WP 57 Essential Dashboards Every Group Practice Owners Needs with Brent Stutzman
In this episode of the Wise Practice Podcast, Whitney Owens is joined by Brent Stutzman, the owner of Brand Your Practice, a media company aimed at helping therapists become smarter practice owners. Brent shares his priceless knowledge about the critical metrics to track in your practice and discusses the three essential dashboards every group practice owner needs to monitor.
Dashboards and Metrics, oh my!
You don't need to be afraid of the terms dashboards and metrics.
A "metric" is defined as a set of data that is collected, tracked and assessed to ensure the success of certain business operations. Metrics serve as an evaluation tool for examining and apprising various aspects of a business, such as marketing endeavors, financial status, and overall operational performance.
A "dashboard", on the other hand, is essentially a tool that summarizes and displays these metrics concisely, making it easier for business owners to visually comprehend the data, gauge their business performance, and make informed decisions in real-time. Dashboards can encompass different business aspects such as marketing, finances, and operations.
The reason practice owners need to maintain various types of dashboards (marketing, financial, and operations) is that they offer valuable insights into the functionality, efficiency, and profitability of a practice. Dashboards help maintain transparency, ensuring accountability, spotting potential issues early, and crafting strategic plans based on well-reported and analyzed data. They also provide peace of mind by presenting a comprehensive picture of the practice's health, thereby aiding in better decision-making.
The Marketing Dashboard
The Marketing Dashboard is crucial for tracking and understanding the influx of clients to a practice. As Brent Stutzman outlined in the episode, it provides critical information such as how many new client leads or appointments are being made, where they are in the pipeline of becoming a client, and the overall conversion rate. The marketing dashboard is a crucial tool for managing your brand's visibility and performance, especially for group practices. It should include key metrics such as the number of new client leads or appointment requests, where these leads are in the pipeline to becoming a client, and the conversion rate which includes people who have turned from prospects into paying clients. It can also track secondary details like the origin of these leads (word of mouth, Google, Psychology Today, etc). If you have an intake team, this dashboard can also monitor which team member is making the most appointments or if there are team members who are struggling. The marketing dashboard offers real-time vital insights, helping practice owners make informed decisions about where to invest their time and resources.
The Financial Dashboard
The financial dashboard is crucial for eliminating financial blind spots within your practice. It comprises primary metrics including revenue, costs, profit, and cash flow and helps to assess how much the practice brings in, what it costs to run the practice, how much profit is made post-expenses, and the amount of cash going in and out of the business over a period of time. It helps practice owners make important decisions as they're able to gauge the financial health of their business through these metrics. Secondary metrics that can be considered in a financial dashboard include profit margin, profit per clinician, and revenue per clinician. This dashboard can be reviewed monthly but if you're a larger practice, you might consider checking this weekly. An ideal tool for maintaining a financial dashboard is an accounting software such as QuickBooks.
The Operational Dashboard
The operational dashboard is vital for measuring and monitoring the practical functioning of a business or practice. This type of dashboard combines important metrics from all aspects of operations such as scheduling, payment, and client notes, providing a comprehensive snapshot of the practice's performance. It's particularly useful for tracking clinician productivity like appointment scheduling, client attendance, outstanding balances, and more. Also, an operational dashboard can incorporate secondary metrics like the number of new client appointments and client turnover, making it a central reference point for reviewing and improving business processes. The ability to track these metrics enhances accountability, ensures service efficiency, and supports data-driven decision-making.
In this episode of the Wise Practice Podcast, Whitney Owens is joined by Brent Stutzman, the owner of Brand Your Practice, a media company aimed at helping therapists become smarter practice owners. Brent shares his priceless knowledge about the critical metrics to track in your practice and discusses the three essential dashboards every group practice owner needs to monitor.
Show Sponsor
Alma - Your private practice support system
Links and Resources
Executive Dashboard: BrandYourPractice.com/dashboard
TheraSaaS.com → Intake CRM just for therapists to capture, qualify, and close more clients.
FREE Ultimate Guide to marketing your private practice & checklist
FREE Course: How to Convert Calls Into Clients in 7 Days
FREE Course: How to Grow a Private Pay Practice → 8-part PRIVATE PODCAST series on how to grow a private pay practice.
Connect with Whitney Ownes on Instagram
Check the podcasts on the PsychCraft Network: PsychCraftnetwork.com
Podcast Production and Show Notes by Course Creation Studio.
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WP 57 | 3 Essential Dashboards Every Group Practice Owners Needs with Brent Stutzman
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Building a private practice can be challenging. Building a caseload, attracting clients who are the right fit, managing the business side of your practice. There's so much to navigate with insurance and billing and paperwork. It takes a significant amount of time and energy and that's all in addition to delivering great care to your clients.
