Brian M. Burton M.D. is an Arkansas native. He was raised in Hot Springs where he went to Lakeside public school from kindergarten through 12th grade. His father (a retired urologist), grandfather (a general surgeon), and great-great-uncle (also a physician in Hot Springs) have served patients in central Arkansas since the mid 1930’s. This makes Dr. Burton a 4th generation physician in central Arkansas.
After high school, he went to college at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville from 1995-1999 with a degree in Microbiology. He then moved to Little Rock and worked for Horton’s Orthotics and Prosthetics Lab as an Orthotist making braces for children with disabilities for 3 years before he started medical school at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) thinking he would become an Orthopedic surgeon. His third year of medical school changed his thinking and he found his calling in OB/GYN, it was the continuity of care throughout a woman’s life that was the draw for him to this profession. After interviewing for residency positions all over the south east he decided to train at UAMS and has made Little Rock his home.
During his first year of medical school he met Jamie, who would become his wife 3 years later in 2005. She has completed her training and is board certified in Internal Medicine, Hematology and Oncology as of 2013. She is a practicing Hematologist/Oncologist at CARTI where she has a busy practice. They have three children that occupy the rest of their time – Jackson, who was born in 2009, Oliver, who was born in 2011, and Norah, who was born in 2013.
Dr. Burton is also an active member of Fellowship Bible Church where he and his wife teach a 5-year-old Sunday school class. Immanuel Baptist Church was his first church home in Little Rock where he was Baptized in 2006. He later taught a young adult Sunday school class for 3 years before turning the class over to one of his mentors, Dr. Orman Simmons.
Dr. Burton has interests in all obstetrics, including high risk and multiple gestation pregnancies, and is passionate about minimally invasive laparoscopic and robotic gynecologic surgery including pelvic floor procedures for urinary symptoms and prolapse. He focuses specifically on rapid recovery and returning to normal daily activities in a timely fashion. He joined the clinic in July 2010 and is currently welcoming new patients.
In Practice Since: 2010
Name: Brian Burton
Company: The Woman’s Clinic
URL: https://www.arobgyn.com/brian-m-burton/
Transcript of the Conversation
Jordan Smith:
Hey everybody! Welcome to the iProv Made Podcast where we help you run your practice like a profitable business. Today, as always I’ve got my co-host RJ Martino. What’s up RJ?
RJ Martino:
Heyyy Jordan! Excited about our guest today.
Jordan Smith:
I am too. Tell us who it is.
RJ Martino:
So Dr. Burton is a partner at the women’s clinic here in Little Rock, Arkansas. They are well known as one of the top OB/GYN practices in the State. He is known very well. You see him everywhere. If there is a face of OB/GYN successful practices, it’s probably his because he is so well known in the community.
And I am excited to hear about it because you know, he and I have been personal friends. His practice actually delivered my children. And so we have known each other for a long time and I’ve gotten to hear that even though it looks easy, they make it look easy, you know, just like every other business out there, there are hard times, there are tough times, but there is also high mode. So, he talks a lot about that.
Jordan Smith:
Absolutely. Both of my nieces were also delivered by the Women’s clinic. He is a personal friend of both of ours. He has also been a marketing client for the past six or seven years too. So we know him personally. We are excited that he has allowed us to kind of share the story with you guys. I think for those practice owners whether you are an old vet and you are listening to this or you are somebody who’s thinking about starting a practice yourself or getting into business. I think he brings up a lot of really good points that everyone needs to hear.
So without further ado, I am excited for you guys to hear the story, Dr. Brian Burton.
RJ Martino:
Welcome to the iProv Made Podcast where we help you build a better, more profitable healthcare practice. I got my co-host with me, Jordan Smith!
Jordan Smith:
What’s up everybody? How are you RJ?
RJ Martino:
I am doing well man. I am excited. I have a friend on today who is an Arkansas native. He and I have been close friends for a long time and he has built a great practice. I mean, if you talk around town and you talked about great OB/GYN practices here in Little Rock, one of the names that you are going to hear all the time is the Women’s Clinic. And representing here is Dr. Brian Burton.
Brian Burton:
Good Morning! How are you guys?
Jordan Smith:
Good. How are you Doc?
RJ Martino:
Great! Looks like you might be a little better outside in the sunny weather.
Brian Burton:
Yes, this is the COVID schedule. It is the relaxed, at home, parent teaching kind of day. So we are kind of doing this in the midst of all that.
