# **CBF Session – March 3**
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Huh, okay, well, there we go.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Now it's going. So in the… so what we started with was really just that,
**Jennie Eckstrom: **That generic,
**Jennie Eckstrom: **service line profit and loss place is just a place to get at, and so everyone is sort of working their way to that in various ways. So again, Florence is using one of her PAs that she noticed had had decreased
**Jennie Eckstrom: **days worked, and sort of using that and taking a bigger scope. Vanika is opening cans of worms and tracking where revenue is being tracked with CPT, so…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **This is really designed as a place to sort of meet folks where they're at in the business, but to really give us a common language to use as we're evaluating things. And also understanding that in the midst of this, we're all still practicing full-time.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **and running clinics, and, you know, addressing things. So,
**Jennie Eckstrom: **But it's really, again, a place that's really designed to be support and really sharing those
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Common questions, you know, that have come up, and really stepping from that place of just having our big line revenue, and really understanding, like, how that filters through a company's
**Jennie Eckstrom: **So that, whether we're looking at a specific provider or a service line, that we can actually make decisions from a data-driven place and not
**Jennie Eckstrom: **a gestalt place.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **So… Anything that you, Vinika, Florence, would add from what you've sort of gleaned from The last couple weeks.
**Florence Shum: **Yeah, I think it's, oh.
**Florence Shum: **I think it's been helpful to really just putting things down.
**Florence Shum: **It's because I'm actually also… trying to set up, like, a bonus structure for productivity for my PA,
**Florence Shum: **So, that's why it was really important for me to have the facts for her, to know where she's… she's the great example for moving forward, like, where we set the standard, because being a senior PA, her standard is different than, like, the junior PA.
**Florence Shum: **So,
**Florence Shum: **I think it was helpful. So then I know, like, what is her baseline, what is her capability, and then how to, like, try to incentivize, like, for productivity.
**Vineka: **I'm starting to befriend the numbers.
**Vineka: **And it's actually good, it's a…
**Vineka: **It's a healthy relationship right now, I would say.
**Vineka: **We were enemies, starch enemies before.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Befriending the numbers.
**Vineka: **It's very eye-opening, what can I say?
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Natasha, would you do me a favor? And I'm not sure how much Florence and Vinika know about your practice and the structure
**Jennie Eckstrom: **And what… You have, you know, created and now assumed
**Jennie Eckstrom: **full responsibility of. Do you mind just…
**Natasha Beauvais: **Sure, sharing a bit of you.
**Natasha Beauvais: **Sure, sure. I'm waiting for my son to finish at the gym, so I'm gonna walk to another place, but that's where I.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **True.
**Natasha Beauvais: **Where we came together.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **I love it.
**Natasha Beauvais: **Yeah, so I, I own a concierge medicine practice in DC and Virginia.
**Natasha Beauvais: **And, I hope this won't be too noisy, but we have 9 providers.
**Natasha Beauvais: **And… Not including me, because I do see patients, but only one day a week, so I don't…
**Natasha Beauvais: **Think of myself, really, as a… active… Breadwinner, and… We…
**Natasha Beauvais: **have been around for a long time. I bought half of my practice from my…
**Natasha Beauvais: **Partner, my previous boss, about 15 years ago, and then…
**Natasha Beauvais: **I bought the second half of my practice from my…
**Natasha Beauvais: **partner, who's 20 years older than I am, about…
**Natasha Beauvais: **5 years ago, and I'm still buying him out.
**Natasha Beauvais: **That's still underway.
**Natasha Beauvais: **And… My goal is to get us to the point where we could become an ESOP, which is a employee-owned company.
**Natasha Beauvais: **And we've been through lots of, Learning about messing up, and… learning…
**Natasha Beauvais: **That our predictions are not quite right, and… Okay, bye-bye!
**Natasha Beauvais: **Predictions are not right sometimes, and our…
**Natasha Beauvais: **We were not making any money for a while, so we had to double our prices. So we're… just started that about
**Natasha Beauvais: **5 months ago. It's going pretty well, but it was a…
**Natasha Beauvais: **it actually, I think, kind of caused a… not, I think, I know, it caused a pretty big rift in our culture, which had been really lovely and tight up until then, and…
**Natasha Beauvais: **now, we have two people who are… pretty…
**Natasha Beauvais: **Disgruntled and not feeling like that, you know, they couldn't be a part of that decision to change the prices, and they don't feel comfortable about it.
**Natasha Beauvais: **And the other 7 feel pretty fine about it, and so I'm navigating, like, two people who are…
**Natasha Beauvais: **Good people that are not feeling satisfied and
**Natasha Beauvais: **Seven other people who are feeling…
**Natasha Beauvais: **great, and we're trying to find a solve, which is largely for those two people to feel like they're included, which I think is a good thing, like, we want people to feel included, but it's interesting that we have the other seven people who are already feeling included, and so…
**Natasha Beauvais: **Some of them are not really sure what are we solving for.
**Natasha Beauvais: **So that's me.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **I don't know if I had realized that, that… it totally makes sense, because of what you're… what you're doing. I don't… I didn't realize that you were that much,
**Jennie Eckstrom: **executive leadership, so…
**Natasha Beauvais: **Yeah, exactly.
**Natasha Beauvais: **a long time.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Meow.
**Natasha Beauvais: **Yeah, it's been… it took about 4 years to really slowly ramp my patients off to other doctors. I mean, if I had just left, I could have just said, sorry, leaving, and everyone would have gone, but we did it very gradually. One doctor came in, and I gave her 60 patients, another doctor came in, another bunch of patients, and so…
**Natasha Beauvais: **That's reduced my clinical load a lot.
**Natasha Beauvais: **How about you guys? What are you? You're running your practice… are you working clinically full-time in it also?
**Florence Shum: **Yep, unfortunately, for now, for…
**Florence Shum: **For, yeah, a long time. I, I mean, I'm by myself. I'm trying to hire, like, more doctors as well, so,
**Florence Shum: **I think it's… I'm trying to work with a recruiting person.
**Florence Shum: **I spoke with one.
**Florence Shum: **like, a few weeks ago. No, actually, a few months ago, and I felt like the price was a little high.
**Florence Shum: **That they charge, and then… I…
**Florence Shum: **just the… just from the conversation, I just felt like, hmm, maybe there's other options, so I kind of held on to it a little bit, and then recently, I got an email from another recruiting firm that I've actually been getting emails from periodically.
**Florence Shum: **So, it just came through, and then I was like, oh! It was, like, actually asking, like, if you're at, you know, if you want to…
**Florence Shum: **looking to hire PAs, like, mid-level physicians, blah blah blah, and then, like, reach out, or something along those lines. So I reached out to her, and I was like, oh, she immediately, like, we clicked a little bit more because she knows the program where I prac- where I was trained.
**Florence Shum: **And she says she was successfully able to, place, physicians for that department.
**Florence Shum: **So she's familiar with, New York.
**Florence Shum: **Which is helpful, like, and she was pretty honest about… the market in New York.
**Florence Shum: **So, so I think I'm gonna…
**Florence Shum: **you know, I need help to recruit, so…
**Natasha Beauvais: **What do you do, and where do you live?
**Florence Shum: **I live in, Brooklyn, New York, so metropolitan, New York City.
**Florence Shum: **And previously, last year, I used, this company called Practice Match, where…
**Florence Shum: **They also have data, like, you know, the US and whatnot.
**Florence Shum: **With the geofencing, whatever, whatever that they have, that they're able to sometimes… they're not a recruiting firm, but they also have data where they can connect, basically, physicians that way.
