Holiday Checklist
/To celebrate the season, we’ve curated our top 5 tips to ensure you’re heading into the new-year feeling healthy and wealthy!
Rock around the negotiating tree
The end of the year is a great time to re-negotiate your contract. Use your success from the past 12 months to ask for what you deserve. If you’ve never negotiated before or haven’t given any thought to what you deserve, use our easy steps to get you started.
Determine what you want - Whether it’s a higher split percentage, lower minimum rent, more commission on supplement sales, or more marketing support – first determine what you want to ask for.
Gather proof - Accumulate quantitative and/or qualitative data to back up why you deserve what you’re asking for. The past 12 months have provided you with a plethora of data on the revenue you’ve brought in, satisfaction rates of your patients and more.
Prepare yourself - The more uncertain you feel about your negotiation skills, the more important preparation becomes. We coach our negotiation clients to use the information they’ve gathered to plan out possible scenarios during the negotiation and practise their responses to each. Role-play how you’d get your point across, overcome objections, and use your proof.
Count your blessings and your balances
Take inventory of your dispensary and record your odometer reading to cash in on lucrative deductions.
Inventory - If you're blessed with a dispensary, you'll have a bit of extra work to do at the end of the year. Your accountant will need to know what inventory you have on hand and the dollar amount you purchased each of these items for. If you've been tracking your inventory in your Healthy Wealth Tracker, this will be a pretty easy task. If you haven't been keeping track of inventory, you'll have to manually go through it, counting each item plus determining the amount it was purchased for.
Odometer - Car expenses are lucrative deductions you don’t want to miss out on! In order to claim these deductions, you need to know how much you travelled during the year (based on your starting and ending odometer readings) and the amount you travelled for business purposes. Our Healthy Wealth Tracker makes this recording these expenses as easy as possible for holistic practitioners.
ICYMI – Travel from your home to your clinic(s) that you regularly practice at is normally not considered deductible. However, if you qualify for a home office, this travel become deductible – saving you a ton of money! More on this next.
Spread office space and good cheer
Confusion surrounds the home office deduction, especially when it comes to holistic practitioners and if/how/why they qualify. In order to qualify, you must meet ONE of the following requirements:
Your home is your principal place of business administration, or
You have an exclusive space for work in your home and you regularly meet clients there
Most of our clients qualify for a home office under the first condition. To break it down a bit more, the first condition means you must do the majority of your “businessey” work from home – completing your bookkeeping, invoicing clients or clinics, designing marketing materials, working on your website, etc.
Once you qualify for a home office, the deductions become grand! In order to cash in you need to keep track of your office-related expenses. You’ll need to record the size of your office, the size of your home, and expenses related to the office (things like rent, mortgage interest and utilities). Our Healthy Wealth Tracker makes recording these expenses incredibly simple.
Make your future merry and bright
Financial freedom is like one of those buzzwords you hear all the time, but probably don’t really understand. Simply put, it means you control your money, not the other way around. You have enough of a financial cushion to rest easy, take more risks and feel secure. For holistic practitioners, incorporation is the quickest path to financial freedom. Period. You’ll pay way less tax, allowing you to have substantially more money left in your pocket each year.
Take our quiz to determine if you’re ready to have a conversation about incorporation:
☐ Yes ☐ No I’m practising as an associate at a clinic and/or I’m a clinic owner and/or I run my practice out of my home
☐ Yes ☐ No I’ve used up my tuition credits, or if I’m unsure, I’ve been practicing for 2+ years
☐ Yes ☐ No I don’t spend every dollar I earn. I have money left over at the end of the year, after paying my expenses
☐ Yes ☐ No I want more time and energy to help more people and live my purpose
If you answered “Yes” to the above statements, it’s time to have a conversation! Reach out to us here.
Deck the halls with fresh intentions
There's no better time to set goals than the new year! Personal, professional, mental, physical, spiritual - no area of your life should be off limits for goal setting. Our top tip for successfully sticking to your goals is to write them down. Studies show written goals are much more likely to be achieved. Make sure your goals are both specific (laying out exactly what you want) and actionable (practical enough that you have the ability to take steps towards them).
Which do you think is a better goal to set?
I will increase my revenue
I’ll monitor my marketing expenditures and compare them with the corresponding month’s revenue, determining what initiatives have the greatest impact on revenue, and use this information to guide my future initiatives
The former is not specific or actionable. The latter is both specific and actionable, creating a path for success.
As a holistic practitioner and entrepreneur your personal goals will often be inseparable from your professional goals - so remember, improvement in any area of your life will mean improvement in your practice!