Transforming Money Shame: Embracing Profitability For Clinicians In Private Practice - with Julie Herres

Transforming Money Shame: Embracing Profitability For Clinicians In Private Practice – with Julie Herres

Even highly successful health professionals can experience shame around the topic of money and profitability. But how do we release the shame and build sustainable and profitable practices? That’s the topic of this episode when Jo is joined by accountant and speaker Julie Herres. Julis is the author of Profit First for Therapists and the host of the Therapy for Your Money podcast.

In this episode, Jo and Julie discuss:

Why practice owners should focus on profit first,
The mistakes we often make when making financial decisions,
Why you don’t need to be good at maths to run a profitable business,
Misconceptions that practice owners often have about what it means to run a successful practice, and
The problems facing the allied health profession if practice owners don’t learn to manage money better.

You can connect with Julie via her website. You can also download the free Profit First Getting Started workbook here.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

If you know you need more support, please visit my website at https://jomuirhead.com

Transcript

Jo:

Welcome to this episode of the Entrepreneurial Clinician Podcast, where we are going to take a bit of a dive into one of health professionals’ most feared topics. Money. We all love money. We love what money can do for us, but when it comes to managing a budget or managing money in our private practice, we all tend to freak out and tell ourselves that we can’t, that we suck, that we are terrible at it. I know, because this is the language that you use when you’re talking to me. So today we are extremely well. I’m extremely grateful to have Julie with us because Julie has written the book on how to start managing your money and get over yourself. That’s Jo’s summary. Julie, if you wanted to put that on your website somewhere, <laugh>

Julie:

No, I need you as my hype team. I love this intro. Thank you. I’m Julie Harris. I’m an accountant. I have a US-based accounting firm called Green Oak Accounting. I’m the author of Profit First for Therapists. And I’m also the host of the Therapy for Your Money Podcast. So I wrote Profit First for Therapists because I’ve seen such a huge need in this space. My accounting firm exclusively works with therapists in private practice. We’ve worked with hundreds of firms, hundreds of practices at this point. And one of the recurring themes that we see is practitioners feel guilty about making money. They feel uncomfortable when they talk about money, and they feel unsure about how much should I make? Should I make money? What should I do with it? How do I pay myself? Right? There’s so many pieces that feel uncomfortable, but the reality is, I think every, every practice deserves to be profitable. And I think it’s actually, I would go so far as to say it’s your ethical responsibility to have a profitable business. I think it helps you serve your clients better. It’s certainly in service of your team, of your clients, of your community, and of you. And if you as a business owner can put on your oxygen mask first, right? Just like if you’re on the airplane and if you can build a business that takes care of you, you’ll be able to take care of everyone else around you that needs your help.

Jo:

Oh, already we have gone deep. That seems to be a theme happening in my podcast interviews at the moment. It’s like, we’ll just start off politely and gently get into it. And it’s like, wham, you have an ethical responsibility to manage your finances. And I would agree with you, I actually think that we do, cause I have worked with so many health professionals all over the world now. So it’s not just an Australian-based issue or a Canadian issue, or a US-based issue, it is the distractions that come up for people when they’re seeing their clients. The things that take them out of being in the moment, seeing their clients is worrying about how am I gonna make the rent this week? How am I gonna pay bills this week? And I think if we really got honest with ourselves and thought about the amount of time we are ruminating on some of that stuff, when we have promised to be in front of a client, we would probably be a little bit ashamed about that. Has that come up for you, Julie?

Julie:

Yes, and I don’t think we need to add any shame to the pile that already exists, but as an accountant, I’ve seen the devastation that a failing business can bring. The fastest way to lose the confidence of your team is to not make payroll, right? The first time, sometimes it’s the only time that you’re not able to pay your team, that hurts in a very deep way. But it also, it doesn’t matter what you do as far as building the culture of your team, if you’re missing payroll, not none of that matters, right? And I’ve also seen what happens when all of a sudden a practice owner has to go out of business because they simply can’t make it, and they’re leaving all their clients with nowhere to go.

