How Following Your Heart Can Keep You Poor

I was inspired to write this post by my cousin’s husband. I’ve known him for well over 10 years now and in all that time he’s dabbled at starting this business and that business but never succeeded.

Personally, I don’t think he was passionate about anything he started - it was always more about making money and as I explain in The Money Spot program, money has to be a by-product not the main reason for you starting something.

Anyway, he comes by the house and says, “Heather, you know, two years ago a friend of mine needed help setting up a nursing agency and she asked for my help. I helped free of charge and after everything was set up she asked me to join her as a partner in the business. I refused because I hate all the bureaucracy and box ticking required to work with the National Health Service (NHS), and today she has 80 nurses on her books.”

That didn’t mean anything to me so I started digging into the numbers. If there’s one thing you find out very quickly about me, it’s that I always jump straight into the numbers. I once met a stripper as I was walking through town and even then I started asking about the numbers right away but that’s another story.

These were the numbers:

• The agency only deals with contracts rather than filling in day spots here and there. This means that they place their nurses in a hospital for 3 or 6 months and sometimes longer.
• The hospital pays the agency £41/hour per nurse
• The agency pays their nurses £29/hour
• The agency therefore keeps £12/hour (£41-£29) – essentially this is their fee for finding the jobs, negotiating contracts and so on. 
  

If every nurse works 8 hours / day and works just 20 days /month – how much does the agency earn per month?

They get: 

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£12 x 8 hours x 20 days x 80 nurses = £153,600 (that’s about $250,000) PER MONTH

The costs of running this kind of agency even with two or three well-paid staff will only be a fraction of this. I am guessing £30,000 ($50,000) per month at the most

THAT IS AN INSANE AMOUNT OF MONEY.

Keep in mind that many nurses will frequently choose to work the 12 hour shift and will frequently work 22 to 24 days per month so most of the time this number will be higher.

My cousin’s husband is already a medical professional and he lost out on this opportunity for the simple reason that he didn’t want to deal with a few forms. That is outrageous.

Why Can’t He Join The Practice Now?

Initially he could have joined the business with his input being his hard work because that’s what both him and the other party had to offer; setup costs were affordable. However, you can’t join a business that is making almost £2m ($3m) a year already without making an equity investment and with that level of revenue he can’t afford to buy an equity stake.

Why Should He Have Joined Despite Hating Paperwork

Yes, I am big proponent of running a business you are passionate about but…

…The fact is, no matter what your passion is, to get the job done there will always, always be tasks involved that you hate. Despite this, as your business grows, you can pass those tasks on to someone else: an employee or even a third-party company. You just have to put your head down and get things done in the early days until you get to that stage.

In the end, he lost out big time and all it took this lady to grow the business to this size was two years. Two years is nothing, when you’re busy it passes by in the blink of an eyelid.

To show you just how much this lady (of African origin like myself) is living it up: He was chatting with her, telling her about all the costs he had at that time with his wife and kids going on holiday etc. and without him even asking she brought out a cheque and gifted him £5,000 ($8,000) just like that! Who does that?

That’s what I call #success.

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