The EntreMD Podcast

How to Turn a Revenue Slump Into a Breakthrough in 3 Simple Steps

• Dr. Una • Episode 478

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When your revenue tanks, it’s easy to panic. All successful entrepreneurs have been there at one point or another. 

But what if I told you there is a calm, strategic approach to addressing revenue slumps that allows you to bounce back with confidence? 

Today, I’ll walk you through my tried-and-tested three-step method for addressing (and fixing) revenue problems. From conducting a postmortem analysis to turning your business around in just 30 days, this method provides a clear pathway to sustainable growth. And the best part is it will give you the confidence you need to face problems head-on without panicking! 

Tune in. 

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Key Takeaways: 

  • 00:00 Intro 
  • 01:52 Running a postmortem 
  • 07:17 Building a pathway 
  • 12:19 Executing the plan 
  • 18:10 Leaning on your community 
  • 20:12 Outro 

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Additional Resources:


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To get on a call with my team to determine your next best step, go here ...

Speaker 1:

How am I going to get out of this? How am I going to turn this around? And let me tell you you're a physician CEO. You can turn this around. You can turn it around. You started your business from scratch, you got it to where it was, and then the revenue tax you could get it back up. Hi docs, welcome to the EntreMD podcast, where it's all about helping amazing physicians, just like you, embrace entrepreneurship so you can have the freedom to live life and practice medicine on your terms. I'm your host, dr Una.

Speaker 1:

I used to think that once I figured out how to create revenue in my business, I would have sorted out all my confidence problems, right, like. I would know how to do things, I'd be relaxed, I'd finally arrived, and one of the things that happened, you know, for instance, the first year that we hit two million in revenue was, all of a sudden, this fear came over me Like, what if you can't maintain this? What if you can't grow this? What if you drop back to a million in revenue and you're found out that you didn't really know what you were doing and all of that stuff. And I addressed that, right, like. So it was a very shocking discovery for me right, but the thing is that you know there might be seasons in your business where it seems like your revenue tanks. Your cashflow is not there. Maybe you didn't get to pay yourself even after you've done really well and after you've done really well for a while. And I want to show you on this episode what to do when your revenue tanks, when your cashflow tanks. And having this way of thinking puts you in a position where you can grow, and you can grow confidently. And when challenging times show up in your business or you anticipate they're going to show up, you know exactly how to handle them, so that consistent growth can be what your business experiences.

Speaker 1:

Okay, and I'm going to walk you through three things. This is something. This is one of the episodes. You probably want to have a notebook and a journal and all of these things and really lean into it. It's going to be a total game changer. So three things the first thing here is going to be running a postmortem, like getting the diagnosis what exactly is going on here? Because the fact that your cashflow is less, it doesn't mean maybe you didn't have enough volume. It doesn't mean you didn't have enough new patients or new clients that like. We don't know what it means until we look at the numbers.

Speaker 1:

Okay, and I want to give you a few examples of the things that could be going on. The first thing that could be going on is it could be that you made heavy investments in your business because you're preparing for growth, okay, and so that could look like. I've had clients who, you know, did additional locations to a private practice. Right, that's something that is a heavy investment, but it's required for growth, right, and the investment precedes the growth. Or it could be maybe you didn't get a new location, but maybe you moved into a new location, a bigger location. I've had clients who did that. They had six exam rooms, whatever. They had it for a few years, they had outgrown it and they had to get more space. That puts you in a place where you're going to make a lot of investments. Sometimes people find themselves paying rent in two locations as they're trying to work through it and all of that stuff. Right, that's a heavy investment.

Speaker 1:

Maybe you're in a specialty, you have a private practice and you're in a specialty where it's very equipment heavy. These are, you know, the machines and all of that stuff. They're really expensive and all that. Or maybe you invested in team. You know, maybe you're a coach and you hired a high capacity team member, maybe a business manager or something like that, or you hired more coaches. Or you're a physician and you hired another physician in your private practice. Right, you have a private practice and you hired another physician. Again, that is an investment that will precede the return on investment.

Speaker 1:

Now, if that is the case, now what you want to do is really separate out the numbers, like. What is the like? If I took out the heavy investment that I needed to make that hasn't started re-yielding an ROI yet, what is my, what do my numbers actually look like? Right, and it's important to do that because you want to see is that the only problem? Are we having multiple problems? You won't know till you look at it. So you take out, let's say you take out the physician's salary and maybe the support staff that you had to hire to support that physician. They haven't started pulling their weight yet and all of that. If I take all of that out, how are we doing? Is it comparable to where we've been? Are we? Maybe we're even growing, right, if you take that out, right?