RJ Martino:
Well, I love that we kind of get to see the authenticity of it. Before we hopped on, you talked a little bit about your schedule. Sometimes physicians feel like their job is hard. It’s gotta be hard whenever you got a schedule like yours. You wanna tell the crew what your day looks like so far.
Brian Burton:
Yeah. Just kind of doing this whole pandemic thing. It’s been crazy. I have only, you know, I kind of calculated out, normal week for me when I am at full speed, I see between 110-120 patients a week. And during this pandemic, it’s been about 25 a week.
So it’s a huge, it’s a huge change in our schedule. And you know honestly, it goes back to kind of the whole point of this podcast, how to build a successful practice, goes into being able to support your staff and your practice during a time like this.
And man, we have been absolutely blessed beyond belief. And in a situation that has kept us alive during all this which has been pretty phenomenal. And talking to other physicians and seeing other physician’s practices and how they had to make changes, layoff and salaries cuts and all, we have just been pretty blanketed from a lot of that which has been a real blessing.
RJ Martino:
Now that’s great. I wanna dig into that but before I do that I kind of just want to set the stage. Would you mind kind of giving us a little bit of history about yourself and how you grew up?
Brian Burton:
Sure. So, you know, I grew up in Arkansas. My dad was a urologist for 36 years in Hot Springs and his dad, my grandfather was a general surgeon in Hot Springs. He finished up in World War II and then came and opened up a practice that when he retired on a Friday, my dad kind of took over on a Monday, two days later.
And it was a private practice, physician owned, physician driven, non-employed practice. So growing up it was all I knew. That’s how I thought all doctors were. It wasn’t until I was much older that I realized a lot of other physicians are managed differently, employed differently. So I always wanted and envisioned that for me.
And so I grew up, went to University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and then went to Med school at University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock and then did OB/GYN because I kind of swore that was something I would never do with my life. And it just kind of ended up, being what I fell in love with, what I wanted to do.
And so when I was in training which I also trained at UAMS, I looked all over the place for places to train and I just decided that this is what I wanted. And when I was in residency, I wanted a practice that was what I was used to, right. A private practice that was a small group, physician owned, physician driven, decisions made by physicians for patient care and I wanted that for my practice. So that’s man, how that all happened was just a total landed in my lap kind of thing.
RJ Martino:
Well, before we get into that, you talked just a little bit about it but tell us about your vision and how you thought owning a practice would look before you actually jumped in there versus what it was like to do.
Jordan Smith:
Yeah! Cuz we know the listeners out there, there are some folks that are working in established practice, there are some that are office managers, but there’s also a lot of people who are, you know, in the shoes that you just mentioned, right?
They’re a provider and they are trying to work towards owning their own practice and building their own vision for what that looks like. So, I’m curious to be able to kind of go back a couple of decades and kind of pick young Dr. Burton’s head to see what he was going through at that point.
Brian Burton:
Man, I’ll tell you. I got a little bit lucky in that I was, it was kind of handed to me in a way. You know, you kind of think it gonna be easy that you kind of think, at least I did, maybe that’s me being pretty naïve. You know, you go to work and you do procedures and you take care of people and you get paid for it, right? And you just have a bank account and that’s it, right.
Well, man, it’s a lot more complex than that and you know from insurance contracts and malpractice and how do you manage durable goods and your contracts for that and you are staying on staff and staying on good standing and how do you stay full certified, when is this due, when is that due, how do you keep your prescriptions privileges with the DEA and how do you keep up with your continued medical education and how do you and how do you and how do you.
And man it is a whole lot of hoops and it’s a lot of jumping and we have some staff that work for us that have just been profoundly instrumental in doing that and it has made it so easy for me and my practice.
And I think a lot of physicians do a lot of that themselves. And a lot of people struggle with that and spend a lot of time doing that. And I am not so sure, that’s so stressful and I think, time is better spent doing other things and maybe outsourcing that or paying people to help with that.
You know, I am not a huge proponent of spend money to make money in some areas, but I am in others. You know, time is definitely one of those things that you just can’t get back. So if you are spending tons of time doing that kind of stuff, then you are not spending time on other things. Right. So yeah, I don’t know if I answered your question or not.
RJ Martino:
No you did. I mean that was a perfect explanation for it. If you could go back to young Dr. Burton, what would you have done early? We are still kind of early talking about you getting started but you know, out of just in training even, would you have taken any other path, experienced any other thing or done this quicker?
Brian Burton:
Man, that’s a great question and I wrestle with that one sometimes.
I spent a month, my fourth year of Med school at University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and I spent a month out there doing a GYN-Oncology internship.
