“Lack of a Physician’s Due Diligence Is a Major Cause of Medical Practice Business Failure”

"Don't confuse due diligence with laziness.
It's not because you don't work hard, but
because you spend your efforts on much less
profitable and productive obligations and don't
recognize the important out-of-mind factors." 

The first thing that comes to mind about due diligence is how it has anything to do with failing as a person or as a business. Failing at any effort you intend to complete, can quickly be attributed to one or more of many causes. Such contributors to most failures are laziness, distractions, fixation, priorities, lack of common sense, and fear of the consequences of stepping out of your comfort zone, to name a few.

Due diligence process means, done or pursued with persevering and painstaking intensive attention and constant in efforts to accomplish.

Digging deeper into those apparent causes, reveals a common thread that lies at the core of failure. If you equate this thread to those who fail and those who don't, you'll notice only two basic categories of humans. Both categories are comprised of super talented and competent people who accomplish their goals in different ways.

There are those physicians who are “results oriented” and those that are “activity oriented.” The latter group tend to find satisfaction with learning, keep busy with things that interest them at the time, and inherently choose activities that aren't difficult or distressful. They don't see the advantage of having plans or ultimate goals.

The former group lets their objectives and goals dictate their activities and progress. Which group fits your medical practice style?

If you examine your original thoughts about the possibility of failure, you may see yourself working a ten hour day, certainly not a lazy person, while hoping for more new patients to keep coming through your door just because you are there and you are a great doctor.

There's a lot of B.S. out there about doing what you love to do by working your butt off and magically having the money materialize, delegating and outsourcing your office work, and chasing your passion towards a 4-day workweek.

The additional undeniable influence on you of 30 years of media and books touting easy success, brainwashing you into believing success can be had much easier and faster than ever before. It leaves blind scars that make it difficult to understand that hard work is still a requisite for real success as well as optimal wealth.

What medical doctors, among others, fail to see is that the word “hard” work camouflages the essential meaning here of the word “work.” Work, by itself, is a scattering effort without direction or purpose. Work in this case needs definition.

Work should be understood as a mental and physical effort that has specific aims and lives under a hood of requirements. The greatest of these requirements is what we call “due diligence.”

Diligence shouts the need of knowing exactly and completely that the work done is not wasted. Diligence means you have real knowledge through evaluation and examination beforehand that your “work” has great rewards at the end. You expect to find, use, and benefit from those rewards that you know are there. There is no hoping, guessing, or feeling that the treasure and
success is there.

One of the greatest threats to your medical practice goals, accomplishments, and wealth is the lack of due diligence.

Most professionals prefer not to have to work hard or to do what they hate to do. For medical doctors and other healthcare professionals, it usually means medical office management and medical practice business financial chores. It becomes a formidable chink in your medical practice business success armor.

Admit it. You hate to do certain jobs that you should be doing, primarily because those jobs interfere with your practicing medicine on patients. This leads back to the thread connecting the various supposed causes of medical practice business failure.

The common thread is the lack of due diligence to every function of your medical office system, if you have one. Once you open your private medical practice business you are obligated not only to your employees, but also to your family and yourself to insure your medical practice business
plan survives.

It further commits you to insure that it remains productive and profitable throughout your
medical career. Isn't that what all doctors want?

Do you truthfully believe that just practicing medicine, treating patients, will provide everything you desire for your professional lifestyle?

Do you honestly believe that your success and wealth will evolve without serious, continuous, and in-depth attention and time to the business of medical practice and its necessary management?

Due diligence in medical practice management includes your doing what needs to be done whether you hate doing it or not, but first you must bring to mind the factors external to your practice that also have to do with your medical practice business success--like too many physicians in your specialty where you decided to start your practice who compete with you for medical patients.

The well known truth is that every highly successful business is run by wealthy leaders who permit their goals to dictate their activities. They all spend evenings, weekends, and holidays doing that percent of their business they hate doing. It varies from 40 to 60%, but never goes
completely away.