Speaker 1:

So you want to take a look at that first and then see, okay, another reason why you know, when you run a postmortem, another thing you may find is you may find that there's low volume of business, right, like, so the money coming in, the revenue coming in period is just it's dropped like it's dropped significantly, right? So in the first instance we gave with a heavy investment. Your revenue may even be more, but you had so much, you know capital expense or you know investments for growth, that it looked like you didn't grow Right and the cash flow is like shot, right. In this case you just didn't bring in the revenue period, right, and it could be a number of things. Maybe you didn't have, you know, enough new clients, or maybe you didn't have enough repeat clients or repeat patients. Or maybe you know you typically have a lot of upsells or you have you're a surgeon, so I've had, you know, surgeons in private practice where they saw the same volume of patients, but now they have more medical and more follow-up and less surgeries, and they saw the same volume of patients, but now they have more medical and more follow-up and less surgeries, and so the revenue is significantly less, significantly.

Speaker 1:

So you want to take a look at that Like is that what happened? Or maybe it's just that you know it's low team productivity. This is the one you always want to look for, and so maybe there's somebody in charge of referrals they didn't do their job. And there's somebody in charge of, you know, making sure there's repeat clients or repeat patients, and that person didn't do their job. Or you have somebody in charge of marketing and they completely dropped the ball like low team productivity, and the bigger your team is, the more important this is. So you want to take a look like did everybody pull their weight? What are the levers that bring revenue into my business? Is everybody pulling their weight? Because if they're not pulling their weight, you still have their expense, but you got no ROI right. And then now you know what to fix. Why is this important? Because until you do this, you do not actually know what the problem is and you can't fix it because you don't know.

Speaker 1:

When you do a postmark, what else could you discover? You could just discover that there's a lot like increased expenses. Okay, so we just have a lot more expenses so not quite capital expenses, like the first example we gave, but you have more, or you have unproductive expenses, and I'll explain what I mean I mean by that. You have expenses that are not creating an ROI whatsoever in your business. Maybe they mattered in the beginning of the business, they don't matter anymore, but you're still paying for them. Now, notice that I put that as a lower example, because a lot of times it's not quite that. A lot of times it's the top number, but, yeah, that could be one of the reasons, and then it could be any combination, right? So, for instance, the person who did the really heavy investment they may have been totally distracted by a new location, or moving to a new location, or getting a new team member onboarded and all of those things that they actually stopped doing, all the things that would normally bring in revenue. So now you have the heavy investment, now you have the low volume of business. You see what I'm saying. So, again, this piece is so crucial.

Speaker 1:

Not doing this is like seeing a patient. The patient is like you know, doc, what's wrong with me? And you start telling them what's wrong with them without doing a proper history, review of systems, exam and all of those things. You cannot make a diagnosis without doing this. It is worth the time it will take you to do it, okay, okay, so that's the first thing is run a postmortem so you can get the diagnosis. The second thing is, now that you have a diagnosis, you want to work on a solution. You want to work on a pathway. Okay, like, what is my path out of that stuff, plus overhead and all of those things, and so your cashflow is shot. What is the pathway? Well, the pathway is filling up that person's schedule. That's the pathway. Now there are other pathways. Right, we could ramp up other producers who can bring in revenue while this person's schedule is being built. But again, that's a pathway.

Speaker 1:

Now, maybe you know how to fill up your schedule. You have a good reputation in the company, in the community where you find yourself. You've used ads before and you know how your ads respond. You have a referral base, a really good referral base that you can talk to and they'll send you people. You have a ton of patients who are overdue for appointments. You can reach out to say, hey, we can get you in this week and all of those kinds of things, and all of those kinds of things, like.

Speaker 1:

So you just map that out, like, okay, this is what we're going to do to overcome that problem and when you're done, you look at it like if we did these things, that we decided to do these five things we decided to do, what are the chances it will fill up this person's schedule? Maybe, say, 80%. It's like, boom, okay, let's go Right. Maybe it's not that. Maybe you know you moved in, you had a low volume, right. It's kind of the same thing If we had a low volume. The question becomes what are the top three things that filled up our schedule in the past? Like, wonderful, now let's go do those three things, let's go all in on those three things again, and maybe there's some loaf hanging fruits you can add to it. So then you build out this strategy, you build out this pathway. This is how we're going to get out of this.

Speaker 1:

Maybe you moved into a new location again, right, and you're like, okay, what is the solution to this? Like our old location is doing, our first location is doing fantastic. Like after we did the postmortem, we found out that's not even the problem at all. Like it actually grew. The revenue for that location grew, the profits for that location grew. Is the second one that makes it look like we have a cashflow problem? Okay, wonderful. So then what are we going to do? It means we need to fire on all cylinders to fill that place up. It means that if we have, for instance, if we have more volume than we can handle in the first location, maybe we pull a dock on the days they're not busy in the second location to come to the first location and see patients and stuff. So they're still bringing in revenue because it's one pot.

