Drs. George and Wendy Varish are a husband and wife team with two facilities in Sheboygan and Howards Grove, WI. They have been Sterling clients since January of 1997 when they trained at Sterling’s Glendale facility.
They were both very pleased with the results. Wendy had this to say: “It has been said, ‘Never marry your business partner.’ The number one reason my husband and I went to Sterling was that we’re both chiropractors and we were having a hard time with the business end creating conflict within the marriage. Not that it was in dire trouble, but it certainly was stressful at times. Every three months we used to have these huge fights about work. Sterling has helped us separate that out for the first time. Obviously, you cannot separate the business and marriage one hundred percent, but we have been able to separate it to our satisfaction. We learned about having an executive staff meeting once a week; yes, we still talk about things at home, but not nearly to the same extent. That was the number one thing that we went to Sterling to handle and it has been accomplished.
“One of the biggest things we learned was how to manage by statistics, how to use the statistics we already had! We never had a true, valid way of tracking how the month was really doing week by week. It’s such a simple, common-sense methodology—but we never did it! We were missing the vital steps one should take depending on what direction the graph is going. Once we started doing that, production went up because we had more confidence in what we were doing. When we started using this system and we could see what caused increases in production and what didn’t, we were able to get rid of a lot of unnecessary wasted motion in the office.”
The Varishes also had their staff trained and had this to say about the result: “Before we had our staff trained with the SPEEDO* program, they seemed to think, ‘Hey, we’re doing a good job already; what more can we do? Why are you asking us to do more?’ What was really nice was that when the consultant came in to provide the training, she didn’t make drastic changes. She just fine-tuned the office. All my staff needed was just fine tuning and streamlining. This made it really easy for the staff to accept. A lot of the things we implemented were the staff’s ideas! We just needed guidance in how to implement. The consultant was wonderful. We have hired three new people since having gone through the program. We used specific tests given to us by our consultant to evaluate who to hire. This was very helpful and effective.
“Our collections are fantastic. We now have 95-97% collection rate; the front desk cash collections are as high as our insurance charges. Our accounts receivable have dropped to less than a month’s worth of charges. There is nothing pending.
“I have a great staff—what can I say?! Staff morale is way up! In a small office situation it can become too much like a family. You become too close to everybody and fail to realize where to draw the line. The last thing you want is to become too attached. By implementing the common-sense business practices Sterling taught us we are able to draw the line and maintain a family type situation with our staff while maintaining a professional environment overall. Of all things we learned, implementing the above has made the most difference. We are all very satisfied with the results. A lot of it seemed to put common sense into practice. There were a lot of times when we said, ‘Oh duh, why didn’t we do that before?’ Some of it was just returning to basics such as putting things in writing and putting things into policy.
“I think no matter how long you’ve been in practice, whether you’re just starting out or you’ve been at it twenty years, I believe you’re going to constantly grow and change in that practice. We just recommended Sterling to a friend of ours who’s been in practice eighteen years. I think we’re all constantly striving for something better and striving to grow more and Sterling’s services give us that opportunity to continue to grow.”
* SPEEDO – Staff Production Enhancement and Establishment by Debug Officer
