"How far do I ride this thing?"
Same answer either way.

Where you are

Peak, and a fork.

New premises since June. Four clinicians, fifth landing — the UK hire is through six months of visas and waiting on a medical. Prices up. Nobody looking to leave, everyone on a pathway. $760K last year, tracking at $900K+ this one.

And you got it valued, not because you were selling, but because you'd always wanted to know. Five to six hundred. Your senior clinician wants to buy it, end of next year — and he's got a North Brisbane property with real equity behind him.

So you asked your wife, and then you asked me: how far do I ride this thing? You don't feel done. You also don't want to sell on the way down.

You don't have to answer that this year. But whichever way it goes, the next twelve months decides what it's worth — and right now the number that decides it is the one nobody can see.

Why it doesn't matter which you choose

Grow it or sell it — it's the same work.

You said it yourself on the call: it doesn't change whether your goal changes, because it helps either way. That's exactly right, and it's worth being precise about why.

If you sell: the price is set off what the business earns, normalised. Last year you made $40K on $760K — after $15K of legal fees, double rent, and a fit-out. None of that is how the business actually runs. A valuer can only add back what you can evidence, line by line. What you can't prove, you can't be paid for.

If you keep it: exactly the same numbers tell you which of your five clinicians is carrying the business, what the new rooms need to return, and whether the fifth hire pays for himself before or after Christmas.

And there's a third case, which is the one you're actually in: selling to your own senior guy. He needs numbers he believes before he'll borrow against his house. You need numbers you can defend before you name a price. That's one set of numbers, and neither of you has it.

The pathway

Twelve months, three phases.

The arithmetic

Where the fee actually comes from.

Fair question to ask of any fee. Here's the arithmetic I work to — assumptions, not promises, and your real figures replace them in week one.

• the whole feeAdd-backs you can evidenceLegal fees, double rent, fit-out, an owner's wage for a role you're barely in. These lift normalised earnings — but only the ones you can show, line by line. On a valuation being set right now, documenting them properly is worth multiples of what this costs.
• ≈ $40–70K / yrMargin back toward where it wasYou ran 15–20%. Closing even half that gap on $900K is $40–70K a year — and at sale, profit isn't worth its face value, it's worth a multiple of it.
• the price itselfA number your buyer believesHe's borrowing against his home to buy this. The gap between a price you assert and a price he can verify is the entire negotiation — and it's a gap only evidence closes.

The seven grand

You said you'd start now if you could. So let's structure it so you can.

The old lease runs to end of January. Seven thousand a month for a 1960s building you occupy on Wednesdays to satisfy a clause. Nothing to be done about it — you've had the lawyer look, there's no sublease market in a building that's 60% empty, and paying it out costs the same as sitting it out.

But it's cashflow, not economics. It ends. And the decisions that set your sale price — the fifth clinician, your senior guy moving into ops, the run rate the valuation gets calculated on — are being made in exactly the months you'd be waiting out.

So: start monthly now, and we look at the upfront option in the new year, once the second rent is off your books. Same twelve months, same everything — the money just shows up when yours does.

How it runs

Fortnightly, data-fed, decisions only.

• Four onboarding calls in four weeks. One hour each — dashboard built, financials and operations looked over. Faster than usual for us: I've known you a year and I know Glide from Profits.
• Then a one-hour call every fortnight, built around your schedule. Business hours — I'm no use to you after five.
• Direct access in between. Text is best. Something goes sideways the day after we speak, I don't want you sitting on it for a fortnight.
• The system does the tracking so we don't. Nookal and Xero feed it. No more PDFs across three screens, no printing things out to compare them.

You made a point on the call that I agree with: the connection is the part that's getting lost. The dashboard isn't the product — it's what stops us spending the fortnightly call building spreadsheets instead of making decisions.

The investment

Simple numbers, straight terms.