Ep 104: The New Owners Playbook. What To Do In Your First 90 Days.

The thing that I think is surprised me the most in business is every time I get exposed to a different level of business, I often think people are doing 10, 20, 30% more. Actually, it's often somewhere between five and 10 times more. So the standard is not incremental improvements, often orders of magnitude better. Getting in your room and just starting seeing a ton of patients will be the best way to get a 10% better outcome. Welcome to the ScaleMyclinic podcast. I'm such a co-founder of ScaleMyclinic here to help general practice owners build driving, profitable and efficient clinics. Together with Todd, we bring you actionable strategies, inspiring success stories and expert insights to transform your practice. Let's dive into today's episode and take the next step to improving your practice. Hey, welcome back to ScaleMyclinic podcast. I'm here with Todd A. Todd. Hi, Sajun. So today we're going to talk about I've just taken over, just settled on the practice and what happens next? This won't cover the actual buying part. That's episode 91. We've got a whole episode on how to buy a practice without messing it up. But today we've done that part, Todd. We listened to 91. We did all of it. We've settled and now we're ready to take over. What do we do next? All right, so our key assumptions here are that all of the staff have been offered agreements on the same or better terms or previously on. And so structurally you haven't changed anything yet. But the first thing when I'm working there, Sajun, is usually when I'm interviewing owners about joining Project X, there's kind of three things that I'm wondering in terms of macro areas. Is the main problem in this practice, a lack of GP consulting capacity? I do need more GPs, is the problem a lack of patient demand? But sometimes that might actually be alignment of patient avatars. So are we getting enough of the right type of patients? And so for example, if people say they're running a private billing practice, but 80% of its bulk billing because they're attracting patients that don't want to pay, then that would be a problem with patient demand because you're not recruiting the right people. And then the third issue is that those things seem to be in relative balance, but there's too much chaos overall. So by chaos, I mean inconsistent outcomes, front desk is noisy, patient complaints are high, often have low Google ratings on these practices. People complaining about their admin services, but usually the medicine is good. It's just that all the other stuff around it makes it harder than it should be. So those are the three lenses I'm looking at things because I want to get to start spinning up that plate to solve the main problem. But then the way I'd look at it is firstly to have a bit of a chat to all of the people in the business. So this is everybody under the roof. And so that would include your employees. It might be the, have some allied health or other people in there. It would certainly include Janet tenant or independent GPs. Sometimes people call them contractor doctors, GP registrars, any employed doctors, any IMGs that require supervision. And anybody else, so service providers, if you've got a supplier that is a supplying medical suppliers, I'd like to talk to all of those providers and suppliers as well. A cleaner, you want to have a chat to everybody. So you're going to be busy at the start having a lot of conversations with people. And effectively what you want to know from everybody is what skills do they have that we're using? And do they have some skills that they haven't declared or aren't being used that they would like to use? Now, it's amazing how often you'll find somebody has a skill that is kind of absent from the team or is being paid for externally. And you've got somebody internally that has that as a proficiency. A really common one would be a younger member of the reception or nursing team that may have digital media expertise or social media expertise and would like to do some of that work as part of their role in the practice. So the skills not being utilised is where there's a lot of opportunities. Often people are going to talk to you about the sort of things that are irritating and annoying them in these meetings as well. And because it's your new to the role in ownership in this business, it's really easy to say, tell me everything because nothing can feel personal at that stage right. And so you want to draw all of that out. That might not be in one conversation. That might be multiple. But they could be one-on-one, they could be grouped feedback. Some kind of a mix between all of those is ideal. And then you want to make regular calendar catch-ups for people afterwards just so that you've got a cadence, a feedback. And then once you've done sort of two rounds of one-to-ones, it's likely that group sessions will be more useful for feedback. Provided people can send you one-on-one messages through your messaging platform or they can do it on WhatsApp or whatever it might be. As long as you can still capture that one-to-one feedback, that's okay. And then it probably will be one-to-one just with the leadership team. Would you add anything else with the people side of things, actually? No, I think it's just that sequence of letting the air out of the bag. And again, we've talked about it before. It's just capturing it at this stage because over time you're going to look for patterns and that's going to influence where you start when you think about improvements and things to work on. But gathering that information, making sure everyone's heard, it's going to be a key part of that journey because that's going to help build some trust for later. Now, what you don't want to do is go in and just get the sledgehammer and start breaking stuff you can hit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You want them to tell you what is not working because the more that it's driven by the people that are already there, the easier it is to make the improvements as you go. But the first step is just building those relationships because I think it can be quite intimidating for people when there's new owners, new sheriffs in town, that can sometimes be a bit suspicious of intentions. They don't often realise that it's in the owner's interests. The owner actually wants a place to be stable and then improve things. But often people assume that someone's going to come in and everything's going to be turned upside down. The worst you can do is fall into that trap and try doing that. I think you really want to stabilise build relationships because that's the solid platform for the future changes. And diagnosis, I think, is very important just deciding what the main problem is, which is what you were talking about, because it's going to be easy to have a differential diagnosis and then try and treat all of the above. You just want to have one diagnosis that you're going to work on. Yeah, I think so. The other thing I think it's really useful with this is such and these some great tools now that you could use to accompany you in these meetings, they would help to transcribe the meetings and make some notes. I know you're a massive fan of AI tools. What would you take with yourself to these meetings just to speed it up and allow you to focus on just asking great questions and being in the zone with your team? Yeah, so I would still take notes. I'd like manual notes because I think there's power in them seeing you take those notes. I would ask permission to record it. Really I haven't got it with me right now, but I've got this little thing called a pocket, which is quite handy, which is a voice recorder that transcribes everything. Most phones have a voice recorder, so you can just put that, ask permission and keep it on and then summarize later with just using AI and the transcript from that. Of course there's otterfly flies, all of those types of things. I'd like to keep it as simple as possible to be on. So I'll either use my pocket or I'd use my voice notes on my phone. Yep, like it. I would take note. I would take note. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's a good habit. As you say, it demonstrates reflective listening as well and that you are engaged in the conversation. So I think it's useful. And again, at the start, you would always seek permission to do that, but that does make a difference. I think some of those people might wonder what should you do with these sessions, how structured should they be? I think they should be loosely structured. So you want people to tell you what they want to tell you. And sometimes the things they don't want to tell you, you would like to hear what you don't necessarily want is to follow a highly formulaic structure. So the two questions I really like to ask at the start is what's on your mind. That's just a great open question that you can get a lot of different answers that you can pull threads on and just expand from that. And then the other question I like to ask is if you were sitting where I am, if you're in my position, what is it you think it's important that I know and then just see where that takes you as well. So I'd really only have those two questions. This is my kind of ones to open things up and then I just pull on whatever threads felt right at the time. Some things you might intentionally leave and just say, look, I'd love to pick this up with you later. Do you have a cap to amount of time for these? So they should all be sort of probably 20 to 30 minute conversations. And then what you might do is come back and just say, hey, I'll ask somebody to spoke a little bit about this and this. I'd love you if you could go a bit deeper on that. Talk to me more about that. And just going in there with a discovery mindset, I think you said earlier, such a new job is not to solve problems in that conversation. It's to hear what's going on and just be be really careful to clarify anything that is uncertain for you. And so this takes a couple of recursive cycles before you're comfortable. You've heard everything that needs to be heard and then you can start making some decisions from that. So I think that's the people layer and that's a lot of time. But what happens if you skip that work? I mean, for you'll be prepared for a bumpy ride. Yeah, it's it's nonnegotiable. I'd say that step. Never shortcut people. or you know, you all feel it. Never short cut the people part. There's other parts you might choose to, but it's a people business. And there's not run by robots, despite, you know, all the people telling us, I mean, it's fully people based business. And for some people, it may be feel convenient to stay away from the people and just let things play out. I think, I know that you wanna be in front of the people as much as possible initially, because they just need to know and feel that you've got their back. And so this process helps achieve that. And then you build on it as, 'cause you don't actually know, you bought something, maybe you've been in the practice, maybe you haven't, you don't know the actual culture, you don't know the reality of the business. Just whatever due diligence is done, you don't know the reality until you own it and you're there. So you really need