Measurable Solutions - The Management and Training Blog

Recession? I think not.

2012-01-27T04:52:00.000-05:00

Are there really solutions?

It is apparently visible from all corners of the earth that this nation is going through a recession. You hear it everywhere, “I couldn’t possibly, there is a recession going on”, “Don’t you know, we are going through a recession”, “Right. Like I could afford that during this recession.”

Now, I am not going to get into the politics involved with a recession, or even the economics of it. All I care about it is the view that we all take on it. I’ve been asked a lot recently, “What is the solution to keeping a business afloat in this economy?”

Well there is a solution, but it might shock you. The solution is so obvious, that you might just laugh it off and forget you ever heard it.

THE SOLUTIONS TO SURVIVING IN A CRASHED ECONOMY ARE, IN FACT, THE SAME SOLUTIONS WHICH MAKE A BUSINESS GROW IN A BLOSSOMING ECONOMY.

That may seem like a pretty bold statement, but here is the logic:

Let’s say that the economy was a machine that produced hot air. Bear with me, as this analogy is quite crude. Now lets take two businesses. One will be a brand new business, with very little structural integrity, and very little experience or proper management. This business, or business A as we’ll call it, will be represented by a hot air balloon. Now business B, is a business that has been built and structured using policies, workable and proven management systems, and with employees who are experts in what they do. This business will be represented by a building, which is being built from the ground up, one floor at a time.

The economy comes along and starts producing what some would call an economic bubble. For our purposes we’ll say that it starts shooting out some hot air. What happens to our businesses? Well the flashy hot air balloon booms! Filling up with the momentum of the economy, and rising faster than management can be properly implemented. It sores above Business B, which is still growing very rapidly all things considered. Business A, when compared to all previous accounts, is now huge, BUT it is still not built to withstand time. It is still hollow inside, which is where it matters the most.

Now lets say the economy crashes, or stops pushing out that hot air. Maybe the economy gets so bad it starts to create a little bit of a vacuum. What happens? Business A crashes quickly. It had no structure to hold it up aside from the hot air of the economy. Business B, however, has been built one floor at a time from the ground up, with all the safety precautions and necessary steps to stay stable and growing in this economy. Business B stands the test of time.

Here at Measurable Solutions, I’ve seen business owners who are actually doubling and tripling their business in 2010 and 2011. I see people reaching levels of affluence they may have never even considered possible previously, because they, like Business B, built their company with workable management, and training with integrity and morals.

So do I think the economy is ever a valid excuse for a business to go bottom up? Aside from day traders, and Wall Street cats, not a chance. From my line of sight it tends to seem more like an executive makes his own fate in this business world. By making good or bad choices when they matter the most, he is the deciding factor in whether or not he makes it.

Don’t forget to check out the question of the day below. You can leave your answer as a comment below or email your response to forrest@measurable-solutions.com

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QUESTION OF THE DAY: What is your view on the economy and the effects it has on your business?

EMAIL REPLY TO QUESTION OF THE DAY

Applicable Links: Website - Blog - Business Blog - Email

2012-01-24T17:22:00.002-05:00

2011-10-18T14:46:00.001-04:00

Practice Owners: Stressed on time? Working too much?

2011-08-29T14:50:00.006-04:00

As a practice owner it can become quite easy to take on all of the responsibilities that go with running a practice. You can quickly find yourself shouldering the weight of a burden all your own, but then what about the wife? What about the kids? And what about the friends who you haven’t seen in months? Is it really possible to fully take in the beauty and vitality that this world has to offer while working 70+ hours a week?

Working at Measurable Solutions it is my goal to get our client’s practices booming and get them to the position where they can successfully run their practice from any distance. That means that if your kid has a dance recital, that there is no way an emergency in the practice is going to stop you from getting there.

There are many factors that go into getting a practice running like a well-oiled machine. An indispensable factor in getting your practice operating at full capacity is definitely hiring and training. In my time here at Measurable Solutions I have learned that there are key posts in ANY organization that, when filled and properly trained, will free up huge quantities of time for the owner. This very much applies to private practice owners. The trick to this is as follows:

If you don’t want to shoulder the entire burden of running a practice yourself you will need to know how to find, where to place, and how to train some new shoulders to distribute the weight too.

That is the simplicity of it. Team building is a huge and irreplaceable piece of freeing up some of your time and attention. Many practice owners simply have never learned the basics of hiring, training, and building a productive team.

It is inevitable that you are going to have to work hard as a practice owner, but the question is, where does that hard work put you at a year from now? If all of the hard work you are doing lands you still answering phones, and taking insurance information in five years from now, then you might want to reconsider where you are investing some of your efforts.

Don’t forget to check out the question of the day below. You can leave your answer as a comment below or email your response to forrest@measurable-solutions.com

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QUESTION OF THE DAY: Have you ever encountered any problems while putting an effort into building a reliable team? What was it that tripped you up, and how did you deal with it?

EMAIL REPLY

BLOGGERS NOTE : I decided to take up this topic today because team building will be a hot topic at Measurable Solutions’ FALL OWNERS CONFERENCE September 12-14. Other topics included will be strengthening patient compliance and getting more referrals from your patients. This Owners Conference already has a very exciting Speakers line-up of successful private practice owners, all of whom have created MILLION DOLLAR PRACTICES and will be sharing their secrets! If you would like more information on this OWNERS CONFERENCE you can CLICK HERE to check out all of the details, or call 800.491.2828.

Applicable Links: MS Website MS Business Blog MS Facebook MS Twitter MS Youtube

The Effect of Music on Your Exercise

2011-08-22T11:22:00.006-04:00

This article was posted on the NY Times Well Blog. It shares some very interesting studies on the subject of listening to music and how it effects your workout.

Full article can be viewed at: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/phys-ed-does-music-make-you-exercise-harder/
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"For a study published last year, British researchers asked 12 healthy male college students to ride stationary bicycles while listening to music that, as the researchers primly wrote, “reflected current popular taste among the undergraduate population.” Each of the six songs chosen differed somewhat in tempo from the others.

The volunteers were told to ride the bicycles at a pace that they comfortably could maintain for 30 minutes. Then each rode in three separate trials, wearing headphones tuned to their preferred volume. Each had his heart rate, power output, pedal cadence, enjoyment of the music and feelings of how hard the riding felt monitored throughout each session. During one of the rides, the six songs ran at their normal tempos. During the other rides, the tempo of the tracks was slowed by 10 percent or increased by 10 percent. The riders were not informed about the tempo manipulations.

But their riding changed significantly in response. When the tempo slowed, so did their pedaling and their entire affect. Their heart rates fell. Their mileage dropped. They reported that they didn’t like the music much. On the other hand, when the tempo of the songs was upped 10 percent, the men covered more miles in the same period of time, produced more power with each pedal stroke and increased their pedal cadences. Their heart rates rose. They reported enjoying the music — the same music — about 36 percent more than when it was slowed. But, paradoxically, they did not find the workout easier. Their sense of how hard they were working rose 2.4 percent. The up-tempo music didn’t mask the discomfort of the exercise. But it seemed to motivate them to push themselves. As the researchers wrote, when “the music was played faster, the participants chose to accept, and even prefer, a greater degree of effort.”

The interplay of exercise and music is fascinating and not fully understood, perhaps in part because, as a science, it edges into multiple disciplines, from physiology to biomechanics to neurology. No one doubts that people respond to music during exercise. Just look at the legions of iPod-toting exercisers on running paths and in gyms. The outcry when USA Track and Field banned headphones in 2007 at sanctioned races like marathons was loud and pained (and the edict was widely ignored until it was revised last year). The neurologist and author Oliver Sacks has talked about personally experiencing the elemental power of music after he injured his leg mountain climbing and had to push himself slowly down the slope with his elbows. He told an interviewer: “Then I found the Volga Boatmen song going through my mind. I would make a big heave and a ho on each beat in the song. In this way, it seemed to me that I was being ‘music-ed’ down the mountain.”

Just how music impacts the body during exercise, however, is only slowly being teased out by scientists. One study published last year found that basketball players prone to performing poorly under pressure during games were significantly better during high-pressure free-throw shooting if they first listened to catchy, upbeat music and lyrics (in this case, the Monty Python classic “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”). The music seemed to distract the players from themselves, from their audience and from thinking about the physical process of shooting, said Christopher Mesagno, a lecturer at the University of Ballarat in Victoria, Australia, and the study’s lead author. It freed the body to do what it knew how to do without interference from the brain. “The music was occupying attention that might have been misdirected otherwise,” Mr. Mesagno said.....

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... to see the rest of this article go to: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/phys-ed-does-music-make-you-exercise-harder/

Thank you to the NY Times blog for posting such interesting articles like the one above.

www.measurablesolutions.com

What's a low glycemic diet?

2011-08-18T14:05:00.002-04:00

Tuesday, January 4, 2011 at 10:22 AM

| posted by Monica Reinagel, MS, LD/N

Glycemic load is another way of looking at how a food may affect your blood sugar. Carbohydrates with a high glycemic load (such as fruit juices or doughnuts) will tend to make your blood sugar go up sharply, while carbohydrates with a low glycemic load (such as berries or bran cereal) produce a lower, slower rise in blood sugar. Choosing foods with a low glycemic load (and avoiding foods with high glycemic loads) can help you improve your blood sugar control.

You can look up the estimated glycemic load (eGL) of foods here on Nutrition Data. Foods with an eGL of 10 or lower are considered "low" and foods with an eGL of 20 or higher are considered "high." Note that you can lower the glycemic load of a food simply by eating less of it!

