The Seven Deadly Sins of Businesses
By Hedley Lawson, Jr.

Many very successful businesses often find problems surfacing that befuddle the most intelligent and successful business person. There is any number of training seminars and business publications that profess to know how to resolve problems. Many, however, don’t take time to isolate the problem well enough to ascribe a solution.

We’ve prepared a short but practical look at what we call “The Seven Deadly Sins of Business.”

The Sin:  We can upgrade later. There’s any number of areas within a business where this typically arises. Let’s take ineffective talent acquisition and employee retention.

The Solution: “Hire and retain the only the best.” Seemingly impersonal, difficult or personally painful as it may be, experience suggests that taking immediate action saves time, money, organizational pain and possible litigation that typically results from retaining less than stellar staff.

The Sin:  Offering a solution in search of a problem.  You know you have a problem when you continually find employees as opposed to a defined problem in search of a root cause definition and a solution.

The Solution: Attain intimate knowledge of your business, your operations and your organization. Craft solutions that address real, not perceived needs. And use organizational or customer feedback early and often to build a strong performance culture and customer focused organization or practice.

The Sin: Excellence is subjective. You know you have a problem when people individually make change without anyone knowing. This results in your employees determining the standard for excellence and you later discovering that excellence widely varies between employees and reflects in your customer value proposition and retention.

The Solution: Create a well defined and evenly applied quality and performance culture. Be honest and constructively critically with your employees. And avoid false praise.

The Sin:  Ready, fire, aim. This is most often evident as a result of poor planning and organization. You know you have a problem when you and others in your organization are too busy to effectively plan. You discover a gap between strategic and operational thinking and execution. And there exists chronic inability to quantify and communicate expectations effectively.

The Solution: Distinguish between goals and outcomes. Equally important, insist on up-front plans, even if they change.

The Sin:  Bring it up at the meeting. Waiting becomes the prevailing organizational planning and communication process and displaces a culture based on a sense of urgency.You know you have a problem when employees and management take a wait and see or hands off approach to tough decisions, or when few probing questions are asked. And after waiting for a meeting, it is not uncommon to find poor preparation and weak analysis that lead to inconclusive meetings.

The Solution: Build a culture of immediacy and urgency that addresses tough questions or problems. Build teamwork that solves problems, not ignoring them.

The Sin:  My people. This is often evident through office politics and a company culture disconnect. You know you have a problem when friends hire friends and protect them. Loyalties take precedence over achievement and candor.

The Solution: Ensure that teamwork is the foundation of your company, and that you will impose zero tolerance for bad teamwork. By doing so, you will take positive strides to ensure bottlenecks to open communication among your team.

The Sin: Blame the measuring stick. By blaming the measure, you experience weak accountability. You know you have a problem when you find results fall short of expectation, or there exists weak internal accountability, or individuals want to throw out performance measures or metrics.

The Solution: What you can do about it is create a performance culture with performance metrics. Don’t accept broken performance promises or commitments without explanation.

Hedley Lawson is the managing partner of Aligned Growth Partners, LLC, a strategic, operational and organizational consulting, and executive search firm ( www.alignedgrowth.com).
 

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Blueprint for Bringing on a New Associate

1. Establish your rationale for bringing on an associate:
   Patients booked out over a week, desire to increase practice revenue, increase scope of practice, preparation for retirement, decrease hours, etc.
2. Define your personal skills and attributes:
   Personality
   Professional
   Business
   Management
   Strengths and weaknesses
   
3. Create a goal checklist:
   Practice goals
   Professional goals
   Personal goals
   
4. Document your “mission statement:”
   Practice culture
   Staff profile
   Facility attributes
   Organizational structure
   Overall strengths and weaknesses
   
5. Develop an “associate profile” (What are you looking for?)
   Personal attributes
   Professional skills
   Business skills
   Management capabilities
   Experience requirements
   