And man, it was so eye opening and so enlightening and I learnt probably more in that one month there, than I learned in a lot of months and a lot of time training at UAMS, not for any other reason but just the volume and the sheer capacity they had and the numbers they had and acuity they had was just, from a medical stamp point, but that was pretty profound.
And during that time, I saw an opportunity to train elsewhere and I really-really-really considered training elsewhere and I spent a lot of time interviewing at other places. And nobody told me probably the thing that just, I got lucky with more than anything and I don’t know if it was just luck, but depending on what you want your practice to look like, where you train is really important.
We always thought that getting the best training was important for your practice, right? And of course that is, right? I mean you have to be medically trained, but a lot of where you train is who you meet. And a lot of who you meet in your training help you establish your practice because depending on what you do, you need a referral source.
You need, you know, if you are the most specialized in a field that’s great. But if you don’t have ancillary staff and support to help you, man, you’re gonna struggle, right.
If you don’t have an interventional pulmonologist to do trans solfeggio, lymph node biopsies and you’re the best chest surgeon ever, you can’t do these chest surgeries if you don’t have that guy to help you.
So you kind of have to pay attention to where you are and who’s around you to know, and so its takes kind of some foresight in the beginning. You know, in Arkansas, I am from here. I went to school here, I went to college here and so I know a lot of people and that has really been a beneficial part to my practice. Training here has been big.
I’ve talked to other physicians who said, Man, I didn’t realize going away for my training was going to impact my referral sources as much as it has. And they, you know, they trained at Brightman or at Yale or you know, these phenomenal programs and they’ve got a great education, not that their education is better than mine or mine is better than theirs, but-
RJ Martino:
No. Yeah, we get it.
Brian Burton:
Just from a setting up a practice stand point, what that’s done is huge. You’re not gonna imagine, you know, we talked earlier about getting a lot of dentists, I can imagine that oral surgeons, or dentists and where they get their referral sources, man, that you know, it’s you gotta get people through the door.
Jordan Smith:
Yeah. And speaking of training, you mentioned something earlier that I do not want to gloss over, where you mentioned that you know, you guys were blanketed over or you guys are blanketed from some of the issues that you know, you are hearing from other physicians and other practice owners during COVID.
But that’s not an accident. So from a business acuity stand point, right, we talk to doctors all the time and you are unique where you know, you are great from a doctor side, but you also got a, in our opinion, a really-really acute business mind also. So where did you pick that up? Was that during training, was that just through osmosis or what is just a really hard lesson where you, you know.
Brian Burton:
Yeah, you know that’s a good question and I don’t know that answer. I don’t have a business sense in some fashions, but I do in others.
I think a lot of it comes from when I joined the Women’s Clinic. I was a two year, you know, it’s kind of a two-year salary guarantee thing and then I wouldn’t, kind of, I didn’t see the books. I didn’t know how the practice was and guys were, you know, the practice is fine, it’s all good. I was like, Okay, great!
And then, I became a partner and I saw the books, things weren’t great. And I think IT was kind of then, I had this kind of epiphany of, okay, this isn’t okay. We need to turn this around.
How do we do it and in all honesty, I just started asking questions, right. I remember, our office manager had been there for ten years and our senior partner had been there for almost twenty years and unfortunately, we had one partner who was just diagnosed with a very advanced lung cancer that he ultimately passed away from, one guy just retired, one guy retired a year before or they have just taken on a new partner. I mean the practice was in this transition from kind of some of the older guys to the newer guys, with one guy kind of bridging the gap and it was difficult to kind of go through.
So during that transition, I asked questions. You know, why do we use this particular CPA? What is this CPA doing for us? Do we have an attorney that works on our contracts? Who is that? Why? When I had my contract written that it takes six months to get that back. It shouldn’t take six months to get a contract back. Why?
And asking those questions, we started thinking about solutions and problems. The CPA, for example, that we were using, had been the CPA for twenty-five years in our practice. Well, we had a massive net operating loss. And, I didn’t even know what a net operating loss was, right.
And so, we kind of started interviewing other CPA firms and they said yeah, you know, you guys can use all this loss to do things, to build your practice without having to spend any money really. I mean we would spend money but it was all different.
And that really, just changing our CPA firm made a massive difference. The other thing that we, my practice learnt the hard way was, you know, in medicine your income comes from working, right. There is no ancillary income really, right, it’s you either work and make money or you don’t work and don’t make money. That’s kind of like lawyers.
RJ Martino:
You eat what you kill.
