buying our mid-tier to middle, upper tier, upper middle tier programs, they made us the most amount of money. And so we very quickly got rid of the lower end. And all of a sudden what we found is we had more time to focus in on and spend time with our best customers. Our reviews increased, our, our profits increased. We didn't have to work as many insane hours. I actually found out I probably didn't need as much staff as I had. And started making some adjustments there, getting rid of some dead weight there. And so this is a very powerful principle. Now, a lot of you are doing a lot of different things. You have this what I call the Greek diner menu of all the different things that you offer. And if you were to go through and really look at everything that made you money, you would find that 80% of the things that you offer, because you think, well, just in case it'd make a really good idea to have this, 80% of the things that you offer, nobody buys and wants. So you're better off just eliminating it. Your staff doesn't need to be trained on it. They don't need to know how to sell it. They don't need to know the benefits of it. They don't need to know the differences between all the things. Just do the thing that you're the best at doing and forsake all other things. I have a client of mine, And his wife is one of the— apparently is a, is a well-thought-of heart surgeon, but I believe pediatric. Okay. And she does a very special simplification, special thing. I'm sorry, she, she's— I think she's pediatric. But anyway, one of her— I'm not getting— I'm prior— I'm not a current customer. I'm sorry, a prior client of mine. His wife was a top cardiologist, pediatric cardiologist, heart surgeon, and she focused on one very specific area, and she was able to charge exponentially more and had people waiting months to come see her because that's the only thing that she did. Uh, Trevor, my client up in Buffalo, does laser lipo. That's all he does in his female clinic right now. He is booking out left and right. In our ED clinics, all we did was erectile dysfunction, men's sexual function. That's it. We didn't offer anything else. We did trimix, we did PRP, we did HRT. That was it. That's all we did. And it worked like gangbusters. So the more you can focus in on this, this is the key to making more money and having more time off. See, the purpose of this business is to serve you. And so, yeah, you're probably doing this because you want to make some money. And yeah, you're probably doing this because you want to serve the patient. But, and maybe you want a little bit nicer car, or maybe you do want a Tesla, or maybe you want a bigger house, maybe you want a vacation house, whatever you want. But there comes a point where there's only so many hours in the day and you have to find a way to leverage those as much as possible. My goal for my clients is for them to see patients about 20 hours a week, and that's it. The rest of the time they can take off, they can think about their business if they wanna go on. I encourage all of them. In fact, this is one of the things we work on. When was the last time you took a 4-day weekend? And I'm talking about a real 4-day weekend. I'm talking about the one where you leave Wednesday night and you don't check in on Thursday and Friday, and you come back on Sunday night and you haven't checked email. I'm not talking about the one where you work on Wednesday and then you realize you got to go into the office for a couple of hours on Thursday morning and you leave at 12, and then you do a working vacation and bring your laptop and you're writing scripts and all of this, and you're on the phone, and maybe you get like a 4-hour window on Saturday where you're not doing anything. That's not a vacation, folks. That is being chained and shackled to your business. Okay, so if you want to get rich owning your medical practice, you've got to change the way that that thought process was. You— it's not about how many hours you can work. It's not about sleep deprivation. It's nothing like that. It's about finding the few things that make you money. And by the way, I'm assuming these are the things that you love to do as well. And, and being the absolute best at it and forsaking all others. That's the key. That is the key. All right. Hope that helps you today. Have a wonderful day. If you would like our book, The Anatomy to a 7-Figure Medical Practice, as always, there it is. You can get it and get over $1,197 of free bonuses. Go to srpmedicalmarketing.com/book. That's srpmedicalmarketing.com/book. And be on the lookout, folks. We are going to be increasing the number of podcasts. I'll be doing a number of interviews. Those will go a little bit longer than these traditional short, tight little podcasts, but we'll be doing some interviews with other successful doctors and practice owners and other people that are really shaping and changing the way medicine is practiced and done and delivered in this country. So thank you so much. I'm Matthew Gillogly. Have a great day. We'll see y'all soon, folks. Bye.