[JOE SANOK]
This is the Practice of the Practice podcast with Joe Sanok, session number 633.

I’m Joe Sanok, your host. Welcome to the Practice of the Practice podcast. I hope you are doing amazing today. Today we’re going to be talking all about money. Money brings up all sorts of different feelings for people. Sometimes it’s a good thing, sometimes it’s a scary thing, sometimes people feel like if they have a budget, either per or with their business, that somehow it’s limiting and they don’t want it. They fight it and they say, “No, I don’t want that.” Other people say, it’s nice to know where the guardrails are. It’s nice to know kind of where we’re headed. I like feeling that predictability. So wherever you are today I’m so excited about our guests that we’re going to be talking to in just a second.

But I know for me, I’ve talked about this on the podcast before I was raised by two parents that were good with their money. They were smart. They taught me all sorts of things about it. I also, when I started a business, had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t know that you could automate QuickBooks to talk to your bank and just auto fill it in. So every year for a number of years, I was just getting all these receipts. I would put them all in one drawer, I’d pull them out and I would put them in envelopes and go that’s for marketing. That was for taking people out to eat. It was ridiculous.

Then I would add it all up. I’d sit there with hundreds of receipts and just add it up, even though I could have just had QuickBooks talk to my bank. I just didn’t know. I had no idea. We were never taught this stuff in grad school. So if you feel like you are at the very beginning of your journey, it’s totally cool. It’s okay. And if you feel like you have a mega group practice and you’re just refining things, we’re going to talk about that stuff today as well. So I am so, so excited about our guest that we have today.
[JOE]
Our guest, Rocky Lalvani is The Profit Answer Man podcast. He’s been doing this for a while. He’s helping business owners to be more profitable with less work. Rocky, welcome to the Practice of the Practice podcast.
[ROCKY LALVANI]
Thank you so much for having me, Joe. Excited to chat with you. I was thinking so many things just as you were going through your opening.
[JOE]
I’m sure you were. It’s funny, we met at Podcast Movement and you were wearing a Profit First shirt. I was just like, I got to talk to that guy because, you know I’ve had Mike on the show. His book has just made the rounds within my community. Then I actually talk about him in Thursday is the New Friday as well. So Mike’s done a lot of great work and I know that you’ve worked with Mike and his approach for a while. So why don’t we start with kind of in the Profit First world, will you just give us kind of a summary of Profit First and kind of how you got involved with it? Because there may be some people that hear Mike Michalowicz, Profit First and they’re like, what are you talking about? We just don’t want them to feel left out.
[ROCKY LALVANI]
So Mike is one of those serial entrepreneurs and he had the same problem you had. He did not understand the finances in his business. He actually was very successful. He owned a forensic accounting practice. They did the Ben Ron stuff and said, “Yep, Ben Ron’s guilty.” Sold that, walked away with seven figures, thought he was the smartest business guy in the world and within two years they were coming for the keys to the house and the car. He’s like, “Whoa, what went wrong? How did I screw this up so badly?”

And he started to think about it and he realized we’ve been told the wrong equation. So if you go to your accountant or your bookkeeper and, how do we define profit? Everyone says sales minus expenses equals profit. The problem there is that profit is a leftover. It’s an afterthought. Mike said, this is why we’ve got a problem. So the first thing he did is a new formula; sales minus profit equals expenses. Now this is not earth shattering. You guys have probably heard this before, pay yourself first. That’s what this is all about. It’s a system that allows you to pay yourself first. It allows you to take your Profit First. And it also sets money aside for that dreaded tax day.

Because for most business owners like you, they didn’t know they were profitable until they got through all those receipts, handed it to the accountant and they go see the accountant at tax time. The accountant says, “Congratulations, you were profitable. Here’s how much you made and here’s how much you owe in taxes,” at which point they all freak out because they’re like, where is that money? I don’t have that money. They’re like, yes, we know you spent it. Then the second question is, how am I supposed to pay the at tax bill? They freak out because now they’ve got this big payment that they don’t have money for. Those are the problems that essentially Profit First solves. It creates a system that works the way entrepreneurs work and allows them to have better control over their cash.
[JOE]
I mean, I remember, I always kind of had the formula that I wanted to just have my basic expenses; the rent, marketing, all that. Then I had set aside at first and then after that I wanted to take 50% of whatever was left over home. So it was a certain amount that I wanted to home and I made sure I always had that other 50% that was just there. That could be used for expenses or for the taxes or things like that. There was this one year that my accountant, who now I’ve fired, he was $30,000 off in his estimates and at the end of the year I owed 30 grand..