Brian Burton:
Yeah. It really kind of is. And so, if you lose a high volume producer for a certain amount of time, then you could be in trouble, practice could be in big trouble.
For example, one of our partners before I started, was riding a horse and broke his pelvis. And he was out for six months. And he was one of the number one producers and so that loss of income for the clinic was huge.
And so we got an insurance policy on that loss of income for the practice, right. So, it was a pretty inexpensive policy that covered his income for overhead. It wasn’t a huge amount, but man, that made a big difference.
So when our, unfortunately, when our next partner was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and he passed away, that policy was in place and when our next partner who was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer was diagnosed and he had to retire like that day, that policy really-really-really allowed us some leeway. That made a huge difference.
RJ Martino:
Well I mean, I think just coupled with what Jordan said, even if having the foresight, you know, one of our what we call kind of our baby steps is accountability. And often, you know, doctors, physicians are the world’s worst at just throwing money at the problems and not thinking about it all.
And, it could have been real easy for you, as a new partner, you just do nothing, and say, hey, I don’t know, it’s just the way we have always done it. But it takes someone going in and asking those kinds of questions. We’ve got listeners who email us, you know, a large group of listeners are talking about turn around practices. Nobody wants to be in that case. You know, sometimes you just look up and you’re there.
Brian Burton:
You’re there!
RJ Martino:
It’s like you have to be so sick and tired of like- so sick and tired of being sick and tired. So tired of doing it the same way, you have to do something about it. Was it just natural curiosity or was there a point where you said, okay, enough is enough, I gotta get in here and do something?
Brian Burton:
You know, it’s kind of both. And I say that because it was natural curiosity but then, you know, when you are in a practice, especially when you are the young guy and you start questioning the way your older guys are doing things. You can really make some relationships go pretty sour, right.
RJ Martino:
Well, imagine a ten-year relationship with something as intimate as a financial or CPA relationship that you could ruffle up some feathers. I could really see that.
Brian Burton:
Yeah. I mean, you know, basically I said, hey, we need to fire the CPA that you all have been paying for 25 years and we need to do something different. But the way I approached that was, Hey! Have we ever thought about this? And it was like, no, we never thought that.
Like what if we had somebody look at our stuff and just say, hey, you know, because the thing is, other, you know, we are professionals in some things, you guys are professionals in what you do, I’m a professional in what I do, I need other professionals to help me do what I do better, right? You guys do too. It’s part of all of our business. There is interconnected weave or web that is necessary to run a business. Right. You have to have bankers, you have to have insurance people, you have to have web people, you have, I mean.
And so getting people to come in and just look at your stuff, most companies, most people will do that for free. And you can have them come in and evaluate you and see what you, see what it is and that can even just give you ideas to spin off of.
And I think that’s, I think it’s important to evaluate what you do and why you do it. Now sometimes, you don’t know why you’re doing something and sometimes you don’t know you need to evaluate something until it’s too late.
And we have all, I mean, who would have even thought of pandemic, right?
And of course our insurance didn’t cover that. So but, you know, to go back to your question RJ, it started off with a natural curiosity, but once you start asking the questions and once you start seeing things, it’s why didn’t we do this sooner, why, what if we considered that now, what if we look at that deeper, what if we, you know.
Jordan Smith:
Yeah. Cuz I can’t tell you how many practices we either talk to from, you know, this lense through the podcast or through the marketing side of things where everybody says, Yeah, I’m busier than ever and I’m busier than last year but I’m making less money than I was.
You know that’s the deal, whenever you asked those partners at the time, how’s the practice, we are busy. So, we’re good. The numbers are what the numbers are. We are busy so I’m sure it’s fine. You know, a lot of people just get blinded by that.
Brian Burton:
Yeah, you know that’s always a continued question because you know, there is probably the thing I want to talk about the most is when you build a practice, it’s not always about income. Right?
And I think that is a very common theme that people look at when they talk about building a practice. I think building a practice is surrounding yourself with people that wanna do the right thing for the patients.
Now you wanna do the right thing at the right time and you wanna really take care of people, but at the same time, you wanna do it efficiently and effectively, so that your outcomes are good and your relationships are good and if you do that right, people see that and they just know, man, this is where I need to be, this is what needs to happen, this is where I need to go and RJ, you said in the beginning like when people talk about, you talk about OB/GYN or Women’s Clinic, it’s because we don’t chase ancillary money and do gimmicky things to make money. We do the right thing all the time and do it well and that just translates to good healthcare.
