The EntreMD Podcast

5 Steps to Make Your Private Practice 1% Better Every Day

• Dr. Una • Episode 434

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We often think that only big changes can make a difference, but that couldn’t be further from the truth!

As any successful physician entrepreneur will tell you, it’s the small changes that build the ultra-successful businesses you see and admire.

That’s why today, I will share the 5 steps you need to make your business 1% better and more profitable every day.

Trust me, if you commit to this process for the next 90 days, you’ll completely transform your business. 

Let’s dive right in!

—

Key Takeaways: 

  • 00:00 Intro 
  • 00:32 Little things matter
  • 02:07 Why the 1% rule is so powerful 
  • 04:59 Defining clear objectives for the next 90 days 
  • 06:41 Creating a simple plan 
  • 08:49 Recruiting your team 
  • 09:19 Build a reporting and accountability system 
  • 12:26 Celebrating
  • 14:00 What I want you to do 
  • 17:27 Outro 

Additional Resources:


When you are ready to work with us, here are three ways:

  • EntreMD Business School Accelerator - If you are looking to make a 180 turnaround in your business in 90 days, this is the program for you.
  • EntreMD Business School Grow - This is our year-long program with a track record of producing physician entrepreneurs who are building 6, 7 and 7+ figure businesses. They do this while building their dream lives!
  • EntreMD Business School Scale - This is our high-level mastermind for physicians who have crossed the seven figure milestone and want to build their businesses to be well oiled machines that can run without them.

To get on a call with my team to determine your next best step, go here ...

Speaker 1:

The opportunity we have to make private practices more profitable is unbelievable. Yes, we have to handle the insurance companies and we have to do all of that, but we have so many things we can do in-house, like right now. Hi docs, welcome to the EntreMD podcast, where it's all about helping amazing physicians just like you embrace entrepreneurship so you can have the freedom to live life and practice medicine on your terms. I'm your host, dr Imna. One of the things that will revolutionize your business the most is this understanding that little changes over time creates the beautiful, ultra successful businesses that you see. It is not tied to doing one big thing once. It is tied to doing little things, little things over time. So today I'm going to show you how to make your business 1% better every single day. This means 365% better, or maybe 260% better if that's the number of days you work every single year. If you do that, you'll build a business that is one of the most innovative, most impactful, most profitable businesses. Okay, so let's dig into this Now. What really inspired this is I released my latest book, the Profitable Private Practice Playbook, which is the game changer. It is a book every private practice owner should have. If you are a private practice owner and you haven't gotten yours yet. This is the time to stop Like right now, go to entrendycom forward slash private practice book. Get your copy today. If there's a private practice owner you actually love, okay, so this is your friend, this is your colleague, this is your spouse, you get them a copy. Like you pause this, I'll be here when you get back. You pause this right now and go get it. Okay, now we did a survey to go alongside that and you can find it on the same website and it is a survey to look at, to really assess the profitability of your practice and look at the opportunity, the incredible opportunities that are just staring you in the face, that are there in your private practice. So let me read some of the data points for you and you'll see why this 1% principle is so powerful. So I asked a few questions. I'm going to read these out to you. So, co-pays are collected prior to the time of service 39% of the people surveyed said never happens in my practice. Okay, deductibles are collected prior to the time of service 61% of the people said yeah, we don't do that. Outstanding balances are resolved prior to the time of service 17% said we don't do that. Insurances are verified prior to the time of service 22% said we don't do that. Statements are sent out at least monthly for outstanding balances 17%. We don't do that. Get this, my schedule is at least 80% filled. Most of the time. 48% of the people said no. And this goes on and on and on. And when I look at this, I see nothing but opportunity. I'm like, oh my goodness, the opportunity we have to make private practices more profitable is unbelievable, unbelievable. Yes, we have to handle the insurance companies and we have to do all of that, but we have so many things we can do in-house, like right now, right now. And when I saw it I was like, oh my goodness, these are little things, these are simple things.

