One of the biggest wasters of productivity in any manager’s day is putting out fires or solving problems instead of working on ways to grow the business. Admittedly, this has to be done. But when problems present themselves in your professional or your personal life, take three minutes and practice what John Harricharan calls “The Power Pause”. At a conference I recently attended, John spoke on this during a brief stretch break. He said there are only three problems in the world: money, health, and relationships. If you think about this in your business, the same is true.

I wear many different hats at our Medical Practices, but the most important hat I wear is the “Director of Guest Relations” hat. While you will never find this title on an organizational chart, it’s the title I use when a patient calls or emails in with a complaint about the services they received. I take each complaint personally because I know that statistics show for every customer complaint there are 26 other unhappy customers who have remained silent. I also know that studies show if you’re able to fix a patient’s complaint, you can turn them into a…

Several years ago I started recommending that Medical Practice businesses add an e-newsletter to their marketing arsenal. If you haven’t yet done this, I encourage you to re-read the article, “Patient Newsletters are Easy with These Free Tools”. If you did implement a patient newsletter and included a way for people to sign-up for the newsletter on your website, in addition to collecting emails at events and at patient registration, then you may be wondering how you can take your newsletter from a “top of mind awareness” tool and convert it into a tool that sells…

A few weeks ago an article ran in the sidebar of Medical Practice Success about tracking customer satisfaction using the Net Promoter Score (NPS) System. It is one of the systems we use at our Medical Practices to both monitor our customer satisfaction levels and to also respond to patient complaints. After learning about it, one of our readers wrote in and asked: “Seems if the real goal is to find problems (since 95% will be positive), I feel that the current system you use is unlikely to necessarily do the job well enough -- some patients will be too timid to say something and hand a…

Do you ever feel like you have multiple projects to handle, but for whatever reason, you just keep dropping balls? Project management is a learned skill set that takes time and tools to master successfully. Recently a friend of mine shared with me the system he uses to manage the multiple moving parts of his multimillion dollar business, and I found it so intriguing that I tweaked it and implemented it, too. I have been using it for the past two months, and I have found it very helpful. The first step is to utilize a calendar at the beginning of the month and write down one big action item or…

The first day of each month is one of my favorite days. I typically spend the first few hours of the first day of the month compiling monthly marketing reports to see how our marketing efforts fared for the prior month. The great thing about these metrics is they help me make educated decisions on where to shift my marketing efforts for the coming month(s). I relay on six marketing reports to track our monthly marketing efforts, but today I’m going to focus on the top three. Report One: How Patients Found Us Before we had an EMR with a good reporting element, we tracked how patients…

I am a firm believer that you can be taught a lesson multiple times, and each time it is taught to you, you take something different away from it. Why? Because the lesson you’re going to learn depends on the situations you’re facing at the time. This past week at the UCAOA Conference in Glendale, AZ, I was listening to Dr. Tim Reynolds give a talk on leadership. I have heard the talk before at the Medical Practice Success Summit. I have heard it before at our executive leadership trainings at HealthCARE Express. But on this particular day, I had a particular issue with one of my…

While watching my nine-year-old cousin play soccer this weekend, I received a text message on my phone. The team member sending it had raised two concerns she felt were going to hurt our patient volume numbers. Caught up in the excitement of the soccer game and not really thinking, I instantly forwarded the message to our managing partner for review, and he sent back a message explaining the backside to the issue and why it was a mute concern. He also wrote, “Start looking for the good, it’s easy to find the bad.” As I pondered that entire situation this weekend, I realized…

Carved pumpkins are lit on front porches across your community as the local kids get ready to transform themselves into goblins, ghosts, and their favorite cartoon characters this Thursday night to partake in the annual trick-o-treating event. How can your Medical Practice utilize this fun evening to market to one of your primary target demographics: Moms with kids still at home? Photo Contests on Social Media One easy thing you can do is hold a photo contest on social media for a chance to win a prize. Awards could be given for things like "Best Costume" or "Best Pumpkin". According to the…

This Friday our marketing team will spend the day together hammering out our 2014 Marketing Plan. We will review our numbers from the past year, set goals for the next year, and figure out what strategies to repeat and what new strategies to incorporate to continue to grow our presence in the different markets where we have clinics. Part of that process has already started. For the past few weeks the marketing team has been compiling a list of events and strategies they want to use in their individual markets for 2014. They will bring that list with them to our planning session, and we will…