Do You Own Your Practice Or Does Your Practice Own You?
9 Sept 2022 · 11 min
Matt argues most medical practice owners are trapped by insurance models and endless hours. He outlines three steps to regain control: systematize every procedure so non-medical staff can follow it, create visual workflow tools like flowcharts, and assign one owner to each system with 90-day reviews. He shares examples from his clinics, including a dosing matrix for erectile-function injections.
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Welcome to the Practice Profit System podcast. Do you own a cash-based practice? Are you looking to start one? Tired of working endless hours and still not making enough money? Want to fire your insurance company? Then you're gonna love our podcast. Each episode is full of insights and proven strategies to grow your practice to 7 figures and more, allowing you to take more time off, make more money, and no longer have to take insurance reimbursements. Plus, get a free copy of my book, The Anatomy of a 7-Figure Medical Medical Practice, where I detail my entire journey to creating my own 7-figure practice. Just go to www.srpmedicalmarketing.com/book. You just pay $7.95 in shipping and handling, and you'll also get over $1,197 in free bonuses. That's www.srpmedicalmarketing.com/book. Now on to our show.
Hey, it's Matt with the Practice Profit System, and on today's episode, we're gonna ask— I'm gonna ask you a really simple question. Do you own your practice, or does your practice own you? Well, if your answer was that the practice owns you, then pay very close attention to what I'm about to share with you in this week's podcast episode. All right, so let's talk about this. Let's talk about why You're unable to take time off. Okay, now before we go any further, I do want to remind you that we are starting our next cohort of Business Mastery Fellowship. This is our premier program where we teach doctors, practice owners, nurse practitioners, med spa owners how they can break free, really master their business so their business doesn't master them. That's why we call it Business Mastery Fellowship. And so you can check out the information at srpmedicalmarketing.com. /bmf, or like Boy Mary Frank, or otherwise Business Mastery Fellowship. And this is our premier program at the time of this recording that it's released. By now we've probably opened up the program. We are going to be starting this just after Labor Day. If you're listening to this after Labor Day and you want to get in, still go check out the page at BMF. We do bring people in throughout the entire program. We have a 12-week run that we start with. If we've already started, you can very easily catch up because all of this is delivered virtually and training is delivered via a site. So check it out. This is our best program that we have available. This is our top program. This is the program designed to help as many doctors break the chains of insurance-based care, get paid what they're worth, and be able to treat their patients as they wish. All right, so let's talk a little bit about this whole concept of does the practice— do you own your practice or does the practice own you? Now, The interesting thing about this, there are many reasons why you get into business, right, for yourself. A lot of the times, really, you just realize you're a crappy employee like I am. But the other reason why you do it is you want freedom. And that's really what I want. That's why I've always had my own business. Well, basically, I've had my own businesses since I was like 28, 29, is I wanted freedom. I wanted the ability to make choice. And, you know, I have a really good friend of mine, one of my closest friends, and he's married to a family doctor. And they were just in at the wedding and she was all happy because in the following week she was gonna finally sell her family practice to the hospital group. Now, she's owned her practice for 20 years. And for her, it had just beaten her down and she was unable to take time off. And so she was excited because she was actually gonna be able to take time off and away. She was actually gonna be able to take a vacation, not have to worry about doing office supply orders, things of that nature. And really, the practice owned her. She didn't own the practice, the practice owned her. Now, what I want to share with you, what I'm about to share with you, is I like to take lots of time off. I actually am a classic ADD guy, or ADHD, whatever classification you want to give me. Can work really hard for a little bit of time, but the period of time, and then I like to take lots of time off. I take tons and tons of time off. And one of the ways I'm able to do that is I have really significant systems in place. So I'm going to share with you. 3 key things in order for you to be able to take time off. And this was actually the key that we were able to utilize in order for us to take our own practices and take from startup. And then in November— so we started in January, 9 months later we opened our second location, 8 months after that we opened our third location. And it really came down to these 3 things that I'm going to share with you. First and foremost, you have to systematize Everything. Now, I'm not talking about checklists. I'll talk about that in just a minute. But our benchmark was— again, I'm not a doctor. I want to be clear, if you're a first-time listener to this, I'm not a doctor. I have zero medical training aside from like wilderness first aid for the Boy Scouts and just my time of being in the practices. But our benchmark was Matt— that's me— should be able to read the instructions and do this himself. That was the benchmark that we used. We had systems on how we did Every single procedure. Now we were doing pellet insertions. We did, um, so our core business was we did injections for trimix. And so the patient would come in and we would, um, get all their medical information and then the doctor would create a dose and we would inject them and get them an erection in the office. Now the interesting thing was, is that we actually, with my doctor's help, we created a matrix.
Mm-hmm.
