One of the most significant changes that I made in my business was to move to the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) after hearing about it from my good friend, Dr. Jay Greenstein. EOS is a complete set of simple concepts and practical tools that have helped thousands of entrepreneurs worldwide get what they want from their businesses. One of the tools that helped my team and me maximize our time and productivity came from completing the “Delegate and Elevate” activity, which helps you see where your time is going.
If you are like me, you spend time on too many tasks that do not bring you joy and are holding you back from practice success. (EOS, n.d.)
This activity helps you separate your tasks into four categories:
1. Work you love and are great at
2. Work you like and are good at
3. Work you don‘t like but are good at
4. Work you don’t like and are not good at
Over time, the goal is that you will use your time on tasks that you love and like and delegate other tasks to someone else in the practice or outsource them to a third-party vendor. When you begin spending your time on tasks you love and like, you are operating in the green. (Breyley, 2021)
What do you love to do? Where is your time best spent? To get a quick idea of areas where you may be spending your time well and areas that may be taking away from building your practice, rank the following common practice tasks from 1 to 10 in order of what makes you happy.
-Educating and empowering patients; seeing them improve
Hiring, firing, and training new employees
Creating/building your own practice (practice visionary)
Compliance (OSHA, HIPAA, OIG, etc.)
Community outreach and impact -Accounting (collections, billing, insurance, Medicare, discounts, etc.)
Doing routine chart audits
Treating patients (adjusting, exams, etc.)
Marketing (print, direct mail, email, social, etc.)
Interacting with and learning from colleagues
For tasks ranked 1 to 5, that is your sweet spot. You receive the most fulfillment from those tasks, and those are areas where your time is best spent.
Tasks ranked 6 and 7 are things you can do, but you may not enjoy them or reap benefits from doing them. Such tasks are necessary but can quickly become draining.
Tasks ranked 8 to 10 are those that drain you. Consider getting them off your plate. You don’t look forward to them, and you may procrastinate because they sap the energy that you should devote to your sweet spot.
When you complete this “Delegate and Elevate” activity, you will see that you are juggling more than you thought. Delegating some of your responsibilities will free up your time and bring more happiness to your work. As you begin to free up your time, don’t automatically fill it up with other meaningless tasks. Remember that you and your business cannot be successful if you focus on everything. Your time and attention are best served when you focus on revenue-generating actions. (Dinsmor, 2021)
“Delegate and Elevate” is also an excellent activity for your team. No one wants to spend their days doing work that is “soul-sucking,” which is how an employee described a responsibility of hers during our team meeting. Don’t get me wrong, we all have a few things that we don’t like or love that we have to do from time to time. However, her honesty stunned me at that moment. Over time, we delegated that task to another team member who thrived and excelled when taking on that responsibility. Now, they are both happier doing work they love.
I didn’t start a business to feel burned out or stuck in place. My team didn’t come to work for me to feel that way either. EOS helped us rethink and question the way things had always been done and empowered us to make the necessary changes for us to be better for our providers, their patients, their teams, and our team. Our shared focus has us working together toward the same goal. When teams work together, the company achieves growth, and everybody wins.
Dr. Ray Foxworth is a certified Medical Compliance Specialist and President of ChiroHealthUSA. A practicing Chiropractor, he remains "in the trenches" facing challenges with billing, coding, documentation and compliance. He has served as president of the Mississippi Chiropractic Association, former Staff Chiropractor at the G.V. Sonny Montgomery VA Medical Center, and is a Fellow of the International College of Chiropractic. To request a free one-page financial policy, send an email to [email protected].
References
1. Breyley, D. (2021, March 15). Do More of What You Love ... and Less of What You Don’t. Retrieved from EOS Worldwide: https://www.eosworldwide.com/b...
2. Dinsmor, S. (2021, February 1). Warren Buffett’s 5-Step Process for Prioritizing True Success (and Why Most People Never Do It). Retrieved from Live Your Legend: https://liveyourlegend. net/warren-buffetts-5-step-process-for-prioritizing-true-success-and-why-most-people-never-do-it
3. EOS. (n.d.). WHAT IS EOS®? Retrieved from EOS Worldwide: https://www. eosworldw ide. com/what-is-eos