And that’s such a sad thing. It’s devastating to everyone including certainly the business owner. And that’s a narrative that I had throughout my childhood. And I talk about it in the book where my mother was a serial entrepreneur and she’s an amazing woman and who really, really wanted her businesses to succeed. And sadly, they did not, right? When I was just a child at that time. But even though it affects the business owner the most, it affects really everyone surrounding the business owner. And everyone goes through the ups and downs. And so for me, as a child, that meant my sister and I moved to a new home. We went to a new school, had new friends, right? And that’s just the little girl Julie version of it. But there’s so much more. There’s ripples and waves when a business doesn’t make it. And that’s just such a sad thing when it really just doesn’t have to be that way.

Jo:

Yeah. Absolutely. And you’re right, we’re not here to put any more shame in the shame bucket at all. I have felt it very keenly. I mean, I’ve been through it myself, I’ve watched people go through it and it’s like, wow, can we have a conversation? And can we get better at talking about this thing that stops us from being the excellent clinicians that we wanna be? Because that’s essentially what happens, right?

Julie:

Yes. And, there’s this tendency to be very open and honest about a lot of things for clinicians, right? Because you’re seeing, you know, this area hurts or that, you know, I’m feeling all these emotions, but sometimes it’s easy, it’s easier to hide the money shame than to just talk about it. And many business owners struggle at some point with money, and it’s okay to be there, but it’s okay also to do something about it, right? Just because you’re struggling doesn’t mean you have to stay there. Let’s do something about it.

Jo:

Absolutely. And that’s one of the things I love about the fact that your book goes profit first. It doesn’t go cashflow, it doesn’t go revenue, it doesn’t go how to put food on the table. You actually start with profitability. Talk to us about the importance of profit.

Julie:

Yes. Well, so Profit First as a cashflow management system turns the traditional accounting equation upside down. So typically, if you’re looking at a profit and loss, which I hope most clinician business owners have looked at that at some point, right? The profit and loss equation is income minus expenses equals profit. So in that equation, profit is what’s left over, right? If there is anything left over! It’s kind of an afterthought. Like, well, let’s pay everyone else first and then we’ll see what is left. So within the Profit First system, we turn that equation upside down, and we say, income minus your profit equals your expenses. So we’re carving out profit from the very beginning to make sure that there is always some profit left. And that means there’s a little bit less left for expenses. But when there is left, you’re typically going to get creative and naturally you’re going to spend less. It’s a little bit like eating from a smaller plate, right? One of the Profit First principles is you eat from a smaller plate. So I grew up Jo in the eighties where it was a good thing to finish your plate, right? I would hear, oh, there’s the starving orphans in Africa. And the Great Depression.

Jo:

I’ve been there. Yep.

Julie:

We’ve been there. So for me, still to this day, that means that if I’m eating from a big plate or a small plate, I’m automatically going to eat everything that’s on the plate unless I spend a lot of mental energy thinking about it, right? So if I don’t eat everything, it’s because I’m thinking, should I have one more bite? Am I still hungry? Should I leave the starch? Should I leave the vegetables? What should I do, right? And so that takes a lot of energy, but when we translate that to our money, if we are eating from a smaller plate where we’re making the amount allowable for expenses smaller, we’re naturally going to consume less. And so we are making ourselves small plates in the Profit First system with multiple bank accounts.

So instead of having one big bank account where all your money hangs out, the feedback that I constantly get from clinicians is if I see there’s a lot of money in my bank account, I want to go spend it, right? That is just a natural reaction of your brain. So when we’re giving you smaller plates or multiple bank accounts with smaller amounts in them, those amounts are earmarked for certain things. And so you’re naturally going to spend less because some of it is earmarked for you. And do you wanna steal from yourself? Probably not. <Laugh>

Jo:

No. I’m shaking my head vigorously here going, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I wouldn’t welcome somebody coming into my office and putting their hand or opening up my bank accounts and withdrawing money out without my permission, so I don’t wanna be stealing from myself either. It seems like such a simple principle, but why do we find it so hard to do it? What gets in the way?

Julie:

Well, so if sometimes one thing that gets in the way is like, oh, I don’t need multiple bank accounts. I’ll just keep a spreadsheet.

Jo:

<Laugh>, I’m sorry, I’m laughing because I’m terrible with spreadsheets.

Julie:

Right!

Jo:

I forget that I have them.

