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BLOG: Planning and planting your practice garden, part 4
Finally, concluding this four-part blog series, there is maintenance.
What would happen to your garden if for several years you didn’t constantly prune, feed and water? The land would eventually go back to its tangled, natural state.
The same thing can happen to your practice. A large number of eye surgeons work today in settings that are the ophthalmic equivalent of weed-choked fields. The truly great practices stay that way by the unceasing attention of their owners and managers. Like weeding your lawn, this maintenance is grindingly dull, repetitious work. And of course, the process is constantly circular. Based on results, the plan is fine-tuned, there is always a little creative demolition going on, and there are constantly new protocols and people to install.
Just as there are only two kinds of gardens, there are only two kinds of practices: the planned and the unplanned. Until recently, both kinds of practices could survive just fine. Until just a few years ago, you didn’t need a green thumb to grow a wonderful medical enterprise. The business of ophthalmology was like gardening in the rain forest where anything grows.
But the medical business climate out there is getting fairly tricky. It’s not raining as much as it once did. It’s time to polish your gardening skills before we all, almost inevitably, arrive at the stage where the only things growing will be a few hardy cactuses.