Your Business is Failing Because You Haven't Made This Key Shift

Entrepreneur. Business owner. Solopreneur. 

Those words encompass a lot of emotions to those who have had the experience of being any of them - excitement, exhilaration, fear, exhaustion, uncertainty, failure, success.

Why is it that 80% of businesses started in the United States fail in their first year? And a staggering 90% never make it past 5 years?

My feelings are that most people get caught up in the passion and excitement about being a business owner, but don't actually make the identity shift into becoming one.

I'll explain: As a healthcare provider you are trained to treat and care for your patients and their injuries, illnesses, and diseases. You learn how to diagnose, prescribe, do surgery, perform therapy, and do all the things that help your specific type of patient get back to living their best life.

How many of you were also taught to diagnose, prescribe and treat your businesses the same way? Here lies the problem. Just because you are good at practicing medicine, does not mean you will have the same success as a business owner providing that service. 

Being a business owner requires an entirely different set of skills and an entirely different mindset to go along with it. You must learn to cultivate this part of your knowledge base if you wish to have a true "healthcare business."

Practice vs Business vs Enterprise

Owning a "practice" means you, as the healthcare provider, are the business. If you're there treating patients, you make money. You take time off - the practice doesn't make money. In this instance you own a job, NOT a business. You're most likely spending 60+ hours a week working IN your business - treating patients and juggling all the business stuff after hours. If you have a family, you most likely hardly see them and your life feels like a giant ball of stress. 

If you own a "business," this should mean the business makes money whether you're there are not. You have hired other practitioners and staff that work on your behalf to implement the systems you have developed. These operations and protocols can be taught to anyone and when they perform them correctly, your business runs smoothly. A business is nothing more than a system of systems. In this version of life, you work less IN your business and more ON your business. This is the essence of being an entrepreneur. 

If you have successfully run a business that it repeatable, sustainable, and predictable - you likely have multiple locations and have developed an enterprise based on the systems you developed. This is the reason why franchises work so well. You get a turn key business that someone else has developed and all you have to do is follow the plan. 

So which one of these are you? Have you developed a business plan and model to where you could hand the keys over to someone and they could run your model of a successful business - without you being there to guide them?

The Mistake Most Healthcare Entrepreneurs Make

In my experience of working with healthcare business owners, the number one mistake I see them making is using their lack of knowledge about how to run a business as an excuse to NOT learn how to do so. 

This means they usually hire people whom they believe know how to run aspects of the business they don't want to have to deal with, so they become managers by abdication. Meaning, they just give people all the tasks to do without really implementing a system according to how the tasks should be done within the vision of THEIR business. Then they get mad when their team doesn't do things the way they wanted them to, so the immediate reaction is, "I'm the only one that knows how this needs to be done, so I'll just do it myself."

Do you want someone coming into your business to run it in the way they worked for someone else? Or do you want people in your business to help you realize the vision of your own business? To implement each position as you view it? To deliver all the aspects of your business aligned with your vision? This is managing by delegation rather than by abdication and this requires you get really clear on the vision for your business.

I guess the next question is, do you actually have a vision for your business?

What is your vision?

Being an entrepreneur means you're the visionary and you have some sort of over arching strategy to deliver on it. You have a top down view of your business rather than a bottom floor looking up scenario.

So what is your vision for your business? How do you see yourself and your business operating? What aspect of human emotion is present in every turn of your business?

What do I mean by human emotion? Well the service you offer is simply the commodity. The feeling you give people that come in contact with your practice is the actual product. In other words, you may be providing OBGYN services or Orthopedic services, but what is the real product or outcome people continue getting from your practice at every single touch point?

Is it care? Relief? Comfort? Hope?

Think about the old MasterCard commercials:

• baseball tickets $100
• hot dogs and sodas $15
• Ice cream $10
• watching your son catch his first foul ball "Priceless"

What's the "priceless" offering inside your practice? Getting in touch with that and figuring out how you deliver it at every point of your business is the essence of finding your vision.

When you have that figured out, you can formulate a plan to deliver on it.