**Florence Shum: **And I wasn't getting, like, too many feedbacks, because a lot of people supposedly was, you know, the feedback I got was, like, the pay's too low, it's, they don't want to be in New York.
**Florence Shum: **So it's kind of discouraging.
**Florence Shum: **And I tried Indeed for a little bit.
**Florence Shum: **And that was also pricey, and even when I was paying for it, like, I didn't see any candidates, even really, like, people posting to look for jobs.
**Florence Shum: **So… That's why I feel like I might have to use the recruiter route.
**Natasha Beauvais: **And…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **You're internal.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **she's neural.
**Florence Shum: **I'm a neurologist.
**Natasha Beauvais: **Oh, neurology, okay.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **And you have your two PAs right now, right?
**Florence Shum: **Yes, so my first PA, my senior PA, she used to work with me for my previous practice.
**Florence Shum: **So that was convenient. Like, she… when I was leaving the practice, she already told me, she's like, take me with you!
**Florence Shum: **Because she wasn't very happy there to begin with, so, so she already kind of…
**Florence Shum: **you know, told me about her interests, so then when I was ready, I hired her part-time first, so she can kind of test the water, for both of us to test the water, and then after a few months, like, I was ready to hire her full-time, and she was ready to leave full-time too, so…
**Florence Shum: **So it was perfect. And then the junior PA was her friend from PA school.
**Florence Shum: **Worked out perfect.
**Florence Shum: **So I got very lucky that route, yeah.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **And then, Vinika, just in case Natasha doesn't know about your practice structure, do you want to just…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Give a belief, brief, and true.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Oof, you're muted.
**Vineka: **I was gonna say, it's a mess. I'm the UNI provider, two locations,
**Vineka: **Growth potential, but limitations due to divorce.
**Vineka: **So, it's trying to kind of navigate
**Vineka: **With everything going on, I guess.
**Vineka: **Because the answer to a lot of my problems is hire a different provider, but I'm limited right now.
**Vineka: **From that perspective.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **How long are you limited? Like, at some point, doesn't it say, like, you have…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Like, does the development of your business get, like, Hogtied for however long.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **The…
**Vineka: **waiting for the valuation, but it still hasn't happened. So, I was going to email my attorneys and say, like, we need to put a deadline, and then if it's not… he wants the valuation, so if he doesn't get it done, then I shouldn't be trapped, like.
**Vineka: **then I, you know, this is the deadline. If you can meet it, great, go ahead and do your valuation. If not, sorry, there's no valuation to be done, because everything is dragging.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Well, or you set a value based upon a date, right? When we do, like, a buy-in and buyout in our organization, or say, you know, like, I'm gonna get bought out of… out of the real estate holding, we set that this is the value as of this date, so that you're not…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **You're not limited in being able to still run your business and know what your business needs.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Right.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **And I don't…
**Vineka: **Maybe that date already passed.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **What's that?
**Natasha Beauvais: **Maybe the date already passed, like, if… are you already divorced?
**Vineka: **No.
**Vineka: **That would be great.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **But…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **and maybe there is a date that you guys can agree upon, because again, in the meantime, I mean, I've watched you now for…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **I think it's been a year, right? Has it almost been a year now?
**Vineka: **Yeah.
**Vineka: **since I failed, and…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **you filed.
**Vineka: **So… yeah, I was just,
**Vineka: **I didn't, like, my lawyer didn't bring that up. I had a discussion with somebody else last week that was like, you know, what's going on? This, like.
**Vineka: **this… if it… If it doesn't happen, then… because we could go on for 10 years.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Right.
**Vineka: **the valuation, because I'm waiting for the valuation to be done, then I can… then we can divorce, and then I can hire, because right now, it will…
**Vineka: **the hiring will increase the value of the practice, that's the whole point. But technically, yes, I can hire, there's nothing that stops me, but economically, it's not good. But…
**Vineka: **you know, the… I don't know if the court will say, like, well, we're just gonna give him his time. I don't think so, though, because it also keeps the court… it delays the court as well, because we could be done, and then it would be off the docket.
**Vineka: **But right now, it's, like, no one… it's… it's serving no one except for him, and,
**Vineka: **In the meantime, like, coverage is an issue.
**Vineka: **like, I was, you know, like, doing… calculating the overhead, but then…
**Vineka: **like, if I have the rooms, I just…
**Vineka: **And I have the demand, so the answer to that is provider.
**Vineka: **And the provider will give me much more, like, a better return on the investment than leasing out the space, which is extra trouble, but that's something that could help the overhead a little bit, but down the line, that's not the good of the business.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Right, absolutely.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **So the question really becomes whether, through mediation, you can agree upon evaluation date. Is it December 31st of 2025, which is already passed?
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Right? Is it March 1st? But you need to set a date so that you can.
**Vineka: **Yes.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **move forward. Otherwise, you can…
**Vineka: **haven't had a hired evaluator, the court, that was supposed to be in January, where they said, you know, like, okay, we're agreeing to a valuation.
**Vineka: **That was January, so what are we waiting for?
**Vineka: **It's March. Come on.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Right.
**Vineka: **I mean, for me, it was helping me, because I was, like, it gave me time for the books, but now that this is done, it's like…
**Vineka: **How long… oh, we're gonna wait?
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Yeah.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Crazy power play.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **But…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **as you're… as you're in this space, I mean, even that whole thing of realizing that… that really you have enough
**Jennie Eckstrom: **capacity in terms of your… your patients needing treatment, that the answer is a provider, I mean, that's still…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **You know, the fact that you can, at this point, be making those strategic decisions, and at least knowing, that that is the answer, and then working through the, what does that look like?
**Jennie Eckstrom: **What kind of…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Volume do they need to see, and what does that structure look like so that, you know, you do have a ramp-up period and a ramp-up plan?
**Vineka: **By then, Florence would have figured it all out, and then I'll just call her, like, where did… like, where did you go?
**Florence Shum: **No, I wish. Still very… lots to learn.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **But that's hopefully the goal as you're starting to look through these things, that then you do have those… the numbers and sort of the strategy to… to really be able to… to say what… what kind of volumes do we need to see, and… and how do we have that ramp up?
**Jennie Eckstrom: **But I agree, like, pushing that…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **To at least have an agreed-upon date, because the evaluator's going to need to have an agreed-upon date as well.
**Vineka: **Yeah.
**Vineka: **So then, it's hiring the evaluator, then the evaluator is not going to be available right away. Then he will give time. Right now, I don't think evaluator has even been hired.
**Vineka: **So we need to get a date for that, at least.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **But you still have an agreed-upon date where they set the valuation, and usually that's going to.
**Vineka: **That was January.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Okay, but agreed upon date, not a date that it's going to be done, but an end date, like, the value of the company as of this date.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Right? And it's always going to be a date in the past, it's not going to be a date in the future.
