Management Skills Made Simple

I just talked with a doctor today in a two doctor practice.  She said “things are fine” but after 21 years in practice, she is feeling that “things” are changing and that they should start taking some pro-active steps to keep up with the times and shifts in culture.  She feels they need systems and

It is SOOOO easy to be lazy and goof off.  The temptation to relax and do nothing beautifully is all around us.  The environment may be beckoning you (a fabulous spring day), or maybe it’s your friends begging to you to play hooky and come play with them. Sometimes it’s the open road that calls,

You half-overheard a conversation and believe that your staff are conspiring against you.  You freeze in disbelief and don’t know what to do or if you even heard it right.  So you walk away and do nothing.  Now you feel awkward and a bit nervous around your staff. Someone mentioned that one of your staff

Do you sometimes feel that you are racing around in your practice like a mad person and wish you had rollerblades to go faster? Too many patients coming out your ears? Booked too far out into the future and losing people? Ticking people off because you run behind schedule too often? Do you sometimes ask

How many times in your professional career have you taken the time and care to do a Treatment Plan Presentation to your patient or client, offering them the most ideal service that you can provide, and then had them tell you: I can’t afford it. I’ll have to think about it. I need to talk

As the CEO of your practice, you are likely presented with the need to make a significant number of decisions each day, week and year. If you have all the correct answers right at top of mind and make them quickly, there would be no stress at all. However, the magnitude of the individual decisions

You, the practice owner, feeling quite generous one day, decide to put in a bonus system of some type for your staff. This seemed like a really good idea at the time and when you presented the idea to the staff, they too thought that it would be wonderful. This doesn’t mean that you are

For most health care professionals, you go through your college years dreaming of owning an ideal practice and it keeps you going when things are hard, like exams and professors. It’s a similar thing to keeping your eye on the mountain top when you are climbing and going through rough, steep terrain, and you have

Going to the office every day can be: Behind Door #1: Fun, exciting, special and fast-paced. Behind Door #2: Sluggish, tedious, repetitive and boring. Behind Door #3: Somewhere in between – kind of lack luster, ordinary, neither bad nor good. Getting out of bed in the morning and looking forward into your day, would you choose

Sooner or later, one of your precious team members is going to be off work because of an illness for a day or so (hopefully). Yes, we do all we can to eat right, sleep well and enough, take our vitamins, wash our hands a lot while around sick people, but even then, it may

My staff and I just spent the weekend at a workshop with Manuel Suarez, an Online Marketing Ninja/Expert/Guru, and although we have been doing online marketing for years ourselves, we had our eyes opened big-time to the massiveness of the opportunities to find and reach potential new clients or patients. To start with, in Canada

It is believed that Ernest Hemingway wrote that “courage [or guts] is grace under pressure.” What an intriguing way of putting it! There are days in a practice, or any business for that matter, where the owner or the staff are under a great deal of pressure. This may be from too tight scheduling, financial