Martin Willoughby | Martin Willoughby

29 Mar 2016

Sticky Post By overseer Posted in Entrepreneurship Permalink

ARE YOU A LEGALLY SAVVY ENTREPRENEUR?

Sticky Post By overseer On March 29, 2016

Unless you are a devout Apple follower, you likely a Microsoft product somewhere on your computer.? However, there were numerous situations that could have altered the trajectory of Microsoft that would have led to a different company dominating the software market over the last 30+ years.? I would argue that one of the reasons that Microsoft survived to become a dominant global brand is because of the legal savviness of its co-founder Bill Gates.

While Gates? passion, drive, and intellect helped him become one of the world?s richest people, what many people don?t know is how legally savvy he was in building his business. For example, when 19 year old Gates and Paul Allen read about the Altair computer in the 1975 issue of Popular Mechanics, they knew they could create some software to make it more useful for hobbyists so they contacted its manufacturer (MITS) and pitched them on the idea of building this software.? They persuaded MITS to enter into a 10 year deal transferring the exclusive rights to their first software product (BASIC) to the company.

Gates had a provision in the contract that said that MITS had to use ?best efforts? to market the software.? MITS was purchased by another company and they sent Micro-soft (as it used to be know back then) a letter saying that they would never sell to a competitor.? Well, that proved to be the ?smoking gun? in an arbitration suit that allowed Gates and team to have full rights back to BASIC which they went on to license to many other people.? The rest, as they say, is history.

When it comes to successful entrepreneurs, we often hear them described as visionaries, innovators, or creative geniuses, but I believe there is another quality that is available for anyone who wants to invest the time and effort.

?That quality is to be a legally savvy entrepreneur.?? I don?t mean that you have to have a law degree to be successful.? However, I do believe that it is important to take responsibility for the legal aspects of your business, understand the legal terrain of your business and industry, and make informed decisions on legal matters.

To help you consider whether you are a legally savvy entrepreneur, I have summarized below a series of questions to consider:

(1) Do you delegate all things legal in nature to counsel or are you actively engaged?

(2) Do you read the documents you sign?

(3) Do you understand the key provisions of the contracts your company enters into?

(4) Do you know the key legal issues in your industry? Your business?

(5) Do you view your legal counsel as ?necessary evil? or a strategic resource?

(6) Do you understand the key tools at your disposal?

(7) Do you understand basic legal terms and language?

As an entrepreneur, there are numerous issues to consider such as your product/service, competition, staffing, CASH FLOW, and managing risk.? Ultimately, you are trying to build a great business and increase the value of your enterprise.? Whether you like it or not, the law and legal matters are interwoven with all aspects of your compamy.? The question is whether you are addressing them in a proactive way.

Put simply, when you as the leader of your business sit down to negotiate your next deal, if you are not the more legally savvy entrepreneur at the table then prepare for trouble.?? In my next post, I will discuss some proactive steps you can take to be a more legally savvy entrepreneur.

14 Mar 2016

Sticky Post By overseer Posted in Uncategorized Permalink

HOW TO HIRE FOR SUCCESS

Sticky Post By overseer On March 14, 2016

In this column, I am addressing ways to hire for success.

“I am looking for a new manager for my practice. Do you have any suggestions on how to hire the right person?”

A critical hire is the administrator or manager of the practice. I have seen great managers help grow the revenues and prestige of a practice, and I have unfortunately seen mediocre leaders create a toxic culture that negatively impacted profitability.? Companies that attract and retain great talent know that hiring is important and that it should be done with great care.? I subscribe to the theory ?hire slow, and fire fast.?? Great hiring is a process, not a one-time event.? I will summarize below some of the best practices in creating a first class hiring program.

Clarify Your Needs

The first step is to know what you want.? Do you have a job description in mind?? What are the specific duties that you want the manager to handle?? What could this person do to free you up more?? ?You want to write this description down. There are standard formats to follow, but feel free to improvise and be creative. This is your roadmap for the new employee, not a boilerplate document.?? Besides just the tasks and responsibilities of the new hire, it?s also important to consider the skills and abilities that you what the employee to possess.?? I consider technical proficiencies such as using Microsoft Excel as well as soft skills such as leadership and communication.? What?s interesting is that successful employers know that the real key is to hire for attitude.? You can teach technical skills and even soft skills, but I have found that trying to get people to improve their attitude is virtually impossible.

In addition to knowing what you want, you need to consider the compensation you want to pay for the position, including any bonus incentives.? I like to consider third party comparable data as well as local market knowledge to find the proper pay grade.? I also consider the impact on the budget as well as think through creating the proper financial incentives to align the employer with the employee.

