Expanding Your Practice Profit Potential – Part 1

Well, did you do the math last week?  Did you determine your growth margin and profitability potential?  The previous Weekly Report should have been like x-Ray vision into your practice helping you to discover the proper profit math necessary to achieve your goals and to identify gaps where money is being lost.

This is critically important stuff, my friend.  However, most doctors (not the ones reading this), first of all, don’t care and, second of all, aren’t willing to do the work to truly optimize profitability.  Yet they still complain about being paid less than they think they deserve.

The morale of the story is that you don’t get more profit out of your practice business just because you think it should.  Instead, you get it out of your practice by building a better, more profitable business by implementing the processes that drive profit, not just production.

As we’ve talked about many times here, if the math doesn’t add up, the money won’t either.  This is not only true from a creation, diagnostic, case acceptance, pre-pay, size of appointments, or schedule situation but also on the back end of understanding the origin of where and how profit moves from patients through your practice to your bank account in a very deliberate way.

Thus, the question, “are we making money on…” (where you fill in the blank) must be compared against two things: one actual costs and two opportunities costs.

So, that leads me to a big question and one of your greatest investment in actual dollars (outside of the value of your time which is even greater – which has been the topic this year in several Weekly Reports and the Practice Focus activities for my Mastery Level Doctors and their Teams)…

Your people.

A return on your investment in your people. 

Here’s the bottom line and the point I want to make today as we delve into this discussion… similarly to last week, there are three core truths about profit as a direct result from your people and how to ensure everyone is working to their full potential to deliver results.

First, as you well know, what you and therefore they focus on you get more of.  If they are focused on creation of opportunity and unabashed about bringing your philosophy of helping patients to life, they you will get more of it and they will be worth more to you.

Far too many teams lose sight of what the most important objective really is.  How it is defined, the ways in which it is tracked, and the level of commitment to achieving it is what determines their profit potential.

Second, as laid out last week, your greatest responsibility of all business ownership is to make sure your people are achieving number one.  Period.  There is no exception.  Where the doctor’s focus, actions, and behavior aim, so shall the team’s.

Having every single team member laser focused and clear on what their highest priorities are is the key to everything.  The same goes for the type of communication, the topics of trainings, where the accountability lies, and what is reported on each day.

A team must be focused on creation activities for the future; not defensive activities regarding the past.  And the more of one the less of the other is possible.  

Where is your team’s time invested most?  Does it align with the number one objective on your practice?

Third, looping all the way back to where we started, your team can and will only be as good as the systems, protocols, processes, and most importantly the expectations that you have in your practice.  Everyone must see clearly the path to achievement and understands the reality of how the treatment flows, the patient moves, and the money is made.

Anyone not in the loop with clear understanding won’t own their core responsibilities and will diminish their necessary contributions.  When one link in the chain is weakened, it leads to vulnerability everywhere else.

There is profit to be found in your people.  This is the most significant leverage point to expand and multiply the potential of your practice.

It’s why I created the “five buckets” to showcase how everyone fits together and how everyone takes part in the ‘making of the money.’

We are going to get into expanding your people’s impact on your profit next week.

 
To wrap up this week, a few questions to ponder…

Is everyone on your team clear on how they connect to and influence the primary objective? 
  

Does each team member value themselves and understand their own specific contributions?

Is money a celebrated component of the practice because of what it represents (for the team, the practice, and the patients) or is it an uncomfortable reality that is rarely discussed?

How would each team member rate on what they see as their highest value actions and with each individual patient?

Have them assess themselves.  Ask where they can improve and where they need to dedicate less time to low value tasks in order to expand on profit producing activities.

Here’s one for you… how does it feel to you thinking about the profit being from your team?  Are you treating them like an expense or an investment, like a liability or an asset?

Now, go back to the three realities I’ve covered here and package that together with last week.  That will give you a practice built on a strong, profitable foundation that is ready for growth because you are committed to making all the assets inside of it more valuable to themselves, to you, and especially to your patients.

Once every team member understands their role and how it all connects together, you’d be amazed at how they will embrace their own potential and increase their personal profitability to the practice.

We’ll pick back up here next week with some tactical strategies and examples on how to leverage up and increase the return on your greatest asset and investment… your people!