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Originally posted on http://www.self.com/health/blogs/nutritiondata-diabetes

-Measurable Solutions Blog

Exercise and Weightloss

2011-08-12T12:08:00.003-04:00

We all know that it is important to stay in shape, and that the better you can achieve that, the better and longer you can live. It seems that a lot of people are tending to make it more complicated than it needs to be though.

This is an excerpt from a article posted on the All Access Physical Therapy Blog:

"Regular exercise is an important part of effective weight loss, weight management, as well as disease prevention and improving your overall health. Research consistently shows that regular exercise, combined with healthy eating is the most efficient and healthful way to control your weight. In addition, regular exercise can help prevent heart disease and stroke, high blood pressure, diabetes, back pain, and osteoporosis.

Your weight is controlled by the number of calories you consume each day minus the number of calories you use each day. Everything you do, from sleeping, breathing, and digesting your food, uses calories. Physical activity, in addition to your usual daily activity, will help you to burn extra calories. Balancing the number of calories you expend through exercise and physical activity with the number of calories you consume will help you achieve and maintain your desired weight. The key to effective weight loss, weight management, and improved overall heath is to make physical activity a part of your daily routine.

There are a variety of different types of exercises or activities you can do to achieve the benefits mentioned above. The key is to participate in a variety of activities and to do them consistently. Ideally, you should be participating in some sort of physical activity for 30 minutes each day. Mixing up your activities is important so that your body doesn’t accommodate to one form of exercise. A program that consists of aerobic exercise, weight training, speed and agility activities, as well as sports participation will prevent your body from getting used to one routine, improve your metabolism, and be most effective for weight management and improving your overall health."

To read the rest of this article CLICK HERE

In closing it is vital that you exercise and keep your body healthy of course. It is also important, however, to keep it simple. 30 minutes a day at least, change it up so your body doesn't adapt.

Best,

Forrest
Measurable Solutions
www.measurablesolutions.com

Managing a Knowledgable Staff

2011-08-12T10:18:00.003-04:00

I just came across this blog posted by Marshall Goldsmith. I thought it was very interesting. Check it out:

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Managing today's highly skilled professionals takes special skills — and not the ones that you may think. Oftentimes, knowledge workers know more than you do about their jobs. So, how do you manage people who know more about what they do than you do?

In such instances, you have to look at leadership through the wants and needs of the worker as opposed to the skills of the leader. Here are some quick tips for effectively managing knowledge workers.

Demonstrate passion
In days past, working 40 hours per week and taking 4-5 weeks of vacation meant that people often focused less on loving what they do. Today people work 60-80 hours a week and it's crucial that they love their work to avoid burnout. Those who lead by example and demonstrate passion for what they do make it much easier for their followers to do the same.

Strengthen abilities
With less job security and more global competition, it's critical that people update and refine their skills continuously. Leaders need to look beyond skills needed today and help their workers learn skills they will need tomorrow.

Appreciate time
People have less time today, which means the value of that time has increased. Leaders who waste their workers' time are not looked upon favorably. Leaders will be far more successful if they protect people from things that neither encourage their passions nor enhance their abilities.

Build networks
Today, job security comes from having ability, passion, and a great network. Leaders who enable people to form strong networks both inside and outside the company will gain a huge competitive advantage along with the loyalty of their workers. These professional networks allow people to expand their knowledge and bring it back to the organization.

Support growth
The best knowledge workers are working for more than money. They want to make a contribution and to grow in their fields. Leaders who ask their people, "What can our company do to help you grow and achieve your goals?" will find it comes back tenfold.

Expand happiness and meaning
No one wants to work at a meaningless job that makes them unhappy. Leaders must show their workers how the organization can help them make a contribution to the larger world and feel rewarded for doing something about which they are passionate.

Managing knowledge workers is a challenging and rewarding job. Leaders who do so must look beyond the work and think about the person who does the work if they are to be successful. By appreciating and encouraging the dedication, time, and experience of their workers, leaders help shape not only the futures of the professionals they lead but also the future of their organizations.

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To see more posts from Marshall Goldsmith CLICK HERE or go to http://blogs.hbr.org/goldsmith

Best,

Forrest

Measurable Solutions

New Horizons? Looks like it.

2011-08-12T09:10:00.003-04:00

Measurable Solutions since its inception in the late 90's we have been working with primarily private practice PT owners and their staff. It was easy for us to find ourselves in this field because our co-founder Shaun Kirk was a very successful PT practice owner himself. This has worked great, and we have developed great relationships with PTs all over the world.

PTs will always have a dear spot in our hearts here at Measurable Solutions, but we are now (by popular demand) breaking into helping other healthcare professionals and business owners establish and boom their businesses. Dentists, chiropractors, nutritionists, small business owners, no one is off limits.

This technology that has been helping Physical Therapists grow to incredible heights at blistering paces and is not ONLY applicable to them. This technology applied to any business large or small, can work wonders in no time.

I will still post regular updates about Physical Therapy breaking news, updates and achievements on this blog, but we will also now be integrating general business announcements and tips. I look forward to continuing everything we've started.

Best,

Forrest
Measurable Solutions
www.measurablesolutions.com

2011-08-11T13:54:00.005-04:00

Should Pain After Swimming?

2011-08-10T09:48:00.003-04:00

The heat has been stifling this year. The heat cap/wave over the U.S. has claimed over 20 lives so far and with this much heat you can only expect that more and more people will be turning to swimming as a way to cool off.

With the amount of swimming that will be going on this summer, it is important to understand your body and the aches and pains that may present themselves. One thing to be weary if Swimmer's Shoulder.

Brett Sears from About.com says, "wimming requires repetitive overhead motion, which can place undue stress on the muscles and ligaments that support the shoulder. When the muscles that support the shoulder become fatigued during swimming, the rotator cuff tendons and shoulder bursa are at risk of being pinched in the shoulder joint.

The most common symptom of swimmers shoulder is pain in the shoulder that is usually worse with raising the arm overhead. Initial treatment includes following the R.I.C.E. principle to control inflammation. Immediately stopping the aggravating activity is necessary and a gradual return to swimming can occur after symptoms have resolved. A visit to a physical therapist may be necessary to help determine the cause of the problem and to help develop a strategy to prevent future episodes."

If you would like to see the full article by Brett Sears go to: http://physicaltherapy.about.com/b/2011/08/09/shoulder-pain-during-swimming.htm

Kinesiology Taping

2011-07-11T15:35:00.004-04:00

In mid April Measurable Solutions client Tammara Moore discussed advanced taping techniques with ADVANCE Magazine. Here is an excerpt from that interview.

ADVANCE: How did you first come to be interested in kinesiology taping?

Moore: As a sports medicine and orthopedic physical therapist, I'm always interested in evidence-based ways to enhance the care I provide. As textbooks and in-services on therapeutic and kinesiology taping began to emerge in the last decade, I became motivated to investigate the theory and the reasoning behind the modality.

ADVANCE: Can you briefly explain the clinical rationale behind kinesiology taping?

Moore: When we use tape for an injury we're aiming for three therapeutic objectives: reduce pain, reduce swelling, and support the area during healing. We typically see a reduction of about 20-30 percent of fluid in the area after the first application. In some cases the effects can be quite dramatic--it's not uncommon to remove a section of tape and notice a "zebra effect" in which bruising under the taped area has been eliminated, while it remains visible in the untaped area.

And of course there is a psychological component to this as well-a lot of times, people come in fearful and in pain; this gives them something useful so they become an active participant in their therapy, and also serves as a constant reminder of the injured area during sports and daily living.

ADVANCE: What conditions will you use tape for in the clinic?

Moore: I would estimate that I use tape on 10-20 percent of my patients. Anyone that presents with a fairly acute injury, or has an area that needs some support-i.e., hamstring tear, ankle sprain, virtually any traumatic injury resulting in bruising or ecchymosis. Almost every sore shoulder I'll tape. It's also very effective with chronic pain patients, and there is some evidence now of a sensory gating effect, whereby constantly stimulating the Merkel cells is akin to lightly touching a patient and will assist in pain modulation.

If someone has a biomechanical flaw or needs neuromuscular retraining, the tape can hold the muscle in a shortened position to support the area and serve as an unconscious "reminder" to the patient during rehab and range of motion activities. Regardless of the reasoning, we never tape in isolation-this is an adjunctive modality that's used in combination with our traditional sports rehab protocols.

ADVANCE: Is there a specific way to apply it?

Moore: The skill set is actually rather easy to learn and therapists can master it quickly. We even teach it to family members so patients can continue benefiting from it long-term after we no longer see them in the clinic.

The true skill lies in the clinical reasoning behind it. If you're using tape in a structural way, you want to allow compression to the area; if you're going for a microcirculatory effect you want a lifting of the patient's skin as they move, to facilitate fluid exchange. If you're going for sensory afferent stimulation or to alter muscle recruitment patterns, you apply it slightly differently. It depends on the ultimate goal.

The tape stays on for about 5 days, at which time we'll either change it, instruct them to have a family member re-apply it, or discontinue if it's no longer producing a benefit.

ADVANCE: Are more therapists becoming interested?

Moore: I think many therapists initially feel that something as simple as tape can't help the often complex and inter-related issues that their patients present with. That skepticism is warranted. But as research keeps coming out, they're beginning to wonder what's behind it and motivated to learn more.

ADVANCE: How do you get reimbursed for the time and materials?

Moore: SOLPT is a 30-percent cash-pay operation. We're fortunate that our patients see the value that we provide and will pay out of pocket. Specifically as it applies to taping, we'll usually charge the patient for the materials, and because the application time is only a few minutes, we won't charge for the time. There is a CPT code for strapping, but we don't bother coding for it. If we explain the charge structure beforehand, patients rarely have an issue with it.

