Leadership is a delicate dance for any business owner in the fertility field. For REI practice owners, it might be the Tango.
Striking the balance between leaning in and stepping away can be a struggle for any fertility executive, and there is usually an added layer of complexity that’s unique to physician practice owners.
If we look at the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) accountability chart, we see where a managing partner might find themselves occupying many seats.
Visionary, whether they’ve sorted that role out with their partners or not
Integrator, if a Chief Executive Officer or Executive Director doesn’t truly occupy the seat
Operations, if they are the Medical, Practice, or Lab Director
Physician, oh yeah. Remember your main job? The one for which you undertook fifteen years of higher education and training? That seat falls below the leadership seats under operations.
Yes, executives of many companies, fertility or not, struggle to step out of many seats. Still, the functions of Medical, Practice, or Lab Director, and especially the role of physician, is a unique charge for physician practice owners.
The accountability chart for fertility practices is its own topic that merits its own article. In this article, we will attempt to get you out of the sales and marketing seat as much as possible.
Even when you properly delegate the sales and marketing seat, there are sales and marketing responsibilities that come with the visionary and integrator seats.
HOTEL SALES AND MARKETING: YOU CAN CHECK OUT ANYTIME YOU LIKE, BUT YOU CAN NEVER LEAVE
What do some of the world’s most iconic brands have in common?
They had or have CEOs (Blakley, Jobs, Musk, ol’ Walt himself) that propagate the market position of the company in everything they do.
If you’re looking for a book on this topic, David Kincaid’s The Brand-Driven CEO: Embedding Brand Into Business Strategy provides plenty of real-world, current case studies from today’s biggest companies.
Leaders must be involved in positioning and branding because the marketing position of their companies is enforced or betrayed in every area of the businesses.
Because principals (the owner of an REI practice or chief executive of a fertility company) are no exception to the positioning requirement, it’s common to get bogged down in sales and marketing responsibilities that they should be able to delegate.
We don’t want that. If you’re struggling with the question of involvement versus delegation in your fertility company, you aren’t alone.
We’ve broken sales and marketing responsibilities into a 12-point spectrum you can use to determine when you need to be involved in branding, sales, and marketing initiatives and when you can delegate.
12 POINTS FOR FERTILITY BUSINESS OWNERS
The external and internal presentation of your company is a relay race. You have to make sure the baton doesn’t get dropped as you run from one segment to the next. This means that you can’t go from leading your team to being completely uninvolved in one take. In business, a dropped baton leads to inefficiencies and expensive mistakes. In the fertility field it leads to patients feeling like they were baited and switched.
But, you can step out at certain points once the baton has been successfully passed. This spectrum allows you to ease off without sacrificing outcomes.
When you need to lead:
Positioning
Branding
Growth Goals
When you need to be somewhat involved:
Brand Development
Growth Strategy
Operational Overlap
When it’s okay to be uninvolved:
Coaching
Brand Activation
Strategy Execution
When it’s time to reinvolve yourself in the marketing process:
Culture
Brand Refresh, Redesign, and Extension
Accountability of Leadership
When the principal of a fertility practice needs to lead
1. Positioning
Positioning influences everything the business does. We’re talking about what differentiates your practice from the competition and what makes it unique. This includes your:
Vision
Mission statement
Core values
Core service areas and focus
10 Year Target
3 Year Picture
A marketing team can’t make these decisions for the company. They can only come from the top.
However, it’s also important to note that if you have partners, everyone needs to be aligned before moving forward. Otherwise, the latter stages of the marketing process will become more expensive, more time-consuming, and less effective.
A fertility business can be in operation for decades. However, if they haven’t structured everything they do in a source of truth (that everyone in the company can point to), they haven’t outlined their unique positioning.
2. Brand
Part of the role as a leader of a company is chief brand ambassador (lowercase, let’s be modest here). Once you and your partners, if necessary, have decided on things like core values and which types of patient segments you especially want to serve, you can move on to branding.
This includes the
Name of the company
Unique value propositions
Overall brand look and feel
Key messages
Your marketing team will be a key player in this process (if they aren’t, something is wrong), but your leadership is still crucial.
3. Growth Goals
Employees simply can’t decide growth goals because they don’t have the skin in the game that the principal does. As Gary Vaynerchuk bluntly puts it, “Your employees shouldn’t care about your business as much as you do.”
Unfortunately, marketing personnel are often not even incentivized to pursue growth goals. Worse, administrators and operations personnel are frequently disincentivized from pursuing growth goals because it means more work for them and they get nothing in return.
Your growth strategy is the measurable pursuit of your values, vision, and brand. It is the traction toward your vision put into numbers. Growth goals include:
Revenue goals
Net profit targets
What type of business they want the company to be (like a designated B-Corp, for example)
Patient satisfaction score targets
Number of new patients served
When the principal of a fertility company needs to be somewhat involved in sales and marketing
During this next phase, you can begin to dial things back a few notches. You still have some involvement in the sales and marketing process, but now your team is starting to run and you begin to extend your arm to pass the baton.