Julie:

Exactly. You forget that you have them. One of the things that most business owners do, and actually most humans do, right? When they’re thinking about making a decision, a spending decision, is they look at the balance of their bank account. So they pull out either their phone or go on the computer, what’s the balance of the account? And that decision says yes or no, right? Like, oh yes, let’s go. Or maybe not. And so when you’ve got also a spreadsheet, a little spreadsheet on the side that does not account for all the things that are coming, like maybe your tax payment is due, maybe rent is due next week, maybe your payroll is due next week as well. It doesn’t account for all the ebbs and flows of a business. And there are a lot of ebbs and flows in the business.

Julie:

It doesn’t account for your liability insurance payment that’s due next month, right? All of those different things. And so, when we’re looking at bank accounts, and if I may take a little detour, I recommend typically five to six bank accounts. When you’re starting with Profit First, we have an income account where all the cash of the business is going into. So only deposits, no expenses. Then we have three accounts that are for the benefit of the owner. We have a profit account, we have an owner’s pay account, and we have a tax account. And so in the US at least, a lot of business entities are passed through entities. So the business itself technically does not pay tax at the federal level. It pays rather it flows through to the owner and the owner pays tax on it.

But in different countries, it works in different ways. So we always want the business to be able to pay taxes whether it’s for the business or on behalf of the business owner. And then we have an operating expenses account. That’s usually where all the play money is, right? That is things like rent liability insurance, we’re redecorating the office, we’re buying new supplies, right? All of that stuff. And then for practice owners that have team members, whether that’s administrative, clinical leadership, then we add a payroll account. So those are the six foundational bank accounts that we have. So when we have accounts that are earmarked for various things, it’s really easy to see like, do I have money in this little bucket for the thing that I’m trying to do? And then it’s a lot easier to see what is actually going on.

Jo:

Yeah. I have that tax account. So I’m in Australia, so we have various levels of taxing tax requirements here as well. And some are state and some are federal, and some of them feel completely overwhelming. Especially when the tax where you have to withhold it for the employees at the moment, and then potential future employees in the future. So you end up with this double whammy approach, which is always fun.

Julie:

That’s interesting. So you’re paying tax on things that have not happened yet, or that may happen in the future.

Jo: Correct.

Julie:

Okay. <Laugh>, that’s interesting.

Jo:

Yeah. That’s a fun thing. But without that tax account, it’s probably the thing I am most diligent on without, cause you know, like a lot of people, like a lot of health professionals, I’m more motivated by the stick than the carrot. I am more fearful of punishment than I am of enjoying reward. So it’s like if I can’t pay my taxes, that’s gonna be bad. If I can’t pay my employees, that’s gonna be bad. It’s like I’m always risk managing the bad things then are gonna happen. But what I’m not so good at is looking after. So we have a thing, a compulsory superannuation here, like a 401k. But if I don’t pay that, there’s penalties for that as well. If I don’t pay all my insurances, then there’s significant penalties. So we are very good at penalising people here. After all, we were a convict colony. Can we just put that out there? <Laugh> So what I’m not so good at though is this whole concept of making sure that there’s enough for the business to do more than just pay its way. Making sure that I get paid, making sure that there’s profit left over in the business. Like you’ve said, I’m very good at looking at my P&L and going, oh surprise. That’s what we’ve left.

Julie:

Yes. And well, and honestly, Jo, I mean you and every clinician out there deserves more than that, right? You deserve to sit in. What do I want and what do I need to live my best life? I mean that is an unselfish thing to do, right? To say, what do I need to live the life that I want to lead? And that doesn’t mean that your business can always generate that for you today, but you can certainly reverse engineer your business into doing that for you. You can say, okay, if this is what I want, if I need to take home 5,000, 10,000, 20,000, whatever that dollar amount may be. It’s just math, right? And it’s less intimidating when you look at it like, oh, it’s just math. What does it take for my business to provide this for me? And then you decide, am I willing to do the things that that requires or not? And then you can make changes. But there’s a whole chapter on reverse engineering your business in the book as well. <laugh>.

Jo:

Absolutely. It is not just a nice book to have. It’s like a workbook. It’s like you put it down, you go implement things, you come back to it. I’ve got two copies. So my other copy is my work copy. This is my one that I’m prepared to show on social media copy <laugh>. Cause the other one’s got lots of dog ears and tags and things through it. But, but there’s like, I’m here on page 246 at the moment. Are you ready to expand? And like you said before, when it’s just math and it takes the sting out of, am I bad? Am I wrong? Am I failing? Like, none of that language gets to operate when we are just going, well this is what it’s gonna, this is the numbers. And then you can ask the question, am I prepared to do what it takes? It surprises me how many of us have not done that?

