How to increase profits by leveraging the power of efficiency

Hi docs, welcome to the EntreMD podcast, where it's all about helping amazing physicians just like you embrace entrepreneurship so you can have the freedom to live life and practice medicine on your terms. I'm your host, dr Ibnah. Well, hello. Hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of the EntreMD podcast. Today we are going to be talking about how to multiply profits, leveraging the power of efficiency. Now, I recently went on a trip to Dallas with my mom and my four kids. I remember us being at we went through the B terminal, which, in my experience, is like the busiest terminal, the process of getting to the airport, doing the check-in, getting on the train, getting to the B terminal. My mom is like there are so many people here. I'm like, yeah, and the thing is that they're so efficient because, even though there are so many people, the people are going through. You know what I mean. And so I remember looking at the statistics and like the Atlanta airport being the busiest airport and things like that. So I kind of wanted to share those with her, but I couldn't remember the numbers. So I Googled it and there are 2,700 arrivals and departures from the Atlanta airport every single day and they are moving about 300,000 people through the airport every single day. So I remember pulling up on my phone and showing her. She's like, oh my goodness, right. Then, of course, you know how I am right, I'm a student of business, like period. And so I started thinking about it. I was like so the major product this airport has is really their efficiency, right? Like think about 2,700 flights, 300,000 people. I mean like that's unbelievable, that's more than a quarter of a million people right Every single day. And so I'm like efficiency, the only way for them to be profitable is for them to be efficient. The only way for them to be a desired hub is for them to be efficient. Like efficiency is their big thing. And so I started thinking about our businesses and I was like I wonder what if we obsessed over efficiency like they do now? I've watched documentaries on the Atlanta airport. It's a thing of beauty to look at how they obsess and get things down to the second and the minute, and I mean like it's fabulous. I mean it's so inspiring that if I go there and there are delays on all of those things, I'm the one who never complains, because I'm like if you know what goes into creating this experience that we have like. Of course, here and there things are going to fall apart and all of that, but for them to pull off what they pull off, they have no beef with. I have no beef with them, right. And so I started thinking. I said, well, what if we also had this habit of constantly thinking of how can we make this more efficient, not less of an experience, not rushed, not done properly, but more efficient, right, so we're getting the same result, maybe even better results, right, in less time or with less resources or in things like that. So so I'm thinking about it and I went back to the early, early, early days of my practice, right, and pulled up an example. I was like, wow, this is crazy, and I'll tell you what it is. When I started my practice, right, there were I don't know five, six practices around me that were much bigger, much bigger, had a lot more doctors, had longer hours, had beautiful offices, a quare and they like all the bells and whistles, right, and I'm just starting not even believing I can employ an MA, right, I told you guys the story of how I was my own MA. I answered my own phones, had a lot of scarcity in mindset around all these things. So, anyway, I remember looking at their reviews and I was looking at their reviews to see what do people love, what are people frustrated by, right. And so I'm looking through all the reviews and I see a lot around wait times. There's so much like it was a thing and I, my core, I'm speedy, right. So wait times they can drive me nuts. So I was like, okay, I'm gonna take that as a unique selling proposition, so USB, that we can brag on, right, Like we'll get you out, and so how are we gonna do this? Okay, and I remember in now this is in high school, studying about economics and all of those things and studying the likes of Toyota and their assembly line, right. So I think we were doing a class on the division of labor, how if you have different people handling different aspects, then they're able to get things done so much quicker than if one person was going through all the entire process. But what it reminded me was was that assembly line. You would see companies like Walmart. They measure the distance between boxes on the trucks and things like that. That's all. Those are all measures of on the belt, like the conveyor belt. Those are all measures of inefficiency. So companies that do high volume, low ticket, especially, they obsess over efficiency, because without efficiency there's no profit, like period. Okay, so I remember that and I said okay, so we started calling our process of door to door for the patient, like arrival and departure. We started calling that our assembly line and not assembly line so people feel like there are numbers on a conveyor belt but assembly line, meaning that we are obsessing over the areas where there is a lack of efficiency. Right, and so we can fix that and make it a faster experience for the patient. Right, because, again, our USP was short wait times. Our thing was we will get you out door to door an hour or less. Okay, until this day. This is Google. Now it will say people typically spend 30 minutes to an hour here, right, like. So it's that whole assembly line thing. Okay, so what does that look like? Well, what it looks like is we took all the steps, and the reason why I'm breaking this down is not for you to use this. For instance, your business may not be a private practice, but it may be, but your processes may be different. But I wanna show you how we thought of it so that you can create your own right. Okay, so the first one was the check-in right, that's the first thing. So they come in, they agree to that whole check-in process, co-pays, all of those kind of things. The second thing is that they're taken to a room, right? So