Why Your Insurance Practice Will Never Grow

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Hey everybody, Matt Scalogli here with the Practice Profit System, and today I want to talk to you about why your insurance practice will never grow. Well, it sounds like a pretty big statement, but I'm going to show you the 3 reasons why your insurance-based practice will never grow and why if you really want to be able to continually serve your patients, it's critical for you to add a cash-based procedure— or cash-based practice, I should say— To your insurance practice. So let me give you a little bit of background context on this. So this past weekend, uh, or actually the first week of November, a couple weeks before this comes out, but we had an event here in Charlotte, North Carolina, where I live, where we did the practice growth event. And what we did is I spent 2 days with a number of practice owners, and we dove in to help them grow their cash-based practice or start or add in cash-based practices. And the funny thing was, is that everybody in the room is insurance-based. And they have tried and struggled to add a cash component to their insurance practice over the last, say, 2 to 5 years. And there's a reason why. You know, what happens is that they have all the good intentions to be able to add the cash-based services, but what happens is that they get back from an event or something like that, or they get— they go back from a training from a machine, and they get back and their insurance practices double with the number of patients because they've been out for a couple of days. And it feels like they can never get to where they will catch up. And the reason for this is very, very simple. So I'm going to talk to you about— there's 3 ways for you to grow your practice, and there's only 3 ways. Well, the reality is, is there's only 3 ways for you to grow a business. There are no other ways to grow a business. This is a basic fundamental of business. This is one of the first things that you learn in business school. It's kind of like Anatomy 101, or it's kind of like basic chemistry, right? Before you go on to organic chemistry, you have to understand the basic fundamentals. And if you don't understand this basic fundamental, this foundation, The rest of it becomes incredibly challenging and incredibly hard. So there are 3 basic rules and 3 basic fundamentals, if you would, to be able to grow a practice. There's only 3 ways to grow a business, I should say, and they apply to growing your practice. So one, you can grow a practice by getting more new customers. Okay, that's the first way— more new customers. The second way for you to grow a business is to Sell more to your existing customers. Okay, so you go and you get more new customers, you sell your existing customers more, and the third thing that you do is that you sell, you raise prices. You sell, you basically increase your price. Those are the only 3 ways for you to grow your revenues. Well, the problem is, is that you can't do that in an insurance practice. You don't have price control. In fact, you have zero control. You have zero control as to what the insurance companies are going to charge you. You have zero control as to what the reimbursement rates are. You have zero control as to when you get paid, right? Now, you may think that you do, but from the fundamentals of business, you do not. And the fundamentals of business don't suspend just when we go into the medical space and we are serving patients. So it's really important that you understand this. Again, I want to state those again. I want you to write these down, and if you're driving, for the love of God, do not multitask. So just maybe bookmark this and come back to it. But again, there's only 3 ways for you to grow a business, which applies to growing your practice: more new customers, sell your existing customers more, increase prices. That's it. Okay, so the challenge with this is, like I said, is that the insurance industry, the way an insurance practice is set up, you can I can't do any of this. Well, the only thing you can do, quite frankly, is you can go and get more new customers. That's it. But you don't get to control how much that new customer pays you. It's dictated to you by the insurance company. So the business model of an insurance practice is fundamentally flawed. And I'll tell you why it's fundamentally flawed and why this is a major issue. for our healthcare in this country. So I want to go down a little bit of a different path here for a second. I get asked this question all the time: why am I doing this? Why am I working with doctors? And I get asked that question by doctors, and I get asked that question by my friends who are in marketing and business. Because while on the surface doctors look like they're a great group to work with, you're a little challenging to get a hold of.

Yeah.