Jordan Smith:
Alright! So you’ve mentioned a couple of those kind of keys to success that you follow that’ve got you to this point. What are the other things that you guys are doing at the Women’s Clinic that you think is contributing to this ongoing success?
Brian Burton:
Yeah. So you know, one of the things that when I started going to our monthly meetings years ago, it was all kind of mundane it was all kind of the same thing.
So I suggested that we have a plan and we say, you know, what are our goals and you know, that’s something that often times you don’t think about. You think, okay, well our goals are to show up at work and go home, right. And see patients and do that.
But you have to have goals from a business standpoint, right. And so every month, we talk about what are our one-year goals, what are our five-year goals and what are our ten year goals. You know, because you have to start thinking about, you know, we all work and put money to retire, so got a plan for people retiring. So that’s typically on your ten-year plan at some point, right. I hope at some point.
And then, you know, your one-year plan might be, you know, how do I get this insurance contract, or what do I need to do to add a new partner or what do I need to do, do I need to re-evaluate our medical malpractice, you know, that’s something that we switched at one point, not that long ago, two years ago and found out it was terrible and switched to different company and so, you know, your one-year plan seem to be where your staffing issues fall in and where your short term growth issues fall in. Do we need to add more imaging, do we need to revamp our lab, do we need to do? You know those are kind of those one-year plans, but continually seeking growth, I think is really important.
That’s something that we have all talked about it at length and you know some of my partners don’t necessarily agree with that plan and it’s fine. We are doing well and that’s something that has to be continually discussed at every point, but definitely going through the motions of you know, again, kind of asking the questions about where we see ourselves in a practice, in a group, in a community, in a hospital, in a field, in a speciality, how does all that fit together?
RJ Martino:
You know; I love that you talked about it because it really aligns with the kind of what we are always talking about at the organization.
So you understand the framework in which we look at it, you’ve laid a lot of it out. I mean the very first thing is you know, as physicians, as dentists, a lot of time, you guys are listening to symptoms all the time and trying to figure out what the problem is, you know, that’s ultimately what we are doing, whenever we talk with a lot of our audience members as we are just listening to their problems and those are usually symptoms of some deeper problem. But if you are not like looking for the problem, if you are not asking questions and you are not digging into those symptoms, you are not gonna fix that problem.
And that goes to the number two, which you did. Number two for us is you gotta be a practice owner and act like an owner, and know that we can’t be four year olds. We can’t just stomp our feet and ask for problems to go away.
We actually gotta be very accountable to make those problems go away. Like, you gotta ask the questions and then you gotta dig in and say, hey, I wanna get involved. Let me look at our contract with that group.
You’ve gotta get involved. You can’t get something for nothing. So you talked a lot about that. And so with the symptoms, we’ll take in accountability, we then triage, and step one for us on the triage part is making sure that there is some vision for the future. That you guys are looking at a ten-year plan.
I think you would be, you might not be surprised, but how many practices were on day-to-day. They are never looking past then what’s right in front of them. And I love hearing that has been a key to your success because I would tell you and you know, every other business owner, whether it’s a physician owned practice or it’s a plumber, if you don’t have a vision for the future, you can’t really build a strategy for how to get there.
Brian Burton:
Yeah!
RJ Martino:
And if you don’t have a good strategy, you also can’t develop tactics on, okay, this is what we’re gonna do this year, you know. If all the time what we wanna do as business owners, you and even me included, is we wanna just buy the tactic.
Oh yeah! You know this guy is saving my friend a fortune on taxes. Let’s use him, you know, that’s very tactical. You really need that ten-year plan breaking down to one-year plan strategy and then you can look at tactics.
But isn’t until you do that long term thinking and planning and really then you can start engaging your team or engaging even partners that are gonna help you succeed. So what you have described has just been spot on with what we have seen with people who have been successful either turning around, starting or dominating the marketing place. So that’s been a great story.
Brian Burton:
No, I think the other thing too RJ is that you know, when you start planning, you start thinking. And when you are thinking about something you are thinking not just there at the meeting, but you are thinking about somewhere else and then you read something or you see something or you meet somebody and you say, oh this guy, he does logistics, but his logistics is weird and I can see how that would play into what I’m doing and how do I, let me ask him how he did this.
I mean, I talked to a restaurant owner not too long ago, and man, he sent me a podcast on leadership and looking at that and seeing that, kind of made me change some of the way I manage my staff and it’s just amazing when you just talk and you listen, how that affects things.
And you have to be willing to make changes too. You can’t be so concrete in where you are that you just don’t do anything different because I’ve said from day one if you are not doing anything different, you are falling behind.
