Newsletter: May 2026

What Had Our Attention This Month:

🍃I took a consultation call this month that should have ended in the first ten minutes. It ran half an hour longer than that.

The caller ran a multi-location practice and came through a referral. She looked like a fit from the intake form and when she got on the call. By the middle of the conversation, she was asking how I handle promotional product accounting for my other clients, what are best accounting practices that my other clients use and whether I could put together a video on it because she was a visual person.

I had the moment to end it, and I didn’t take it.

The conversation kept going because of the intake process, I developed when the Healthy Bodies of Finance was smaller and looser didn’t catch up to where it is now. Updating that system was my job, and I didn’t do it. I almost called that a mistake, but the label doesn’t fit. Healthy Bodies of Finance got bigger, and the old intake didn’t grow with it. Calling that out is part of the leadership work at my desk this month.

I made a few changes after that. The Financial Operations Diagnostic is the first step on the website now. A more detailed intake forms come before any consultation. The engagement model is published, so prospects see the structure before they book.

Any practice owner reading this has the same pattern somewhere in their operation right now. What you set up when you have one location stops fitting when you have four. Supervision, ordering, role definitions, vendor handling, hiring, training: all of it has to grow when the practice grows, and the calendar doesn’t give you a heads-up.

Small signals tell you first: a vendor calling because your team can’t answer the question, a new hire still escalating routine decisions to you in month three, a month-end close that doesn’t happen until you sit down with the books. Catching the lag is how you lead.

The call cost me one slot. Every slot after it gets a tighter conversation. I would rather lose the one than keep losing the rest.

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✨Where Our Energy Went

Most of this month went into work that happens inside Healthy Bodies of Finance and doesn’t show from outside the organization. We focused on the systems the team and I run every day, especially the pieces I set up when the organization was smaller and have not examined in a while.

The work was tightening: cleaning up what no longer fit, removing what no longer worked, and documenting what had been running on memory. This work doesn’t show on a client invoice. Client work depends on it being right.

I had to face what the organization has outgrown this month. All of it pointed back at me, because I am the one who set these things up to begin with.

Of course, the team was part of this. I asked them what they had been seeing, and the conversation went both ways. Their observations told me what they had been running into, and their questions sharpened the changes I was thinking about. We put the changes into how we work day to day, beyond where I had them in my head. By month-end, the team owned the changes as much as I did.

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🍃Thoughtful Reads for Your Practice

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🌿Mindful thought of the month

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🔍 Forensic Friday

The Facts

This one is from a couple of years ago, and the only thing that has changed since is the date. An office manager was sentenced on federal fraud charges for a scheme that ran eight years. The part that should worry every practice owner is how ordinary the theft looked from the inside. She diverted patient payments into a hidden account, rerouted the practice’s tax refund checks, and ran up fraudulent credit cards in the owner’s name for her own travel and property. The owner trusted the picture she handed to him every month. It was fiction, and he signed it himself.

The Fraud

She had been authorized to close a temporary bank account open for a one-time event. The account stayed open instead, and the owner never gave it another thought. From there it got almost lazy. Patient cash and checks went into that account instead of the operating one, and because it was registered under the practice’s own EIN, the bank waved every deposit through. She funneled the tax refund checks in the same way, money the owner assumed had gone to the next bill or back into operations. Then she used a forged signature stamp on the very documents meant to catch her: the monthly reconciliations and approvals he reviewed to confirm the money had gone where it belonged. The watchdog reported to the wolf. Eight years of it paid for a lifestyle the practice never knew it was funding.

The Effect on Finance

🚩 The Control Breakdown: one person owned the whole cycle. She took in the revenue, made the deposits, sent the tax payments, and produced the records he used to check all three. Put all of it in one set of hands, and every number the owner sees is a number she chose to show him   

What You Should Take From This

Here is the fix, and it costs you one afternoon: pull every bank account tied to your practice’s tax ID, not just the one you log into each morning. Her hidden account had been sitting under that same number the entire time, waiting for someone to think to check. If one person counts your money and also assures you it all arrived, you are running on faith. Faith belongs in a marriage, not in your month-end close.

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