Are you working for nothing? The urgent need for R3MA

I listened to a frustrated Principal tell me the other day, that she opened her multi-chair clinic in 2019, that she is grossing £60,000 in an average month (a long way out of London, by the way), and that she hadn't taken any money out of her business in 5 years.

"Hopefully I can sell this fxxxing thing for a few million at some stage in the future."

That really is a toxic way to arrive at work every morning and a shit plan - and that's why she has hired me.

And so another journey begins - get the numbers, analyse the numbers, understand what the numbers say, make tough decisions.

R3MA - that's a "rolling three-month average" - and that's now the benchmark for measuring your profit and loss, your Key Performance Indicators, your Operating Cost per Surgery per Day and your fee-earner productivity and profitability.

Wait for it - that's also now the benchmark for reviewing your fee per item pricing.

Wake up.

Gone are the days when:

• You could put off plan price increases for another year;

• You could send a Tesco bag full of invoice and receipts to your accountant and wait for the accounts to arrive 6 months later;

• You could ring the bank on a Friday afternoon, check the cash balance and have a good weekend (or a lousy one);

• You could tolerate a team of loss-leaders in the other surgeries, accepting that your own production would have to make up for that ( but only if you don't get paid);

• You could look at any historical numbers as a measure for real-time decisions.

In a few days time we will be celebrating the end of the first quarter of the 21st Century.

• Cloud-based accounting, supported by POS (point of sale) cloud-based bookkeeping;

• P&L, KPIs, OCPSPD and individual fee-earner production and profit available within 7 days of the month end;

• R3MA;

• Targets and prices reviewed monthly and adjusted quarterly;

• Fee-earners supported and then held to account for targets on average daily production and attendance;

• Course corrections made rapidly in synchronicity with changing conditions.

Or, of course, you can keep battling on with no pay and your head firmly in the sand.

At least my new client has taken:

• Step 1 - recognise you have a problem and

• Step 2 - decide to do something about it.

Maybe that should be your New Year's Resolution as well.

Let me know if I can help.