That is why Alma gives clients the tools they need to build a thriving private practice. When you join their insurance program, you get credentialed within 45 days access to enhanced reimbursement rates with major payers. They also handle all the paperwork from eligibility checks to claim submissions and guaranteed payment within two weeks of each appointment.
In addition to their insurance program, Alma offers time saving tools and administrative support so you can spend less time on paperwork and more time delivering great care to your clients. To learn more about building a thriving private practice with Alma, head to helloalma. com slash wisepractice.
That's helloalma. com slash wisepractice.
Hello. Hello. Thanks for hanging out with me, Whitney Owens today on the wise practice podcast. I appreciate your support and the love and looking forward to sharing some awesome content with you today. So on today's episode, I interviewed Brent Stutzman, who is a new friend of mine who had reached out to me.
He owns a company called branch of practice, and he does a lot with marketing branding, but also data collection in your practice. One of the most common questions I hear from practice owners is What data do I need to basically track in my practice and how do I go about that? So not only does Brent provide incredible content because I was writing things down and learning, but he also is going to give you a freebie in the episode, which is a dashboard.
So make sure that you listen. He's got several different dashboards and discusses the importance of each one and how to implement them in your practice. So looking forward to sharing that with you. We are coming up on the end of the year. You guys, doesn't it just feel like it flew by? Like I'm recording this before Thanksgiving, but I cannot believe Thanksgiving is just around the corner.
So super excited about that. I actually, this episode's going to drop when I get back, but I'm about to go to Hawaii. Yes. Hawaii. Like I've been planning this trip for a long time. It was actually the first trip I ever planned with a travel agent. So if you've never used a travel agent, I highly recommend it, even though I haven't gone on the trip yet, but I am recommending it because she's planned this whole thing for me.
And it really wasn't nearly as expensive as I thought it was going to be to play it. The trip is expensive, but to get the travel agent part, I thought that would be more expensive. Totally worth it. Didn't have to contact any hotels. Didn't have to research excursions. Didn't have to plan anything with that.
So it's been really great. So I'll be taking my husband and 2 kids and then my father actually interesting fact about me. He lives in the Philippines with his wife and they are also going to be flying and meeting us in Hawaii. Now you're thinking, Oh my gosh, Whitney Hawaii. That's so expensive. And yes.
It is expensive. And I've even looked online, man, those restaurants are going to be expensive, but this is why you have profit in your business, right? I have literally been saving for like five years for this trip. I'm using a little bit of profit each and every time I run payroll, putting it aside and now having an account to be able to go to Hawaii.
So I encourage you. Even if it's a little out of time, if there's a trip that you've had on your heart that you want to go to just start saving a little at a time and make sure you make it happen. 1 of the reasons why is my location is because my father actually is a pilot retired and has gone to every state but Hawaii.
So I'm excited to give him his last state here. And have that experience with him. Plus having some childcare on your trip is nice. So him and his wife will allow my husband and I to do a little bit of hiking and hopefully having a meal or two out. So anyway, I will be able to update you when I get back about that, but you'll be listening to this episode.
Once I return so we're going to go ahead and jump into the episode today. And like I said, this is with my friend Brent Stutzman, and he's going to talk about the dashboards that every group practice owner needs in their business.
[00:04:59] Whitney Owens: today on the wise practice podcast. I have my friend Brent Stutzman. He is the owner of brand your practice incorporated, a media company, helping therapists become smarter practice centers. After he helped his wife's launch her practice in 2016, he saw the need to help therapists launch market and scale their practices.
[00:05:18] Whitney Owens: Since then, he's launched over 12 private pay practices across the country, a software called TheraSass, and an e course called Private Pay Program Practice. He is a certified StoryBrand guide, lives in Chicagoland with his wife of 19 years and their three beautiful children. Thanks for coming on the show.
[00:05:36] Whitney Owens: Well, thanks for having
[00:05:37] Brent Stutzman: me.
[00:05:38] Whitney Owens: Yes. Well, I always love when I read people's bios and I see their businesses were created out of their passion and for a need. And you've got both of those right there with your business.
[00:05:47] Brent Stutzman: Yeah. Yeah. And the need was also to put food on the table when my wife launched her practice too.
[00:05:52] Brent Stutzman: It's like, we got to make this work. So, uh, so yeah, it's been quite a journey and it's been super fun. And along the way, helping other practice owners launch and scale up their practices. So it's been really fun.
[00:06:04] Whitney Owens: Awesome. Well, as you know, this is a faith based, uh, podcast group and I always have different people on here with different perspectives, but it always brings me joy when I get to have other faith based people come on the show.
[00:06:16] Whitney Owens: And so you have some experience in the church world. Isn't that correct?
[00:06:19] Brent Stutzman: Yeah, I was a pastor for over 10 years. I'm an ordained pastor. So I went to seminary and for all those who have their MDiv out there, it's good to, good to see you. Um, so yeah, for many years I was. Uh, in the local church, I was a music pastor with youth ministry and assimilation ministry.
