BUSINESS

  BUSINESS STRATEGIES

DON’T JUST “THINK POSITIVE”

TAKE STEPS TO PUT POSITIVITY TO WORK IN YOUR PRACTICE

IF YOU WALKED INTO your practice tomorrow and had an appointment book full of your favorite patients, the ones who delight you and your staff, a staff who were totally on board with your practice values and goals and never made any mistakes, an admin. side of your practice that ran as smoothly and efficiently as a finely tuned Swiss watch with the power, excitement and energy of a new Lamborghini, and at the end of the day, a checkbook overflowing with cash, would you be happy with your practice? Odds are you’d say “Yes!” followed by, “Gary, you’re dreaming.”

THE DREAM PRACTICE

A practice like the one described above would be a dream practice for nearly all of us. Yet, as our team has talked to literally thousands of doctors and visited nearly as many practices, we do start to see some striking patterns. Those patterns have roots in optometry’s unfortunate legacy of focusing on negatives. Most recently, issues like managed care, EHR challenges, government compliance, Internet competition and too many doctors graduating from too many schools are topics that seem to creep into every O.D. business-related conversation.

With so much chatter on these topics, is it any wonder so many of us are negative about our profession and our practices’ futures? With all this focus on the nightmare of private practice, there is no time or grey matter real estate left to dream of a better practice, let alone a dream practice.

Yet, we’re all aware of practices that seem to flourish no matter what obstacles the rest of us appear to be facing. Are those doctors smarter than us? Do they have 25 hours in their days instead of our 24? Have they hired every last possible rock-star staff person in your community, leaving you with the crumbs of an untalented labor pool? Have they been destined for greatness while the rest of us have been subjugated to mediocrity or worse?

I don’t believe it’s any of those things. And, in fact, after spending the day with our clients at our last national client meeting, I know it’s none of those things.

IT’S MORE THAN POSITIVE THINKING

“Your attitude determines your altitude” is a saying you’d see on a coffee cup or locker room wall. Yet, after spending a day focused around the content in the book, “Stomp the Elephant in the Office” (Wister & Willows, 2008) by Steven Vannoy and Craig Ross, my team and our clients learned that there’s more to these great practices than “think positive.” We were taught how to be positive and how to put that positivity to work in our clients’ practices.

Now, since that day, with the tools and strategies we learned being implemented by our doctors, even those previously submerged, and in some cases, nearly drowning in negativity, we are seeing great results. Namely, the doctors and staff are happier, performing better, and their bottom lines are growing.

A FOCUS ON WHAT WORKS

I can’t do the book justice in this column. But I can tell you the concept of acutely and consciously focusing on what’s working in your practice, being hyper aware about what you appreciate in your practice, patients and staff, setting out a plan to do more of those things and then actually executing that plan, works. And, it is exponentially more effective than the typical behavior we see of focusing on what doesn’t work, blaming our staff, patients’ attitudes and circumstance, setting out a plan that is now focused on trying to fix all those wrongs and being so immersed in negativity as to never execute that plan.

The chicken and the egg conundrum is complex. The happy doctor or successful practice puzzle is easy: The doctor came first. OM

GARY GERBER, O.D., 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.