The RDtoCEO Podcast
Dive into The RDtoCEO Podcast, hosted by Registered Dietitian and CEO, Eva Haldis, where she shares her journey in entrepreneurship, with discussions on the basics on building a private practice and becoming a confident CEO. The RDtoCEO Podcast is your go-to resource for mastering the art of transitioning from a dietitian to a successful CEO.
The RDtoCEO Podcast
My Q3 Financial Update: Managing Financial Highs and Lows
What happens when revenue takes a major dip for the first time after a period of growth? Join me today as I share my personal journey navigating the financial highs and lows of managing a group practice, and once again, share the real numbers! You'll learn the critical importance of understanding profit and loss, even when the numbers don't look promising.
Episodes Mentioned:
- Let’s Talk Money! Part 1: Navigating The Financial Reality of Private Practice as an RD
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In this episode, we explore the foundational aspects of finances in private practice, including budgeting, pricing strategies, and managing business expenses as a registered dietitian. - Let’s Talk Money! Part 2: The One Where I Share Actual Financial Numbers
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Continuing the conversation, I share detailed financial insights, including real numbers from my private practice, offering transparency around earnings, costs, and the financial decisions that have helped my business grow.
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Affiliate Links Often Mentioned:
Gusto for Payroll - https://gusto.com/h/eva6486
Practice Better- https://practicebetter.partnerlinks.io/evahaldis9298
*Please note that while we strive to provide valuable insights, our podcast is not a replacement for personalized legal or financial counsel. We strongly advise consulting with qualified professionals for specific advice tailored to your individual circumstances.*
Welcome to the RD to CEO podcast. I'm your host, eva Haldis, registered dietitian, who one day found herself a whole CEO of a business. Join me as we navigate the world of entrepreneurship so you can go from being an RD who sees clients in private practice to a confident CEO growing the practice of your dreams. Welcome back to the RD to CEO podcast. Hi everyone, welcome back to another episode. Today we are going to be talking about money and I'm going to be updating you all on my quarter three financial so how the my group practice did in Q3. And it'll be a really great conversation about ebbs and flows of owning a business and how easy it is to get stuck in a negative self-talk, especially when it comes to money. So we're going to dive into all of that today. If you have any questions, be sure to hit the send a message button in the show notes and actually receive that message and can hopefully answer it on an episode. If you enjoy the podcast, it would also be really helpful and awesome if you could rate it. So, whether you're listening on Spotify or Apple, I'd really love the support if you could hit, hopefully, five stars if you think this podcast is worth five stars. Really excited to talk today about money. It's always a very popular episode when I talk about money, so I hope you enjoy it and find it helpful and validating and all the things. As always, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you are getting your podcasts. And finally, if you'd like to be a guest on the podcast, whether it's for a coaching call I have done some complimentary coaching calls that have been recorded for the podcast or if you're also a business owner and like to talk about business topics, head over to wwwrdtoseocom and hit the podcast tab and under there say be a guest and you can fill out a form there. We would love to have you on the episodes.
Speaker 1:So, without further ado, let's get into talking about money. All right, so let's talk money. If you haven't already, I would definitely encourage you to go back and listen to my two-part financial episodes that I've done, which I'll be sure to link in the show notes. In there I talk a lot about money and what to expect, especially in private practice, and in part two I actually go through my profit and loss sheets since I started my private practice to give you all a sense of sort of like what can be reasonable growth for a private practice when I was solo and also in group practice as insurance-based group practice, and I wanted to do an update on how things have been going so far this year. I don't know if I'll make this a series where I'll just update every quarter.
Speaker 1:Like I said, I find that people really enjoy these episodes. I know I really like listening to this kind of stuff. I'll sometimes see influencers post what I earned this month and I just like to see it because it's really interesting for me to see what I don't know money people are making. So I guess, if this is an interesting topic, maybe I'll do it more. But the reason I really wanted to do it in particular was because spoiler alert our revenue has actually gone down this past quarter.
Speaker 1:So quarter three was probably like the first loss in revenue that I've seen in my practice, probably since I started growing. So that's interesting, right, and so I have a lot of. You know it's not significant. It was only a couple thousand dollars Actually. First it was only a couple hundred, but I talked it over with my financial coaches I work with and also had just some moments to kind of reflect myself, and I'm going to talk a little bit about that today.