Build Your Candidate Pool

Now that you have clarity on what you want, the next step is to solicit potential candidates. This can be done in a variety of ways including traditional newspaper advertising, internet search tools such as CareerBuilder or Monster, third party recruiters, and word of mouth. I often receive emails from colleagues looking for recommendations for hires. Another avenue is to get your employees to submit referrals.? Some companies even have bonus programs for employee referrals.? You have to be careful about hiring ?buddies,? but it?s helpful to get referrals from employees whom you trust and that actually know the candidates.? In this solicitation phase, you are creating your pipeline of candidates.? You want to make sure that you have a clear timeline and process for intaking and following up with people.

Narrow the Field

Once you have built a good pipeline of prospects, you want to narrow the field through resume review and phone screening.? Does the candidate appear to have the background and training that you are seeking?? Can the candidate communicate clearly? Are they articulate? If you don?t have a good first impression on the phone, then your staff, patients, and vendors probably won?t either.? This process should whittle your prospect group down significantly to a handful of candidates to bring in for an initial interview. If possible, have someone interview the candidate with you.? It?s helpful to get two perspectives on the interview.? If the candidates pass through the ?gate? of a first interview then I recommend a potential 2nd and 3rd interview as well as the opportunity for your staff to interview them.? It?s amazing how empowering it is to have your staff participate in the hiring process.

For candidates in critical roles such as being an administrator, I also recommend interviewing them in a social setting such as a lunch or dinner where you can see if the person behaves any differently than in the formal interview settings.? This can reveal a lot about someone that does not always come out in an office interview.? All along the way, you should be respectful of those candidates you are not going to continue with and let them know accordingly. You also want to always be clear with people about next steps and follow up expectations.? This shows respect for people as well as demonstrates the professionalism of your practice.

Trust, But Verify

Finally, you want to check references.? So many people don?t actually check references, but I have seen it help employers avoid huge mistakes by actually taking the time to check them.? Besides the best practices described herein, you also want to make sure that you are following the proper applicable legal requirements in your hiring process.? Hopefully, the fruit of your effort in this process will culminate in a formal offer letter which is accepted by your new hire!

08 Feb 2016

Sticky Post By overseer Posted in Business Development, Entrepreneurship, Lean Startup, Managing Your Business Permalink

HOW TO VETT YOUR NEXT BUSINESS IDEA

Sticky Post By overseer On February 8, 2016

Entrepreneurs are people with big dreams and ambitious goals. They pour their time, energy, and resources into their business ventures in hopes of success. Unfortunately, the odds are stacked against most of them reaching their destination. Statistically, we know that most will fail within the first five years.? However, there are some people who defy the odds and somehow achieve success as serial entrepreneurs.?? Are some people just born with the Midas touch?? What is it that people like Sir Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, Ltd, have that gives them the ability to repeatedly strike gold in the cut-throat marketplace?

While there is no one magic bullet, there do appear to be some consistent themes.? One quality worth noting is the ability to critically vet business ideas to make sure the new venture has a fighting chance.? This takes rigorous analysis and the ability to honestly and objectively review the idea and the entrepreneur?s own ability to execute.

Clark Love, a native Mississippian, has achieved the goal that most entrepreneurs only dream about ? he has successfully started a business, grown it, and sold out to a larger company. Love, a graduate of Ole Miss and Northwestern?s Kellogg School of Management, started Forest One, Inc. (later renamed Lanworth, Inc.) in 2000 at the age of 28.? Lanworth is an information technology company providing consulting services, applications development, and software to the forest products, environmental, and land management industries.? Love originally founded Lanworth with his college friend Dr. Henry Jones and grew the company to be a multi-million dollar enterprise with the main offices being in Jackson and Chicago.? In 2007, The Westervelt Company acquired Lanworth.

While Love achieved his goals for Lanworth, he has not remained idle.? His entrepreneurial drive has already rekindled as he in the process of launching several new ventures. Love?s analytical training as an engineer in college, his experience as a consultant with Accenture, and his ?real world? experience with Lanworth and other startups has allowed him to develop a framework for analyzing new business opportunities.? His checklist for a new business venture includes the following requirements:

Have a Cause

The product or service offered by the business should move people. ?Love added, ?It doesn?t need to move everyone, just the segment of customers I plan to go after and the people I will hire.? You want a business people will put their hearts and soul into.?

Know Your First 3 Customer?s By Name

An entrepreneur should know by name the first 3 customers for the product or services the business will offer.?? Many people have ideas about what will work in the marketplace yet they have never actually vetted the idea with a potential customer.? You need to know if anyone will actually buy your product or pay for your service.

Build a Recurring Revenue Model

A large majority of the revenue should be recurring so the business does not have to start from scratch each year.? Having a solid financial base of recurring revenue allows for more growth opportunities.

Be Passionate about Your Industry and Customers

Love noted, ?Starting a company is incredibly hard, harder than most people realize.? Pay and economic reward are not enough ? you really need to have a passion for the business and serve customers that you actually care about.?? This passion serves as the ?pull through? that helps you get through the difficult times as an entrepreneur.

