A business plan is an essential component of success. It provides a strategic roadmap outlining where you are, where you want to be, and how you plan to get there. Starting a practice without a business plan is like building a house without blueprints. You might succeed, but you’ll take longer, miss key opportunities, and spend more recouping the costs of mistakes. With every aspect of the medical industry becoming increasingly complex, a detailed business plan can separate profitable practices from the rest.
The Benefits of a Medical Practice Business Plan
Creating a business plan for your medical practice delivers short and long-term benefits. These include:
- A clear direction. A business plan will help you define your objectives and align them with owners’ or stakeholders’ goals. This is especially vital if there are multiple people or groups with an ownership stake.
- Prioritization. You can’t build an entire business overnight. A business plan lets you focus on your core priorities first while giving you a path for implementing your secondary projects or priorities in the future.
- Improved staff and patient outcomes. A business plan allows you to strategically allocate time, resources, and funding as you grow, ensuring better outcomes for staff and patients.
- Obtaining funding. If you require a loan, funding, or outside investment for your practice, a solid business plan will help you get the green light.
- Performance benchmarking. A business plan acts as a benchmark for past and future performance, showing you where you’re meeting, exceeding, or falling short of your goals.
Creating a Medical Practice Business Plan
Your business plan should be simple, straightforward, honest, and realistic. It should cover every aspect of your business from the high-level and strategic through to estimated revenues, costs, and projected growth. When creating a business plan for your medical practice, be sure to cover:
- General information. Outline your mission, values, goals, corporate structure, start date, market research, ideal patient profile, growth plans, and any upfront capital costs. Also perform a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats).
- Revenues. Detail your anticipated revenues, which services they’ll come from, expected volume, potential payors, any special relationships, and estimated bad debts.
- Expenses. Detail all possible costs, including accounting and legal, insurance, marketing, billing and collections, continuing education, debt repayment, equipment, IT, lab and vendor fees, medical and office supplies, salaries, taxes, telecommunications, patient portals, maintenance, and repairs, and the cost of leasing and outfitting a space.
Your plan should begin with the vision and mission rather than the numbers. Start with what you’re trying to achieve, then plug in the numbers to see if they work. Be realistic. If they don’t, see what needs to happen for your practice to be viable. Would you need to expand your services? Outsource certain elements? Grow more quickly? Move to a more affordable space?
At Gittleson Zuppas Medical Realty, we know that choosing the right location for your medical practice is key to the success of your new medical practice. We can help you identify a space that meets your needs and helps take your revenue projections from marginal to high-performing. For help finding the right space, get in touch!