[00:06:36] Brent Stutzman: And, uh, there was kind of a point where my wife's like, look, I want to start my own private practice and I need you to do the branding and marketing. I said, well, let's figure it out. Cause I've been, you know, for those out there in small churches, you kind of learn how to do everything and you need to do everything.
[00:06:51] Brent Stutzman: So, uh, it went down the, the branding and marketing rabbit hole. And loved it and along the way, acquired a set of skills that other therapists need, uh, and who are willing to pay for in order to grow and scale their practices. So, you know, starting out from just at the very beginning, doing the brand and marketing to scaling them up to some that, you know, have over 25 therapists, 2 locations, you know, grossing 2 million a year in revenue.
[00:07:15] Brent Stutzman: And there's those in between. So basically, I've come along as a consultant and solving problems as they scale and creating systems and operations and all these things, uh, to help them scale easily. Because I think, I think, you know, growing a private practice should be simple, it should be affordable, and I think it should be fun too.
[00:07:33] Brent Stutzman: So that's kind of my, my lens of which I am, uh, I'm, I'm doing my work these days.
[00:07:38] Whitney Owens: Oh, I love that. I love that. Well, and I think we talked about this on your, uh, pre call. We were talking about coming on this show. My husband actually just got his 1st church as a senior pastor. Yeah. So it's interesting seeing how.
[00:07:51] Whitney Owens: Now, I think about church differently now that I have the business mindset, which you were kind of sharing. It's like the branding of your church and the marketing of your church, as weird as that sounds, it really is a skill set that goes hand in hand, how we run a church, how we run a practice, all those
[00:08:04] Brent Stutzman: things.
[00:08:05] Brent Stutzman: Oh, it's yeah. I mean, the way I think about churches now is way different now that I've been a business owner and people on the payroll and organizational structure, all that stuff. Yeah. It's totally changed everything. It's been, and it's been helpful to be able to. Bring some of that to the church that I, that we're now attending.
[00:08:20] Brent Stutzman: So, yeah,
[00:08:21] Whitney Owens: cause people need to be able to find you to find God, you know, and it's the same for our counseling practices. People need mental health treatment. They've got to find us. And so the branding is so
[00:08:29] Brent Stutzman: important in that. Yeah. Yeah. And also clearly communicating that. As well, right? Because not all churches are the same, you know, different denominations, different beliefs.
[00:08:38] Brent Stutzman: Like, so how do you actually create a message that kind of differentiates so that you can attract the people who are looking for your type of church, but also tell those who would not be a good fit, like this would not be a good fit for you to come to our, to our church because of these things. And that's okay.
[00:08:53] Brent Stutzman: That's okay.
[00:08:55] Whitney Owens: Definitely. Yeah. So I am looking forward to this conversation today. We're going to talk about metrics and dashboards in group practice. I know you have, there's so many things we talked about you talking about. You do a lot of marketing for solo and group practice centers, but I did latch onto this one because this is a topic I get a ton from group practice centers and you have an amazing dashboard that we can talk about at the end that we can share.
[00:09:16] Whitney Owens: Um, so we're going to hit content heavy. What are the three kinds of dashboards or metrics that we need as group
[00:09:23] Brent Stutzman: practice centers? Yeah. So here's really the problem that we're looking to solve. There's a lot of practice owners who are busy and they have to be able to quickly digest critical information to make decisions about their business.
[00:09:34] Brent Stutzman: I'm not talking about clinical information, but business metrics that are critical to their operations and they need to be able to measure the performance of these operations and also their marketing and their finances. So these business metrics and these dashboards are going to be talking about, well, I would say the metrics that we're going to be talking about are embedded and displayed in a dashboard.
[00:09:56] Brent Stutzman: So we're going to be talking about these three essential dashboards that every practice owner needs to scale, but also share a bonus dashboard at the end, uh, that my group practice owners that I support love and your listeners can download for free. So a dashboard really let's define what a dashboard is.
[00:10:12] Brent Stutzman: It's a, it's a simple screen that displays predefined business metrics so that practice owners can really do three things in real time. They can do these things. The first one is they can quickly assess the overall health and performance of the business. They can make data decisions. So I should, they should make data driven decisions about where to allocate the resources and not just money, but maybe time and attention.
[00:10:35] Brent Stutzman: And the other thing about dashboards is that they actually give you the peace of mind. So you can always know the health of your business. Like you'll sleep better at night knowing the essential metrics about your business and if you're in a healthy place or not. So the three really, there's really kind of three dashboards for solo practice.
[00:10:51] Brent Stutzman: We're going to group practice owner. The first one is a marketing dashboard. The financial dashboard, and then the operations dashboard. Uh, so we'll just jump in. I'll start with the marketing dashboard. Um, and so here are some critical things they need to know and some metrics they need to track. How many new client leads or appointment requests are being made?
