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Success in Podiatry Business Management - who needs money anyway?

Discussion in 'Introductions' started by AdminMan, Jan 28, 2009.

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What's the biggest problem/challenge in your podiatry business that stops you making lots of money?

Poll closed Mar 14, 2009.
  1. Don't have enough patients

    4 vote(s)
    66.7%
  2. Don't know how to get more patients

    2 vote(s)
    33.3%
  3. Worried that if I charge more my patients will leave

    3 vote(s)
    50.0%
  4. Don't have good business systems that make life easy for me

    2 vote(s)
    33.3%
  5. Can't find good staff

    0 vote(s)
    0.0%
  6. I advertise but get no results

    0 vote(s)
    0.0%
  7. Patients don't come back

    0 vote(s)
    0.0%
  8. Patients don't rebook for their next appointment

    1 vote(s)
    16.7%
  9. I don't know, but I wish i did!

    0 vote(s)
    0.0%
  10. Can find anyone to help me make my business grow and make profit

    3 vote(s)
    50.0%
Multiple votes are allowed.
  1. AdminMan

    AdminMan Member


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    Hi all at Podiatry Arena!

    Hi, my name’s Mick Shaw and I've been a member for a couple of years and have enjoyed the threads & posts, most educational! I’m not a podiatrist, in fact I spend nearly ten years of my life as a police officer. I spent most of my police life working in Detective sections and I’ve earned a degree in Investigations. I have solved cases ranging from house break-ins to robberies, rapes, murders, motor vehicle rebirthing and major frauds. My last posting was to the Major Crime Squad working on organised crime rings and I can tell you I learnt a lot and saw some things that could make toe jam look like peanut butter!

    I also have a passion for property investing, which I have been doing for over 15 years, but that’s a story for another time.

    My wonderful wife has been a podiatrist for over 10 years and has run 2 podiatry clinics during that time. Last year she sold one of the businesses for a healthy profit, and at the same time we were selling that practice we on holidays in Thailand, our second international holiday in a year. She is about to take maternity leave to give birth to our second child, meanwhile she’s leaving the business to run itself under the steam of some amazing business systems that make sure bills are paid and profit is made every day.

    I met my podiatrist wife 5 years ago and was very impressed when she told me she was a podiatrist and owned two of her own podiatry businesses in some very prominent locations in Adelaide. I thought ‘Yes! I’ve hit gold here!’ and asked her more about her businesses. She told me how she had lots of loyal patients that had been coming to her for years and years and that business was so good that when there was no patients booked in she could go for a walk on the nearby beach, or catch a new movie at the local cinema, or go shopping to buy candles, flowers and ribbon to make her house look pretty. My wife loves that pretty stuff, I just don’t understand the candles and ribbons though!

    Wow, she must be a real good podiatrist, I thought. She loved her patients and they loved her. She enjoyed going to work and prided herself on giving excellent patient care. I even visited one of her clinics and meet a few patients who sung her praise. They said ‘I’ve been coming to see your wife for years and years, I even bring my family to see her. She’s so nice! I love chatting with her. My feet feel great after I leave here!” and lovely stuff like that.

    I was really impressed by what her patients had to say about her and in 2006 I married her (not just because of the podiatry businesses, she really is a very amazing person!). We started to talk about our dreams desires and goals in life. We wanted to live a comfortable life, in a nice house, start a family of our own, and be financially free. I asked about cash flow in her business and she said her accountant took care of all that stuff. That set off some alarm bells and I asked if she wouldn’t mind if I had a look at her financial records and business records. She didn’t mind.

    What a shock I got after seeing her Profit & Loss sheet which looked like she was about to go bankrupt!! I asked if she knew where her money was going and she didn’t know. She just took cash from the business cash till at the end of the day and that’s it.

    After studying her accounting books for a couple of hours it was obvious things were out of control. She wasn’t claiming all her expenses, she was telling the tax office she had earnt tens of thousands of dollars but wasn’t actually collecting the money from her patients, she had no idea who owed her what and had no way of tracking if they ever paid, she relied on patient’s honesty, because they loved her and she loved them. She had stacks of over due accounts and that was just the start of it. Mail went unopened because she didn’t want to read about who she owed money to!