Julie:

Yes. And I can tell you, a lot of clinicians are intimidated by the math, right? I’m like, oh, I’m not good at math. And this is really simple math. It’s not complex, but it can be scary sometimes to look at what’s actually going on under the hood of your business. Right? I’m like, oh, what am I going to find? So I know for some practice owners, I’ve heard this story of like, I would rather not know than have to cause maybe it’s not that bad if I don’t look. And the truth is because I’m the accountant again, we run the numbers. That’s what we do. And then we present it to our clients. And a lot of times, I would say most of the time when we say, okay, here’s where you are, here’s where the situation stands. What we see is there’s a sigh of relief of, okay, now I know now we can make a plan for A, B, or C. Right? Whatever the situation may be, you can do something about it. But if you don’t know and there’s just a pile of tax bills sitting in the corner that no one’s looking at, you can’t do anything about that situation. So just looking at the math, looking at the numbers, it’s just math. The numbers are not judging you. They’re just telling you what’s going on.

Jo:

That’s right. Then they’re not judging you in, in fact, you’re judging yourself harshly because, and I can say that clearly cause I judge myself harshly and I continue to have to work on self-talk around when I open my bank accounts and I see what’s not there, and I go, well, my first place is I’m terrible, I’m awful, I suck. I can’t tell anybody about this. I’m embarrassed. Who am I to be a coach? Coaching people around these issues. And then, you know, four days later it’s like, oh, somebody got back from annual leave or all those funds just got released from that particular third party payer and it’s like, oh, maybe I’m not so bad. But the more often I tell myself that story, of course the easier it is to believe it. And you are nodding your head there and you’re going, oh, I’ve heard this before, <laugh>

Julie:

Yes. And it hurts me how harsh clinicians and business owners can be with themselves, right? Because you already have so much responsibility. I feel like you start a business and you get like on each shoulder just a sack of potatoes of responsibility and is just weighing you down. And it’s a hard road and it can be a lonely road as well. But because even if you have a business that is not profitable that doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. That doesn’t mean you’re a bad clinician. You may not be a great business owner in that moment, but that’s a learnable skill. You can absolutely learn how to be a savvy business owner and make good data-driven financial decisions. You, that is absolutely a learned skill.

Jo:

Yes, it is. So here we go. This is Jo’s little piece of encouragement for everybody. Nobody is ever gonna argue with you that you are a poor clinician. If you are listening to this podcast, chances are you are not a sucky clinician because you are committed to your own growth, learning and development. And we know that clinicians who are committed to their own growth, learning and development are the ones who turn up with the best interest of their clients at their heart. That is what drives us. Right? So you can learn these skills. You learn how to tie your shoelaces. For those of us who remember shoelaces, we learn how to type for those of us who had to learn how to do that, you learn how to be an occupational therapist or a physical therapist or an osteopath or whoever it is that’s listening to this. Today I am in a testament cause I grew up with a father who did not manage money. Well, you can learn how to do this because the math is simple and the math is data. It’s not a statement about who you are.

Julie:

Yeah. Right. And I’ve seen the biggest impact is not from making a grand statement and never touching it again. The work is in the small incremental steps in many other things in life, but certainly with your money. And so as your listeners are listening in today, maybe they’re saying like, oh, I’m really overwhelmed. So either I have to go all in or I have completely failed. And that small incremental step, that’s the most important piece. So what is the next step for you? For some that might be ordering the book, for some that might be looking at your bank account, for some that might be pulling your profit and loss and looking at what’s actually going on. For others that might be looking at your complete the instant assessment. So everyone’s journey is going to be a little bit different, but it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. It could be what is the next thing for you? And that can move that alone. That one next thing can move the needle in your business and in your financial life and your financial future. And it’s okay to want to take care of yourself. It’s okay to want to take care of your future self. To want to be able to retire in dignity and retire well and be able to do things for yourself, your parents, your children, whoever it may be. Like all of that is okay and it’s something that you deserve.

