It’s great to talk about strategy and tactics for growth in a medical practice. I love the subject – to me it’s fun, mainly because I’m good at it. Yet as I talk about strategy and tactics with many prospective clients I sometimes get the feeling it’s all a big waste of time. Why? Because they don’t have the right people to work with in the first place and even if they did, they don’t have the right vision and management structure to move those tactics forward. The sad fact is that many practices right now are hanging in by a thread and they lack the sound fundamentals to survive in this or any economy.
This lack of what I call infrastructure, for lack of a better term, mostly manifests itself as sameness. You try something new and things don’t really change. Try something else and it changes for a little bit then reverts to the same old level of dysfunction. Promises and dreams do not get realized. Complacency soon follows after the inertia of sameness is realized. Why? No compelling vision. No ‘reason to believe’ in the practice.
If this describes your practice and your situation what can you do about it? First of all, realize that the same thinking that got you to where you are is not likely to solve the problem. You are probably going to need new insight, new blood to come in and change things. If you’re not open to change, if you’re resistant to bringing in someone that will change the dynamics of your office, realize that you may be the problem. You may be too complacent to allow the fresh air of new ideas into your practice.
By the way, if you want to grow your practice, particularly through marketing efforts, this notion of vision is critically important. If you feel like you are selling too hard in your marketing, that may be a sign that you lack the vision and the management focus to execute on your promise to patients. But please, don’t use that as a reason to stop marketing – use it as a reason to improve your operational vision and infrastructure. Rally your team together to fulfill the promise you made to patients when you opened your doors in the first place. When you get better operationally, your marketing will, in turn, become more specific and effective.
As a cliffhanger, the next post will give you a list of things you can do to overcome the inertia in your practice. Study that list!
David Zahaluk, MD is a Dallas-based practice optimization expert and the author of The Ultimate Practice Building Book. His firm, Ultimate Practice Builder, takes physicians to the top 10% of their specialty – in income, time off and quality indicators - within 3 years… guaranteed. Learn more at www.UltimatePracticeBuilder.com.
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Tags: Business, Consulting, Dallas, Management, Marketing, Marketing and Advertising, Organizational Change, Social media
