Healthcare Leaders
Examples:
Healthcare Business Owners (multiple medical and radiology practices), Healthcare Business Leaders, Healthcare Businesses (small to medium)
INDUSTRY DESCRIPTION
The Healthcare Leaders sector provides professional, scientific, medical and technical services to a range of health care markets. Expansion is largely linked to how these professions are built into a business model with team around them to assist them to leverage their skills. When this is done successfully, they’ll target more of the right work that is specialised and more profitable and less of the type of work that is more generalised and less lucrative. When this strategy is not implemented correctly, professions can have too much work but of the wrong type and without the team to support their ability to scale.
Professions can charge an hourly rate or service rate and receive funding from multiple sources not limited to but including; businesses, grants, medicare, health funds, workers compensation and personal out of pocket expenses that cover administration staff, office and specialist overheads.
A common life cycle for a Healthcare leader often begins as an individual or partnership that break away from a larger organisation by transferring or establishing themselves with a loyal client base or they start from scratch.
A common life cycle of a multiple practise owner starts with one practise rapidly expanding into multiple practises they invest in as much capital as required or afforded for fitout.
How far the business expands will depend on the interest and intentions of the owners to add support staff.
If workflow is an issue because of too much work or poor prospecting and pitching disciplines, then the business will stall as the owner falls into the cycle of “do the work” then “chase the work”. Other issues come from too much work coming from large key accounts or from the wrong demographics. Then with client servicing on larger accounts, it stalls the amount of work required to acquire a stable client base. The objective of the business must be to bring on sufficient work to require them to add staff. Many professions stay at the 1-3 staff level when this is the case.
Practise Management becomes the focus that is done either by an Admin Manager, Practise Manager or a Managing Partner. This person not only needs to manage such KPIs as billable hours etc, but also needs to monitor client attraction, referral management and practice management systems in order to utilise the capacity of the practise. Furthermore, managing team engagement and culture can sometimes be outside the scope of a typical practice manager whereby owners may need to drive this aspect. As such, Healthcare Professional Businesses get into trouble when these things are not managed.
If the business gets sufficient workflow, they will begin the process of scaling up. This usually starts with technical roles and admin support before moving to practice managers or admin managers. This will progress with portions of the business being able to be done by other support or technical staff. Directors often end up with core clients and grow primarily by word-of-mouth or by attracting other health professionals to join them and bring their clients and relationships with them. Increasing their referral network becomes important in this stage.
When to get help
Healthcare Leaders need help from a Business Advisor to provide direction on how to break the cycle of “do the work” then “chase the work”. Typically we assist businesses with an initial assessment of the capacity utilisation. Then we’re able to assist on how to optimise the current workflow before engaging in sales and marketing activities to drive profitability.