6. Create a detailed job description including goals and expectations:
   Duties (managerial, professional, training, motivation, etc.)
   Responsibilities (role in achievement of practice goals, etc.)
   Other expectations (community service, marketing, education, etc.)
   Responsibilities vs. authority
   
7. Create an ongoing performance evaluation process based on your expectations:
   Establish specific timelines to review status of the relationship
   Create a format to handle organizational and personal issues
   Put an annual assessment procedure in place
   
8. Establish a “viable” compensation plan:
   Salary vs. draw
   Bonus based on specific objectives
   
9. Establish a timeline and guidelines for creating a partnership, if applicable:
   Specific revenue generation
   Personnel management
   Personal objectives
   Staff and peer compatibility
   Length of “buy in” plan with benchmarked timeliness
   Detailed description of process
   Agree on a “practice valuation” methodology and timing
   
10. Meet with staff for input and buy-in:
    Discuss in detail, final plans and gain buy-in
    Define both doctors’ roles relative to authority and responsibility
    If possible, have new doctor spend one to two weeks in practice, prior to agreement
    
11. Write an Associate Agreement
    
12. Contact optometry schools, state associations, local societies, the AOA, etc., and inform them of your search for a new associate
    
13. Begin the interviewing process

This blueprint was taken from a lecture series presented in March at Primary Eyecare Network’s semi-annual conference called Preserving Independent Optometry (PIO). To obtain a copy of the Compatibility Survey for Bringing on an Associate/Partner contact Primary Eyecare Network at (800) 444-9230 or visit their Web site at www.PrimaryEye.net

Managing Your Inner Manager
By Gary Gerber, OD

Doctors have different business management styles. Some of us are hands off and out of touch with the business side of our practice while others are micromanagers awash in a blizzard of paperwork.

What’s the best balance between these two CEO styles and how can you manage your own management skills? Listed below are four main problems plaguing today’s ODs. If you follow these basic guidelines, you’ll be sure to negotiate the fine lines between doctor, boss, CEO and final arbiter of business details.

Don’t Be an Enabler
“Dr. Enabler, I’m not sure where this frame gets filed, under the buying group name or the frame company name? A common response would be to either file it yourself or tell your staff member where to file it. While both responses are correct, fast and reinforce you as the go-to source for information, don’t do it! Doing so encourages your staff to ask you questions instead of researching the answers on their own.

Good managers encourage active research. Instead of simply answering a question, add sources of information such as Web sites and journals. This will stimulate a sense of learning in your team and they won’t be relying solely on you to answer all of their questions.

Explain Your Practice’s Objectives/Brand
You can’t expect your staff to support your practice’s objectives if they don’t know what those objectives are. Every action your staff takes, from clinical skill execution to answering the phone, should be done under the umbrella of a well-understood and assimilated practice brand.

Staff should know exactly what is expected of them, and these goals and tasks should be clearly documented. When this is done, your management style can be one of coach and teacher instead of enforcer.

Establish Deadlines
As a practitioner, your day is totally structured by deadlines. The same should be true of your staff. Use deadlines and schedules to your benefit. Simply telling a staff person, “We need to do an inventory of our frames” isn’t nearly as effective as adding, “and we need to have it done my March 1.”

Create a simple task sheet that designates who is responsible for each task and when it’s expected to be completed. Alert your staff to tell you if they feel a deadline is too aggressive. Having tasks and deadlines recorded allows you to oversee them at timed intervals.

Focus on Results, Not Details
Effective managers are careful to focus on results rather than the steps that lead to the end product. You can say, for example, “While I certainly care about the process of ordering trial CLs, I’m more concerned that we don’t run out of them.” Cut your staff some slack and let them exercise some creativity.

Finally, small changes in your style are usually all that’s needed to help you spend your time more effectively. Make these changes and focus on the results!

Dr. Gary Gerber is the president of the PowerPractice, a practice management consulting company aimed at making doctors more profitable. He can be reached at drgerber@powerpratice.com or (800) 867-9303.   This article originally appeared in Review of Optometry’s SECO Show Daily, Feb. 25, 2006.

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