Road map for success: Planning the future of your practice

A business plan is an essential tool for knowing where you want your practice to go, and how you want it to get there. Here's how to put together and execute a plan.

By Larry Stevens, AMNews correspondent. March 20, 2006.

The single most important business tool available to medical groups, many experts say, is the business plan.

While a business plan requires some effort to develop and update, its benefits span the range of business activities that make groups successful. It's a blueprint for growth. It's a succinct practice description for recruiting. It's essential when applying for financing for new ventures. And parts of it can be used to develop marketing material or be the basis for the annual report.

Business plans span the gamut. They can be relatively static documents that describe the practice's mission, goals and staff. Or they can be regularly revised documents that include strategic and financial plans, with feasibility studies and timelines for project implementations. In any case, it's no mere mission statement to hang on a wall. It's a detailed account of where the practice wants to go, and how it wants to get there.

William Johnstone Jr., MD, an obstetrician-gynecologist and president of 35-doctor Pinehurst Surgical Clinic in Pinehurst, N.C., sees his organization's business plan as providing a unifying direction for the group.

"Most of our work is done within committees. The business plan helps all group members know the direction we're planning to travel. It helps us keep on track with our goals and make decisions throughout the year," Dr. Johnstone says.

Darrell Schryver, a Denver-based consultant and principal at the Medical Group Management Assn., adds that just the process of creating a business plan, the discussion and debate among the physicians putting it together, can be helpful, because it allows doctors to share what's on their minds and determine what goals are reachable for the practice.