Three Great Rules Of Productivity For Your Medical Spa

How can you improve the productivity of your medical spa?

Here is an excerpt from an article in Connect Magazine. 

Employer Rule No. 1: Give employees ownership of real deliverables. Depending on the kind of manager you are, you’ll either shy away from this because: a) you can do it better, or b) you don’t want to overload your direct reports. Either is a mistake. In my experience, most complaints I’ve had with any of my past employers have related to having too little to do, rather than insufficient salary/title/etc. Give your employees meaningful work, and they will (eventually) love you for it.

Employee Corollary No. 1: Insist on personal accountability. Yes, it’s scary to have people counting on you. It’s much easier to coast along behind the scenes. But admit it: it’s not very satisfying. Sloth never is. It’s much better to be king of an infinitesimal pond than a nobody in a massive ocean. Go for the responsibility, not the title. (I’ve made this mistake on several occasions, and each time I’ve regretted it.)

Employer Rule No. 2: Less is more. You really don’t need 10 people for two jobs. You need one. I’ve become a big believer in slow, organic growth in organizations. It’s much better to hire one person and stretch them thin than it is to hire 10 people and have them struggling to find sufficient work to keep them occupied.

Employee Corollary No. 2: More is less. If you’re in Sales, you “just need Feature X in the product to sell millions of Product Y.” If you’re in Marketing, you just need Research Report Z in order to do a quality competitive analysis, figure out the product direction to take, etc. If you’re in Engineering, better hardware, more software, etc. is your complaint. In every case, you’re wrong. You don’t need more. You just need to work with what you have. There is a customer base out there for nearly any product; the best product marketing/competitive due diligence is done out in the field, getting your hands dirty (and not some overpriced tripe from an analyst who sits in an office all day); and the best code is often free, done on cheap commodity hardware. The less you have, the more resourceful you’ll become — this makes us think like a real customer, who has to stretch an IT budget. Speaking of which….

Employer Rule No. 3: Every employee should be revenue-additive. This is the most important of them all. Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL, once told me that he thinks business development is something every employee should do, all of the time. I didn’t believe him then, but I do now. Every employee should understand how she contributes to the company’s top and bottom lines, and should be held accountable for how she measures up. Everyone should be selling, developing product, marketing it, etc. No exceptions.

Employee Corollary No. 3: If you’re not making money for your employer, you’re a waste of money. If you don’t understand how you fit into the Circle of Life for your employer, find out. Or figure it out. But don’t just collect a paycheck. You owe it to your employer and to yourself to help defray the cost of your paycheck, as well as that of others’. The more revenue-driven we become, the more effective and the better our chances of improved future employment.

Personal rules of productivity by Matt Asay.