[00:11:11] Brent Stutzman: So you need to have a little box on your dashboard. It says, all right, how many new client leads or appointments are being made through your website or phone calls? Something you have to track it. Where are they in the pipeline and becoming a client? So a pipeline is really the different stages that a client is moving through.
[00:11:26] Brent Stutzman: Before they become a paying client. So, for example, uh, you know, uh, a stage in that pipeline could be the client lead has been contacted or have they been followed up? Maybe that's another stage. Uh, maybe there's a consultation or scheduled or maybe they need to be put on the wait list. So that's kind of the pipeline.
[00:11:44] Brent Stutzman: The other third metric that practice owners need to know is the conversion rate. How many of those people looking to schedule an appointment have actually converted into paying clients that are now moved into your EHR? Now, those are the three main ones. There are a couple of secondary dashboards that you might want to consider.
[00:12:00] Brent Stutzman: One is, or sorry, secondary metrics. The first one are the attribution of those leads. Where did those leads come from? Were they word of mouth? Google, Google business psychology today, or some of those other director websites. Uh, another thing you might want to have is how much are you spending on marketing overall?
[00:12:17] Brent Stutzman: What, how much did you spend that month on Google ads or Facebook ads? Another secondary metric is, um, really with, if you have an intake team, this is kind of interesting. So if you have more than one person on your intake, who on your intake team is scheduling clients or they're struggling to schedule clients.
[00:12:35] Brent Stutzman: So you could say, you know, how many clients they've been assigned to them and have they've actually converted into clients or not. So, um, that's just another way of kind of keeping another secondary metric if you have a larger group practice, you know, one of my, um, one of my clients and I, we were digging through the numbers of a particular clinician of why they were struggling to keep their clinical hours up.
[00:12:55] Brent Stutzman: And we were able to quickly discover that we gave that individual 40 new client appointments, but they only had a caseload of 10 clients per week. So we knew that was something there, but because we had a metric that we were tracking new appointments and how many we were able to do to diagnose that pretty quick and kind of put a correction path in place.
[00:13:16] Brent Stutzman: Yeah, so let me so let me tell you this and you mentioned at the beginning of about their SAS. So there really wasn't a software out there that could quickly, easily and answer those marketing questions for us. Those especially those intake questions. Especially. Something that was HIPAA compliant. So I was able to cobble some software together, and we designed something called TheraSAS.
[00:13:36] Brent Stutzman: And TheraSAS is just really a HIPAA compliant cloud based platform that helps practices quickly capture, communicate, and qualify new client leads. You put one of our custom forms on your website, they type in all the necessary, you could customize it to whatever you want. So they. Whatever the necessary information you need to qualify them, you really get all that information at step zero, right at the very beginning.
[00:13:58] Brent Stutzman: So you can also include questions like, how did you hear about us? So you can start tracking referral sources. You know, is it Google or is there a pediatrician or someone in your community? So, um, but built into TheraSAS as a dashboard. So you can quickly see how many appointment requests were made, where they're at in the pipeline and becoming a client.
[00:14:19] Brent Stutzman: Have they been followed up with? Are they on a wait list? And then have they've actually been converted into a paying client and put them in their EH, in your EHR? So for dashboards, um, you really just be able to select the date range. So you can get a snapshot. Is it a week? Is it a month? And then you can quickly get that information.
[00:14:35] Brent Stutzman: And there's actually just been like a game changer for my, my clients and they love it. So, um, I'll say one more thing about. like tracking conversion rates. So, um, your intake team, I've seen a healthy conversion rates are really between like 50 to 70 percent somewhere in there. That's kind of like a healthy range.
[00:14:55] Brent Stutzman: Um, but if it drops below that, you may need to be asking yourself some questions. So, uh, are your clinicians reaching the capacity, right? There's just no room on their, on their schedule. Maybe this is a sign that you need to hire because your conversion rates are low, but you're getting a bunch of intakes in.
[00:15:13] Brent Stutzman: Uh, was there like a holiday or time that was, they had a week off during that month? Or maybe your intake coordinator isn't responding in a timely manner and you need to coach up your intake team. And their SAS has this unified inbox so you can see all that communications with text message emails and phone calls.
[00:15:30] Brent Stutzman: So everything is transparent for the practice owner to diagnose any potential issues with that. So that's kind of a little bit on conversion rates there. So depending on the size of your practice, you should be checking your conversion rate every week. And, uh, definitely at least monthly. So, yeah, I'm just curious if you have any questions around that.
[00:15:50] Whitney Owens: Yeah. Well, this is great because you're saying all the things that I'm like, yes, so spot on. Right. I'm always telling practice centers. If you don't have data, it didn't happen. Oh, like, like you can tell me all day long. Yeah. We convert most of our calls. Well, I don't know what that means. You know, I think we get about 20.