Luckily I had just been setting money aside and said at tax time, that’s when I’ll do a payout to myself. That payout, that year ended up being a payout to the government, but at least I had that money sitting there where I had kind of a basic sense that I shouldn’t just be spending everything that’s coming you in. That was before I learned about Profit First and having different accounts. But it’s, now that guy’s fired , but that idea of having a huge tax bill, like how am I going to pay this thing, so many people deal with that when they don’t think through their finances.
[ROCKY]
That is probably the number one piece of feedback I get from people who implemented Profit First; is tax time used to be scary and there was a lot of anxiety because we never knew what the number was and we didn’t know how we were going to cover it. Now they’re like, hey, tax time comes. I know I’m ready for it and I feel confident and whatever my accountant tells me, I can stroke a check for. And a lot of times there’s more money in the tax account than the tax bill. Well, then you get a bonus. So as much as we hate tax time, it now becomes bonus time. So it’s one of the main benefits of Profit First.
[JOE]
So take us through how kind of the different accounts typically work. Because I know that as I started learning about Profit First, I was doing a lot of what you talk about kind of in my head where I would have, okay, I know about this much is for taxes. So I need to not spend down from the main account past that. I know that I want to have at least this much for some extra profit. I know I need about this much for marketing and for payroll. So it was all in my head and then eventually kind of Profit First walked me through having a few different accounts. What are the typical accounts that Profit First teaches? Then we can kind of dig into those.
[ROCKY]
So all of this is based on Parkinson’s Law, which I know quite well. Basically what happens is when you’ve got a big pile of money sitting in that bank, while you kind of have a number in the head, you will use up all the money because you’re like, hey, there’s money sitting there. I have to spend money to make money. And you see that there’s money there, so you feel a little bit more comfortable spending it and that’s the problem because you will overspend. That’s where Profit First sets up these different bank accounts.

So it’s kind of like the old envelope system. Back in the day our grandparents would get their money and they would separate it. They’d put money in the rent envelope, money in the food envelope, money in the utility envelope and when that money ran out, they stopped spending. That was amazing. They didn’t have credit cards to overspend. And that’s basically the same system that Profit First uses. So what it does is the first accounts is the income account. So all the money that comes into your business goes right into the income account.

So if you want to see how much income you’ve had since the last time that you did anything with it, you can just look and you immediately know how much money came into your bank. Then what we do is on a set regular schedule we allocate that money with it purpose. So the first account we allocate to is profit because we should take our Profit First. The second account that we allocate to is owners pay so that you get paid. The next account —
[JOE]
Let me pause you there. Why do you guys separate out profit from owners pay? I know why, but some people might say, wait, that’s paying myself twice. Why do I need two accounts for that?
[ROCKY]
So part of the use of the profit account is to build up a vault account in your business so that when you hit the bumpy times, you have extra cash in your business to handle it. Part of it is you invested in your business so you should get a return on that investment of investing in your business. As the owner’s pay, it’s like you getting paid for the work you do, but not for the reward of owning a business. So we kind of separate the two and that allows you to build up essentially an emergency fund inside your business over time.
[JOE]
Okay, thanks.
[ROCKY]
Then, so we allocate to owner’s pay and then we allocate to tax and then whatever is left gets allocated to the operating expense account. That’s where you spend your operating expenses. But now instead of keeping all these numbers in your head and it’s somewhat jumbled, you just look at your bank balancing if you have money to pay the bills or you don’t have money to pay the bills. You also know that you can comfortably pay yourself because you’ve put the money aside to do it. So it’s very emotional. Like this takes a lot of the emotion out of it and by giving each dollar a job, it makes it easier for you to feel comfortable removing money from your business.

Especially in the beginning, a lot of people struggle with that. They’re like, I don’t know if I should take money out or can the business support me and this makes it so much easier. Then all we do is on a set regular basis. It might be monthly. It might be twice a month or it might be weekly. You allocate your money to where it belongs and then you go about your business like you normally do. So there’s no longer worries about budgets because you’ve already pre-decided how you’re going to keep your money and where it’s going to go. The system works. So it uses Parkinson’s law to constrain your spending and it makes sure that you get paid. And in the book, Mike has targets based on the size of your business, of how much you should put in each account. The reality is you have to start with where you are today. And for a lot of business owners, it might take them a couple years to get to the targets, but we take baby steps, little by little.
[JOE]
So Mike taught all this. Now, Rocky, you have your own podcast and your own business and you’re applying this. So how do you take it past what Mike taught or do you just kind of do what Mike taught?
[ROCKY]
So I do two things. Number one, the reason I partnered with Mike was I realized that this was my gift. I didn’t realize how many business owners didn’t understand the business of business. I just assumed they did. So that was kind of a shocking aha revelation to me. This is my natural gift. Like I’ve been doing these types of things my whole life. I was separating my money into different accounts, giving it purpose and so forth and I realized I could do this all myself, but then I would have to do the parts of the business that I didn’t enjoy, which was creating all the material. I just want to look at the numbers and help people. I don’t want to the marketing material, create the systems and do all of that.

