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FACT: Efficiency creates profit in your medical spa.
Example: Sarah was a young entrepreneur with lots of promise. She had recently brought on her first two hires at her practice but didn’t know anything about payroll. At this point, she’d been paying her bookkeeper (who was actually her friend, Brenda) who never seemed to be reconciling her accounts, couldn’t fully explain what was going on with the books in a concise way, and hardly responded in a timely manner to any communication that Sarah would send.
Up to this point, Sarah knew that it probably wasn’t going to work with her friend keeping the company books but Sarah kept putting off the inevitable because they were friends, and that was important to her. She’d tell herself, “It’s okay, this will get better”, but it never did.
As the final straw, it was later in the year, and she had missed payroll because Brenda never ran it. The payroll company locked Sarah’s account and began tallying fines for every day that Sarah was past due on her payroll. After a last ditch effort to get a hold of Brenda without success, Sarah gave up and contacted us.
When we dove into Sarah’s accounts, we discovered that her chart of accounts was a mess, her books hadn’t been reconciled for many months, so none of the information she was receiving from Brenda was correct. Obviously, whatever decision-making ability Sarah possessed was handicapped by this “blind-leading-the-blind” scenario.
Come to find out, in the beginning, Sarah had hired Brenda for two main reasons: 1) Brenda was a good friend whom Sarah trusted, and 2) Brenda’s services were very inexpensive. Therein lie two great lessons for any business owner.
The first - be extremely careful when hiring friends. Because the barrier to entry in starting a bookkeeping practice is so low, it’s easy for an inexperienced entrepreneur to hire an unqualified family member or friend to be their bookkeeper because they trust the person. More often than not, I’ve seen this scenario end in a ruined relationship. The entrepreneur doesn’t know what they don’t know, so they don’t know what questions to ask before they engage their trusted friend in business.
The second lesson - beware of low cost service providers. More often than not, they’re low cost because they’re low quality. If you hire someone who is unfamiliar with the accounting processes of your medical spa, that lack of knowledge will breed incredible inefficiency, costing you far more than the bill to clean up their mess.
We were able to immediately help Sarah fix her payroll issues (not an easy process, even for experienced bookkeepers), reconcile her accounts, and implement our proven systems into her practice. Now Sarah enjoys higher profits without the stress of dealing with a strained relationship. Three cheers for efficiency!
- Speakeasy Bookkeeping