ADVANCE: Any closing thoughts?

Moore: I'd say the overall message surrounding rehabilitative taping is that our clinical reasoning is beginning to justify the results that athletes have been realizing for some time now. There wasn't a lot of evidence at first, but what we're learning now is that there really is solid research behind this modality. It helps increase range of motion and relieves pain. There's also great work being done in the area of lymphedema, scar tissue reduction, hand therapy, not to mention the work into neuroplasticity and persistent pain, where this is truly groundbreaking.

Is taping a miracle cure? Of course not--but if you can modulate pain and get a person moving again, you can get them actively involved in therapy while decreasing your treatment times and improving your clinical outcomes. One of our 80-year-old patients shattered her ankle in a glider accident and was in chronic pain that wouldn't resolve through traditional methods. After several sessions of taping the area we were able to reduce her pain by 50 percent, and to her, that was a life-changing improvement.

Jonathan Bassett is on staff at ADVANCE, and can be reached at jbassett@advanceweb.com

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Dr. Neil Tricket Shares His Successes

2011-06-20T17:34:00.003-04:00

Click Here to find out what Measurable Solutions can do for you.

Hawaiian Patients Gain Direct Access to Physical Therapy

2011-01-24T11:30:00.001-05:00

Measurable Solutions is happy to see that patients in Hawaii now can get treated by a physical therapist without having to obtain a Physicians referral. While there are limitations on regulations like this in some states, Hawaiian patients will have unrestricted access to Physical Therapy.

Read more >>>

The Crucial Point on Success or Failure

2010-11-02T10:29:00.002-04:00

Are you going to succeed or fail? In this video Shaun Kirk will tell about the crucial point which will determine if you are going to have success with your business or not.

Get Doctor Referrals – Use One Single Action!

2010-08-30T16:46:00.003-04:00

Did you know that you only need to use one single action to make doctors refer?
If you haven’t already you should read the FREE report "THE ONE ACTION THAT WILL MAKE DOCTORS REFER", from Measurable Solutions which describes this action. Using the effective information from this report will without doubt help you with expanding your practice and achieve your goals.

Go read it right now at www.measurablesolutions.com/referrals/

Medical Billing Specialists – Want More Clients?

2010-07-28T10:10:00.000-04:00

Measurable Solutions is helping Medical Billing Specialists to increase their income. The New Client Course is designed to take your Medical Billing Company into a higher level by getting you new clients and Measurable Solutions can also help your existing clients to become more successful.

Find out more on the webpage, go to: www.measurable-solutions.com/professionals

Service Delivery in Park City Utah

2010-06-17T12:44:00.002-04:00

Time is running out to sign up for Measurable Solutions service delivery in Park City, Utah.

If you are on the west coast do not pass up this opportunity to get exactly what you need to turn your practice into the success you want it to be!
The dates are June 26 and 27.

Call us now to register: 1.800.491.2828!

Measurable Solutions Helps With Strategic Planning

2010-05-18T11:18:00.002-04:00

"The strategic planning workshop was outstanding. Jeff and Shaun are effective teachers and provided astute observations and consulting during the development of our strategic plan. The workshop gave us the time and resources to focus on what our business needs in the coming year in order to expand and grow. Shaun also helped us to define the WHY that needs to be properly handled in order to push our success. The experience was amazing and very valuable. Thank you."

-- P.W.

Measurable Solutions News Flash

2010-03-30T09:01:00.003-04:00

APTA neither opposed nor supported the new health care bill that recently was signed into law. What they successfully did do with the help of their members was to help ensure that some provisions, critical to the physical therapy profession, would be included if the bill passed. The provisions:

• Extension of the Therapy Cap Exceptions Process for 2010
• Authorization of a Study of Direct Access Under Medicare
• Advancement of the Physical Therapy Workforce
• Rural Payment Equity Under the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule
• Establishment of Rehabilitation as a Minimum Benefit
• Non-Discrimination
• Guaranteed Issue, Renewal, and Choice

You can read more on this subject on APTA’s blog.

Looking for New Patients?

2010-02-23T15:47:00.015-05:00

Who would have thought that you already have a hidden goldmine you can unleash. The question is, do you know where to look?

The new release from Measurable Solutions, Your Hidden Goldmine, will tell you all about this.

The report will show you how to:

Utilize your hidden goldmine to increase new patients

Change your current market strategy so that it’s more effective

Create better relationships with referring Doctors so that they refer even more

“Wow this was great! A big thanks to Measurable Solutions for doing all the hard work and gathering this data. I know exactly how to get more new patients and it really did come from a pre-existing goldmine!”

•• Sarah, W., PT ••

•• The FREE report is available online: ••Your Hidden Goldmine

Real Measurable Solutions That Result in Best PT Practice Awards

2010-02-10T10:02:00.003-05:00

Advance Magazine is one of the country’s leading magazines in Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation Medicine. The “Best PT Practice Award” is annually presented by Advance to designate the most outstanding physical therapy practice in the nation.

Two years back-to-back the award has now been presented to a Measurable Solutions client who has been trained in effective management technology solutions that bring top results.

Read more about the awarded clients:
Best PT Practice 2009
Best PT practice 2008

The Referral Booster

2010-01-29T12:07:00.001-05:00

If the name, The Referral Booster, didn't already give it away, it really will do just that: Increase your referrals!

Using a tried and true technique, this course will give you the tools and the know-how on how to boost your referral base and unleash your practice's true potential.

Taught in a classroom style setting for only $595, at the end of this two-day course, you will leave feeling completely confident that you can go home and boom your practice.

Call NOW 800.491.2828

Measurable Solutions Announces New Release

2009-12-17T17:03:00.005-05:00

At the December 2009 Owners conference Measurable Solutions announced the release of a new course that hits just right on the spot where Physical Therapists are having problems today.

-- Solutions to Declining Reimbursements

More about this new releases at the EVENTS BLOG or go to Measurable Solutions website: www.measurable-solutions.com

Can Treating Patients Stop Expansion?

2009-11-13T12:08:00.003-05:00

WHEN THE GOING GETS TOUGH, THE OWNER TREATS PATIENTS.

This may seem to you as the right thing to do, I thought so myself, but like it or not SOMEONE has to be at the helm steering the ship. Like the captain who prefers to spend his time in the galley preparing 5-star meals while the ship runs aground, a practice owner who spends all of his time in the gym working with patients could similarly run his practice aground.

Most practice owners spend the majority of their time on what they knew how to do and have no worries in doing so and that is providing PT services. Unfortunately, the worries you experienced in private practice are never patient care related. They were usually administrative related.

Problems such as, “How do I increase the patient visits into the practice?” “Why am I carrying the majority of the patient load?” “What’s happening with the collections?” “How do I get those two staff members to knock it off and get to work?” These are everyday problems in private practice but I don’t think you commonly ask yourself, “How do I fix Bob Smith’s back condition?”

We have solutions for this at Measurable Solutions and our website can give you more information on this subject.

You can also find out more about Measurable Solutions events at www.measurable-solutions.net

Record High Signup for the December 2009 Owners conference.

2009-11-03T15:48:00.000-05:00

Measurable Solutions has already in the beginning of November reached a record breaking signup for this year’s December Owners conference. This tells us that it is going to be even better then last Conference that was held in July which got raving reviews.

Read all about the upcoming conference on Measurable Solutions Events Blog: www.measurable-solutions.net

News Blog at Measurable Solutions

2009-10-20T15:57:00.002-04:00

Measurable Solutions is proud to present their news blog. The new Blog intends to bring you news, not only about Measurable Solutions but also general news for Physical Therapists.

This link will take you there: www.measurablesolutions.com/

History of the National physical therapy Month

2009-10-14T10:25:00.004-04:00

Did you know that the National Physical Therapy Month originates form the National Physical Therapy week which started in 1981. It was in 1992 it changed to be a month instead of a week

You can read more about this and the different Themes through the years at the APTA website.

Demand For Physical Therapists On The Rise

2009-09-30T12:35:00.004-04:00

13 to 18 percent of physical therapy positions are open and this according to the American Physical Therapy Association.

Read more here

The Foundation For Physical Therapy And APTA Announce New Foundation Bylaws

2009-08-31T11:35:00.005-04:00

Taking effect on January 1 2010, the new Foundation bylaws will clarify the relationship with APTA.

www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/162206.php

Michigan Passes Legislation to License Physical Therapist Assistants

2009-07-01T10:03:00.000-04:00

Michigan Passes Legislation to License Physical Therapist Assistants

Michigan is now the 48th state to regulate PTAs, according to the Michigan Physical Therapy Association (MPTA).

Owners' Summer Roundtable Event 2009

2009-06-09T10:45:00.002-04:00

Owners' Summer Roundtable Event 2009
It is about marketing, public relations, promotion, referrals, more new patients, higher numbers and success!

At the Owner’s Conference held in December 2008 we asked the group if they would be interested in getting together again in about 6 months instead of waiting till the end of the year and the answer was “YES!”

So, you asked for it and here it is – the Owner’s Summer Roundtable Event!

This event is a three day series of roundtable discussions hosted by some of our most successful clients. You said that you wanted to hear from other private practice owners and so that is what we are giving you at this event. Modeled after the outstanding presentations hosted in December, these roundtables will address the areas of marketing, public relations, fundamentals of promotion and much more. If you didn’t attend the event in December please check out the earlier posts on this blog to see what you missed.

In all 12-15 topics will be presented by our clients with ample time for discussion, question & answer periods and networking.

Additionally there is time built into the event for everyone to work out a PR & Marketing Campaign that will end 2009 with a BANG!

