As we’ve moved into Q-4 of 2020, there’s a good bit of conversation and speculation regarding the product side of our business. Encouragingly, I’m talking with many colleagues who have found during Covid that their APT (Average Patient Transaction) is noticeably HIGHER these recent months, and that seems to have folks wondering things like:
Ready or not, Helena, here we come!!
Alas, it’s time for The Gathering, and Summit partners and their staff will be converging on Helena for a couple days of great colleagueship, great dialogue, great food and drink and great fun! I hope you and some team members will be joining us there, but in the event you can’t make it this year (or if you’re coming), I wanted to share some planned focuses of our time together this weekend and get the creative juices flowing.
Have you noticed a lot of colleagues looking for an associate right now? If so, it’s not just you.
The good news is private practice optometry is alive and thriving. As we’ve discussed, consumers are flocking back to relationship-based patient care rather getting stuck where a third party puts them or hunting for bargains on eye exams and being one-time patients at The Vision Barn. There are of course consumers that haven’t seen the light (no pun), but more have than haven’t, and the move back to relationship-based care is even trending on the product side with stable and even increasing Spectacle and Contact Lens Capture Rates.
Have you noticed a lot of colleagues looking for an associate right now? If so, it’s not just you.
The good news is private practice optometry is alive and thriving. As we’ve discussed, consumers are flocking back to relationship-based patient care rather getting stuck where a third party puts them or hunting for bargains on eye exams and being one-time patients at The Vision Barn. There are of course consumers that haven’t seen the light (no pun), but more have than haven’t, and the move back to relationship-based care is even trending on the product side with stable and even increasing Spectacle and Contact Lens Capture Rates.
Two of perhaps the most misunderstood things in all of practice development are LEADERSHIP (often confused with management or authority) and MARKETING (often confused with advertising). We’ve clarified and discussed in the blog posts and podlectures that leadership is not about managing people, but rather influencing people; and colleague dialogue and success stories these past few weeks has me realizing it’s time for some similar clarification and discussion on the marketing front.
As mentioned in Part 1, we’re hard-pressed to find a hotter or more frustrating ownership topic these days than employee compensation. Staff shortages and resulting hiring bidding wars have made it plenty clear we need to be more creative than ever about ways we attract and retain good help with our compensation structure while not breaking the bank!
We’re pretty hard-pressed to find a hotter and perhaps more frustrating topic in private practice (and all small business) ownership these days than employee compensation. Staff shortages and resulting bidding wars to get people hired contributed greatly to the chain reaction of the runaway inflation these recent years, and more than ever, it’s incumbent on us as CEOs of our practices to be as creative as we can in providing strong employee compensation while not breaking the bank.
Some months back, we put together and sent out a quick questionnaire to get a feel for how Summit practices were compensating staff, and found Bowen’s Blog a helpful outlet to report those findings back to our partner practices. Given so much needed attention of late on how to recruit, hire, pay, retain, and often times partner with our associates, it seemed a great time to survey the partners on associate compensation and get a solid feel for what we’re doing there within Summit.
While pondering content for this topic, I found myself reflecting on an interesting trend that has become clear as we communicate with colleagues around the country. Once upon a time, when a colleague would reach out for some help with the practice, the most common driver of that conversation was practice growth. We found that to be the case through the 80’s, 90’s and well into the (no longer so) new millennium – How do I grow my practice?
What a year it’s been, Colleagues! 2023 brought its share of challenges to be sure, but as always, we saw that if we make a choice to control what we can the best way we can, we will (and did!) steamroll the things we can’t control!
That’s certainly not to say it’s easy, as every reader of this blog will attest. But it absolutely is to say we have the ability in post-Covid bricks-and-mortar private practice to achieve our objectives. In practice and in life. And as we put the wraps on a great year (and for those readers participating in MetCHECK Monthly Metrics Tracking, a RECORD YEAR), let’s do a Lightening Round Review of highlights from the 2023 blog discussions that helped (and keep helping) us quiet the private practice nay-sayers out there!
Well it’s that time of year, Colleagues! …The time of year we’re getting into the Holiday spirit (no Scrooges please!), likely putting on a pound or two and hopefully putting some real thought into the objectives we’ll establish to motivate our teams in the year ahead and create that “bias for success” we talk about!
And let’s remember that’s absolutely the primary purpose of object…of an objective… right Friends? A source of individual and team motivation that biases things in the world to go our way, despite the fact challenges and obstacles will be there and might otherwise knock us off course. It’s the motive of an objective, and the bias in our favor it creates, that powers us and our teams through.
