Being the executive/owner of a practice and also being the practitioner is double trouble and often results in too much stress. The balance between the two functions is assumed to be 90% practitioner and 10% manager in order to keep the income as high as possible. Yet the “10%” usually means coming in early, staying late or giving up lunch hours in order to take care of business matters such as marketing, patient difficulties, human resources issues, payroll, supplies and purchases, banking, future planning and so on.
Hence, you end up joining the Executive Burnout Club. How do you unsubscribe yourself from the Club?
It’s a conundrum for sure but there are quite a few solutions and these will vary from professional to professional and practice to practice:
Methods of Unsubscribing:
- Delegate as much as you can to your existing staff. Many staff can be cross-trained and take on additional duties that they may have a particular strength in, such as inventory control and ordering, or marketing actions, and so on.
- If you are doing the bookkeeping and payroll, and you are putting in after hours time on this, perhaps you have grown up to the level of requiring the services of a bookkeeper (even if only part time) who can handle all those functions and payroll, banking, etc.
- Re-arrange your scheduling to be more stream-lined and more efficient. (See us at AMI for how to book an Ideal Day for more efficiency and less stress.)
- There is a rule: If a function isn’t scheduled into your day, it is going to get done after work hours. You may find you need to trim your treatment time in order to accomplish the other functions, and bingo, there’s where an associate comes in.
- Burn the midnight oil and create extremely effective marketing so that you get so busy and so far booked out that you have to hire an associate. Get them busy and this will allow you to back out of a day or two of production (yet still make more income) and that extra freed-up time can then be put to good use by you as the executive.
- Increase your income through increased management skills (see us at AMI for help with this) by at least $10,000 per month and spend $2-3,000 per month on a salary for a Personal Assistant to whom you can off-load a variety of functions such as ordering and obtaining office supplies, booking flights for CE, doing payroll, doing the bookkeeping functions, personal banking, shopping for best insurance rates for your car, following up on marketing ideas, documenting office protocols and policies, and so on. This is not the same as an Office Manager where the CEO would step off the day-to-day management of the practice. The personal assistant (like a “Girl Friday”) doesn’t need to have an in-depth knowledge of your profession. This can be a good way to groom someone into the Office Manager position if you don’t already have one however.
There are probably many other solutions to unsubscribe from the Executive Burnout Club if you just start looking.
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