Speaker 1:

Do you see what I'm saying? So I can't give you the exact thing you would do, but once you have a diagnosis, you can then look for the pathway. So think about three to five things that you can do over a 30 day period, 60 day period that will really I like 30, which will really rev everything up right, like you want to. You want to create that pathway and you may have this thought like, oh, I don't know what that pathway is and it's almost never true, especially if you're established. You want to tap into your own wisdom and say, knowing what I know, like, what are the top three things that would deliver X results? Okay, and what are the top three things that are proven to deliver X results? And then you come up with your own pathway. So that's the second thing we do, right, we build out a pathway.

Speaker 1:

Maybe your expenses went way out of whack. Maybe somebody else, who cannot feel the pinch because they don't make the money, is responsible for spending the money, right. And you decide, okay, I'm gonna take that, that back, or I'm going to put parameters in place and stuff like that. I'm going to cut out the things that don't have an ROI. I want to say this you know very clearly when it comes to cutting out things that don't have an ROI, let me give you three things not to cut. I say this all the time on the podcast.

Speaker 1:

The first thing you don't want to cut is you don't want to. Okay, now you want to make sure your team is a profitable team, right, you want to make sure they're all creating revenue and things like that, but you don't want to cut your team. You train your team or you remove underperformers, but you don't cut your team. And then, third thing you don't want to cut is your education. Right. Is your education when you find yourself in a position where it's more challenging? That's when you want to lean in more, like I need to be in a community where I'm getting my business education, so I know what to do, I know how to respond to circumstances and all of those things. I'm continually upgrading myself as a physician CEO and things like that. Okay, so those are three things you don't want to cut.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so we talked about running the postmortem Very important. I keep saying this because if this is not done, none of the other things matter. Okay, so I run a postmortem. Okay, I decide on a pathway. How am I going to get out of this? How am I going to turn this around? And let me tell you, you're a physician CEO, you can turn this around. Okay, you can turn it around. You start your business from scratch Most people, you start your business from scratch, no-transcript.

Speaker 1:

And then our revenues tanked and stuff, and I said, okay, I don't like what happened, I don't like what's happening with the revenue, I don't like what's happening with the cashflow, and so what I found is that there there are a lot of you know, like what was responsible for the tanking is how I had low volume of business. So for a practice that may look like you know, we got really comfortable. We're like oh yeah, everybody just finds us by word of mouth. And here comes this competitor and we did not have the engine in place to respond to the competitor because we had grown fat and lazy, and we're just like, oh yes, we're just, you know, we're just leaning on our word of mouth, we don't have to do anything, right? I got real humble real quick, okay. So I'm just giving an example.

Speaker 1:

I got humble real quick and I said, okay, what is the diagnosis? Here? We are doing nothing to bring in new people. Nothing, nothing at all, okay. And I'm like, okay, fantastic, we shouldn't have done that. But we're here now. What do we do? We're like, okay, great, we can hit the recaller, because we have a bunch of people who are overdue for appointments. We don't call them anymore because we're like, you know, we don't have to do anything and we just get all these patients.

Speaker 1:

So we're going to hit the recaller. We're going to reestablish our relationships with our referral sources, right, and we're going to go back to posting on social media. We're going to go back to showing up on a YouTube channel where people are finding us anyway, and we're going to ask for referrals from our patients, right, not just from other doctors referring to us. And we're going to do these five things, and we're going to do it every single day for the next 30 days. And we're doing with intention. What is the intention? New appointments on the books, right, okay?

Speaker 1:

So that then becomes a sprint that I run and in the beginning it will look like it's not working. Okay, so let me tell you that you know real quick here, in the beginning it will look like it's not working and then the more I do it, the more it will work. The more it starts to snowball, the more we create momentum and then we begin to shift that. Okay, so it's a little bit of a long game, like not long, like years or many months, but it's a little bit of a long game. You have to have the inner strength to just stay and see it through, right, okay, so that may be the thing. Or let's say, I got an additional location and I do the postmortem and it's just like there's just low volume of business, right, for the new location. First location, doing great, in fact, it even grew Fantastic.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so what's the plan? We'll keep the first location, as is Everything that's working. We'll just keep that working. And we come to the second location. We're like, okay, what could we do? All right, we have, you know physician in this new location that's being underutilized, so they work four days a week. Maybe we'll have them work three days a week in the new location and then one day a week in the old location.

Speaker 1:

Knowing that we we're like, okay, we make a database of all the referral sources, potential referral sources there, and then we just go at it. We just go at it to build and our goal is okay, over the next 30 days, we want to have three to six people who are who are active referrers for us, right? That's the next thing that we're going to do. The third thing we're going to do is man, you know, maybe we even have a YouTube channel, for instance. That's already going, but we're now going to lean into it. What are the hot topics? What are the things that our patients really want to know? What are the things that are evergreen People are always asking about this stuff and then make our podcast, so our YouTube channel, so relevant that it's creating all this buzz for us and stuff like that.

