A couple weeks ago I met an incredible entrepreneur, Tai Lopez, at a networking gathering from whom I quickly learned quite a number of things; but the lesson that stuck with me the most was one I’ve been hearing for years… The most successful people in the world tend to have the biggest passions for continual learning, and they are avid readers.

This particular entrepreneur reads a book a day! Yes, that’s right, a book a day. He makes a ton of money and is involved in quite a few businesses. Between my busy clinic schedule, content creation and other activities for this website, and trying to have a life outside of work, I’ve found that reading a book cover to cover has become quite rare for me. So I asked him how he does it all. Though his “book-a-day” routine is only possible because he is an expert at extreme speed-reading, he made a very important point:

He told me that he thinks it should not be called “reading,” but that it should be called “gold-mining.” When he is flying through a book, he is searching for one or two golden nuggets of information that will help make him and his businesses more effective and successful.

So in the continual effort to be an action-taker, I went home and bought about 15 books that he recommends; and I’ve decided that I will occasionally use a blog post to pass on the golden nuggets that I find in these books.

Embracing a Factory instead of a Tribe

Only 10 pages into Seth Godin’s book, Tribes, I came across the following paragraphs that seem incredibly relevant to our field:

So here we are. We live in a world where we have the leverage to make things happen, the desire to do work we believe in, and a marketplace that is begging us to be remarkable. And yet, in the middle of these changes, we get stuck.

Stuck following archaic rules.

Stuck in industries that not only avoid change but actively fight it.

Stuck in fear of what our boss will say, stuck because we’re afraid we’ll get into trouble.

Most of all, we are stuck acting like managers or employees, instead of like the leaders we could become. We’re embracing a factory instead of a tribe.

The irony is that all of this fear used to be useful. Fear of change is built into most organisms, because change is the first sign of risk. Fear of change in a huge factory is appropriate when efficiency is the order of the day. Today, though, the fear that used to protect us at work is now our enemy; it’s now the thing standing in the way.

So, my friends, here we are. In an industry that has always relied on 3^rd party payor reimbursement, but that reimbursement is dwindling every year while our business costs continue to rise. The situation is clearly unsustainable. Fear of change can be paralyzing. As Seth implied, fear can also be useful and good in certain situations. In fact, many practice owners who changed their business model to decrease reliance on shrinking reimbursements have also been spurred to act because of fear: the fear of what will happen if they don’t change something!

If you fear what’s to come with declining reimbursements and/or have a fear of veering away from the insurance-based business model …

Don’t let that fear paralyze you; let it mobilize you! [click to tweet]

And with that said, please keep this in mind: The change doesn’t have to occur all at once. It can be done slowly, safely, and incrementally in a wide variety of forms that do not just include dropping insurance contracts. The list is nearly endless when considering the different ways one can add non-treatment cash-based services. The non-physician referral sources that all of us can work to develop is another nearly endless list of opportunities.

But I Digress … Does Your Tribe Know You Exist?

This was supposed to be somewhat of a book review, and I’ve gone on a rant. Hopefully my rant was somewhat inspiring to at least one of you out there.

So as I made my way through this book I found that it has quite a number of golden nuggets. I’ll present one more here in the form of a question to you: as a current or future practice owner, do you understand that you are in a situation to lead your own tribe? I’m not talking about your employees. I’m talking about your patients. I’ve been able to “get in” with the youth sports population of a few schools in my area. I can tell the young athletes have a sense of camaraderie with the other athletes in their school and on their teams who come to me for care. But it could be so much greater than this! (If only I had time! 🙂 )

What do I mean by that? As I read this book, a number of ideas popped into my head that any one of us could employ among our patient populations.  One such example would be to create a secure forum and/or online community for your patients to interact; connecting those with similar issues and symptoms to each other to share stories and find comfort. You could put on seminars for your patients, featuring experts (aside from just yourself) in health, wellness, nutrition, fitness etc. You could add fitness and wellness components to your service offerings, and create a scenario in which which patients can work out together, share nutrition ideas, even post their exercise logs and compete against one another (sound like any fanatical exercise groups out there you know of?). Yes, in some of these scenarios there are HIPAA and other regulations that would have to be accounted for, but I’m just throwing out ideas here and I think you get the point.

We are all in the position to be leaders and to guide our tribe towards greater health and wellness. Getting creative about how you lead your tribe can also be a huge benefit to your bottom line, and can give you the opportunity to bravely veer away from reliance on insurance companies and physicians for your livelihood.

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