Delegating Functions to Create a Staff Driven Practice

As a practice owner in an expanding practice, it is vital that you can delegate and get others to take on functions and duties. To grow any business, learning the functions and getting good at delegating them is vital.

Some chiropractors have said to me that they just want to get their staff doing all the functions well so that they can just treat patients.

It sounds great in theory, but is it?

You delegate the front desk to someone without really understanding it yourself and then find out that patients who were supposed to be scheduled to come back in were not scheduled, or leads that came in from your marketing are not being followed up or there could be a myriad of other things go wrong with that.

Since you didn’t yourself lay out the sequence, duties, policies and have a way of tracking these things, you find that YOUR practice is not running as YOU want it to run, thereby decreasing patient volume, profitability and overall success.

UNDERSTAND IT AND THEN GET OTHERS TO DO IT

The only way you can stop doing something yourself is by being able to do it well yourself. Sounds backwards, but let’s take a look at that.

If you are asking employees to do things that you don’t know how to do then you are up setting yourself up for one of 2 things: a) you hire a great employee who can do it very well, who closes patients on care left and right and all goes well – until it doesn’t. The employee leaves, asks for a higher salary than you are willing to pay or whatever. And now you are stuck with the problem again and no real solution. Or b) you hire someone who needs training on that job, you can’t apprentice them or show them how to handle some of the problems they are running into and you are back to having the same problem yourself.

But, if you had taken the time and the responsibility to really learn that job and be the best at it then it is no problem. You can hire someone, train and apprentice them (with the help of The Business Academy) to do it and then let them succeed. If that person goes on maternity leave or moves out of state, you can jump back in, do it yourself and train another to them move back up and out of the job.

LEARN AND BE CLEAR ON WHAT THE OWNER JOBS ARE THAT YOU CAN’T DELEGATE

There are a number of jobs that you have as the owner of the business, which you must maintain. These include financial oversight, providing direction and purpose, planning, creating or approving office policy, broad marketing direction and overseeing major HR matters.

You also must review the statistics of the business and know what is happening while you can also predict the future with the statistics (The Business Academy teaches you which statistics, how to read them and formulas for improving them).

If you as a business owner were to delegate many of these functions, even to a very good office manager, the basic control of the practice can be lost, the financial well being can be affected and you can find yourself with bigger problems.

At the end of the day, it is your business and none of your employees are as connected to it as you.

None of these functions have to be extremely time consuming and they can be done without even having to be in the office much, but they must be done.

When we help out clients to have a staff driven practice, there are a lot of pieces and parts to it – all of them vital. Being able to do all of the functions in the business as above is one of the most underlying necessities.