Positioning Your Practice for Success Is Easy With These Tips
The last 12 months rocked, but how do you maintain momentum as a new chapter launches? What should be top of mind to ensure a future that’s merry and bright for your audiology or ENT practice? With just a few sure steps, you (and your team) can take 2025 by storm!
Our Audigy business experts have prepared a list of five things to think about as a new year of possibilities gets underway. These practical tips help ensure you, your business, and your team are positioned to put your best foot forward today, tomorrow, and beyond.
Make Impressions Count
In nearly any interaction, the first impression is often the most powerful. It sets the tone for the start of a relationship and can drive future interactions. As the saying credited to actor and humorist Will Rogers goes, “You never get a second chance to make a good first impression.”
How can you ensure every interaction — including that first one — feels positive, is memorable, and keeps your patients (and your people) coming back? One helpful resource is hospitality veteran Jan Gunnarsson’s TEDx Talk, “Hostmanship: The Art of Making People Feel Welcome.”
As you hit the ground running for a successful new year, make sure your procedures for patient interaction — a key way people form impressions of your practice — are polished:
- Are you regularly reviewing inbound calls and patient-experience scores? These metrics provide invaluable insights on consumer engagement with and perception of your business.
- Is your physical office poised to make a great impression upon patient arrival? Cleanliness, comfort, and accessibility are just a few of the many factors to consider. Have a checklist.
Boost Patient Referrals
Did you know? The investment to gain a new patient from referral is just 10% of the cost of other marketing outreach, such as direct mail, social media, and more, per research published in the Hearing Review. Referrals make good “cents”!
Revisit your patient-referral process and get creative. Strategize ways to make referrals fun and engaging for your team and patients. Talk to your marketing manager for process recommendations or patient-referral card templates.
Optimize Your Block Schedule
It’s all too easy to fill up your schedule reactively: Calls come in, and you try to fill your open slots as quickly as possible. With block scheduling, you fill up your schedule intentionally, the goal being practice-wide efficiency.
What exactly is block scheduling? It’s a proven practice in which each day is divided into parts reserved for a specific type of activity — hearing aid evaluations, for example. Guided by your clinic’s goals, you organize those parts of your day to prioritize revenue-generating events and other key needs.
Align your block schedule with upcoming office closures and your team’s time off. Be sure to front-load the schedule with extra opportunities to ensure you hit your patient and revenue targets before you’re out of office.
Aim for Excellence
Success typically takes planning, which should include taking stock of past lessons and accomplishments, eyeing opportunities for improvement, and aiming high. What are your hallmarks for exceptional care and service? Keep them front and center as you plan the next year.
While reflecting on the current year’s successes, be sure to celebrate with your team, helping honor and reinforce their indispensable role in reaching critical business milestones. Include them in goal-setting, driving home the important stake everyone has in the process.
Review targets monthly with your people to ensure things are on track. Set a stretch goal and offer incentives to motivate your team. Reinforcing a powerful goal and demonstrating each person’s connection to it can inspire folks to further step up beyond what’s believed possible.
Ensure Team Alignment
Like rowing a boat, reaching the destination takes working in unison. If everyone’s paddling in different directions, you’ll simply spin in circles. In business, when everyone understands and pulls toward a single destination, you can proceed with purpose and speed.
Host a team meeting to align everyone on the business’s 2025 objectives. Now’s also an important time to review your practice’s mission, vision, and values to make sure everybody’s in step heading into the next 12 months.
Looking for outstanding support in 2025? At Audigy, our members get expert business guidance and innovative solutions to start and end every year strong — with satisfied patients, smooth operations, engaged teams, and consistent growth.