to know where are we right now? Because if you're not accurate or clear where we're at right now, it's hard to decide, you know, once you've decided where you wanna go to, it's hard to map that journey. So you do need to spend time understanding from the people. And if you get that part right, a lot of change that, you know, increasing and improving, increasing value and improving the practice, not that's gonna be much simpler if you can get that people part right. Because you've got their buy-in and once you've got buy-in, any change is just much easier to implement. Absolutely, unlocking discretionary effort is what it's all about, right? And so this is super critical. Yeah, I think one of the really lame business things is, but it's relevant here is that if you don't speak to the people you don't get buy-in, then you have to assume a lot. And if you assume you make an ask out of you and me, and so don't make an ask out of it and ask out of yourself, particularly after you've paid good money for something, this is the easiest way to damage your investment almost immediately. So I don't recommend that. All right, so after the people, we would then, and I want people to think in hierarchical structures here. So the way we like to think about it when we're coaching owners and systems, there's overarching systems, so there'll be financial systems, there'll be clinical systems, there'll be HR systems in the business. The systems, then there are processes that sit within those larger systems and underneath processes are tasks. And so I do wanna understand those hierarchies. In many cases, they won't actually exist. So accreditation is often a standard that people say, "Oh, we've met the accreditation standards." It's kind of a basic standard that mostly centers around clinical systems. So that'll mostly make sure that people get their reminders of what happens with recalls, all of the kinds of parts of clinical medicine, but they're not worried about whether or not you actually financially get paid by your patients, whether you have a good system for reducing patient debtors, hey, manage your third party providers, they're not worried about any of those things. They're not worried about your financial structures, separation of duties. None of those things are captured in there. So there's a lot you're gonna need to unpack. And in most cases, you'll find that a lot of these things are assumed. And so that's okay again, I think whatever is actually documented, the reality is the practice is running. And so some of those systems may just be ones that are generally understood and are communicated like fairy tales, just through stories over time. And so that's okay. Again, at some point, you just need to start capturing at least what people are doing, even if it's not things the way you would like them to be, you do wanna capture the current version of the process of everything that's there. So again, it's thinking systems process as tasks. One of the things such and that I think is relatively easy from the task side of things is just say to everybody and the team for the next two to four weeks, we're gonna capture everything that you're doing. The main thing to be aware of is you just wanna pick a relatively normal time period. You don't wanna pick something that's abnormal. So for example, end of year, end of financial year might be somewhat abnormal, but it's useful if it's gonna pick up annual cycles or an annual cadence of events. And then there'll be a bunch of things that you don't pick up in that period of time. It is, get them all down. They don't have to be organized. This should be recorded somewhere for each role. And that way you can get all of the tasks that are being done by all of the people. And that's gonna give you a little bit of an idea about the accountability of the individuals, what the accountability chart looks like, a clarity as to what all those roles are. Usually there's insufficient role clarity, but it could be a place that's got great role clarity. And these are some of the things that should come out from those interviews with people as well. So systems process tasks, get all of those out and understand where the gaps are. You really just wanna work on the high priority areas. So the high priority areas to get systems in place would just be where the most frustration is. What are things that are annoying people the most or that are the most inconsistent? And those are the areas to begin, I think. - Yeah. And so if someone's taken over, what are the ones that they should make sure without fail, functional? Like not, not have to be perfect, but need to be at a minimum functional to avoid a punch in the face. What would those be from your perspective? - Yeah, my number one, sexual, breeder, financial operating system. And so the two things I wanna know in there are the movement of funds, who's moving those funds. And I wanna have appropriate separation of responsibilities in the financial system. Therefore, the person who approves that appraement is not the same person that uploads the payments. And so we wanna make sure that whether that's a bookkeeper that I have permission to move money around, they just have permission to upload the files. I wanna be really clear on processes around change of banking details in particular or adding a new PAE, what happens around that, what verifications are in place. A common one that is going around is fishing scams to change GP details. So just having a few chats around what the criteria are to change anything, how many permissions and approvals that needs to go through. I think in a current environment, any change of banking requires