The Private Practice Blueprint

In this episode, I want to share with you The Private Practice Blueprint

• Importance of Drive and Goal Setting: The critical role of 'drive' in distinguishing highly successful practices from moderately successful ones and stresses the necessity of clear, actionable goal setting.
• Strategic Planning and Team Alignment: The importance of having a well-thought-out strategic plan (practice blueprint) and the need for team alignment to achieve these plans effectively.
• Operational Efficiency: I introduce the concept of a 'five-hour block,' a dedicated weekly time for practice owners to focus on high-level management tasks without distractions, which he identifies as a game changer in practice management.
• Financial Management: Shaun addresses common areas where practices lose money and underscores the importance of identifying and plugging these financial leaks to stabilize and grow the business.
• Leadership and Resistance Management: Shaun talks about the inevitability of resistance when implementing new processes and how effective leadership and communication are vital for overcoming such challenges.
• Practice Blueprint for Success: Outline of the 'Private Practice Blueprint,' an eight-week course designed to equip practice owners with the tools to build a robust foundation for their business, enhancing both management efficiency and financial performance.

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Schedule a consult with Shaun by visiting  https://ptpracticesuccess.com

Transcript

0:09

I'm going to be fast in this presentation. I want to share with you how many practices operate on a day to day basis versus how they should operate on a day to day, week to week basis. Hello, my name is Shaun Kirk and I'm a former practice owner who quickly realized that I would never achieve my goals as a business owner being a full time clinician. So I got some help on the business side of my healthcare business. Well, we grew ninefold. I since sold that practice. And for the past 20 years, I've been training and consulting private practice owners on how making little changes in your organization could lead to massive success. In this presentation, I want to share some standard foundational actions that I established with all of my clients and let you know about how these standard blueprint actions could be incorporated into your practice. And the impact it can have on your ability to reach your goals. I have a good friend and client who I've been working with for nearly 20 years, who asked me a simple question. He said, what do you believe is the biggest difference between the client who maybe have grown their business by multimillion dollars versus the guy who did okay? I said, well, it's just one word. It's drive. Take two people with similar intelligence and provide them with similar information. The one who will be the most successful is the one with the greatest drive towards the achievement of their goals, myself included. So let's start with your goals and vision and what you set out to achieve with your practice. Goal setting is a specialized thing. The difference between a goal and a dream is a plan. A goal without a written plan is simply a dream that may never come true. A goal, however, with a written step by step strategy that you follow will have a greater likelihood of success. Do you have written goals along with a strategic plan that you believe if you followed would get you there? If you don't have one, well then why not? For many, including myself early in my practice career, I had more than a few losses when it came to reaching my goals. After a while, I had serious self doubt that I would ever be able to pull off what I envisioned as a private practice owner. I was settling for far less than what I had hoped for. So take a look. Did you have a goal for your practice that you really wanted, but maybe now you've given up on it, perhaps settling for something else? Shifting towards goal achievement versus quote going to work is a mindset change as well as a behavior change, and it must occur. In you, along with your team. The point is to have a goal that is attainable, a goal that you can get buy in from your team is also very important because you will never achieve your goals alone. No one really does. Okay. So now we have an attainable goal. And we've got the team on board. Next, you'll need to steer the team to make orderly progress on your well thought out written plan that will serve as your practice blueprint. Your practice will need to consider the need to handle or improve a particular area of your practice. The resources that you have available, such as your personal bandwidth to take on the plan, its finance, the clinic space, etc. The last thing to consider when creating a plan is the capability of your resources. Here we could be looking at base knowledge, willingness to learn new things, leadership and management skills. This applies not only to yourself, but to your team. Let's face it, many owners do not have the right team to win the game. Be honest with yourself when assessing your team's willingness to do new things and their leadership skill. No B team has ever won a championship You may create a plan that is perfect for an A team, but you may have a B and C team. If that's the case, then you're going to need to scale back your plan accordingly. So it's important that you ignite the fire in your belly to play a bigger game. The first thing I would recommend you do is to establish or re establish your 12 month goals and vision. Then map out your practice blueprint. that you believe will get you there. Once you've established an achievable 12 month goal that considers the need, the resources, and the team's capability to pull it off, the next step would be setting the foundation. Most practice owners are so busy in patient care, usually outproducing other clinicians that they have no time for really anything else. Many consider that when they're treating patients full time that they at least know they're making money. And that's true. But what are they losing? Possibly a lot. If you don't have a plan of what actions to take to build a more