Budgeting for your physical therapy business income goals seems complicated. However, as you understand its importance in order to achieve your target income, you will realize that budgeting can be fun. Nitin Chhoda explains how creating a budget for your practice can be simple and enjoyable.
Let’s say that you’ve already set a schedule with a skilled financial planner either for your personal goals or physical therapy marketing plan and other business concerns.
And you know exactly what your income needs to be this year, next year, and into the future until you retire, at the age you want to retire.
As the owner of a physical therapy practice who commonly uses physical therapy marketing, you should be able to estimate how much you’ll need to bring in to fund the practice as well as to pay you the income you are hoping to make.
And figuring out just what your clinical goals should be will make budgeting straightforward.
Budgeting Can be Fun
Everyone says they hate budgeting and they hate spreadsheets. They don’t like to look at reports and they feel that their accountant is probably laughing at them for being inept at the financial side of things.
Don’t be afraid of physical therapy marketing budgeting. It may sound funny, but if you give yourself the right incentives, budgeting can be fun.
The Success of Your Business is an Incentive
As the owner of a physical therapy practice with a good physical therapy marketing plan, your incentive is going to be the success of the business and the income goals you’ve set for yourself. How do you reach those goals if you aren’t willing to spend time budgeting? And what exactly does it mean to budget?
The simple break down is that building a budget is just looking at your current and future expenses, then figuring out how you’re going to pay those expenses. Where will your income come from? How many patients per day do you need to see for the practice to succeed?
What will your physical therapy marketing strategy be? Will physical therapy marketing actually bring in enough patients to justify the cost? It probably feels like there are an infinite number of questions like these and that finding the answers will be hard and will take a lot of time. It’s going to be easier than you think. And the time will be time well spent.
Eye on the Big Picture
Sometimes that initial budgeting session is a bit of an eye-opener. Maybe you realize that to pay yourself the target income you’ve set, you’ll have to see hundreds of patients per week.
Or maybe you’ll realize that each physical therapy marketing staff member is going to need to be paid more than you realized, if you want a really skilled staff doing an efficient and quality job every day.
As the owner, it’s your job to look at the practice from the bigger picture viewpoint. Will you have to adjust your income goals so that you aren’t making quite as much initially?
Short-Term to Long-Term Goals
Maybe the trade-off for a good physical therapy marketing campaign will be worthwhile. In the short-term, it may be more important to invest in physical therapy marketing or staff rather than yourself.
Because what you do in the short-term is going to have a big effect on the long-term. If you make those tough choices today, you may be able to make your long term income goals a reality.