triple verification. It should be by email, and that should be demonstrably from the original email from the provider. It should be by text message and it should be by a voicemail verification as well to the number that you've already got on file. So of course somebody giving you a new mobile number or a new email address is not acceptable. And so you would get triple verification. The reason I think this is AI voice synthesis is such that they have been, I mean the funniest one I saw was a video called a Zoom call where $20 million was scammed out of a business because it was an AI avatar that somebody knew from the business that was able to trick them. So if that's possible, that means that you really need to make sure that you are very skeptical about any requests for change of details. And you should be treating it like Gen X, which is myself, and Gen X just thinks everything's bullshit until proven otherwise. That should be your default setting. (laughs) And then my kids always say, "Yeah, you say everything and it's bullshit." I'm like, "Well, most of it is in the end." And so I think that's probably the key thing, Satch, in getting the financial system right, I would like to observe everything personally. You and I like to have a two week cadence for money movement. And I think that's appropriate. Early on though, there's likely to be some bad habits here in kind of money movements happening regularly and a lot of chaotic presentation of documentation for urgent payment, when really it's pretty easy to make sure that the terms are uploaded and installed. So you want to know how we are uploading the invoices, how we're deciding when we're going to pay people, how we're verifying that we receive the goods or receive the service. All of those things would be my first priorities to make sure the financial system is accurate. And then, Satch and in there, I want to know where the buffers are. Again, you and I in businesses we own, like to use profit first. That's a multi bank account system. It's probably going to take a little while to set up here because it implies that you're going to be building buffers up. But it is awesome to know that when your tax bill comes, there's an account that has that money already in it and a little bit of a surplus. So you're not kind of scrounging to take it from your own pocket. So there would be my first priority. That's probably, I think that one has to be accelerated because if there's a problem or a leak or a problem with fidelity or honesty in that system, you want to pick it up really early on. You don't want to wait and find out that somebody's, you know, scanned you out of 20 grand, 30 grand or more. So that would be my first priority of all of the systems to address. And I'd want that. Whereas with the other systems, I'd become the world kind of iterative improvement over time and probably thinking over six to 12 months as long as they get to standard that is 90% of where they need to be, I'd be happy. I'd probably want that financial system to be operating at a high standard to 90, 95% of my preferred performance within probably four weeks, I think would be about right. There's also a true up period of time. So any sale, there's always flows of money that come in of that were accounted for before the sale or after the sale money movements that occur. It appears to be, it's usually four to 12 weeks post sale and you need to make sure that that money is treated appropriately because if it isn't your money, then you obviously can't go spending that. So you need to have it increased oversight. I do love separating outbook keeping from the PM role. It's something I'm conflicted in that you and I are part owners of GP bookkeeper that does only bookkeeping or general practices. The reason I love it. is it's professional, it's a high standard. It's done where a financial operating system is installed in the business and they can get up to speed quickly because it doesn't require your labor or your PM's labor only them to allow access. And so I like things like that because you can effectively outsource the running of that that layer of the business. Make sure you've got the financial control for movement of money and then all of those processes are part of what you get with a service like that. If you do it internally it's probably somewhere between I'm going to say 80 and 120 hours of work like it's going to be a lot to get it right but you are going to need to make sure that it's a high priority I think. What about you do you have a different choice or would you choose financials? No, no, I agree. The only bit I would add is the biggest people difficulty that can arise is when you take over there is likely to be some type of error in some payment to either the traditions or the employees. And so I would pre-frame that we're running our first for your first few. I would pre-frame it that there may be errors or there may be problems. Yeah, anything problems. There may be questions or clarification because things are different. That's entirely normal. So we welcome all questions about it. And if there is any problem or difficulty that's occurred we will correct it as soon as we're able and then I would have proactive conversations around that. Just so that you've pre-empted all of that especially if there's for example a team member who's left the business when you've purchased and maybe they were doing the finances before or there was a bookkeeping service that hasn't been retained or someone's retired you know there's all sorts of interruptions in who's managing that and I think that's super important and then the other one I would say hey so a quick