I’m currently sitting on a beach on a remote island off El Nido. It’s bloody beautiful! I’ve had a week of 10am lie-ins, walking 10 meters from my bed for a morning swim, coffee delivered to the beach, and glorious food. Jealous? In that case, I won’t mention the 35-degree heat, crisp white sands, and crystal-clear water… you get the idea.
Four and a half years ago, my co-founder, girlfriend Hannah, and I were struggling to afford food, let alone a holiday. We put everything into the business, working 20-hour days (and I mean 20-hour days).
People often ask what it’s like being an entrepreneur. Here’s what I tell them:
- You’ll have no money.
- You’ll lose friends because you won’t have time to see them.
- You’ll get fat because the gym is a luxury you don’t have time for.
- You’ll forget how to order in a restaurant—that’s a thing of the past.
- What’s a holiday?
- You’ll likely take 10 years off your life due to stress and anxiety.
- If you don’t have grey hair when you start…
- Your family will suffer, whether that’s not being able to spend time with your children, your other half, or other relatives.
It’s bloody tough, but hard work (along with a lot of luck) is what it takes to make it.
I speak to successful clinic owners every day. Like me, no one ever REALLY has a holiday. A weekend without work is an oxymoron. There’s always some issue to deal with. Every single one of them tells stories of the struggles they went through, the months, and sometimes years, of not being able to pay themselves. The stress, the anxiety, and _____: any of you reading this can fill in the blank.
It’s fucking hard work.
But something has changed over the past few years. It seems to be a UK-wide phenomenon where hard work seems to be frowned upon and everyone’s talking about work-life balance. From investment bankers moaning they have to work 100 hours a week even though they earn millions to endless Instagram posts about self-care and memes about work-life balance.
It’s happening in healthcare as well. I won’t touch on a massive issue I hear every day about clinicians just not willing to put in the hours—that’s another topic—but I’ll focus on clinic owners.
I’ve seen two things. The first is new clinic owners expecting to make money with little or no effort. The second is experienced clinic owners more concerned about their mental health than their business.
An example of each:
- New clinic owner, three-month-old clinic, struggling to get patients through the door. I suggested, as it’s Christmas, they stay open the entirety of December. Every day. Including Christmas Day. We’d run ads around emergency physio appointments, offer 24/7 availability. Everyone else is closed and there is still demand. The amount he could have grown his clinic in one single month would have been extraordinary. 30 new patients in that month would have been easy and the word of mouth long-lasting. But he ‘needed’ a holiday. Suffice it to say, we dropped him as a client.
- An experienced owner who’d obviously read a few too many self-help books and listened to some dumbass podcasts about looking after your mental health and explained to me that work-life balance was crucial and answering messages on socials or emails after 6pm or on weekends wasn’t conducive to their way of life.
Now, I don’t want to sound like an old boy or a dinosaur who thinks mental health is an issue for the weak, but my job is to help people make money, grow their businesses, and see them reap the rewards.
Let me put it this way: You will not have a successful and profitable business if you want to work 9-5, have multiple holidays a year, and weekends off.
And maybe you don’t want one. Maybe you’re happy just getting by and your definition of success is helping people, which is wonderful and I actually applaud this. But I’m speaking to those people that want to be able to afford the Rolex, go on tropical holidays, have the nice car, and the big house. Sometimes it’s just wanting to be able to extract yourself from the business and do less work. It seems some clinic owners today think you can have all this without putting the hours in and you just can’t.
I was chatting with one of our favourite healthcare business coaches, Katie Bell, a few weeks ago. It was a bank holiday. I have no idea when it was because as a business owner a bank holiday is just another working day. But she was on holiday in, I believe, Tenerife, and we spent over an hour chatting business. She has both a successful clinic and coaching business and I can promise you she wouldn’t if she picked up the phone and said, “Michael, it’s a bank holiday, I’m abroad, I need some me time.”
I liken owning a clinic to being in professional sports. You don’t hear footballers say, “I’m a bit sad today so I can’t train,” or a rugby player saying, “my knee is a bit sore, I need a week off.”
What’s this got to do with marketing? Unlike what some believe, you can’t spend a few quid on marketing and expect that to do all the hard work. Or spend a fortune on “done for you marketing systems” in the hope that you can sit on a beach and watch the money roll in. I know that’s what the gurus want you to believe but it’s bullshit. Marketing is incredibly important but it isn’t 100% of what makes you successful. It’s a bit like hiring an accountant and expecting them to make the money. It doesn’t work like that.
And even when you do start being successful, don’t expect to go on holiday and turn off your computer.
So when a business coach or marketing guru promises you that silver bullet of all the money with no effort, ignore them.
And if you’re serious about hard work and growing your business, get in touch!
That’s my little rant of the day out of the way, I’m going to go back and spot some amazing fishies in this beautiful water. But don’t think for one second I won’t be thinking about work or that I won’t be working at some point again before the end of the day. I’ll finish off with a picture of Hannah at dinner last night. Why did I have my phone in my hand? I was answering a customer email even though my out-of-office was on!
