The First Three Months
another WCA Numbers post
In December, CareOregon gave WCA $25,000 to support our new clinic, WCA North. This is actually the second Community Giving Grant that North got; in September 2022, CareOregon gave $10,000 to launch a series of pop-up clinics there. The purpose of this post is to say thank you, again! And also to break down the math of a new WCA clinic to show how meaningful these grants are to us.
Last summer we estimated that if WCA North opened with five shifts a week, regular monthly expenses would run about $6,000. (I’ll get to irregular expenses in a minute.) The plan is to add shifts as we grow because payroll is always our biggest expense — but we need to start out with enough shifts to be able to grow. A big part of opening a new clinic is finding the sweet spot where we’re open enough hours to give people a chance to find us, but not so many hours that the clinic bleeds money — and a big part of that is estimating what it costs to be open at all. Remember the last post about how availability of acupuncture creates demand for acupuncture and not the other way around? That’s what we’re trying to do here, and it always feels like tiptoeing out into the void.
We estimated right! (Whew.) Averaged out, the first three months of WCA North’s regular expenses (rounded up for ease of math) look like this:
Payroll: $3000
Rent: $2000
Insurance: $140
Utilities: $400
Supplies: $240 (everything from needles to toilet paper)
Total: $5780 per month or $17,340 total for October through December 2023
In those first three months, WCA North provided a total of 766 affordable treatments, or 255 per month/70 per week, for the 11 weeks we were open in 2023. For a new clinic, those are GREAT numbers! They’re a direct reflection of the first grant CareOregon gave us, which funded six months of weekly pop-up clinics. When North officially opened on October 8, 2023, it already had a patient base ready and waiting for more clinic shifts. The void was not nearly as void-like (see also, “desolate” and “howling”) as it would have been without that first grant.
Also in its first three months, North earned $14,039 total, or an average of $4680 per month. That’s just $1100 per month shy of breaking even, and it shows the financial boost that the pop-up clinics gave us.
The picture wouldn’t be complete, though, without an accounting of irregular expenses. Included in this category are one-time start up costs, unpleasant surprises, and things that didn’t quite go to plan:
Security deposit to landlord: $6000
Washer and dryer: $3000 including warranties
Installing our beloved neon sign: $6000
Last minute contractor jobs due to misinformation on install requirements for washer and dryer, plus a switch repair for our beloved neon sign:: $2000
Interior leak protection/safety build (remember how WCA North used to be a coffee shop? We had to remove the floor drain, put in replacement tile to complete the floor, and add electrical safety caps and pull-backs/capping for the water pipes): $800
And then there’s the literal chill that fell over every small business in Portland last week:
Estimated lost revenue from a week of snow and ice: $1000+
Which gets us to a total of about $22,000 of WCA North costs so far that the CareOregon grant has absorbed. For a small nonprofit that earns most of its income through patient fees for treatment, that’s a big help to our bottom line! And as of the first week in January, we’ve added three additional shifts to each week, meaning that now we have at least one shift every day. The remaining $3000 will help to buffer the costs of those new shifts as they grow.
I get the impression that the acupuncture profession in general believes in the Scarcity Principle of social psychology — the idea that making services hard to access will increase their perceived value and thus demand for them. And maybe, unfortunately, a lot of US healthcare operates on that principle too? Being a community acupuncturist convinced me that most people’s lives are hard enough already, thanks, and you know what would be a really interesting alternative? Making things easier.
CareOregon made opening a new WCA clinic much easier for us than it would have been otherwise. A not insignificant part of that is that CareOregon’s grants are easy to apply for and easy to report back on. We’re grateful for all the ways that partnering with CareOregon helps us create alternatives to scarcity.