[00:16:09] Whitney Owens: Well, about is not 20, you know, and so I love that that's the 1st thing we're talking about is the importance of metrics. And I love that you made marketing the 1st dashboard because that's where it all starts. And so many practice owners, even today, I was talking to someone and they were like, yeah, I'm going to get Google ads, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
[00:16:25] Whitney Owens: And I'm like, yeah, but. Are you converting the ones you are getting, because if you're not, then you're about to waste your money on Google ads. I just think everybody's looking for that quick fix when really going back to that data and really tracking it. And most practice owners are not tracking it or not tracking it appropriately.
[00:16:43] Whitney Owens: And so I love that you kind of, you kind of laid that out, you gave the statistics, you even provided a resource and made that super easy. Like people, no more, no more excuses for not tracking. In fact, I track every week. The stuff that you just shared every single week, I'm going in and looking at that.
[00:16:58] Whitney Owens: Cause the larger your practice, the more important that you're doing it.
[00:17:01] Brent Stutzman: Yeah. Yeah. The larger the practice, the more detailed you have to get on it. Um, and that's the other thing is attribution is crazy. And there's a lot of practice owners. They don't even know how to set up the Google ads, right?
[00:17:12] Brent Stutzman: Correctly. So it can actually be recorded. And here's what I say about this on attribution. Like all I have practice owners, like, or the Google ads working. Well, to me, Google ads are working in conjunction with your organic and your Google business. It just all works together. And so it's hard to always just be like that was 100 percent Google ads like that lead right there.
[00:17:33] Brent Stutzman: Sometimes you can, right? But a lot of times it's all working together because they might come to your website several times. The first time they might come through Google ads, the second or third time might be coming through organically. Third time could be coming through a lead generator before, you know what I mean?
[00:17:45] Brent Stutzman: And then they decide to become a client. So they, or schedule an appointment. So it all, to me, my answer to that is just, they all have to be working together, but it is important to set up Google ads, right? And your other tracking metrics, uh, to make sure that you can track your ROI, like how to do it with psychology today.
[00:18:01] Brent Stutzman: And make sure you are tracking that attribution correctly as well. And Theris actually, you know, you know, gets all that information in there so you can actually see all that really easily.
[00:18:11] Whitney Owens: Yes, I love that. And even when you're talking about where they're coming from, like, that's a big thing that I'm always looking at too, because I know, hey, we always get 50 to 60 percent of our inquiries through Google.
[00:18:21] Whitney Owens: Well, if that percentage fluctuates. It shows me the problem where our conversions are always around 50 to 60%. If that fluctuates, I know there's a problem. And all I have to do is look at that number. I don't have to look at anything else. And then I can diagnose that issue.
[00:18:37] Brent Stutzman: Yeah. And you need to track it because there's seasonality in this stuff too.
[00:18:40] Brent Stutzman: Yes. So if you're like, well, our Google conversions are really down. I wonder why that is. Well, if you look in the past year or two, you might see that around that time. It's just slow. And then you don't have to freak out, right? Like you just kind of know, but you need that data in order to sleep better at night, not
freak
[00:18:55] Whitney Owens: out.
[00:18:56] Whitney Owens: That's right. That's right. All right. So that's great. What is the next, uh, dashboard that we need to be looking
[00:19:02] Brent Stutzman: at use of finance? Yeah. Yeah. This, yeah. Let's talk about the financial dashboard and it's, um, and it's critical because you want to eliminate any financial blind spots. So the, the, the primary metrics that I like to track for a financial dashboard are these one is revenue.
[00:19:16] Brent Stutzman: How much did the practice bring in this month? The next one is expenses. How much does it cost to run your practice? The other one is the profit. How much money is left over from running the practice after the expenses are deducted from revenue? And the other one I like is cash flow. So cash flow really refers to the amount of cash coming in and going out of the business over a period of time.
[00:19:38] Brent Stutzman: And this is important to know because there's a lot of practice owners who take large distributions every month because they're not on their own W 2 payroll, but they take large distributions and those owners draws do not hit your profit and loss sheet. So it's material for you to know the financial health of your business.
[00:19:54] Brent Stutzman: You have to track that cashflow because I know there's a lot and there's probably a lot of practice owners listening. They're like, yes, I take distribution. So, um, and sometimes that's the only thing they take right now. So revenue expenses, profit and cashflow, primary metrics for finance, the financial dashboard, some secondary metrics.
[00:20:13] Brent Stutzman: And you can check these like once a month. is really your profit margin. So this is the percentage of revenue that remains after you deduct your expenses. And it's a percentage that is calculated by really dividing the net profit by your revenue. So a higher profit margin indicates that your company's more efficient at controlling costs and generating profits.