Speaker 1:So if you are not familiar with profit and loss sheets, basically I'm going to talk about like our revenue, which is all the money that was brought in by the group practice, and then the profit is, of course, the money that is sort of left over after all of our expenses. So the profit and loss sheet kind of shows you that, because it shows you if you've made profit or lost money or if your expenses are too high. So I've said this before in financial episodes looking at just your revenue is not the only thing you should be looking at, because ultimately it's really the profit. So you could be having like great revenue, like coming in tons of money, but like overspending, and then you're left with nothing. So that's going to be important information as well. So it's not just about the revenue, it's also really important to look at the profit part as well.
Speaker 1:But I would say, because I've been in group practice and it's been pretty steady for the last year or two, our expenses have kind of stayed the same. So I wasn't too worried about are we spending too much on the expenses? The profit has been staying, I would say, pretty consistent. Some months it's a little bit higher, some months it's lower. I think some of that is just like did I pay for I don't know something twice in one month that's like meant for like the second month, like I've done that before where like I'll pay for I don't know an example of like rent I'll send the rent money in the first of the month and then I'll do it at the end of the month. Of like rent, I'll send the rent money in the first of the month and then I'll do it at the end of the month, but then it all is in one month. So that might make it look like there was higher expenses, but we're sort of looking at it from like an overall standpoint. It really wasn't significant.
Speaker 1:So in this particular situation I'm just going to be talking about mostly revenue, because I think when we see those numbers in particular, like the money coming in and we see it sort of going down, we're like oh shit, what's going on? Is this bad? And I certainly had those feelings myself. So as a reminder, of course, when I'm talking about Q3, that's going to be July, august and September, I believe in my financials, episode part two, I think it was probably a few months ago, so I don't know if I ever really went over what our second quarter looks like, but our revenue did jump pretty significantly, which is not a surprise. So, even though I'll be mostly talking about quarter three, I'll give you a little bit of a quick review of the year so far and I'm just going to be speaking on total revenue. So this is just money that the practice has brought in, and then we'll talk about it a little bit more in detail and I'll start from January till now, so you kind of get the bigger picture, and then we're really going to be focusing on, like, well, what happened this last quarter? That you know resulted in a drop in revenue.
Speaker 1:So in January we started at $22,821.76. In February our revenue went up to $25,620.31. In March we did have a little bit of a drop from February, $24,052.07. I think I really didn't worry about that because it was higher than January, and I think last year in December was when I probably hit 20,000 as a revenue point for a month. So I was like not too worried about it.
Speaker 1:And then April which I've said this a million times before March is always our busiest month, april, our revenue. And the reason I say that is because, especially with insurance payments. A lot of it is like stuff that happened in March is going to be reflective in April's revenue. April's revenue was $30,145.78. So I was like whoa, amazing, awesome. And this was really when, like I would say, we pretty much had three full clinicians. I would say pretty much everybody was full at that point, so it makes sense that the revenue was the highest.
Speaker 1:Then in May it went up just a little bit to $30,508.04. Then in June it went down just a little bit, $29,946.93. And in June one of our clinicians went out on maternity leave. So she sold clients through the month. I think mid-month maybe, like second or third week, went out on leave. I had also started. I did hire two dietitians that started around that time as well. One of them was to sort of help offset some of the clients that the clinician who was going to leave was seeing. So at first it was sort of evening things out and then brings us to Q3.
Speaker 1:So from June where it was, as a reminder, $29,946.93, july went to $27,530.77. So I was like, okay, you know about a $2,000 loss. Once again, I wasn't super surprised by that. Summertime things definitely slow down. The clinician who was on leave was fully on leave and so we were like, very slowly, you know, the one clinician who was sort of covering her had a couple of clients and then our other new clinician had only a small handful, so I wasn't super surprised. A lot of times in the summertime too, there's a lot of clients and then our other new clinician had only a small handful, so I wasn't super surprised. A lot of times in the summertime too, there's a lot of cancellations, rescheduling, everyone's on vacation, some clinicians go on vacation, so I wasn't super shocked by that.
