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When it comes to building your private healthcare business, writing a strong business plan and implementing it properly is perhaps the most effective strategy to propel your business to success. Whether you are just starting out, or are already an established healthcare practice, it is never too late to write your business plan and put it in place.
We’ve put together seven steps to help you write a healthcare business plan and then implement it. You can also find a sample private practice business plan PDF here to get you started!
Perhaps the most important step of writing a business plan is identifying what it is you are trying to achieve. Identifying clear business goals will enable you to build a step-by-step plan to ultimately achieve these aims.
Dr Gero Baiarda, Clinical Director at GPDQ, states the importance of knowing your practice’s aims in our ‘Launching a Private Practice’ ebook. He states that identifying your purpose, vision, and mission, will help keep you consistent and accountable to your goals. Knowing exactly what you are seeking to achieve in your business will mean that your business plan is tailored to achieving that goal at every step.
To write a business plan that will enable you to reach your goals, you need to understand how your business is currently performing. Obtaining a complete and in-depth overview of the health of your business will help you to make concrete and achievable goals based on accurate data.
Tracking data is also essential as you progress further with your business. You can’t make a successful business plan without knowing your business inside and out, and you won’t be able to understand how you are performing against your business plan without measuring data as you go.
Make sure you have access to business management tools that allow you to track the key data, such as revenue, patient numbers, cash flow, and other financial and patient demographics which will be useful for your growth goals.
With a business goal in mind, the best way to create a business plan is to break it down into smaller, achievable steps. By doing this you will be able to map out a clear trajectory for your business over the next months or years and it will be easier to track your progress against your aims and expectations.
Work backwards from the end goal to create smaller steps, each with a clear, quantifiable goal, such as reaching a revenue goal in a certain month or number of patients reached. If you work well with visuals, experiment with creating a visual diagram or board that you can keep close at hand to check and measure up against as you grow your healthcare business.
A business plan is about improving and growing your business, and to do this it is important to understand your strengths and weaknesses. Consider what has worked well for your business and what has not.
For example, how is your staff management? Does your team work well together, understand their individual roles, and achieve tasks efficiently?
By identifying main strengths, you can work them into your plan to help you improve business performance. Identifying any weaknesses will enable you to know areas that need some attention and a greater input of time and resources to help you build an all-around stronger business.
An understanding of your patient’s needs is essential to performing well in the market. Your patient population will depend to an extent on the healthcare services you are offering, but conducting key market research into the specific needs of your patients will help you to create a unique and tailored service that will perform better in the market.
Oliver Capel, Managing Director at Medico Digital, explains that market research and patient demographics such as age, gender, religion, income level, and more, can help you to cultivate a more targeted and effective marketing strategy because it provides insight into what sort of marketing materials will be best received by patients. For example, a young mother will respond differently to marketing than a 60-year old male retiree.
Explore how to use patient market research to improve your business performance in Chapter 2 of the ‘Launching a Private Practice’ ebook .
You can’t expect to see results in business growth if you don’t invest the time and energy into nurturing it. Whether that be investing in your own development with business management learning time, or setting aside a weekly hour for growth strategy and progress reviewing, it is essential that you carve out time to work on your business.
There are many online courses, books, and guides for basic business management which could help you learn invaluable skills for managing and growing your healthcare business. Start by identifying areas where you have less knowledge and schedule in an hour a week for learning, planning, and strategy.
Even as little as one hour a week will have a profound effect on your business skills and management, and the results will soon be evident!
There is little point in setting goals if your team is unaware of what they are. Sharing business goals with your team and employees means that everyone can do their part to reach certain milestones and improve the business. It also helps to create a stronger network that you can rely on to carry out delegated tasks and ease the burden of both business management and the day-to-day running of your private healthcare practice.
Whether it be improving customer service with better bedside manner, or making changes to workflows to improve efficiency, making your team aware of the end goal will help them understand why change is needed and thus more likely to get on board.