The Summer Roundtable starts on Monday July 13th at 9am and lasts until 4:30pm on Wednesday the 15th. The agenda for each day is being finalized and the schedule is 9am until 5pm except for the last day. This event is exclusively for our Executive Training clients.

The event will be held in sunny Clearwater, Florida at Measurable Solutions. As usual, we have corporate deals with local hotels compliments of our always hard working Joanne Wheaton so bring the family and make a vacation out of it!

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Physical Therapists Advocate for Access to Rehabilitative Services on Capitol Hill

2009-05-22T12:05:00.000-04:00

Two hundred physical therapists, physical therapist assistants, and students of physical therapy marched on Capitol Hill Tuesday to educate lawmakers about the critical need for patients to have improved access to physical therapy services. The group -- members of the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA) -- conducted approximately 350 visits with Representatives and Senators.

Physical Therapists Advocate for Access to Rehabilitative Services on Capitol Hill

New Patients Requesting the Owner to Treat Them, What to Say

2009-05-18T10:06:00.003-04:00

An owner has many responsibilities beyond patient care. Since the owner is often known in the physician community is it sometimes difficult as the clinic expands and one hires more clinical staff to reduce his or her clinical hours.

Many times patients will call in and ask for the owner but their condition may not really require the owner’s assistance but since the docs consider that the owner is the same as the practice in many ways, it becomes quite difficult to reduce the clinical hours so that the owner can take the helm of his or her ship.

Here is how I’d recommend your Reception handle calls from New Patients requesting to be seen by the owner:

Patient: “The Doctor told me to see Owner.”
Receptionist: “Owner is very busy running the practice on a day-to-day basis and has a very limited schedule when he sees patients. Fortunately, owner also only hires the very best physical therapists to work with him AND he has a firm policy that if after 3 visits working with one on his other physical therapists if you are not happy with your care he will personally move you over to his limited schedule.”

If the patient persists in seeing me:

Patient: “I really need to see owner.”
Receptionist: “Sure. I can schedule you on owner however he does not have a very flexible schedule and as long as your schedule is flexible perhaps we can work it out. Would you like mornings or afternoons?”
Patient: “Afternoons.”
Receptionist: “I’m sorry but owner only sees patients from 8-10 daily. Can I schedule you at that time?
Patient: “Sure.” (Go ahead and schedule as the openings allow.)
or
Patient: “No. I really need afternoons.”
Receptionist: “Let me go ahead and schedule you onto PT (name). She is very good, patients love her and she is one of our best. I will let owner know that you preferred him and I will see to it that he introduces himself to you and makes this transition as smooth as possible. Okay?”
Patient: “Sure. Let’s do that.” (Go ahead and schedule on another)

NOTE: If any patient who requests the owner is placed upon another PT please make a note next to their name that they requested the owner so that he or she may introduce themselves and ease the patient’s concern and to let them know that their PT will take excellent care of them.

Where Am I Losing Money In My Practice?

2009-03-18T10:10:00.000-04:00

In the past 11 years since I started consulting private practice physical therapists, I have heard it all. Everything from competition to managed care as reasons why it's hard to create the practice of your dreams. New patients are needed to keep any practice going but it is how you and your staff manage these patients that determines your success in private practice.

Every practice that I have gone into over the years I have been able to increase the bottom line, improve the delivery of care and markedly reduce the confusion in the workplace, but what amazes me most is the amount of lost income from poor handling of the 5 major income generating areas of any practice. I will cover 4 of them.

The actual amount of lost income can be calculated. I will describe where you are very likely losing large amounts of money and why. These areas if handled will help you lose less money in your practice or in other words, make more money.

We are always looking for ways to increase revenue but we seldom address the areas where buckets of money may be slipping from your fingers. It is common to look at the cost of handling a situation in your office but little attention is paid to the fact that not handling a weak area of your practice is costing you way more than what it may cost to solve the problem.

You need to be able to measure the 5 areas and the way to do it is with a statistics. How can you evaluate how close you are getting toward handling any weak area of your practice or enhance an area already doing well if you are not using statistics? We operate off of statistics.

On the following page I will go over 4 of the 5 key areas of lost income within the organization.

We commonly fail to look at what we are currently losing from weak practice management and training of staff.

1. YOU CAN LOSE MONEY WITH POOR SCHEDULE BOOK CONTROL

Ideally, with proper patient control at the front desk and certain procedural actions in place you can achieve a percentage of kept appointments at 95%. To the degree that the control at the front desk is missing or the patients are dictating when they will come in or not, you will be losing money. This is quite honestly an easy fix and can improve your bottom line quite markedly.

2. YOU CAN LOSE MONEY FROM HAVING A POOR COLLECTIONS RATIO

Once you make the adjustment in your production for managed care and other plans you should be collecting 95% of the remainder. Ideally, when calculating your true collection ratio you would use the last six weeks of collections divided by the previous six weeks of production. For a quick assessment, we calculate your collections ratio based upon the data you provide from your last month's production and collections. There are 8 areas if fully handled will put your collections ratio in a whole new range.

3. YOU CAN LOSE MONEY FROM HAVING AN UNTRAINED OR POORLY TRAINED STAFF

Take your average weekly collections divided by the number of full time equivalents (FTE). Don't forget to include the owner's hours and if he or she works 60 hours that is a 1.5 FTE. Every staff member has value to the organization but some are clearly more valuable than others. When you have a staff member that knows what to do, is very efficient in his or her ability to get the job done and somehow motivates others, you know they are worth their weight in gold. What is sometimes difficult to understand is that getting employees to actually do their job with a high degree of productivity is attainable. Every time you hire someone within your organization you should have a certainty as to how much income per week they should bring to the table through their efforts. The average should be somewhere around $3,500 a week for each FTE.

4. YOU CAN LOSE MONEY FROM LACK OF EFFECTIVE MARKETING

This is the number of potential new patients in a month multiplied by the case average minus last month's gross income. This may be hard to accept but a practice that has a very large referral base sending maybe one patient a month is unkillable. Any successful business attempts to capture territory. The more people who buy some goods or services from them the better. The most risky PT practices are the one where 50% of the referral base comes from less than 10 doctors. Upsetting just one of them can be devastating on your business.

If you were able to acquire a base of say 100+ doctors referring only 1-2 patients a month with 35-40 doctors representing 50% of your business you would be much more stable in business and can waste a doctor if he or she is trying to tie your hands or treat you with disrespect and your business will not suffer. There is a way to get this without having to drop doughnuts off at the doctor's door.

It is always surprising to private practice owners when they evaluate just how much money is lost in their organizations. Try determining just how much money you are losing from having the patients controlling your schedule book versus you controlling it at a 95% Kept Appointment rate.

To find out what the 5th key area of lost income is – email me.

What Lies Keep You From Getting New Patients?

2009-03-03T12:14:00.001-05:00

Measurable Solutions has been delivering our New Patient Course for a few years now. During this time we’ve had several hundred physical therapy private practices come through our facility: some are large and some are small. What is interesting is that I notice there are certain characteristics that all of them have in common to some degree, and I’d like to make them known to you in case perhaps you haven’t recognized any of them in yourself or in your own practice.

Commonly, a physical therapist in private practice has many things that take his or her attention away from the actual expansion of the organization. One of the things to recognize is that the attention is taken away from the expansion of the organization. It’s not necessarily that practice owners want a large facility or multiple clinics, or their name in lights or a shrine built to them, it’s just what we commonly find is what most people want is the ability to run their practice from a distance. And many people are in practice for two years or twenty years, and they have not been able to achieve that goal. There are some of you that have, and that’s fantastic.

We find that in the area of getting new patients stably coming into the practice there are a lot of reasons why this problem has never been addressed. These are what I call the lies that keep you from having new patients.

One common lie that I find quite interesting is the number of private practice owners who come into our company and state that they do practically nothing to expand their practice as though it’s as if they are proud of it, in some bizarre way. I certainly expect that all of us should be doing good work, and if you aren’t at least achieving that end goal of helping patients get well, you should just quit and do something else. But assuming that everybody helps patients get well and their clinical standards are high, I’m always shocked to hear that a large number of practice owners do nothing at all to expand their practice. I usually hear things like, “Well, I’m busy — I treat patients most of the time, and doctors want their patients to be seen by me, so I do everything possible to treat these patients, and if I’m out knocking on doors, then I won’t be able to treat the patients.” What’s usually underneath all that is they don’t like knocking on doors, they’re afraid to knock on doors, and they find it easier just to treat patients and that’s what they do. You don’t have to knock on doors to get new patients, particularly the owner, but you do have to do something, that’s for certain.

Another lie that we hear very often as a reason for not expanding the practice is being overwhelmed. Now, it is an interesting thing that whenever you propose a solution to anyone – including your patients – if the patient is overwhelmed already with things to do or problems in life, they won’t implement it. I mean you could be leading them straight to the fountain of youth, but they would deny it and go in an opposite direction. I find commonly that overwhelm is nothing more than an inability to recognize the important things from the unimportant things. By survey, the average physical therapist in private practice wants more new patients. A tremendously high percent, by survey, say that the number one problem that they would like to have solved is more stability in their referral base and more new patients. With that stated, by survey, we also found that the lion’s share of physical therapists in private practice spent less than one hour a week doing anything about that. In other words, it’s the number one problem where the least amount of energy goes to resolve it.

If you were talking to another private practice owner, and he was telling you that the most difficult problem that he has in his practice is figuring out how to get new patients, yet you also found out that he spends less than one hour a week working on his expansion, what would you think of him? Would you feel like he’s running the ship; that he is truly at the helm -- or his business is running him? If it is something that he wants, why isn’t he making it a priority? He’d better.

