In this episode, I’m chatting about 4 initial mapping steps you need to take to craft your plans for your business. First, we’ll talk about mapping out your business services and what types of physicians you’ll be marketing to. Then, let’s take a look at the market in your area based on these services and physicians local to you. Third, you’ll figure out your startup costs so that you can budget accordingly. And lastly, we’ll discuss how to map out your revenue potential to see where you’re headed.

Transcript:

(00:00):
Grab a seat and a cup of coffee because you just enrolled in ultrasound Business school. We are obsessed with all things ultrasound and are here to take you on a journey through the messy and the magical side of business ownership. Think marketing, contracts, vendors, admin, growth mindset, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. This is the Talking Tech Podcast, a sonographer’s guide to entrepreneurship. Here’s your host, Jennifer Lindsey.

Jen (00:31):
Somehow we are already on episode 21. I’m so excited for this one, and I know I say that in just about every podcast episode, but I really love being able to lay out this information for all of you considering starting your ultrasound business, and those of you who are in the stages of growing and building it. It’s so much fun for me to take the last almost two decades of our mobile business and our coaching division and lay that out into these podcasts to be able to help as much as I can. So I’m excited about this one because today we’re talking about planning your six-figure ultrasound business. I want this to be the go-to for those people who are saying, Hey, I’m thinking about an ultrasound business, not sure where to start, not sure what to do, not sure what I need to have in place.

(01:23)
I want to get the basics so I can decide, nope, this isn’t for me after all, or yes, absolutely, I need to figure out what my next steps are to get this business started and going. So that is the point of today’s podcast. What I want to do is give you guys those first steps to kind of getting things down on paper so that you can decide what services you’re going to be providing and how you’re going to be set up with the business a little bit more on who you would be marketing to then based on the services you are going to provide, the costs that are involved in getting the business started up and the revenue potential that you can see providing these services into your area. So again, this should be exactly what you need to say. Nope, not for me, or yes, absolutely. What do I need to do next?

(02:11)
So let’s talk a little bit about setup options. There are two main ideas in people’s heads. Either I’m going to set up a service-based model where I go out and provide the services into the physician practice. They’re already credentialed with insurance, so they’re going to bill for the ultrasounds, they’re going to receive the reimbursement back, and then I am going to charge them a service fee for coming in and providing those services. Or I have other people that say, I want to have control over the billing, so I want to get credentialed with insurance and be able to bill directly to insurance and get paid back from insurance specifically to me. And then, in that scenario, you are able to pay a rental fee to the physician practice in which you are providing services.

(03:03)
There is a specific Medicare calculation for that. It has to be fair market value. Of course, there’s a contract involved there as well for the rental side of it. Those are the two main setups they usually look at from a business perspective; it makes the most sense to start with a service fee model. Even if you want to get into billing later, and I’ll tell you why I’ve explained this, I think, a few times in the podcast as well, I really like to kind of hit this home because I think when you start a business, it doesn’t matter what the end is if that makes sense. You can always change up the types of services you offer. You can always add things in, and you can always pivot and alter what you’re providing, but it doesn’t make sense to start something that’s going to be way more costly and take way more time if you can start up another way while you’re working on all that on the backend.

(04:02)
So the reason I say that about setting things up in the billing model where you are a mobile IDTF, you are billing insurance and Medicare for the services. You’re getting paid directly; you are going into different offices and paying rental space rentals for that particular space you’re utilizing. The problem with setting that up initially is that you must purchase, lease, rent, or whatever you’re doing with your machine first because the Medicare paperwork requires the serial number, make, model, etc. All of those specific details are to be listed on the Medicare paperwork; you can’t bill Medicare until they approve you. And so likely, you’ll buy, lease whatever your equipment and have it sitting in your spare bedroom while you’re waiting on this credentialing to finalize. I’ve seen it take 60 days; I’ve seen it take a year.

(05:04)
And so it doesn’t make business sense to lay out all of this money to get things going while you are sitting there doing nothing, receiving no revenue stream whatsoever. So even if you are saying, I want a bill; I want to have control over that, it makes great business sense to set things up with a service fee model first so that while you’re waiting for all that credentialing to happen, you already have your machine because you’re out there providing services on a service fee, contract basis. With physicians, you only have to have a couple of contracts. You could set it up that way, get a few initial contracts while you’re waiting on all the credentialing to finalize, and then you’ve got two options. So when you go into your physician practices, you can say, Hey, if you guys want a bill, we’re more than happy to do that.

