Is it really possible to double your per hour worth?

If you’re making $150 per hour, could you improve this figure to $300 per hour or more?  Yes, this is possible and also a realistic goal. I’ve done it. Many of our doctors have done it. They did it using the method and philosophy I’m sharing in this article.

How is Per Hour Worth Determined?

The only valid way to determine what you make per hour in practice, is take your total collected revenue for a month and divide it by the number of hours you worked on patients.

If you collected $20,000 this month and worked 80 hours, your per hour worth is $250 per hour. We do not factor in time spent doing external marketing, lectures, or staff meetings. We only want your per hour value while delivering the healthcare service.

If next month you make $35,000 working the same ‘live’ hours, your per hour worth increases to over $435 per hour. Per hour worth is an important measurement to determine how productive you are. It is a window into how well you handle practice capacity.

If one doctor can process double the patients during the same working hour, his per hour worth should be double. Per hour worth should be measured monthly. It’s one of my favorite vital statistics we track. Goals should be set to improve Per Hour Worth, just like you do for number of New Patients.

What’s the fastest way to improve Per Hour Worth?

There are three ways:

1. Process more patients per hour
2. Increase value per patient
3. Rejuvenation

Process more patients per hour!

To see more patients per hour, means you’re generating more revenue per work hour. You do this speeding up procedures and having the ability to handle a greater number of patients during the hours that are most popular.

A doctor in our Mentor Program was able to double his practice, by closing his practice during his slowest day, and staffing up to handle greater capacity during his three most popular time slots.

Doctors always tell me their problem is lack of new patients. Sometimes this is true but most often they’re wrong. The answer to an instant 30% growth spike usually lays in expanding their ability to process more patients, during the 20% of operating hours that they see 80% of their patients.

By the way, consultant Greg Stanley has done an excellent job covering capacity issues in his programs. They were a big inspiration to me and opened my eyes to this problem.

Increase value per patient!

You increase value per patient by presenting more effective Case Presentations, achieving higher case acceptance, and offering add on services. I taught one doctor a simple upsell that enabled him to double his case average.

The other way to increase value per patient (often called Lifetime Value per patient), is offering Back End Products and Services. Some of my favorites are Weight Loss Hypnosis, Nutrition Programs, Non-Surgical Cosmetic Facelifts, and Anti-Aging Programs.

One Doctor is making more by offering Photo-facial skin treatments then he in from his regular patients. Remember, these are all cash programs. Anything you can do to increase the cash side of a practice is wise.

Rejuvenation!

One of our doctors, Dr. Greg H., worked 9 days last month and had his best month ever. One of our doctors is down to working on 1 day per week, and he’s collecting over $80,000 a month. His staff always complains how irritable he gets when he is forced to work two days a week!

One of the best ways to get productive and more focused, is to take Free Days. Have you observed how productive we are the day we return from a vacation? Why is that? When you rejuvenate the spirit and mind, productivity soars.

It’s always challenging to get Type-A personalities to realize that the fastest path to high levels of productivity, is to take off one extra day per week. If you’re currently working 5 days a week, force yourself to close and take an extra day off.

The opposite of rejuvenation is burnout.

Why Burnout Happens in Practice

Burnout leads to terrible case presentations, staff problems, and unhappiness in practice. I’ve seen boredom and burnout lead to really bad decisions. Like building a larger office, investing in bad real estate projects and the like, because they were so burned out or bored. Doctors have the toughest jobs. They must do Physical Labor all day with precision. And are expected to excel at Emotional Labor.

Dealing with patients all day is heavy-duty work because of the psychological energy it consumes. To quote Price Pritchett, “The social effort you have to put forth hour after hour, day after day, represents a tremendous amount of emotional labor.”

Let’s call this Emotional Labor.

Being under fire with Physical and Emotional Labor can lead to terrible burnout, very quickly. Trust me. If you want to double your per hour worth, one of the most important things to do is take at least three free days per week, and four is even better.

The majority of our doctors take four days off per week, and they’re some of the highest earning practitioners in their profession.

It’s fun to increase Per Hour Worth

There you have three specific ways to increase per hour value. The best part of doing these things, is they lead to more revenue overall yet you’re working less hours. That’s the best of both world’s and luckily it’s the fastest path to growing income, without factoring in any sort of marketing.

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