As a practice owner, are you interested in increasing the profitability of your practice? If yes, you are in good company with almost all practitioners.
After 7 years of post-secondary education, on-going continuing educational courses, a major investment into starting or buying your practice, and a lot of sweat equity, you really DO deserve to have a profitable business, right?
“How can you increase your profitability” is probably a question in your mind, so here are the answers.
What are the 10 Key Profit Killers?
1. Not Enough Patients
Perhaps your practice is not solidly booked out a few weeks into the future. This is usually due to lack of an adequate or correct marketing strategy to drive in business on the practice for some exciting expansion. The marketing plan would include both internal and external marketing actions that are proven to work.
2. Cancellations and No Shows
Your schedule LOOKS full but ends up having holes each day and lost income due to cancellations and/or no shows. Your recall system may be at fault. Most staff have no or inadequate sales training on how to handle these situations.
3. Disappearing Patients
One of the invisible practice inhibitors is the cracks that patients fall through in your systems, and get lost or forgotten. Perhaps it’s time for a search and discovery project to find these folks and get them recovered. You need a reactivation program with incentives for them to come in.
4. The Co-Pay Problem
Many practitioners run into patients or clients wanting discounts or, if insured, don’t want to pay the co-pay portion of your fee. Losing 20% on and off through the day, week and month can take a big bite out of your profitability. Sales training for the front desk and yourself is very beneficial in handling these situations. The patients WILL pay the co-pay if you and your team have the correct sales skills.
5. Lack of a Bonus System
You, as the owner of a business, are on a straight bonus system (called profitability) so the harder and smarter you work, the more bonus you can earn. So it should be also for the staff. If a bonus system is well designed and implemented on a weekly or monthly basis, it has been resoundingly proven to encourage increased productivity and attention to detail and therefore increased profitability.
Want to know how a bonus system can fail miserably? Click Here.
6. Wrong Purpose
To be doing what you are doing solely for the purpose of making money is not something that your staff and patients are particularly interested in, right? Therefore, you need a great mission statement or purpose that you can all agree on and work towards. It energizes the team to be achieving the goals or mission of the practice.
7. Location
Some practitioners have been in the same location for a long time and the neighborhood has gone down scale. Or the mall is looking decrepit or is half empty. Then again, when was the last time you renovated or revamped the look of your practice internally and externally? Patients can get to thinking that you are not keeping up with the times, or not doing well, or if you are even interested in having referrals from them.
8. Underutilized Staff
Some practices have staff that are not fully or correctly utilized and that in itself results in lost income (that could have been generated). For instance, giving them additional duties such as marketing actions can help grow the practice.
9. Incorrect Scheduling
Most practitioners find that the scheduling of their time is not done efficiently and so they feel like they are overworked yet underpaid. Changing up or just tightening up the scheduling of patients can make a huge financial difference.
10. Treatment Presentation Skills
This may appear last on the list but is probably one of the biggest reasons for lack of adequate recompense for your hard work. Patients come to you expecting to be told and helped to go ahead with ideal care. Can you imagine asking your patients, “Would you like us to do a cheap solution or would you like the best care we can provide for your long term health?” What would their answer be? This doesn’t mean that patients love paying money for the best care, but they will if you help them want that. Sales training is vital for your patients’ sake.
Pay Back Time
If you fix all of the above issues, you will have your dream practice and will be properly paid for delivering your high-quality service.
If you want to isolate your profit killers and see how we can help fix them, please call and schedule a free, in-depth Practice Efficiency Assessment with one of our senior consultants. The 3-1/2 hours could change your whole life as it has done with most of our 1,800 clients over the last 32 years.
Call us at 416-466-6217 for a FREE Practice Assessment!