**Vineka: **Right. Yeah, we need to acknowledge that, I didn't think of that.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Yeah, so if you can establish that date.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **then you can still move forward doing what you need to do, because you've already said, we have agreed upon this date. Because you could also argue in court that by not setting a date, you're actually suffering damage, you know, the… experiencing damages? I don't know the court words for it.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Because you aren't able to make decisions that are in the best interest of your company.
**Vineka: **Right.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **That's probably the argument that I would… that I would.
**Florence Shum: **It isn't, like, setting, like, evaluating, it's basically, let's just say, arbitrarily, like, you know, it's December 2025. So, all they will look at is basically all the revenue that you generated up until…
**Florence Shum: **like, December 2025, and then, like.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Yeah.
**Vineka: **But we don't know the date that the valuator will decide.
**Florence Shum: **Right, I mean.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Why does the evaluator get to decide, is the answer, the question I would ask. Why is that within their purview? You guys should be able to choose a date, and then say to the evaluator, here's the books, and this is the… this is the date that you need to establish that, versus…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Having that question be addressed.
**Vineka: **Yeah.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **You can do a retrospective look and set a value of a company.
**Florence Shum: **Yeah, based on, like, revenue, based on your asset at that time, like.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **They're good.
**Florence Shum: **open, right? Like, all the.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **We're just…
**Florence Shum: **that you use.
**Florence Shum: **And just another question, it's…
**Florence Shum: **Like, even if you hire somebody, does it automatically increase your value of your practice? Because there's a lot of expenses.
**Florence Shum: **Right? You're carrying that person, so is it more of your advantage, actually, to include that when you hire that person to decrease, kind of decrease the value of the practice?
**Florence Shum: **Because of…
**Vineka: **The case… there's a… the case in Utah that has one is a sole practitioner.
**Florence Shum: **Eve.
**Vineka: **the business.
**Vineka: **So there is no dividing.
**Vineka: **That's… that's the main argument that she's using.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **For the valuation of yours in a… In the court of law.
**Vineka: **So if I… if I take… if I… if I go, there's no practice?
**Vineka: **Hence, that's called, like, goodwill, and that will be the maximum percentage, let's say even 80%.
**Vineka: **then I only have to divide, let's say, 10-20%, as opposed to me having a provider. That means it's just divide in two, because it's a marital asset, so then he gets 50% right off the bat, if I had a different provider, because then that case doesn't apply.
**Vineka: **And technically, it could even be like, well, yeah, she's gone, there's no business, and he might not be able to get anything, actually, but my… our suspicion is that
**Vineka: **the… the majority would be goodwill, and then… which cannot be divided, and the rest will be just the major assets of the company, as opposed to the revenue of the company. So, kind of like the valuation is actually useless, but he's trying to… to kind of prove that this is… wow, this is a…
**Vineka: **Such a great, you know, profit generator.
**Florence Shum: **I remember when…
**Vineka: **you can't prove that. He can't prove that. The numbers don't reflect that.
**Florence Shum: **Got it.
**Vineka: **And I don't have a lot of assets, I don't have a… I have my two TMS machines and, you know, computers, but I don't have a lot of equipment, really, that… the assets that get divided.
**Vineka: **Right, so that's why it's worth waiting, kind of, to be the sole provider for now.
**Vineka: **But technically, I wonder if the judge would say, like, he's not… that's not stopping anything, go ahead and hire. That's my fear as well, but maybe it's not. Well, these are good questions to ask the attorney.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Yeah.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Because in any other aspect of business, and again, I don't… I can't really speak to the divorce piece, but bringing somebody on, or as a partner, or letting them go as a partnership, and you know, and Natasha can speak to this too, is she…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **started the plan of buying out her other partner, the moment that she started that buyout, that person
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Cease to be an owner in the company unless she had some other
**Jennie Eckstrom: **provision. How did you structure that, Natasha, on both those buyouts? Were they… did they have any sort of shareholder status? Or when she started that buyout, now you took over
**Jennie Eckstrom: **I mean, you can structure…
**Natasha Beauvais: **however you want, but we just structured it so that the entire
**Natasha Beauvais: **Transfer of ownership happened all at once, and the pay-up payment happened over time.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Yeah. And that's what we do as well, and so… so that's what's going to happen in a normal company that, you know, that… where you… and you're not bringing on a partner, but… but where you're still going to make decisions for the good of…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **of the company, so I would, you know, I would argue in that space that
**Jennie Eckstrom: **The… delaying this now at a year plus is really preventing you from making… making the decisions that are for the good of your company.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **And the employees that, you know, that are there as well, right?
**Jennie Eckstrom: **So…
**Vineka: **Right.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Because this could, ultimately, could starve you, right? I mean, it could starve and destroy your business.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **That may be the intent, I don't know.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Or maybe the intent to make you so desperate that you just buy them out, or you pay them however much to make them go away.
**Vineka: **Right.
**Natasha Beauvais: **Yeah, I think… right, you should be able to force the date to happen. Do you have a good AI resource for legal… asking your legal questions?
**Vineka: **No, I just asked chat. Does… do you know of one?
**Natasha Beauvais: **Claude? Yeah, Claude Cowork just came out with a really nice legal, like, thinking…
**Natasha Beauvais: **If you download Claude, and then you get the… Claude has now a co-work option.
**Natasha Beauvais: **so you don't have to do anything fancy, it's just, you, like, get the $20 a month Claude, and then right at the top it says you're either in chat, which is, like, chat with Claude, or you're in co-work.
**Natasha Beauvais: **Or you're in code.
**Natasha Beauvais: **And when you're in co-work, there's a whole set of,
**Natasha Beauvais: **of awesome things that Cowork does, and one of them is it's a legal thing. I'll send.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **do a screen.
**Natasha Beauvais: **screenshot of what it has in it, if I can figure that out. But basically, it's a… it's not a lawyer, but you could ask all these questions, and you could be like, I'm trying to get divorced, here's my situation.
**Natasha Beauvais: **I'm, you know, 40 years old, I own a medical practice, I asked for a divorce 12 months ago, the divorce hasn't taken place yet.
**Natasha Beauvais: **I own the medical practice, and here… here it is. And you could even put your numbers in to co-work, if you have, like, spreadsheets for your practice, and you could
**Natasha Beauvais: **play around with valuation, but it doesn't sound like that really matters. Like, really, really what matters is that you get the… get the legal… you… you can drive the legal ship.
**Natasha Beauvais: **So that you're setting the agenda.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **No.
**Vineka: **Right.
**Vineka: **Oh, that's awesome.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Yeah. I have used chat similarly to that, specifically in my… in my buyout when I dropped in, like, the partnership agreement of what does this process look like.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **how… what should I expect? What's the timeline? You know, those sorts of things, but it sounds… I know Claude has really emerged and is continuing to emerge as a… a much more savvy…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **And sophisticated AI tool, so it's interesting to hear that you're… you're using that, Natasha.
**Natasha Beauvais: **Yeah, and since… I mean, I haven't used the legal thing much, its co-work just came out, but, it's only $20 a month. Like, if you get anything… if you even improve the structure of your thinking so that you know what to talk to your lawyer about.
**Natasha Beauvais: **That would be amazing, because you'll save a lot of time, like, asking the lawyer, like, basic questions.
**Vineka: **Yeah, much better than $400 an hour.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Yes, 100%.
**Vineka: **Thank you for that.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Natasha, I'm… I… are you at a place where you can chat?
