Chiropractic Business and Tax Tips
In The Waning Days of 2014, This May Be The Most Valuable Tax Savings Tip You’ll Read Anywhere By Garrett B. Gunderson This is the perfect time of year to be looking ahead and working in partnership with your accounting advocate to review your tax strategy and be certain you are on course to keep your tax bill in check – for 2015. Yes, you read that correctly. 2015. The 2014 calendar year is almost history, and while many business and practice owners awaken each November and December to go hunting for year-end tax savings ideas, they are approximately 12 months too late to truly maximize the potential advantages of well-thought and executed tax planning. You may have noticed that in the opening sentence of this article I referred to your “accounting advocate.” Most people describe this under-utilized and under-appreciated professional as an “accountant” – which technically is correct. But too often the images we have of our accountant – whom we meet with maybe once or twice a year, usually between January 2nd and April 15th – is of a cyborg-like records processor – part human, part machine – who ingests our bank statements, credit card logs, cash receipts and other documents and then, voilà, spits out our business and personal returns like a can dispensed from a soda machine. I refer to my accountant as my “accounting advocate,” because a quality, properly utilized accountant is really a tax-planning and savings partner. I speak with or meet with my accountant throughout the year, to review our tax philosophy (more on this in a minute), monitor my financial performance to date, telescope any IRS rule changes that might be on the horizon, and embrace tax savings strategies that will accelerate both my income and my deductions. Here’s another unusual aspect of my relationship with my accounting advocate: I pay him richly. When small business owners commoditize their accountants, assigning their tax preparation to the lowest-priced bidder, what they typically get is qualified performance, but not quality. Would you select your family physician, dentist, or chiropractor primarily on the basis of the lowest available hourly rate? Likely, not. Then why subject the health of your business and finances to low-cost operators? I find that the added value my well-paid accounting advocate brings to me and my businesses is an investment whose returns far offset any savings I might realize by scrimping on my choice of CPAs. Selecting and working closely with an accounting advocate who will help you develop and implement a long-term tax philosophy is one of the “New Rules of Business Success™” that sets Freedom FastTrack members apart – and ahead – of so many other business owners. There is a sharp distinction between tax preparation and savings tips, and a financially rewarding tax philosophy. Most people can sum up their current philosophy as it pertains to taxes in just three words: “I’m against them.” A bona fide, Freedom FastTrack-style tax philosophy is a little more sophisticated than that. It begins, as Brett Sellers so articulately details in this edition’s Monthly Spotlight, with the conviction that how you pay and avoid taxes must support your primary business goals and strategies. Falling over backwards – in the business sense – to cut your tax burden is a rookie mistake. Each business and practice is unique, so it requires an individualized tax philosophy that supports the business owner’s unique objectives and Soul Purpose. All of the false financial idols that I topple in my bestselling book, Killing Sacred Cows, must be expunged from your tax planning: So long 401(k)s; adios scarcity mindset; ta ta to cash flow corks. In their place, you and your accounting advocate want a flexible approach that provides for long-term wealth generation, married to an abundance ethos, and the pursuit of your life’s calling. I liken a good tax philosophy to a speedboat – sleek, powerful, capable of fast acceleration and easily maneuvered. By comparison, Uncle Sam and the IRS are co-captains on a massive cruise ship. In the time that it takes the U.S.S. Taxman to turn and displace one of my tax philosophy components, my accounting helmsman and I have prepared for the contingency with multiple other well-plotted courses. At the moment, I personally am working with my accounting advocate set up a tax-advantaged trust for my two boys – consistent with my life’s Sole Purpose which includes providing well for them. As art lovers, my wife Carrie and I have also been taken by the prospect of purchasing photographs that we love, enjoying them and displaying them for colleagues and clients, then donating them down the road in return for a deduction of the then-appraised value. What excellent examples of a tax philosophy – tied to my family and my business – in ways that my accounting advocate can suggest because he and I have taken the time to look at tax strategy through the prism of the Gunderson Family’s lives. A robotic, cyborg accountant – if he or she would offer any advice whatsoever – would likely trot out the go-to mantra of all board-certified CPA lemmings: “Why not start a tax-qualified, employer matching, defined contribution pension plan – typically a 401(k) – for your employees?” (I could write a book about why that’s not a good idea. Oh, yeah. I did write a book explaining why.*) A savvy accounting advocate can contribute in innumerable ways. He or she can help determine if you’re paying yourself properly; whether you’ve set up the right legal structures to insulate you from unnecessary tax obligations; if cost segregation of your office space is being handled well; if it’s really wise to defer this year’s taxes to future years; what role charitable trusts might play for you; how to minimize or avoid capital gains taxes, etc. One Freedom FastTrack member recently saved roughly $250,000 in the first year alone by moving from a cash to an accrual accounting method. So, indeed, pick up the phone when
Improve Profitability With SMART Marketing Plans
Building your chiropractic dream practice will greatly depend on how well you market your services. The hard part will be figuring out just which marketing activities will produce the desired results of attracting new patients and retaining existing ones without breaking the bank or taking up too much of your time. Regardless of your chiropractic marketing expertise, the best laid out plans will fail if you can’t find the time and discipline to follow through on them. It’s also important to set realistic goals that are ambitious enough to motivate you without overwhelming you into paralysis. Ideally, you should be able to use your marketing activities as patient relationship building tool to improve the profitability of your chiropractic clinic through increased patient flow. Measuring your success and ROI, however, will require a SMART marketing plan that complements your general business plan. And just like your chiropractic business plan, it should consist of specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time based goals that you will need to iterate each month until you achieve them. For example, if you want to improve your chiropractic billing performance to increase your monthly income by $900 you would also need to improve your Patient Visit Average (PVA). As such you could tie your chiropractic marketing goal to this specific business goal and quantify it with 30 new patients gained from all combined marketing activities, or 30 rescheduled no-shows resulting from a successful email campaign to drive up your PVA. Needless to say, you will need to have the necessary framework in place to measure the results, such as asking new patients how they heard about your chiropractic clinic on their intake form, and tracking monthly no-shows as well as billing performance with your Genesis chiropractic software. If you end up falling short of your goals of increasing revenue and/or of attracting 30 new patients through your combined chiropractic marketing efforts at the end of the month, you will need to evaluate which of your activities worked and which did not produce any results, then create a new chiropractic SMART plan for the following month. Here are 5 SMART chiropractic marketing goals you should focus on: S: Attain a specific number of new fans on facebook, twitter, and/or any other social media account M: Achieve a measurable increase in monthly traffic to your chiropractic website (e.g. from 1,000 unique visitors to $1,500) A: Expect attainable results from chiropractic social media efforts (e.g. 30 new patients/month) R: Post relevant blog articles on chiropractic treatments and appropriate healthy lifestyle tips for your chiropractic patient personas T: Track time based numbers (e.g. number of monthly no-shows & monthly chiropractic billing performance with Genesis chiropractic software) and plan marketing activities for each month based on goals on previous months’ results Last but not least, you should also assess any monthly chiropractic marketing expenses for website maintenance, advertising as well as other marketing efforts to determine your actual ROI. Since marketing is a testing game you will need to adjust your monthly goals in accordance with the results you are producing.