Find Your “Sweet Spot”

Identifying your practice’s “sweet spot” can bring big results but only after you understand your constraints and have brainstormed multiple ideas to push them back.

What is currently your practice’s single biggest constraint to growth? What is the one ingredient that, if you had more of it, would allow your practice to grow most effectively?

While every practice has multiple limiting factors, each has one Limiting Factor (capital “L,” capital “F”) that does the most to constrain its growth in the here and now.

Pushing back your biggest Limiting Factor is a major leverage point to growing your practice. One key way to do so is to identify and push back your current Limiting Factor quarter by quarter. In the context of creating a true Level Three practice, that means you’ll need to build the systems, team, controls, and culture to help you push back your Limiting Factor in the long term.

Precisely Identify Your Limiting Factor

The more precisely you can identify your Limiting Factor, the easier it is to effectively push it back. For example, if you say your Limiting Factor is cash flow, you might come up with a dozen ideas to improve your cash flow, but many may be counterproductive because your initial diagnosis of your Limiting Factor is too broad. Consider these questions:

Is it a cash-flow challenge caused by low patient volume relative to your current clinical staffing and capacity?

Or is it low cash flow caused by a poor mix of patient base and insurance payers?

Or is it an issue with your collections?

Or, instead, is the root cause that your providers regularly don’t follow the right procedures and best practices when they fill out the EMR system? Do they miscode their clinical work, substantially lowering your earned reimbursements?

As you can see, before you rush off to “solve” your Limiting Factor, you’ve got to carefully and accurately nail down your diagnosis in the first place.

Select Your Highest-Leverage Tactics with the Sweet Spot Tool

Once you have a clear diagnosis of your Limiting Factor in hand, it’s time to select the highest-leverage tactics to push back this Limiting Factor. We developed the three-part Sweet Spot Analysis Tool to help you do just that. First, brainstorm all the potential ideas you have to push back your Limiting Factor. Don’t settle for five or six ideas. Instead, push to come up with at least ten ideas$ndash;or, ideally, fifteen to twenty.

For example, if your Limiting Factor is a cash-flow challenge caused by low patient volume relative to your current staffing level and clinical capacity, your list of ideas could include implementing a “friends and family” referral program or a past-patient reactivation strategy.

Or you could begin to give community talks, or increase your online advertising budget, or reduce your staffing level, or . . . You get the idea. The key is to push yourself to come up with as many ideas as you can that could potentially help you push back your Limiting Factor. The best way is to first come up with a list of a lot of potential ideas.

Run Ideas Through Two Filters

Next, run your brainstormed list of potential tactics through two filters: what we call the “Low-Hanging Fruit” filter and the “Home Run” filter.

Low-Hanging Fruit refers to a no-brainer opportunity that you’re almost certain will be successful. While it may or may not have a big impact, it is fairly straightforward to implement. That gives you a high level of confidence it will work. A Home Run, on the other hand, is an opportunity that, if all goes just right, will have a huge payoff for your business.

Go through each brainstormed idea on the list and ask, “Is this tactic a Low-Hanging Fruit?” If it is, check the box in the “LH” column identifying it as a Low-Hanging Fruit.

Then, in a second separate pass, go through your list of brainstormed ideas and ask of each item in turn, “Is this tactic a Home Run?” If it is, check the box in the “HR” column.

You’re looking for any tactics that are both Low-Hanging Fruit and Home Runs. These are your “Sweet Spot” ideas$ndash;the highest-leverage choices to push back your Limiting Factor. Low-Hanging Fruit are easy to implement with high odds of success, and Home Runs offer big results if they work. Your Sweet Spots are the first and best places to focus your practice’s resources.

Mini Action Plans are the Dessert

Finally, now that you’ve identified your Sweet Spot tactics, turn them into a mini Action Plan of who needs to do what by when. By using this Sweet Spot Tool, you’re on your way to successfully growing your practice.

Get started right now, download a copy of our Sweet Spot Tool by requesting your free Medical Practice Success Tool Kit.