Sometimes I hear another comment or lie that holds the practice down, “I don’t want to be too busy.” Now, I can understand how if you were the only one treating patients and your practice got busier, that you would be busier. But in the most successful practices that I am familiar with, the owner doesn’t work more hours, he or she works less. The staff doesn’t necessarily work more hours, they just don’t have any downtime. It’s run efficiently, it’s run smarter. When someone tells me that they don’t want to be too busy, what they are telling me is they are already overwhelmed. And what is interesting, is if you take your patient volume from where it is presently, and cut it in half, just cut it in half right now, would you work half time? Or would you work frantically full time plus try to figure out what you could do to get the numbers back up to where they are right now? My guess is that you would be working frantically. Now, if you knew exactly what to do, and what are the vital steps that you must take in order to turn that thing around, then you have executive prowess. If you work 60 hours a week and you are not able to get your stats into a higher range and increase the volume in your organization, then it’s likely you are doing either things that shouldn’t be done or you’re doing trivial functions that quite honestly don’t expand your practice. The most difficult thing to spot is what are the most important and vital steps to take. I usually don’t hear a practice owner tell me that “my numbers dropped by one half, and I’m working about 60 hours a week doing trivial stuff that doesn’t work, but I’m going in there and I’m giving it my all nevertheless.” Most practice owners consider that they are doing exactly what is necessary to boom the business. But if the stats are not rising, they are not doing the vital and correct steps. Plain and simple.

Expanding your organization is not as complicated as you may think. It doesn’t have to cause more time, trouble, or stress, but there are vital steps that must be taken to make that happen. And a little bit of time is necessary on the part of the owner, to step away from a patient care responsibility to an executive responsibility to make that happen. Those who have done that successfully look back and wonder what took them so long to make the decision and take on the viewpoint of an owner versus a clinician.

It’s not like you can’t treat patients – that’s totally fine. And as much as you might love treating patients, ask yourself this: if you had all the financial problems of your practice completely solved, would you work 40-60 hours a week treating patients? Or would you work maybe 10-20? Think about that. And if you are working anything more than your ideal number of patient visits, then there is something that you need to know, something that can help you have more life.

The practice is supposed to enhance your life in some way. You decided to go out on your own, because you wanted to be your own boss. I think what you ought to do is to consider doing it professionally. Be a professional executive and a professional physical therapist. Take on both and do them both well because you may have your own goals that you would like to obtain as a practice owner, personal and financial. But it is the responsibility of the owner to take care of his or her staff, so whatever you need to make financially or you have as a goal that would make you happy, you better double or triple it, because it isn’t going to be enough to take care of your staff and provide what those individuals would like to achieve working with and working for you. Your goal needs to be bigger.

If you have a successful practice that is doing well and is taking good care of you financially, but you still feel stressed because you have to think about it or worry about it or fret about it, or you have to show up every day to see how things are going, then what you need to do is to improve the skill of those staff who actually run the organization day to day as executives so that they can run it for you. That is really how you get distance from your organization. Have a competent team who knows how to get things done and can make the practice grow in your absence. We can help you. We do it every day. It’s very simple, it is not complicated. The only decision that has to be made is that there is a desire and a willingness to go into action on the part of the owner to expand his or her organization. We take it from there.

How To Create Time

2009-02-16T12:25:00.001-05:00

Catchy title wouldn’t you say? If there was a way to milk out a few extra hours in a day or even one hour for that matter, would you want to know how? I thought so.

I find it astounding how many clients do not implement the training in full because there isn’t enough time to do so however if you were able to properly implement the training you’ve received you would have more time. Catch 22 you’d say and you’d be right.

The trick is, “How do you eat an elephant?” The simple answer is one bite at a time. (I heard they taste like chicken) How do you implement this information you’ve been taught when you haven’t had time and again the simple answer is “one bite at a time.”

My advice to you if you have recently returned home and are about to get started applying this technology or if you have done some training and returned home only to be overwhelmed is that you got the cart before the horse. You tried to implement BEFORE you were prepared to implement.

If you don’t allocate a portion of your day or week to something no matter what it is, it seldom gets done. There are other things that appear to be more urgent that capture your attention and your day ends and nothing you wanted to do got done.

If you are a clinician you know what a schedule is and how almost magically you can complete a patient’s treatment right in time for your next patient’s appointment. Perhaps you were always behind when you were a new practitioner but eventually you figured it out. You realized that if you didn’t stay on schedule you were buried with paperwork and disgruntled patients.

Many times you may have run into a lighter schedule that permitted a hour or two break in the day and you may have wasted it away because you didn’t PUT SOMETHING ON YOUR SCHEDULE DURING THAT TIME. When you have a break like I mention here it seems to be a green light for other staff, who have been waiting patiently for this break unbeknownst to you, to tackle you and hit you with problems and there goes the rest of your day or that break when you could have been doing something to expand the business.

You didn’t, in advance, put something down that YOU wanted to get done so you became the solution for some other staff member’s problem.

Here is how I’d recommend you create time to implement:

1. Find 5 hours a week.
Note: Preferably this is a singular 5-hour block of time. Do not do anything else as far as implementing until you pull off this primary target. You might have to get pretty creative depending upon how many staff you have to spread the workload around but if you can’t figure out how to find 5 hours you will need to speak to your consultant to get their help on figuring this out without crashing the stats.

If you start trying to implement and you have a staff greater that 3 or 4 and you haven’t figured out this time block you will likely generate more confusion with your staff than order and they will not be able to get those confusions cleared up because you are treating patients and don’t have time.

2. During the 5-hour block you simply implement.
Note: Start with your implementation programs, the first one and go on from there. Make sure that you simply follow the program and DO NOT skip any step. If you take those 5 hours and decide to “catch up on your notes” or some other PT responsibility you are in Treason as the executive for not wearing your hat and could end up spending the 5-hour block writing up a Treason formula. (Not really kidding here.)

3. Don’t become backed-off in confronting those staff members that seem to get you to feel that they need to be handled differently than the rest of the group.
Note: Too often we can’t confront certain staff and when we begin to implement it really can push a few buttons on people so some staff can begin to push your buttons in return to get you to back off. If you really are certain in your application of the technology you are on sure footing here. If you back down when another pushes back you are sending a message to the rest of the staff that all they have to do to disagree is to be like ________ and you will back off. They won and your organization will likely emerge smaller and with more internal turmoil. I’ve got at least 20 clients that could attest to you on this point as being the greatest reason for their difficulties.

I do hope that this helps you. I believe that if you start with the 5-hour block and apply correctly and confront situations are they arise you will soon be able to increase that 5-hour block to 10 or 20 or more hours a week to wear your executive hat and get some freedom and distance from the practice.

Let me know if this was helpful for you.

I Am Expanding In Spite Of The Competition

2009-02-03T09:47:00.007-05:00

Here is another story from one of our clients that I want to share with you. His name is Amit Gaglani and he has done very well increasing his new patients through the New Patient Course.

“We have been doing very well since I started with Measurable Solutions. I am expanding in spite of the competition. There are at least 3 large corporations, a few orthopedic physicians that have their own physical therapy clinics and at least 3or 4 other private practices around me.
My marketing method before I did The New Patient Course was visiting doctors’ offices. I was trying to create relationships with doctors whenever I could get away from treating patients. That was difficult — when you’re busy you can’t go out and when you’re not busy you go out – it went up and down constantly.
I knew this was a losing situation. I knew that unless I continued to create a good relationship it is not a long lasting relationship because the doctors forget about you even though you do great physical therapy.
One of the things I would tell the doctors was, “You know, I could be the best physical therapist in the world, but if I don’t have patients, I’m not helping anybody.” In other words, unless I’m seeing patients, I’m not really utilizing my skills for any good. The reason I went into this profession was because I want to help people, but unless the physicians know that we can do that great work, it’s all for naught.
A few people I know had done The New Patient Course and had some pretty interesting things to say about it. A couple of them were actually scared because they thought they would be too busy and couldn’t handle the business. My frame of mind was I knew that if I keep providing a good service and I keep expanding, there is no limit to how far I can go.
I had a goal and the only way I was going to achieve it was if I got more education. I saw the value of what Measurable Solutions was trying to do to help me and I knew that the only education I had was how to be a good physical therapist, not how to be a good business owner.
The New Patient Course was the first step to something a lot bigger – my gaining control over my practice instead of my practice having control over me. I wanted to gain control over my financial destiny and the outcomes I would have in the future instead of relying on a couple of physicians and hoping that they would refer to me.
I’d like to thank Shaun and Jeff for creating Measurable Solutions and doing something so the private practice PT owner can achieve success. Physical Therapists are here to help people and Shaun and Jeff are here to help the people that help people.”

Is There Really A Solution To Get A Consistent Abundance Of New Patients?

2008-12-22T12:44:00.002-05:00

There comes a point in time in a practice, whether you’re just starting out or have been practicing for years, when you find yourself saying, “We need new patients.” You seem to find yourself up against the same walls as the next practitioner. So what are you doing to bring in new patients on a consistent basis? Doctor’s lunches? Delivering marketing gadgets? Meeting with doctors with the hopes that you’ll get referrals? Does this sound all too familiar?

I’ve been a practicing physical therapist for over 15 years and in private practice for 10 of them and I know what you are going through. As a physical therapist, I have always considered my skills to be excellent; but it wasn’t driving new patients to my door. I needed help.

I had reasons for my difficulties. There were 26 physical therapy practices located within a 3-mile radius, with 14 of them on the same street within those 3 miles. I was also feeling the pressures of managed healthcare; I felt it was getting the best of me. I knew that if I didn’t get tough and learn how to make my practice expand, the practice would consume all of my time and attention.