**Natasha Beauvais: **Yeah, yep, I'm home.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **You're home now? Are you home?
**Natasha Beauvais: **treasure house? Yes. I'm… I'm interested in…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **You know, just the… the culture that has been created in your company as you… have…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Change the financial structure and change the membership fees
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Like, what does that process look like, such that you now have, sort of, that 7-2… Split.
**Natasha Beauvais: **Well, it was already a company where people have to pay to come here, so…
**Natasha Beauvais: **That was something people were already used to.
**Natasha Beauvais: **And… Essentially, we…
**Natasha Beauvais: **two things happened. One, we should have been increasing our prices more annually, but we were very, very conservative on increasing our prices.
**Natasha Beauvais: **And then I wanted to get ready to grow, so I was hiring people to do services that were more than what we used to need, so our cost… like, our… our overhead went up.
**Natasha Beauvais: **Because I hired financial advice, and I hired a marketer, and…
**Natasha Beauvais: **I have managers, more than one manager, and I'm not seeing many patients anymore, so my ability… you know, I'm not bringing revenue in to the extent… I dropped my salary way down as well, but I can't drop it to nothing, because I have to show the bank that I can pay them back.
**Natasha Beauvais: **And so, basically, when we grew.
**Natasha Beauvais: **Because, largely, the cost basis went up.
**Natasha Beauvais: **We had to increase our prices.
**Natasha Beauvais: **And the other thing that's happening is I'm buying out my partner, and he's… his salary has gone up while that buyout is happening, because that's just where we put the buyout. And so, that is an expense in the business as well, whereas it didn't…
**Natasha Beauvais: **It didn't come off the balance sheet, it came off of his… out of his salary.
**Natasha Beauvais: **So,
**Natasha Beauvais: **basically, we needed more money. We did a big assessment of it, and I have a really good…
**Natasha Beauvais: **fractional CFO who helped us figure out, and then we went to a bunch of meetings and talked to a bunch of other practices where they had had to increase their prices.
**Natasha Beauvais: **And we got some external confidence about it, and we… Decided to do that.
**Natasha Beauvais: **so that's the basic part. Are you asking about the cultural rift?
**Natasha Beauvais: **Well, so I think that that's the thing. So you're… you're making all of those decisions, from the aspect of the CEO of your business, right? How do you message that to…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Your… your providers such that they feel like they.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Or lack thereof.
**Natasha Beauvais: **Yeah.
**Natasha Beauvais: **I mean, I did… I would not say I did a very artful job of it. I, you know, we explained what was going on, we, like, talked about, here we have this much debt.
**Natasha Beauvais: **You know, we have this very slow path that we're paying it off, but we need to accelerate the pace of paying it off.
**Natasha Beauvais: **And when we told people we needed to double their prices, people were shocked, like, Completely, like… dumbfounded.
**Natasha Beauvais: **Because we hadn't done all the research together with all the…
**Natasha Beauvais: **staff, like, I did it with the administrative people and not with the other doctors, and…
**Natasha Beauvais: **the other doctors didn't have a fiduciary responsibility to the… to the practice, right? They are W-2 employees, and…
**Natasha Beauvais: **We had been borrowing money for several years to pay everybody.
**Natasha Beauvais: **well. We pay everybody pretty well. And, so they didn't ever really feel the pain of what we were kind of developing to see over time. And so, you know, every year we would have to borrow
**Natasha Beauvais: **I mean, easily half a million dollars for a while, to pay… just to pay salaries, and eventually we'd pay that back, and the next year we would do the same thing and pay it back. And,
**Natasha Beauvais: **So… because no one was feeling the pain of that, and…
**Natasha Beauvais: **We, you know, everyone is employees, we hadn't really shared it with anybody.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **And I think…
**Natasha Beauvais: **we, you know, whatever we did when we communicated it did not land well. And then we engaged in about 8 weeks of conversation about it to say, like, okay, we've got to back up and explain our whole situation, explain our debt, explain our…
**Natasha Beauvais: **Cost basis, like… but there's a private… you know, the part about the partner buyout is not public to people, so we didn't talk about that.
**Natasha Beauvais: **And so, there was one person in particular who it really made mad.
**Natasha Beauvais: **And I think…
**Natasha Beauvais: **that's the biggest cultural thing that happened, is that that particular doctor really wants to buy in to the practice, and I was advised
**Natasha Beauvais: **it's not a really good time for somebody to buy in, because you have so much debt, like, pay off your debt first, and then figure out the buy-ins, and 3 different people that know more about it than I did recommended that.
**Natasha Beauvais: **And this person, in his defense, had come into our practice 6 years ago. He was planning… he had come from a prior ownership situation, he was looking to become an owner, and he had
**Natasha Beauvais: **Wants to buy in.
**Natasha Beauvais: **I don't want to do it in a little one-off thing where only one person is allowed, and like…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Oops.
**Natasha Beauvais: **he barks the loudest, and so he gets it. Like, I wanted to have a fair process where we would be able to explain what that was like for everybody.
**Natasha Beauvais: **Create a roadmap for it. And honestly, we haven't done it because we don't want to spend the money working up the legal structure for it.
**Natasha Beauvais: **But that particular person, since he is the most knowledgeable about how
**Natasha Beauvais: **practice ownership works, feels really, I think, left out of the authority.
**Natasha Beauvais: **Structure, he wants to be a decision maker, he wants to be in the know. You know, he's kind of…
**Natasha Beauvais: **he goes over the numbers in his head, and they don't make sense to him, and he thinks we're mismanaging things, or he suspects that, even though we have a CFO who's a great communicator, and he, I think, has helped everyone else feel comfortable.
**Natasha Beauvais: **This person really feels I think really what's happening is that he is actually…
**Natasha Beauvais: **Quite distressed that he's not able to buy in and not see what's going on, and… therefore, he's…
**Natasha Beauvais: **Like, his reticular activating system is, like, on the lookout for things that are going wrong.
**Natasha Beauvais: **And, he's pretty mad. He's very mad at me. He's mad at…
**Natasha Beauvais: **Like, he's mad at a series of decisions, he doesn't feel trusting of our administration, where the trust ranks, if you ranked everyone else's on trust, would be quite high, so…
**Natasha Beauvais: **that's how I rolled it out. Poorly or mediocrely, that's what we did. And, you know, I would say the 7 other people are feeling…
**Natasha Beauvais: **Okay, 6 people are feeling certainly okay, and maybe one of the other ones,
**Natasha Beauvais: **It's still kind of settling into it, but he's… he'll get there, but it's a really hard thing to change your prices for people that have been your patients for two decades with a different price structure.
**Natasha Beauvais: **But it is going well, like, technically. It's not going well…
**Natasha Beauvais: **For those two people, culturally, and then…
**Natasha Beauvais: **culturally, if they're unhappy, everybody else starts to wonder, like, should I also be unhappy? Like, these guys are really unhappy, like…
**Natasha Beauvais: **So what do I do? What… you know, so I think it's a… it's a potential souring of the culture for everybody, because…
**Natasha Beauvais: **two people aren't happy. And I'm… I don't feel good about it at all.
**Natasha Beauvais: **So, I don't…
**Natasha Beauvais: **feel like I need to create something to suddenly acquiesce to what this particular person wants, because I think he's getting…
**Natasha Beauvais: **The way in which he's getting upset is… Eye-opening, but,
**Natasha Beauvais: **But I don't feel good about it. Like, I don't feel like…
**Natasha Beauvais: **I mean, I do feel good about the overall direction of the company, but this cultural thing is…
**Natasha Beauvais: **Happening right now, so… it's weighing on me.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Yeah.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **One of the things, though, is that you can actually, from this, see how this person would act as a partner.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Right.