So I partnered with Mike because he does kind of all of that and he essentially does a ton of the marketing that I don’t want to do so that, you know you saw that Profit First shirt had. If I had my own shirt you probably wouldn’t have come up to me, but because I had that shirt, it made sense to you. So he does the things he loves. I do the things I love. And what I do is I really dig down into the business owners’ numbers. I help them to make better and wiser decisions.

And we’ll start with everything from the beginning of how many leads do you need and what’s your conversion rate of leads to turn into clients? How many clients do you need? What’s the appropriate pricing for your clients? What’s the retention look like? How does that turn into dollars on the bottom line? What are all your expenses? Are you appropriately spending? Are you appropriately paying yourself? Where can we cut costs appropriately? Where can we increase spending appropriately? It might be marketing. It might be staff that you can better run your business. So I sit in the space of how helping you make better financial decisions so that you can go do the parts of your business that you love.
[JOE]
So do you typically work where you kind of come in and do an assessment and here’s the recommendations? Is it more like partnering with a bookkeeper or how’s your role fit into all the puzzle pieces of a typical practice?
[ROCKY]
So let’s just talk about it because I don’t think people realize all the different roles in accounting. And just because there are these different roles doesn’t mean somebody has to sit in one each full time. Generally the bookkeeper’s job is to take all your receipts, all your bank balances and get them into a software system. That’s what bookkeepers do. They might cut your checks for you. They’re doing all the process work. They’re not really doing any analysis work. As your business grows, many businesses will have what’s called the controller. The job of the controller is to look at these things and make sure that the cash flow is going appropriate, that there’s enough money in the bank to pay the bills and do all of that. Then you’ve got your CPA, but your CPA’s main job is taxes. Their job is generally not to help you to be more profitable.

So that’s a different role. My job is to help you be more profitable. So that’s kind of the seat I sit in. I look at not just the numbers. I look at the owner themselves, and then I look at the business and how do all of these come together in a way that’s appropriate? So for most of my clients, it’s a long-term we work together, because every month you’re going to have business issues. Every month we’re going to have cash flow issues. Every month we’re going to be evaluating sales. And what I do is I help them put out their goals for the year, we give them accountability of how to hit their goals, we deal with all the, the pivots that have to happen throughout the year. We deal with the roller coaster ride of cash flow and I work with them to do all of that.

Can they do this themselves? Yes, you can do this yourself. People can go buy the book, read the book and implement. What I have found and what Mike has found is people don’t implement. They love the book. They hear Mike talk. They don’t actually open the accounts and start doing it. So that’s a big part of what I do, is hold their hand to make sure that it gets done. And there’s a group in between. If you’re first just kind of starting out and you’re not too sure what’s going on, I do have a course for those people that takes it into more depth than the book and then of course also allows you to get your questions answered so that as you’re going through it, if you have a question about your specific situation, then you can ask it and get in the answer for your specific practice and how it works for you.
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[JOE]
So why don’t I go through kind of how I’ve set things up for myself and you can tell me where I’m wrong or where I can improve?
[ROCKY]
Okay.
[JOE]
So most of our finances come through PayPal because we have a lot of kind of subscriptions and things like that. We’re open to changing that to a different system if there’s one that can have the same features. We definitely need to have some sort of subscription model because of how many membership communities we have. So those sometimes are time limited subscriptions. They could be for six months and a monthly fee, or they could be just ongoing. So that money then kicks over to our main bank account. So we just call that the operations account and then from there each month or if there’s a particular situation, we have different accounts.

