Hey everyone! We are finishing up the curriculum for our "summer" conference at the beach! We've talked in the past about our Advanced Coding Growth Strategies curriculum and will talk some more about it soon. We have several improvements and changes this year that are pretty exciting.
Today I want to talk a little bit about the curriculum for the Practice Growth Strategies seminar that we will be presenting at our "summer" conference.
It has been eight years since we taught our Practice Growth Strategies seminar. Over the past several years I have learned many more things that I have found incredibly helpful in my practice. We will cover the 'business' side of our practices. There are many things you can do to 'improve' your practice. But what does that really mean. What I've done is to take all the things I've tried and then measure exactly how much profit it translates into. That means I can separate all the programs, advertising, and systems we've developed into two types: Those that make money and those that do not. We will actually cover both types in this talk.
Most importantly we will focus on the systems that improve profitability for the practice. For example, last July we had a very slow season where we literally were half-full every day with our appointments. I pulled a report of all the people that had not been in the office in the last year. We then cut out everyone that hasn't been to the office in the last 2 years-these people were not really 'active' patients.' We then sent out emails, texts, mailings, and physically called these people. We explained that it had been over a year since they had been in to see us and asked if they wanted to schedule their yearly check-up (Health Maintenance Exam) during our 'slow Summer season.' We also explained this was a good time to come in because we had much fewer sick patients in the waiting room at this time.
Our staff spent 4 days calling everyone on the list. Over that time period we made approximately 120 appointments over the next month. That's well over $10,000 in revenue for 4 days of work when the staff wasn't busy anyways. Plus this was necessary medical care that was not being performed because our patients just 'hadn't got around to it yet.'
Just as important as systems that work, we will discuss some of our programs that didn't work. We can look through both systems and analyze why they didn't work. This should save you from making similar mistakes but also we can look at patterns to help predict what will be cost-effective in the future.
We will also discuss many staffing and management issues that we've come across. I have made the mistake of not addressing staff management in a pro-active way. Let me show you the problems that arose plus we will discuss how to identify these early and address them in a beneficial way. We will also discuss three cases where people had to be fired. I will show you what I did. Then we will discuss in small groups how it could've been done better. Even more important we will discuss ideas for how the problems could've been prevented in the first place.
These are just a couple of the things we will be discussing in the totally re-worked Practice Growth Strategies. These 'business items' have always been near to my heart. I haven't been able to teach on these over the past few years because of our focus on coding. This material is very exciting and should be quite beneficial to your practices. I also look forward to learning from our small groups how I can do things better myself.
Next week I will answer some questions and answers that have been coming across in emails. I will also include the 3-day seminar agenda to show you some of the topics we will be discussing.