    At that point I offered to manage her podiatry businesses. It seemed although she was an excellent practitioner, she wasn’t an excellent business owner.

    The thing that made me the most surprised was that she didn't even realise she was very quickly going very broke and was on the edge of having it all repossessed by the banks and creditors! I asked her how her business was going and she said 'great, all my patients love me!".

    I asked her how her bank balances were and she said 'excellent, see, I've got $17,097 in my VISA credit card and $12,595 in this MasterCard !"

    I almost fainted! She didn't realise that she owed stacks and stack of money and that she wasn't even making enough money to pay her suppliers. About 3 weeks after I had started living with her I answered the home phone and it was a man from a podiatry supplies company. He wanted to know when my wife was going to pay the $3247 dollars she had owed for the last 6 months! He indicated that it was well overdue and that if I looked out my window I would see a big dark car parked on the street with 4 big dark men sitting in it. I looked out the window and couldn’t see the dark car, but the man on the phone said if the bill wasn’t paid by the next day I wouldn’t see anything for a few weeks!

    This was enough to make me take a long hard look at my wife’s podiatry business and try to work out why a business that sounded so wonderful could be performing so poorly on the financial side.

    What I found out about her business was incredible!

    Because this is my first post I don’t want to take up too much of your time, so if you want to find out more about the shocking truths I learnt about my wife’s podiatry business and what we did to take it from running at a HORRIBLE LOSS to making a massive $276,407 in turnover in less than 2 years, then click on the REPLY button below and reply to this post and I’ll fill you in with the gory details.

    REPLY NOW and tell me the Biggest Challenge or Problem you are facing in your business that is stopping you from making stacks of profit and spending more time doing what you want like holidays and spending time with family and friends.

    If you have a similar story or know of some with a story like my wife’s I’d love to learn from your story. I’m sure others out there in the podiatry Arena could learn heaps too!

    We have learnt some powerful and simple strategies that helped take my wife’s business form bust to boom in less than two short years. Imagine what your life would be like if you knew what we know! I’d love to share these amazing ideas with you.

    Post your reply now!
     
    Last edited: Jan 28, 2009
  2. dyfoot

    dyfoot Active Member

    I think that we would all like a bigger profit and a better lifestyle, but there's ALWAYS a catch!
     
  3. Asher

    Asher Well-Known Member

    Hi AdminMan,

    Share away ...

    Feel free to share with everyone on this forum. As you know, all types of clinicians share their knowledge here on a daily basis.
     
  4. AdminMan

    AdminMan Member

    Hi again,
    Thanks for welcoming me to the forum and thanks for taking the time to read my introduction.

    I'm currently getting my thoughts together on paper in a format that is easy to share with others in this forum. Because we are all so busy these days in our podiatry practices I wouldn't want to put information out there that wasn't easy to read and understand. More importantly it's essential to me that if you want to learn anything that the info is easy to implement and gets you the best results you can get.

    dyfoot, you are right, there is always a catch to learning more, earning more and working less. The catch is that you have to be willing to change, that you have to be prepared to do some things that are out of your usual comfort zone and that you need to be ready to let others help you grow.

    I have many mentors who I have learnt from over the years. Successful people in all walks of life usually have spent time working on themself, learning more and learning from other successful people. That's the catch.

    I’ll be posting some great info about how you can improve your podiatry business in the coming weeks. Life has been generous to me and I feel that it's important to give back to life and this forum is the perfect place where I can give back.

    Look out for some new posts in about 2 weeks time that will begin to help you take your practice by the reigns and give you more time and money in return for your efforts!

    Take care till then...
     
  5. Heather J Bassett

    Heather J Bassett Well-Known Member

    :welcome: Mick, i am sure you will find many of us have been in the same boat as your wife. The newer pods do some admin and biz management stuff a bit at uni unlike the rest of us.

    You may want to continue this or transfer it to another forum.
    Introductions is not a forum that everyone checks out.

    Look forward to hearing various strategies for improvement.

    Good to have you along

    Cheers
     
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