Speaker 1:In August I guess it didn't go down from that. So from July to August it actually went up about $300. Our total revenue in August was $27,805.31. And then I think this is really where I was like what's going on? Because in September our revenue was $23,651.12. So September was our second lowest month of the year so far in 2024. So for me to see a steady drop from May, which was in 30,000, to then 23,000 September, I was like uh-oh, what's going on? Just as a reminder, in the beginning of the year I had three full-time clinicians. By the summer we were pretty much at two full-time clinicians and two very, very part-time clinicians. So I would say both the full-time clinicians and two very, very part-time clinicians. So I would say, like both the part-time clinicians didn't really replace my one clinician who went on a maternity leave.
Speaker 1:As far as, like the clients she was seeing and with the summertime stuff slowing down and cancellations and also I think for me this, I kind of just allowed myself to coast a little with things. You know everybody, sometimes in the summer it kind of just is what it is. You know, I also, in looking back at our inquiries, august was also our slowest month of inquiries and so it sort of once again made a little bit of sense why some of those numbers had gone down, and I think that was okay. When I first saw this, of course, I was like, oh my God, what's going on? In panic mode and luckily I had an appointment with Joe, my financial coach, and we were kind of looking at this and he pointed out that from March till April I had a 25% increase in revenue and then from August to September, where I had that drop was actually a 15% drop. He was like do you feel like you have the same level of energy, of excitement or happiness when you have that 25% increase as much as you have the 15% loss, and definitely not. I mean, I think it's very natural and human thing to like focus on the negative. It can be very easy to spiral into that of like something's going on, what's happening. When I really rationalized everything, I was like okay, in September, pretty much.
Speaker 1:At that point I had two full clinicians. The clinician who was on maternity leave started back up two weeks into September, so just starting back up. The clinician who was covering for her has pretty much stopped seeing clients. And then the other clinician who is very part-time, is still very part-time because we're not ready to make her full-time yet with her life and other commitments she has. So we're hoping to make her full-time starting in January. But it makes sense. It makes sense why there's less revenue.
Speaker 1:And the reason I want to bring this up too, especially for this episode today, was, I think sometimes what happens and I feel this myself all the time, and especially when I talk to my coaching clients when people maybe look at my group practice. And here's the thing. This is not to say that I'm not so proud of the growth of my business and like my clinicians and how amazing they are and like all the work they put into it. But sometimes, you know, if somebody were to look at my website or hear me talking, they'd be like how many employees do you have? And I'm like, well, I have six, five dietitians, one admin. And they're like, oh my God, wow, you must be killing it.
Speaker 1:And it's not to say that we're not killing it, but it's also like well, you know, two of those clinicians are full-time, one has just come back to being full-time, one is very part-time and one of them is pretty much, you know, going to be transitioning out. And so it's like, yes, we're doing great, everything's exciting, but not everything is like what it seems sometimes, and that's okay. It's also not to say that things are really, really bad for us. It's just there's going to be ebbs and flows for every business mine, yours, anyone's and it's sort of like what we do with that. That really helps us move forward and not allow it to completely crush us, because that's one of the toughest parts of being an entrepreneur. You're not going to a job where you're just like going and getting a paycheck and leaving. There's a lot of ebbs and flows and you, as the business owner, really have to push through some of these discomforts and use it as data and information.
Speaker 1:I've always loved data I talk about it all the time on the podcast, but even with my clinicians and information. I've always loved data. I mean, I talk about it all the time on the podcast, but even with my clinicians and clients, I've always said to them everything's just data collection, right, like things we say to clients that sometimes don't land. It's just data collection. Like maybe that was not the best analogy or maybe this wasn't really a helpful suggestion to give to this client. Just data collection. There's no good, bad, it's all neutral and we just have to really look at it as neutral information and what we want to do with it. And I think that's really important too when we look at our financials Because, yes, if I look from January to September and see all this revenue going up and then going down, it's like oh no, what's going on.
Speaker 1:You know, it was sort of disappointing for me because I think naturally I mean, of course it feels good to see numbers going up. I mean I feel like one of the things I miss about not being in school is like not being able to check my grades. I just love, just like checking my grades and seeing, like you know whether I did well or something. So it kind of feels like that sometimes. And so to see our revenue going up and up and up, I was like, oh my God, this is amazing 30,000 month revenue. In my mind that was what we were going to continue to do and I sort of didn't take the time to recognize, well, there's no way we're going to be able to do that if one of the clinicians who's full-time is going to be on maternity leave and we don't replace, replace that client load, you know, or that client amount basically, and so but that's okay because at the end of the day also, I still got paid, everyone on the team got paid, my admin still got paid, my biller still got paid.
