Case Study 3 – Chris Murphy

Training Provider Learns To Delegate, Stops Working 100-Hour Weeks And Saves Company

Imagine working 100 hours a week on your business for years and yet still facing the prospect of having to wind the company up.
That was the situation physiotherapist Chris Murphy found himself in just over a year ago. At the time, the company he founded, PhysioUK, had been operating for about 10 years. For the first seven or eight years, the business had gradually built up as interest in the company’s training programmes and conferences for post-graduate physiotherapists and health professionals grew.

But then things took a turn for the worse, due to a combination of factors including changes in National Health Service funding and the recession as well as increased competition.

“At first, we started to notice a little bit of a downturn in bookings,” recalls Chris. “The majority of the day courses have about 24 people and it’s the last five or six people who represent our profit. We weren’t filling them so we’d be breaking even or losing because fixed costs weren’t being met. To combat that, I put more money into advertising but that didn’t really help. We started seeing our costs going up and our revenue going down.”

Chris did what many other business owners facing the same predicament would do: he started working even harder, spending longer and longer in the office until he was racking up an average 100 hours a week. Every day, he answered upto 80 emails and spent time doing administrative work.

Not surprisingly, he felt tired, stressed and worn out most of the time.

Despite his best efforts, the training and seminar bookings were still dwindling.

“The worst period was about a year ago when I thought, ‘At this rate, we’re going to go out of business.’”

It was the idea of losing his business and his health that prompted him to join NABO. “I realised I needed to do something different. I received an email from [NABO’s Founder] Jonathan Jay inviting me to attend a free one-day seminar and I asked myself at the time, ‘What’s the worst that can happen? I’ll go away for day and not necessarily learn anything. I’ll be no worse off and at least I can work on the train on the way there and back and get some things done’.”

In fact, he got so much value from the free event, he immediately signed up for a comprehensive three-day event. “I went along to that convinced I wouldn’t buy anything else. But I enjoyed it and joined the MasterMind programme. I thought, ‘What other choices have I got? Nothing I’m doing is working. These other things sound interesting and exciting.’ It was a significant investment but I made the choice.”

He learnt not only how to market his training programmes and conferences far more effectively but also how to manage his and his staff’s time better.

“I made some changes with the staff. I said, ‘Look, if we carry on the way we are I’m going to be working too many hours and I’m going to drop down dead far too early and that will be the end of the business.’ We had a couple of good chats and I ended up handing over a lot of the day to day things that I was doing.

“The staff said, ‘Well we can do some of that but we don’t know how to do it’ so I did lots of screen capture training videos. I would talk through what I would do normally. They asked me some questions. If they weren’t sure how to do it they watched a video and if there were any problems they would then ask me. I would do a little video about how I would solve the problem, upload it to the server at work and they could watch it.

“In the space of about eight to 10 weeks, I turned it around. Before I was doing those 80 emails a day, now I do about 15 which has made a tremendous difference to my time. There are piles of jobs that I’ve been meaning to do for six months which I’m now working my way through.

“The other thing I did with regard to the office was to make sure I didn’t have a desk. I used to have a desk and I’d go in and I’d spend my working days in the office and people would ask me lots of questions. Now, I go to the office for about three hours a week. The staff communicate with me via email mainly and I check in once a day on the phone and they ask me questions and so on. Gradually it’s a case of turning that around.

“The business does run better when I’m not there. There are two reasons: as soon as I’m there, people start asking me questions. The other is that as soon as I get in, I start interfering because I see stuff that I think, ‘Oh, I don’t want it done like that.’

“It is difficult to let go but I had to face the reality that if I didn’t do something to change then my health was going to suffer and then I would never achieve what I want. It came down to ‘let go and create a whole new realm of possibilities or don’t let go and be stuck in the same situation you’ve been stuck in for the past eight years which is heading on a downturn’.”

He admits that although he’s working from home, he’s still working hard. The difference now is that he’s beginning to get the space and time to work on profitable activities rather than administrative jobs. He’s also had the opportunity to do gardening – something that seemed like a pipe-dream a few years ago.

“I’m not enjoying more free time yet but I’m trying to offload the rest of the work I’ve been doing. I’ve taken on another member of staff to start looking at the other area that’s my responsibility. At the moment, I’m focussing on managing myself out of the day to day running of the business and streamlining our systems. If that’s successful I can feed into that with new strategies and ideas to get more bums on seats then hopefully things will turnaround and the company will be a lot more profitable and I won’t have to be there very much at all.

“I’ll be able to look at what other exciting opportunities there are for the business and how else we can improve our marketing to our customers.”

That will take him closer to achieving his goal of being able to work a five-hour week. “I want to be freed up so that I can go skiing and work while I’m abroad for about an hour a day. That’s my goal.”

Using the marketing techniques he’s learned from NABO has already meant that some of the seminars have been filled to capacity with waiting lists which in turn has had a positive impact on the company’s turnover.

But it’s not only the improved seminar attendance figures and turnover that tell Chris he’s on the way to achieving his goal of more free time and better health. “I’m sleeping a lot more and people no longer tell me I look like I’m going to drop down dead!”