If Your Podiatry Practice Needs You Every Day, What Have You Actually Built?

Being Busy Isn’t the Same as Building a Business

Practice owners often wear being busy as a badge of honour.

They have the fullest diary. Everyone asks them questions. Difficult patients get referred to them. Staff need their approval, and they’re involved in every decision.

It can make you feel important. But being indispensable isn’t necessarily a sign that you’ve built a great business.

Sometimes it’s evidence that you’ve built a business that is far too dependent on you.

The Goal Should Be to Make Yourself Less Important

This sounds strange, but one of your goals as a business owner should be to make yourself progressively less important to the daily operation of your practice.

• That means developing systems.
• Training your team.
• Delegating responsibility.
• Developing other podiatrists.
• Documenting how things are done.

And allowing people to make decisions without asking you twenty questions every day.

You should still provide leadership and direction, but you shouldn’t need to push every button yourself.

Build Something Someone Else Would Want

Here’s another way to look at it. Imagine someone approached you tomorrow and wanted to buy your podiatry practice.

What are they actually buying?

If most patients only want to see you, every important decision requires you, and revenue drops dramatically whenever you take a holiday, they’re not buying much of a business.

They’re buying your job.

A practice that operates successfully without the owner is far more valuable because the business itself has value.

Freedom Is Another Form of Profit

We often measure business success by revenue, profit and growth. But there’s another measurement I think is equally important: Freedom.

Ask yourself a few simple questions.

• Can you take a holiday without constantly checking your phone?
• Can you have a Monday off?
• Can you spend time with your family without wondering what’s happening back at the clinic?
• Can you eventually sell the practice and genuinely walk away?

If you can answer yes, that’s when you’ve built something worthwhile.

And you don’t need to be planning to sell your practice to start building it this way. You simply need to decide that your business should work for you, rather than you spending the rest of your career working for it.

If you’d like help creating a podiatry business that’s more profitable, less dependent on you and gives you more freedom so you can enjoy life, let’s have a conversation.

You can reach out to me at tf@tysonfranklin.com, and I will help you where I can. 

Or, if you just want to make more money in podiatry, we can talk about that as well.