RJ Martino:
Well, it stinks like as humans, you know, it takes us almost filing bankruptcy before we start saving money. It takes us almost letting our doors closed to our business before we change.
And we know it, you and I and every business owner in the world have hired consultants and they walk into the door and they tell us stuff we already know. But it’s like we have to be so sick and tired before we act and I just wish we can change it. But it’s just how we are built. How we are made up.
So great stuff and another question I’ve got on, we talked about engaging your team whether it’s your internal team or even your outside, we talked a little bit about this but from your perspective what team members are really critical for your success?
Brian Burton:
You know, the first person I think about that’s critical for us is our office manager. You know, in my ten years at our practice, we’ve had two, the first one was okay. You know, we had to look over her shoulder, not at all the little things, but at a lot of things. We had to repeatedly ask her to do things. And then she moved to a different career and we got a new office manager and that, oh my goodness! That has been a saving grace.
And what that has done for us has been huge and she looks for ways to help us be more efficient and productive. I think, you know, you said it, throwing money at things, you know, you just can’t do that. It’s easy to think that. It’s easy to think that, oh I have a good income, I have a high income, I am a high earner. I am just gonna push money at things. And you can’t always do that. Right.
Sometimes it’s about saving money, and it’s about re-evaluating policies and procedures, and nobody likes to do that. Nobody likes that. But you have to, I mean that’s the reason for HR departments, right?
Jordan Smith:
And it’s also about finding the organization that has the same core values as you guys too and they think the same way that you do. Right?
Brian Burton:
Yeah. And surprisingly it’s really hard to do that in medicine. And I mean, I would it is in a lot of businesses too, but to find people who are competent medically that have better aligned the same ethically, and spiritually, and to blend all that together and have the same kind of business savvy, it’s like a herd of unicorns, you know, just not gonna happen.
RJ Martino:
You know, you said this earlier that everyone of us thinks, oh! this is great. I am going to practice cuz patients are gonna come see me. I’m gonna hire people that will take care of those people. I am going to partner with professionals that do what I am not an expert in.
And it sounds so easy, you know, and you said it alright. It is so hard; I mean there are so many pieces. I often think if I wanted to be a physician, I don’t know if owning your own practice is the best way to go out and practice medicine.
For someone struggling with that concept because, you know, as they dig in, they do realize people say it’s a lot harder, you always think oh it’s hard for you, but it’s gonna be easy for me. But, you know, someone going through that, have you got thoughts on that?
Brian Burton:
Man absolutely, so you know my wife is also a physician and she is employed. She is completely and totally an employed physician and her income is based on production and she has really very-very-very-very little control over her staff. For example, one of her nurses quit last week and she wasn’t even told that her nurse quit. I mean she didn’t know. Like she kind of heard it in the hallway kind of thing, right?
It was her nurse. She was one of her nurses. And so she is in her place of employment the same as anybody else, right. I mean as an employee.
There are some advantages and disadvantages to that right. It’s easy cuz you don’t have to deal with all the business aspects of it, but it’s harder and then she actually loses a lot of autonomy. You know, I wouldn’t, and it could be the way I grew up, I wouldn’t have my practice any other way. I do not want to be owned. I want to make my decisions. I want to do things the way I want to do them and if I have an employee that’s on their Instagram or Facebook live in the middle of clinic saying things, I mean, I’m sorry, I’m gonna let them go. Right?
I have that autonomy and there is a lot to that. And I think each person really has to ask what they want right?
You know we see in my field in OB/GYN, a lot of people that are finishing training that are women. And young women statistically tend to start families at some point, right? So they don’t wanna worry about running a practice while they are on their maternity leave and they are starting the family and some people are wanting to be just shift work and do laborious kind of program. So everybody has their own wishes and desires. I think it’s important to ask yourself what you want out of your practice.
RJ Martino:
Okay. Let me ask you a different question before we kind of run into our final round of questions because I know we are running short of time and I wanna be respectful of your time.
A lot of our audience has so much information, you know, there is only so many hours in a day and you’ve got to be practicing a lot of those and then you get off and then you are told numbers by a marketing team and its slew of numbers. You are told numbers from an, from your accountant and its slew of numbers. You are told numbers from the front desk girls and it’s a slew of numbers.
What numbers are you looking at that are really important to you? Are there these numbers that you are saying, hey! I’m gonna watch these numbers and that’s it or do you literally look at all of them?
Brian Burton:
You know, I think, I thought he was starting to quiet down. You got your question in so I will answer it. Don’t worry. That one has gone a while back. He is going up and down on the fairway and now he is going to come around this way and it’s gonna be an hour.
