Imagine you’ve had a sore throat for two days.
You finally make it to the urgent care down the street.
You check in. There are maybe six people ahead of you.
Not bad.
Then the doors open and 200 people walk in.
A local employer has sent its new hires for pre-employment physicals and drug screens. All at once.
You look at the waiting room.
You look at your phone.
You walk out.
And you don’t come back.
I know it sounds like an outlier. It isn’t.
I’ve seen versions of it in urgent care again and again.
Here’s why it happens.
Urgent care rarely survives on walk-ins alone. Occupational health, workers’ comp and employer contracts matter a lot to the economics. So the sales team does its job.
It lands a big employer. Everyone celebrates. But nobody told operations. Or operations was told, and the schedule, staffing and space were never built for it. The win on one side of the business quietly costs you on the other: the walk-in patient who chose you, and is now telling people not to.
It’s not a demand problem.
It’s a communication and operations problem.
And it’s fixable.
Sales and operations planning the week together. Dedicated times or space for employer volume. Staffing that matches the contracts you’ve actually signed, not the ones you had last year. The owners who struggle with this usually say, "That’s just how urgent care is." It isn’t. It just hasn’t been designed for yet.
When did your sales and operations teams last plan a week together?
Originally published on LinkedIn.
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