So one account is like our conference account, so when we’re putting on Killin’It Camp or Slow Down School. If there have been sponsors or ticket sales, that money goes into that account. Or for my book, for example, all of that money that Harper Collins gave me, I’m spending specifically on marketing. So I wanted to keep track of that outside of the operations account. Then we have our tax account where every month it’s taking, I think a little more than a third of the quarterly taxes out, just so we have more than enough for that. Going into the tax account, we have our payroll account and that’s where Gusto pulls for all of our payroll. Then we have our profit account, which then automatically kicks into there. So what am I doing right? What am I doing wrong? What would be my next steps if I was going to go next level from there?
[ROCKY]
So one question is do you have an account for your pay?
[JOE]
So my pay comes out of the payroll account. So that goes through Gusto. So I get paid separately from my pay through that payroll account.
[ROCKY]
But everyone else’s payroll is in there too?
[JOE]
Right. So, but we know what that is. And it’s pretty predictable, I’d say.
[ROCKY]
Correct. One of the reasons that we have an owner’s account and its percentage based is as your business grows, you automatically get pay raises.
[JOE]
Okay.
[ROCKY]
So that’s one of the reasons to have the owner’s pay account, is it allows you, let’s say right now you’re at $10,000 in revenue, you bump up to $15,000. And even if it’s only for one month, it takes the extra and puts it into your owner’s pay account so you do get compensated for that bump up. So that’s one thing. It sounds like you’re doing most of the other things very well. The other thing we talk about is how do your percentages compare to what’s in the book and are you making changes quarterly to tweak the numbers, to keep increasing your profit and pay while maintaining or watching your costs?
[JOE]
Okay. So kind of watching that more carefully?
[ROCKY]
It is. We you were just on my podcast and you were talking about how as businesses grow, they bloat. So it’s taking the time on a regular basis to go through your systems and say, hey, am I still paying for this software that we stopped using last year? I can’t tell you how many people do that. Or they sign up for a trial and they never cancel it and it’s still continuing on. Or you sit down and you do an audit and you go, hey, we have six different software systems. Three of them are duplicated. Why can’t we just start combining all of these and get rid of two or three of them and be more efficient? So a big part of it is on a quarterly basis and on a yearly basis is constantly reviewing everything and saying, am I appropriately spending my money or is it just disappearing and I don’t even know where it’s going.
[JOE]
Yes. I think the amount of times that, just recently I was going through our 2021 expenses and profits and kind of just looking at it line by line and there’s a lot of things in there that I’d forgot that we were paying for. I have a team that kind of oversees all of that. So there was none that was duplicates, but even just to look at that and be like, oh, I remember when we signed up for that. That’s for Pinterest. Or is that, even just thinking, is that giving us a good ROI on that amount of money to automate some of the things that is going into Pinterest or things that are going into some of our social media and to say, well, okay, we tried that for a couple years. Has that grown our Pinterest page and does that Pinterest page bring in customers for us?
[ROCKY]
That’s an appropriate thing because if Pinterest isn’t bringing in revenue for you, then it’s either, then the question is, do we need to change what we’re doing on Pinterest? Or do we just not need to go to Pinterest because my clients and the people that I work with just aren’t there? Then you eliminate not only the cost of it, but you eliminate the time that gets put into Pinterest.
[JOE]
Yes, all the design time and turning each podcast into some Pinterest image or things like that. I love this. So if people are top level, so they say they’re a group practice owner, they’ve got 10 or more W2 or 1099s that are working with them, they’re doing the clinical work., maybe they’ve got a handful of assistants also, when you’re at that level, or maybe you have 15 staff in some way, what are unique problems or things that should be on their radar if they’re kind of a mega group practice owner?
[ROCKY]
So one of the most important things is how are they getting paid and what is the delay? If they’re billing insurance, what is that delay between when you bill insurance and when you get paid and are you collecting appropriately? The other thing that comes in there is pricing. So who’s determining your prices, the insurance company, you? How is that all being billed out? And a lot of times what happens in businesses is they’re accepting X dollars for doing something and if you actually take the time to look at it, you might find out that it’s costing you money to serve that client. And in that case, you have to either renegotiate fees or walk away from that type of business, because it doesn’t make sense anymore. So it’s just having true clarity on, are we profitable and where is our profit coming from?

