When we took over the other office, it took about 9 months to take the office from losing tons of money every month to starting to make it into the positive. In this blog, I am going to outline all of the steps we took to turn that office into a profit machine.
1. We got the wrong people off the bus and kept the right people on. In one day, I permanently freed up time for several people to find jobs that were better for them. Note: I did all of this in one day. When you're going to do a mass personnel change, it's critically important that you don't drag out the process. Doing this will make the "right" people uneasy and some of them will quit, while others will be poor producers until the time passes. So, I got it all taken care of at once and then assured the remaining associates that their jobs were safe as long they got their act together. Making sure we had the right people on board was the critical first step.
2. The manager who was in charge of the business was demoted and subsequently resigned. I will note here that when the CEO suggested to me that the manager be fired, I opted to allow him to continue his job as clinical director instead of firing him. Does anyone think he would have extended me that same courtesy?
3. We reviewed all of their written systems, found that they weren't using any of them, and re-implemented all of the written systems that I and the CEO had created for use in my office
4. We re-trained the entire staff on all of the written systems - over and over until everyone had it down cold.
5. We created new positions that mirrored some key positions in the other office to make sure that each office operated identically.
6. We put new managers in place to operate the office locally and set up vital reporting lines to ensure that everything ran smoothly.
7. We agreed that I would be on-site at the office at least one day per week and the CEO would be there every other week. Another key manager frequently worked on-site as well to make sure some of the inner-workings of the medical office ran smoothly.
8. We identified and cleaned up the back-logs in every area so that everyone was able to work on current operations and old billings didn't get too old to collect.
9. I trained the new on-site office manager to manage the staff and their operations the right way.
10. We brought the collections operations to the home office in a successful effort to centralize billing and collections. This was a huge success.
11. We graphed everything for ongoing feedback on all business areas.
12. We continue to review their systems, technology, staff, and all business reports to make sure that everything continues to run in a way that breaks records.
So, remember - when you take over a failing business, always make sure you have the right people in place (do this swiftly), create and use effective systems, train everyone to do the right job the right way, teach managers to manage effectively, create feedback systems, graph everything, and never lose touch with the operations.
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