**Natasha Beauvais: **Ens.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Right? And so, if anything, that may be the hidden blessing of… I mean…
**Natasha Beauvais: **Yes. You are real.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **That you are getting to see character, good or bad.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **But that is… is probably the blessing of this.
**Florence Shum: **So please, sounds like…
**Florence Shum: **Yeah, I just want to share my previous practice. I worked for, like, 10 years. It was multi-specialty, and there were partners, and then there were a couple of, like, employees. So, even as partners, we didn't all
**Florence Shum: **like, always, especially in different, fields, like, it was, like, orthopedic, neurosurgeons, pain management, neurology, it's, like, all very different.
**Florence Shum: **division, especially ortho and, like, you know, the neuroscience side. So, even among the partners.
**Florence Shum: **maybe we had 12, 13 of us that were partners. We weren't even on the notes, even though we're… there was a CEO that, you know, that managed the whole company.
**Florence Shum: **It was not… not even transparent, even as partners. So, let alone when I was an employee, like, I did not expect
**Florence Shum: **The administration making decisions, you have to
**Florence Shum: **Consult me and ask me, oh, how do you feel about… this.
**Florence Shum: **You know, they just did it, and then…
**Florence Shum: **after they make that decision, then they tell you, okay, this is what we're gonna do from here on. We're gonna change your structure this way, or something like that. So, I think the fact that you already… you're actually asking, or informing them.
**Florence Shum: **this process.
**Florence Shum: **I think it's already…
**Natasha Beauvais: **Better than what I got from my previous life.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Yeah. Hmm.
**Natasha Beauvais: **Were you… which group were you in, Florence? Were you in the owning group or the employee group?
**Florence Shum: **So, I was both, because I was in the… I was…
**Florence Shum: **employee for, like, two… so basically, at that point, it was an owner, it was a private practice with, or, like, a physician-owned practice with a high administrator.
**Florence Shum: **And when I was hired, I was told that after 2 years, they will assess if they would want to make me into partnership. And then there's a buy-in, but the buy-in is very little, because they don't really hold, like, assets.
**Natasha Beauvais: **So to speak, right? And…
**Florence Shum: **So then after 2 years, they offered me the position, but because of during that 2-year period, I was, like, feeling a little uncertain about the practice, so I hesitated. I wasn't like, oh, yes, I want to be partnered right away.
**Florence Shum: **I've been about, like, at least 6 months, or not a little bit more, to make my decision at the time, and also because I felt like, well, what other options do I have? Like, do I look for another job? Like, what will happen? You know, there's all these things that go into, like, you know, a new attending, like, it's very inexperienced, like…
**Florence Shum: **But regardless, I signed on as partnership, and…
**Florence Shum: **it was really not transparent at all, and I felt like, at the time, the administrator made all the decisions.
**Florence Shum: **It was always
**Florence Shum: **We would look at the numbers, maybe… the partner meeting was maybe, like, twice a year at most.
**Florence Shum: **one of the reasons why I had to leave, because I felt like the overhead was, like, over 70%. I think it was, like, close to 75%.
**Florence Shum: **You know, at the time, there was no profit sharing at all.
**Natasha Beauvais: **We have… so all the partners get all the liability, but there's no profit to share.
**Natasha Beauvais: **Oh, interesting.
**Natasha Beauvais: **Yeah, that's really interesting, because I think, I mean, we could run into the same problem trying to become employee-owned, because the goal of that is eventually that a lot of people really do understand the finances, but once, you know, when you are teaching people that, there's… you have to start slowly. It's like, there's a lot of…
**Natasha Beauvais: **Questions people can have, and…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Well, and you can have ownership that doesn't have voting, right? So you can have different share classes where you have ownership and are invested in the company, but still don't have the decision-making authority, and if anything.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **you… you are going to need to maintain that upper echelon of understanding and authority, and I think you can still do that.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **While still having people invested and having ownership in the company itself. You know, whether.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Class A and B shares, so you have voting shares and non-voting shares.
**Florence Shum: **corporate world.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **What's that?
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Kinda like the corporate world, the corporate side of things.
**Florence Shum: **Mmm.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **that's ultimately what's sort of the direction of our company, but I, you know, I totally share, like, or Natasha, we… every January, we always had to leverage our service… or our line of credit to cover… to cover our,
**Jennie Eckstrom: **salaries as well, because we would drain the company at the end of December, so that we wouldn't have to pay taxes, because we're a C-Corp.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **And nobody wanted to pay taxes twice, so we had to thrive and, you know, leverage that line of credit. And, you know, obviously that's not anything that we ever shared with
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Our employees, but it definitely… it makes you think about things.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Differently, and you.
**Natasha Beauvais: **I have to make…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **decisions from a place that's the benefit of the… of the corporation first, so that there is a company to pay the salaries. And the alternative was for you to say, I'm sorry, everyone's going to take a 50% hit. Do you want to do that, or do we… or do we increase the…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Thank you so much.
**Florence Shum: **There were… there were months where we didn't get paid for, like, two paychecks, 2 or 3 paychecks, and we would… they would never make it up.
**Florence Shum: **They had to do that so that, basically, the partner so that they can meet payroll.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Yeah.
**Natasha Beauvais: **Wow, so you really shared the risk.
**Florence Shum: **Yeah, and that happened not one year, not two years, but it was almost like the norm, like, after I became partner.
**Florence Shum: **And then I get a missed paycheck. I was like, what? Do I not need to pay my mortgage then?
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Now, that was…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **because we did the same thing, but then we would have a, you know, we would dilute, you know, distribute the profit in the company in December, so you just needed to, like.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **hold on to those dollars, because you knew you wouldn't have a paycheck in January, and usually February would be pretty ugly. So, you know, once deductibles would pay, then, you know, Q2, 3, and 4 would be better.
**Florence Shum: **Nope, they never make that up.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **That's… that's nuts.
**Florence Shum: **Like, you'll be…
**Natasha Beauvais: **That's another thing that we're doing, is we're trying to get to a structure that's not the way that normally doctors
**Natasha Beauvais: **run companies, which is doctors drain their companies every December. They take the money out, and they don't leave it back in, and so I feel like I'm in,
**Natasha Beauvais: **A situation that has potential, because we…
**Natasha Beauvais: **I won't promise this will happen, because…
**Natasha Beauvais: **anything can happen. You know, this person that's mad may not be working there in 3 months, I don't know. But,
**Natasha Beauvais: **Our goal is to have cash that we just keep in the company, like, and we kind of run it, like, more like a business that would keep one to two months of cash flow needs in the bank. So, if you know you need $500,000 every month, you would keep
**Natasha Beauvais: **$750,000 in the bank.
**Natasha Beauvais: **so… That is what we're working toward. We're not…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Does the eStop allow you to do that without having the tax liability of those dollars?