There were some tools that I didn’t have in my tool kit when I was trying to grow my practice. I learned some basic marketing tools that permitted my practice to expand without having to meet with doctors, because at that time the thought of soliciting the referrals from physicians was terrifying to me. I applied everything I learned and we boomed! In fact, we skyrocketed from there and overall, increased my practice nine-fold.

I sold my practice in February 1998 because I found that once my practice was growing and now on its own, I was sneaking out of the office to help others grow their businesses. The company wanted me to stay in its corporate ranks but I decided against it.

I have spent several years educating myself in a management technology that works; now I share it with others. I am a licensed management consultant, and I have teamed up with Jeff Lee to establish Measurable Solutions, a management training and consulting company for physical therapists in private practice. Jeff has over 20 years experience in consulting healthcare practitioners, including physical therapists.

Our company is called Measurable Solutions for a reason. If you have a problem which becomes solved, what should happen? Expansion of your company! We train you how to grow your practice and measure that expansion! You will know in weeks that you have been helped.

People in private practice, I consider to be a cut above anyone else. It takes a lot of courage to step out on your own. I know, I’ve been there and done it. Sometimes you might wonder whether or not you made the right move. I am sure that you did. There could be some doubt that you have, right at this moment, as to whether your future is very sound; but I am telling you that what we run into with practice after practice, is that if they changed just one little thing it would turn the whole thing around.

NEW PRIVATE PRACTICE LEARNS THE VITAL STEPS TO EXPANSION

2008-10-27T14:25:00.002-04:00

This week I am bringing in a guest blogger who is one of our clients. I hope you find her story to be helpful.

Best,
Shaun

Having seventeen years experience in physical therapy, Kim Chastain decided to open her own private practice.

“I knew that I had the skills as a clinician, but that I’d need further training as an executive in order to run a practice fully on my own. I knew I didn’t have all there was to know about marketing to have a stable referral base. The only option I’d seen out there was to go out and knock on doors, meeting with doctors in person, but I was looking for a way that was less time consuming and that would result in stable success.

I knew I was lacking skill as an executive also. I’d observed another clinic run with all the staff wearing all the hats, with no real organization, no method to grow predictably. They were doing duplicate work and no one really knew how to measure how well each was doing individually. I knew I needed training in the subject of organization itself.

I had Measurable Solutions’ newsletter for a few months, sitting in my briefcase – I would read it once a week at least. I realized that all that they said, all the myths that they had listed – that was exactly how I thought. I thought, this is too good to be true…this newsletter was almost too good to be true. I decided to gather as much information as I could because I knew that everything that I had been taught, If I kept doing that, I was going to be in the same boat. I would never get out of my practice. I would never be able to work part-time.

Shortly after I made this decision, I took the New Patient Course, as I wanted control over my expansion. I knew I would really need to get the word out as I was going to be building my own practice from the ground up. I also realized that despite a respectable degree of success I really didn’t have the knowledge it took to effectively manage a practice.

I completed the New Patient Course two months prior to the opening of my facility. I felt so confident after the New Patient Course that I decided my “dream” was a little too small. So I contacted my contractor and had him double the size of my building. We opened our doors in February, immediately implemented the New Patient Course techniques and never looked back. We went from 0 patient visits to over 225 patient visits per week in just over 4 ½ months! The most amazing thing is that I didn’t have to spend a bunch of time meeting with doctors to do it. Clearly I did not have the time because I had to treat the patients! My biggest problem was getting physical therapists hired on fast enough to keep up, which is a better problem to have than waiting for the phone to ring.

I then rolled up my sleeves and became trained as an executive as well at Measurable Solutions. I can say that I now feel 100% certain of success. Before I believed that only my relationships with doctors would determine my growth. Now I know I can grow as fast as I want to grow and that I can create a diverse referral base through what I now know about public relations and marketing.

I can also say with total certainty that I understand what it takes to make a team and how important every staff member is to the expansion of the practice. Having the ability to manage each individual’s production with statistics allows everyone to be self-sufficient and to determine their own pay as well. We are also starting out with a way to communicate internally which will not waste each other’s time and will allow each individual to do their own job; something which we never had before.

I feel that I really can have the dream that I wanted, I feel that I can opt, if I’d like, to not work the practice at all. I feel that I have all the training tools that I need to create another CEO (that is not even me) and I could leave. That blows my mind -- that I could not be there, and it can be a lucrative business.

With the training, it’s whatever your goals are. Depending on how much you choose to expand is how much you will expand. And I can step out or not. That’s definitely being able to do what I want to do with my own personal life!

I have seen what’s out there by the so-called experts. This is the only workable technology that I have seen. Just the New Patient Course alone, you go back to your practice and you know exactly what you need to do when you go back. No other course has given me that -- even those courses specific to physical therapists.

Prior to Measurable Solutions’ training what the philosophy was to buckle down and shrink. Measurable Solutions’ philosophy is the complete opposite, you know, you have to expand! I never thought that I would be seeing 200 patients a week! I never thought that would happen!

My advice is, if your goal is to be a slave to your practice and have it totally dependent on whether you are there or not, continue to do whatever you are doing. But if you want some freedom and you want to be able to work part-time or not work at all and still have an income, you need to have these tools or you are never going to get out.

I am glad I took the opportunity to do things right the first time in my new practice and would encourage anyone in practice for a long time or just starting out to get trained as an executive.”

A Sneak Peek into the New Patient Course

2008-09-19T14:15:00.001-04:00

Both Jeff and I have been traveling a lot over the past 6 months. We are now delivering seminars in cities across the United States and Canada and while it is great getting out of the office it hasn’t left a lot of time for us to write. So this month we decided to post a sneak peek into the New Patient Course. I hope you find it useful.

You have worked hard to become the best possible physical therapist and private practice owner - now it is time for you to have the practice of your dreams and to have the freedom to achieve your goals.

In order to do that you must have new patients and marketing is the key to a sustained volume of new patients. But what are the correct steps to take?

Marketing your physical therapy practice is essentially communicating with the outside world. Sounds simple enough, you want new patients and so you send out newsletters, e-mails, birthday cards, holiday cards, and informal “thinking of you” letters to current and former patients as well as “thank you” notes to doctors who send referrals. You visit doctors and buy lunches in the hope that it will result in more referrals but there is no guarantee.

As our clients learn in the New Patient Course, typically what happens in most practices is that they have a certain patient volume or ceiling that they consider is all they can treat because of the current staff situation. This results in a patient volume that looks like a rollercoaster. New patients go down so you have to go out and build relationships and meet with doctors. New patients go up and you stop doing the actions that resulted in the increase of new patients because now you are treating.

As time goes on, the practice statistics take on an appearance of going up and down, up and down, up and down over a period of years. Since many practice owners may be commonly used to the rollercoaster and were not completely certain as to why the statistics went up to begin with, they are not surprised to see them fall.

The solution to this is simple and it is based on knowing how to correctly staff your clinic not just on how to market your practice.

Here is something interesting…

If you were just starting a new physical therapy practice and you are the first staff member as the owner/PT, the office manager/receptionist/administration/collections is the second person you hire and typically the third person is a PTA. The third person you hired in this scenario is your first mistake in private practice. Ideally, the third person you should hire is someone who drives in business into the organization, doing whatever is necessary. Typically, it is an omitted step. So how does this manifest itself in most practices? What happens is, the numbers are down, and the PT/owner has to go run out and try getting referrals. So whom do you go see? So whom do you go see? Do you see the doctor who likes you, and is sending you a lot of business or the person who is sending you a couple of guys? You go see the one who is sending you the most business already. You get the scenario of a large practice depending on four or five doctors! 60% of the people who attend our New Patient Course have lost a major referral source within the last 6 months, or there is a threat of one. Doctors who do not refer you business do not like you! Plain and simple. Don’t take it personal. They may simply not know you but regardless of the reason if they are not referring to you then they don’t like you. The doctors who do refer a lot of new patients to you do like you and when you go to see them they like you more. So how do you break this cycle?

The question you must ask yourself is this, if you could increase the number of new patients into your practice without having to go meet with doctors who don’t like you and if you could do it with out actually having to do it yourself, would you? Let us know.

Marketing a Physical Therapy Practice: What Works & What Doesn't

2008-07-31T14:53:00.002-04:00

The most frequently asked question we hear is, “What is the most effective way to market my practice?” The answer to this is both simple and not-so-simple. The simple part is that you should market your practice at every possible opportunity and from every position in your clinic, and you should market to everyone who either has the potential to be a patient, or has the ability to refer you a patient.

Marketing a private practice is a multi-faceted activity. The most successful practices utilize many different types of marketing and promotion. Successful practice owners realize that marketing is not just something that one does only when the patient volume is low. They know that marketing is a perpetual pattern of behavior that never slows or comes to a halt. Some clinics spend thousands of dollars each month to market their practices, while others spend virtually nothing. Ironically, some owners spend thousands of dollars each month and get virtually nothing in return. They simply market the practice the way they have seen others market their own practices. Handing out colorful brochures, expensive prescription pads and other “educational” materials is common practice. Another popular strategy of many owners is to set up lunches with physicians to gain the opportunity to market the practice to the physician and his/her entire staff.

The question is, “do either of these methods work?” In some instances, such marketing efforts may, indeed, be effective. Many of the owners who participate in marketing of this type will testify that their efforts pay off, but few have any statistics to back up their assertions. Factually, printed materials such as brochures, flyers, prescription pads and literature are only effective when presented in such a way that the recipient is actually desirous of the information being presented. An example is when you are walking down a busy sidewalk and a local business has hired a “hawker” to loudly announce the product being sold while aggressively stuffing flyers into the hands of anyone who will make eye contact with him. Typically, you will reluctantly accept the printed material, only to discard it in the trash can down the block. Do you want your expensive, glossy, four color brochures handled the same way?

