Advance warning – if you are a practice owner, I am going to burst your ego.
You see most practice owners will say they built their business with long hours, sweat and tears. In some cases, many tears. I often see the tears, but rarely do I smell the sweat. Maybe we all use good shower gel or use so much antiperspirant it can stop a dam from overflowing.
Anyway, it is true most practice owners put the hours in. And many would also at the beginning of their journey earn less than if they were employed by another business.
But the reality is most successful practices were not built by their owners because most practice operators are artists. What does that mean?
Well, medical professionals in the business are dreamers attached to the service of healthcare. We don’t care so much about the money. We don’t care so much about the systems and procedures. It’s all about healthcare. It’s about the passion of doing what we do.
The problem? Passion on its own is not enough. The practice only operates if the owner is there to operate it. Take the practice owner out and the practice is, well, out of business.
And passion is never enough if you want to scale a practice. A successful sustainable practice requires leverage. It means it needs more people to make a difference.
Zig Ziglar said: “You don’t build a business. You build people, then people build the business.”
I agree.
But because we do not see it that way, we believe we are the ones that make a practice successful. After all, we need to brag about the long hours, the tears and yes, it is the only time we are happy to talk about our smelly sweat.
How many times have you thought to yourself, “I have to build my practice?” Or, “I have to ‘create’ a successful practice? Or, “I have to ‘assemble’ the perfect strategy for my practice.”
But, have you ever thought of yourself as a motivator? Or a leader? Someone whose job is to build up the self-esteem of your team?
As practice owners, your job is to sell the product or service to our team. Get them to understand the passion, the mission, and the dream. And instead of one person (you) being passionate about it you now have an army of passionate people.
You have to remember that it is your responsibility to “build” your people; your team. And once this happens, once you have a “built” team, then your people, your team, will work with you and work on building your business.
Think about all the successful businesses out there. If you take out the passionate business owner, will it still operate? Did Bill Gates write the code for Office? Does Elon Musk work on the assembly line? Does Jeff Bezos pack and deliver products and did Steve Jobs build the first iPod?
They all came up with ideas, sold the idea to their team and their team made the business. And you may think that the above billionaires are in a different league to you and you will be right. But every successful business I have seen has become successful because the leader was the dreamer, loves their product or service offering but the team made the business by doing the things the business needs.
So, next time you ask or tell yourself you have to ‘build’ a practice or you have to ‘create’ a successful practice stop and ask yourself a different question that goes something along the lines of:
‘What do I need to do to get my team to build my practice.’
And that may mean you have to ask two more questions:
– Who is it that we need to hire? and
– Who is it that we need to fire?
Because if you cannot sell your passion to your team, don’t expect your patients to buy into your passion.
If you would like to have a discussion about building your business, give us a call.
