When determining the value of a practice, don’t overlook one of its greatest assets: its people. Bolster success by establishing a team culture centered on three principles.
Whether you’re looking to sell or simply appraise your practice, it’s important to evaluate the character and stability of your staff. How do they interact with each other and clients? How do they approach their roles? Are they content and productive? All these questions can be answered by assessing the atmosphere created by you, the owner.
Known as “team culture,” this atmosphere consists of expectations, rules and values that define a business and the way it operates. A good team culture is evident in most successful practices and directly contributes to client satisfaction and operational efficiency. A bad team culture, on the other hand—or a nonexistent one—can significantly damage your financial health and salability.
But what aspects of a veterinary practice contribute to a good team culture? Use these three principles to measure your success.
Right person, right role
As one can imagine, high turnover and low consistency create an unstable work environment. This not only affects the reputation within the community and rapport with clients, but also transfers to profitability through additional recruiting fees, new employee training curve, and reduced efficiency. This is why it is critical to hire the right person at the outset.
Although skill and experience are important, it is secondary to personality, intelligence, enthusiasm, attitude and work ethic. While job skills can be taught, the others cannot. Those features are either engrained within the person or they’re not. These attributes affect the ability of employees to work together in harmony as a team, which is noticed by clients and affects their visit experience and opinion of the practice.
Once you hire the right people, make sure they continue in the right roles and empower them to perform in those roles, often at their own discretion. In a bureaucratic setting, the Peter Principle commonly comes into play. This management concept recognizes that success in one role will not necessarily translate to success in a promoted role that requires a different skillset. There is eventually a level of expertise above which most of us cannot reach.
Therefore, it is important to find the best-fitting position for each employee. One may be great on the phone and in the front office, for example, but inept in the treatment room. Once that position is established, keep that right person in the right position by offering promotions in the form of salary increases or bonuses instead of position changes.
No investment, no retention
Employee retention is essential for any business. It takes time to build client and patient rapport, and retraining is expensive and inefficient. Clients become accustomed to the same atmosphere and staff, and easily notice change.
In addition to offering competitive benefits and creating a culture that celebrates individual success, it’s important to know when to hire additional staff. As a practice grows, so do the demands on your staff, which can lead to burnout if not addressed in a timely manner. Importantly, you need to allow time to work on your practice versus in it. For most practices, a good rule of thumb is to consider hiring another veterinarian once practice revenues begin approaching $1M. Even if part time, an additional doctor on staff will:
- Help grow the practice
- Provide more time for patient-client attention
- Offer more salability when the time comes
Seamless flow, poised to grow
Positive client experience is one of the cornerstones of a successful practice. Aside from staff competence and personality, the aspect of team culture that affects this experience most is traffic flow. Examine the client and patient flow—from the entrance, to the exam room, to check out and exiting the building.
During a typical visit, a client will have multiple interactions with multiple staff. How efficiently they perform their duties will directly impact that client’s satisfaction. Is your front staff too encumbered by administrative tasks to promptly greet clients? Have you established expectations for how long a client should wait before going to an exam room? Is there a clear, standard procedure for processing labs? Does each staff member know where they fit into the flow of a typical visit?
The answers to these and related questions point toward team culture, for better or for worse. Placing parameters and clear expectations around the “practice experience” not only helps ensure happy clients but also boosts efficiency and production.
Once everyone is on the same page, these three principles simply become “the way we do it.” By establishing a good team culture in your practice, you’re investing in the long-term stability, as well as the salability, of your practice. If you and your staff have suffered from a bad or non-existent team culture, it’s never too late to correct course.
A practice appraisal is the first step to identifying operational shortcomings that could be affecting your team culture and, therefore, profitability and attractiveness to potential buyers. Contact an experienced Simmons broker to start the discussion.
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