Do You Have The Wrong People?

One of my old clients, when asked how many people he had working for him would think for a moment and then quip, “Oh, about half.”

Yes, there are some staff who are not trainable. In fact, they are actually not employable! Yet you may have some of them “working” for you, or at least taking your money.

In the system of management we use, personnel are divided into 3 categories: The WILLING, the DEFIANT NEGATIVE and the WHOLLY SHIFTLESS. How do you identify these?

Starting with the defiant negative, this is a person who says or acts out “NO.” In some cases they seem very nice and say, “yes, yes, yes.” But you can’t get them to do the task you are asking them to do. Whatever the mouth says doesn’t connect with the real world.

In some cases they have lots of reasons why whatever you want done can’t be done or shouldn’t be done. They give you all the reasons they can’t make recall calls or send out insurance forms, and then when you go in with your next patient, they go back to watching their YouTube video.

Some people are completely shiftless. They just don’t want to work. They waste your time, in some cases they use up all their sick time and are very unreliable. Some practices are stuck with this kind of personnel. And they tend to spoil the morale and production of the rest of your staff.

I have seen an extreme example of this in two practices recently. In one practice, they were stealing about $7,000 worth of frames a month. In another, they embezzled over $39,000 in the last year.

You know the lifestyle that you’ve worked so hard to earn with all that investment of time, effort and risk. Want to know where it’s going? Maybe you have hired the wrong people.

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How to Train Your Staff

So you have staff problems? Your staff is not performing the duties you hired them for. You show them how to do it and they only do it when nagged or watched.

There is a principle called the “irreducible minimum.” A person on a job tends to drop the less visible tasks and only do those things they absolutely have to do. If they did any less, they’d get fired.

You hire someone to hold the front desk, to welcome patients, do recalls, follow up on insurance and another two dozen tasks. They sit at the reception desk text or email their friends. If they did any less the patients would never arrive in your chair. Business begins to slip. What do you do?

One important tip is to ensure that the staff actually understand the words and terms of optometry and for each piece of equipment they operate. We have lists compiled that can assist in this. Even veteran staff often have lots that they don’t understand and this gets in the way of their ability to do their functions and handle patients properly. Whatever system you use to train you staff, this tip is of critical importance.

There are 2 right ways to train your staff and an infinity of wrong ones.

If you have experienced great difficulty in getting staff to perform, if you have to issue a constant stream of orders, if your staff still screw it up even after they’re “trained” then you have discovered some of the wrong ways to train them.

Why not give us a call and discuss your situation and see if there is a simple, straight forward way to improve it and bring about a practice that works the way you’d really like it to work.

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Why We Are Different

The vast majority of optometrists have so little actual training in running a business or professional practice that it’s a wonder they do as well as they do. In fact, if you had that little training in optometry, it would be impossible for you to practice.

The result is that even in practices that run pretty well, there are dozens of petty annoyances and problems that crop up continually. A lot of this centers around staff and their weaknesses.

There are slow seasons every year when you lose $500-$2,000 per day in production because there are no patients in the chair. This comes right off your bottom line and is lost income you can never recover.

Your staff know how to re-confirm patients and you’ve told them to do so. But they do only a fair job at it and you lose money every day from patients who don’t show.

It’s hard to find good help. With all the unemployment there are 6 people looking for every job, but the quality available today is shockingly poor. How do you find the right person?

You hire what you think are good, loyal staff, using your “common sense” and gut feeling. But by my estimate, employee theft or embezzlement are major problems in 1 out of 3 practices, and poor employee performance is a problem in almost every practice in America.

You want to replace a staff member, but doing so is very costly, even when it is done smoothly. The cost of the ads, the training, the lost business because of rookie errors.

Sometimes you have to hire 2 or 3 people before you find the right one.

Some of it is attributable to the doctor and some is a problem with staff and lack of know-how to fix these issues.

What is the actual cost to a practice to let these things go unaddressed and unhandled day-after-day, year-after-year for the life of the practice?

This is where having a Certified Master Consultant to guide you through can pay off in spades. Not only can you fix the problem you have now in a smoother, less costly manner, but you learn how to manage and control your business from a trained professional.

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Your Staff, Your Most Valuable Asset?