pause if you're a practice owner you can book a 20 minute practice growth call with me just me. It's confidential it's an audit style conversation where I can put fresh eyes on your practice and having looked at a thousand or more practices over the years I can usually spot the real opportunities quickly and owners often leave that conversation saying hey I had no idea that was even possible. So if you want that kind of clarity grab your spot it's only for practice owners and the link is in the show description below. I just double check is whichever the high clinical risk processes there are like you know the urgent recalls and those types of things that we're just clear on how that's being done because they're the big sources of pain or your income generators the the the the GPs and so we just want to make sure that we've minimized the risk of problems with those two at the outset and even if there is a problem because you've pre-framed it there's less meaning that's attached to it that it's been you know a mistake or it wasn't predicted so I think that's important. All right so we've done a diagnosing the problem we've done the people and skills we've done systems processes tasks you've talked about what's next. Next I'd be doing an audit of the tools that we are using in the practice now that's pretty easy because you get a sharp in the financial accounts so the question here is what am I paying for and particularly I'm thinking is it being used and is it fit for purpose those are the two questions in my mind sometimes you'd be surprised how many expensive tools you have that people aren't using or aren't using to their full capacity and so the type of things that you'll likely be paying for you you're going to be paying for your medical records software obviously you'll have some appointment making software you're going to have payment systems terminals that either through Tyro or a bank, high caps things like that you're going to be using some tools from the Google or the Microsoft world most likely and then one of my favorite tools to use and this could just be the free version such an it's like for non-clinical messaging so clinical messaging if you're using best practice should remain in the in the F8 messaging that's where all of the patient related messages should go because they remain part of the patient file it's like isn't built for patient privacy so it's they don't use it for that but everything else in the business should be through a platform like Slack we won't go through the channels that you would set up today but that's a really good way of just sharing asynchronous updates you can do video you can do voice you can do text-based you can share documents through there it's a really cool place to work and to collaborate asynchronously if you really wanted to traumatise yourself and you had Microsoft you could try and do that through teams but I really really hate Microsoft and teams so you all never catch me doing that in fact such and I think if I'm ever held hostage and I needed to get a message to you I'd say hey such and I'm invoiterishing out your Microsoft teams and you would know that I'm in trouble and send all available help I send my carrier pigeon because it's better exactly exactly and so you know you're going to find some tools in here that you may be surprised about or you're not sure about what their function is so you just need to go deep on any tool find out who's using it is there a super user or an expert in the team that really loves it who isn't using it and then when you go and audit the logins you'll find that there's a bunch of people that probably have left the business they're still paying for access so this is a good opportunity to reduce your expenditure quite dramatically and often either have no impact on performance or sometimes improve performance if you're paying for software tools that aren't being used the odds are they distracting people or they're slowing things down so I'd be having a look at this and here's a tip this is something you taught me such and is if you're not sure if something is being used or if it's useful guess what you should do yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah you can always start a backup I think that's important you taught me this and at one point in time I went through and audited three clinics that I own and the total amount we're able to save with reducing tools tightening up on IT and things like there was 120 grand a year of expenditure so that's 1.2 million dollars of buildings that you would normally need to correct for that it was a huge amount of money just through creep you know just people add things you're going to have this you're going to have that all these tools that are designed to have creep as well you know do you want to upgrade to the pro version then the next thing you know this tool you're bought to do this thing now there's five things and there's three things that I've all had with a different tool so you know there's a lot of there's a lot of work here in in pulling these pieces apart but you'll find here there's a great opportunity to save some money reduce the number of things that you use I think that's really important that you use items that are that are tools that are specialist designed and ideally have a single purpose not what something that does eight things poorly and so that's probably what I'll do next again that's this is probably around about three months of work it's not a sort of small body of work and the people are going to ask you for tools so part of your people interview people are going to ask you for all the the bright shiny objects that they