(05:51)
I have a contract set up, specifically for that. We have you bill them, you receive reimbursement, we charge a service fee for coming in, or we are also set up to be able to provide those services in your office. And in that scenario, it’s free for you, right? They don’t pay anything; you pay a rental fee for the space they’re utilizing. So, I always like to tell people that because people get very excited about the thought of being able to bill insurance directly, but that is a big caveat to that. I also have tons of people I talk to that say I don’t want to deal with any part of the billing; I just want to set things up as a service fee model. So either one is great. We, as you guys probably know if you’ve listened to multiple podcasts of mine, we have our own mobile ultrasound business in Indiana for, gosh, probably 12 years or so.

(06:44)
We only did a service fee model, so it can be done, and you don’t ever have to bill if you don’t want to. So it is really up to your preference and what you’d like to have, set up. I will say it is a pain working with insurance companies. But we opened our market when we added that in as an option for our physicians because there were many physicians that we had met with previously that said, Hey, I’d love this service, but I don’t want to do the billing myself. And so we just kept those people on a list for the future if we ever decided to add billing options for our company. And once we did, we had that list to go back to and to start adding in some of those physicians as well.

(07:26)
So those are a couple of different ways. The main ways to set things up, and then there are so many different things you can add. And suppose you haven’t listened to episode 20 yet. In that case, I highly suggest that you do that because I got so much great feedback from that podcast, from people that hadn’t started their business yet that kind of reached out to me to even clients of mine that I just had a coaching call yesterday with a client of ours that, after listening to that podcast gave them a couple of ideas. They wanted to run a few things by me. So that was really fun, and I’m excited that that got such good feedback because I think creating an offer suite is really important, kind of starting out the way that you want to start and focusing on the types of services that you want to focus on initially and then looking as your business is growing at what other, diversification you can add to your company.

(08:20)
Because the more ways that you can provide services to increase revenue only builds your business. And so if you haven’t listened to that episode, I definitely suggest it because I think it’s got some great ideas into what you can add in after the fact after you’ve started and kind of got a base going, some different things that you can offer add to your offer suite. So one of the first things then once you decide how you’re going to be set up, if you say, Hey, I want to do a service fee model and then add in billing right away, or service fee model sounds great, I probably don’t want to do billing, or maybe I’ll do that years the road. Once you’ve decided that the next thing you need to take a look at is the types of ultrasounds you are going to be providing.

(09:03)
What I think is such a cool thing about this business is that you guys don’t have to decide what type of business services you are going to provide, right? So many people are like, I want to have my own business; what should I sell? You already have that down pat; you’re selling ultrasound services. There are, of course, many different ways that that can be set up in the physician’s office, as we’ve discussed, but the fact that you don’t have to figure that part out, I mean, so much of that is already done for you starting this business out because you’ve got the services already there. And so if you decide the exact types of ultrasounds you’re going to be doing, and I say this in the sense that some of you probably do echo only or echo vascular only, or only general and vascular.

(09:49)
And so if you say, okay, those are the ways that I want to start out with my area of expertise later on down the road, you can always add in additional staff, PRN people even if you want to part-time to be able to add in those types of services. Because, again, the more service offerings you have, the more likely you are to keep increasing that revenue stream because you’ve got diversification there. And so if you decide initially what types of scans you are going to provide, then you need to say, okay, I am, as an example, going to be providing echo and vascular services later down the road. I may add in general those types of things, but right now, I’m going to focus because it’s my niche; I’m going to focus on echo and vascular. Once you decide on your services, you need to look at which types of physician practices would be ordering those types of ultrasounds.

(10:48)
And that is going to be your initial marketing list. Those are the types of physicians then that you know you are going to be marketing to. So let’s kind of go through a list as with this example. So echo and vascular, I would definitely target internal medicine doctors, family practice, and geriatrics. There are a multitude of different specialists as well that would be ordering echo and vascular neurology groups. Podiatry would be one of them. Of course, cardiologists are going to be ordering echo vascular. Most of them will likely already have their equipment and tech, but not necessarily if they’re a smaller practice; maybe in a smaller town, they may not have access to that. And so, I don’t think adding them to the list of potential types of offices that could utilize your service hurts. Once you do that, and once you know what types of practices you’re going to be marketing to, you can literally go through and take a look at.