So there’s another book called, I think it’s called pools. It’s not called pools of profit, but it came out of a professor at MIT. What he basically said is that if you looked at a large corporation, 20 to 30% of what they do is highly profitable, 30 to 40% of what they do is losing money and the rest is break even, but nobody knows what’s what. So it’s taking time to figure out where are your pools of fit, where are your highest value clients, and then shifting your practice to serving them. You’re more on the one side, but I’ve heard stories of people who were in, it’s not a ophthalmology, but in that space where they’re doing the cataract surgeries and all of this, and they realized they were getting paid so little from Medicare, that it wasn’t worth serving. So they got rid of 80% of their patients. They got rid of 80% of their staff. With 20% they were still taking home the same amount of money because they realized that’s where all their profit it was. And every business is different, but you’ve got to take the time to dig in and figure it out for your particular business.
[JOE]
It’s so funny you use that as an example. My sister, her husband is an ophthalmologist. When they first moved back to town, he was looking at joining all these big ophthalmology clinics and all that and he was looking at to buy in as a partner, just how long he would be in debt to have this clinic that had all this equipment that he owned and could be outdated in a couple years. He decided he was going to have a small clinic where he had two staff that just helped run it and one that helps with kind of the setup with the eyes and eye drops and all that and the other one that helps with insurance. Then he just uses the local hospital and has to be on call and things like that. He’s completely in charge of his schedule. He doesn’t have this mega debt bill and it seems sort of thing you’re talking about where it’s just a highly specialized, well oiled machine that it can be the kind of business he wants, where he can go golfing on Thursdays if he wants.
[ROCKY]
That is the ultimate. That is the way you should design and build your company to be highly efficient. We have a saying, which is top line is vanity, bottom line is sanity and cash is king. And many business owners focus on the top line. Ooh, I did a million dollars in sales. I want to do 2 million. It’s like, wait a minute. If we actually looked at a business and said, well, I did a million dollars in sales and I had a 10% profit margin, well, that means you made a hundred thousand dollars. So most business owners will say, okay, I want to double it. I want to do $2 million so I can make $200,000. The problem with doubling it is you get those inefficiencies in bloat. So there’s no guarantee.

What I tell people is, look, if you’re making the million dollars, can we raise prices 10%? Maybe we can’t do it overnight, but maybe we can do it over time. You raise prices by 10%, you just doubled your bottom line from a $100,000 to $200,000 and it didn’t take you another minute of work. Then I say, hey, wait a minute., what if we could cut our costs by 10%, 11%? If you can cut your cost by 10 or 11%, you just picked up another a hundred thousand dollars, the same exact business. One of them’s making a hundred thousand, one of them’s making 300,000 just by focusing on the numbers and doing things appropriately. That’s me. You’ve got your book. It’s the same thing, like do less make more.
[JOE]
Oh man. Rocky, well, the last question that I always ask is if every private practitioner in the world were listening right now, what would you want them to know?
[ROCKY]
So I always tell everyone, let’s start with a baby step. Go open one bank account and take 1% of your revenue and put it in the bank account, just 1% every month. And after three months, look at what that $1 out of a hundred turned into and then double it. Take 2%. You’re not going to miss these small amounts and you’re going to start to build some significant profit and over a period of a few years, you’re going to get up to a profitable practice. And it’s amazing what happens. Once you start seeing it after two or three quarters, then go get the book and go full blown.
[JOE]
Such great advice. So Rocky, if people want to connect with you, if they want to work with you, what’s the best way for them to contact you?
[ROCKY]
So the website is profitcomesfirst.com. From there, you can schedule time with me. You can see about the course, or you can go over to the podcast, which is Profit Answer Man, where we dig much deeper into all of these topics. Essentially I teach how to do this so that if you want to implement yourself, you can learn everything you need to on the podcast.
[JOE]
Oh, Rocky, so awesome. Thank you so much for being on the Practice of the Practice podcast.
[ROCKY]
Thank you so much for having me, Joe.
[JOE]
Well, thank you so much for listening to the Practice of the Practice podcast today. Oh, I just love these practical interviews that we have that help you just clean up some of those areas that maybe has been on the back burner. Maybe you haven’t really created the systems and looking at this sort of approach can just be so helpful. If you’re ready to outsource things now is the time to do that. We’re getting towards the end of the year. It’s already November. It’s amazing to think about, okay, let’s really clean some things up.

If you want to clean up your SEO, Simplified SEO Consulting is our podcast sponsor today. So simplified SEO, Jessica, the owner, she was at Slow Down School, helping people just on the couch to rank higher in Google. And at the end of the week, there were so many people that said, Jessica, you’ve got to start a business to help people with SEO. She’s like, really? I run a counseling practice. Now Simplified SEO is her main gig. It’s amazing to see what she’s doing with it. And what’s great is that she is a therapist. She has a heart of a therapist. She owns a group practice. She gets it and she is a geek about SEO. So heading over to simplifiedseoconsulting.com/joe, and you can meet all about their done for you services. We use them to help rank higher for our SEO. They’re amazing. Again, that’s simplifiedseoconsulting.com/joe.

Thank you so much for letting me into your ears and into your brain. Have an amazing day. Will talk to you soon.

Special thanks to the band Silence is Sexy for your intro music. We really like it. This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. This is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.