And you're a little bit slow to make decisions sometimes, but there's a very specific underlying reason why I do what I do. And I suspect my underlying reason is the same reason why you continue to have your own practice or just dream of having your own practice to be able to serve your patients. You probably have your own business or are looking at starting your own practice, I should say, because you want to provide the best care possible To your patients. You feel that you believe better than the insurance companies as to what will make a patient feel better, live without pain, live a life without opioids, whatever, right? Whatever it is. Get rid of their type 2 diabetes, drop 25 pounds, sleep through the night, make love to their wife, make love to their husband, stop peeing in their pants, whatever it is. Okay? And you suspect— I'm going to guess you, you— the reason why you do this is you feel that you can do a better job if you are allowed to prescribe, diagnose, recommend treatments that are outside of what the insurance companies deem appropriate. The problem with that is that we know that those appropriate procedures and medications are not always in the best interest of the patient. And so there's a pretty good chance the reason why You're doing what you're doing is that you really, at your heart, want to be able to serve the patient as much as possible. But there is a catch. You have zero training in business. Zero. Or maybe you've taken one or two classes, but it's still not enough, right? So you struggle, you struggle, you struggle, and eventually maybe you give up, or you just get so frustrated that you feel that this is just the way it's going to be. And you see 40, 50 patients in a day, and you just, you know, kind of Deal with it. So that's why you do what you do. And the reason why I do what I do is I believe the future of healthcare is in our hands. And I believe that if I can help you be a better businessman or businesswoman, then our healthcare system stands a chance of not being controlled by bureaucrats in a cube somewhere. I believe that if we want to have true autonomy in our medical space, for you to be able to have the ability to recommend procedures and protocols and medications and treatment plans that are really going to be in the best interest of the patient, that are not going to make them addicted to opioids, that are— that's not going to make them addicted or dependent upon taking metformin the rest of their life. Did you know, by the way, that— If somebody starts a protocol of opioids, I was just reading, one of my doctors shared this statistic with me, that the average patient in 5 years will be unemployed. Think about that. I want you to think about what that means to our society. And so it's incumbent upon us to get this word out to as many patients as we possibly can and treat as many patients as we possibly can. Because by the way, the money that we make from that could actually help us continue to see patients from an insurance standpoint. So you can treat those who don't have the financial ability. to be able to do some of these higher-end procedures. See, this is why it's so important for you to pay attention. I want you to have a great business. Not necessarily— maybe, maybe it's not about driving a Lamborghini or getting a beach house, but maybe it's just simply about providing for your own retirement so you're not a burden on society or your kids or your grandkids. Maybe it's about being able to make enough money in your cash side. So that when you are seeing your insurance patients, you're actually able to spend more time with them because you don't care that the insurance company is saying you only get 9 minutes, or you only have to spend 9 minutes because you have to go from room to room to room to room because you're only making $49 on your office visit. See, this is why this is so important. And this is why it's critical that you learn these business skills, just like you would learn how to do surgery, just like you would take a fellowship to go learn how to do something and study under the best. You need to do the same thing from your business standpoint. This is not something that you can say that I'm going to avoid, that maybe it'll take care of itself. That's kind of like the fat patient saying, maybe the metformin will help me lose the 20 pounds, or maybe if I just cut back to half the number of Twinkies, I'll lose the weight. Maybe I'll just get a shot that will work. No. The patient, if they're gonna lose the 25 pounds or the 100 pounds in order for them to stop being type 2 diabetic, they have to do the work. You have to do the work. Your fat patient, obese patient— I don't know if I can say fat anymore in this society, but I'm going to say it anyway— but your overweight patient, your obese patient has violated the fundamentals of weight loss, and it's why they'll never lose weight unless they go back to the fundamentals. And it's exactly the same reason why your business isn't growing. You are violating the fundamentals of business because you don't Understand them. It's that simple. Most of the people that are obese in your office, that are type 2 diabetic, that have 25, 50, 100 pounds to lose, it's not that they're dumb. It's not that they don't want to lose the weight. It's not that they don't have the desire, but then they become susceptible to get-rich-quick marketing messages and marketing schemes, or to lose-weight-fast marketing schemes or marketing messages, because they think that it's going to be quote unquote Easy. You and I both know it's not about hard, it's not about easy, it's about consistency. It's about learning the basic fundamentals of what it takes in order for you to grow a practice. So your insurance-based practice is never going to make you the money that you want, no matter how many new machines you buy, no matter how many new procedures you add in, no matter how many more seminars you go to for how to do a certain procedure. That insurance practice is never going to make you any more money. In fact, what it's going to do is it's going to suck more time away from you being able to do the exact thing, thing that you want to do, and that is treat patients on your terms, which is why you need to understand these basic fundamentals. The basic fundamentals again are— there's only 3 ways to grow business. They are: get more new customers. 2, sell existing customers more. 3, raise prices. You can't do 2 and 3 ever in the insurance practice. You can do 1. But you can never do 2 and 3. Well, Matt, I can offer them other procedures. But you don't get to dictate the price. And that's where this— that's where that fundamental gets broken. Yes, you can offer another procedure. Yes, you could do some other things. But you, unless it's a cash-based procedure, you do not get to dictate the price. And therefore, you can't make your metrics work, and your business model is doomed. So what do you do? Okay, well, one, listening to this podcast on a weekly basis. Thank you for those of you that listen to me regularly. I really appreciate it. It means the world to me. It's great to watch the number of subscribers and the number of downloads go up. But more importantly, what I want you to do is I want you to check out our site. We are launching a new program called the Business Mastery Fellowship. There'll be some webinars coming out. You'll see them in your emails. Maybe you've already seen them. I highly recommend that you at least listen more to what we have to say about it. We're going to start working with a small collection, a selection of physicians, practice owners, nurse practitioners, people that own their own practices or want to start their own practices. We're going to work with a small group of them every 90 days. And this fellowship is going to be exactly that. It's going to be a type of fellowship. Now, I can't— you can't come here to Charlotte. I'm not going to pay you for the fellowship, right? Sometimes, you know, but you're going to be able to learn virtually. And I'm going to take you through the basic fundamentals. It's going to be relatively inexpensive compared to some of the other things that you pay for. And I'm going to show you how to make some really great decisions to improve your cash flow and improve it quickly. But the last thing I want to remind you of is the insurance business model is never going to work. It just will never work. I have cardiac surgeons, just had a conversation the other day with a cardiac surgeon. I have cardiac surgeons who are coming to me going, My reimbursement rate for the same surgery has been cut by 40%. Cut by 40%. I have surgeons that were doing $5, $6 million a year that 2.5 years later are doing $3.5 million a year and seeing more patients. It's clear where the insurance industry wants this to go. It's clear where the big hospital groups want this to go. It's clear that we have an uphill battle. But the time is now, and the time is now to take a stand, kind of like George did right back there. Yeah, that's George Washington crossing the, crossing the Delaware to go to Trenton and make a big bold move. So what's your Delaware River? Cross it. Let's get after it. Let me know how I can help you. I'm here for you, and I look forward to talking to you soon. Thanks again for listening to the Practice Profit System. This is Matthew Glogli, your host. As you know, every week we launch new stuff. And I want to, I want to be part of that and help you grow your practice, I should say. All right, have a great day, everybody. Talk to you soon. Peace out.

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