Based on their age, their weight, their ethnicity, because that factored in on a lot of different things with regards to what kind of dosing that we used, the medications that they were on. And this was the first time what we did is I said, Doc, you gotta make it so that I could do the dosing. And it was a little hard for me at first to get that and understand that. I'm like, look, I'm not trying to do the dosing. I don't wanna practice medicine. I don't want to break the law. But I, my point is, is that we've gotta be able to make this as easy as we possibly can because that was a constraint to growth. So the benchmark should be that I should be able to read the instructions and I should be able to do it myself. So a non-medical person should be able to read the instructions and do it themselves. Now, clearly, if you're doing like bone marrow aspirate, pulling it out, yeah, it's gonna be a little bit harder. But the, this is, it's kind of the joke, but it's the benchmark. I hope that makes sense. Again, I know it's harder to explain how to inject interdiscal, but you should be able to make it as simple as you possibly can, because this is how you're going to replicate and replace yourself. The second thing is that you need to create visuals on how to do things, not written. Now, we do have written steps, but our first step is we actually— what we do is we have flowcharts. We have visual flowcharts that we use, and it explains— we ask the simple question, what happens next? Now, I recently just spent 2 days up in Syracuse, or actually Skinny Atlas, with one of my doctor clients. He has 20 staff members. We did 2 days of training with their staff, and this was one of the things we worked on is— excuse me— what happens next? And we draw it out on a board. And in the future In Business Mastery Fellowship, I actually have an entire training about how to create systems. Okay, and then the next big idea, the third thing, is that you have to review your systems every 90 days. And by the way, someone has to be in charge of that system. If they are not in charge of that system, then no one's in charge of that system. 2 people cannot be in charge, only one. And it's their job to review the systems. If they make changes, communicate that to the staff so you don't just make changes, what I call Highway or hallway operations. You know, hallway operations are like, oh, hey doc, I'm so glad I finally saw you. You know, we got this problem with blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you go, yeah, that's fine, go ahead and make that change. But it's never communicated to the rest of the group 'cause you're actually thinking about the next patient or the patient that you just saw or something else. So what we do is we put people in charge of those systems and they're the ones who are in charge of making changes to it. But a change has to be reviewed and approved and has to be laid out to the staff. Okay? And everything is done visually so that people can understand it. This is what we did in our clinics. We had a major issue one time, and what we did was I gathered— it actually had to do with the flow of the patient, and we had to check patients' erections every 15 minutes, and it wasn't happening. And we're having major issues with charting and all of this. And so what I did is I gathered everybody in the room and I took Post-it notes, and we held up the Post-it notes, and I said, okay, Freddy, and that was our med tech at the time, what's the first thing that happens? And we laid everything out, and what we realized is we had inserted about 10 steps that didn't need to be there, and that was creating complexity. So we eliminated them, and I said, that's the system. That's all we have to do. And it became a very simple way to do it. Now, if you do not have systems, if you do not have systems of how to check people in, if you do not have scripts of how to check people in, if you don't have scripts of how how to convert somebody into a high-end program, if you don't have any high-end programs, if you don't have a clear funnel, if you don't have a clear way to bring in leads, a consistent way to bring in leads, if you do not have monthly recurring revenue, if you are not taking any time off and you are feeling completely buried, then sign up for Business Mastery Fellowship. That's srpmedicalmarketing.com/bmf. Now, this is for you and your staff, okay? So it's not just for you. We want your manager there. We want your, your office people there. I want them to be part of these things. I want them to be part of this growth. So it's designed for the entire staff so that they can get all on the same page. So check it out. Leave you with this last thought. When was the last time you took a vacation? Now I'm talking like a real vacation where you didn't bring your laptop, where you weren't looking at charts while you were there, saying, I'll just look, review charts for the first couple of hours in the morning while I sit on the balcony and And look at the pool and have a cup of coffee. Now I'm talking about where you didn't bring your laptop. When was the last time you did that? Been never. You need to be part of Business Mastery Fellowship. If you're tired of, of the insurance game and you wanna make the transition, be a part of Business Mastery Fellowship. If you've opened a non-insurance practice and it's struggling, you're not doing 7 figures a year, or you are and you're working like crazy, join Business Mastery Fellowship. This is for you and your team. I want you to have the freedom that you richly deserve. So Check it out, get in on the early launch. If you're listening to this for Labor Day, srpmedicalmarketing.com/bmf. All right everyone, have a great day. We'll talk to you soon.
Thank you so much for listening. If you liked this episode, take a moment and share it with your fellow medical professionals or post a positive comment and rate it on wherever you just listened. Now don't forget, you can get a copy of my book, The Anatomy of a 7-Figure Medical Practice, for free. Just pay $7.95 in shipping and handling. Plus you'll get over $1,197 in free bonus material. Simply go to srpmedicalmarketing.com/book. That's srpmedicalmarketing.com/book. Thank you so much, and we'll see you next time.