**Jennie Eckstrom: **So you don't have to pay corporate taxes.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **On those sellers?
**Natasha Beauvais: **I don't know the answer about if an ESOP, what happens with all the cash then. I do know that you need cash, and you need… and you put some of it into the trust for the ESOP. We're an S-Corp, so the tax is a little different, but we would pay taxes on it.
**Natasha Beauvais: **Anyway, but…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **we would…
**Natasha Beauvais: **But we… by leaving it in the bank, we've already would have paid the taxes on it.
**Natasha Beauvais: **So, yeah, there's probably a lot of nuances about the taxes things, but we're not… we're not close to that yet. We're still using our land credit. It's gonna take another year and a half, or, you know, could take two and a half years if somebody leaves. I don't know how long it'll take.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **We've actually used our line of credit when we brought on new partners, until… now we've gotten to the point where we have enough of…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **employed providers. Now, the employed provider service line is the line of credit, because we've got a couple providers who are very mature and are generating enough revenue that that can help
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Pay for the newer providers who just aren't up to productivity.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **So it remains in that service line, but that's only something in the last… I think we have now…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **I think we have 4.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **4… 1… We might just have 3.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **I have a question about…
**Natasha Beauvais: **I have a question about giving feedback to this person, because sometimes I want to say something, but I don't know if I want to say it.
**Natasha Beauvais: **in front of other people, because I don't want to embarrass him at all, and so… It's,
**Natasha Beauvais: **I don't know, I think I have…
**Natasha Beauvais: **I guess… I guess I'm kind of answering my own question, because I think I would… I think it's already hard enough to give feedback
**Natasha Beauvais: **Individually, so it probably still needs to stay individual, but… But, yeah, I'll stop.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Well, I think even just having that space where… Where you acknowledge
**Jennie Eckstrom: **The difficult place where he's in, where he can feel like there's lack of transparency.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **And… Lack of transparency. Lack of transparency may not be the right word, that it…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Acknowledging that it can be difficult to understand the financial metrics without knowing all the financials, and that,
**Jennie Eckstrom: **I mean, I would… I would call out that…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **You know, having been a part of this company, you know, in that ownership of this company for now the last 20 years, that your goal really is for it to thrive, and even acknowledging some of the, like, you know, in a perfect world.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **we would have had our physician salaries match what we were paying, or we were collecting, and those two things would have grown together. And unfortunately, they've been mismatched, and when you're mismatched, you have to align them. And, and I hope that you can
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Understand that, and understand that we are working from a place that
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Really has the success of this company and the character.
**Natasha Beauvais: **of our…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **at the first and foremost, and maybe even refer back to your value statement and your goals and how that is in alignment with them.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **And then also give him the space to recognize that this may or may not be in alignment with your values and your goals. I think you are a very good provider. I want you to be able to stay here and thrive here. And at this point, we really need to be able to move forward.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **And I would like you to be able to move forward with this. I mean, I think if you're, like, 2 or 3 months into this, and he is still, you know.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **acting like a, you know, a dog that got skunked. You know, at some point, you gotta call that… that out just a little bit.
**Natasha Beauvais: **Yeah. Something happened in the last few weeks that's changed the…
**Natasha Beauvais: **The communication, or sense of urgency.
**Natasha Beauvais: **And I'm not sure exactly what that is.
**Natasha Beauvais: **So… It's… it's very young, like, I'm right in the middle of the… Early part of it, so…
**Natasha Beauvais: **I think he's quite frustrated, and I'm not sure if our answers can solve his frustration.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **And that's okay? And I guess, have you gone to the place where you
**Jennie Eckstrom: **have imagined. What does it look like if he is no longer a part of this organization?
**Natasha Beauvais: **I have just started imagining it, but I haven't talked to my CFO about it, that's tomorrow morning, so…
**Natasha Beauvais: **We'll imagine it with numbers tomorrow morning.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **I mean, do you feel like maybe that is something that's sitting in the background is sort of the worst-case scenario, sort of the unknown that makes it more difficult to have the conversations?
**Natasha Beauvais: **It's… The unknown about what we would look like without him?
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Or the unknown… yeah, what does the financials look like? I mean, I think, you know, until we give ourselves that opportunity to imagine a scenario
**Jennie Eckstrom: **without somebody, and actually have the numbers and know, can we survive, or is this the one person that's keeping us afloat, right? Because I think we tend to think of it in extremes.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Right? So what happens if he tomorrow says, 90 days out, I'm out.
**Natasha Beauvais: **Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I wonder the same thing, and I'll find out tomorrow. I'm not sure, but yeah.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **I think when you can approach it, though, within that knowledge, just like Florence was saying earlier, like, we're still a physician. We still have the ability to practice. You know, when you know that that is no longer that which should be feared, I mean, we don't ever want to lose a physician. We don't ever want to lose
**Jennie Eckstrom: **A team member, and yet, when you find that so much energy is going to try to assassage the concerns of this one person, and they're really being quite disruptive.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **At some point, you have to say, do I want to really cater to the whole, rather than, you know.
**Natasha Beauvais: **Right.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Cater to the one, or two.
**Natasha Beauvais: **Right?
**Natasha Beauvais: **Yep, yep.
**Florence Shum: **Before…
**Natasha Beauvais: **Yeah, I think that's what we're about to say. Go ahead, Florence.
**Florence Shum: **Alright, like, I'm just thinking, like, before, like, this change, like, would you… was that, like, kind of the path that you would offer him the partnership, like, eventually?
**Natasha Beauvais: **6 years ago, when he joined, I would have thought that the answer would be yes, and I told him, we'll consider that in 3 years, but then…
**Natasha Beauvais: **By the time 3 years came.
**Natasha Beauvais: **A lot of things had changed. I had bought my partner out, so I was in the part… part of a 6-year buyout with my partner.
**Natasha Beauvais: **We had gotten forced out of our lease twice, which forced us to take on an additional million dollars of debt.
**Natasha Beauvais: **And so our cash flow constraints were pretty different than they were, and I had also learned in the process of buying out my partner that we could become employee-owned.
**Natasha Beauvais: **And I had also learned that the only way I could really protect that is… well…
**Natasha Beauvais: **in order to protect that, I had to protect the decision-making.
**Natasha Beauvais: **And so… I guess my feelings have… have…
**Natasha Beauvais: **continued to evolve, and that… I mean, I think clarity is kind, and I don't feel like I've been 100% clear, because the situation that we are in… or maybe I have been clear about each situation, but it feels quite different than it did when he came. So, if I were him, I would be…
**Natasha Beauvais: **feeling strung along as well, so I don't want to, you know, do the thing that I'm stringing along. I feel like I really owe him a clear…
**Natasha Beauvais: **you know, just step-by-step, like, this was… this is the process, like, you were asking to buy in 2 years ago, and this was the situation.
**Natasha Beauvais: **And it's still the situation. And also, his previous buy-in was… Kind of an old-school…
**Natasha Beauvais: **way of buying in. Like, you give money now, and then somebody else gives a little bit money, and there's a little bit more shares, and somebody else gives money, and then there's no more shares all of a sudden. And I wasn't planning to do it that way anyway, because I wanted it to be fair, to be more equitable for
**Natasha Beauvais: **future doctors, which requires a change in our legal structure, so… he doesn't know that. And I think all along, I was thinking I probably need to preserve decision-making, and I think what he's thinking that he wants to buy is decision-making.
