Naturopathic Clinic Owners Meet Monthly Income Goals and Stabilize Practice Growth

I'm Dr. Sapna Patel Flower and I'm Dr. Sue Lev. We're the owners of Restore Integrative Health in Toronto. We're both naturopathic doctors and North American Menopause Society certified practitioners. Sapna and I started Restore back in 2012, we opened up the clinic straight out of school and our goal was to create a space where people could come, be heard, patient-centered care with multiple different practitioners. And over that time we've continued to do that. We have a fantastic reputation in the neighborhood, the neighborhood of Leslieville here on the east side of Toronto. We have the time, we're able to take that time and have the conversation with the person so they really feel heard and they can get all the information that they need. So you can go online to restoreyourhealth.ca and hit the book now button on the top right of your screen for online booking and another option is you can always give us a call at 647-725-2525 and our amazing receptionist can help get you booked in. Before the Vista program we were both just running our business the best that we knew how and then over the last decade plus we started getting into place where it just felt like it was humming along but not really progressing in the way that we wanted it to. And we were feeling a bit in the dark about what we should do. We had worked with a lot of different business coaches and hadn't really gotten the answers or any action items and really sort of felt as if we didn't know what to do. I think that the thing that made us go ahead with the Vista program was knowing that we would be in a group of other clinic owners that we could learn from and also with Sean and Jordan's expertise. Sean's experience in working with dentists and working to help support their practices and then Jordan having her on board as well and knowing that she has a successful clinic. I think it was a combination of a lot of them as Sue had mentioned. We had done a lot of programs in the last eleven to twelve years of our business and not any of them gave us the outcome that we wanted. It always felt a little scattered. So we were a little bit I guess disappointed in the other programs that we had done. And so, we did think about this one a lot. But I feel like with The Confident Clinician as well, we had basically built confidence in the program just through the education modules that The Confident Clinician had. Like, with Jordan's modules. Then we were thinking like why not leverage it into the business side? Because I feel like they had done such an awesome job already. And I also remember after chatting with Jordan about the program, really realizing that there was opportunity to make change in our business. Then I remember us chatting and saying it actually is a risk to not do it and not do it now because we knew that something wasn't right and we knew that we needed to figure out what that was and we felt confident that they were going to be able to help us figure it out. It's given us a lot of things to think about when we hire new practitioners. What kind of questions to ask. Where, in the past, we kind of just, like, did it but now we feel like we have a solid understanding as to what we need to ask practitioners before they join our team and as well, also within the business itself. How to identify to cut losses at an earlier time as opposed to just hoping that it gets better. By knowing our numbers and knowing what we need, it's a lot easier when onboarding a practitioner and chatting agreements with them to be able to tell them what the agreement would look like and why. And having that confidence behind us I think has gone a really long way because we haven't had any trouble onboarding practitioners with the agreements that we need in order for the clinic to succeed now. It's made me feel more hopeful with regards to the long term nature of clinic ownership. I also think on a personal practice perspective, there's been a couple of changes that we've made in terms of having more patients come into our practice with patient retention and then also we increased our rates based on Sean's recommendation and our group's recommendation. And so because of those changes now we have met our income goals and we're suddenly meeting those targets on a month- to-month basis. So it's really nice to have that stability with regards to our practices but then also feeling confident and having the support through the program has helped us to manage the business itself. I feel like from a clinic ownership side, it really gives - especially naturopathic doctors that are owning clinics, where we were never given the business structure as to how to do this - I feel like it gives us the structure to really understand, as Sue mentioned, your numbers. Because it is a business in the end and I feel like that's what it really excelled in to really help us identify all these really important business decisions. I think as business owners we've had each other through these years but a lot of practitioners who own clinics work on their own. So I know that they feel very isolated. And even for us, having this group of practitioners who were all there to support one another and to share their own experiences, has been really, really invaluable.