Can I help grow your practice?
The team here at Professional Formulas works daily to support your heroic work. In that same spirit, I’d like to offer some insights into growing your practice – insights I’ve learned over 30 years in business.
Your time is valuable. In fact, only you can give patients better lives through improved health, so protect your time – ruthlessly. I understand the tendency to minimize expenses by performing office tasks yourself, especially when starting a practice. But the truth is that “the business side” of your practice doesn’t require your medical training or expertise. So be intentional with the work you perform and the tasks you delegate. Hiring office help may cost a little more in the short term, but the long-term benefits will outweigh the costs, I promise.
We developed patient fulfillment specifically to save you time. It’s an option if you want to spend less time ordering and dispensing products or in cases where you want a patient to have a product you don’t stock in your medicinary.
Track your active patient base. You’re welcome to read a hundred books about starting and growing a business, but the most important growth metric to watch is active patients. If you’re not already doing it, I suggest developing a very simple system that records three things: the number of (unique) patients you see/serve each month, the number of new patients who contact you each month, and how those new patients found you.
Your medicine works, so you’ll quickly find that your active patient base – and ultimately your practice – grows with your new patient counts. I know: you were attracted to healthcare to help others, not be a marketer. And it’s easy to spend a lot of time posting on social media without knowing the return on that investment.
It only takes a moment to record the name of each new patient, the date they initially contacted you, and how they found you. But if you record and regularly review the information, you will quickly see which marketing or social media efforts are driving new patients. So, eliminate marketing activities that aren’t producing results and lean into those that work. Don’t worry if you’re not an expert at optimizing Google or Instagram ads, for example. Because once you really know how new patients find you, you’ll know exactly what kind of expert you should pay to help you.
Did you know that hundreds of patients contact us looking for a trustworthy healthcare professional? With your permission, we’d love to send some to you!
Finally, take the long view. Growing a medical practice – or any business – is hard. If it were easy, everyone would do it. But your work matters, so it will always be worth it. Please be encouraged, and don’t get too focused on today’s unique challenges, but make your biggest decisions in the context of a 10-year vision for your practice because you’re literally changing people’s lives, their families, and even their communities. You can count on us to support you.