[00:20:32] Brent Stutzman: And my experience in working with lots of practices is that the 20 percent profit margin is really a sweet spot for them. If you're running at 20%, That's pretty good. Um, sometimes it's a lot lower. Um, those who are primarily insurance based, typically I see a lower profit margin for those who are private paying and it can, can command a little more revenue.
[00:20:56] Brent Stutzman: Um, you can see higher profit margins there. So, uh, the other one you can track is revenue and profit margins per location, if you have a multi location practice, another secondary metric. Would be, um, revenue per clinician. So this way, you, you basically track linearly on your dashboard. The amount of revenue each individual clinician brings in each month.
[00:21:21] Brent Stutzman: And that's helpful to see if there's like, any dips and the clinician or every, especially if you were like. They're contractually obligated to maybe bring in so much revenue per month or, Mm-Hmm. see a certain amount of clients per week. You can easily track that. Uh, the other one that I find it's, it's a helpful metric is profit per clinician.
[00:21:37] Brent Stutzman: So this is where you take all your monthly expenses, you divide it by each clinician on your team, and then you take the revenue of each clinician and subtract and average that the expenses out. So, um, let's say you have 10 clinicians and you're. Your expenses are 30, 000. So it's like 3, 000 a month per clinician is the expenses.
[00:22:00] Brent Stutzman: So you want to see how much revenue they brought in compared to that 3, 000 expense that it takes to run, run your business. You kind of average that out. Then you can kind of start to see which clinicians are more profitable. Or if you're trying to AB test, like, all right, I have a full time salary employee and I have a commission only based or you have a couple different commission tiers.
[00:22:20] Brent Stutzman: She. You can then, uh, run kind of comparisons. All right. What's more profitable full time employee, or is it more of a commission based at this percentage split, that type of thing. So that's a little deeper, but I found that having some of those metrics are really helpful. There's just a little touch point.
[00:22:36] Brent Stutzman: So the software that I like, all my practices to use are as quick books. So you can quickly get all that data for the metric, all that, the, yeah, the metrics of that data, and you can build a dashboard or your bookkeeper can do it or someone on your team. So, yeah, any questions on financial dashboards? Yeah.
[00:22:52] Whitney Owens: Okay. So TheraSaaS is for the marketing dashboard. That's right. The dashboard would be
[00:22:56] Brent Stutzman: different. Correct? Yeah. Yeah. So QuickBooks or something. I always think like a system. So you have a marketing system, operation system, uh, financials. Each system really should have its own software to accompany that because it's going to allow you to leverage that, save time and money and get that, get the numbers that you need really quickly.
[00:23:13] Brent Stutzman: So yeah, I recommend QuickBooks or some other accounting software, but QuickBooks is kind of the standard
[00:23:17] Whitney Owens: for that. Yeah. Yeah, no, that's great. And how often would you say, I think you might've mentioned it. How often should a group practice owner or solo owner go in and look at that financial dashboard?
[00:23:27] Brent Stutzman: Well, it just depends. The larger you are, uh, you might need to be checking that weekly, but most for the financial is, I mean, also just like cashflow issues. If you have like a weird cashflow situation, you might be checking that weekly or even daily, but usually monthly is all it is that you need to grab from that.
[00:23:43] Whitney Owens: Yeah. Great. Such an important dashboard that I think a lot of us don't want to look at,
[00:23:48] Brent Stutzman: right? Yeah. Oh, there's a, so like this similar, like you shared a story about, you know, if it's not measured, it doesn't exist. Or if it's not measured, you can't grow it. Well, there was, we got a bookkeeper, uh, when my wife's like, Hey, will we profitable this month?
[00:24:05] Brent Stutzman: I say, yeah. She's like, how much? I go, I don't know. It was pretty good. There's cash in the bank. She's like, excuse me. So when it started to get a little tension, our marriage around finances, that's like, all right, I need a bookkeeper and start tracking this. And data like, again, we could sleep better at night.
[00:24:22] Brent Stutzman: Like we had all the data and data doesn't care about your emotions, but it can really help your emotions when trying to make these decisions. So, yeah,
[00:24:30] Whitney Owens: definitely. Yeah, actually I had to make a decision on bringing someone on a salary. That was my marketing person. I was very nervous because, um, she's very good.
[00:24:38] Whitney Owens: So I wanted to offer her a good salary. So I went to my accountant though, and I was like, can you run these numbers as if I had hired her five months ago, you know, and let's see if I would've been able to pay her for five months. And lo and behold, I could have, and still had a little profit. I was like, all right, like, so it does really help you make those decisions.
[00:24:55] Whitney Owens: And I could sleep better going, okay, I already know I have the money for this.
[00:24:59] Brent Stutzman: Yeah, that's a great, that's a great example of that. That's a great example. And, and now you can just confidently do it, right? Like, that's right. I don't have to worry about it. I can do it because you had those numbers.