like and you need to have a way of testing and validating tools I think my brother has this saying people can promise the world and deliver you an atlas that's software people will talk about all sorts of things that it will do when you get it it may not do that so you're really going to want to have the idea of the minimum viable product what is it you can get that's the lightest version to test it and then test it with a minimal viable audience a few people in your business that are motivated to try it evaluate the impact and performance does it do what it says on the tin and then make a decision whether you expand that or or contract it I think that's really important to have a good process as to how you introduce new things people who who love tech and there's a lot of doctors who love tech they probably shouldn't do this role I think such and because what happens is they want to they want to just add more and more stuff and they're not really looking at how much go you is it adding you don't have a good idea around that absolutely there's plenty of evidence from other industries that the more tech you add actually contributes to burn out and reduces retention of team members and so you do have to tread carefully when considering sometimes less is way more in terms of benefits and value and remember I think just on that topic you know especially a GP and most of the team members they aren't they aren't tech driven most people most people are they're using tech to assist them in their work sometimes we get so enamored with the technology we think of that above the work our job as owners is to help them do better work not but barriers in their way even if we think something is going to improve it we have to tread carefully because they may not feel the same in fact they may feel the opposite all right so we've covered the diagnosing the problem we've got the people and the skills we've done systems processes tasks including the finances we've talked about the true up after four to 12 weeks we've talked tools what do we got left yeah I think the true remaining things are the heartbeat and the assets and so when it comes to the heartbeat I call this the heartbeat just because there needs to be a metronomic cadence of the right meetings with the right people in the leadership team and below them we coach a GP operating system in scum eclic which is around the types of meetings that people should have same page meetings weekly meetings weekly leadership meetings they should have a wonder ones with line reports these all have structure quarterly's annuals there are clinical meetings that are a normal part of the cadence that you run there's an all hands or a town hall meeting that you run all of these needs to have the appropriate structure, cadence applied and then they just need to be embedded in calendars that are ones that are already heed to no matter what. And so here, you will not have to talk about this before, Sachin, but here I'm a fan of actually having roles based calendars. So an individual person who comes into your team, say it's Sachin Patel, this new doctor that's a part of a team, he's the medical director, there should be a medical director calendar that you can subscribe to. Just so as that when you leave that role calendar and the cadence and heartbeat that role remains, that doesn't kind of die with your profile dying. Well, I, oh, now we want to unplug Sachin Patel at ABC Medical Centers.com.au and that means that we lose all of that knowledge. We just want to have those all built out within your system. So as that when somebody enrolls to it, they know exactly what they're meant to show up to and by when. And I know your preference, Sachin, which, which mirrors mine is to have your weekly leadership meeting early in the week. So you've got time to get on top of things. But not first thing on Monday morning, because you will need to have data, etc. updated. So that's probably a little bit later in the day on a Monday, maybe late morning or around lunchtime. Give everybody enough time to get in, get started, get their game face on, get that data in there and then have a really good meeting. We won't go through what each meeting covers, but we do need to make sure that the right people shop to those meetings. There is an expectation that a shop to those meetings. When we coach owners and practice managers in project digs, we run our owners webinars on Wednesday morning and our PM webinars at lunchtime on Thursday, something like the lunchtime webinars. As an owner, I would embed in my PM's calendar and that would be a base expectation for me that they attend that every week, because I want them to get better at what they're doing. And that's that's taking direction from an education knowledge from a community that is bigger than my brain and my experience. And so things like that already embed in there as well. That way their calendar reflects all of their responsibilities over the year. When you look at it, it's going to be a lot and it might be a little bit intimidating. But what you'll see is that when you've got that stuff laid out in your calendar and the reminders set appropriately so that you're prepared for those meetings, if you're a leader or department lead, you're still going to have to speak to your metrics and what's going on in your department. It means you know exactly where you need to be and when and it saves a lot of the work that would ordinarily happen where people are asking for those things because you don't have appropriate structures. So I think sometimes I'm sad to say people have this flawed idea that if I have these meetings, it's going to waste my