**Natasha Beauvais: **So… You know, I think there's a mismatch in what
**Natasha Beauvais: **in… and I need to develop more… more clear communication to be…
**Natasha Beauvais: **really upfront about it, so that he doesn't keep feeling strung along. At least he feels… Clear.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **It's hard to be clear if you don't have that clarity.
**Natasha Beauvais: **Yeah, it feels like it keeps evolving.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Yeah.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Well, even… even getting… I mean, it sounds as though you have gotten to the place where…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **The buy-in that initially he was presented with, or at least that buy-in structure, really no longer exists.
**Natasha Beauvais: **And that was all in his mind, like, we never talked about any structure. It was just an idea, yeah.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Yeah.
**Natasha Beauvais: **Yeah.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **True.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **So…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **And he's gonna have thoughts and feelings, obviously, about that, and that's really not anything that you can control. So really the…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **you know, I think that the clarity that comes is, you know, if you anticipate
**Jennie Eckstrom: **There will ever be an opportunity that he buys in, or if… really the structure of buy-in's
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Is yet to be determined, and you really can't… can't…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Promise him that that is going to be available, and you want to be upfront with him.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **And…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **And then give him that space of either to decide, like, you say as a, you know, as an employee for now, and… or does that change your desire to be here, if traditional partnership is not something
**Jennie Eckstrom: **that… At this point going forward, you intend to… to offer, right?
**Natasha Beauvais: **That sounds good.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **That is not in your future plans.
**Natasha Beauvais: **Right. And he knows we want an Aesop.
**Natasha Beauvais: **So… but I… yes, I agree. That would be…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **It's sort of a little bit of a Fisher-cut-bates sort of moment, right? Where at least he knows what's coming down the pipe, the best to your knowledge, but that a traditional partnership buy-in is not really in the cards.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **And so…
**Natasha Beauvais: **Yeah, and the thing is, I think if we were already at the ESOP, like, right now, we were kind of, like, giving out shares, you know, whatever, even a small percentage, like.
**Natasha Beauvais: **10% or something, and that we're starting, I think he would at least begin to feel like, well, this isn't what I wanted, but at least there's something.
**Natasha Beauvais: **And…
**Natasha Beauvais: **we're probably still a couple years out from that, and I think there's a… yes, there's a sense of pressure that he feels, because he's the age where he wants to be, like, making great investments, and…
**Natasha Beauvais: **he wanted to have this as an investment, and… But I… so, I don't know if… if we were at the… if we were even starting with the future state in a few years.
**Natasha Beauvais: **maybe he would actually like the end result, but I'm not sure. And I don't know if it would be financially healthy for him, like, the best investment. Maybe if he put his money elsewhere, it would grow faster. I don't know, actually.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Right?
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Yeah.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Yeah.
**Natasha Beauvais: **I have been carrying a lot of risk for several years, and
**Natasha Beauvais: **that's another… that's a learning, too, I would say, like, for people running their own practices. If you are…
**Natasha Beauvais: **carrying loans…
**Natasha Beauvais: **you have to really consider what, you know, what you're willing to take on with those loans. I… when I bought my partner out, I wound up buying
**Natasha Beauvais: **The responsibility, and then we had to borrow another big chunk of money to have another build-out for our office, and so…
**Natasha Beauvais: **that wasn't… I wasn't planning to have that much liability personally, but…
**Natasha Beauvais: **We got kicked out of our lease, so I do.
**Natasha Beauvais: **So, so those kinds of debts can creep up on you, and…
**Natasha Beauvais: **They're good and bad. They're both.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Yeah.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Hmm… Dad.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Managing humans.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Managing humans. Their expectations is…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **an interesting part of this game that I don't think that any of us really…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **anticipated. And also being the human's expectations who are being managed, right? Then we bring that
**Jennie Eckstrom: **To the table, as well.
**Natasha Beauvais: **Yeah, and they're good people. They're really good people.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **They're good people, and they're taking care of patients, and they're probably providing excellent patient care, and so you want them to feel heard, and you want them to feel safe and secure.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **So…
**Natasha Beauvais: **Bye.
**Florence Shum: **Having one disruptive person can be… really disruptive.
**Florence Shum: **That's all… sometimes all you need is just one person. Like, I just want to share, I had an employee… she started with me from the very beginning, when I first started my practice.
**Florence Shum: **And I groomed her because I felt that she has a lot of potential.
**Florence Shum: **And then, I pay for courses for her to become an EEG technician. She's a very smart girl, she, you know, started with part-time and then full-time, and she had…
**Florence Shum: **more responsibility, and then, you know, I increased her pay, like, market value. It's like, you know, I thought she would be happy, and then at the same time, she was the only one that had the schedule where she gets to work 4 days a week and 5 days a week, like, alternating.
**Florence Shum: **So, she had the special treatment of that, because she has to take care of her kids and whatnot. And then, after that, she also, like, was… we call out sick a lot.
**Florence Shum: **I was taking time off, even after, like, all her PTO, exhausting all her PTOs, her sick time, and all of that.
**Florence Shum: **And over, so basically she would take time, and we didn't penalize her, she just got no pay for those days, but we didn't, like, give her any warning where, okay, you're gonna lose your job, right?
**Florence Shum: **But at the end of it, she was so upset with us, because she felt like she was still being treated unfairly, because she saw at one point that she was not allowed to take this more sick days. And that was because she already took everything that she could possibly take.
**Florence Shum: **But she just, like, pinched on, why is it that I can take off? I always… it's just, like, in retrospect.
**Florence Shum: **she… I think it's her own person, her own thinking, where she literally had some mental issue as well, I think, because she had a few panic attacks, like, full, full-blown panic attacks.
**Florence Shum: **In the office, while she's at work.
**Florence Shum: **And she would have to, like, go to the break room and, like, hyperventilating, like, crying hysterically. We almost had to, like, call her family, right?
**Florence Shum: **More than once, like, two, three times, where, like, I mean, it kind of scares, like, the other co-workers.
**Florence Shum: **And, like, being… and I try to be, like, I try to tell, okay, you can just, you know, just go home, you feel better, and whatnot, and all of that.
**Florence Shum: **And… With all of that, she's still…
**Florence Shum: **Very disgruntled, in the sense that she still felt like she was treated unfairly.
**Florence Shum: **And it's something very minute.
**Florence Shum: **at the end that I really…
**Florence Shum: **You know, that was the straw where she… during our Christmas party, so we always buy presents for all my staff as almost like a raffle.
**Florence Shum: **for… so, basically, Roger did, like.
**Florence Shum: **my husband, helped with, like, getting… wrapping all the presents, right? So there was, like, 15 or 17 presents for everybody, so everyone can go home with something.
**Florence Shum: **But then, in the office, also, they had their own Secret Santa thing.
**Florence Shum: **So, Roger said, okay, I'll participate, whatever, but then he forgot to actually wrap her present, or something like that, so he didn't have an actual present for her.
**Florence Shum: **But she still got a present from the office, right? So the… at the end, like, the next day, she actually said to me, like, why am I the only person that… why did he forget my gift?
