You Can’t Grow a Practice Without Pillars

No matter what kind of year 2011 has been for your practice, as managers and owners it’s that time again—time to set goals and budgets for the coming year. I can’t imagine any practice not setting growth goals, and laying plans for how they hope to accomplish next year’s growth. How many of you plan to strengthen the pillars in your practice? How many of you need to create new pillars in order to grow at all?

What’s all this crazy architectural talk about pillars, you ask? Look at the success of your veterinary practice from an architectural standpoint. A strong foundation is created when you have a cohesive, complimentary owner-manager team. This foundation is the base for all future growth, but without pillars the walls and roof will be weak. In this analogy, the walls are your team and the roof is the amount of production the team can handle. Without pillars, your walls may crumple under the weight of the roof. You need pillars for stability and growth!

A pillar is a team member who has willingly given 100% of themselves to the success of the practice. Pillars are your natural leaders, your big picture thinkers, and innovators. They are the people who see problems and want to fix them, rather than wait for someone else to notice. They are the people who take pride in your practice and come to work everyday, treating it as if it were their own.

In The Innovator’s Toolkit: 50+ Techniques for Predictable and Sustainable Organic Growth (Silverstein, Samuel, and DeCarlo), the authors say, “organic growth takes a lot more than ideas. It takes galvanizing leadership and a sustainable growth engine. It takes deep understanding of key concepts and a robust managerial process. It also takes a groundswell of employees who can skillfully apply all the necessary techniques and tools of innovation…”. Those employees are your potential pillars!

It’s very easy to create new pillars in your practice by paying attention to, and tapping into the natural talents of your team members. I learned long ago that shaping people to fit a particular job description doesn’t necessarily work. I actually tend to rewrite job descriptions around people’s talents, and fill the gaps by balancing them out with people who have completely different strengths. One of my all-time favorite management books, First, Break All the Rules (Buckingham and Coffman) explains these concepts more in-depth than I ever could in a blog post.

Now that you have practice pillars, how does one go about strengthening them? Start by making sure you are providing them with a solid foundation—do you make yourself available for coaching and support? Are you providing them with continuing education opportunities? Do they have all the tools they need in order to do their very best? Do they have close friends at work? These are all things that will strengthen your pillars, and in the long run will grow your practice year after year. Rather than focusing strictly on spreadsheets and numbers, be sure to incorporate your pillars into your growth plan. The more you put into them, the more your practice will reap in return.

Tags: growth, leadership in veterinary practice, planning

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 14th, 2011 at 3:19 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.