Jo:

Yeah. And it’s interesting how we still have schools, I know in particular in the US, the social work schools. They really like to discuss how money should not come into discussion of it. If people can’t pay, you can’t deny them services. And we’ve been conditioned with that rhetoric as health professionals. Most of us have cut our teeth in either community health or hospital-based health. Where we are not touching the data where we’ve got no responsibility for the money that is spent or how money is used. So it can come as a bit of a shock when you’ve got this business around you. You might have your first contractor or employee or paying rent or paying a license or paying for all. I mean, it takes a lot of money for us to actually open our doors. Let’s just talk about that for a minute, Julie. Yes. <laugh>.

Julie:

Yes. Yes. So much money. And especially when you have a team, I think it’s very easy for resentment to creep in for a team member, right? I hear this often from people who have recently gone out on their own as their own to open their own business. And I think if someone wants to be an entrepreneur, I think that’s wonderful. And there’s probably not much you can say to dissuade them, right? So I think they absolutely should follow their entrepreneurial journey. But I hear all the time something along the lines of, Julie, I went out on my own because I was tired of someone else keeping my money. I want to make my full fee and I cannot help but laugh at that. Right? And Jo, you are laughing too.

Jo:

Im, I’m like, oh honey

Julie:

I wanna scream this from your rooftops. No one gets to keep their full fee. No one, no one. Because when you are the business owner, there’s licenses and taxes and, and rent and software and supply. There’s so many things. And you’re also exchanging, maybe you are getting a little more money, but you are exchanging a whole lot of time for that, right? You are now making your own website, scheduling your own appointments, running your own billing. There’s so many other things that you are doing now. So I think that there’s a lot of different ways that resentment can creep in. But then I also see the other side of it. When the business owner themselves, when they have a team and the team is getting paid way too much and there is no profit margin in the business, the business owner starts to resent the business. Their team, everyone around them because they sometimes have made poor business decisions. So it’s so easy for that to creep in from every side and it really doesn’t have to. You can pay your team well, a fair wage that, you know, you can feel secure that you are paying them the most that you can because you are also required to make sure that there’s a profit in the business that is very reasonable. You should not take on additional risk if you’re not going to have any kind of financial reward. That’s just not something that makes sense.

Jo:

Agreed, so smart. So much wisdom. Julie, and I’m just thinking of a couple of people that I’ve had in my world this year. Just by helping people get over the fear of, and I’m talking about people who are running multi-million dollar practices now, getting them to look at their numbers, cause the conversation is usually, when was the last time you gave yourself a pay raise or a pay raise? And they look at you and they go, when I started. And you ask, when was that? 2018. Wow. Okay. No wonder you are finding things tough at home because you’re actually not keeping up with inflation, let alone cost of living. And we looked at the numbers in both in these two instances and went, so you do realise you can give yourself a $20,000 a year pay rise just based on what we know right now. And they were like, oh yes. So why don’t we look at these numbers more often, <laugh>. Cause quite clearly you know what you’re doing. So that’s kind of exciting being able to help people see that.

Julie:

Oh yes. Absolutely. And a similar conversation might be you can afford to offer additional benefits or additional perks to your team. Right? Like, that’s a great conversation to have, but if you don’t know what’s actually going on, there’s sometimes some fear around like, oh, I can’t possibly do that because will I be okay? Right. And that’s a good place to be cautious. But if you have the money, take care of your team. That’s a wonderful gift.

Jo:

Yeah. And just because we as the business owner are taking care of ourselves, taking care of ourselves. Cause this comes up a lot in my coaching clients, is I don’t want my team to think that I’m taking advantage of them. If they see me with a new car, I don’t wanna wear nice clothes. I don’t wanna take another day off. I don’t feel like I can take vacation cause I’m worried about what my team will think. I’m like, Ooh, who’s the leader in that business?

Julie:

Yeah.

Jo:

Yeah. That’s an awkward conversation.

Julie:

I have a little confession. I sometimes feel like that too. Occasionally that does bubble up for me, right? The money piece is much, much less because that’s what I do every day. But sometimes I do feel, oh, can I have these, these nice things?

