Who is your “one more than you need” employee? Wait, you don’t have one? Most businesses are lifelong members of that club. Not sure if you need one or if it’s worth the extra money? We’ll tell you this – if you don’t like lighting money on fire, or headaches, read on to review 3 reasons why our consulting team believes it’s time to staff up (and reach us directly for advice from a YT Consultant on who to hire and when).
Because illness, babies, and life events are inevitable.
Whether it’s covid, the flu, or even just the common cold, we all know people get sick. A year ago over just a few months during a massive growth year, we had 4 people contract covid, 2 people out for over three months on maternity leave, and a family emergency requiring a VP to be out of town on and off for a month.
These situations are unavoidable and predictably unpredictable. That means we never know when situations and challenges will occur, but we can be sure they are coming. Having extra help may be the difference between your business staying seamlessly afloat or feeling like it’s falling apart, if and when it happens.
Because you like money.
Here’s one email from one of our long-term consulting clients in reply to our President’s voice note sent on the topic of having at least one extra floating staff member at all times:
“Just wanted to let you know the YT mantra ‘one more than you need’ saved us $67,000 this week. We added an RN a couple of months ago to do preops and help out in the OR. The other two nurses were both out this entire week with COVID. If it wasn’t for having ‘one more than we need’ this week’s OR cases would have been lost or would have had to be rescheduled…”
We’ll leave that right there.
Because the workplace landscape is changing drastically.
Unless you employ frontline workers that report to a hospital, there’s a good chance your employees workday, workplace, and work mindset drastically shifted during the early stages of the pandemic. Especially for the aesthetic industry, virtual consultations and the increased dependence on technology has forever changed how our business is conducted. The same changes that were made as a simple means-to-survive have drastically changed how industry workers see their roles and values in the workplace.
In the same way you, as a provider, have to learn to embrace this new technology-forward world, so have they. Some employees will prefer this “new normal” so much that they may seek it out permanently. For instance, your front desk associates may prefer jobs where they can answer practice calls and questions in PJs from their couch instead of a lobby desk.
If your practice is not able to offer a hybrid work model, don’t be surprised if current employees leave in search of a more adaptable role. Yes, the right fits exist for in-office or operating-room roles, but the shifts and restructuring process may take a year or two to work through and turnover may increase during this transition. Having one more employee than you need is helpful in anticipating turnover in favor of the “grass is greener” situation that is, unfortunately, common in the aesthetics industry.
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Because there is work to be done.
Do your employees constantly come to you asking for more work, unsure of what to do as they are so bored, and ready to seek new work due to how over-staffed your business is? That doesn’t happen here either! It’s never happened anywhere, we’d guess. There is always more work to be done and owners are infamous for overworking their staff or at least having dozens of projects sitting on the proverbial backburner.
Make a list of everything you’d like to complete and soon you’ll see that there is much to be done and that “extra” person may not be extra after all. Here’s a few things we find most medical practices and med spas have on their lists:
- Organizing, cropping, and adding photos to the website or sending them to the web team to add to online galleries.
- Getting email marketing pieces out by email or snail mail every month.
- Contacting the 1,000-20,000+ patients who never proceeded with surgery 5-10 times to invite them back in.
- Contacting hundreds of patients who are due for botox, fillers, facials, lasers, or body contouring to remind them they are behind on treatments or need to use their loyalty points.
- Performing an annual “spring cleaning” to declutter, perform product inventory and more.
- Research lower-priced medical supplies and credit card processing fees (pro-tip: email us at info@yellowtelescope.com and we’ll connect you to teams that have a high % chance of saving you money).
- Carve out time from the manager’s schedule currently being used on paperwork and other delegatable projects to free the manager up for a weekly or monthly management 1-on-1 to check in with staff.
- Reach out to local businesses (wedding boutiques, yoga studios, etc.) to form corporate partnerships.
- Create quarterly and annual events generating 10s or 100s of thousands of dollars in fresh revenue.
- And much more…
Of course, having one more employee than you need won’t solve every challenge, but it’s one way to stay ahead of staffing woes and maintain smooth sailing on your path to profitability. If you opened your practice or med spa a week ago, it’s not time to overspend on staff. For the majority of readers who are a part of, or own, a medium to large established business, however, the benefits far outweigh the additional salary. Should you hire now? And for what positions? If you’re looking for more detailed insight into how to optimize your practice and staff up properly, we can help. Reach out here, e-mail info@yellowtelescope.com or call (305) 455-0720 to discuss your practice growth with a YT consultant.
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