The Secret to Appointment Scheduling Optimization to Increase Your Profit Per Hour
In any service business that relies on appointments, scheduling optimization is one of the toughest challenges. Everyone knows that when you provide a service, you make a certain amount of profit every time you deliver it. But many business owners focus solely on the profit per service, which often leads to disappointment when they calculate their weekly earnings. Why? Because you don’t get paid based on your gross margin per hour—you get paid on your gross margin per week. That means the number of booked hours and the price you charge for each is crucial. Missing just a few appointments each week can drastically reduce your overall profitability.
In service businesses—whether it's physiotherapy, veterinary care, or even consultancy—the goal should be to maximize every hour. Many businesses offer a variety of services that their clients love, but do they know which combination of services can maximize their weekly return?
In this article we’ll explore how to improve scheduling processes to increase your profit per hour.
Table of Contents:
Understanding Your Business’ Optimal Service Mix
Maximizing Your Skills Per Hour
Scaling Your Business: Choosing the Right Resources
The Importance of Zooming Out
Structuring Success
The Results of Filtering Low-Value Work
Understanding Your Business’ Optimal Service Mix
Let’s assume you already have four or five services that people love and you have clients coming in. Do you know with your current mix of resources what the ideal mix of services per week is in order to maximize the return? Your mix of services includes both the different offerings you provide and the types of customers you serve.
Take a physiotherapy practice, for example. It might offer 30-minute sessions, hour-long consultations, group fitness classes, etc. Not all of these offerings bring the same level of profitability and there will be an ideal mix of which ones you provide, balanced against the resources you have, to drive your most profitable hours.
Let’s consider a scenario where a physiotherapist offers a fitness class for 20 people at $50 per person, generating $1,000 for the hour. Compare that to a one-on-one session, where the therapist may earn between $60 and $120 for the same hour. The return for the business is significantly higher for the group class, even though the time commitment remains the same.
Maximizing Skills Per Hour
In professional services, everything revolves around your minutes. Are you working at the top of your license? Are you working at the top of your skillset or are you playing down?
Whenever your business is out of pattern for the optimal service mix you can deliver, the consequence is that people at the top of their game end up playing down. Not maximizing their minutes. And normally when you're not maximizing your minutes, you're not maximizing your profit per hour.
Too often, business owners look back at their weeks and realize they are spending way too many minutes doing tasks that don’t require their skill set. The way they sold their mix of services and the way they are deciding to deliver it is not optimizing their skills. As a result, they are leaving dollars on the table every week. The most difficult part of working in professional services is that you can’t get the minutes back.
What is the Best Hour You Can Do?
What is the best hour you can do with the resources you have? The solution lies in understanding your service offerings and identifying ways to leverage lower-cost resources for tasks that don’t require your direct involvement.
In the case of a physiotherapist, this could mean hiring Kin assistants to support their one-on-one sessions, ensuring the individual is working through their exercises, allowing the physio to see two or three clients in that hour. That turns the $100 hour into a $300 or $400 hour.
Scaling Your Business: Choosing the Right Resources
When you start looking to scale your business, you need to decide which areas you are going to scale and understand the resources you need. For instance, a physiotherapist can’t just run fitness classes all day. Initial consultations, treatment plans, and follow-up care are all necessary, personalized services that require a higher skill level. Group fitness classes, on the other hand, can be offered as a preventive or strengthening program, complementing the one-on-one care. You have to view it as a suite of offerings.
The challenge with the suite of offerings is that way too often business owners get caught doing the work that doesn’t bring them the return. They end up a “busy fool.” I’ve been in that boat as well, I’ve been a busy fool many times in my life where I ended up doing work that didn’t require my skills. That’s why I recommend stepping back to look at your business model.
The Importance of Zooming Out
This is where leadership development becomes crucial. Business owners need to step back and take a bird’s-eye view of their business model. What does an ideal week, month, or year look like for your business? Some industries, like healthcare, have distinct seasonality. For instance, flu shots are offered during specific months, not year-round. How do you structure your business to mitigate seasonality and maximize your time?
If you want to be a physiotherapist, that’s awesome, but it doesn’t mean you have to be a “busy” physio who is not making money. You need to figure out how to make the business work for you, ensuring that you’re not just filling your schedule but doing so in a way that maximizes your time and profitability.
The Levership Program: Structuring Success
To solve some of these challenges, we’ve developed the Levership program that helps business owners step back and ask critical questions about their business. The goal is to help business owners focus on the big picture: Why does your business exist? What problem are you solving, and who are you solving it for? What’s the financial model that will lead to long-term success?
Many business owners, especially those who started as technicians, get stuck in the day-to-day grind and lose sight of the bigger picture. They spend so much time working in the business that they don’t take the time to work on the business. Levership acts as a forcing function, prompting you to ask tough questions and map out a plan for long-term success.
Key Audits in the Levership Program
Before someone joins our Levership program, we work with them on three key areas:
12-Month Operational Pro Forma: We help you understand how many hours you’re working, with what clients, and the return you’re getting. This gives you a clear picture of your weekly and monthly profitability.
Customer Rationalization Exercise: We assess your best and worst customers. If you replace the bottom 10% of your clients with clients that resemble your top 10%, how much more profitable would your business be? This exercise helps you understand which clients are truly driving value.
Pricing and Positioning: We examine your pricing strategy and positioning in the market. Many businesses underprice their services or fail to position themselves properly, leading to lost revenue opportunities.
These three exercises give business owners a completely new perspective on their company. They help frame the business as it is today and outline the steps needed to achieve future goals. This is often an eye-opening experience for technicians who are great at their craft but haven’t yet developed the skills needed to run a business efficiently.
The Results of Filtering Low-Value Work
By filtering out low-value work and focusing on high-return services, our clients often see immediate ROI from the Levership program. Understanding the levers of your business—hours, clients, and pricing—gives you control over your profitability. One client, for example, described this process as “magic” because it helped her see the connection between her financials, hours worked, and the types of clients she served.
Business owners can now look at their financials with a new lens, not just relying on their accountants for numbers but understanding how to control their profitability. This leads to more informed decision-making and a clearer path toward sustainable growth.
Conclusion
Appointment scheduling optimization and understanding your service mix are critical steps for any service-based business looking to increase profit per hour. The truth is, you can’t afford to be a "busy fool," spending precious hours on tasks that don’t maximize your skills or your income.
By stepping back, analyzing your business model, and making strategic choices about how to use your time and resources, you can unlock higher returns and long-term success.
The Levership program is designed to help you do just that. It empowers business owners to ask the tough questions, audit their operations, and focus on the levers that drive real results. Whether it’s streamlining your services, fine-tuning your pricing, or identifying high-value clients, the path to better profitability starts with clarity and control.
Don’t just fill your calendar—optimize it. Make every hour count, and your bottom line will thank you.