There may have been a time when it was possible that in order to be a successful optometrist, a doctor simply needed to know his trade and ply his medicine skillfully, and a successful practice would follow from that. But popular wisdom has been proven true: ‘times, they are changing’. With increased demands and expectations from not only patients, but also paperwork-driven, bureaucratic insurance providers, and vendors, maintaining a successful practice requires considerably more than medical know-how.

An effective, efficient staff is an absolute necessity to running and maintaining a successful practice. At first it may sound like a glib one-liner, but the fact of the matter is simple: your staff must be your most valuable asset. The reason for this is straightforward: your staff is responsible for every aspect of business that you’re delegating to them; if your staff is a headache, if they’re irresponsible and ineffective, you’ll never trust them enough to take on the truly difficult, time-intensive aspects of running your business that you shouldn’t be spending your valuable time on.

And business management, personnel development & training, everything that goes into running the people of a practice is not something that is taught to graduating optometrists! Take a moment and imagine how smoothly your practice would run if you could trust every aspect of maintaining your business besides the actual medical procedures to a member of staff. Paperwork, scheduling, payroll, maintenance, the list goes on and on. It’s not a convenience when your staff runs everything for you – it’s a necessity for a successful business!

There are simple, effective, proven methods to inspire your staff, encourage them toward efficiency, and training methods that guarantee they’ll be able to do what you need from them, in exactly the way you prefer it to be done. At Vision Practice Management, we know them and are ready to get your business to the place it needs to be with professional, responsible staff members.

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How Do You Motivate Staff, Anyway?

Many practices have lost their sparkle and are caught in the grind because no one is motivating the team. In surveys done of optometrists who have used outside consulting firms, one of the consistently recognized benefits mentioned is “my staff were more motivated,” and of course that meant “more productive.” Continue Reading…

What the Right Staff Can Do for You — Optometrists Get Big Benefit from Hiring the Right Staff

In our surveys of optometrists at the South Carolina Optometric Association Convention in Myrtle Beach this December, issues with staff surfaced as front burner problems. And for good reason. Good staff is the make/break of your practice. Let me illustrate with a true story. Continue Reading…

Today’s Optometrist™ - PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE

Since this may be my first chance to get to know you, I want to take the opportunity to give you a sense of my own background and the purpose of Vision Practice Management.

I have been building my five successful practices in Columbia, South Carolina, for more than 20 years. Prior to that I started first as an associate, had my own private practice and several other arrangements. Whatever your style of practice is, I’ve probably done it.

During the first 10 years I found myself struggling with challenges I didn’t like - staff issues, marketing failures, turn-over, patient retention, training weakness, financial shortfalls and more. When I began mastering the skills of management, I found that I could successfully overcome these challenges and grow my practice with far less effort than I had imagined. At this stage of my career, while I still see patients when I’m in town, I have built a strong team so that I have not been involved in the day-to-day running of the practice for several years.

This offers me the freedom to see patients when I wish, as I enjoy that. But I can travel, spend time with family and pursue my other goals while enjoying a good income whether I work or not. Continue Reading…

Since Good Staff Are Often Hard to Find . . .

Maybe you have noticed there is not an abundance of certain vital resources - like competent staff.  So what are you, the owner or manager, to do when you can’t seem to find the personnel you are looking for?  If you are smart, if you want your practice to grow, you will train your personnel to be as good as you need them to be. Continue Reading…

Are Your Staff Your Most Valuable Asset?

It pains me to see how some optometry practices  continue to struggle with personnel problems. I realize that personnel can be unruly, troublesome and downright problematic.  An effective practice management system will always put a lion’s share of attention on making sure your staff are a valuable asset.   Our senior practice management consultant, David Sanders, has proven to me that by taking control of this vital - even crucial - area, I am cultivating my greatest strength, and the very foundation of greatly increased profits.  Continue Reading…

Welcome to our practice management Blog - for Today’s Optometrist™

As President of Vision Practice Management, Inc., and owner of five thriving optometric practices, I am pleased to acquaint you with our CEO, and Senior Practice Management Consultant, David Sanders. David and I agree that you should manage your practice your own way, but we believe that you want your practice management system to lead to more profits and a more secure future.  Right? Continue Reading…