The Dance of the Doctor and the Entrepreneur
Think of a Tango. Now think of a Waltz. These are partner dances.
A type of dance in which both dancers hold each other by bringing their bodies together to form a dancing unit.
These dances could not exist if one of the couples were missing and that — if the evolution of the dancers starts from a common vision and builds-up on mutual trust-, they can become spectacular. They can change a few people’s lives.
In the world of business, doctors and businessmen are also dancers, in which the product of their close collaboration can also be spectacular. But sadly, they rarely are.
The failure of these couples does not lie so much in the fact that each one is an expert on a different field (such as, for example, doctors who are good at treating patients or operating on them, and entrepreneurs who know how to plan financially, and invest in robust marketing strategies); It does not lie so much in their difference in vision (such as, for example, the doctor’s vision in which he measures success in how many hours he can be caring for patients in the consultation room or the OR, while the businessman prefers that the doctor supervises others who do it for him); It does not lie either in the expected times to see dividends (because doctors usually want to see money at the end of each day, while the entrepreneur knows that it is necessary to reinvest in order to grow and we might even have to wait until the end of the year to see profit).
NO. All these are reasons that can be worked out through several hours of rehearsals, and going to dinner together afterwards to talk about how the day went and what can be done to improve. The fundamental reason why some dance partners transcend and stay together for years, while others start out with a lot of expectations but end disastrously, is the underlying lack of trust between them. This is why we don’t see enough medium-sized companies with doctors and entrepreneurs as co-founders.
From the first steps that the couple begins to take together, the lack of trust is never spoken out loud, but you can feel it all the time. The problem is that as the first show tickets start to sell well, those conversations are left for later. What usually happens, however, is that the initial mistrust begins to grow relatively quickly.
The doctor begins to resent his partner because he spends his entire working hours doing calculations in Excel, while the doctor spends long hours with patients, coming home late and doing the heavy and tiring work. The doctor, then, makes his calculations and realizes that the businessman is taking a very important piece of the pie. (The doctor was taught to do the bills for a small office, but not for a bigger business. Therefore he does not think about rent, insurance, taxes, bank fees, bad debt, marketing strategies, and all operating, commercial, administrative expenses, so that the medical company — and not a private practice of one attending professional — can operate and grow in a standardized and scalable way).
The doctor also resents his partner because he did not have to spend the grueling years of medical school, days and nights in residence rounds or studying without earning a single penny. He does not understand why he is not taking the bulk of the money and all of the applause. And now, the initial suspicion that he has been harboring quietly all along is fueled more than ever: The doctor is almost certain that the businessman is going to take advantage of him. He doesn’t know if he will do it in the short term or the long term, but he is certainthat eventually, he will.
The deep individualism of the doctor — an individualism that has been simmering throughout his career, in which he was always forced to be the best, having the best grades, and sometimes standing out at the cost of stepping on his peers or defending himself in any way possible — does not help much either. In addition to the delusions of grandeur with which doctors grow up and an impenetrable ego, the doctor goes and wraps himself into his own world and instead of communicating frankly, he starts being late for some shows and stops staying for dinner.
The businessman, on his side, has been considering that he will eventually replace his partner. Since the first shows that the two put together, the businessman has been thinking how to duplicate himself, but above all, how to duplicate the doctor. As soon as he has the Know How, he will be able to say goodbye to him and it will be very easy to find a new partner: cheaper, more hard-working and who asks less questions. He knows that he already has the brand and the patient generation system and will eventually be able to get rid of the person with which he co-founded the business. The businessman is confident that there are thousands of doctors dying to do business with him.
The arrogance of the businessman, in his idea that the world can be explained -and changed- with aspreadsheet, in his delusion of grandeur as well and in his industrialized way of thinking, he forgets that his dance deals with real patients, with humans, who cannot be reduced to a Business Plan and a couple of standardized metrics to value his business in the millions. He forgets that each show is special and forgets that his partner is the one who knows how to care for each patient with love, time, and empathy. He also forgets that the well-being of the doctor is fundamental so that the wheel of his business continues to turn. So the businessman stops showing up to certain shows and starts flirting with other dance partners to whom he sells the dream he co-created with his current partner.
Very quickly, then, the doctor starts asking uncomfortable questions but the businessman does not like to show all of his cards. So the doctor, in turn, also begins to keep his own cards, and starts planning a new businessof his own for when the business stops paying him the salary and the expensive training courses he is taking on the companies´ bill. In other occasions, it is the doctor who starts seeing patients “outside” of the clinic or carrying out practices that are not aligned with mutual interests.
So, regardless of whether the couple was trying to waltz — for example, make a multidisciplinary clinic, or a tango — a network of surgical clinics — or a salsa — a medical tourism business — all efforts fall apart. Not from a lack of shared dreams but from a lack of trust in putting yourself in the hands of your other half, and clarifying things with transparency and openness.
In that sense, the dances of doctors and businessmen are very similar to other business dances: It is difficult to find and maintain the right partner. And even when it seems that we have found it, it requires work and continuous communication that not only establishes — preferably on paper — everything that is being committed or negotiated, but also has the maturity to ask the difficult questions from the day they started out together in the rehearsal room.
There is no doubt that the evolution of medicine and the evolution of business will continue to create desirable new realities, but the opportunity to join forces between these two worlds is greater than ever. Medicine needs new economic models to be able to make profitable practices that focus more on health than on disease, that monetize the generation of well-being, that integrate multidisciplinary work and that also allow the doctor to have a balanced life without spending all his time in the operating or consultation room. Healthcare businesses need empathic physicians that add more humanity to their fixed way of thinking about healthcare and go beyond the necessity to standardize a profit-making-machine, in order to actually build wellbeing platforms.
There are thousands of new dances that are urgently needed in health. Working on building trust between the doctor and the businessman is one of the best things we can do to reinvent the art of health businesses so that they can be truly spectacular.
Víctor Saadia is a health business consultant @ ALIVE Consulting.
Read other articles:
8 Principles to Start Building a Multidisciplinary Clinical Practice
From a Hammer to a Toolbox: The Health Industry and Systems Thinking
