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BLOG: Planning and planting your practice garden, part 3
Next step: Demolition
Once you have a practice plan, it may be time for a little creative destruction. Most landscaping projects start with pulling up half-dead plants and old rubble from the job site. The same goes for practice “landscaping” projects. Do you have half-dead staff who will never be brought back to life with the watering and fertilizer of bonuses and pep talks? Gently and appropriately — but briskly — help them to the door. Is it time to toss out the 1980s furnishings and equipment? Is your decade-old ad campaign (and the agency that came up with the idea) long past stale? Through all of this, look at yourself personally and critically, too. Are you and your partner still holding onto old, angry events that are keeping you from moving forward and building a practice together? It may be that the partnership itself needs demolishing.
After that: Installation
After planning and demolition, a landscaping contractor is faced with clear land and a host of installation tasks. So it is with you and your practice; these tasks should all be launched only according to plan. Timing and costs and preparatory work should be forecast and scheduled.
The glaucoma specialist should be “installed” only when the general ophthalmologists are ready to give up their patients needing this subspecialty care. The new office wing should be built only when the existing facilities are nearing full utilization and solid growth forecasts substantiate an expansion. The new surgery center should only be developed when there are sufficient case volumes.
There’s another dimension of timing and tempo to consider. Affluent property owners can install all of their landscaping in a short span of time — 35 workers descend on the site, the trucks roll through, and just weeks later the job’s done. This applies to affluent practice owners, too. If you have a clean balance sheet and the ability to forego income, you might decide to build a new office, sink $500,000 into new capital equipment, hire a star administrator and launch a major marketing offensive all in the same year. But if you’re the more typical practitioner, you’ll have to stage the development of your practice, taking on only one or two new projects at a time.
We’ll continue this planning discussion with the next and final installment of this blog.