10 Tips to Leverage Business Coaching to Grow Your Medical Practice

A Business Coach is an experienced entrepreneur who’s been where you want to go and experienced what you want to experience who can give you the outside perspective and counsel to build a more successful medical practice–without having to go through all the painful trial and error yourself!

In a real way, a Business Coach is similar to sports coaching in that your coach’s role is to help you focus, plan, prepare, execute, and regroup so that you get the results you’re committed to in your practice.

Too many practice owners build their practice in isolation, lacking the outside perspective and feedback from an experience mentor.

In fact, too many practice owners don’t have anyone in their business lives who will challenge them to think through their business moves and to question their assumptions.

The right Business Coach will not only provide this valuable sounding board for ideas, but more importantly he or she will help you concretely craft your medical practice business strategy so that you focus on the right things at the right time.

What’s more, the right Business Coach will also help you turn your medical practice business strategy into a definite, written action plan that maps out the precise steps you need to take and by when to grow your practice.

Finally, now that you have this clear action plan, your Business Coach will provide the accountability and support you need so that you stay focused and on track doing the things you need to do so that you get the results you are committed to get.

Here are 10 tips to get the most out of your business coach.

• Pick a coach who has deep experience set and knowledge-base to draw upon. The whole idea of leveraging a business coach is to help you avoid a lot of the expensive trial and error that most medical practice owners take as they build a practice.
  While many of the situations you come up against in your practice (whether they be about managing your team, growing your sales, creating your next products or services, or controlling your expenses) may be new to you, your Business Coach can draw on their past experiences to share with you how they’ve dealt with it and how you can too.
  
  
• Pick a coach who can articulate and explain things to you in simple, step-by-step language so that you can integrate what they share and put it to immediate and effective use. In fact, ideally you’ll work with a business coach who has a structured process to grow a medical practice that has been validated and proven to work.
  
  
  Priceline.com founding team member Jeff Hoffman with Maui CEO David Finkel after a joint television interview.
• “What I get out of having a business coach is that my coach has run and worked with so many companies that they’ve seen that they’ve seen every situation. So when I don’t even know how to handle a new situation, my coach says, “Don’t worry about it, I’ve seen this pattern a dozen times. Here’s how to best handle it.” – Jeff Hoffman
  
  
  
• Meet frequently with your business coach – but not too often. We recommend every two weeks. You want to meet often enough that you can have effective accountability, but not too frequently that you talk a lot, but don’t have time to get things done.
  
  
• Get your business coach weekly updates on your progress. We’ve found that by having our clients take 5-15 minutes each week to use our “Big Rock App” to update their coach about their progress, it both gives the client a useful way to review their own progress, and it also keeps their coach up to speed on their company. This means that you’re much more effective and can maximize your bi-weekly coaching sessions.
  
  
• Share your numbers–candidly. Yes it can be scary to share your revenue, gross margin, and operating profit figures with complete candor, but by being open you will get valuable outside perspective and feedback. Don’t sugar coat anything. Our medical practice coaching program clients share their numbers with their coach on a quarterly basis through our “Quarterly Review” web app.
  
  
• Don’t just focus on one-off challenges – look for systematic, global solutions. Solving a challenge is great, but solving a challenge in a way that improves and develops your company’s internal systems and controls is even more valuable. Ad hoc solutions are hard to scale. Systems driven solutions are more stable and easier to grow.
  
  
• Give permission to your coach to hold you accountable. The right coach will always be in your corner, and sometimes this means being the one person in your business life who calls you on the mat. Your employees can’t do this – you sign their pay checks. I’ve seen the impact on their practice when they play full out and allow the coach to hold them accountable.
  
  
• Don’t rationalize or explain away reality, because even if you “win” the discussion, reality will still win the day. You don’t need to defend or make excuses with your coach. Use your medical practice coaching relationship to be the place where you can be fully transparent with what is going on in your business life. Your coach will help you take full responsibility and accept the objective facts on the ground. And from this place you can both come up with an effective plan of action to harness those facts to reach your medical practice goals.
  
  
• Let down your ego and accept the help and insights of your coach. You don’t have to posture or look good. Your coach has seen just about everything your dealing with and worked through it. Let them save you the time, energy, emotion, and money by helping you learn from his or her experiences versus painful and expensive trial and error.
  
  
  Dr. Tom Umbach and his wife Holly:
  
  “In the first year of the program,
  we knocked our workload down significantly
  at the same time we grew by over 50%.”
  
  
• Get rid of your excuses. Some medical practice owners say, “I don’t have the time,” but really, how much longer will it take them if they do it all on their own–isolated. Other medical practice owners say, “I want to work with a coach, but now is just not the perfect time,” as if someday, magically, the perfect day will appear.

My final piece of advice to you is that if you want to enjoy the growth and freedom that our >medical practice coaching Clients have, then you can’t wait for “someday”. You have to start right now, right where you’re at, and take that leap of faith.

The most common feedback we hear we hear is, “I wished I would have gotten started sooner.”

What will you be saying 3 years from today? “If only I had…” or “I’m so glad I did!“

Get started today with a complimentary 90-minute medical practice growth strategy session.