The following is written by Tom Mallon, CEO of Regent Surgical Health.
As I was beginning my entrepreneurial life in my late thirties, my father cautioned me against any business that was based on partnerships. His advice was summed up by the phrase, "The surest ship to sink is a partner-ship!" This did not bode well for my business model. However, in spite of his warning, we have successfully established over twenty-two partnership ventures in the last ten years. And, we established these ventures with a management contract and minority ownership interest. We do not hold any significant control. We have to use our experience and our ability to influence our partners' and medical staffs' behavior in order to gain consensus and cooperation.
One of the most influential business books ever written is the classic, "Think and Grow Rich" by Napoleon Hill. This is the story of Mr. Hill's mandate to communicate the principles of wealth developed by Andrew Carnegie. It is a fascinating read. My favorite chapter is the "Power of the Master Mind". Hill's definition of the Master Mind is as follows: "the coordination of knowledge and effort, in a spirit of harmony, between two or more people for the attainment of a definite purpose." We have attempted to use this principal within Regent by attracting individuals who will work cooperatively together. We also seek people with a desire to succeed and competence in the healthcare industry. We seek people who can influence their colleagues in a positive and constructive way.
We start a project by identifying the "lead dog", the person who is respected in the community and knows every significant surgeon personally. It is often an anesthesiologist. He then opens the doors for our business development team to meet and ask physicians into the partnership. If we do our job correctly, the board is then formed by individuals with an interest in the business side of healthcare facilities. It is our job to educate them to know everything we know about the business.
What I find extremely fascinating is the challenge of creating this cooperation between groups of physicians. If you think about how a person becomes a doctor, they are competing from their early years. "I win, you lose" surrounds just about everything a student experiences while fighting their way through medical school, residency, and establishing their practice. This results in a "fighter pilot" mentality — extraordinary training and competence but not training and supervising people in a cooperative manner. In fact, the residency programs more closely resemble hazing than training in many instances.
We have enjoyed a recent success story in the quest to create cooperative and profitable relationships. In a small center in a rural market, one of our lead physicians was adverse to his biggest competitor. There existed a legal dispute born years earlier between the other physician and our lead doctor. In an effort to reinvigorate the center, we reached out to the local hospital to partner with us to increase our revenue. The hospital asked us to consider bringing in the very physician with whom our lead doctor did not get along. To everyone's credit (both the physicians and the hospital), the two men met, agreed to put their past behind them and now enjoy a mutually profitable and beneficial partnership.
What we have learned in our 10 years and many ventures spread across the country is, if you will treat partners with respect, listen to them, treat them as customers and serve them with all of your skills, in most cases they will cooperate to everyone's mutual benefit. We appreciate the significant effort that all of you expend to make our partnership ventures successful. With the economy strengthening and real cooperation starting to emerge in Washington, we are encouraged by what the coming year has to offer.
Learn more about Regent Surgical Health.
Read more from the leadership of Regent Surgical Health:
- 4 Ways to Benefit From Your Surgery Center's Natural Advantages
- Becoming and Remaining Engaged: Critical to Success of Physician Partners
- 5 Critical Surgery Center Mistakes