successful practice, you may just as well stay in full time patient care. You must set up a solid foundation from which to expand. So here's one foundational step I would recommend. Set up a five hour block during the workweek to implement your practice blueprint. This five hour is a distraction free space. It is not time for doing notes or anything else, but top level management actions and blueprint implementation. An intelligent practice blueprint that is executed will be far, better than random orders barked out to staff between patients. There are many things you should be doing within your admin time. And quite frankly, depending on your practice, Five hours a week may not be enough. However, if you're really being a clinician and manage your practice after your staff go home or between patients here and there, you may find this five hour block smartly managed as the thing that turns your practice around when one of my consultants is having trouble helping a client, my first question, no matter the circumstances is, does he have a five hour block? If he doesn't have one or dropped it out, I send the consultant back to his client to help him establish or reestablish the five hour block and what he must do during that five hour block. So, get yourself a five hour block and follow the practice blueprint. Okay, so now you've got your blueprint. And you're executing it during your five hour block. Now we need to identify if the practice is hemorrhaging money so that we can begin to plug the leaks. You won't get very far with a leaky ship, so we have to plug the leaks. As an owner, you must be able to shift your focus from patient care to the recognition of the proper levers that drive expansion. Patient visit practice management is a base level of practice management. There are several areas of a practice where you could be losing money besides simply just patient visit volume. You need to know what they are and the impact financially of failing to close the holes in the bucket. There are six areas where practices tend to lose money. You will want to make sure that your blueprint keeps you and your team focused on these areas and follow the plan to close the holes. Do this before you go nuts trying to just get new patients in the door. So here's what I'd recommend you do. Identify areas of your practice where you could be losing money, then write up how you will change procedures and strategies to plug the leaks and include these changes into your practice blueprint. Okay, where are we at? Now we have your goals and vision sorted out. We've created a practice blueprint that will help you achieve your 12 month goals. We've set the foundation of allocating a 5 hour block to implement your strategic plan with your team and coordination is what is needed and wanted from them. You've analyzed several areas of your practice where you are presently losing money and worked out a series of possible changes to your blueprint to help you maximize your success in reaching your 12 month goals. Now we need to establish the proper reporting of the news. for your particular practice. And now what I mean by reporting the news is keeping of the proper high level KPIs for your business into a practice scorecard or dashboard that you can look at on a regular basis, daily and weekly, that tells you your practice's health. Your practice scorecard should be designed in a way that permits you to see your lost income recovery efforts along with other metrics. Your big picture scorecard will help you to evaluate the impact of the changes that you're making to your organization by following your practice blueprint. At first, you may find you feel like a statistician. You're gathering information, you're entering it into a spreadsheet. Well, roll up your sleeves and do this work on your own before delegating it to another. You must have accurate information. So do the work, become proficient before turning this function over to someone else. So, I'd recommend you create a practice scorecard for your practice, perhaps as a Google Doc. Then start keeping a few statistics, but collect them on your own at first before turning that responsibility over to another. Okay, so what's next? Well, this is what I say. Welcome to the resistance. By this time you're starting to implement a few things. You're likely experiencing some pushback from your team with the changes that you're beginning to implement. It could be an eye roll or an I'm on it and it doesn't get done. It could be I forgot when it came to getting something done or I didn't have time or whatever, right? If you are weak at getting others to execute an order that comes directly from you, you will soon give up on your goals and create lesser goals that you believe maybe they could agree with. Your ability to get agreement and cooperation from the team sounds easy, but if you've never tested them or made them accountable for executing an order, well, they may see you now in an entirely different light. You may hear things like you're all about the money, or it's not as much fun as it used to be, or what have you. You may think that maybe you need to become more of a drill sergeant in order to get the team to change how they've been doing things, to run things more efficiently, or to become more profitable. But you'd be wrong. If you have the right team and become the right leader. who has patience and persistence, the staff will appreciate you leading them. It is important to understand that without resistance, there will be no change. A good leader will embrace the resistance and use their communication skills to gain agreement and cooperation. This is vital if you want to bust out of average to become exceptional. Your practice blueprint assumes that you have a team who want to play ball and are A players. If you have C players, Replace them. If you have B players, you will get the greatest resistance from them. So it's important to embrace the resistance and use your persistence and your communication skills to overcome their resistance. Okay, let's recap again. So you've established your 12 month goals and you've created a blueprint of strategic actions to get you there. You evaluated any