“Hurry up and wait.”
Far too many fertility companies, practice or not, rush into their goals… only to abandon them when they realize that the strategies required to reach those goals require more work and investment than expected.
Whether they like it or not, all fertility practices are entrepreneurial enterprises. Still, many independent centers don't approach growth like their corporate competitors, who actively set and pursue explicit market goals. Corporate fertility groups sometimes set goals but fail to align their efforts to achieve them.
When an REI practice is in a hurry to catch up to what competitive fertility providers are doing, they may make hasty decisions that paradoxically waste more time (and money).
Some example requirements of different business development strategies include
Reserving provider availability for subject matter expertise for digital content or events
Creating content to support an advertising or public relations campaign
Scheduling staff to stay late or stop seeing patients early to shoot video
Restructuring your call center to fix the attrition of new patient inquiries to consult
These are only a few. When centers face challenges like these without a committed goal in place, they are far more likely to abandon the pursuit having wasted time, money, and effort.
Some fertility centers even hire marketing personnel only to fire them in a year when they aren’t seeing the results they expected.
The way out of the cycle is for fertility businesses to set and commit to (or not) goals in four steps.
Slow down to speed up
While goal setting produces real value for any business, in these four steps, we use examples that companies in the fertility field have to consider.
Stop the dreaded “hurry up and wait” cycle once and for all because when you slow down goal setting, it’s easier to speed up the growth of your REI practice.
The four steps of goal setting for fertility businesses are:
Opportunity
Priority
Alignment
Resource Allocation
1. Identifying opportunities for REI practice growth
Fertility specialists have no shortage of ways to grow their businesses — there’s a virtually endless array of services you can provide and demographics you can serve. Growth opportunities you could pursue include
Patient Satisfaction
Egg freezing retrievals
Third-party IVF recipients
Third-party IVF cycles
Tubal Ligation Reversals
Donor recruitment
New patients
Specific provider volume increase
Targeted region/office volume increase
Specific patient populations, like LGBTQ+ fertility services and other diverse family-building paths
For each potential opportunity, you first need to benchmark your current volume, set a goal, and calculate profitability.
A basic formula you can use is (Goal Volume-Current Volume)Profit = Opportunity Potential
Using IVF cycles as an example:
Goal of 1,000 IVF cycles with a profit of $4,000/cycle = $4 million
Currently at 500 IVF cycles with a profit of $4,000/cycle = $2 million
(4,000,000) - (2,000,000) = $2 million opportunity
At this stage, many practice owners look at the numbers and think, “We have to do everything!” That’s a natural impulse. You want to care for as many people as possible and you don’t want your fertility business to lag behind its peers.
We’re not making any decisions yet, though. Pump the brakes and slow down so that you can move much more quickly when it’s time for execution.
2. Prioritize the ‘infinite’ goals of a fertility practice
Research suggests that having too many goals leads to diminished outcomes. That’s why it’s critical to narrow focus and prioritize. If every goal is the priority, none of them are the priority.
The prioritization calculation has many moving parts. In order to effectively prioritize, your practice needs to:
Rank opportunities by profit potential using the calculation above.
Estimate effort--goal against current capacity Does the goal represent unmet capacity that the practice can easily meet? Or, will you need to add more doctors, staff, office space, or equipment to your business?
Subtract effort from goal. You may be able to pursue a more profitable service, but how much effort will it take to reach that goal?Ex: a practice wants to pursue fertility preservation instead of IVF, because of a higher profit margin. If their practice isn’t positioned well, or in a challenging market for egg freezing, filling out IVF capacity may be the quicker win.In addition to helping you rank priorities, estimating the effort of achieving a goal reduces the likelihood of wasting time, money, and effort by abandoning it.
Consider your mission. You are a clinician first and a business person second. If your personal practice is about advancing fertility preservation, serving LGBTQ+ patients, or treating recurrent pregnancy loss, that has to impact which goals you prioritize.
Weigh brand/market liabilities, particularly strengths and weaknesses in the marketplace. If your practice doesn’t make a move on a certain opportunity, will a competitor take it over and make it difficult for your business to get back in the game? Will it make your brand appear antiquated if you don’t pursue?
You might worry that other goals will be ignored if you choose a single priority to focus on first, but that isn’t necessarily the case. Other areas of the practice almost always benefit from a snowball effect.
Goal Snowball
Here’s an example of how prioritizing one goal can benefit others. Let’s say an REI practice has ten physicians with very different workloads:
Two or three REIs have a higher than normal capacity and they have met it. They each do more than 300 retrievals per year.
Five REIs are each at a normal capacity of 180 retrievals per year.
Two or three physicians are below 150 retrievals per year so they are a financial and access-to-care constraint.
This group has many goals, but they have ranked specific provider volume as their biggest priority. As a result, they:
Streamline their call center to balance waitlists. They achieve their highest priority of increasing the volumes of the lagging physicians
And
Progress toward their goal of increased patient satisfaction because they have improved the early interactions between practice and patient.
Prioritization doesn’t mean you’re ignoring the other goals of your fertility business because it maximizes the effectiveness of your resource allocation.
We’ll discuss resource allocation shortly. Before we get to that part, though, all of the practice’s partners must be aligned on the priorities.
3. Aligning your partners with the goal (and each other)
Even when the managing partner of the fertility practice or the chief executive of another fertility company has final say, alignment with the partners is crucial.
The fact that partners need to achieve alignment doesn’t mean they don’t already have a healthy relationship, though it can. It simply means that they must be explicit and clear about an initiative so that everyone can come to a mutual agreement.
When everyone is on the same page, it’s much easier to work through any obstacles and questions that arise in the process of reaching a goal.
When it comes to aligning a practice’s partners, third-party support is often the most effective and efficient way to reach a consensus. This isn’t about moderating for conflicts, necessarily — it’s about
Prompting necessary conversations that are easily put off when everyone is focused on a new goal.
Bringing new ideas for partners to consider.
Acting as an objective sounding board in discussions between partners.
4. Resource allocation: Time or money?
The goal snowball means that the strategies required to meet different goals often overlap. It doesn’t mean they’re completely imbricated.
The amount of overlap will vary based on your available resources:
With more money, you can plan and execute multiple strategies concurrently over less time.
With more time, you can sequentially plan and execute more strategies for less money.
The goal snowball allows for a progressive return on investment. That means you can continue to invest in your fertility business without decreasing your income.
How will you set goals for your REI practice or fertility business?
Before investing time and money on a plan to achieve a goal (not to mention the execution), slow down so you can speed up:
Quantify opportunities
Prioritize them
Align the partners
Allocate your resources accordingly
If you would like outside expertise and experience, we can help. This four-part methodology is part of how Fertility Bridge helps fertility practices and other fertility companies navigate their biggest business challenges.
If you’re ready to set and accomplish goals for your IVF center or fertility company, sign up for the Goal and Competitive Diagnostic here.