Speaker 1:

Imagine if somebody decided okay, I have all these opportunities. So somebody look at it like I have all these problems. I do not call them problems, they actually get me excited. They're opportunities. We have all these opportunities. And what if we could just take them? And every day, we just get 1% better, we get 1% better, we get 1% better. You may not fix everything in a day, but imagine what you can fix in 90 days, if you're focused, six months, if you're focused, a year if you're focused, three years if you're focused. And so in the book we have Dr Ebony, who is our case study. She's made up with our case study and at the end of the day she's almost $800,000, like she recovered in her practice by taking care of these things. So again, am I saying you're going to get $800,000? You may get less, you may get more, you may get a whole lot more. And this was for one doctor. So if you have more than one person seeing people in your practice, you have no idea how much money is sitting down there. Okay, and so if you haven't taken the quiz, go take the quiz too. It's on tramdcom forward slash private practice book. But it made me come up with this concept 1% better.

Speaker 1:

Now, if you're discouraged by the things happening in your business, whether it's a private practice or not, this is the deal. This is what I tell my clients. Your business is and will always be a construction site. It is and it will always be a construction site. There will always be things to work on. There will always be things to make better. This is always going to happen. And so when you look at it, you're like something to fix. Just convert it into a project and fix it. Don't make it a thing, it's not a problem, it will always be. It's never going to be done. You're never going to build and say, whew, we're done. That's not the way that works.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so let me give you this process. What to do is get out of the weeds and define clear objectives for the next 90 days. Okay, so let me say let's assume that there is a person, and this person was not doing any of these things. You're not going to fix all these things. This is where the overwhelm comes from. Right, oh, I have these 10 things to fix. I don't know where to start from. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Then you get into paralysis and you don't do anything. You just stay frustrated, which doesn't help anybody. You are a savvy physician, entrepreneur. You don't do that, okay. So what are you going to do instead? You're going to take clear objectives. So we're going to say, okay, our schedule is not 80% fall most of the time. So we're going to fix that. And we're not collecting any co-pays at the time of service. We're going to fix that. And since we're there at the co-pay place, we're also not taking care of any outstanding balances before the time of the visit, and so we'll take care of that. Oh, but, dr X, you have these 12 things that are not working. Yes, but over the next 90 days, we are going to work on three things. We're going to fill up our schedule. We're going to work on three things we're going to fill up our schedule, we're going to start collecting co-pays and we are going to start taking care of outstanding balances. Doing those three things has the potential to bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of a year.

Speaker 1:

You can practice what I like to call I don't even know if I call it that or if I heard that from Brian Tracy but what I call creative procrastination. Okay, it's not like oh, you know, I'm not disciplined, so I'm just procrastinating. This is more like I chose to procrastinate. Okay, so I have 12 problems to fix. I am taking these three and we're going to tackle them over the next 90 days. So that's the first thing. That's the first thing. The second thing is then create a simple plan. Okay, create a simple plan that could look like for filling up your schedule.

Speaker 1:

Maybe Dr X has been in private practice for the last 13 years. If Dr X has been in private practice for the last 13 years and schedule is not full 80% of the time, I guarantee you there are thousands, thousands of patients on part of his panel that are overdue for appointments, and so the simple plan may be plan number one. We are going to recall everybody in our practice who is overdue for an appointment and tell them Dr X noticed that you are overdue for an appointment and we would like to get you in to take care of this immediately. So does Wednesday at two or Friday at 9am work for you. Simple call, simple strategy, right, and it could be automated. There's so many ways to do it, but the bottom line is we're going to do that.

Speaker 1:

Strategy number two is that Dr X is going to, over the next 90 days, attempt to build a referral relationship with three doctors who would happily refer to him. See how it's a simple plan. We're not doing 2000 things, we're not buying 700 million things. Simple plan Will those two plans deliver? They will deliver, they will deliver, okay, so that's so, that's, you know, for the schedule, we can do that.

Speaker 1:

The copay, we just it's more, you know, we're just like okay, so now we collect all copays. So when they come in. You know, dr X is excited to see you today and all of that stuff. Your co-pay is $20. How would you like to pay for that check or visa? The option of not paying is just not there, right? So we start doing that Outstanding balance, you may decide. It's a simple thing. When we do the reminder call, we'll say, oh, ms Jane, we noticed that you have an outstanding balance of $120. Let's take care of that right now so we don't have to wait on that. When you come in for your appointment, how would you like to pay that Visa or MasterCard? So those are three simple things.

