Improvement

Leveraging your Time to Produce Maximum Income

What if you could spend less time working and still take home more pay?

All of our clients have already done a great job of leveraging by outsourcing their billing to Practice Management. Hiring physician extenders for clinical tasks is another great way to leverage. But there may be more you can do to improve your leverage. Consider the value of your time. At home, for example, many professionals have lawn services to tend to their yard. People may say that servicing the lawn is a boring task and that they have better things to do with their time. But there is another important reason for using a lawn service. If you do it yourself, the money that you are saving amounts to only $5 to $6/hr for your time. For busy professionals, our per hour earning ability is so much higher that it doesn’t make sense to give up our free time to do it ourselves. Paying others to handle repetitive tasks allows us to have the time for memorable life experiences, personal development, and sharp focus on our primary professional activities.

Do you save money if you personally perform non-clinical tasks? Yes, but you give up the possibility of making your normal high level of income for that period. Or even worse, you give up your priceless free time.

A simple method can be used to determine whether you would benefit from delegating or hiring. Start by calculating the average revenue you produce per hour, and subtract expenses related to the service (don’t include fixed expenses such as rent, only those that increase with the provision of services). Perhaps your net revenue is $50, $100, $500, or $1000 per hour. Now think about any administrative tasks you handle personally for your business. Whether payroll, accounts payable, distributing mail, or anything that is not related to the provision of services. If you could provide services for patients and hire someone to do the accounts payable, or hire a payroll service, what would be the financial impact to you? In most cases you will find that getting someone else to do the non-revenue producing work will have a positive impact on your bottom line.

If your services are worth a net revenue of $200 per hour, does it make sense for you to be handling an administrative task that could be done by someone else for $15/hr? Or alternatively, looking back on your life experiences, what will you remember fondly… the time you mowed the lawn or the time you squeezed a patient in and wound up saving their life.