Purposeful disregard for business education tears away the only platform that guarantees the highest incomes in private medical practice.
Along with the other challenges that continually reinforce physicians’ financial problems, the indoctrination of all medical students and later physicians with the “groupthink” myth that has been destroying physician practice careers for the last century is added to the list. You know, “You can practice medicine without a business education.”
The fact that private/independent medical practice is being erased from the medical profession map doesn’t seem to be noticeable. At least there has been no rioting or uproar within the medical profession to reframe the myth with the truth. Medical school education scholars aim at the poverty of physicians, with no regard for their post-medical school careers in the business of medical practice.
Let’s look at the consequences of the business education gap…
What happens when you:
1. Need to increase your income. You will have to obtain a much larger number of new patients on a persistent basis—income depends on your patient load. How do you do that quickly and efficiently? Without knowing the business tools needed to do that, you lose. It commonly threatens the loss of your practice. Do you have the money to hire business experts? Do you know marketing?
2. Need to expand your skills. Have you set aside the funds to obtain that training? In the USA, a distance trip with transportation, hotel, food, and the cost of training costs over $5,000. Do you have to save up for the trip? Many physicians desire to do that but lack the income to afford it.
3. Need to stay on the cutting edge of your medical knowledge. Many physicians must withdraw money from their take-home pay to afford the new education. Your marital partner may not approve. Your monthly medical education classes, which you attend locally and are required to take, do not serve the purpose.
4. Find that the CPA monthly profit and loss statement is discouraging. Practice income has been down for the last three months. Are you worried? Is it just a seasonal slump that will turn back up with time? Do you know how to read the P and L statements and what they tell you? If you are at the start of your practice disintegration and don’t see it, you may later be unable to save your private practice. It happens more often than you might think.
5. Have to shorten or delay vacations with family for financial reasons. Has your practice flattened out in income with no increase in patient load? Lowering and flattening practice income for more than three months is a serious sign of financial problems, and you need help right then. You can do this yourself and save lots of money with business tools.
6. Need enough take-home income to fund your retirement plan. This is a big issue for private practice physicians and often never happens. Wouldn’t it be great to earn enough income to never worry about your retirement fund?
7. Need to be able to pay for the kids’ college education. Especially when college costs keep increasing and your practice income isn’t enough. More debt to pay when loans are needed.
8. Meet all your home debts and family needs. Often, this obligation fails, and you must insist that your wife and kids get jobs to help out. Does this make you feel you are at the poverty line? Or are you a failure? It’s a common cause for divorce. Did you attend your kids’ graduations, missed birthdays, anniversaries, or family-expected interactions? Wealthy physicians do. Doesn’t that stimulate your action to do better? There is a way out of this.
Do you need to make some important decisions? For example, priorities that demand decisions you don’t want to make. I suggest you include these:
1. What factors do you think will make a significant difference in your personal life, medical practice upgrades, and peace of mind in the future? Make a list and prioritize it—then stick to it.
2. If you could pick one action that would provide you with satisfaction in your medical practice, avoid all the financial potholes, and enable you to reach your highest potential in medical practice with no regrets, what would you choose?
I’ve failed in my mission if you choose anything other than a business education. If you are unable to justify the need for a business education, it makes me sad and disappointed. You should know that I became a victim of almost everything discussed on these pages. I lost my own specialty private medical practice because of my business ignorance and lack of due diligence.
The rage I had when my 20 years of research on the causes of losing my practice was exposed continues today. I decided to try and do something to prevent it from terrorizing all future private practice physicians who have already been set up to fail (to variable degrees). Nearly all physicians in our nation have no idea why these things happen to them for unrecognized reasons.
Physicians drift toward disobedience and call it freedom. We cherish the discipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation. We drift towards compromise and call it tolerance. We drift toward superstition and call it faith. Our drifting is the way most of us manage our lives. And this is why it is the perfect weakness that permits our government to abuse us without any form of backlash.
Now that our medical school system is deeply integrated into government grants, subsidies, and control, most medical schools cannot exist independently. So it gets down to tolerating the abuse or quitting medicine. It is so easy for our government to replace U.S. physicians with foreign doctors because they have lived in a socialistic society and are used to low-income and dictated medical practice.
I’ll be writing far more about how physicians can overcome fee restrictions. The best place for physicians to practice today is private concierge practice, and business education can boost that by 400 percent.
Never conclude that you have reached your maximum status and income unless you already have a business education and are using the tools. We have been teaching business education for over ten years. My membership medical website, which contains over 150 detailed instructional articles about using marketing tools and management guides, will be online soon. This means that you can continue practicing while learning how to do it all.
When you can raise your medical practice income high enough to eliminate your worries about money/income, you are a winner. I know you can do that; after all, you made it into medical school, right?
Curtis G. Graham is a physician.