Speaker 1:You know this isn't talking about the profit piece. You know our expenses are managed. I feel really comfortable with like sort of the budget budget and making sure that we have enough money to cover the expenses that we have. And really at this point for me the profit is, of course there's going to be, in doing the profit first method, a small percentage. That goes to me as the business owner. But also what I'm looking for when I see profit is like, okay, there's money left over. That means I can start adding a different benefit next year.
Speaker 1:That's really my goal with my practice is, as I see it grow and as I see the revenue grow and as I see the profit grow is like that's money that I can now put back into my employees, because they're the ones that are doing the work and building this practice. Of course, there's parts of it as the practice owner that I'm doing and I see a very small handful of clients, but they're the ones seeing most of the clients at this point, and so I want to also like give back to them and continue to make this a workplace that they're going to want to stay at, of course, and it's going to support them financially. And so I always just want to look at things from a bigger picture standpoint of like, yes, we've had a loss and we'll see how things go with October. I'm hoping the revenue sort of balances out now that our clinician who was out on leave is back and we're sort of like picking things back up and all that stuff. But at the end of the day, like I'm feeling very good about where things are at, I'm not like panicked about do we have money to pay people or any of that kind of stuff, which is wonderful, and that's like really where you want to be at. And I think, when we talk about I think this is like going back to the episode that I did on like how to pay yourself is also understanding how to use the money that you have efficiently, and like make sure you're not spending money on things you don't need necessarily or spending beyond what your practice can afford, and so I feel, because I've done that when we have these kind of drops in revenue, it's not actually a major deal and, like I said, everybody's still able to get what they need and get paid, including myself, which is like the most important thing, because that would also obviously suck if we didn't. So sometimes, like numbers are gonna sort of paint a picture to you in your mind of like what that might mean, and that's not necessarily. You know, when we look at it from a bigger standpoint, what it all comes down to and you know, like Joe, my financial coach, said, like it was a 15% decrease versus like a 25% increase that we had for March to April, and you know one of the things that when things like this happen so I said this earlier too.
Speaker 1:You know, our August inquiries were low. That's usually once we have like a low increase and it's usually like summertime holidays there's sort of trends, right. This is where tracking is really important. I can see those trends. That's usually what I'm like. Okay, I need to kind of like pick back up with marketing, because that's really like where I spend a lot of my time is how can I get our name out there more, how can I make more connections for my team and sort of increase our visibility in the community so that we are getting more referrals and more inquiries and making sure that our clinicians have clients to see. And since we've done that, I'm going to pull up my inquiry sheet now. So over the summer.
Speaker 1:So this is really like when we were talking about July, august and September for Q3. And now when I look at the actual number of like new inquiries we were getting, june, july, august were the slowest right and remember, with insurance and revenue, we have to kind of like look at it like a month before. So like what happened in July was as a result of June and for the most part, july was as a result of June for the most part. And June we had 18 inquiries. July we had 17. And August we had 16. They were our slowest months that we've had all year, because as of today, october 22nd the day before this podcast will be released on October 23rd as of today, october 22nd we've had 19 so far in October.
Speaker 1:So the numbers are very obvious. Right, we had slower inquiries, less people reaching out, less new clients. A lot of the existing clients are going on vacation. Rescheduling Clinicians are on vacation. It actually makes a lot of sense that our revenue would have been lower. And so the same thing that I do when I look at this revenue thing I mean like what's going on I do the same thing with our inquiries and tracking that information really helps me because once I started seeing those numbers going down, I was like okay, something must be up, aside from the like summer of it all, and picked up some additional marketing stuff. And by September we were back up to 28 inquiries and, like I said in October, so far to date we've had 19. 28 inquiries and, like I said in October, so far to date we've had 19. So my guess is things are going to continue to kind of go up and grow, which is awesome and great. That is why keeping track of data and using it neutrally is so, so important, because that's really what's going to help us know what to do and how to make decisions.
Speaker 1:The other thing about tracking information is, you know, I always keep track of where our referral sources are coming, so I'm not spending time marketing to something that maybe isn't like showing a lot of return. Now, sometimes things take time, like I just gave a presentation to a local college, to their athletic teams. You know, is that going to like necessarily increase our referral basis like significantly from them? Like maybe not, but it might slowly build and might slowly add more opportunities and things like that. So some stuff we don't see right away is like the return on it, but typically for us at our practice, like most is coming from therapist referrals and Google, I would say for the most part, I would say like it looks probably 40% to 45% is from therapists. So that is typically where I do most of my networking as a result, because that's where the data shows it's effective.
