One Business Habit That Can Save Your Practice: The Weekly CEO Hour Introduction
Counselors are trained to pay attention to what is happening with our clients. Practice owners have to learn to do the same thing with our businesses.
Unfortunately, it is surprisingly easy to spend an entire week providing therapy, answering emails, completing notes, returning phone calls, and putting out fires without ever actually looking at the health of the practice.
That is why one of the simplest habits a private-practice owner can develop is a weekly CEO hour.
Start with the money. What came in this week? What did not? Are insurance claims aging? Are outstanding balances growing? Are expenses changing? Your bank balance alone cannot tell you whether your practice is financially healthy.
Then look at capacity. Are you full because demand is strong or because your schedule has become unsustainable? Are there open appointments no one is filling? If you employ or contract with other clinicians, are some overwhelmed while others have availability?
Next, look for risk. Is there a payer issue you keep postponing? A credentialing deadline? An outdated policy? A fee that no longer reflects the cost of providing the service?
Ohio counselors have some concrete business-compliance responsibilities worth periodically reviewing. But you do not have to review everything every Friday!
The purpose of the CEO hour is simply to create a predictable place where business problems get noticed before they become emergencies.
A denied claim discovered this week is manageable. Fifty denied claims discovered six months later are a revenue problem. One open appointment is information. Eight consistently open appointments may signal a referral problem. One unexpectedly high expense is annoying. A pattern of them may require a change in strategy.
Private practices rarely struggle because their owners did not work hard enough. Sometimes, they struggle because no one had protected time to stop working in the practice long enough to work on it.
Your CEO hour gives someone that job.
And in a small practice, that someone is you.
Your challenge for this week: Block out just 60 minutes on your calendar right now for your first “CEO hour”—treat it with the same priority as a client session.
Next time, we’ll dive into The 4 Financial Metrics Every Private Practice Owner Must Track (And How to Read Them in 10 Minutes) so you know exactly what to look at during your new weekly check-in.
