Culture Of One

Prepared for Maria Stephens · Re-Vitalise, Ballarat · July 2026

Three rooms and a studio is enough.
Here's the pathway.

Not a program brochure — the plan I'd actually run for Re-Vitalise, written up after our conversation this week. Private link, for you.

Where you are

Nine years in, carrying all of it.

A practice with a real reputation — good enough that I chose not to build one in Ballarat, because Re-Vitalise already existed. Three rooms and a studio, a main-road location, a community that already knows you.

And right now: you and one part-timer. Forty to forty-five treating hours a week you didn't choose. Every hire feeling like a coin flip you can't afford to get wrong.

You said it yourself — staying at this pace isn't an option. That's the assessment. Here's the plan.

The pathway

Twelve months, three phases.

Months 1–2

Find great people

Land the Melbourne physio on clean terms. Your flat-45% contractor instinct is right for a testing arrangement — we structure it so it can't bite you later.

Then build your candidate reach so the next hire isn't luck. A small bespoke clinic can't outbid the corporates — but it can out-offer them on everything that actually keeps good clinicians.

Months 3–6

Enable them to stay and produce

Onboarding that gets a new clinician to a full book, and pay structures that clear the award floor with room to spare — and can be explained in one sentence.

The award pressure gets designed into every offer from day one, so nothing needs unwinding in 2028.

Months 6–12

Fill the rooms, wind you back

Your treating hours come down deliberately — not by hoping, by rostering. The dashboard runs clinician economics fortnightly, so we always know what each room is returning.

The prognosis

Three rooms and a studio is enough for a seven-figure clinic that stays small and bespoke. The threshold is four to five staff — past it, the practice starts paying you $200K+ a year without you carrying forty hours of caseload.

Why now — and a gift

The floor rises every year from here.

The new award puts an experienced full-time physio around $87,000 plus super today — and in real terms the floor keeps climbing, to roughly $97,000 in today's dollars by 2030. Every hire you make between now and then gets priced against it.

So instead of a static chart, here's the calculator I had up on our call — embedded for you to play with, and yours to keep whatever you decide. Any classification, any year, your own assumptions.

Open it full screen →

Try it on the Melbourne physio: set her classification and slide the years forward. That's the conversation you're about to have — with the floor already known before you make the offer. No urgency games; just make the call with this in view.

The return

The maths of the first 90 days.

Fair question to ask of any advisory fee: when does it pay for itself? Here's the arithmetic I work to. These are assumptions, not promises — your real numbers replace them in week one, and we track it on the dashboard where both of us can see it.

≈ $15–20K / yrThe hire, landed and producingEven at 2.5 days, a producing clinician bills roughly $110–130K a year. After their pay and their share of everything else, figure around 15% reaching the bottom line — call it $15–20K in real profit, growing as their book fills. Most of the 90-day arithmetic hangs on this — which is why it's phase one.
≈ $15–20K / yrA considered lift on your feesA modest, staged adjustment across the caseload you already see. Nine years on a main road, with a community that trusts you, carries it easily — and a fee rise is close to pure profit, without a single extra hour on the tools.
≈ $10–15K / yrGetting each offer right the first timePay structures that clear the award, protect your margin, and can be explained in a sentence. Built once, they hold — and the discipline compounds across every hire you make after.

The bar I work to

By day 90, the aim is simple — for the moves we've made, annualised, to be tracking toward the year's fee. I won't put a number in writing before I've seen your figures, but that's what this is built to return, and it's what we'd measure together on the dashboard from week one.

How it runs

Fortnightly, data-fed, decisions only.

A one-hour call every fortnight. Plus direct access to me between calls — a contract question, an interview debrief, a week that goes sideways.
The system you saw, fed by your data. Payroll and billings flow in; the numbers stay current. You never build a spreadsheet or dig through Xero again.
Our time goes on decisions. The tracking is automated, so the calls are about you, your people, and the next move — not admin.

You wouldn't be the first

Owners who arrived at the same spot.

"My mentoring sessions with Shane over the past year helped my practice grow from a solo operation to a small team of five. When I've felt out of my depth, he's helped me navigate it with a personalised, collaborative approach that respected and honoured my own values and business vision — invaluable to my growth in leadership and to the expansion of my business." Sam — grew from solo to a team of five

"Everything was on me — processes, decisions, questions… Mr Fixit. [Now I've] developed the skills to be a business owner, and not just a physio working in my own business." Frank — clinic owner, five years in before we started

"I wanted to grow in the right way — controlled, sustainable… learning from someone who knows how to navigate the ins and outs of the business side." Tim — solo practitioner with a busy clinic

The investment

Simple numbers, straight terms.

MonthlyCancel terms per agreement

$2,500 / month

Six months upfront20% off

$12,000

30-day money-back guarantee. If the first month tells you this isn't the direction, we part as friends and you get your money back.

I ask for a 12-month commitment. Quick wins come early, but "the business works for me now" is a second-year result, not a 60-day one — I'd rather be straight about that upfront.

Next step

If this is the direction, it's one reply.

I'll send the agreement, get your data feeding into the system, and you'd have your first session inside a week.

Reply to Shane Or call — 0435 004 231

Three rooms and a studio is enough.Here's the pathway.