BUSINESS

  business strategies

Putting Things in Perspective

You shouldn’t stress about taking time off from your practice. Here’s why.

GARY GERBER, O.D.

I recently had to euthanize my two Bernese Mountain dogs within two weeks of each other. It was an emotionally devastating time. And for the first time in the history of The Power Practice, I shut off my cell phone and e-mail for a week. I was in no shape to make any important decisions and needed some quiet time to grieve.

When I finally turned on my phone and checked my e-mail, I wasn’t surprised to see they were both jammed with messages. What was extremely gratifying and a powerful lesson about taking off, however, is that we were still in business and as vibrant a company as ever. Clients still engaged with their consultants, and their practices still hummed along just fine — even with me disappearing for a week.

Enjoy the fruits of hard work

There’s a saying that no one ever dies regretting that they didn’t spend more time at work. And the goal of this column isn’t to be a downer or philosophize. Rather, it’s to help you put things in perspective and to use that perspective to not only grow your practice, but to enjoy the fruits and rewards of your hard work.

Too often, doctors stress over taking time off from their practices. This can be in the form of delaying vacations or missing opportunities for holiday closings, late openings or early closings. We think, “If I close on Friday, I’ll lose a full day of revenue.”

Missing a week or two. . . gets absorbed through time.

While it’s certainly true that you’ll lose the revenue that would have come in on Friday, you don’t lose it forever. Instead, patients who would have come Friday come before or after. So, a few days before and after are invariably busier than normal. At the end of a few weeks, missing a day or two is an undetectable blip on the graph. Missing a week or two for vacation gets absorbed through more time, but get absorbed it certainly will.

Meaningless daily metrics

This leads to a discussion about the time elements you use to measure metrics in your practice. Not much else is more frustrating to an entrepreneur than a very slow day, especially after a really busy one. Going from seeing 22 patients on Monday to three on Tuesday can rattle just about everyone.

What you need to keep in mind is that day-to-day metrics are, for all but the largest practices, meaningless. For most of us, the smallest meaningful time interval we should consider measuring is monthly numbers, and for many of us that might be too small. In that case, quarterly makes more sense. There are too few data points in one day, and there are too many variations through short periods of time to make comparative measurements meaningful. Weather, news (good or bad) and community activities all can compete for “mind share” and cause your day-to-day metrics to rise and fall. This all gets smoothed out and allows for better business decisions if you look at metrics on a monthly or quarterly basis.

Set aside a few hours

We strongly advocate our clients set aside a few hours per week during which they use that time solely to work on their practices. Any appointment slots that are consumed for this purpose only cause patients to come in a little earlier or later, and, through the ensuing weeks and months, revenues are unaffected.

Asia and Caico, you know I miss you terribly, and you can add this lesson above to all the valuable lessons you taught me. OM

DR. GERBER IS THE PRESIDENT OF THE POWER PRACTICE, A COMPANY SPECIALIZING IN MAKING OPTOMETRISTS MORE PROFITABLE. LEARN MORE AT WWW.POWERPRACTICE.COM, OR CALL DR. GERBER AT (888) 356-4447.