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?
In recent years, and particularly since Covid, practice growth has been de-throned by leading/managing/ retaining my team as the number-one driver of practice owners seeking help running their practices, and although more and more colleagues are gaining the upper hand, I suspect TEAM will top the leaderboard for a while to come. I talked with a client just yesterday, in fact, who mentioned he and his staff are just back from a convention where the standing room only lecture was called something like Dealing with a Toxic Culture.” A sign of the times, it seems to me.
Well having done our share of focusing on TEAM together in the Blogs and Podlectures these past three years, and with every intention to continue that conversation in the new year, let’s shift gears this month and get back to practice growth, which should certainly never go away as paramount among our focuses on the business of practice.
You may recall in Podlecture #33 (“Patient Base By Design!”), we had a good conversation about the importance of targeted growth by way of the evolving the patient base. Rather than grossing ourselves to death growing all categories of revenue, we discussed the importance of HOW we grow revenue, and we realized there are some categories of revenue we should grow and others we definitely should not. Even some we should deliberately shrink! To reiterate the general theme of that conversation, it’s not how busy we are, but how we are busy that determines the net benefits of growing revenue. And we want to be evolving our patient base to reflect that all through the Practice Life Cycle.
In this month’s post, let’s think again about targeted growth, but this time, let’s do so by geography, and to that end, I’d love to share some actual (paraphrased) colleague dialogue form the THRIVE Help Desk:
Colleague: Great Seeing you in Helena! We’ve added 2 new doctors and are now working on filling their schedules. We’ve created a 2-sided large postcard we’re looking to mail to our local communities. We did this when ( ) came on board and it worked well. We’re wondering your thoughts on doing this again considering that mailing costs have gone up substantially. I have attached the postcard and here are the mailing costs and numbers:
-Community 1 (zip code): (# of people)
-Community 2 (zip code): (# of people)
-Community 3 (zip code): (# of people)
-Community 4 (zip code): (# of people)
-Community 5 (zip code): (# of people) 2
-Total mail-outs: (total # of people)
-Total Cost: (total cost for design/print/postage)
THRIVE: Great seeing you in Helena as well! Love the plan here, and this a well-done piece. Here are a few suggested changes ( ). Also have a few questions for you regarding the geography:
1. What percentage of your current patient base comes from each of these communities?
2. Can you rank the communities by desire to expand your presence in those communities?
3. Are you currently leveraging a Referral Enhancement Program in the practice?
4. Do you have a designated marketing budget for this year and next year?
Colleague: I ran the numbers and found this informative for myself as well:
-Community 1 50%
-Community 2 17%
-Community 3 10%
-Community 4 10%
-Community 5 10%
-Other Community: 1.5%
-Other Community: 1.5%
Our local community of ( ) is really growing, and of course we want to continue to increase our share of patients from our hometown. ( ) is the closest community with the most people compared to the others, and we would like to increase our patient base from there. ( ) is the next closest, but a very small community and this may reflect the smaller percentage of patients we see from there.
THRIVE: Based on the numbers you’ve provided and your helpful expound, it looks like within our primary Geographical Trading Area (GTA), it’s ( ), ( ) and ( ) as 1, 2 and 3. So we want to make sure we’re hitting those areas well with our external marketing endeavors in general, including this one. We of course pick up other areas around those communities with your referral program and with external marketing like radio, while direct mail requires exact choice by zip code. So for this one, we want to make sure we hit ( ), as well as ( ) and ( ), given their productivity-per-population for the practice. Direct mail is still a great way to make the most of our marketing dollars in those specific areas, and this plan and piece bode well for that (particularly with a strong offer).
This paraphrase from an actual (and decision-making) dialogue really helps illustrate the point here, and at a great time of year to do so. As we think about this year’s marketing plan, including the external marketing piece and budget, we want to think very deliberately about how AND where we want to grow our patronage, and then reverse engineer our strategies and placements to do that. So let’s make sure our practice Marketing Coordinators are asking these questions, and that we’re forming specific marketing objectives to guide our initiatives in the new year from the answers:
1. Which specific services and product categories do we want to grow this year (and which do we want NOT to grow?!), and whom do we target to do so?
2. In what specific geographical areas do we want to grow our patient base within our broader Geographical Trading Area?
3. How do we reduce answers to these questions into specific Marketing Objectives? 3
I hope that gets us thinking a bit more specifically about the how and where of practice growth we kick off a new year, Colleagues. And as always, let us know how we can help!
Like all THRIVE content, the purpose of BOWEN’S BLOG and SUMMIT TALK Podlecture conversations is to keep us driving together toward IMPACT. If something here has struck a chord, shoot us an email or give us a call and let’s talk it out! Tbowen@mythrivecoaches.com or 402-794-4064.