The Private Practitioner's Guide to Lessons Learned
Finishing the year off strong with a thorough review of your private practice is an important step in ensuring success in the year ahead. As a private practitioner, you are also responsible for making important decisions that pertain to aspects of your practice such as practice development, administrative processes, marketing and more. Over the course of the last several months, you might have noticed some areas for improvement and made a note of these observations; often called Lessons Learned.
Lessons Learned can be described as knowledge and understanding that is gained through tangible experience. Lessons Learned can be both positive and negative and it is important to track both to ensure that your practice can continue to grow, provide excellent client service and stay on budget through the course of your operations.
By tracking this knowledge and understanding, you are able to make informed decisions about different policies or procedures in your private practice to ensure that you can repeat things that went well or avoid mistakes that caused you stress or even loss of income.
Examples of Lessons Learned in Private Practice
Some examples of Lessons Learned in your private practice might include some of the following:
Scenario: While most of your clients are respectful of your schedule and make the commitment to attend their appointments, you have one client who is consistently late or even worse, a no-show! You find yourself struggling to address this with the client so you avoid the problem and continue to lose revenue with no-show appointments.
Lesson Learned: The Lesson Learned would be that you need to develop a cancellation and no-show policy and adhere to that to ensure that your clients respect your time and practice operations.
Scenario: Your private practice is rapidly growing and your schedule is becoming harder to manage. You have noticed that client retention and turnover is an issue in instances when you are emailing back and forth several times to book a session for your client. Your clients may be frustrated with your booking process and search for someone more accommodating or user-friendly.
Lesson Learned: The Lesson Learned in this instance could be that you need to look into hiring an assistant to help manage bookings or set up an automatic scheduling system to allow clients to book and reschedule appointments instantly to suit their schedule.
The importance of tracking Lessons Learned
As an entrepreneur, your focus is likely on building a successful private practice that supports your ideal life while allowing you to have a positive impact on the lives of your clients. With any business, there are likely to be areas for improvement as you provide your service and conduct business.
Tracking Lessons Learned allows you to understand what worked (or what didn’t) and why and to identify what you can do differently to improve your business going forward -- or what you can replicate to experience the same success!
How to track Lessons Learned
Actually tracking Lessons Learned in your private practice is just as important as identifying them. Start a simple spreadsheet or document to log any instances where you think ‘that worked really well!’ or ‘that could have been done differently to be more successful’. Tracking these occurrences as soon as they happen will allow you to take effective action to make the necessary changes in your business process.
It is important to include any pertinent information or specific examples in your Lessons Learned log so that you can create new procedures and address areas for improvement accurately - so the more detail, the better! Your Lessons Learned log should also be stored in an easy to find location (in your electronic filing system) to allow quick access for yourself, and your team if applicable.
Your Lessons Learned log should also include the recommended process improvement (the actual Lesson Learned) as well as the impact the scenario had on your private practice. Did the situation cause you to lose out on revenue because of a no-show? Perhaps you launched a new product but did not meet your sales target, can you determine what you could do differently next time?
Your Lessons Learned log can, and should, be referenced often -- especially when starting a new project, onboarding a new client or implementing a new process. Your log can be especially helpful when bringing on additional team members or expanding your practice to include other service providers as it can get all parties up to speed and allow them to avoid similar problems (or replicate a success) that you have already experienced.
Taking the time to analyze the success of your business is a crucial part of being a successful private practitioner. If you’re looking for support in stepping into your role as an entrepreneur, please feel free to join one of the BYPP Programs.
