How to Focus Your Urgent Care Business Plan on Sustainable Growth
By Socius Staff
December 15, 2021
As with any business, the goal of your urgent care center should be sustainable growth for years to come. This highlights the importance of developing a business plan geared toward growth and development. If you don’t have excess funds you can allocate toward your business plan, don’t worry. There are ways of growing your business without taking major financial risks.
In this article, we’ll discuss how to create an urgent care business plan that will drive revenue without exhausting your cash flow. Read on to learn more about how this is done.
What Is Sustainable Growth?
A sustainable growth rate is the maximum growth that can be sustained in the long term, without needing additional financing or debt. In other words, your urgent care facility is growing and expanding, but you and your team are not becoming overstretched.
Reaching for too much growth too soon can put your business at risk. You may find that your resources cannot keep up with demand, which can make it difficult to maintain this level of expansion without drawing upon additional financing or debt. Sustainability always has to come first when you are writing a business plan.
Tips for Writing Your Urgent Care Business Plan
It’s easy to ensure that your business is sustainable in the long term—you simply need the right plan. Take a look at these tips for building your urgent care center business plan and targeting sustainable growth.
Assess Your Current State
Sustainability needs to come from a strong and well-defined foundation. If you have already established your urgent care facility, you need to define your key sources of revenue and the profits you are recording each year. You will also need to establish other pieces of information — such as the market you are operating in and the general profile of your most common patients.
If you have not already opened the doors to your urgent care center, you need to work a little differently. You will need to establish how your center fills a niche in the market — either a geographical one or a niche relating to a specific service.
Define Your Sustainable Capital Structure
What are your care center revenue streams? What kind of capital do you expect these streams to bring in over the coming year and beyond? Understanding this revenue means you can target growth without taking on more debt and without issuing more equity. Recognizing the revenue that the care center will generate helps you identify the line between sustainable and unsustainable growth.
Know Your Patient Profiles
Which demographics are the most likely to come to your urgent care center? Which services do they need? For example, young men and women playing on local basketball and football teams are likely to need very specific services, while retirees will need a different set of treatments. It may be common for your urgent care facility to have different patient profiles and types — get to know each of these so you understand how to market your services to each group.
Be Conservative With Estimates
It’s always better to err on the side of caution. Even if your growth projections are looking strong and you have found a way to keep your resource costs low, be conservative. Temper your “best-case” predictions and plan for “worst-case” scenarios so you always remain prepared.
This is a far more sustainable approach than alternative options. If you start spending money you have not yet made, you are going to hit some seriously hard times if you fall short of your growth predictions.
Capitalize on Market Demand
The services your care center offers are subject to market forces. If demand increases, you have more potential to increase your sales. If demand falls, the opposite is true. Sustainable growth means optimally leveraging these market forces. In other words, make sure you are generating as much revenue as the demand for care services. You can advertise and promote your center to increase this demand, but sustainability will need to be based on existing demand in the marketplace.
Focus on Problems and Solutions
Build everything around a simple problem-solution formula. Refer to your buyer profiles and find out more about what your patients need. Consider the problems these patients face, and think about how you can solve these problems efficiently and effectively.
Make sure you know how you will be communicating these solutions to your patients. Build this into your patient profiles — do your patients prefer to be contacted by email or telephone, and do they look for services on social media or via other channels?
Final Thoughts
When writing a business plan, it’s essential to develop a growth strategy built on data. Knowing your patient profiles and learning how to market to them is vital, as is being conservative with estimates, identifying your patients’ needs, and more.
Now that you know how to create a business plan based on sustainable growth, it’s time to put it into action. You can begin by working with an experienced consulting business that can help with search engine optimization, content development, web design, media campaigns, and more. Our team at Socius Health Solutions will aid you in all areas necessary to grow your business sustainably.