This checklist can serve as a useful tool in analyzing any new business opportunity.?? I believe that serial entrepreneurs like Clark Love will play an integral part in Mississippi?s future in creating jobs and opportunities for Mississippians.? Hopefully, we can collectively make Mississippi, Tennessee, and the Mid-South attractive places for entrepreneurs to invest their passion and energy into creating world class businesses.

04 Dec 2015

Sticky Post By overseer Posted in Entrepreneurship, Health Care, Healthcare, Leadership Permalink

ARE YOU A MEDICAL ENTREPRENEUR?

Sticky Post By overseer On December 4, 2015

Successful Medical Practices

All doctors are medical entrepreneurs to some degree. Since the pioneer days in America when they hung a shingle outside their practice door, doctors have been the original medical entrepreneurs.

A simple definition of an entrepreneur is ?a person who has possession of a enterprise, venture or idea and assumes significant accountability for the inherent risks and the outcome.?

Sound familiar? Physicians, like other professionals, often practice in solo or group settings where they are the boss and certainly experience the intrinsic risks and rewards of their medical practice. You may not necessarily feel like an entrepreneur and that?s certainly understandable. A physician?s first and foremost responsibility is obviously patient care. In fact, almost all of medical training prepares physicians just for that task. However, most professionals, including physicians, rarely are trained on how to run their own practices.

I have spent more than 25 years operating and working with entrepreneurial business ventures, and I?am now the CEO of an emergency health care company in Memphis, TN, Emergency Mobile Health Care. I have had the good fortune to study with and learn from some great mentors in this arena, and I?m passionate about seeing people fulfill their entrepreneurial potential. I?m excited to share with you in this column some of the key principles I?ve learned about entrepreneurial success, and specifically, how those can be implemented in a physician practice setting. In addition, I?ll highlight some notable medical entrepreneurs and offer tips on how to evaluate business opportunities outside of your core medical practice.

I begin with the simple premise that your medical practice is an entrepreneurial business, and that your practice shares many common features of any entrepreneurial organization. Common characteristics include people management, implementing systems and processes, taking care of your customers, and financial risks and rewards.

People Management (or Cat Herding)

Rarely do I find an entrepreneur or a physician who operates as a solo act. To run your practice, it takes nurses and staff to operate effectively. Therefore, your success becomes interwoven with your ability to get the most out of the people you work with. Anyone who has every managed an employee knows that hiring and developing talent is no easy task. Therefore, the questions become: what kind of leader are you? Are you getting 100 percent from your team or are they giving you the bare minimum to get by? Building a great team around you is a key step in your path to success.

Systems Management

Every medical office, like every business, also has systems for doing things. The question is whether you know what those systems are and how are they working.? Are you streamlined and efficient, or are you daily enduring broken systems?? Exemplary practices have written ways to do things that people understand and follow. The way Chic-fil-A can serve up a great chicken sandwich no matter what store you visit in the country is based on one simple thing: a great system!

Customer Management

Your patients and referral partners are your ?customers.? Every time one interacts with you, they have a customer experience. Do you know what that customer experience is? Have you thought through your interaction from first contact to final communication? Is there consistency and predictability in what your customers experience with you? Great practices have a well thought out customer experience cycle that is clear and repeatable.

Financial Management

What about the bottom line? While we all hopefully work to pursue a calling and seek personal fulfillment, we also are trading our time and effort for money.? Today?s medical practices are complicated and can be difficult to manage financially. There are lots of expenses, and reimbursements tend to go down and not up. Therefore, keeping a careful eye on the bottom line is critical. Physicians, like many busy entrepreneurs, tend to entrust financial responsibilities to others in the organization. However, I believe it?s also critical for physicians to know and have clear visibility into the key economic drivers of their businesses.

Thinking Strategically

Finally, as entrepreneurs, I encourage physicians to take time to work ?on their practice? and not just ?in their practice.? Most people are so thankful for a day off that they rarely want to turn around and think more about work. However, most of us stay in the trees and rarely plan and dedicate time thinking about the forest.? The end result is that we often feel like we?re on a treadmill we just can?t seem to get off.

I spoke with Robert Harris, MD, a urogynecologist with Women?s Specialty Center in Jackson, MS, who is a well known entrepreneur physician. He shared:

?I try to purposefully take time away from my day-to-day practice each week and work on improving both my practice and my life.?

For Dr. Harris, this has allowed him to not only strategically improve his medical practice, but also to create the time to pursue medical start-up businesses outside of his bread-and-butter practice.

In sum, we give a great deal of ourselves to our work and professions. By becoming entrepreneurially minded, you help not only gain better control over your practice, but also your life.

(c) Martin E. Willoughby, Jr.

Originally published in Medical News