(11:47)
I mean, you could even Google it, you know, cardiologists in Indianapolis, Indiana, for me as an example. And look at the numbers; you can do that on WebMD has a physician finder list. You can freely, you know, multiple different sites for no cost. Go on there and see how many physicians are local to you. And so that’s something that you can take a look at and say, wow, okay, I’ve got a hundred different physician offices or 500 different physician offices or a thousand different physician offices within an X-mile radius of me that could potentially utilize my service. So I think it’s always nice initially just to look at how many offices are local to you; that would be those types of physician practices that could potentially utilize the types of ultrasounds you will be providing.

(12:37)
Once you do that, I always like to remind people that you don’t have to have that many clients to fill up your week. Now I’m not saying that this is easy and there’s an easy button, and it doesn’t take hard work. That is definitely not what I’m saying. But I think people get wrapped up in the fact that, oh my gosh, there’s only, let’s say 200 physicians local to me. Is that going to be enough for me to provide these services? And if you think about it, let’s say you’ve got a physician client that needs your services based on their patient load one day a week. You only need five of those types of practices to completely fill up your week. And now you’re not marketing anymore. You don’t have to go out and market anymore.

(13:24)
You’ve got your entire week filled up, right? Let’s say you initially find smaller practices that only need you a half day a week. Well, you only need 10 of those types of practices to fill up your entire week, Monday through Friday. So you don’t need a ton of physician groups; you need a special few that don’t already have an ultrasound.  I always suggest marketing to people not employed by the hospitals just because it’s way easier for them, obviously as an independent practice, to decide for themselves what they want to do. I did get this; I want to make a quick note here. I got this question from a client the other day because when she looked through things, it was saying, you know, that this particular physician has privileges at these hospitals. That only means that they can admit patients to those hospitals.

(14:22)
Of course, physicians need to have privileges at local hospitals for when patients need to be admitted to admit them there and do their rounds there, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they employ them. So at this initial stage, I would really just look at the number of physicians that could potentially utilize your service just to see what your area looks like. Okay? Now, once you’ve decided that, so we know how we’re going to set up, we know what types of services we will be providing as far as the types of ultrasound go. We know what types of physician practices we will market to and how many local to us could potentially utilize our service. The next thing that we want to do is figure out our startup costs. Okay? So I’ve got some averages here.

(15:07)
Now people are going to spend a little bit more, some are going to spend a little bit less. Some people will say; I want the latest and greatest of XYZ. Others are going to say, Hey, this basic stuff is good for me. So everyone is going to have their own kind of specific startup cost. But I love breaking this down because, again, I want this podcast to be that go-to for those that are considering their own business, and this is going to be some really great information for you. Now, can you do this on your own? I want to make sure that I always say to people that I don’t do this podcast, so I can say, Hey, come buy our coaching services. I do this podcast because there is nothing else out there like it. And I want people who are considering starting their own business to know the basic facts and the information they need to know to be able to decide, yes, this is for me, or no, this isn’t.

(16:02)
When starting your business, I just think not to go off on a rant here, but starting a business is so scary. And when you do it without any prior knowledge, and you’re trying to figure it out all on your own, it is so anxiety ridden that if I can take some of that away from people, I love that because I didn’t have that when we first started our mobile business. We didn’t know what we were doing. We had to try to put everything together on our own. And when you do it by yourself, you are reinventing the wheel. You are coming up with all of the ideas on your own, and you’re trying them out for months on end a lot of times to see if they work. That can cost you a ton of time and a ton of money.

(16:44)
And so for us to be able to provide the services that we do, it’s literally why we exist because we began helping tech so that they didn’t have to reinvent the wheel. They wanted a step-by-step plan to focus their hard work in the right areas rather than focusing all their hard work on 20 different things to see which one worked. And so the fact that we can also save about 70% of the normal startup costs is huge as well. So I am going to do these startup costs from the sense that when I start working with a client, I will tell them, this is your basic startup cost beyond our program. And I’ll have some information at the end, too, if you guys want more information on some of the ways we are helping our clients to finalize your startup cost.