the MA comes, calls them, puts them in a room and all that stuff. Third thing is that their vitals are done. The fourth thing is the doc comes to see them. The fifth thing is what we call postdoc. Whether that is vaccines, or they needed some labs done or they needed a referral, whatever, there's some the doc left. And there's this postdoc thing. We're clear that it's not for every patient but a lot of. I'm pediatric, so a lot of patients will have that. And then the last thing was the checkout right. And for us we document checkout as a separate part of the assembly line, because we want everybody to leave with an appointment, right, we want that to happen. So we do the recall or less, so we have stability with our schedule and all of those kind of things. So it's check-in, roaming, vitals, doc, postdoc, checkout, right. Now of course there is a quote, unquote assembly line for getting them into the office. There's an assembly line for your revenue cycle, like all of those things. They're all processes right At the end of the day. But this is door to door, okay. So, door to door, we call that the assembly line. Now, what that did is it put us in a position where we can go to each place. So for, like, our wait times are long. We can strategically go and say, okay, there's so many things we can fix here, and we are going to be working on this assembly line for as long as this practice exists. It's continuous improvement. So the question is, which one is the one that will give us the biggest bang for our buck? What is the place that, if we go here and make a tweak here, we can shave off five minutes, or we can shave off 10 minutes, or we can shave off 15 minutes, okay, so I'm going to give you a number of examples here. So there was a time when and this is really showing you how to troubleshoot your assembly line so the first step is to create your assembly line. The second step is, okay, to audit your assembly line. Where are things falling apart? Okay, where are things falling apart? So, for instance, we said well, when the doc is in the room, we're finding that there's a lot of time being spent generating what, getting answers to what we would consider routine questions, right? So mommy comes in and they are asking questions like how much milk does Johnny drink? Then mom is like oh, I get off work at two o'clock, so by the time I get home at three, johnny will usually wake up then and have two ounces and then after that. And so they literally do the entire math in the room and we have like a thousand things to talk about. We don't have all this time to just get the amount of milk. And so then what we did, recognizing that, was keeping the doctors long and it's not necessarily value to the patient. Understand what I'm saying. So it's not about getting the doctor out of the room, it's about giving the doctor the opportunity of doing what is of most value. So it could be as simple as Johnny gets 20 ounces of milk a day and that's it. And she can go on to ask the parent questions, examine the kid, answer the questions that are important to the patient, and so what we did is then we said, okay, to shorten this up. We created our own questionnaire of all these questions that they end up asking for specific age groups, and so when they come in, that's part of the paperwork that they fill out and it shortens that time. Because all that time calculating the milk, checking the number of poop diapers and all of these things, those are all reduced to numbers and if the numbers are fine, you're like okay, this is number, this is with their normal, moving on. So that's an example of removing inefficiency. So the doctors are able to do a really good job and they're able to do it in less time and the patients felt like they were heard because they talked about what they wanted to talk about. So that's an example. Second example may be okay, the postdoc, so the doctor's made the orders, but there's this lag between whenever the person comes in to give the vaccines or comes in to do the lab. It comes in to do all of those things. So then you analyze it. What can we do here? For example, some of the things we did for patients who are getting boosters, so not their very first vaccines. When the patient is being worked up, the nurses ordering whatever vaccines that they're going to give. So that way the doctor has an opportunity to look at it and they're telling the parents you know, johnny's going to get XYZ parents are okay, they don't have any objections. So when the doc comes out, the nurse is not needing to try and figure out anything. It's already been figured out. If it's not something that needs to be reconstituted, it's already pulled up and they're ready to go. So it shortened that time between when the doctor leaves the room and when the nurse comes in to give the vaccines. Right, and you can look for a thing after thing. We looked in the check-in for patients who have old balances coming in and say, okay, we have an old balance, and they're like I don't know understand why I have a balance and all of those things. We removed that. So in the process of letting them know your appointment is coming up, at that point we're like and you have this balance, how would you like to take care of that today? So before they even come into the office, that's done. So there's so many things that you can just say how can I shave off five minutes here? Why is this taking this long? He doesn't have to. Referrals used to be. We try to look all over the place for all these referrals. We made a one sheet with all the referrals. So doc wants a referral. You highlight what that is, boom done. And so, just thinking in those kind of terms, you start thinking how can I make this more efficient? This is an ongoing thing. How do I make this more efficient? How can I make this more efficient? How can I make this more efficient? And it's not something you graduate out of right Because as your volumes increase or as you bring on another doc or COVID happens, so some things had to change. Your assembly line is always going to need work, right, so you create the assembly line. If you're a coach, it's the same thing. So maybe what you're doing you're emailing back and forth to schedule appointments. Well, maybe it's time to