To quote The E-Myth philosophy:
- a technician wants to spend 100% of her time as a clinician;
- a manager wants to spend 80% of his time as a clinician and 20% of his time leading other clinicians;
- an entrepreneur wants to spend 100% of her time leading other clinicians.
Most of my clients are managers by this definition.
Generating 60-70% of the overall production in their practice.
If they take a holiday, get sick, enter a post-graduate course or lose their mojo – the finances of the business quickly head downhill.
The pressure to keep producing is intense and relentless.
After their 28-35 hours a week of clinical concentration, they have to start dealing with all the other issues of running a business.
The challenge for the technician is to become better at what they do – to invest their 10,000 hours to become a genius.
The challenge for the entrepreneur (in 2016) is to find suitable acquisition targets and grow clinicians.
The challenge for the manager is to reduce their own production as a percentage of the total – to target 33% as the proportion of total sales that emanate from their chair-side time.
So if you are a manager currently grossing £400,000 (no matter how many days a week – although it should be no more than 4), then your target is a practice that grosses 3 times that – £1.2m.
You do this by training and mentoring good clinicians (technicians) and developing smart marketing.
It is only by becoming a third of the sales that you will create the room in which to live – otherwise you are in a hamster wheel, doomed to keep running.
p.s. two reasons for this post
- talking to a dentist who is grossing 75% of his practice total, who asked me whether he should increase his clinical hours (NO!).
- the realisation that my January sales at 7connections are about 33% of total sales – result.