(17:33)
So the startup expenses that I list for our program clients is their business incorporation, number one. This, I say, is about an average of $250. This is totally approximate because it depends on your secretary of state. Everybody has their business setup fee, as far as their state goes. So that is an approximation there. At $250, you’ll also want to get your marketing materials printed. This is going to be about $250 as well. I always suggest doing a very small batch in the beginning because you may find as you go out and you’re, you’re giving your handouts, and you’re giving your presentations to the physicians that, Hey man, in my market, I keep getting this one particular question that’s easily added to my handout. So, you know, if you’ve got a thousand handouts printed out and you spend a bunch of money on it, you are not going to want to do another print until you’ve used all those up.

(18:41)
So I always suggest, in the beginning, do a small round of printing just so that if you decide you want to change anything, it is easier just to go, you know, to do that again and do another small round. I love GotPrint. They’re one of my favorites. We use them a lot for our business. The quality is amazing, and it is dirt cheap to print exceptional quality items. So just as a side note, one of my favorite places, another startup expense, is your annual insurance premiums. And so I have this out at about $1200 to $1500 or so per year. You won’t need to get like your general liability insurance until you grab your ultrasound equipment. So this likely will be startup expense towards the end of your startup, which will be nice. I always tell people, too, for our clients, if they don’t have a reliable laptop, to go ahead and grab one; you don’t need, you know, a MacBook that costs $1000.

(19:39)
I have this for $350 to $500 because you can get a nice fast computer for right around that price. Obviously, the more advanced it is, the quicker stuff will go over pushing your images and those types of things. But I love having a laptop computer for each of our techs that work for us because they can take it to each physician’s practice, plug their ultrasound system right into the laptop, and pull all the images over for them to push up to the PACS. So they can batch their work on their computer as they go through their entire day. So it makes it so much easier for them to do that. So I suggest doing that instead of just a desktop at your home office where you’re uploading everything because that can take a lot of time in the evening.

(20:24)
And if you can batch it all during the day and be sending that up to the PACS, I think that’s the best setup. I also tell our clients just to kind of pack a little bit of money away for miscellaneous items that you find that you need along the way. So I say about $1500 or so for that. Now, you will obviously have monthly business expenses to run your business beyond the startup expenses. And so some of those items are, I have listed out here for sales and marketing, I put down $500 a month. Now this can go up, or it can be lower than that as well. What this is going to be used for, for this type of business, we don’t need to buy radio advertising or Facebook advertising or things like that because our physicians, the way to sell into physician practices is a face-to-face meeting with the doctors.

(21:16)
And so a lot of offices require lunch appointments. Their doctors are busy; they’re running in between patients. A lot of you may be that work in practices where you know, you have a multitude of different types of physicians where it’s not like it’s just a radiology department are probably familiar with office lunches where like the reps will come in, bring a lunch, they’ll be able to chat with the doctors, but you’re bringing lunch for the entire office. And so to have a budget set aside, I say that this is your marketing budget, some people say, man, I have to bring in lunch for everybody. Yes, that’s the marketing budget, just think of it as your marketing budget, and you’ll understand that that is what you need to set aside because we don’t have to buy those other types of marketing solutions like TV, radio, et cetera.

(22:05)
And again, that can go up or down, and when you first start, if you say, Hey, okay, my budget’s going to be like $250, that’s all I can afford right now, that’s fine—just going to have to be smart with the catering choices that you make. And then, as your business grows, you can always up that budget as you need. But again, you’re going to come to a point where you’ve filled up enough days where you are going to put a hold on the marketing part of your business because you’ve got enough clients to fill up what you’re doing. And so then you know, if those clients, you know, fall off for some reason, get bought, bought out by a hospital or you know, in our business, we’ve been doing this so long, we’ve had doctors retire, you know, so, there are times when those, offices will fall off and then that’s when you just start up your marketing, process.

(22:50)
Again, we also have down here for the monthly business expenses, about $150 a month or so for client supplies. And so that would be like your gel, gloves, all of that type of thing. This obviously, $150 is going to be higher if you’re seeing a ton of different offices lower as you first start. But that is, you know, I put it in monthly business expenses because, of course, it’s monthly replenishment, but this will be towards, like, when you’re ready to first start that first account, you’ll need to have a little bit set aside for that, for that first month so that you can order your supplies for those first initial accounts that you have. Now we all know this is 2020, but doctors, for some reason, still love their fax machines, and so we have a fax service that we do for our business monthly; it’s around $15 or so.