Speaker 1:

So create a simple plan. So three objectives, not 1 million, and one to three. It may be simpler than that, right? So one to three objectives over the next 90 days. Build a simple plan.

Speaker 1:

Number three recruit your team. Don't try to do it alone. Bring your team in, say, okay, we have these opportunities that we need to work on in the practice. These are three objectives. You can even ask them how do you think we should approach it? Take the ideas, fine tune the ideas and say, okay, get your team on board, get their buy-in right, because you're going to do this with your team. I don't recommend that you do it on your own. When you have a team, you have people to bear the weight of the responsibility of your practice or your business. Okay, so don't do it alone. So recruit your team.

Speaker 1:

And then number four, which is this is where the rubber meets the road is build a reporting and accountability system, because it is the things that get rewarded, inspected, that get done Okay, they get rewarded, they get repeated, they get inspected, they get done Okay. If you don't inspect it, it's not going to get done. So what does that mean? What that means is if you say, okay, so one of our strategies is we're going to hit the recaller, then you build a system for reporting. So then they can say Monday I made 30 calls. Tuesday I made 50 calls, wednesday I made two calls, and you can go like so what's right? Like so, you want to have a reporting system.

Speaker 1:

Now I'll give you an example. Right, we do in the EntreMD Business School, we do a lot of monthly challenges, right, whether that is a video a day, or whether that is, you know, an ask a day, or like so many kinds of things we've done, and it is not unusual. This happens all the time because we have a accountability post where people go in and say, okay, this is what I did for this day, and things like that. It is not unusual that people say, oh, I realized I didn't do what I was going to do, so when I did it real quick and then came and gave the report, right. So reporting actually drives behavior right. When they know they have to turn in this report every day to say this is how many people I called, then they'll call because they need to do the report right. So it drives behavior. And the next thing that drives behavior is then the accountability.

Speaker 1:

So, on these objectives, you're meeting every week with your team and this can be remember, it's not 2000 objectives, it's three objectives, it's one to three objectives. So you can meet every week and this meeting can take anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes. It doesn't have to be a year long meeting, right. And then so you come in and you're like okay, so this is this objective, this is the team member in charge of this objective, give us your report. And they're like this, this, this, okay, are you having, where are you having a challenge? Where do we need to support you? All of that stuff, boom, good, any tweaks we need to make for this week? No, okay, and then you go on to the next one, right? So you want to have the accountability, because this is the deal If they make those calls, you will get appointments. Chances are you will get a lot of people on your schedule.

Speaker 1:

We have a client who he's like okay, I have holes in my schedule, I'm going to do the recaller. It was so beautiful. He had a virtual assistant team. He had them make calls and initially they go yeah, we made the calls. We made the calls and I think like four of them all together were making 30 calls. And he's like yeah, that's not how this is going to work. How did he know that? Reporting and accountability, right. And so we found out he's like nope, you can actually make a lot more calls than that and all of these things. And so they started slamming it like really making a ton of calls and all that Same people, same number of hours and all of that. And they started scheduling on average 30 calls a day. So he went from a schedule that was not full to a schedule that was booked two to three weeks out because they hit the recall. And so I want you to understand how this is playing out.

Speaker 1:

Reporting, accountability this is usually where objectives get lost. So we have the objective, we built the plan, all of that stuff, we've recruited the team, but there's no follow through. There's no follow through, so everything falls apart. So that's number four, number five. Number five, number five, is this this is the thing that makes you go from one level to the next, to the next, to the next to the next. Number five is celebrate. When you hit that 90 day mark and you're like, oh my goodness, look what we did. Celebrate it, celebrate it, celebrate it, celebrate it, and then rinse and repeat, celebrate, like, oh my goodness, this is amazing. We wanted our schedule to be 80% full. Most of the time Now, out of the 18, out of 20 days, we were fully booked and all of that stuff. And you're celebrating and you're doing all of that, and we're just going to keep the actions that we did to create that. These are now the actions, this is the way we show up, this is what we do at this practice and all of that. And now, for the next 90 days, these are the objectives that we're going to tackle, right? So celebrate, rinse and repeat, celebrate, rinse and repeat, celebrate, rinse and repeat.

