FEATURE PRACTICE DEVELOPMENT BUILDING THE DREAM TEAM Finding your purpose and setting goals as a clinic owner P BY DR. ERIK KLEIN, DC erhaps you work as an independent contractor, an employee, or maybe you rent a room at a clinic owned by other NDs, chiropractors, physiother-apists, RMTs or other health practitioners or businesses. If you’ve found it difficult to find the right team environment, maybe it’s time to create your own. THE WHY/FINDING IT IN YOURSELF EMPLOYEES OR CONTRACTORS DR. ERIK KLEIN is a chiropractor and CEO of Town Health Solutions, a network focused on the growth and development of clinical excellence and entrepreneurship for manual therapists. For more information, please visit www.townhealthsolutions.com/franchising. 16 Chiropractic and Naturopathic Doctor May/June 2021 As a clinic owner, you can employ other NDs and chiropractors. Employment is simple, straight forward, but it does come with added costs. You need to factor in the employer CPP and EI contributions, which can add up to over www.Cndoctor.ca Photo: © Pixel-Shot / Adobe Stock You’ve likely done stints with the big chains, moved into privately owned chiropractic or physiotherapy clinics that were more “clinically” focused, often unhappy with the split they’ve ended up negotiating.They enter “ABC” clinic hoping for team meetings, lots of inter-office referrals, and mentor-ship from senior clinicians, but it rarely comes. After three years of watching new NDs/DCs being brought in to pad the bottom line, you depart. Rinse and repeat. Sure, you may earn a satisfying income, but not feeling fulfilled or free. The most important consideration to take into account, is that taking this step is less about being the “boss” and more about being the attendant. Being a clinic leader is actually a very lonely place. This doesn’t make it bad, but if you’re doing it for the right reasons, you’re serving a higher purpose, and you’re serving your people. The acco-lades don’t always come, your thera-pists don’t care that you are late paying your taxes, and maybe you won’t be included in water cooler talk. Being a clinic owner/leader means lifting people up, helping them to ex-ceed their expectations and be a better version of themselves – this is a purpose, a passion, a calling. It is not leasing a space and renting rooms out. Hopefully through all of that, you can afford to keep the lights on, and live an appropri-ately comfortable life for your efforts. You must be ready to cut back some of your own clinic time in order to run the business. You will miss both family and recreational time running the busines, but at the end of the day, you should be satisfied. ACCOUNTING/LEGAL CONSIDERATIONS Please take note, none of the advice in-cluded herein is meant as legal or account-ing advice. It is the opinion of someone who has “been there, done that,” and you should always have professionals provide the final say on your plans. Structuring your clinic with the appropriate legal strategy is important. You will need a corporate entity to begin. To reduce overexposure to un-expected HST expenses, you should keep HST registrants (RMTs/acu-puncturists/athletic therapists) sepa-rate from non-HST registrants (NDs/ physios/chiros). A physio or a chiro will likely have their own professional cor-poration so working with them and their advisors is a key factor here. Consider these issues in advance to avoid a failed audit and unexpected HST penalties in the future. In actual-ity, in many provinces physiotherapists CANNOT be contracted or employed by any private entity that is not owned in a majority capacity by anyone by a physiotherapist. As we’ll discuss later, to bring physio in, you should find a physiotherapist partner that you trust.
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