time. But in fact, not having the meetings waste more time and it damages alignment and focus because people don't know what they're doing. They don't know what their accountability is or responsibilities are they don't know what their mission is. They don't have any values to work from. So they can't make decisions themselves. They have to come back and re-calibrate everything with you. When you've got all this stuff nailed, the emission, your values, we had the two-page plan as part of this with a weekly meeting cadence recording those, making sure you've got cascading communications going to people. All of that stuff is part of the heartbeat. It has to be installed and that includes data. So metrics on individual people, on teams and at the leadership level and the appropriate feedback loops that go with that data. Cool. So we've got the business heartbeat and we'll do a podcast on that so that we can go into that in more detail in the future episode. And then we've got assets. It was a bit left. So tell us about that. So in the assets, I'd be looking at the digital assets particularly. That's effectively your front window into your business and so that includes your website, Google My Business, your Google reviews. The likelihood is that's been neglected or ignored and so you can start to put some attention in that. You can improve Google My Business often really immediately. Your website, your social media presence. Your personal social media actually becomes part of the business social media and so that's important to understand as well. Your branding and whether that's appropriate for you or whether you want to refresh or update that and then part of the assets are physical space as well. So the clinic layout and the clinic equipment is it fit for the moment? Is there any cycle that you need to undertake for refreshing and updating that? That includes the IT platforms as well of course as well as the general practice medical equipment. And it's likely that as part of those people conversations earlier, people will ask for stuff like I'd really like this thing, you know, that does dot dot dot. I'd really like this software tool that does dot dot dot. So you want to be able to collect all of that and then have some kind of a plan as to when you might roll those things out. It's important to remember that how things are, it's not there often been for years and so just giving people a timeline towards either a time when something is possible or a condition that has to be met in order to get that. So this is a really good opportunity to say the nursing team wants to upgrade part of the treatment room. They're like cool, let's do that as part of our plan to roll out our 75 past health assessments or our CCGPMP plan and that when we get to this level we can then do this thing. Same thing might be true of the amenities, the facilities in the staff room that could relate to meeting certain milestones. That aligns everybody behind a target because it's something they want and in order to get that you get something that you want. So it's some really good opportunities to kind of engage in some fun and focus activities here to get people to the outcomes that they want as well. Those are most of the things that's on my mind with the assets. Anything else that's on your mind with that, so true? No, I think you've covered it there. I suppose that the question I have is we started the podcast they were just taking over and you've shared, you know, we've talked about quite a few things. How long before I can get stuck in to acting on all of this light? So you know, what is this, what period should I spend of time like doing this stuff we've talked about today? Is it a four week thing? Is it a six week thing? Is it 12 months? What is it? This is a great question and I think the thing to keep in mind is with people slow as fast and fast as slow. So that will take a little bit longer. I would think that the betting in is probably three to six months. I also think that this is where coaching is a real source of leverage. If you're the source of all the ideas and inspiration in the business as well as motivating people, holding them accountable, then that's likely to be unsustainable. And so getting people in a community of other like-minded people that are out to grow their business is really important, particularly your PM. And so this is where coaching can help people move more quickly, just by being exposed to other people that have higher standards. The thing that I think is surprised me the most in business is every time I get exposed to a different level of business, I often think people are doing 10, 20, 30 percent more. So the standard is not incrementally improvement. It's often orders of magnitude better. And so I want my team to be exposed to that really early. And that will help set some high standards for improvement. And then ideally, this is that African proverb, if you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far go together, I want to go far. So that means I'm going to be getting my heads of department educated really quickly. So my nursing lead would be connected to the tools that are appropriate for them. My PM would be connected to the tools knowledge and community that's appropriate for them. And as an owner, I would also be doing that as well. What can you do? Well, I just spoke to an owner yesterday that has a clinic in a triple M1 area. She's been working with us for two years now. And took a business from $2.3 million per purchase price to more than $5 million over two years. So you know, you can get substantial improvements in the valuation of the business. And obviously