**Natasha Beauvais: **I didn't meet with.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **And…
**Florence Shum: **Even he was like, I wrapped 15 other people. Actually, he gave her his Secret Santa gift. It's like, if you don't mind, you can take mine.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **And she was like, okay, yeah, no problem.
**Florence Shum: **But at the end, like, she twisted it, like, in her mind.
**Natasha Beauvais: **Sure, and why does that even matter? Yeah.
**Florence Shum: **Like, it's so, like, bizarre, I can't… I couldn't understand it. So, because it was so sensitive, we didn't want to let her go. We didn't want to be like, okay, because you're like this, we had to file you now, you know? Like, we didn't want to do that.
**Florence Shum: **But eventually, she resigned anyway.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Yeah.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **It sort of just gets to that place where… where when you find yourself making concessions for one person rather than the whole, then it… you know, we think we're doing the right thing, because we don't want to… want to lose a person that we've invested in, that we've…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Trained and all the things, but at some point, we have to say, okay, at what point are we better off just… just parting?
**Florence Shum: **And honestly, after she left, it was so much better. The office was so much better.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Yeah.
**Florence Shum: **No.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Yeah.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **we had an administrator that was the same way, was so… I'm pretty sure she was histrionic. She was accessed to, for sure. But same sort of thing. So disruptive, and then by the time that, you know, she ultimately left, it was like, oh, this is what this could be like.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **So… Well, Natasha, I am interested to see, as you explore, like, that whole idea with your fractional CFO, of what… what does the practice look like
**Jennie Eckstrom: **without a provider. Because again, I think that with that… that knowledge piece, I think it becomes a piece of empowerment, so you're not… you're… you understand your…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **your risk and your liability, but what also may be your benefit. It may be that right now, in this setting, that actually not having that salary…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **may also be a blessing. And not that you want them to go, but just… just being able to have that knowledge as you're walking in. So, so I think in a lot of ways.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Evaluating the profitability of one person, and then also understanding what the absence of that
**Jennie Eckstrom: **that cost is, whether that person is contributing to your overhead, whether the expense of their staff, like, really understanding the levers that you have in any individual service line. So.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **I know you had mentioned that there weren't a lot of place, you know, time for P&Ls, but this is an exact…
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Example of how you use that information to make strategic decisions, strategic personnel decisions, so…
**Natasha Beauvais: **Yeah.
**Natasha Beauvais: **I'm looking forward to my meeting tomorrow. We'll see.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **I think it was posted.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **And, Vinika, I would love to see you explore how you can set a date
**Jennie Eckstrom: **For the valuation of your company, so you can continue to move forward… For what benefits you?
**Jennie Eckstrom: **And not be held back.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **by the… The indecisiveness of your soon-to-be ex.
**Vineka: **Yes, have to do so in a way that doesn't… Hurt my, attorney's ego, interestingly.
**Vineka: **wouldn't…
**Natasha Beauvais: **Oh, brother.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Little brother. Well, but…
**Vineka: **Yes, they work for me, I pay them, but there's also that dynamic that has evolved as to, like, oh, yeah, we've… why are you using ChatGPT? Because ChatGPT answers some of my questions, and then that… and you're not available all the time, and… and…
**Vineka: **okay, if it's wrong, then it's wrong. I'm, I'm… you're not… you're the expert.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Or you… you leverage chat to, like, take the, this is what I… what I've discovered, and this is how I want to frame it, please put this in my voice in a way that is…
**Vineka: **iterations of, let's make it professional, but we have… do you think that my attorney have an ego issue by the way they responded? Yes, so let's put it this way, like, despite all of this, there's still that, that sense of, like, you know, it's kind of like.
**Vineka: **We are the experts who rely on us, but also It's illogical, anyway.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Yeah.
**Natasha Beauvais: **Yeah.
**Vineka: **So, no, Cloud AI is going to go in, for sure. Because right now, it takes, you know, like, if…
**Vineka: **why didn't you set the parameter for the deadline, right? Like, this is something
**Vineka: **kind of, like, it's logical, so I have the right to bring it up. If you tell me if it's not possible, I'm okay with that. But I am not the expert, but I have the right to defend myself, is where I'm coming from, so whenever there's ego involved, I'm like, I'm just gonna…
**Vineka: **this is big for me, but I'm going to, I have…
**Vineka: **I can voice out, like, I can use my voice, too.
**Natasha Beauvais: **You 100% have to use your voice, and you have to really know your shit, and you have to be on top of it, because they're gonna be like, oh, this is a woman, she doesn't know anything about law.
**Natasha Beauvais: **she's not prepared, she's waiting for me to give whatever, and, like, I'm wondering, like, do you need to even fire your lawyer, because…
**Natasha Beauvais: **if you have to worry about your lawyer's ego and you're not sure what to say, like, how expensive to fire that person? Like, move on. Get a lawyer that's advocating for you. Like, you should be having somebody who's lining it up for you, like.
**Natasha Beauvais: **Yeah. They should be telling you this. You shouldn't be having to ask your friends. Like, I understand it's really good to ask your friends, and I'm glad you're asking your friends, but it…
**Natasha Beauvais: **it's just, like, not having the right doctor. Like, you know what good healthcare looks like, and you know what mediocre healthcare looks like.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **That is a mic drop.
**Vineka: **I've already fired one that was saying the wrong thing. She's very good, and she's really good at fighting, but then sometimes it's kind of like, we're on the same team, guys, like…
**Vineka: **Hello!
**Natasha Beauvais: **Right. Oh, brother, you've already had to do that once. I mean, maybe your husband is, like.
**Natasha Beauvais: **I don't know, maybe somebody needs, like, a super strong structure so that they can handle whatever he's doing.
**Vineka: **Right, yeah, we'll think.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Right.
**Florence Shum: **When you ask, like, the valuation date, if they say no, I'm trying to also learn myself why. Why is it that you can't do it? Well, what's the alternative? Like, they can't just say, no, you can't do it that way.
**Natasha Beauvais: **I think you should be ready to say that's wrong.
**Natasha Beauvais: **You can do it that way, and prepare and really do the research ahead of time to know. Like, I think there's another… there's another AI that's called Robin. I think that one's more about contracts, but if you just look up what's the best legal AI,
**Natasha Beauvais: **I bet you you could buy a legal AI for a couple of dollars a month, and…
**Natasha Beauvais: **But Claude co-work has the legal thing in it. It's, like, not… I mean, regular Claude, you could ask the questions, but co-work has a special legal, like, set of rules about how it thinks to tell you the answers.
**Vineka: **Yes, I'm gonna… we're gonna be chatting.
**Natasha Beauvais: **Okay.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Alright, you guys, it's been great to meet with you tonight. Like I said, I'll be, 6 o'clock next week. On Monday, we'll just plan Mondays through the month, and like I say, just wherever you're showing up in the
**Jennie Eckstrom: **in the financials piece, I want to continue to do these conversations and be a support.
**Vineka: **Thanks, Jenny. Natasha.
**Natasha Beauvais: **Okay, yeah, good to see you guys.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Yeah, you too!
**Natasha Beauvais: **Okay.
**Jennie Eckstrom: **Alright.
**Florence Shum: **Take care. Good night. Good night.
