By Thomas Lecoq
Let’s go out to dinner. Your favorite main dish with all the trimmings.
We arrive at a Chinese food place and have the first dish of our meal; some egg drop soup. Then it’s off to a place with a great salad bar. Next, we drive across town and get a side of veggies. Then to another place to get some potatoes.
By now we’re in the mood for steak and lobster so we go to a great steak house, then drive over to the seafood specialty restaurant for that lobster. Finally, we load ourselves in the car and drive to the best dessert place ever.
There we go, a complete dinner. Of course, it took us five hours, and now we’re hungry again.
Obviously, a metaphor, right? It was a complete dinner, but it was not a great experience, cost us a bundle, I caught the sniffles from the chilly air and you’re never going to dinner with me again. Lesson learned.
The problem with tidbits
Yet, when it comes to operating a vision therapy practice, many doctors put their operation together piecemeal. Dinner with that great doc where you picked up a tidbit, or at a meeting you hear pearls in a lecture, or you read a great idea in one of the journals or watch a webcast and pick up some more ideas.
I started Lecoq Practice Development because after four years as OEPF Communications Director, I’d seen that while about 20 percent of VT ODs had very successful, systematic operations, the rest had seriously underperforming practices. And more than a few were really what we call “hobby” practices. Seeing a few patients now and then, making low income from therapy, or even losing money to stay in the game.
What the underperformers had in common is that their system of operations, communication, training stank. They’d pieced together a bit of this, a bit of that. And often, good ideas died and nothing changed.
What about your practice?
If you’ve read this far and you think about your practice, are you in the top 20 percent or somewhere in the middle or bottom? Honestly assessing your practice, do you think you could, or should, be doing better? If you want a checkup, complete our practice assessment. You may be surprised at what you learn, and what you’re putting up with.
We teach a system, a comprehensive way of starting and building a great VT practice, one that produces a high gross and net, in which 90 percent of the patients you evaluate enroll in therapy, and nearly all complete therapy. Not only that, but your graduates send others for VT. Yet you have plenty of time for family, fun, learning more, contributing to others. Freedom.
Today, we’re so deluged with “free” information on the web, in print, and pearls at meetings, that it’s easy to have a patchwork way of operating.
The power of a unified system
While Lecoq Practice Development offers courses, and sometimes webcasts with partners and associates, what produces great results is spending time learning the system with your whole staff, or at least key players, directly from Amee Lecoq, in your practice or at one of the courses. The two courses, Mastering the Business of Vision Therapy, and Mastering the Art of VT Communications are a part of our system and can be taken separately.
But the real rocket ship that blasts the practice into orbit is the four days of on-site training that come with our full consultation. It is purposely designed to get everyone aboard. To have every single staff person see that the steps they take prepare the parent or patient for the next step.
We rehearse the most important elements until doctor and staff can actually do them. This is done in a spirit of teamwork and mutual dedication to helping the children and adults who come to the practice for life-changing help.
But that isn’t the total package. Before any courses, Amee spends time assessing and coaching the doctor and key staff. For new practices, we often review the office blueprint and find ways to simplify and make the space more functional. We go over staffing and have guidelines for hiring the right people for the key positions. We want the doctor and the Vision Therapy Administrator (VTA) to be present at our courses.
In it for the long haul
After the on-site consultation, Amee does extensive phone/remote training for the VTA, and consulting follow-ups with the doctor for the remainder of the 1-year program.
Every management book urges the documentation of duties for staff, but few do this. Documents are a way to train new and replacement employees, to keep the system running smoothly. We have seven notebooks that document all the steps in the Lecoq system, plus nearly 800 digital documents, forms, PR, guides, studies. And videos of previous trainings and courses so you can get new people up to speed.
With us, you get a full course dinner, with the finest ingredients. The end of patching up a system that got kludged together, and in its place, build a system modeled after the best of the top 20 percent of practices.
We want you to contact us to learn more, but please, before you schedule a complimentary call, fill in the practice assessment form (for existing or for planned practices) so we can understand what your issues really are. And of course, we will invite you to enroll in a course or complete consultation. But it’s completely your choice and we don’t teach or use hard sell.
Please feel free to share this email and blog with other doctors. We’ve been at this a long time. We’re very good at it. You’ll be happy you accepted my personal invitation to a hearty practice development meal.
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