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BLOG: The fine art of quitting — How to make a strategic retreat, part 3
In this last blog post in a three-part series, I continue the discussion of how to be a “smart” quitter.
You should also retreat from the people who are wrong for your practice. Think to yourself: “Do we have any lay staff or associate doctors who should be terminated today? If so, how long ago should they have left the practice? Why have we kept them so long?” The same question set applies to your fellow practice partners. Should you keep up appearances or retreat from a partnership that isn’t working? If you’re an employee in an unwholesome setting, should you be quitting the battlefield your practice has become?
Continuing down the evacuation list:
Have you been putting off abandoning equipment that no longer works properly or should be replaced by a more profitable or clinically appropriate alternative?
Are you maintaining unprofitable satellite offices — maybe branch offices that worked a decade ago when you were more energetic or worked for higher fees, but are now personally exhausting or uneconomic?
Should you retreat from surgical or clinical procedures that you don’t do all that well personally or have not kept up with?
Are there business procedures your staff now do more by rote, from outdated standing orders, than for any practice benefit?
Are you still gathering financial or volume performance data that you’re no longer using to make management decisions?
Ponder each of these questions, not in the abstract, but as they apply to your specific setting.
Are you doing things for yourselves within the practice, like payroll administration or office cleaning, that a vendor could do better and cheaper? On the flip side, has you practice become larded with an overabundance of vendors who are performing functions better left to internal staff? Go through your general ledger, vendor by vendor, and give each a score for necessity and performance.
Finally, and most broadly, is it time to drastically change your professional context? Is it time to be leaving the academic world for private practice, or vice versa? Is it time to stop your surgical career or leave medicine altogether?
Is it OK to quit? In some cases, no matter how foreign “giving up” is to the average eye surgeon, the answer is “absolutely.” By confronting these difficult questions — and achieving a better life and practice with a little well-timed subtraction and backtracking — you’ll be more inclined to win over the long run.