When you discuss business owners of physiotherapists, accountants, and other health and professional services in Australia, there is a number that you hear. It is not a turnover. It is not their hourly rate. It is two, as in, two hours each and every working day on stuff that has never been invoiced.
Two hours which no one is paid. Two hours that are hemorrhaging the business to lunch.
Multiply by a typical charge-out of $200. Multiply once more by 240 working days. You’ve just found $96,000 sitting on the floor. And that is a bare minimum.
The discouraging aspect of the whole situation is that most of these owners already have a clue that something is amiss. They experience it, they experience the long days, which do not seem to be productive, the psychological burden that goes home with them, the feeling that the business is working them and not the other way round. The problem they do not realize is how exactly they are spending that time, or how to reclaim it.
The software trap
The impulse, which is natural, is to take a tool. Now there is an app that handles all of it: scheduling, invoicing, communicating with clients, staff management, marketing, reporting. And some of them are really useful.
However, the one thing that no one tells you before taking three months to establish a new platform is that software does not rescue a broken process. It speeds one up. When onboarding your clients is hectic and unstructured, you are only automating the hectic, and this time you can automate it at a faster rate and less human flexibility to fix the mistakes.
The actual business automation begins somewhere other than a product demo. It begins with a clear image of the real flows of work, how it works when a new client requests, who takes it, what are the steps, what is dropped and why. Such an honest analysis normally reveals something startling: most of the time we are not lost to a single obvious issue. It is lost in dozens of little place of friction that no one has ever taken time to repair.
The same reasoning is applicable to AI. Many business owners are either hastening to use all the AI tools they can, or avoiding the entire category altogether because it seems overwhelming. Both reactions are off the point. Like any other software, AI tools are used in the strategy. They do not invent one. Unless you have your basic systems sorted out, the introduction of AI into the mix is another layer to deal with.
What really has to occur first
The most helpful exercise before making any decision about automation is embarrassingly simple: list every single thing that consumed your time last week that was not billable. Not an approximate notion,–write it down, with time beside it roughly.
The first thing that most individuals discover when they do this sincerely is the fact that financial administration is close to the top of the list by a large margin. Invoice chasing. Bank reconciliation. GST records. Bill filing. Payment confirmations. Nothing in it needs your professional knowledge. All of it takes hours that would otherwise be client facing or more importantly, your own.
There is where the automation discussion ought to begin. Not using the latest scheduling app or the artificial intelligence assistant who claims to reply to your mails. Begin with the activity that consumes the greatest portion of your time, occurs the most frequently, and is most apt to cause trouble when done unevenly. Fix that one first. Properly. Then to the other.
This is a sluggish method compared to the downloading of an app. It is the only one that does hold.
It is not aimed at a high-tech business
The idea is a business that does not require you to do everything. One that can manage a week with you out of it, and in a few more weeks four, without disintegrating or leaving a heap of work to find when you come back.
And that is not a dream. It is a design issue. And as with most design issues, it is far easier to work out with the correct assistance than it is to work out on your own.
Biz Bloke is a business coaching practice based in Melbourne under the name of Andrew Volkman, a former award-winning architect and CEO of allied health, and now advises professional services and health business owners on how to rebuild their businesses around their lives and not vice versa. In case your business is consuming more of your time and energy than it ought to be, then bizbloke.com.au is a good place to begin.