Pop analysis: the case of Sauk Valley Orthodontics

In this post, we examine the closing of Sauk Valley Orthodontics, a 2 office practice in Illinois.  If you are so inclined, you can read the news story about it here.  

Certainly, this practice is not the first to close nor will it be the last.   Moreover, I am not going to discuss what seems to be the rather abrupt closure of the practice.  Maybe they had a good reason for having to close with almost no notice or maybe they didn’t.  No need to speculate about that.  Our goal is to take the facts from the story and what we see online to determine what operational changes could have been made to enable the practice to survive.  

To do this, I am going to make one major assumption: the practice had to shut down because the volume of paying patients was insufficient to enable the practice to pay its bills.  In other words, the practice did not shut down because someone stole a bunch of money or major malpractice or a radioactive leak at both offices.

Here’s what I see:

4 quotes that should give you pause

In the vein of our previous post on declining practices, here are some quotes we’ve heard over the last few months that should cause a practice to pause and re-evaluate things.  Unlike the previous post on the topic, these aren’t necessarily indicators that the practice is in trouble, but if you hear them or find yourself saying them, any owner or business manager should take pause and reevaluate the situation.

Annual meeting fails: lessons learned

We’ve gotten several comments looking for more mistakes made during annual meetings and lessons learned from those missteps (aside from the alcohol fueled missteps and mistakes).  We here at the Engine aren’t afraid to admit our mistakes and we’ve made our share so here are more meeting fails:

Doctor’s meeting, New Orleans.  This was around the year 2000 when WiFi access wasn’t ubiquitous like it is today.  But at the time, internet access was prominent enough that we simply assumed that we could plug a network cable into a wall jack and get online.  Big mistake.  I had scheduled a breakout presentation to demo our new online reporting product.  And since this was a Saturday presentation, the one guy in the whole hotel who knew what to do was off and unavailable.  Quite clearly, doing a demo of an online product doesn’t go well when there is no online component.  We muddled through, but I got some poor reviews.

Lesson learned: Test extensively beforehand.  See if the resort will let you into the exact room early to do a quick test of everything.  And have a backup plan.  If something crashes, have something available that doesn’t require you to be online or have power or whatever.

Annual meetings: doing it right

If you have a practice of more than a medium size, you probably find yourself more than a little occupied by the day-to-day of the operation.  Patients need to be seen, fires need to be put out, marketing needs to be done.  That leaves little to no time to take a breather, introduce new products, find out where everything stands with the staff and do some in-depth training.

I know that a lot of practices have morning meetings or weekly sessions, but those are usually to address short term, micro issues.  Patient X wants a refund or staff person Y needs someone to substitute while on vacation.  Things like that.

One useful tool that we have employed over the years is an annual get together of the doctors and/or managers.  We’ve done everything from renting some empty space in an office building to blocking out rooms at a resort in Hawaii and hiring entertainment for each evening.  Whatever the level of opulence you decide, here are some tips for making your meeting successful: