Oct 24, 2018
Why Practices Fail and Why Yours Shouldn’t
Most experts say fifty percent of businesses fail in the first five years and eighty percent within ten years. Don’t believe them. It’s not true. Very few businesses truly “fail,” probably fewer than five percent.
What really happens? The practice owner gets tired because they are focused on the Tyranny of the Urgent, reacting to their practice and living on a treadmill. They become hostages to their practices. When you’re a hostage and you’re tired, you stop paying attention to Important things, and that results in your failure.
A treadmill is very exhausting and demoralizing if you don’t know how to get off of it.
Time and Money
One of the fundamental mistakes we make is to measure our practice against itself instead of against what it provides to us as practice owners. We focus a lot on how it could provide us money but rarely think of how it could provide time for us as well. And it is this separation of the two that keeps us from having enough of either.
Building a Mature Practice
You get what you intend, not what you hope for. What are you intending? To get a lot of revenue? My definition of a “mature practice” is from the point of view of the people in the practice, not from the viewpoint of the practice itself. A mature practice has at minimum two attributes:
- The practice owner is not the major producer— the produce by choice.
- Because of number one, the practice regularly makes money when the owner is not there.
Thinking Differently about Business Maturity
Let’s change our intentions from creating revenue and/or profit, to building a practice that serves our Ideal Lifestyle, and then we can figure out how much revenue and profit we need to do that. It’s a very fine, but very important distinction.
You might be thinking, “But my practice is unique.” Listen to the podcast for the The 1000 to One Principle to get you started, and remember what Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t…