Speaker 1:

And we're going to look at our online reputation. We're going to really go hard, hard, hard on the Google reviews, right, and you can get Google reviews from the first location. It's the same, it's the same company and stuff like that. Right, so we're going to go after Google reviews and stuff like that. Go after social media, so we're out there, so people can see us, right? Then for the patients who come into the office, we're asking everyone to refer patients to us and stuff like that. Like, I'm just making this stuff up, right. But think of it that way and we're like, okay, boom, get the whole team on board Next 30 days. Boom, this is what we're doing.

Speaker 1:

But, guys, we not respond. We cannot take decisive action. We cannot respond casually to something as significant as our revenue tanking. Right, like so we, this is like, we're dealing with this with a sense of urgency, not frantic energy, that's not what I mean but urgency, right, which means this is important, this is timely, this is time sensitive and we're going to go all in, right. And so, when you think of this is just a simple, like, quick and dirty way to come up with a plan to respond to, that is just a simple, like, quick and dirty way to come up with a plan to respond to that.

Speaker 1:

We have used this so many times Now in my private practice. We use it a lot in anticipation, right, like so in pediatrics, we know, in the summer, people talk about the summer being dead, nobody's coming in for appointments and all those things Not our experience at all. Because we anticipate it and then we build a plan like this and we put it in place to prevent that from happening. Right, and so does it work? A thousand percent, yes, it works, and it works all the time. Right, but it's something that we need to do, and I do want to say this, you know, because sometimes you know, when things like this happen, there's a lot of shame around it.

Speaker 1:

Right, like if I knew what I was doing, this wouldn't happen. If I was on top I needed to be this would have happened. This happens to the best of people, this happens to trillion dollar companies, and I want to invite you to not embrace the shame, to not take the shame, to not accept it at all. Just go like huh, okay, we're going to learn a new thing, we're going to learn how to run a sprint and we're going to learn how to turn a machine around, turn a business machine around, which is what you're going to do, which will be so exciting, and after you do it, and you do it with your team. Guess what? You guys now have another skill that you can use, and now maybe even use it more for prevention, right, and you know, okay, we anticipate this will happen and we know what to do, we know how to respond to it. Okay, so that's what I would do. That's what I would do for that.

Speaker 1:

As far as you know the the journey as an entrepreneur, as you go through this, I will also say you definitely want to lean on your community, right? Like this is the reason why I'm such a huge advocate for, you know, physicians, being in community with physician entrepreneurs who are thriving, who are pushing, who are trying to become the best version of themselves, building their dream businesses and their dream lives, who believe in collaboration over competition like, really lean into the community and get the help that you need. I say this a lot, that I'd rather talk to somebody about a challenge that I'm having and have it done in five minutes than have to deal with something for five weeks or for five months, right, so you want to really lean into your community, and I think the last thing I'll say here is you know, when you're in this season as the physician CEO, one of the things you want to do is make sure you're an excellent steward of your time. Now, are you going to be an excellent student steward of your time? A hundred percent of the time? No, but that's what the intent needs to be, which means, for the times that you do show up for your business, you want to make sure you're in the 20%. You want to make sure you're doing the highest level activities and stuff like that, because it's game time. It's game time, we want to turn this ship around. We want to turn the machine around right. So I want to make sure you're doing that. So do this.

Speaker 1:

And even if you're like, okay, this was really great, someday maybe, if I need it, I'll know what to do, I want to invite you to just practice it. Like, even if everything is going fantastic, just practice a 30-day sprint, like, let me jumpstart my business right. You can think of it that way. Let me jumpstart my business, let me get it out of cruise control. You know, think of it that way. Or maybe you need it, and if you need it, use it right. And that's what I want you to practice doing. If you feel like man, you know, I want to be in a community of docs who are doing just this. Of course, I will always welcome you to come into the Entremet Business School. I believe it and actually it is. It's the only. It's the only business school of its kind for physicians, for physician entrepreneurs who are crushing it right, and so so do that.

Speaker 1:

But regardless, this is the deal. I want you to see yourself as a kind of person who can experience challenges in business and you can just turn it around. You can flip it around. You can just flip it around Now. It will take a minute. You're not going to flip it around in two seconds. That's not the way this works. But you can create a strategic plan, you can execute on the plan and you can blow your own mind by the results that you create. I am rooting for you, relentlessly rooting for you. If this helped you, just send me a private message on Facebook or Instagram. Let me know that it did. If you have follow-up questions, I'm so happy to answer them. Okay, rooting for you always. See you on the next episode.