that reflects improved financial metrics underneath it, improved profitability. You can do that pretty quickly through through just executing well on what I've just talked about. And then particularly keeping your eyes on the fries is to which one of those problems, which of the tree is your focus. So the return can be huge. What it means is leaning into the areas that are not cheap, you're getting in your room and just starting seeing a ton of patience will be the best way to get a 10% better outcome. And I think that's not acceptable. If you've done that, you've done a really poor job. Absolutely. And so you gave just one little vignette of someone who's over two years gone from mid to double defective, more than double the value of their business. You've got another story of someone who may have purchased done this stuff you've talked about and then got to work on on it. Like what sort of things have been achieved? Yeah. In terms of when somebody buys something for a definitive price, there's a few things. I think I've done this before myself where I've bought clinics and merged them into mine. So it's slightly different in that basically what I've done is helped doctors that have an aging environment exit that and moving to a modern environment. Usually what that does is allow them to sell the old practice at a profit. Typically they are in the real estate and then they usually will all go up in earnings somewhere around about 30 or 40% has been my experience just because they instantly have modern systems that they're exposed to. And in those cases, we've mostly looked after all of the logistics that go with them being relocated. So that's one way that that happens. And in other ones, there've been ones where people have started from really small locations. So I don't have one that I can think of. You might have an example where over two years that's changed from a purchase. This is one where I know the person purchased it. I know the purchase price and I know that the business valuation is near north of 5 mil. What one comes to mind for you? Yeah, I was thinking of someone we know that probably bought for I think around three, three, three mil and over three to four years. Probably spent about six to 12 months doing this work we talked about today and knew the latent potential and over four years took it to a fivefold increase in valuation almost. And those sort of things are completely possible when you focus on first of all doing the transition right. And there can be there's help that you've talked about to get that bit happening faster. But then getting to work on those value levers and focusing on them carefully and intentionally. And then just building momentum and consistency over time. Going from three millionish to five times that over four years or more than two times that in the situation you described. And these are quite significant gains that are far outstripped your personal earning capacity and create a legacy whether you choose to exit or not. They create a platform to be able to do all sorts of other things in terms of wealth, helping family or creating freedom and experiences for your family. There's all sorts of things that can come up to that. But it all starts early in the journey and you have to get this first bit right to allow that that stuff to happen. Cool. Well, we're coming to a close. Any final piece of advice? No, I think my main reflection on my career in building clinics. I built Greenfields and then as I said, I purchased other clinics. When I say purchased, it was usually for very little money or sometimes no money and merge them into mine. If I had my time again, I would do more buying of other clinics. As you sort of outline with those examples, there's a lot of leverage in this if you play the right game. And so I think the key thing is playing the right game means spending more time on leadership management, accountability, sitting in that seat where you're the visionary is really important. And so I would have done more of that. And I think I probably would have created a somewhere between three and five times more wealth by doing that, which is my personal reflection is if I had done it with somebody else's assets that they built but weren't very efficient, then that would have been an easier lever. The worst thing that I've said in this, that would have been without project X. And so it would only have been less than half of the knowledge. I think our combination together plus others is more than it's a multiplier effect. And so maybe three to five is not correct without project X, but it certainly would have been able to move more quickly and build a bigger empire building on what had already been created. That's probably my main reflection on this. So those of you who have just bought a clinic, well done. Your job is now to optimize and then do it again and again and again and reinvest that knowledge and build an empire that is ideally a lifestyle empire. Perfect. Well, a great way to finish. Thank you, Tob. Thanks, Action. Thanks for tuning in to the ScaleMokinit podcast. I hope today's episode gave you valuable insights. And practical steps to take your clinic to the next level. If you enjoyed the show, make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And don't forget to share it with other general practice owners who benefit from improving their practices too. Looking for more tools, resources and updates? Why not follow us on Facebook at ScaleMokinit to stay connected to join the conversation with like-minded practice owners. Let's keep working together to scale your clinic and build something truly impactful. See you next time.