(23:45)
There are a couple, well, probably more than a couple; there’s probably a million different electronic fax groups that you can go with. We use MyFax; there’s one that’s called eFax, I think. So you don’t need an actual fax machine that can all be done online, but men are physicians; they still love their faxes, so we want to make sure we have that option for their web hosting as well. So, for our clients, we include the web design, and then hosting is a monthly expense that you will need to make sure you have in your budget. It is not expensive; I would say anywhere between $15 to $30 a month to host your website. So that’s it actually being live online. The other thing you’ll want to do as well, of course, is purchase your domain name, which you can do on GoDaddy for super cheap.

(24:38)
I mean, I think I’ve seen them for $3. So I would say, you know, $10 or below for the domain purchase, and that’s just a one-time I’m buying my website name. And then the hosting is what, again, as I said, keeps it live, monthly online—the ultrasound system. Now, we always recommend, as I’ve said million times, but we recommend waiting to get your system until you’re ready to close that first account so that the revenue that you’re generating from that account is helping to cover the system cost. Now we’ve got a pretty big, wide variance here. We say anywhere between $500 to $1000 a month. This is going to depend on a multitude of factors. The type of equipment that you get. The more expensive the equipment, the higher the monthly cost is going to be and the amount of probes, all that type of thing.

(25:30)
People’s credit, of course, plays into it when you’re, you know, leasing or purchasing anything. And so that will give you a good kind of, I know it’s a wide range, but I would say when you’re putting all your numbers together, use that $1000 a month instead of the $500 just to give you some leeway there if it is less expensive. So I always like to do that when I’m crunching numbers, is going to be as conservative as I can when I’m putting things together so that it is a happy surprise when things cost less than I initially anticipated that they would that, again, shouldn’t be leased or purchased until you’re ready to start that first account. And if you think about it from this perspective, sometimes I know that a $1000 a month like that is kind of sticker shock when you think about it.

(26:17)
If you think of it in the sense that $1000 in one eight-hour session is what you are going to be charging, you don’t need a big first account to be able to cover that initial expense. And again, it won’t always be $1000; it’s going to be somewhere between $500 to $1000, but go ahead and put that $1000 as your budget for the month, for each month for the monthly expense for the ultrasound equipment just so that you can be conservative on the backend and be able to, to put all that together. Now, I always suggest having accounting software so much easier, obviously, than doing like books on paper and that kind of thing. We use QuickBooks online for our business. It is around $30 to $40 a month.  I love QuickBooks online because it pulls in if you guys, you know, don’t have a business yet and you haven’t ever used that before, it pulls all of your bank statement information in, and then you can give access to your accountant too.

(27:19)
And we’ll talk a bit about accounting services here in a second, but I like that I can do my daily bookkeeping, so I’m not paying an accountant to do my daily bookkeeping. I’m doing all my daily bookkeeping, where everything’s coming in, and any expenses that I have. So when I’m purchasing marketing materials or lunches for the offices or, you know, spending anything that I’m doing, my fax service, my web hosting, all of those expenses that come in, I can categorize them for my accountant and approve them basically in QuickBooks so that when my accountant goes in to do our quarterly books, everything’s already done as far as the daily books go. And so they know everything that’s in there has already been taken a look at, and they can go ahead and calculate anything they need to do for the quarterly taxes and that type of thing.

(28:08)
I personally have our accountant do our payroll taxes and all of that. There’s an option in QuickBooks to add in payroll services where I can pay out our employees through QuickBooks, which is awesome. And so I do that. Accountants will do that too. So it really just depends on how much assistance you want as far as accounting services go. And so that obviously is going to alter how much that’s going to cost you on a regular basis. So I would say, I think it costs us something around $80 a month or so for the things that they look at for us. They calculate our, like confirm and calculate the payroll taxes that we owe the IRS each month and that type of thing. So that is an expense that we pay every month. That could vary.

(28:58)
It could be lower or a little higher, depending on how much help you want from your accountant. And then at the end of the year, they, you know, calculate all of our information and stuff for our into-the-year taxes and all of that. So I would, I put down here for this, expense about 500 to $1,500 a year just depending on how much you are having them do. Let’s see; I want to go through a little bit. So that is, that’s the overview of the startup expenses and the monthly expenses that I give to our clients because a lot of the stuff that they would have to buy outright if they did it on their own, they don’t have to do that because they have popped into our program where we have, you know, they don’t have to get attorneys because we already have both the contracts that they need, all of that type of thing.

(29:49)
So for those of you that are wanting some outlying pricing, if you did this on your own without going through a program like some like our clients do, there are multiple items then that you’d need to outsource sales training for sure, okay? I know most people aren’t going to do this if they do it on their own; they’re not going to go out somewhere and get sales training. But I have to tell you, the problem with not knowing how to sell into a physician practice is that if you don’t know how to sell and you don’t know how to get in there, it doesn’t matter how great all of your other services are. If you can’t sell them, you can’t build your business. And so, having an idea of the specific things you need to do to be able to sell your service is crucial. And so you’ve got to have that in there.

(30:34)
I honestly have no idea what sales training would cost. Probably a few thousand dollars; I would imagine having someone teach you specifics about selling into physician practices because physician practices it is different than selling anywhere else. Contracts. So those of you that do it on your own, you have to have contracts. Those come in our Ultrasound Business Academy and our one-on-one coaching. We include that in there because, like I said, we’ve wrapped everything up into a start-to-finish program process. Contracts, the two that you need, are going to cost about $7500 doing it on your own. It’s going to be probably higher East Coast, West Coast. To give you an idea, the last contract we had our attorneys craft us cost about $12,000. So these services are not cheap, and they’ve got to be done right.

(31:26)
They’ve got to be done by a healthcare attorney so that you are getting what you pay for. You may have another attorney that can do it for a lot less, but they may not know all the detailed caveats of the specific laws in healthcare that need to be carved out. Our service agreement that we have for the actual services portion of that we have in our program is 17 pages. I think it is long. There’s a lot of legalese information in there, and that’s to carve out all of the exceptions for Stark, a kickback Medicare fraud and abuse, all of those things that you’ve got to be sure that you’re complying with because physicians can get into so much trouble if they ever got audited by Medicare and it wasn’t set up correctly. So that being said, the other thing you’ll need is business documents.

(32:13)
So in our program, we make sure that our clients have a ton of information on, you know, once they get that contract, we want them to be able to breeze through implementation and all of that. So there’s a ton of stuff that, of course, I’m not going to go into in a podcast, but there are a lot of business documents that you’ll want to make sure if you do this on your own that you have crafted as well. So those are a few of kind of the main points if you did it on your own that you would really need to have and pay for and add into your startup costs. And so, like I said, I’ll give you some information at the end of this on how to get in touch with me so we can walk you through next steps.

(32:50)
If you put all this stuff together, decide yes, this is definitely something I want to look at; I think this business is for me.  I can help walk you through some of those next-step items and see what we might be able to do to help you get there. Okay? So now that we have all of that done, you need to decide who needs to be on your vendor team to make all these things happen, right? There are some things we can’t do, we can’t read our own studies if we’re not radiologists, so we want to make sure that we’ve got that on our list of vendors. And luckily, we’ve got a vendor list for our clients too. That includes a ton of the main things that you’ll need, which are radiologists or cardiologists to do your interpretations for those physician offices that you work with that don’t already have that option that you know they can’t read on their own ultrasound equipment.

(33:38)
For general ultrasound supplies, you’ll need to purchase gel cause you want to come in with a turnkey service; you don’t want your offices buying that. You want gel, gloves, masks, and whatever else you need to be able to provide those services in the office. You’ve got to have a PACS system to push images from point A to point B. We even have marketing specialists for prospecting calls in our vendor list, which is cool too. So that’s the first step in our sales process. I did a whole podcast on our sales process as well. So if you haven’t checked that out, that’s a good thing to listen to understand how that sales process in general needs to go branding, okay? That’s something you’ve got to have on your vendor list. As I mentioned before, we do like a logo website and all of that for our clients, but if you are doing this on your own, you want to have a branding expert work with you on your logo, on your website, on your business handouts and those types of things, your business cards because you are in there marketing to doctors with other professionals, right?

(34:46)
There are pharmaceutical reps, medical reps, those types of reps that are in the office, and they work for billion-dollar companies that have, you know, exceptional branding handouts, all of that. So you don’t want something done that you printed on your home printer, you know, in Microsoft Word, okay? So you want to have something professional because you want to also be able to stand out with your exceptional marketing materials as you’re out there marketing to your physicians. As I mentioned too, you’ll also definitely want a CPA if you’ve been doing your taxes or at least just an accounting firm; if you’ve been doing your taxes on your own, you know, as just an individual, please know, you will not be able to do that once you get your business. And that’s why I added that in as some of your monthly and annual expenses there because having that person be able to do all of that expert work is going to be important.