4. Brand Development
At a minimum, every company should have a set of brand guidelines, also commonly called a brand book or a brand style guide. These documents guide every marketing campaign going forward and they provide the templates of your company’s look and feel.
Your marketing team will work on these guidelines, but the involvement of the principal ensures that the brand comes to life in a way that supports its core values and overall goals.
5. Launching Growth Strategy
The baton is almost passed. The principal doesn’t need to be involved in every aspect of planning the fertility company’s growth strategy, but they need to be the one to commission it’s execution.
The principal must see and approve the plan before execution begins. Even when your team is fully incentivized to move towards the company’s growth goals, the principal must ensure that execution of the plan is underway before she or he can step away.
6. Operational Overlap
When you look at the Four Phases of the Fertility Patient Marketing Journey, you’ll notice that the closer you get to the outcome of getting paid and improving patient satisfaction, the greater the operational overlap.
Without continuity across these areas, there is a sharp decrease in the likelihood of the marketing team being able to complete the desired results. These areas are run by other people, and your marketers are not their bosses.
The principal must remain active until operational, administrative, and financial teams accept their role in the strategy.
When a fertility business’s principal can be uninvolved in marketing
We’re finally at the point where you can pass the baton, take a break from the relay race, and let your team take care of the heavy lifting.
7. Coaching/Management
There’s no need for a fertility business’s principal to be involved in coaching your physician liaisons, call center, patient navigators, or marketers. Their managers are in charge of the day to day performance and outside companies can train your teams, or train your managers to train your teams.
If you participated and led at the points you needed to, you can trust your team to get to work.
8. Brand Activation
As the principal of a fertility practice, you don’t need to direct the brand assets that engage patients with your company.
You’ve approved your brand book; this is a job for your marketing team — they’re the ones who should handle brand activation initiatives like website design, social media templates, and launch campaigns.
9. Strategy Execution (with one exception)
You don’t need to schedule video shoots, write social media posts, edit blog posts, oversee advertising campaigns, implement CRM or EMR sequences, monitor lead conversion, or report on post consult follow up.
There’s one exception, however.
If you’re being featured in a piece of content, you need to be available as the star while your team produces, writes, directs, films, and edits.
When the principal of a fertility business should get reinvolved in marketing
Periodic reinvolvement keeps the foundation of the REI practice or fertility company solid and ensures long-term success.
In marketing you can set it but not forget it. As the leader of your practice, it’s important to check in, reinforce accountability, and ensure that sales, marketing, and operations have stayed true to core values.
10. Culture
In most cases, I hate calling a company's workforce a family. Employees are most certainly not children and they are not your children. In the specific instance of who models the company culture that everyone else imitates, however, this wisdom from Gabrielle Reese is apt.
“[Children] watch you, they don’t listen to you.”
You are the matriarch or patriarch of your fertility business’s family in this sense. The family follows your example.
Really, culture is the ongoing commitment to your positioning, and the critical element of commitment is action. If you’ve decided that your company is going to be more in tune with the needs of same-sex male patients than any other organization, for instance, your team can only live up to that culture to the extent that you champion it.
11. Brand refresh, redesign, extension
Many fertility companies need a brand refresh, periodically.
Fertility centers that built a brand for Baby Boomers or Gen X-ers need to update because Millennials and Gen Z patients now make most of the patient and donor populations. They respond to different types of marketing because they have different concerns.
If you decide to extend your identity with a new brand for fertility preservation or third party IVF, the principal must be involved in the beginning stages of those initiatives. If you are changing the identity of your IVF center or fertility company, even moreso.
12. Accountability of Leadership
Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) Accountability Chart applied to fertility clinics
Finally, even trustworthy and capable sales, marketing, finance, and operations leaders need to be held accountable by the visionary and integrator of the organization.
As fertility experience consultant Lisa Duran says, “people do what their managers pay attention to”.
It’s not just about them. Periodic check-ins also demonstrate that you’re holding yourself accountable. Employees don’t need to be micromanaged with due dates and metrics. They should see that the principal is paying attention to the outcomes to which they contribute:
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
Are you ready for a better relationship with your marketing team?
While you do need to be involved in many aspects of the marketing process, chief executives of fertility companies and REI partners like you also need to be able to free themselves of certain marketing responsibilities.
Getting to the point where you can pass the baton only happens when someone else is completely in charge of the outcomes that grow the business. Pay attention to these twelve points to know when to lead, when to throttle down your involvement, and when to release.
Letting go can be difficult, though.
That’s where we can help. Get Fertility Bridge’s support in selecting marketing personnel, determining their responsibilities and outcomes, and more with our Goal and Competitive Diagnostic.
