Like most healthcare professionals, you may have in your head the idea that perhaps your practice could be more profitable, more efficient, more organized. Just a sneaking feeling … maybe a bit vague though on how it can be achieved.
Maybe you’ve seen published stats through your college or association as to how others are doing; or maybe you have a friend or two who will share their personal stats. And maybe your stats aren’t in the elite athlete range yet … but you sure would like them to be.
Some of you may even have gone into apathy about it all and feel that nothing can be done about increasing the profits. This mindset alone can stop a practice from growing (practices ALWAYS grow substantially when we work with them because we always get our clients into the mindset that SOMETHING CAN BE DONE ABOUT IT as the first step!).
Bottlenecks
While there may be a whole variety of reasons you feel your practice can’t reach its full potential, there are 6 main bottlenecks preventing full growth:
- You may have staffing issues. You could be overstaffed or understaffed or incorrectly staffed (i.e. workloads not apportioned correctly). The most common one is understaffed on the front desk and therefore “shoppers” are lost, recalls or reminders are not thoroughly done, confirm calls don’t always get completed, etc.
- You are probably not a trained executive in how to organize for efficiency and productivity, how to train staff from scratch and how to correct them, how to give effective orders and be a great leader, how to delegate (and quit doing things others could be taught to do), how to manage by stats for peak efficiency, etc.
- Your marketing department may require some updating (or even putting one there at all). There are a lot of very inexpensive but current ways of marketing that most practices are not accessing and implementing fully. This may even be the biggest bottleneck to reaching your full size.
- The team may not be trained on sales skills to help your patients or clients accept and go ahead with the ideal care they deserve to have. From the front desk staff to the back staff including you, everyone will take the practice up a notch in terms of quality of care if you are all good at presentations. The real winner will be your patient or client as they will now go ahead with ideal care.
- The service levels may be suffering from way too many patients or clients to service for one provider, and it is time to get an associate.
- Your staff have never been trained by you on exactly what is expected of them on their positions or what you in particular want from them.
This list could go on and on but the main point here is that instead of giving up on reaching your goals, or settling for less, you need to reach out and learn some more tools and ways of effectively running your practice. Things will not change unless you decide to make them change and then learn how.
Remember, something CAN always be done about any situation!
