Eyeworld

efficiencies. Know your prospec- tive administrator's core compe- tencies before you make the hire, and realize that any missing skills will either have to be learned, supplied by someone else in the practice, or outsourced. 4. The core competencies of the ad- ministrator you hire should coin- cide with your practice's greatest current and anticipated needs. If you're financially on the ropes, you need numeracy. If referral source outreach is lagging, you need selling skills. If customer service is your weakest link, make sure your new hire has a proven record of improving service performance in a similar setting. 5. Practice management and leader- ship is only partially a so-called "learned" profession. Unlike law, engineering, or medicine, there is no agreed or obliged standard of licensure, no test to pass. Even if you personally have a great ed- ucational pedigree, don't be an academic snob. I've seen more MBAs blow up practices than up-through-the-ranks managers with associate degrees. 6. Hiring a high-energy, gung-ho person to lead your practice is necessary, but insufficient. To in- crease the odds of business suc- cess one needs to hire gung-ho people who have a proven track record of analogous performance in analogous settings. Hiring an ex-hospital administrator for your very large practice may sound logical, but the skill set needed to run a 400-bed hospital is profoundly different than the skills needed to run even the largest ophthalmology practice. 7. Executives who are gung-ho but inexperienced, when paired with a high-demand boss who labels all requests "RED HOT," will collect more open, incomplete projects than closed accomplish- ments. If you are a high-demand practice owner, make sure you hire someone who can prioritize and stand up to your criticism about why last week's hot project hasn't been launched yet. 8. Unless you are acting as the MD- administrator of your practice and just need an executive assis- Become an ESCRS Member Integral to your continuing education FREE TO MEMBERS: ESCRS on Demand Online library of presentations from ESCRS Congresses Access to iLearn Online interactive courses Journal of Cataract & Refractive Surgery Reduced ESCRS Congress Fees ESCRS FREE 3 YEAR MEMBERSHIP FOR TRAINEES visit www.escrs.org today On choosing continued from page 55 tant to carry out your ideas and orders, big brains are obligatory in your top executive. But intelli- gence is an incomplete substitute for raw time commitment. 9. Beyond the time commitment of your administrator, the manag- ing partner of the practice must commit time and attention to the company. Even the strongest CEO of the largest practices in America that I get to see first- hand struggle if their lead MD counterpart is time-poor or dis- engaged. In practical terms, this typically translates to the effec- tive managing partner of a solo to 5-owner practice spending up to 8 hours a week on leadership duties, and the MPs of larger practices commonly putting in 12+ hours a week. 10. Management and leadership are contact sports. To be successful and achieve the shortest cycle time between finding and fixing a problem, everyone who touches each problem has to be in the same room together. Ide- ally, in a group practice with nu- merous providers, the doctor's personal offices (or study carrels in thrifty practices) are arrayed around a large board table, and the administrator's private office is in this same suite. An execu- tive assistant, bookkeeper or CFO, and IT exec are nearby. This increases the odds of owners and managers running into each other throughout the day, devel- oping stronger relationships, and applying better solution to prob- lems they find faster. Half of all ophthalmic practices in America perform below average, which means that if you are reading this, your business has 50-50 odds of being in trouble today. Improving this, and improving your practice's frank viability in the challenging years ahead, starts at the top with an above-average administrator. EW Mr. Pinto is president of J. Pinto & Associates Inc., an ophthalmic practice manage- ment consulting firm established in 1979, with offices in San Diego. He can be contacted at 619-223-2233 or pintoinc@aol.com. About the author

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