Note: As a medical and dental practice management consultant, I can tell you that goals are needed for you and your business to be your best. Is your goal to have the best dental or medical practice and attracting a lot of good new patients? Read this article on how to make your dream come true.
What the business owner can’t imagine he will not achieve!!
It is the business owner, which has to be the main dreamer in the place.
Everyone should be a dreamer for his own life and for the area of his business endeavor.
Let me give you the hierarchy of dreamers, managers and workers.
As said above, all of the best are dreamers. But the “chief dreamer” is best off only to dream. No working if possible. By the way, by a dreamer we are talking about a goal-maker. So every time I use the word ‘dreamer’ or ‘goal-maker’ I mean the same.
It goes like that:
It is the company’s boss, the practice owner, who sets the direction and goals of the practice. This is a well-known fact and every doctor does that, even long before he ever enters medical school.
This is exactly my point: You must dream up something for it to happen.
Then the practice is open, patients start coming in, and everyone, including the practice owner gets busy. That is good; in fact, it is what the practice owner dreamed up before and during medical school.
But here is where the trouble starts and the dreaming ends. Well, actually the dreaming does not quite end but the time to implement the dreams is gone.
The goal-maker is too busy seeing patients, making sure billing is done, OSHA is complied with and the staff in general does what they are supposed to do, otherwise NO profits at all.
The rat race has begun; expansion is slow, overhead high due to government regulation, stress is up and it looks like the dream of yours is not making it. What changed?
Too much work to be able to dream and to implement the dreams.
No time. You started trading time for money and are totally engrossed in the mechanics of practicing and in the daily operations of the practice.
The same, by the way, is happening with your managers.
They after all are supposed to set goals for their departments and then get them executed. They are supposed to constantly check whether all other employees are doing their job. Right ?
But what usually happens is that the office manager really is only the best person for all the jobs and she/he is just doing that. Your office manager has little or no time to manage because she/he is doing the actual work. Sometimes they call it ‘trouble-shooting’. The only reason too much trouble-shooting is needed is because of lack of organization. Also called ‘no real managing’ going on.
Of course not, the manager has no time because he is doing the actual work.
This, my dear doctor, is a real cut-throat situation. It robs you of most of your dreams.
Workers do the work. While they do their work, such as billing insurance or making phone calls or sterilizing the instruments or performing a surgery, they cannot manage and cannot set goals.
The actual ‘work’, by definition, demands the person to be hands on. There is no possibility of doing other things while working.
You might have noticed that I put the doctor as a ‘worker’. Because that is what he is when doing the health care work — a higher paid worker than a typist, but still a worker.
So, a manager must have lots of time to manage, organize and give orders which can be executed by the staff at a certain pre-determined time.
Managers might be the managers because they can do all the jobs and can do them well, but they MUST stop doing them and MUST start running the place.
If this sounds like it will cost you money, because you are too small to have a manager who does “nothing but manage”, then I might remind you that the large companies do not do the things they do (such as having managers, train people at great expenses, do lot of meetings, spend lots on marketing and public relations) because they are large. They are large because of the things they do.
Read the above again. This is important.
Sure, you might have to start small, free up your manager to do the managing some of the time, and you will find that business is expanding more smoothly.
Don’t stop there, continue to free up your manager to manage more and more and expand more and more.
Now, if what I said is true for the manager, then what do you think would happen if you, the practice owner, starts concentrating a lot more on the creation and implementation of your goals?
The moral of the story is that most small business owners and practitioners work too hard so they have no time to dream and set goals. Never mind that they have absolutely no time to organize their dreams into actions to be performed by their staff. Even if they give orders to get some new project (a dream or a goal) going to the office manager, it will hardly ever get done because the manager is herself too busy doing physical work and will have little time to organize the staff to implement your orders. She herself has only two hands and can’t do it alone either without neglecting the other necessary workloads.
So, in order to not neglect the necessary work which services the current patients and pays the bills, most new expansion projects which could bring some well deserved freedom and peace of mind, fall under the table.
Most of the time, such attempts at implementing new dreams not only falter shortly after, due to what I explained above, but in the meantime they distract from the current affairs of the practice.
Contained in our consulting programs are exact ways which you could work your way out of a ‘worker’ position and become a true goal-maker. All you need to do is to believe in your dreams and dare to dream and think big.
Dream on doctor, dream on – and your dreams will come true.
Remember: Doctors and dentists, like small business owners, work very hard – they have to deal with billing, practice management, staff management and new patient marketing etc. But they must make it just as important to set goals and dream.
Category: Healthcare Marketing.