say, okay, well, let's put a calendar in place. So it is one email, here's the calendar, and then they schedule their appointment. It's just a way of thinking. The assembly line is not specific, it's a way of thinking. So you map out your line from when somebody signs up to work with you, they schedule their coaching call. They do this, they do that, like all of it. You map it out and you're like how can I make this more efficient? Okay, you're a podcaster same thing. What is your workflow? How can I make it more efficient? So it used to be for me back in the day. I would send out an email love for you to be on my show. They would give some available times. We'll do the whole back and forth with the times and then I would have to remember to send reminders before. Sometimes they would miss it and they have tremendous to thank them afterwards and all of these things. And I just went into Calendly and built a workflow. So there's one link and then all the things we need the bio not sending a separate email for the bio and the headshots and all of that. As you schedule it, everything is there. You have a reminder, I think the week before the day before the day of a text, an hour before. You get a thank you email afterwards, 30 minutes afterwards and it's all one workflow. So all that work I had to do, I don't do it anymore. It's just schedule your appointment. Once you schedule it, you trigger everything else. So what does this have to do with profits? Well, a number of things. One is, when you take care of people in an efficient manner, their satisfaction goes through the roof. It's like they're happy because they're getting what they want. They get in a timely manner. They're happy, and people who are happy tend to continue to work with you. People who are happy tend to tell other people about you. People who are happy, if there's an opportunity to work within a different capacity, they'll usually take it. So we want people happy is good for our profits. The second thing is that you are able to take care of more people. Again, this matters for all models, whether you're high ticket or low ticket. But it matters even more if you're in a low ticket model, because the low ticket model works because of volume. Okay, so if you put yourself in a position where you cannot handle the volume, then you cannot make the profits, right? And so you wanna put yourself in a position where the more if you're efficient because the more efficient you are, the more you can see the volume that is required to make your business profitable. So sometimes people tell me well, I'm seeing 10 patients a day and I'm burnt out. When people tell me that, what I hear is I need help making my practice more efficient, right? Because, especially if you're primary care and stuff like that, you shouldn't be. You should be excited Like I feel, like I don't work, like I only see 10 patients a day. You see what I'm saying, Like you should not feel like you're burning out. If you're burning out, then what that means is there's a lot of efficiency, okay. So what I want you to do today this is one of these is you're gonna workshop this, okay, and if you have a number of doctors, for instance, working your practice, you have team members, all this stuff, this is a great episode to share with everybody, and then your team can work on this. When I worked on this the very first time, I probably did it by myself because I was coming up with a concept, but I've never done it by myself ever since then. And we do this for everything, like our training systems, for our staff. We build in how do we make this more efficient? How can we get somebody on boarded and ready to work with us in a week and two weeks, and stuff like that. It's a way of thinking, right. So share this episode with your team members and then map out what your assembly line is and then look like if I could only pick two projects, don't try to do 72, right, and if you looked hard, you would find 72 things. Okay, there's always something wrong with the assembly line, okay. So, but if I could only do three tweaks of my assembly line. If I could only do three, what would that be and what would be the order of priority? Okay, and then you can start taking wax at it, but what you'll find is your staff will be so much happier because now you're taking things like there's this frenzied energy, this hustle mode that the more efficient you become, the more it goes away, like people are just confidently doing what needs to be done. But it's not a hustle, let's make it work. We're done and we have to see them some kind of way. It's just there's an ease that goes with it. It's still hard work, but there's an ease that goes with it, right? So I mean, your staff satisfaction will go through the roof as well, right? Okay, so share it with your team. Build out your assembly line, like based on what you have now, like what is our current assembly line, but just itemize it, right, and then do that audit. What are the top three things I can start working on? And then start working on them and you'll be setting yourself up. Maybe we're not gonna be like the Atlanta airport. We're not gonna be putting 300,000 people through our businesses every day. However, our businesses will feel so much lighter and our patients will be so. Our patients, our clients, will be so much happier and our team would be so, so, so much happier and our profits will be better. Okay, so it's a win-win situation. So I want you to do this and I want you to send me a PM. Send me a DM on Instagram or PM on Facebook or LinkedIn, as I, dr Una, we did this and this is the difference that we made. I would love to hear your story. I would love to see how you're applying this and changing your business and your life using this. Okay, all right, so go do the work. I'll see you on the next episode of the Ultra MD Podcast. All right, so let's get started. Hey, if you love listening to the Ultra MD Podcast, I wanna invite you to join Ultra MD On Demand. It is my signature subscription program that gives you access to a library of business courses designed to help you do one thing as a physician entrepreneur, and that is to thrive. Just head out to untramdcom forward slash on demand, and I'd love to have you join us. See you on the inside.