What makes a dental, medical or healthcare business successful?
Those working in the dental, medical or health and wellness professions will often wonder what they need to do in order to to ensure they have a successful business… There are 3 key elements of success.
Technical Skills
The first key element is to have good technical or clinical skills, without these the business is unlikely to be truly high performing and as successful as it can be.
However, and is rather a big HOWEVER… I’ve seen too many businesses focus all of their efforts in improving clinical or technical skills in the belief that it will enable them to have a more successful business.
The reality is, that if no one knows you have the skills (marketing) or they are not backed up by good customer service (processes), or don’t make the business enough money ( finances) then clinical skills alone just don’t cut it.
You need more than just good technical skills, you need good business skills…
Business Skills
One of the best frameworks I know for managing, monitoring and adjusting a business is what’s known as the Balanced Scorecard. It looks at 4 key performance measures:
- Financial perspective – this takes into account profit and loss, cash flow and balance sheet. It should be seen through the eyes of someone focusing on the accounts.
- Customer perspective – this takes into account marketing and how the customer perceives the business and interacts with the business. It should be seen through the eyes of the customer.
- Internal business perspective – this takes into account internal processes and systems. It should be seen through the eyes of the business as a whole.
- Innovation and learning perspective – this takes into account the self reflective practitioner, learning, development, team etc. It should be seen through the eyes of the individuals within the business.
And yet, even with the highest level clinical/technical skills coupled with the business skills (and even using a balanced scorecard) some businesses still don’t reach optimum performance… There is one factor still missing…
Mindset
It’s possible to be the best clinician and the best businessperson, but if you don’t believe that you are, then you aren’t! It really is that simple.
“The mind is just like a muscle – the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets and the more it can expand.”
― Idowu Koyenikan, Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of Your Ability
Limiting beliefs are common factor for holding a business person back, beliefs about not being worth it, beliefs adopted from our parents who told us we will never achieve anything in life, beliefs that are written out of past (perceived) failures.
As our beliefs take hold we become more risk averse, we make poor decisions and sometimes, we even destroy our own success in order to prove that negative belief we have about ourselves.
“I’m going to prove that I will never achieve anything in life by destroying this business, then at least I’m right”
Yes, this is actually what happens. We like to be right and if the beliefs about ourselves is negative then people do actually (unconsciously) destroy what they have built in order to be right.
How many times have you seen business people yo-yo? Build a business > Bankrupt > Build a business > Bankrupt > Build a business… (perhaps not quite so dramatic as this, but you get my point).
The good news is that whilst business and clinical skills take time to acquire, mindset is based on ‘state’… And states can be managed and adjusted at any time.
There really are no other resource for people, just unresourceful states, and if we can access those resourceful states, whilst removing unresourceful states then we can build a successful business based on our fabulous business and technical skills.
Without the need to yo-yo!
