Lesson 1

Does Shannon really have the basics she needs to run her physical therapy practice well?

Morning was always a rushed time at Mike and Shannon’s, but they were having an unusually tough morning. Their youngest child had mysteriously lost both shoelaces, the two oldest had been bickering since they got up, there was no milk for breakfast, and it was clear that either Mike or Shannon was going to be late to work.

“Someone has to pick up those cupcakes for the school party,” Shannon barked.

“Well, someone agreed to make them, and I don’t think it was me,” Mike shot back, pawing through a pile of papers in search of a permission slip.

“Why am I always the one who gets stuck with these things? They ask me because I’m the mom, but I’m also the business owner, so I’m working eleven hours a day and handling all kinds of crises — when am I supposed to bake cupcakes?”

“Both of us could say that,” Mike protested.

“It’s different for you,” Shannon said. “You’ve said yourself that your restaurant practically runs itself and you have plenty of people you can delegate to. You could have delegated the cupcakes, for that matter. You may work long hours, but I never see you dealing with a crisis.Things go more smoothly for you than for me, that’s all there is to it.”

Mike found the permission slip, signed it, and pushed it into a backpack — only to realize that he had put it in the wrong backpack. He fished it back out, found the right backpack, put it in, and distributed backpacks to the kids.

“Get out to the car, everyone,” he said. The kids trooped off, and he turned to his wife. “Shannon, every business has crises. If you spend all your time putting out fires it’s because you don’t do the things you need to do on the front end.”

“How could I possibly do more?” Shannon objected. “Between work and the kids”

“I’m not saying you don’t work hard. I’m saying that your practice has grown and your practice management skills haven’t kept up. You’ve made a few changes, but you don’t really have systems in place and as the practice grows, you just work harder. That’s not how business works.”

Shannon was shocked. Mike seemed to be saying things he’d been thinking for some time.

“You have staff,” he continued, “so why don’t you have people to delegate things to? You’ve looked at plenty of software packages, so why are you and Theresa still having to do everything by hand? Running a practice means running a business, and you didn’t learn how to do that in school. But maybe it’s time you learned.”

“It sounds like you’re saying I’m incompetent,” Shannon said, hurt.

“In this particular area, you are,” Mike agreed. “I’ll take the kids to school and get the cupcakes, and you go on and deal with the latest crisis.”

Mike stormed out and Shannon picked up her bag, feeling dazed. She might not be late to work after all, but she wasn’t sure she’d be able to concentrate on her patients, let alone on managing the practice.

Does Shannon really have the basics she needs to run her physical therapy practice well?

Disclaimer: For HIPAA compliance, all characters appearing in this post are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons or actual events is purely coincidental.