Grow Your Medical Practice and Get Your Life Back 
                            
                            
                            
                          By 
                            
                        David Finkel 
                      Dr. Pariksith Singh 
                     and Alan Gassman, Esq. 
                     
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                                                                  Table of Contents 
                        
                       Foreword  
                        
                       An Invitation 
                        
                       Part One: Four Simple Steps to Grow Your Medical Practice and Get Your Life 
                       Back 
                        
                       1.       Step One: Make Building an Owner-Independent Practice a Stated Goal  
                        
                       2.       Step Two: Reclaim Your Best Time 
                        
                       3.       Step Three:  Determine Your Practice’s “Fewer, Better” 
                        
                       4.       Step Four: Build Your Master System 
                        
                       Part Two: Apply the Six Practice Accelerators to Go Faster 
                        
                       5.       Accelerator One: Strengthen Your Core 
                        
                       6.       Accelerator Two: Engage Your Team 
                        
                       7.       Accelerator Three: Cultivate Your Culture 
                        
                       8.       Accelerator Four: Enhance Your Profitability 
                        
                       9.       Accelerator Five: Protect Your Assets  
                        
                       10.      Accelerator Six: Hire a Coach 
                        
                       Conclusion: Five Steps to Enhance Your Practice Right Now 
                        
                       About the Authors 
                        
                       Appendix A: The Medical Practice Success Tool Kit: Your FREE $1,375 Gift from 
                       the Authors 
                        
                       Appendix B: Get Your Life Back Faster 
                        
                       Acknowledgements 
                        
                       Index
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                        Foreword 
                            
                            
                            
           In the summer of 1984 I took a trip across a sultry India with my mother and 
        brother. Perhaps to help us pass the time, my mother told us stories about her father—my 
        grandfather—a dedicated healer who had lived in a small village. He concocted 
        treatments for ailments like spider bites and burns, and he used them to care for the 
        people in his village and from other villages nearby. He didn’t charge for these services; 
        he simply wanted to help people. That was his goal: to help others and to try to make 
        their lives better. 
           I was inspired by that story. As a child growing up in India, I had always aspired 
        to be an engineer, but in the moment that I heard that story, I decided that I would 
        become a doctor. I attended medical school in India, and in 1992, I was selected for a 
        residency at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. Then, in 1993, I came to the 
        United States to finish my residency at Mount Sinai in New York. Afterward I relocated 
        to Florida, where there was an acute need for physicians, and I went to work for another 
        doctor, whom I’ll call “Dr. K.” 
           Dr. K. was a brilliant visionary, but he lacked the practical business and 
        operational skills to execute on his practice’s vision. For example, at one point he brought 
        forty new physicians into one office all at once. As you can likely imagine, he just didn’t 
        have the patient volume, nor was he able to develop it fast enough, to keep the 
        considerable overheard of all these provider salaries from pushing him over the financial 
        edge and into bankruptcy. By watching Dr. K., I learned the importance of maintaining a 
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        firm handle on the business and financial aspects of the practice, and why strong 
        operational systems and controls are required to help any practice thrive. 
           While this was happening at Dr. K.’s office, another physician in our county, 
        whom I’ll call “Dr. O.,” opened a practice of his own. He was ambitious and secured a 
        contract to take all the ER calls at a local hospital. That first year he worked incredibly 
        hard, earning $400,000 for his efforts. So what did he do? He hired a new physician for 
        the second year, and had him take over the ER contract, effectively allowing Dr. O. to 
        stop seeing patients. Well, you can probably guess what happened next. Dr. O.’s patients 
        shifted their loyalties to the new physician or simply left the practice. The new doctor 
        was unhappy and resentful because he was seeing all the patients and he couldn’t see how 
        Dr. O. was adding any value. Soon enough, the vast majority of Dr. O.’s patients went 
        elsewhere, and his practice ground to a halt. Yet all of this would have been totally 
        avoidable if Dr. O. had just had a better map for how to mature his practice before he 
        stepped out of the direct clinical treatment of patients. 
           I have one more story to share with you about a third local doctor, a talented 
        gastroenterologist, who started his practice around this same time as the other doctors 
        I’ve mentioned. I’ll call him “Dr. R.” His approach to scaling his practice was quite 
        different from both that of Dr. K. and that of Dr. O. Dr. R. set about personally seeing as 
        many patients as he possibly could. Since he was a very skilled practitioner, he soon had 
        a long waiting list. To handle all this demand, he set a rigorous schedule for himself: his 
        first appointment every day was at six o’clock in the morning, and his last one finished at 
        around eight or even nine o’clock at night. If that sounds draining, that’s because it was. 
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