I’ve had thoughts of opening my own practice but current owners ingrained in us how hard and expensive it is to run a practice. As a solo doc, what’s your overhead like (percentage wise) for having 4 staff members?
First, to answer your question, things tend to end up around 50-60% overhead. Any higher and you'll start to look at ways to increase revenues and decrease costs. Any lower and you might have an attractive profit margin but you might have a very small scale business that could be more profitable if you invested a little more, or you're just doing too much yourself, like spending your evenings/weekends on the ledger.
You have to think along the margin, will this extra employee make the doctor more productive or not? In other words can you increase the practice income by working more because you have the personnel offloading tasks from you? What kind of fringe benefits do you give your employees? If you want to build a bigger team, that becomes more important.
Another question to figure out on your own is what do you do yourself vs what do you outsource? Obvious examples: payroll/bookkeeping, HR, cleaning crew. Are you going to hire a biller in your practice or contract with a company to do it for you? And lots and lots of other little things.
And there we have it, this is
the another truly stupid thing about podiatry. Managing a business is often tedious, many times interesting, sometimes exciting, occasionally overwhelming, but always challenging. The practice of podiatric medicine, at least the nonoperative podiatry that happens in clinic/office, is
so much easier than the business decision-making necessary to make it all possible. I often feel like, "As soon as I get through all this patient care, I can focus my efforts on some of these bigger projects," and then I have to remind myself, "oh yeah seeing patients is supposed to be what I'm in the business of doing." Yet what do we spend 7 years learning vs what do we learn as we go?
