Many innovative leaders within our profession have found there to be a need to break out of the mold we have been living in for the past four decades and be revolutionary about how we operate our practices.
As we embark upon 2020, we need to adapt in order to meet the needs of social media, personnel recruiting, and the most recent reimbursement cuts. We can no longer continue to treat as if it’s 1995, we need to put more effort into cultivating our staff and company culture. This means new technology, new operating processes, new branding, and personnel engagement strategies. So here are a few tips from our leading owners that have proven successful and hopefully afford you the same success.
BE TRANSPARENT
As the leader of your group, be more transparent with your staff. This will help to create greater trust and loyalty from them to you. Share with them your purpose for being in private practice, and the goals you have worked out for the upcoming year. Most importantly make sure they can communicate effectively.
CREATE A CULTURE OF GIVING
Creating a company culture of giving more than taking allows you to take pride in and feel the purpose of your practice in play within your community. You can do this by sponsoring community events, or participating in dollar cost-sharing with your favorite charity. It works like this; for one month you set aside a $1 per treatment to go to your favorite charity at the end of the month. You can also promote the attendance to a community event for the benefit of that organization, or post it out on social media promoting the event.
USE REAL NUMBERS
As the leader of your group, you should know how to run an end of the year summary report and then use those numbers as your baseline for the upcoming year to build your business strategic plan (BSP) from. Never shoot for anything less than a 15% growth year over year. A very important element to this step of goal setting is to involve your key employees in this process from the beginning. The old way of walking down the hall with the plan in hand to delegate duties is old school and not very effective.
CREATE AN ANNUAL MARKETING PROGRAM
In order to be effective, you must tie your marketing annual program to your business strat plan. Break it down into a running two-month calendar of time that we can track our monthly marketing campaigns on and then execute weekly using a very effective tool called the management action plan (MAP).
CAREER DEVELOPMENT TRAINING IS VITAL
The most important tip for your practice to be successful is to have some form of career development training (CDT) within your practice. It should be heavily promoted and used to enhance staff’s skills both personally and professionally resulting in greater staff retention.
Make sure that it consists of the following:
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- Full accountability with an internal function to track the progress of each staff member doing their training.
- Consistent. The messaging needs to be the same across the board, post by post so as to eliminate all possible misinterpretations from various trainers.
- Comprehensive. It should not only train you on how to do your job better but also show you how to be a better person living a happier life with new life skills.
- Engaging with active participation. Otherwise, it’s just a bunch of bright ideas and only about 10% (at best) will be retained.
- Ongoing. It should be frequently updated for relevance in today’s ever-changing healthcare environment.
- Applicable. Physical tools must be given out, and assignments completed to ensure the full application of what has been taught
All owners seek to have staff on-boarded that are certain in the systems of operation within the clinic and how they are designed to help the practice succeed in meeting the new challenges of today. From the front desk management system to effective hiring and onboarding programs it is critical that all possible variables that could lead to misapplication are eliminated. Career development training leads to the recruitment of better staff with higher staff retention that is more efficient and overall productive.
Brian Gallagher, PT is the founder and CEO of MEG Business Management, LLC. He has more than 27 years of experience in the field of rehabilitation and 19 years in business and specializes in Physical Therapy practice management and executive coaching nationwide. As a licensed business management consultant, Brian has helped hundreds of business owners nationwide improve their business operations through proper restructuring to achieve improved systems of efficiency and productivity as well as marketing and sales with effective public relations which have proven results for double-digit growth year-over-year with businesses around the country.
