Lead, follow, or get out of the way. A pithy saying with a kernel of truth for many medical groups.
As the New Year approaches, have you asked yourself where it is that you’re going?
Your business landscape is changing. Exactly how and exactly where it will wind up isn’t completely clear, yet it’s not going to remain the same and it certainly isn’t going to return to an imagined, idealized past.
For hospital-based medical groups, anesthesiology, radiology, pathology and emergency medicine, there’s pressure to roll up or be rolled up.
With one exception, there’s no control over your destiny once you’ve been rolled up. A bit of cash in your pocket now for your soul over time.
To paraphrase the economist Thomas Sowell, it’s amazing that groups that think that they cannot afford to pay enough to their doctors to retain and recruit them somehow think that by selling to a large group there will be enough money to pay to their doctors, and to pay a bureaucracy to administer them, and to pay a sufficient return to the investors.
The one exception? Being rolled up can be very profitable if you’re an owner who’s selling and then quickly leaving practice.
The alternative of simply protecting your turf – preserving the status quo – isn’t a great strategy when the ground is moving under your feet.
The remaining choice: You must both improve the status quo to protect your current relationships and consider how you’re going to grow your practice to enable your group to compete on a larger scale. What other groups can you partner with or acquire? What other locations can you expand to?
Do you want to live your life from a position of fear of being forced out or of being turned into a serf, or from a position of increasing your control and of building a bigger future?
What’s your plan for 2017?
