If Your Practice is Failing, It's Your Fault

I’ve seen too many doctors fall into the victim mentality: blame the staff, blame the marketing company, blame the economy. Anything to avoid the uncomfortable truth that they are in charge of their own practice. You are the master of your own destiny. If the practice is failing, the buck stops with you.

This episode is about your mindset and your limiting beliefs, the ways you are holding yourself back, and ultimately about accountability. Nobody else is coming to fix this.

Why This Matters Now

Turnarounds are where this lesson gets proven. Gartner Plastic Surgery was a turnaround client: one New Jersey office that grew to three, including Manhattan. Turnarounds never start with a new logo or a clever campaign. They start when the person in charge decides the results are his responsibility and starts firing what doesn’t work. That decision is available to you today, for free.

The Paralysis of Analysis

The one thing that will kill your business is doing nothing, sitting there analyzing it to death.

The paralysis of analysis will kill your practice.

Nobody Is Coming to Save Your Practice

You are in charge of your future, and it’s your responsibility to move yourself forward. No one else is going to do it for you. Even if everyone around you drops the ball, your suppliers, your marketing company, all of them, it’s still your responsibility to fire them and course correct. Don’t sit there wallowing in self-pity about things not working. If something isn’t working, figure out why and fix it. If your marketing company is the problem, I wrote how to fire your marketing agency for exactly that moment.

Nobody Should Care More Than You Do

I’ve been doing this for 20 years, and one of the most damaging things I’ve ever seen in medical practices is a physician who cares less about the practice than I do. When I care more that the phone is being picked up, that the emails are going out, that people are showing up for procedures, that practice isn’t going far.

Nobody should care about your practice more than you do.

The Instincts That Are Killing Your Business

The same instincts that make you a good doctor are killing your business. Your compassion and loyalty to staff. Your unrelenting analytical thinking. Your fear of making mistakes. The belief that because you got through med school, you’re qualified to do everything yourself. And the only reason you think you can do everything is arrogance.

Arrogance vs. Experience

Society put it in your mind that med school makes you qualified and intelligent enough for everything. I’m letting you off the hook: you don’t have to know it all. Being great at medicine doesn’t make you a great marketer. I was speaking with a doctor just last week who wanted to sign up for our services. We run a full vetting interview with every prospect. He’d never built an eight-figure practice, but he was sure he was qualified to overrule my recommendations because he’d read a few books and heard a guru at a conference.

There’s a difference between arrogance and experience.

Doctors Make Bad Marketers. That’s Fine.

Most doctors are not great business people or great marketers. That’s okay, because they’re great doctors, and that’s the craft worth focusing on. In all my years doing this, I’ve seen fewer than 1% of doctors who can do medicine and business at a high level simultaneously, and the ones who manage it sacrifice a lot: family time, health, sometimes their ethics. This is why most medical marketing fails, and why pretending otherwise is expensive.

Perfectionism Is a Disease

Perfectionism is mandatory in surgery. You have to get every detail right. Business is not surgery. Perfectionism isn’t progress, and analyzing something to death is its own disease. Excellent instincts in the OR. Fatal ones in marketing. I went deeper on this in the episode on making mistakes in business.

Charge More. It’s Your Obligation.

The goal is a great result with high satisfaction and happy patients. Price carries its own placebo effect. If charging more gives patients a higher sense of satisfaction, you have a moral obligation to do so. You have a responsibility to your family, your staff, your practice, and your future to charge properly for your services, and to root out these limiting beliefs. Treat them like the disease they are: use your medical instincts to find the root cause and treat the problem, not the symptoms.

If you want a second set of eyes on what’s actually broken, that’s what our advisory work is: someone who will tell you the truth without worrying about getting fired for it.