areas of lost income in your practice and you've adjusted your blueprint to recover the lost income in six years of your practice. You blocked out at least five hours a week to execute your blueprint and work on on the business actions. You've created a scorecard of top level KPIs to be able to see objectively how your practice is performing now and to allow you to assess performance and success of your blueprint over time. We've buckled in and strengthened our resolve that resistance is expected when there is change, and you're ready to stand firm as we get the team to embrace some changes to better the overall practice. So what's next? Now we're talking about the staff meeting. Most staff meetings consist of the owner. Normally delivering a sermon to the staff, the state of the union, if you will, if you have staff meetings like this, change them immediately. If you get your staff on statistics and they are accountable for their production, the staff meeting will largely be the staff sharing their successful actions that brought about the successful week. You want your staff to do most of the talking in the staff meeting. They are sharing their statistics and owning their weekly performance. And they are heavily acknowledged when they are performing well and stone silence when the performance is subpar. Many practice owners consider that staff meetings are undervalued and a waste of time, but when done right, it's a game changer. The staff meeting is my top five most important actions to set the stage for serious growth in any practice. The staff meetings are very important once you have your staff on stats and have an action plan for the new week. You should start your weekly staff meetings. Now we have a bunch of individuals who are responsible for their own productivity, but it's likely that you're still handling too many things. You'll need an organized leadership team because without one, you'll have too many fires to put out. So you need to establish three leaders, one over administration, one over operations, and one maybe marketing and sales. They are responsible for the performance of those people underneath them. So, your next step would be, if your practice is a certain size, you should name three BPs and let them know that they're responsible for the performance of the staff underneath them. You already have the staff on statistics and you have, operational KPIs that you're using. So, We have something we can measure your VP's performance with. Now you'll find in most cases, after you appoint your leadership team, they will do exactly what they did before you gave them the title of manager, VP or what have you. They don't know how to lead. We can help you with that. Here's what we've got. It's called the private practice blueprint. It's an eight week group delivery course that sets you up with strong foundation of management routines that you follow daily and weekly. That is a catalyst for success. I have been training practice owners in their leadership team for many years, and it is a fact that organized activities expand. Flying by the seat of your pants is fine. If you'd like to stay a small practice within an eight week period, you will obliterate any self doubt about building your ideal practice and light that fire in your belly once again. We will work out your 12 month goals that are objective and measurable. We will then guide you through the strategic steps to pull it off. We want you to have real intangible goals so that we can track your progress in achieving these goals. Next, we figure out in real dollars, just how much money you're losing in your practice compared to practice. benchmarks. We will see where you're losing money from analyzing six key areas of your practice, and we'll show you how to recover that money and adjust your blueprint as needed. We will help you build your CEO muscle, starting with your management of your five hour block. You will know what to do in the five hour block to stabilize the practice, then expand the practice by following your management routines and your practice blueprint that we will walk you through. Next, we will put together your practice scorecard and incorporate into the scorecard the lost income areas of your practice so that we can monitor performance as you implement your lost income strategies into your practice blueprint. One entire weekly call is centered around getting your staff on board, handling their resistance to change, and how to get compliance to orders. There are tons of fixed ideas that many owners have about getting staff to be accountable for their performance that can put you on your heels when it comes to handling noncompliance. If you're weak in this area or think you have to be someone you're not to get people to do things, you will find this lesson to boost your certainty in handling opposition and recognizing how to obtain agreement and cooperation from your team. We will work out what each staff member produces on the job in which the company exchanges a paycheck for doing so. You build a building on a solid foundation. The same thing is done when building a business. We call this eight week course the Private Practice Blueprint. We've taken startups to multi million dollar practices, and with all of them, we get them to build upon this foundation in this blueprint. The blueprint applies to any size practice, or any business for that matter. Although establishing these fundamentals apply to any business, this may not be for you. Since this is a group call, we have to have doers and not complainers. You'll be expected to complete your homework each week and get what is needed implemented into your practice. If you want a management crash course for a private practice owner, well, this is it. I deliver it live for 8 weeks. It's complete with programs to implement along with files and various drills for your staff and more. Click on the link below and schedule an interview. The group size will be relatively small because there's a lot of interaction in this delivery. It's not just me droning on and on. Our next class is starting soon. So click on the link below and book your practice blueprint strategy call. You can do this.