Many times you may have been told that you need to have a business plan for your practice. Well, generally it's not required. It's often a very good idea. A business plan sets the goals, directions and future for the practice. And looking at a business plan, you have four types of resources in order to implement your plan. You have human resources, physical, fiscal and the fourth is information technology.

Human resources are your people. It's the skills they bring to the table and the skills which you need to develop and that's why I talk about training your employees in order to grow their skills. This is a very fast-changing world and nobody's going to walk in with exactly the skills you need. So it's incumbent upon you to grow your business and do what's best for your employees.

The physical facilities are your office space, the kinds of equipment you have. You may decide you want to open a second office and you may even decide that you need to expand. So in looking at your business plan, you are going to look at the kinds of space needs you have, are you in a good location in the number of years to come.

Fiscal resources deal with finances, both the cash available and your ability to raise capital through debt financing or through investing some of your own funds and those of your other owner-partners into the practice in order to expand and grow into your practice over the long term.

The fourth area is information technology. Just as with every other industry in this country, you also need to be investing continuously in developing your information technology resources. Electronic health records are coming. They're coming very quickly and you should be preparing for it now. There may be opportunities to partner with your hospital in order to implement this but either way, you need to be looking seriously at the kinds of options out there and looking to make decisions and make that investment which is gonna require time and money over the next one, two, maybe three years at the latest. This is going to become mandatory so now is the time to start preparing for that eventuality.

We have human resources. We have physical resources. We have fiscal, we have information technology. How we look at them, how we put them together and where you put your priorities, that essentially becomes the essence of the business plan to grow your practice for the years to come.