Over the past five years, I’ve worked hands-on with MANY privately owned hearing care clinics to help them run smarter marketing and grow.
In that time, I’ve noticed that there are three types of clinics.
- Clinics that are struggling (the majority)
- Clinics that reach a certain stage and stagnate
- Clinics that see continued exponential growth year on year (the few)
What’s interesting is that the difference between these clinics’ success has nothing to do with how good of an audiologist or hearing care professional the owner is.
It’s all to do with their mindset, how they think, and their understanding of the e-myth philosophy that I’m about to share with you.
Here’s the harsh reality; the success of your clinic has often nothing to do with how good of a hearing care professional you are or how long your clinic has been open … it has all to do with understanding where your clinic is in the following three phases and developing a plan to reach maturity as quickly as possible.
Allow me to explain …
If you’ve ever read Michael Gerber’s E-Myth, he identifies three phases in a business.
- Infancy
- Adolescence
- Maturity
Let me explain each of them …
The infancy stage is where you’re the business
Without you doing your thing, the business cannot operate. Naturally, this is often needed to get the business off the ground, but to evolve and grow into adolescence, you need to realize the need for managing the business rather than being the business. For many clinics, this is an uncomfortable step, as it requires you to hire, delegate, and hand responsibility/patients to other people. This keeps many clinic owners stuck in this phase as they overwork and firefight every single problem.
The second phase is adolescence
This often happens when a clinic owner gets too busy and hires their first person (or people). It may mean that you hire another provider or your front desk. Unfortunately, this now means you need to manage these people, dealing with HR, keeping them happy, and keeping them busy. Clinic owners who resist managing will see the business continue to grow beyond their comfort zone until they either return to infancy (get small again), crash and burn, stay in survival mode, or move on to maturity.
The third phase is maturity
Not many clinics reach this stage, yet it’s where the magic happens for real growth. This is where the owner is no longer required to run the day to day of the business, doesn’t see patients on the front line, and has a manager or CEO in place to manage the daily operations of the business. They then spend their focus on growing the business and tackling the big challenges such as vision, patient experience, marketing, systems, etc.
These three phases are true in any business, especially hearing care clinics.
As you may have noticed, these three phases also align to the three types of clinics that I started this article by sharing:
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Clinics that are struggling are often trapped in infancy.
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Clinics that reach a certain stage and stagnate are often in the adolescent phase.
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Clinics that see continued exponential growth year on year are in the maturity phase.
The question that you need to ponder is: Where are you right now, and what do you need to do to reach the next stage?
