How To Create A Business Plan & Budget For Your Micro-PC
When you own and operate a micro-PC it is important to view yourself through the eyes of someone running a small business. Essentially you are a business. Your micro-business doesn’t have to be complicated, and you certainly don’t need an MBA to manage it. But one of the first things that must do is to create a budget that is crafted around your business plan.
Put On Your PC
A micro-PC business plan for a physician is actually very simple. After creating your micro-PC it will become an invisible business cover that overlays your individual professional skills and go everywhere you use your medical degree and license. This medical small business power is far more valuable than you realize. Unlocking it will place you in a position to thrive as a physician. I believe this micro-PC covering is one of the most important steps you will take to preserve your professional autonomy and prevent future burnout.
Whether you are a resident or mid-career physician, it’s never too early or too late to start your PC. I started mine when I was in my 40s, but wish I would have done it right from the outset of my career during residency. The earlier in your career you start your PC, the better, in my opinion.
Business Plan
A business plan is a document that outlines the goals, objectives, and strategies of a business. It is a formal document that includes information about the company’s products and services, its management team, its financial condition, and its marketing strategy.
As a physician, your micro-business plan for your corporation will include what you want to achieve, how you will achieve it, and the resources that you need to achieve it. This should integrate your personal and professional goals for the next five years and how you will get there as an attending physician.
A micro-PC for you as a doctor is unique because of the tight integration it will have with you personally and your household. Although you and your small business are separate entities, they are both highly inter-connected. Thus your business plan will flow into your personal budget, lifestyle choices, quality of life, family life, and financial well-being.
This is why I think it’s important to consider both your personal and professional goals as you begin to create your micro-business plan. Follow this link to a free guide called Dare to Dream that will help you do this.
After starting your micro-PC, reflecting on your personal & professional goals, and then sketching out a business plan, now you get to make some additional choices that are all based on the shared priorities you and your significant other have discussed. These decisions are critical elements that will influence your business plan as well as your personal and professional goals. Sadly some of you have never paused to even consider these questions as you just took a reasonable first job out of training and jumped right into living the attending physician life with gusto. Due to Newton’s first law of inertia, you now feel stuck and are powerless to make a change in your life due to the fear of disruption. The status quo turns out to be a powerful force.
I am here to tell you that for the sake of your well-being, you need to have the courage to consider or re-consider these questions so that you can flourish in life as a doctor. One in which your identity is far deeper than your life as a doctor.
1. Where do you want to live?
2. Where do you want to work, and does it need to be in the same location as where you live?
3. How much do you want to work?
4. How much money do you want to earn?
5. What is your current financial health, such as your net worth?
6. How much are your debts and what is the best plan to eliminate them?
7. Who do you want to work for?
8. What kind of job structure are you looking for?
9. How long do you want to work?
10. How will use your micro-PC in your job structure, if at all?
During your roughly 30-year career as an attending physician, your answers to these questions can and will change. They are dynamic and static. This is because life and priorities during this phase are also very dynamic and constantly changing. This is why my wife and I do our Dare to Dream exercise every year because life does change. It’s important to pause and reflect with one another about how those changes affect the professional and personal interests and goals within your household.
The growing physician shortage places you in full control of these variables as there are a growing number of job options for you to fulfill your goals. I encourage you to not settle long-term for traditional employment due to its large W-2 tax burden and the high burnout rate even though the financial incentives can be hard to pass up. Overall I do think employment has many benefits, but I prefer the more progressive model called employment lite because it provides you with you greater professional autonomy and enhanced financial well-being. More on that later.
After you have worked through your business plan, now you will need to translate it into a budget.
What is a Business Budget?
A business budget is the financial details that support your business plan. As a doctor, this is personal due to the way a micro-PC inclusively surrounds your entire household. In a micro-PC, there is an overlap between your professional business plan and business budget and your personal life/goals and personal budget. That is one of the reasons that I like having a micro-PC so much, because of the way it reflects the real-life integration of our professional and personal lives. No matter how hard we try to separate work and home, there is always a lot of overlap due to the demands of our professional life. So why not embrace the overlap by maximizing the small business benefits to your household?
One of the unexpected benefits that I discovered with forming my micro-PC was how it connected my stay-at-home spouse to my work. Because she was the company bookkeeper, this made her feel like an important employee and stakeholder in the small business. Her insights now were framed more as business strategies for meeting our mutual personal and professional goals, rather than just nagging that my profession was taking too much time away from home. I think most physicians do want a good home and work balance and involving your spouse as an ally in that battle is very helpful. Involving them in your micro-PC takes that up a notch.
A budget is an essential tool for any business including a micro-PC. It helps you understand the flow of your earned dollars and how they cover the expenses.
Most micro-PCs will attempt to reduce the tax burden for the business owner by coming as near as possible to a minimal business profit each year. In other words, between business expenses, salaries, fringe benefits, and distributions you will want your projected budget each year to be as close to zero as possible.
How to Create a Simple Business Budget
The best way to create a budget that works for your company is to use a template from Apple Numbers, Microsoft Excel, or Google Sheets spreadsheet as it allows you to easily input data and manipulate the information.
There are many different types of budgets that are suitable for businesses with different needs. So if you’re not sure where to start or which one would suit your company best then I recommend you talk with an accountant or financial advisor about how they can help.
I will spend some time in the next few blog posts talking about the two major elements of your business budget: revenue and expenses.
In the end, you just need to choose what system works best for you, but I suggest keeping it simple. A micro-PC budget does not have to be complicated and it can even be fun as you get more involved in managing the expenses. That is because most of your expenses will be organized around finding creative ways to use your business revenue to benefit your household.
It’s About You
Your micro-PC exists to help you reach your personal and professional goals. This is in stark contrast to traditionally employed doctors who are made to feel like impersonal cogs in a wheel that feeds the massive salaries in the C-suite and the whims of the board of directors!
The bottom line is being the CEO of your own micro medical business is better than being a worker-bee for the CEO of a company that may not even know who you are.
Just a note here as well, just because you are the CEO does not mean you have to do the work yourself (even though I know lots of self-sufficient doctors will try). You can outsource a lot of the business management and in fact, I think you would be wise to build a team of professionals around you to help you.
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