How To Manage Your Clinic Business Using Shifts

How do you get more new patients or hire more clinicians at your clinic and yet still remain profitable? This is the question and I'm on a journey to get you the answer. I'm going to interview the best marketers and clinic owners across the world to give you access to their winning strategies from recruitment, marketing, operations, finance and more. So you can easily take action on the secrets to grow your clinic. I'm Rick Lau. Welcome to Clinic Boss Secrets. One of the most effective ways to be able to optimize your clinic space is running shifts. Check out this episode. Dale Yardley and I talk about how you could optimize your clinic business using like shifts.

Check it out. Something we do in our community all the times we we get everyone to go on shifts versus non shifts.

Right.

Paul, can you maybe share with like our attendees, like what we mean by that and, and how it could have impact on your business?

Yeah, for sure. So I think the majority of clinic owners, the majority of clinic owners have a shift that looks like the non shift side where it's like 9am to 3pm maybe, maybe like they go into the evenings, 5 to 6pm that sort of thing. And that shift is really designed for the clinician. Right. The clinician wants to work 9 to 5. But if you're really, you know, wanting to provide a business that is patient centered, that is really about the patient experience and the patient journey, then the shifts actually become really important. Because most people work like most people in the general population work a 9 to 5, right. And so if you don't have a shift where you start before their nine to five or a shift where they can come after work into the evening, then that's gonna be a very poor patient experience. So what we do is we have a morning shift and an evening shift, 7am to 1pm and 1.30pm to 7.30pm we also do not, and we're gonna talk about this a little bit later, but we don't do part time people. Everybody works full time hours or we try anyways to get people to work full time hours. Because again, it's about patient experience. We want patients to have consistency with the same person getting enough frequent treatments and front end loading those treatments so that we get patients better, faster.

Right, That's a good point. Because if you only have like six beds, right? If you only have seven beds at your clinic at 1500 square feet, if you run non shifts, like you can only put one person, you could have twice as much, you could move those beds twice as much. If you actually run into shifts.

And I think on that note too is we don't want to get into the patient experience too much here. But I'm also a prime example personally when I was transitioning out of my full time clinical role. And what I'm doing when I'm mentoring right now is we prescribe based on the clinician availability. So I would do that as opposed to truly what the patient needs. Because we know that as clinicians we aren't really good at sharing patients even when we want to. It's. That patient has built a relationship with me and it's really protective of all of us. So I think that's the piece that you really want to think about is my availability versus the patient's needs.

Yeah, and we're not saying this is easy to do, but if you have the right culture and you actually have like the right people on board and you've done over time, if you could get your clinic to be running shifts, you'll, you'll find that you actually don't need 3,000 square feet. You know, you can actually run a, you could run a 2 million, 1 million dollar clinic off like a thousand or 1500 square feet, right? But you have to be running shifts. So some math here. So if, assuming you only have six beds, okay. If you run four shifts, if you have six beds and you, and you could actually have four shifts a day, okay. And that means in a week you would actually have 28 shifts, right? And when I'm saying like running your, your clinic optimally, you want to be opening on Saturdays and Sundays, right? And if the average, if the average like person sees like 14 patients per shift at 80% utilization, that means for six beds you could actually crank out 392 patients per week. Right? And that's $1.6 million having six beds running shifts. And that to me is a 1500 square feet clinic. But this is like a tight operation.

That's a tight operate.

Yeah, absolutely.

That's a, that's a tight operation and we've seen people do it and it's pretty amazing. But even if you did like 80% of that, the 80, 20 rule, right, you had one morning shift and two evening shifts. You're still going to get very close numbers to that, like 1.2, 1.3, which is pretty awesome. I know some of the people on the call are probably like, holy shit, we're open on Sundays. Like who opens on Sundays, right? This is the direction that healthcare is going. It's about patient experience. It's about Availability, it's about making sure that your schedule caters to your patients and not necessarily your clinicians.

Right.

Yeah. I think in the past we would have said we had failed attempts at doing weekends. And right now my clinical practice, because of my schedule is on a Saturday and it's full.

Yep, I know. Clinics opening on Sundays now too. Like it used to be Saturdays, now it's Sundays. Right. And you're gonna find light, you're gonna, you're gonna find your, your, your senior therapist won't do these jobs, but like the new people will. Right. Just depends on the messaging that you put together. Right. And we talked about this earlier, like part timers and full timers. Paul.

Right, yeah, part timers. I call part timers clinic killers. Right. And it's nothing about their personality or nothing about how they treat. Right. It's purely because I know that if I want my patients to get better, I know I'm going to front end load those treatments. I want those patients to not come forever, not come for the rest of their lives. But you know, for the first couple weeks at least, I want them to come three to two to three times a week. But if I have someone working just Tuesday, Thursday and they're at another clinic on the rest of the week, the chances of those two days, of the clinicians days matching up with the patient's two days that they need to come in, the chances of those two days matching up are very slim. Like it's very unlikely. Right. Some of you might have people who are working three days in the morning and three days in the evening. That's essentially the same thing as having two part time people, one person working in the evening, one person working in the morning. The same effect is going to happen. So, you know, again for me it's about consistency, patient experience, having the availability of that physio, that chiro, that massage therapist available for that patient. And you can only achieve that with full time people.

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