Growing your Naturopathic Practice is a marathon for sure.
It takes time, sometimes years, to get your practice to where you want it to be. Let’s face it, as a business owner and a doctor, there is always too much to do!
To avoid overwhelm and burnout you need to accept that fact and commit to small consistent steps forward every week to achieve your goal and build the practice of your dreams.
That said, sometimes you need to sprint!
Recently I was helping a few doctors create and launch new online programs to add a new income stream to their practice. We summarized what was done so far, outlined the next steps, made sure they were clear on what they needed to do.
For some it was steps like; create my 4 webinar invitation emails, for others it was create my presentation slides, for others, build the sales page for my program so people can sign up at the end of my webinar. All perfect “bite sized tasks” that they could get done in a few hours using the templates and examples I had provided. (Small consistent steps forward).
Near the end of the call I asked my normal (sometimes dreaded) coaching question…
“When can I expect to see that first draft for review?”
While most replied with “I’ll have to you in the next few hours” or “tomorrow” or “by the end of the week”. All perfectly acceptable answers and timelines.
But I was surprised, almost shocked, at the answers from a few of the doctors.
Answers like; “ I’ll need some time to think it through, so how about I get it to you in 2 weeks?” or, “I’ll have it ready for your review this time next month” or even worse, “Let me look at my schedule and I’ll email you when to expect it”!
Now I know everyone works at their own pace, and some doctors are running multi-million dollar practices while others are busy building a new practice from scratch, but sorry, when you have made the decision to launch a new product or service, that’s exciting. Use that excitement to fuel your productivity and accelerate your output… this is a time to sprint!
If, or when, a project that could be implemented in a few hours, days or weeks, takes months and months to complete the excitement fades. It becomes a chore not a new exciting thing that could change your practice and your life for the future.
What do I mean by sprint?
I mean you make time to get the next steps done as quickly as possible to get to the project finish line and turn it into a revenue producing machine as soon as possible. If that means working a few extra hours each week until complete, then that’s what you do. If that means you get up an hour earlier to have time to work on it before seeing patients then that’s what you do. If it means working for a few hours at the weekend, then that’s what you do. You do whatever you need to do to get the project completed on time and then, once completed, launched and producing revenue, go back to your normal pace of small consistent steps forward.
If you don’t have the bandwidth or time or energy to sprint, then outsource or delegate it so they can sprint for you.
Most of the Doctor’s I was helping with that project recently got everything done on time and many are already busy onboarding people into their new program or welcoming registrants to their first webinar. (One ND just messaged me while I was writing this to say: “20 Registrants for the first workshop so far!”
The folks who said, next week, next month or let me check are still months away from launching anything if they don’t pick up the pace.
Sometimes you have to SPRINT for a while if you want to win the race!
Let’s sprint for two days together at the upcoming ND Marketing Intensive Workshop!
Leave A Response