What I will say to you now may come as a bit of a surprise but in order for your practice to grow fast, it needs to grow slowly first. By that I mean that you need to ensure that your practice is ready to grow before you take off.

Can you handle the influx of new patients? Have you got all the procedures in place? And what happens on your day off?

I’ve put together a few tips that can help you fast-track and maintain your practice growth.

1. Slow and steady wins the race

It’s easy to create short term revenue growth by running lots of ads, or offering discounts, but it creates the wrong impression for patients and isn’t sustainable. For you as a practice owner, it can give you an illusion of growth, when in reality it’s only short term. It is therefore critical to make sure that you don’t hire too many staff or run too many ads on the early days. Instead, use this time to ensure that you understand your patients’ needs and are fully able to satisfy them. As you get your processes right and understand what works, then you should invest in successfully marketing your practice further.

2. Be ready

There are lots of known unknowns in any practice – but there are also lots of issues and problems that a good practice owner should be able to predict. It’s critical to be proactive, and find solutions to problems before they blow up. Invest a lot of time in researching your competitors and the field you operate in, so you can give your practice a competitive edge for it is critical to stay ahead of the curve. Don’t wait until it’s too late to act.

3. Find great staff

It’s almost impossible to grow a practice without having a great team around you who can rely on. When you’re a small team with only a few people, you are expected to do everything, but as the practice grows, it’s simply not possible. From a practice owner’s perspective, it can be difficult to delegate – especially if you’ve worked hard to build your practice from scratch. Therefore, make sure you employ an honest and loyal team, and put great systems and procedures in place. That way, you can increase revenue without harming the levels of service being provided to patients and you as a practice owner can focus on further growth.

4. Think outside the box

There is actually really only two ways to build a great practice: you need to create something completely new, or do something that already exists and do it better than anyone else. Remember, if you want to grow you need to find something that your patients need which gives them a reason to take up your care. If they are already under care, you have a market for a new and improved service.

5. Add a little bit of luck at the end

Besides what I have listed above, every great practice has been built through a mixture of skill and luck. So if you want to succeed, you need to be able to predict a demand for a service and satisfy that demand efficiently and at the same time, have a dose of good luck along the way.