RJ Martino:
Well you’re fine. We are fine anyway.
Brian Burton:
You got your question and I will answer it in a second. Sorry my kid’s piano teacher was calling on the phone, FaceTime on another device and kids were ignoring it. Two kids are watching TV and they should have been, I mean
RJ Martino:
Man, you know, I’ve always told Amy and kids that I am not getting you guys a phone. I’m not getting the phones. I’m not. And now, you get to the point, I get to the point, I get it where I wanna give my kids a phone just cuz they will stop asking for my phone. I don’t even have my phone or my iPad fifty percent of the time whenever I am at the house as the kids are bothering me for it.
Brian Burton:
Kids never getting my phone. Never. They haven’t played my phone in two years.
RJ Martino:
I gotta say that president, the problem is I did. I broke it and it’s like now trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube.
Brian Burton:
Yeah. We got lucky. I will answer your question in just a second. So to answer the question about looking at the numbers RJ, I think you have to look at all of them. I really do. Then you have to decide what’s important, right.
Are you gonna care more about your, you know, for example, you can always get more patients in the office, right. But it doesn’t make sense to get all these patients in the office who don’t have a payer source and not that you don’t need to take care of patients, even sometimes patients who have lost their insurance or whatever and having an efficient practice gives you that opportunity. So if you don’t look at all the numbers and understand what’s coming at you, then you really can’t understand what is important to you. Does that make sense?
RJ Martino:
It makes perfect sense.
Brian Burton:
What you think is the most important thing, it isn’t. Right?
I mean, is it the most important thing to get 200 patients to the door every day? That would be great, but if all of them have a payer source that’s terrible, that didn’t do you any good. Not that you need any good, yeah you make a living that way, but your overhead is gonna go up and your reimbursement is gonna go down. So that’s gonna affect your efficiency.
So to have a blend, so that when, you know, your neighbour calls you and says, listen my daughter just lost her insurance and she just really needs something taken care of, is there any way? You go you know what, yeah, I can. I’ll be glad to see her and take care of her and we’ll do what we can do. I will walk her through this whole process because I’ve got a healthy practice that can absorb that, right?
And that gives, having own amount of practice and doing what the way we do it gives me that ability to do that.
RJ Martino:
I love that. You know just said again cuz it’s worth repeating, having an efficient office allows you the opportunity to buzz others, when we have all seen it, we’ve got friends who do it, when you have an inefficient practice, you wanna help those people but you can’t. You are trying to keep your head above water and so I think that’s just a great message.
Brian Burton:
And then as a provider, just the added stress to that, you know, I know I’ve got you know, twenty-seven employees that are non-providers that depend on us. I mean that’s twenty-seven families that have to eat, and pay their bills, and do their, you know. It’s a lot of pressure on you to do that. You know, and so when you feel like you have to just churn out the numbers to provide for them, that’s not the healthy practice. Right?
I think you should wanna love to go to work. I think you should want to enjoy taking care of patients and when that line is crossed, I think you’ve kind of re-evaluate where you are. You know, when you don’t enjoy it anymore and if you look at the numbers and physician is coming out of practice, or coming into practice, their satisfaction rates are terrible. Right?
Why is that or it’s often times, it’s because you are being told what they have to do, what they have to do, what they have to do, you gotta do this, gotta do this, gotta do this, this is what you gotta in order to get reimbursed you gotta code this way, you gotta, I mean you are just in dated with that.
So the joy of what you do for living has to come from somewhere, right. If something is gonna pull me away from my kids and my wife, I gotta like doing it. It does matter what I get paid. So you have love it. So, in order to love it, you gotta find that blend.
RJ Martino:
Hey! Love it. I think you are speaking to the soul of a lot of our listeners and they needed to hear that. Even I needed to hear it too as just a business owner there is a lot of smart business acumen in those paragraphs there.
The last thing we do is kind of this final round of questions and kind of wrapping up. You know, we always talk about businesses or are in business to create repeatable results, reliable results. We want kind of, you wanna walk in and know what you are getting. That’s what a business does. It creates these repeatable results. So we ask if there was just one strategy that you know, if our audience were listening to and you said hey, implement this strategy every day and if you do it every day, you are going to get results.
You know it’s like run every day and you don’t have to be faster the next day. You just gotta go out there and do this. If they did something every day, what would you tell them? One thing, what would that be?
