Picture two physicians who own a practice together.
It’s 2 PM on a Tuesday.
One is with a patient.
So is the other.
So who’s looking at the five-year strategy right now?
Who’s watching the margins?
The payer mix?
The partner who’s quietly starting to think about retirement?
Usually, nobody.
Not because they can’t. Because they’re busy doing the thing they started the practice to do.
When I say "independence doesn’t have to mean alone," this is what I mean by alone. It isn’t a lack of talent. Physicians are some of the smartest people I’ve worked with in 30 years. It’s making big decisions without all the information, because the information lives in hours nobody has. So strategy gets the leftover time.
Early mornings. Lunch breaks. The weekend before a partner meeting. And leftover time tends to produce leftover decisions: The location you open because a lease came available. The hire you make because someone quit. The offer you take seriously because it happened to show up. None of those are bad decisions on their own.
Together, they quietly decide what your practice becomes. That’s a bandwidth problem, not an ability problem. The fix isn’t asking physicians to work more hours. It’s making sure someone actually owns the long-term view, whether that’s a partner with protected time, a strong administrator with real authority, or an outside partner who knows the practice.
So here’s my question for practice owners: Who in your practice owns the five-year view? And how many hours did they spend on it last month?
Originally published on LinkedIn.
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