With regards to marketing lunches, a similar phenomenon occurs. The physician’s office has become so accustomed to pharmaceutical representatives providing lunches for the staff that they have extended this practice to physical therapy clinics. These “meet and feed” sessions are simply standard operating procedure and have no inherent value to the physicians or their staff. In their minds, the therapist is simply another “drug rep,” hawking his goods or the latest and greatest treatment technique. What’s an hour or so in exchange for a free lunch? The physician did not ask for this “education” nor does he desire to be educated. In fact, in the physician’s mind, therapists are so dependent upon physician referrals, that they will often dodge the lunch entirely, showing disregard and contempt for the therapist’s intentions. They simply don’t desire or appreciate the marketing effort. The therapist is over-reaching in his or her efforts to promote the practice. Moreover, pharmaceutical companies spent $7.2 billion last year marketing their drugs to physicians. It is doubtful the pizza you ordered will ever measure up to those standards.

If physical therapists are going to learn to market our services, we are going to have to learn the laws which govern effective promotion and marketing. What makes people want what you are selling? How do we get consumers to want what we have to offer? How do we get others to reach for what we are capable of providing without demeaning our profession in the process?

Since developing the New Patient Course Jeff and I have been constantly striving to answer these questions with better and more efficient answers. The current success of our clients demonstrates that we are getting this product. If you have any questions on how to market your practice please let me know.

Community Economic Solutions

2008-07-15T09:23:00.009-04:00

Following a survey of our clients on the current state of the economy, we were glad to see that 97% of the clients surveyed felt that the executive training they received at Measurable Solutions has helped them to be successful – period. The answers were varied but all held the common threads of the Management Technology itself, certainty, plans, policy, programs, accountability and how to rise above what is happening outside their practice so that they could be in control of their future. This was excellent news but we also found that over half of these same clients felt that their practice had been adversely affected by the economy due to the stress it was putting their patients under.

Knowing that the real solution to a stable economy is the Management Technology we use with our clients, we have been involved in charitable activities since we started this business to place this Management Technology into as many hands as possible. This provides us with a point of control from which to weather the storm of bad news that we can get hit with whenever the economy is viewed as in poor shape by the "experts".

For this reason we wanted to provide our clients with the same opportunity to make a difference in their own communities, across the country and abroad. So we held a special briefing on the Measurable Solutions Legion of Honor which is a charitable campaign to get this technology into the hands of the general public through public libraries. We held the event during the PR Workshop and our clients donated over $72,000 which will place these materials in over 170 libraries.

We want to thank each and every person who attended that event and especially the clients who made donations.

As the event was held during the PR Workshop we of course also sent it out as an event to the local newspaper here in Clearwater and they covered the story. It you want to see the article and photographs just click on the link titled "Community Economic Solutions" in the Recognitions, Associations and Press Releases section of the blog.

Best,
Shaun Kirk and Jeff F. Lee

How to Handle Competition

2008-06-20T12:18:00.002-04:00

As both a private practice owner and as the co-founder of Measurable Solutions, I have noticed that physical therapists in general are constantly worried about competition. Physical therapists worry about competition from not only physician owned practices and chiropractors but also from other physical therapist.

Why is that? The fact is there is no shortage of potential patients but there is a very real shortage of physical therapists. Do you know how many people there are in the United States alone? There are about 300 or 400 million people in the US and North America and if you add Canada to the mix, that’s a lot of people. How many therapists are there in North America? Not that many. As a matter of fact, on the high end there are only about 27,000 physical therapists in private practice. That’s not enough therapists to treat that many people.

The truth of the matter is that at some point in their lives a large percentage of the population is going to need the services of a physical therapist. Unfortunately the majority of the population has no clue what physical therapy is and what it does. So they are going to go somewhere else, or they will just take a pill, or get surgery, or they’ll get this or that and then maybe they will end up seeing a physical therapist because they eventually get referred. Yikes! That’s not the way you do business. The way you do business is you gain control of your market!

Now, you get control of your market and your practice is going to take off. When you learn that the success or failure of your practice is totally hinged on YOU, then you are going to start going places. The only reason the practice is doing good or bad, is because YOU are there. And you’re at the helm.

The New Patient Course teaches you how to drive in new patients and the Executive Training teaches you how to be the CEO of your practice. Armed with this information you are completely capable of gaining control of your market and expanding your practice regardless of any perceived, real or imagined, competition. How do you handle competition? By making yourself the best executive you can possibly be and using the tools you learned in the New Patient Course to successfully promote your practice and gain control of your market.

Why Seminars?

2008-05-19T15:56:00.002-04:00

Jeff and I developed the Seminar Series in direct response to what was needed and wanted by our most successful clients. They told us that they wanted even more experience in how to apply what they were learning and so we laid out the top areas of concern and designed a seminar for each area.

The purpose of each seminar in the series is to help our clients better apply what they have learned in their Executive Training as well as to cover issues specific to private practice physical therapy. It is an opportunity to not only learn the successful actions I took in my practice to apply this data but also to learn from some of our most successful clients.

Another benefit of the seminars is that they are the first chance our clients get to bring their staff down for training other than the New Patient Course. The staff get a first hand look at Measurable Solutions, other clients and what their boss has been talking about since he started going to Florida all the time. It becomes real to the staff how they fit into the big picture and this literally fires them up. They want more and as a result the Seminar Series has become a bridge so to speak that helps our client’s employees become more effective at their jobs and reaching for more training.

This of course helps our clients achieve greater freedom from their practice so that they are able to BE the owners and secure a brighter future for themselves, their families and their employees.

Each month we hold a different seminar and some are now even being delivered in Salt Lake City, Calgary and Toronto. Next month we will be holding the Referral Source Management Workshop in Clearwater as well as in Salt Lake City.

I regularly get asked by clients "What else can I do in addition to the New Patient Course?" Well one of the answers is this two day workshop. Clients have stated after doing this workshop that they have many ideas of how to get referrals from physicians that they have had trouble getting referrals from in the past; that the drilling is an invaluable tool that gives them confidence with the subject matter and that the workshop gives them the power to handle doctors. All in all this workshop has proven to be very successful for our clients.

I would love to hear from you on what you have gained by doing a seminar with us as well as what you hope to get from future seminars. Just drop me an email with your thoughts.

How to Customize the New Patient Course

2008-04-25T10:43:00.005-04:00

Hey Shaun,
Its Amy Seaman with Freestone Rehabilitation in Bozeman, Montana. Nate and I were in the New Patient course in Calgary in April. The results are fantastic. I am looking ahead to the 11th and 12th week and I had some questions regarding the "program" which is normally the Spine Program with PTs. We are looking of course for upper extremity focus and I remember you mentioning a OT group that had done this prior to us. I was just wondering what approach they took in regards to this program letter. Any info you have would be great!
Thanks, Amy Seaman

Dear Amy,
Here is how I would handle the program letter. We have other OT practices as clients of MS and what we have them do on the substitute of the SPINE program is to do what is called an "invoice survey". An Invoice survey for a clinical practice is to simply look through your database of people who have purchased your services (patients) and find out what they most commonly purchased from you (meaning what is the most common broad category ICD-9 diagnosis) and promote that service. It is most likely, unless you are sitting next to a hand surgeon, that you see a variety of patient conditions but there is likely one that you see more of. Maybe its cumulative trauma I am not sure but one thing to get your wits around is that if you promote a post-surgical condition you have dramatically reduced your referral pool to just surgeons. I have seen this many times where PTs promote to doctors for ACL Patients which is a much smaller base that back pain and get a significantly smaller result. So pick something that:

1. Has a reasonable reimbursement rate

2. Is a large enough condition that doctors (all) would know about and see in their practice and not just the specialists.

3. Is a non-surgical condition.

Once you guys sort out the condition you wish to promote for the New Patient Course the format of the program is a piece of cake.

1. Speak in very broad general agreements and "never tell them how you do what you do!"
2. A simple gradient to almost any patient condition would be to 1st get the symptoms of pain under control. Next work on passive ROM within the limits of a patients pain. Next move into an active or resistive range of motion or strengthening and lastly independence in ADL or return to work training.
3. Look over the simplicity of the Spine Rehab Program for the simple points of agreement and design your program much like that.

So Amy I hope this has been helpful. I am expecting to hear some great things come out of Bozeman very soon.

Do well,
Shaun

Ask the Owner!

2008-04-17T11:32:00.008-04:00

When it was suggested that Jeff and I set up a link on our blogs so that you could ask us questions I felt like I had just had a “V-8” moment!

Since this is something new I thought I would start the ball rolling by letting you know why I want to do this. I do what I do because I want to help others and I think that having this line set up will not only provide me with an opportunity to help you as an individual but also to help the group as a whole.

So, any questions I receive that I feel are valid for the entire group I will post along with my answer.

I am really looking forward to fielding the questions that you may have so fire away and I will do my best to answer back quickly!

Shaun

How to Handle the Recurring Lows and Highs of Patient Visits

2008-04-03T15:20:00.002-04:00

Sometimes a practice owner will find himself running into the same situation again and again. One area which most practice owners commonly don’t handle on a permanent basis is the actions they take to drive new business in the door.

Most practice owners put the quality of the care, the time they spend with patients, the results that they get in clinical practice as the areas that they put most of their attention on. This does not mean that practice owners should weaken their quality of care, because if their quality of care is weak their success will be short-lived. It does mean, however, that if no one knows of a practice owner’s results in clinical practice, he or she is going to have some difficulty.