Brian Burton:
Do the right thing. Do the right thing every time. And sometimes, you know, you find yourself in a hurry and you are like I gotta do this real quick and then I could go to this. Anytime you try to make something go faster, what happens?
You back drop it. I mean, almost every time. So do the right thing every time and your results come out, whether it’s, and I am not saying the right thing financially, I am just saying do the right thing. Take care of people, that’s why we do what we do. Do the right thing.
Jordan Smith:
That’s great. There’s another question, but that’s just a nice little ending that’s the perfect little thing to go out on. Dr. Burton, you have given some great advice here. If there’s folks out there and they’ve got questions or you know, they are in your shoes or they are in your shoes where you were right when you started with your partnership, how can they, if they got questions for you guys or just wanna learn more about you, what’s the ways they kind of can reach out to you and find out more about the Women’s Clinic.
Brian Burton:
You know; we have a great website. But yeah, you know, we are, I love having people that get in touch with us and ask us questions, you know, our emails are on there, my phone numbers are on there.
But I absolutely, I think mentorship kind of opportunity is something that doesn’t exist anymore like it should. And I am sure not saying that I do everything right because there’s plenty of mistakes that we all make.
But we’ve gotta definitely have successful practice now that didn’t exist seven years ago or five years ago. Where we are now is so different from where we were. That, you know, I think bringing people in and just talking to them and helping people understand, and asking questions. I love young physicians or people who are struggling. I love talking to them. Just kind of see them cuz oftentimes, I mean RJ you said it already, you know it’s there, you pay people to come do things, but you already know the answer. You just gotta realize it. You know, it’s there, you just gotta scratch it.
Jordan Smith:
Wow, I love that and I wanna say Dr. Burton, we appreciate it and you know, a client of iProv, a great doctor, a great business owner and a friend of both RJ and mine too. So we appreciate you taking the time.
Brian Burton:
Yeah. It was great, anytime!
RJ Martino:
Brian, we would love to have you on again. We’d love to even guest host with us and we could bring on one of those young guys and they can talk about some of their struggles and maybe you could relate to them and bounce off. But love to have you on again. And thank you so much for your time. We know you are a busy guy.
Brian Burton:
Well, I’m not as busy today I like to be but you know, here we are. Good having my kids here, so.
Jordan Smith:
Thanks Doc.
Brian Burton:
I get to review a chapter book summary now.
RJ Martino:
Highest paid chapter review guy in the world. Hey, this is great dude. You need to be on more of these things. You are just a great speaker, great presenter, you need to do more of these things.
Brian Burton:
Okay! Pay me for them.
RJ Martino:
I will pay you what they pay you to do that chapter book summary.
Brian Burton:
Oh yeah!
Jordan Smith:
RJ, Dr. Brian Burton. It was a pleasure. Right?
RJ Martino:
Oh that was great. You know, he got really into the meat what it’s like to be a practice owner. I just love that.
Jordan Smith:
Yeah. I mean, I think one of the most impactful tips is just the simplest one. Just start asking questions. That’s how he said he got started. I know everybody seems like they are busy. If you are curious about how the practice is performing, what a good next step is, ask questions. I mean doctors are professional question askers. There is no reason you shouldn’t do it about the business either.
RJ Martino:
Yeah. And you know, your ears will tingle when you hear something that doesn’t make sense to you. Your intuition will kick in and it’ll hopefully force you into action. So I loved that he talked about that because it’s human nature but we just fight a lot at work and you know, we are scared to look like we don’t know what we are talking about. Put all that to the side and just get curious.
Jordan Smith:
Just get curious and talk to lots of people who have expertise in other areas.
RJ Martino:
Oh yeah. His concepts and mostly his consultants are free to talk to you and that will stem ideas. That’s true. I mean, if you sit down with Jordan, he is gonna give you facts and figures that you didn’t know about your own business. That you don’t pay a dime for. You can then take them and decide what to do with them. So I think he just had a really good insight, obviously he has been part of turn around practice and that takes a special kind of business owner. So I’m happy he was on the podcast and just hope our listeners soaked it in and hope that they hear him say, he loves talking to other practice owners. And one of the best things I ever did with our business was starting to connect with other business owners that looks just like us.
Jordan Smith:
Absolutely. So alright. Well if you know anybody else just like Brian, shoot us a note. We would love to have them on the podcast.
Like, comment, subscribe, share, all the things. All the buttons you can click, click on them for us. And we’ll talk to you next time.
RJ, Thanks so much!
RJ Martino:
Thanks Jordan!
Jordan Smith:
Alright! iProv Made Podcast out!