Speaker 1:

This concept is so simple. There is nothing I've talked about that is complicated. It is so simple. But if you will do it, what will happen is every 90 days, your practice will be better. Every 90 days. Your practice will make a leap Every 90 days. What is even better is that when challenging times come, you can weather it. Your team is agile, they're flexible, they understand how to respond to circumstances. They don't roll over, they don't play dead. I mean, it's so amazing. It is simple, it is profound. It will change your practice completely.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so how can I make my business 1% better every single day? You do that by engaging this process. You may not be able to make your practice 360% better in a day, but 1% better every working day of the year brings you to 260% better every year. That is a phenomenal business. Phenomenal business, okay. So what do I want you to do? I want you to take this and decide this is what we do every 90 days in my business, private practice or not. This is what we do every 90 days. We have this improvement program that we've put in place, where, every 90 days, we pick objectives, we build a plan around it. We recruit the team, we report and hold accountable. We celebrate Okay.

Speaker 1:

So create your first 90 day block and go to work. Go do the things. Let me know I picked it. Oh, my goodness, dr Una, everything is about to change in my business. Okay, and I'm super excited for you. Okay, if you are also like my goodness, like I, have the potential to create dramatic shifts in my business. You know, sometimes people will tell me I really want to be in the entrepreneur business. I really want to work with you, work with you on a different level, but I don't know if there'll be an ROI.

Speaker 1:

I want you to listen to this podcast episode. There's already going to be a massive ROI on this episode. I want you to think about it already. Then what happens if you're in the EntreeMD business school? Then what happens if this is what you do day in, day out? Then what happens when I mean, you give your team the gift of accountability? But when you have accountability, what happens when you are able to take your whole business? Because we live 90 days at a time in the Entremet Business School, you take your whole business and your life and make quantum leaps every 90 days. That's what happens in the business school. I literally, oh my goodness Okay, let me see if I can do this in real time, because this is something that happened that absolutely blew my mind, and I expect these kinds of things, but I'm still blown away when they happen.

Speaker 1:

This is a doc who joined the Entremdi Business School. It's been less than 60 days and please understand that I'm not promising you this doctor's results. I'm just trying to show you what is possible. Okay, so she said, let me read it. It's like Dr Una exclamation marks everywhere. She's like I started my journey in the business school when, with lots of question marks, we are still under 90 days and, truthfully, she's under 60 days, we're still under 90 days. My goal that I made during the Entremde Live in Atlanta was low like 5K in 90 days, right Starting. Now. She's like guess what? I'm at $25,471 in less than 60 days. She's like I can't wait to see where I'll be at the 90-day mark. It's mind-boggling what can happen when you start engaging the process, the processes, the strategies that are designed to take you to the top.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so if you've been thinking about it, I want to challenge you to kind of replace your fear with vision, or replace your fear with what could be, or replace your fear with all of that and go do your next step, which is to make a call. It is a simple next step and in the Entremdi business school, we are not motivated to pressure you into coming. There are people who've come and have said, maybe wait, and this is when it will be appropriate for you to join, and Makita, who is the boss of all of those things, she does the same thing as well. So, really, you just want to go schedule a call. Entremdicom forward, slash, call, and if it is your best next step, we'll help you come to that decision. If it's not like, we'll just walk you through it, answer your questions, help you determine how this will create an ROI for you and then you can come join us.

Speaker 1:

It is such a magical place, such a magical place. So entremedycom forward, slash call, schedule that call. My team will be happy to meet with you and in the meantime, I want you to go, take action on this and start creating massive results. I want you to identify as a savvy physician, entrepreneur. Show up that way. You have a strategy to show up that way and go crush it. Okay, see you on the next episode of the Entree MBA Podcast.