Speaker 1:And that is really, I think, the way that we can approach things when maybe we start telling ourselves a story of like oh my God, my business is going to burn to the ground. What's going on? I suck. We want to look at the data and say, okay, what's really actually going on? And having things to track can also help us. Right Me, knowing March is always the busiest I can anticipate for that, or summertime hit or miss, but usually pretty slow. I can prepare my team for that, like it makes sense. Also, they're going to go on vacation, so it kind of works out that things are a little bit slower. They don't have to worry about their clients and where are they going to put them all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:So, in conclusion, when you are seeing things like this, don't panic. I'll be excited to see where things go. In October, like I said, maybe I will do a Q4 update and it'll be sort of a good way to reflect on the year as a whole and we kind of see what goes on with the revenue and if some of the like efforts around marketing and things like that do pan out, especially having our clinician back from attorney leave and then hopefully growing our fourth clinician to full time by the start of next year, and that's sort of the way to handle those situations. So I just want to say all that to like remind you that if you are looking at somebody else's practice and it looks like they must be killing it and I definitely suck, that's not true you don't actually know what's going on behind the scenes. Once again, I don't think we suck. I don't think we're, like you know, going down. But just keep that in mind when you are maybe judging yourself and getting into a negative talk spiral. We're all just doing our best and, as always, I hope this was helpful. I hope it's helpful to hear numbers of like what, what can be expected of group practice.
Speaker 1:I remember seeing recently in a Facebook group I'm in for group practice owners, for dietitians, and somebody was saying about how they have a couple of part-time employees but they're like feeling like they're seeing no return and I think that's just like. One of the biggest misconceptions about group practice is that if you hire people and they start seeing clients that you're going to to make significantly more one revenue and profit and it really does take time, especially if you're paying people an adequate wage. And I actually didn't even share the profit on Q3. If we look at July, so as a reminder we had $27,530.77 in revenue and after expenses and all that things, our profit was actually negative. It was negative $1,309.42. Now I'm going to say that's probably because I double paid for something in July, and this is where looking at your QuickBooks can be helpful.
Speaker 1:I don't remember exactly what it was. It might've been like one of those things where I paid the rent twice in one month, when you know in, because once we look at August, which our revenue was $27,805.31, our profit was $5,339.27. So it went negative back up to you know 5,000. Then this past month, september, where we had our second lowest revenue month, $23,651.12, our profit was $1,145.44. So a couple more expenses there and so less of a profit.
Speaker 1:Now, should I be panicking about that? Not necessarily. Once again, our team was paid, I was paid and Marbilla was paid. Everybody that needed to be paid got paid. I didn't go up in credit cards, and so I'm okay with that, because if I look at it from like the bigger picture of all together, for the year so far we've had about $22,000 profit, which is great because this is the first year that I'm now salary as part of my practice, and so before, where the profit was sort of my income, it's actually just profit of the business now. So I'm okay with that there's going to be some ebbs and flows in that If you see some negatives in your profit, don't panic.
Speaker 1:If you're seeing negatives like every month, that's something that you might want to take a look at. But there's going to be some months, like in January it was negative, then the rest of the months it was not. So always keep that in mind to look at the bigger picture, look at it over a year time or quarterly, and really see what are the trends that you're seeing, and there's usually an explanation for things like that, and so that's why I'm not too too panicked about it. All right, I think that's all I have to share on that. I'll be sure to update you all when the Q4 ends at the end of this year and we can see where things go from there. I'd also really love to hear from you.
Speaker 1:Was this episode helpful? If you have my contact, please let me know. Please send a message. Would love to hear what might be helpful to talk about when it comes to money, because I know it's a very hot topic thing to hear about and learn about. As always, be sure that you are liking, subscribing, following along wherever you are getting your podcasts. Hope everyone has a great rest of their week and I will talk to you next time. Bye. Thanks for listening to the RD to CEO podcast. Be sure to check out the show notes for any resources mentioned or find more at wwwrdtoceocom. Never miss an episode by subscribing wherever you get your podcasts. See you next time.