Jo:

Confession, and thank you for sharing that and normalising it for us because we care. Like we’re health professionals. We did not go to investment banking school or marketing school or how to make money school. We went to, ‘I wanna take care of people’ school and ‘make the world a better place’ school. So of course we are gonna have to bring people into our world and we feel responsible for them. And we wanna make it a great place. Cause most of us started our businesses as a reaction to unhealthy places of work. So we feel that very, very keenly. But that’s one of the over identification pieces that we’ve gotta be aware of as a business owner. It’s like you don’t go around flashing your money. Like let’s be respectful here. But if you’re gonna give something to your team, well what are you giving to yourself? If you’re gonna give something else to your team, what are you gonna give to yourself? And making sure that it’s a balanced conversation because you’re right. And if you have enough resentment, that’ll turn up in every team meeting. People will feel it.

Julie:

Oh, absolutely. And I love how you talked about it as an identity and look at it. And I’m kind of imagining like you just put guilt or that feeling, put it on the shelf. You can look at it and then just be done with it and let it go.

Jo:

And I’ve had to learn to do that because guilt and I are very good friends. So it’s like, yeah, I’m probably not gonna get rid of the guilt, but it’s like, okay, we can have a conversation for a couple of minutes and then I’m just gonna put you away and you don’t get any more influence in today. That’s been a powerful thing for me. Thank you to all the amazing mental health professionals who have helped me throughout my life.

So a question I’ve got for you here, what do you see for the future of health professionals if we don’t learn how to do money or learn how to money better? Let’s just turn that into a verb. What do you see if we as health professionals don’t learn how to money better?

Julie:

I think it could be a disappearing profession. I think it’s already very challenging at least in the United States to hire therapists. There’s not enough therapists coming out of school because people are burnt out. They’re just coming out of school and they’re already burnt out. And I think that’s a really dangerous place to be as a profession, right? Because there’s such a dire need. And if we can’t get to a place where mental health professionals are getting paid what they are worth there has to be a financial benefit. A spinal surgeon never feels guilty about charging their full fee, right? They don’t have sliding scale spots. Like they get paid hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars per year and they own it. They drive the flashy BMW or whatever it may be.

And so I think there has to be a shift at some point where we value the work that is being done in order for more people to go to get into the field. And I don’t think that people should get into the field just because of the money, right? Just because it pays so well. But I think there’s probably a whole generation of people who are not entering the field because they’ve heard the narrative. Well, if you go into mental health, you are not going to make any money. And I think that’s for someone who is saying like, I need to change the narrative in my family and I need to change my family tree, and I need to make more than $35,000 a year or whatever that number is.

And if they don’t feel like they can get that, they might be shifting their attention before they even get to grad school. And I think that’s hurtful to the industry. So that’s what I would like to see where people are getting paid well and they’re unapologetic about it. I want to change, I don’t think there should be a narrative that being a mental health counselor is about poverty, because I think that’s harmful to the entire industry. So I hope that changes in the next hopefully five to 10 years. We’ll see if that happens. But that would be my wish for the industry.

Jo:

Wow. So it’s not just we’ve gotta get our needs met and our business is actually a bigger reflection of that. So yes, we have responsibility to look after me, my team, my clients, but how I do that actually sends a message to people watching me, to people who might wanna come and work alongside me, to the people who read my blog or listen to this podcast or have me interviewed. And we all know that everybody’s watching all the time. But how do I present being a health professional to other people? Because I talk about burnout a lot, but I talk about you don’t have to be that way. But if we just walk around going burn out, I’m burned out, I’m burned out, my life sucks, like my life used to be, then people are gonna go, I don’t wanna work that hard and have that less amount of money and then my mental health be crap for the rest of my life. Like, is that the message we’re giving <laugh>?

Julie:

Well, what do you think Jo? It’s been a very hard couple of years in this space.

Jo:

New grads are talking about that all the time. New grads are always saying, I don’t wanna work that hard. I don’t wanna do what you did. And then we’ve got the Gen X bosses like myself going, but I cut my teeth. I worked really hard, I went without, I did this. So then we’ve got the Gen Xers like me going Yeah, but we don’t want you to do it this way. I wish I didn’t have to do it this way. But you can’t do it any other way in my business. And I really do think that we are at a point where we need the younger generations coming through to help us understand how to lead better, how to lead so that we don’t build businesses that become hubs of burnout.