A close look at “burnout” and medical practice failure

Medical practice failure or burnout do not occur in any medical practice where the doctor(s) take this diligence concept seriously.

If you dive into the chores required of a medical practice management business owner, you will find and prevent every aspect of your medical practice business that will lead to ultimate failure of your practice, if not tended to early on. Only you as the owner of the practice can do this... no substitutes.

Some of you do not have a clear understanding about what being diligent really means. So here it is. Every step of every job, activity, and performance issue that makes your business profitable must be scrutinized for everything from efficiency to profitability on a regular basis:

A few of the questions you should be asking yourself.

• Can this office procedure step be eliminated or improved?
   
• Is it doing the maximum of what it could do?
   
• Can it be replaced with a better tool or system or staff member?
   
• Can several issues be handled efficiently with one person?
   
• Do I need additional staff?
   
• Can each office job be performed by all the office staff members?
   
• Why do I need an Office Procedures Manual?
   
• Are my office employees working efficiently and at their
  maximum potential?
   
• Does every employee understand my goals and objectives?
   
• Do You have a marketing plan in place? Told your staff about that?
   
• Do you have a referral marketing plan in place?
   
• Do you allow your office staff to be creative in their jobs?
   
• Can you recite the number of new patients you have gained in
  the last 3 months?
   
• Do you have the statistics that show whether your practice is
  growing or declining?
   
• Do you routinely review your financial reports, income, and expenses, and act on the
  below standard ones monthly?
   
• Do you have a business system and plan in place to increase the efficiency and income of
  your practice?
   
• Do you really know how to read and interpret your financial statement from your CPA?
  

When you ignore what you hate to do, serious repercussions to your medical practice
business follow.

Not only do consequences occur, but they are additive over time. That factor leads directly to
medical practice failure unless you make changes to avoid them.

Some things that due diligence resolves or relieves...

1. Due diligence in your practice means you know your business in every detail. It means you are able to answer any question about your business that any business expert can ask you about.
   
   It only takes three questions to you by a business expert to find out how little you know about your own practice business. If you avoid the work required of your medical business, it is certain you will fail to a significant degree sooner or later.
    
2. Due diligence to every function your medical practice business right from the time you start medical practice will inevitably prevent your practice from financial failure and you having to close your practice.
    
3. Due diligence is how you discover what's working in your practice business and what's not. Because you can identify quickly the weaknesses in your practice business early, you can correct the problems easier and without much disruption.
    
4. Due diligence to each aspect of your practice and business enables you to know when to make changes and uncovers the reasons why.
    
5. Due diligence prevents burnout because it uncovers all the serious problems in your practice business that worry you so deeply and that you feel helpless to prevent or cure. It gives you a chance to correct those problems before they become truly un-repairable.
    
6. Due diligence is the means for relieving practice frustrations which often lead to financial failure of your practice. If you don't know how to read, evaluate, understand, and make decisions about what your monthly financial statement is telling you, you are on your way to bad times.
    
7. Due diligence happens only when you firmly commit your time to the business of medical practice. After all, your greatest talents, medical knowledge, and remarkable skills will not accomplish anything without having a sound medical practice business foundation to accumulate the rewards of your highly respected education and training.
    

The typical story of a failing medical practice

The lack of due diligence is what actually destroys a medical practice and your career in private practice. It's a matter of whether you take responsibility for your medical practice business plan
requirements, or not.

Regardless of the fact that you may have had no business or marketing education, you have the ability to search out and fix the elements of your practice that are causing problems.

By familiarizing yourself with the medical practice business facts and advice contained in this medical practice business and marketing website content that is available to you in only one place
in the world of medical practice in our nation today (2021), you can be sure that your private medical practice business will never fail you.

Secondly, you will not only reach your ultimate potential faster and more assuredly than over 95%
of other physicians, but also you will build a medical practice that can withstand all of the government mandates and restrictions on private medical practices that increasingly continue to
harass you daily.

Predisposing symptoms of medical practice failure...