[00:25:09] Whitney Owens: Yeah. All right.
[00:25:10] Whitney Owens: And what is the third dashboard?
[00:25:11] Brent Stutzman: All right. The third dashboard is the operations dashboard. And I really like to break this dashboard. Like break down into two dashboards, really. So the first one is the clinician's dashboard. So for the clinician's operating dashboard, the practice owner owner really needs to track every week for themselves.
[00:25:28] Brent Stutzman: This, these metrics for a clinician on your team. The first one is how many, like the number of client appointments that were scheduled, how many was on their schedule, how many ended up were paid appointments. Right. So how much they actually showed up and paid, and then you can have a percentage, which is what some call a utilization rate or productivity, right?
[00:25:48] Brent Stutzman: So this is the percentage of, uh, clients scheduled to clients, uh, paid. And, um, you, we don't track this as much, but I find it's actually a really helpful. At least at least getting the how many were scheduled and how many showed up, right? If you're starting to see some wild numbers there, then you might see there's a problem people not showing up to their appointments Another one is to uh, another metric is how many how much outstanding balances they might have that clinician Um, you know, I know simple a lot of my practice owners use simple practice and they can pull this information pretty quick Uh, another one is did you complete all your client notes?
[00:26:24] Brent Stutzman: Yes, or no, did you charge all your clients? Yes, or no, if they're in charge of charging their own clients. So those are some of the primary metrics that I think a dashboard should have. So, on the clinician dashboard, some secondary metrics, if you want to dive a little deeper are. Numbered, uh, already talked about numbered and miscanceled appointments.
[00:26:44] Brent Stutzman: That's in the first one. Uh, but how many new client appointments were they scheduled that week? Uh, how many number of clients did you close out or terminate? Did you submit all the insurance claims for that week? And how many new treatment plans were created or reviewed? So that's some from like a clinical director standpoint that some of my practice owners have been diving a little bit, like, more down at that.
[00:27:06] Brent Stutzman: And I can say that, you know, therapists struggle to be measured and held accountable for some of these numbers, like clinicians and such a thing. So it's really kind of a culture. That you need to start building from the ground up if possible, or you need to implement something, uh, because whatever you measure, it's going to communicate to the clinician.
[00:27:26] Brent Stutzman: This is what's important. You have to hold them accountable to that. Now, you could also add some things in there that may not that kind of softens it. So what we've done is say, hey, Some secondary measurement, like where's some personal growth goals that you have. Do you want to exercise every day? Do you want to like these other kind of personal things?
[00:27:44] Brent Stutzman: So it doesn't feel like it's so businesslike. Um, are there, are there trainings or certificates that they want to achieve? So you can add that to the overall dashboard or their clinician, you know, growth chart or progress report or whatever you want to call it, um, to kind of help soften that. Like, it's just not always about numbers.
[00:28:03] Brent Stutzman: Uh, but these, but you got to track it. You got to track it. I mean, there was one case where there was not being tracked. And, um, one person didn't submit for insurance for like over six months. And so it's like, well, to not have that, let's implement something else where we're actually tracking it and measuring it and holding them accountable.
[00:28:28] Brent Stutzman: So, uh, now if I can get to. The other dashboard and this is the bonus dashboard. All right. Call this the executive dashboard. The executive dashboard really combines the critical metrics from the marketing finances and operation dashboards all into one. And this is where your leadership team can take a look at this every month or different people from your team can fill it out.
[00:28:50] Brent Stutzman: So when you have your leadership meeting, all the metrics are there. Uh, this is typically reviewed monthly, but if you're a larger practice, this might be an updated weekly. Um, dashboard. And so from the marketing, you want to have your new client appointment requests and your conversion rate. I like to include email subscribers, like total, like how many new email subscribers and the total number of email subscribers.
[00:29:12] Brent Stutzman: Because I think building a brand also involves having a, like a branded newsletter that you're sending out at least once a month. Uh, from the financial metrics, you want the total practice revenue. Uh, the revenue per appointment overall for the practice, and then maybe total expenses in the profit margin, okay?
[00:29:29] Brent Stutzman: From the operation metrics, um, the total number of paid clients for the month, and then the revenue per clinician. So you could have a breakdown of all the revenue on this executive dashboard of each clinician. And then you can kind of see where they're at, kind of linearly throughout the year. Other ones on an executive dashboard, I like to include our key performance indicators like KPIs or strategic economic objectives so that your whole team is you're looking at, all right, we need to hire two new clinicians.
[00:29:57] Brent Stutzman: How are we at, how are we doing on that? Or do we need to move offices or, uh, let's say Sarah's caseload, uh, needs to be at 22 clients per week. How are we doing at getting there? Or do we need to get 20 Google reviews? You know, some other kind of key performance indicators that are. Strategic for the business to follow through on.
