By: Michelle Jara, MBA, LSSGB

Do You Know Where Your Practice Stands?

If you are like any other Practice Owner or Manager, your day consists of an intense balancing act between pleasing your clients, supplying exceptional patient care, supporting your staff, and trying to find a break in the day from the madness. You spend your day continually putting out fires. Inevitably, your to-do list keeps growing and that production report you wanted to review gets placed on the back burner. All the practice goals and projects you wish to carry out remain unfinished quarter after quarter. Sound familiar? You are not alone.

Unfortunately, this is an all too familiar scenario for many leadership teams. It is no surprise that one of the challenges practice owners and managers face is keeping their finger on the pulse of the practice. According to Traction: Get A Grip On Your Business (Wickman, 2014)1 the five most common frustrations of running a business are a sense of lack of control, managing people, low profit, little to no growth, and the “nothing is working” feeling. Often, it can feel like it is impossible to know how your practice is doing due to the complexity and dynamics of running day-to-day operations.

Your practice is very much an entity that requires attention, care, and resources to support its sustainability and propel growth. Additionally, you must ensure your practice is readily able to adapt to changing times. You must have business skills and processes in place. The question is, how you can do this in a realistic way that will help your practice reach the next level and sustain continuous success? How can you manage your time? How can you hold your team accountable for achieving practice goals? Where do you even begin? Before answering these questions, you must start by understanding the basic components of your practice.

Understanding the Basics