• When a physician avoids 100% management of the medical practice. Meaning that any physician who does not set aside at least 30 minutes a day about 3 days a week, an hour and a half per week,or 6 hours per month to work on his or her medical practice business plan improvement, serious erosion of the practice will occur in the future.
   
• Physicians don't understand profit and loss statements nor how to use them to make practice decisions. Leaving the financial advice and the following fixes to your office CPA or Financial Manager is practice suicide and makes you a fool. There is no one but you that knows your mind, where you are headed with your practice, how you want to get there, nor what you want done with your practice money.
  
  Even if you carefully tell them exactly what you need and want,they will forget what you told them in a week (they also work with 50 other people expecting them to provide what they need) and end up doing what they “feel” is best for you and best for them getting paid each month. Be smart about this.
   
• Physicians who don't recognize that the medical practice business can only reach its maximum profitability and efficiency when everyone in the office is working as a compatible team. The pain caused by each employee pulling in different directions is escalated by confusion among the medical office staff.
  
  Simply not understanding what the overall goals of the practice are, and never being informed on repeated occasions by the doctor about the steps necessary to take those goals to reality, insures that the medical office staff will never be a responsible supportive team working for the good of all.
   
• Any practice without a means to measure and prove the actual health status of a medical practice is not only dereliction of a physician's duty, but also is unspoken permission for the practice to sink into the quicksand of management ignorance.
  
  The monthly financial statements of the medical practice doesn't tell you what you need to know and are not a reliable source of information for creating your practice progress measurements. Just knowing the number of new patients joining your practice each month and those leaving the practice is the bare minimum of what factual measurements are needed to tell you how you are doing.
   
• Physicians who deny that business knowledge and marketing strategies can help their medical practice in this present economy of 2022, are predestined for unrecoverable practice failure and should be looking for a different career.
  
  This is also true for those medical doctors who masochistically attempt to run their own medical business either based on their own superficial business knowledge or by obtaining the necessary knowledge and not using it the right way.
  
  Often, they give up on their efforts because they expect immediate results and don't get them. They don't know what they don't know.
   
• Physicians whose medical practice is already in trouble and don't recognize it, or ignore that possibility, is the primary factor in medical practice failure for most physicians. The reason is that by the time they do see big bad changes happening to their shrinking pot of gold, it's too late to do anything about it... at least to reverse the process.
  
  They then understand (usually too late) why due diligence and all the important business factors described above were proven methods of ensuring that they would never fail.
  
  By this time they don't have the funds to pay for the real expert help they need so badly. By this time they normally are frustrated to the point of helplessness, can't think logically, and make even worse decisions that escalate the downward spiral.
   

Remember these medical practice lessons... 

1. Somehow, get the business help and knowledge during medical training or soon after,
because your practice busyness will prevent you from doing it later.

2. Spend the time to thoroughly know your medical practice business inside out.

3. Make sure you have medical office employees that all work towards your goals...
not theirs... and you have shared your vision with them.

4. If you follow these golden rules of due diligence, you will never have to admit your
practice failed to anyone. However, bragging about how well you are doing, is appropriate.

5. When you have finally met your full responsibilities to your medical practice business,
you will know what fulfillment means, what peace of mind feels like, and what one physician
is able to accomplish in his professional medical career that goes far beyond expectations.

----Professional Probe----

"One simple mistake, what's the big deal?"

Sometimes, we are distracted from our due diligence, not paying close enough attention to our business, and forget to be constantly improving each functional part of it. Over 95% of doctors in private medical practice ignore due diligence in their practice.

It's the management side of practice business that usually succumbs to complete neglect. If you don't understand what that means in practical terms, then what you learn in this article can and will save your practice in more ways than one.

If I asked you about your medical business, would you be able to tell me what the last 12 improvements to your practice business were... maybe even as few as 3?

You must understand that working on your medical practice business is different from working in your medical practice business. Working IN your business makes you a staff member. Working ON your medical practice business makes you the
owner/CEO of your medical practice business management.

Articles © 2013-2022/CGG INVESTMENTS LLC. All rights reserved. #40, 3-16-22