How to Create the Ideal Practice
Do you want to have and maintain an ideal, high-profit optometric practice with lots of happy patients and staff? If so, your first step is to have a clear vision of EXACTLY how that looks.
Why? Consider this. Just like with a patient’s vision, when something goes wrong, it may or may not be simple to fix. The longer it’s been going wrong the more difficult it can be to correct.
Just like having patients do an annual exam, there is a best way to get early warning that something is going wrong – and that is to know how it SHOULD be. How else could you spot when something is NOT right except that you already know what “right” is.
Imagine you’d never seen a percolator coffee pot before, and someone set one down in front of you and asked if it was broken – if you don’t know what the proper functioning of that coffee pot is, you might think it’s broken because of the strange noises and sights it makes while working. Or if you don’t know what good coffee tastes like, you might think it is working fine despite terrible coffee coming out.
So you need to know how your practice SHOULD look if it were perfect, so that you can tell when it’s not perfect, and fix it so that it will be perfect. This applies on a large scale and a small one. To run a successful practice, you and everyone in your business must know how clean your bathrooms should be, how your reception area’s seating should look, etc. You must know how the entire practice should operate.
This is simple but terribly important! It has three simple steps: 1) Know how your practice SHOULD look or WOULD look in the most ideal conditions. 2) Find those things that do not coincide with #1 (called “outpoints”). 3) Figure out how to handle them so that they look like #1.
Try it! I think you’ll find it works like a charm.
Of course on a professional level we use a more detailed series of steps which involve categorizing the outpoints, assigning them to particular people or areas and figuring out WHY they are that way. Then we address them in the correct manner. In the interest of keeping this newsletter brief, we’re only dealing with the basic idea, which you can apply to remarkable results in your practice.
We have methods for visualizing the ideal scene of your practice, spotting which elements are not meeting that vision and working out proper ways to handle any aspect of the practice. At Vision Practice Management, we take great pride in helping optometrists find a way to have a really ideal practice.
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