[00:30:14] Brent Stutzman: So that's what I would say for the executive dashboard, uh, to have at least those metrics, uh, that you can review every month. All right. So yeah. Any, any questions? That's, those are the three dashboards, I guess, four, including the bonus one. Yeah. Any questions or thoughts on it? Well,
[00:30:30] Whitney Owens: bonuses are always good.
[00:30:33] Whitney Owens: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So what I know people are thinking when they're listening is that's great. Where do I get all these dashboards? I don't have to do all the work.
[00:30:41] Brent Stutzman: Yeah. Yeah. So I, if, so it's going to be linked in the show notes and maybe in the email when you send it out. So there's going to be a link to a Google sheet, to the executive dashboard, and that's where you can kind of get started.
[00:30:51] Brent Stutzman: It's just a Google sheet. Then you can. Manipulate it however you want, but it's the exact same sheet I use for all of my clients, my partnership clients. As we take a look at those numbers every month, all the way from the marketing operations and finances. So you can get that. Yeah. Yeah. That's very generous of you.
[00:31:06] Brent Stutzman: Yeah. Yeah. And if they, uh, wanted to check out their SAS, they can go to t h e r a s a a s. com to check out the marketing software that I mentioned earlier as well. So I highly recommend that it's been, it's been amazing. Like that was the big piece because we could not keep track on pencil and paper and Google sheets anymore of all the client leads coming in.
[00:31:27] Brent Stutzman: It just got insane. Yeah,
[00:31:31] Whitney Owens: definitely. Definitely. Well, we'll put all that in the show notes and people can grab those links. And then you have a freebie as if that wasn't afraid to be enough. I know you have another freebie about marketing your practice. Yeah.
[00:31:41] Brent Stutzman: Yeah. So I have a free ultimate guide to marketing your private practice and it's a checklist is too.
[00:31:45] Brent Stutzman: So you can download that. Uh, just go to brand your practice. com and go into the research or sorry, resource tab and you can dial. I got a ton of free guides because my goal really is to like grow private practices so that they come, they become so overwhelmed with all the new, uh, intakes coming in that they want to buy their SAS or my e course or whatever it might be.
[00:32:07] Brent Stutzman: So I'm just giving away all the things. Uh, for free essentially. So they would, um, they would consider those couple options. Well, you've
[00:32:16] Whitney Owens: learned the secret that therapists like free things.
[00:32:18] Brent Stutzman: Yeah. Well, I mean, when we were first started, we had no money. That's right. So we were, I was clamoring onto any resources we could to, to get going.
[00:32:27] Brent Stutzman: And there's sometimes we actually bought money in order to Expedite the learning process, right? We had to buy courses or whatever. So absolutely do that. But, um, what I found is, uh, I was like, these are the things that therapists need in order to market or to launch a practice. Cause these are things I've done several times over and over and over again.
[00:32:45] Brent Stutzman: So just giving it away.
[00:32:47] Whitney Owens: Yeah, well, that's great. And, and, you know, I think more and more, and I say this to people in my membership community or do consulting with when you start putting your money into something, if it's a person, a program or a software, you really invest in it better, you know, just like our clients, the ones that pay your full cash rate are usually more invested in therapy, not always, but, but it really is important.
[00:33:09] Whitney Owens: Um, and really will help you as a therapist when you choose to invest in a service. That's right.
[00:33:14] Brent Stutzman: That's right.
[00:33:16] Whitney Owens: Wonderful. Well, is there anything we didn't touch on? You provided so much good information.
[00:33:21] Brent Stutzman: No, I think having a dashboard, at least having an executive dashboard is going to help you sleep better at night.
[00:33:26] Brent Stutzman: I think you need it. I think you need it more than you do. Then, you know,
[00:33:30] Whitney Owens: all right. Well, yeah, if anybody has follow up questions or wants to learn more about your business, what's the best place for them to go to?
[00:33:37] Brent Stutzman: Just go to brand your practice. com. I got a podcast. I have a blog. I have a ton of free guides.
[00:33:42] Brent Stutzman: So you could, you could spend a long time. They're just getting all a lot of good information to scale your practice, whether you're just at the beginning, thinking about starting and what you need to do there. I have a launch guide there, or that you need some marketing, some fresh marketing ideas and what's working, what's not working.
[00:33:56] Brent Stutzman: I have guides and lots of podcasts around that as well. So, yeah.
[00:34:01] Whitney Owens: Well, thank you. Yes. I actually went through your podcast the other day and was like, wow, you've had some great interviews on here. So it's definitely a good resource. I remember when I was in the first phases of practice, I listened to a podcast almost every day and just implemented something new every single week.
[00:34:15] Whitney Owens: And so it's a great show to, to go to. And I appreciate you coming on the show today.
[00:34:21] Brent Stutzman: Well, thank you for having me.