Julie:

It’s such a hard thing to do. One example that comes to mind is one of our clients. I remember she said to me at some point, you know, I worked Saturdays for 10 years before I went to weekdays and she said, these new grads are coming out of school and they don’t wanna work Saturdays. And it’s this shift of like, well, I had to do it, so you should, but that’s just simply not working anymore. And I think there’s probably some work to be due when it comes to insurance companies and legislators. There’s a lot more work to be done there as well, just to change. Like what other professions are you spending one hour face-to-face, one-on-one with someone for the rate that you do?

Jo:

Oh, $37. And it just blows my mind. And throughout my entire career, I’ve thought that if we wait for regulators, legislators, big companies, big pharma to change, we will miss the opportunity. They won’t change when we keep obeying the narrative. Now, I’m not suggesting that you will need to go and throw away your insurance contracts and go, you know, St. Joan of Arc. Like I’m gonna be different. Like you’ve gotta have a plan for that. But I’m very, very clear that if we as the health professionals don’t go, I’m sorry, you can’t tell me how to treat my clients. You didn’t go to school, you don’t have the credential. I got very cranky about this and that’s why I don’t do very much insurance based work here in Australia at all now. It’s cause it’s like, no, I’m sorry. You don’t get to tell me how to treat my clients. It’s my ethics on the line here. It’s my license on the line here, not yours.

Julie:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we’re seeing that more and more. And I think just even dropping one panel, right? Let’s say you’re on five panels and you drop the lowest paying panel that sends a message like, we will not accept this anymore because you are far below everyone else. So if enough practices do that, then they start to look at, oh wait, we have no providers in this space. Something is going on. None of this is easy. None of this is quick either. But all of these are important.

Jo:

And like you said earlier on, if we as individuals do one thing to make our money mindset, our money practices inside of our clinical practices, if we improve just by one thing and we all do that as a collective, then that’s what’s gonna drive the change.. And that’s what I love about your approach to this is like, I’m gonna empower as many clinicians and health professionals to have a profit driven business so that we can have more people getting the care that they need and we have more health professionals entering the industry. So that selfishly I go, so when I’m in my eighties and I need to be taken care of, I know that I’ll be taken care of by clinicians who turn up to look after me and are not worried about how they’re gonna put food on the table.

Julie:

Yes, yes, yes, yes. Exactly.

Jo:

So Julie, you have also agreed to come and speak at the Future Proofing Health Professional Symposium in September. Thank you so much for saying yes.

Julie:

I’ll be there!

Jo:

Without knowing what it even meant. <Laugh>, that was very cool.

Julie:

Excellent. Yes. I will be there. I’m gonna be talking about Profit First. So we’re going to dive deeper into some of the intricacies of Profit First and how to set it up. And I cannot wait, Jo.

Jo:

No, it’s gonna be great. So if you have enjoyed this conversation today, you wanna come along to the symposium, the Future Proofing Health Professionals Symposium last two weeks of September. There’ll be a registration link in the show notes for you. We even have a free Facebook group called Future Proofing Health Professionals. You can go find that in Facebook. If you wanna join in, Julie will be there. If you’ve got questions for her, she’ll be more than happy to answer them.

Now, the most important question for me today is when we finally get together in person and we are in a cafe, because, you know, that’s where we’re gonna be going. What coffee are you going to order?

Julie:

Hmm. I will order a hot venti latte. A very large latte.

Jo:

We’re hanging out for a while then, Julie.

Julie:

Yes. Because yeah, we can keep the conversation going. I don’t even care if it gets cold at some point I’m gonna keep drinking it cause I sip my coffee. But we are gonna have a long conversation.

Jo:

Gorgeous. And just before we got on this call today, you actually shared with me a resource that you’ve created for the listeners of this podcast. Can you tell us a little bit about that and where they can get it?

Julie:

Yes, absolutely. So we’ve talked a lot about some of the details of Profit First today. I’ve thrown a lot of different things at you, the bank accounts, this and that. And so if you are interested in finding out more about Profit First, I have a free workbook for you. If you go to profitfirstfortherapists.com/jo you can get that free workbook and get an idea of what Profit First can do for you. Obviously you can also then pick up the book if that’s something that’s of interest to you. But I wanted you to have this free resource so that even without spending a single penny, you can start looking at Profit First.

Jo:

You’re wonderful. Julie, thank you so much for gifting me your time. Thank you to your family who have allowed you to come and have this conversation with me. And this is another episode of The Entrepreneurial Clinician. Until next time, go be your awesome self.