There is commonly a feast or famine situation when it comes to running the practice. Practice owners will become busier for some reason and then things slow down, often with the same degree of surprise. Part of the reason for this is that practice owners are not fully handling the situation of consistent marketing.

A typical PT practice is such that a certain volume of patients come in the door and when the patients are discharged, the practice has to create some more business. So typically the owner will go out and knock on doors and talk to doctors to get them to refer patients to the clinic. Unfortunately in most cases, the owner is also the clinician, so when the patients start coming in the owner has to now treat the patients. As the owner is moving through that process of treating the patients, he no longer continues to handle the situation of getting in more new patients. Consequently, the patient volume drops.

This is a situation that becomes handled and then has to be rehandled again. The problem of getting consistent patients is not a terminatedly handled situation.

If an owner was fully handling driving new patients into the practice, there would be actions within the practice that would occur every single day and every single week that would keep the practice growing and expanding, instead of only taking action when the numbers are down.

In other words, a practice can be put together in such a way that the owner has activities going on that make his or her results in clinical practice broadly known. These activities get done on a regular basis, regardless of whether the patient volume was already through the roof or not. These are in fact ordinary activities which resolve this particular problem of having consistent patient visits.

Of course, when the situation of having consistent patient visits is handled, the owner finds himself facing other problems, such as not being able to hire on staff fast enough to keep up with the demand.

I have to admit that one of the problems that we create for many of the people who have attended our New Patient Course is that the volume increases to a point where they have to hire new people and FAST. In a slow growing practice, the owner might have an idea that he needs to hire a therapist perhaps in the next 3-4 months at the rate of expansion that he is having. And commonly he will go through whatever actions he normally goes through to bring on a therapist in the next 3-4 months. But if the practice owner is truly handling the situation of what it takes to drive in a consistent volume of new patients week after week, he might have to find that Physical Therapist in a much shorter period of time, possibly 3-4 weeks. But that is a better problem to have.

By survey, many practice owners have two phenomenally weak areas when it comes to confronting and handling. These two areas are getting a consistent volume of new patients and getting paid for the services that you deliver. In the absence of this ability to confront these two areas, all kinds of problems come up which have to be handled such as: “We have no patients” and “We have no money for payroll.” These problems can have very serious ramifications on the practice, but if the owner handles them only when something blows up in his or her office, it slows down expansion and can give the owner quite a lot of headaches.

So what I am trying to share with you is that there is a way to terminatedly handle the worry and stress of bringing new patients in your door. Having consistent patient visits could give you some other worries such as, “How do I handle bringing staff on fast enough?” but even that we can help you with. I will tell you this – there is significantly less worry and stress when you have certainty on the expansion of your practice than when you don’t.

Step Off the Roller Coaster and Get into Control of Your Business!

2008-03-17T12:10:00.002-04:00

One of the most common complaints that business owners have today is that they feel their business is running them and that they’re being pulled in every direction instead of really running the business themselves.

Well, I’d like to tell you, when I was first in business I experienced the same thing. I was working too many hours, not seeing my family as much as I should; my staff always came to me looking for the solutions to day-to-day scenarios and so on. I found I was lacking the amount of time necessary to really do what I needed to do in order to ensure the expansion of my business.

After years of burning the wick at both ends, I decided something needed to change quickly because my candle was getting ready to burn out.

I realized that in the midst of running my business with all its stresses and being a husband and father, I needed to get my priorities straight, re-evaluate my purposes and really become the very best administrator possible to make my practice and personal life efficient and enjoyable again.

You’re probably thinking what you’re going through is normal or that’s just the way it’s always been or supposed to be. Well, I’m telling you it’s not normal, that’s not the way it is and you don’t have to live with these administrative difficulties or be controlled by your business.

So, how do you change it and get off the roller-coaster ride? There are a few important factors to look at in order to accomplish this. First, take a look at why you became a business owner in the first place. Are you fulfilling that dream the way you envisioned it in its entirety? Now, look at everything that is not optimum or that you’re experiencing that is not part of your dream. Look at things such as: Are you spending enough quality time creating a future for your company? Do you spend time with your family? Does your staff know their positions fully? Does your staff put problems or situations on your plate that you need to now solve? Does your staff get along or are you a mediator to their continuous problems? Are you working too many hours and lacking the return? Are you pounding the pavement to generate more business with little to no success? Are you behind in your financial plans or goals? These are to name just a few of the common areas of concerns that business owners face. Take a look at those things that come to the top of your mind that concern you the most. Then prioritize those things which are causing the most difficulty for you in your company or life.

It’s easy to list out what may be going downhill, but the ultimate question is how do you turn those things around?

The way you do that is by becoming the very best administrator possible so that you can manage, train and delegate in order to create the most effective and efficient machine possible. What is an administrator exactly? Well, per the Webster’s College Dictionary “Administrator: n. 1. a person who manages the direction of a government, business, institution or the like. (Latin- administrare to assist, carry out, manage the affairs of.)

There is no other person in your business that is more responsible for your business than you. And when you assign that responsibility to someone else and detach yourself from it, you get into trouble. Now, I’m not saying you should be handling all the positions in the office, because after all that’s what is making the business control you. What I am saying is you should know every aspect of the positions in your office and train those under you to handle certain tasks in their entirety and then manage them from above. This is one of the most basic fundamentals of being a good administrator and when you can successfully master this fundamental you will be on your way to a happier life.

How to Increase Your Business and Make it Grow without Killing Yourself in the Process

2008-03-05T15:52:00.003-05:00

The typical business owner is usually heavily involved in the day-to-day production of the company and manages around the edges. When they try to make a run for the bathroom someone will commonly stop them and ask them a question. Oftentimes the owner doesn’t have enough data to actually answer what’s going on or solve a particular problem. This lack of information can result in making some poor decisions. Sometimes the owner will make a decision for a staff member and the staff member walks away thinking that the decision or solution will never work. At times owners get very frustrated with their staff when presented with problems in the office which require their help -- saying that they are busy and when they get a break they will solve that issue -- not realizing that this particular approach results in the staff waiting for the answer to their questions -- this slows down overall productivity.

What I have found is that the owner often finds that things that are going on in the office that are hard to face and confront and seem very difficult to manage. It either makes you nervous or it might upset another or perhaps you lack the know-how of how to solve the problem and you don’t want to show it. Or you hope if you wait long enough, maybe it will just go away. But unfortunately, some problems must be confronted. Some problems or situations need to be faced without flinching or avoiding. We can make all kinds of excuses so that we don’t have to face something, but every time we do, we usually end up with more problems later.

Let’s take a situation where you have a staff member who has not been doing his or her job extremely well. At one time this staff member was doing very well without any difficulty. But over the past few weeks you notice that there has been a drop in the job performance and that there is less desire and spark in this individual. You assume that there might be something going on at home -- perhaps an upset with the husband or wife. You choose to ignore it. Let’s say that over time the job performance starts to falter even further. You start having negative thoughts about this individual. Maybe perhaps start wondering whether or not he or she is the right person for the job. In actual fact, all you need to do is just talk to the staff member and find out what happened prior to the decline in job performance. It could be something like the staff member was telling you about his or her weekend and you were distracted and walked away. Something as simple as that. Before having this conversation you might have imagined that this was a very complicated situation -- perhaps a touchy subject, so you shouldn’t even ask or inquire, when in actuality it was just a simple misunderstanding.

Have you ever had a problem in the office that you were not really handling and you went home and talked to your wife or husband about it as though they were going to handle it for you? Have you noticed that they usually don’t handle it for you? They may give you a couple of ideas, but then do you go back in the office and implement them or do you continue to ignore the problem? This is what I mean by adding complexity to something that you cannot confront and face without flinching or avoiding.

Even in the action of driving in new business this can come up. Most owners actually don’t derive tremendous amounts of pleasure going out and knocking on doors to drive in new business or whatever it is they must do to market. They hope that their good work alone will make them busy. Oftentimes it does pretty well but sometimes there are things missing – some things that the owner must do in order to increase and grow the business. Unfortunately, that might require going out and talking to some sources of new business so they make excuses as to why they don’t want to do that – they don’t like it, the person they need to see is always busy, they don’t want to feel like a salesperson, etc. I don’t disagree with any of those comments, but if you don’t have another solution in hand to solve the problem of how to increase business then why not go out and knock on doors? Everybody else does. What are you not confronting?

Maybe it is uncomfortable. But in actuality, no matter how many excuses you want to make up, if you are not doing anything to get new business, then you are not confronting the situation. You are complicating it.

When it comes to managing a business, the typical owner, as I mentioned before, works most of the time handling the day-to-day production and a very small amount of time around the edges trying to run the business. If you decided on Monday morning to work 20 hours a week handling daily production and the other 20 hours doing the administration, what we usually find is after a while you end up spending most of your time handling daily production again and leaving almost no time for administration. What happened? You may not know how to be an executive and grow a business. It seems hard to confront. You do know how to produce. You can confront that, so that is what you do.

Somebody needs to be at the helm, running and guiding the ship. That someone is the owner and if he or she is absent then that ship sails aimlessly in the night. There is a way to increase your business and make it grow. There is a way to put together a team that is completely behind you and helping the organization achieve its goals so that the individual team members can reach their own goals in life. There is a way to drive business to your door without compromising your own integrity and feeling like a salesperson.

You may have heard this before, I say it quite often -- if you keep doing what you are doing, you will keep getting what you’ve got. In order to move the business up to a higher level, you need to realize that you need to change what you are doing.