(35:42)
We added into our business we work with Raymond James, so any of those types of companies that can help set up certain things like simple IRAs, which are, you know, Roth IRAs. A simple IRA is very, very similar to a 401k. And for us in our business, we wanted to be able to have the opportunity to contribute like we would have if we were working for someone else. And so that’s something that is an option. Something to think about: once you go full-time, remember, too, you don’t have to start your business full-time. You can start it part-time as you’re working or doing PRN or switch your hours around those types of things. You don’t have to start full-time, but once you go full-time, if you’re the one who carries your health insurance for yourself or your family, it would be time to start thinking, you know, before that happens about talking to some brokers, that deal with that so that you can make sure that you’re covered as far as health insurance part goes.

(36:42)
Let’s see here. What is next? All right, so now that we have talked about kind of the main expenses, startup expenses, monthly expenses, and annual expenses, now we need to know how much money we can actually make. Okay? That is really the next and really final step in deciding, okay, now I know how much this costs, I know what my services are going to be, I know what it’s going to cost me to get this started up, how much revenue potential is there with this business? And that way, you can do some math and decide what this looks like. I did on episode two forever ago how to make $1000 a day in your mobile ultrasound business. I break this down super specifically there. So if you want more detailed information, head to episode two of the podcast.

(37:28)
You can take a listen, but the industry average that you can charge for your services when you’re going in and providing that service fee model where the doc is billing, you’re charging the physician the hourly rate to provide your services. And again, as a side note, we always suggest setting things up in half-day or full-day blocks when you’re working at physician practices. So you’re not driving around all over God’s creation for one patient here and two patients there. It’s easier to set it up. Let’s say every Tuesday from eight to 12. I’m at Dr. Smith’s office; they know it; they book everybody in that time block, and you’re good to go. And then it’s easy for everybody from a logistics and a scheduling perspective, but the average you can charge for bringing in the equipment and the tech providing these services is about $125 an hour.

(38:13)
So it honestly makes the math easy as well. It’s going to be different in different areas of the country based on your reimbursement averages. But that is a good average. And like I said, it makes the math easy when we’re looking at a four-hour, half-day block in your physician client office that then provides a $500 gross revenue day, half day. A full day or eight-hour block is going to provide $1000 in gross revenue back to your business. So if there’s an average of 20 working days a month, right Monday through Friday, your total full capacity, gross revenue potential with one tech, and one machine working five days a week is about $20,000 a month, right? That $1000 for a full day is multiplied by 20 service days per month. Now I have clients that want to work a couple of days a week themselves, and that’s all they want to do.

(39:08)
I have a couple; I have clients that want to work a couple of days a week for themselves and hire out, you know, have a part-time person that works with them to work the other days. I have others that work themselves and have multiple techs working for them. So the options honestly are endless, kind of based on your actual revenue goals. Once you start adding in additional techs and equipment, your monthly expenses will increase, but so will your revenue potential. So you can also add in additional, as I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, add in additional types of revenue streams to kind of diversify your options. And again, I’ve laid all this out in episode 20 in creating your Offer suite. So check that out if you haven’t because there are some really good ideas in there to think about where you’re going to go next.

(39:56)
Okay, guys, there you have it. The first steps in getting things put down on paper so that you can decide your services, the market potential in your area, the costs involved in starting up and running your business, and the revenue potential. These four things should be exactly what you need to say. Nope, not interested, not wanting to move forward, or yes. I want to see what my next steps are. So now, what do you need to do if you’ve decided this is something you really want to look at seriously? That is what we do over here at Advanced Imaging. So I want you to go over to aic-ultrasound.com/help. So aic-ultrasound.com/help. Cause I’ve got a questionnaire there that you can fill out. I will review it personally. I’ll shoot you over a calendar invite so that you can book a discovery call with me.

(40:51)
We can chat a little bit about where you’re at in the process and how we might be able to help get you where you want to go. We do so many different things with our clients that we’ve been doing for over a decade. We’ve helped hundreds and hundreds of texts across the country, and I get so excited about it because it just, again, helps keep people from having to reinvent the wheel and gives them a really good step-by-step process on getting things started and going. So until next time, I will be over here cheering you on.

(41:19):
Ready to see what it takes to start your own mobile ultrasound business? Grab our completely free startup guide and learn how you can make a thousand dollars a day with your own business. Head to our website, www.aic-ultrasound.com, to check it out.