Over the 24 years we have been in business we have learned many things and found various ways to improve our business. A few of these lessons have made a huge difference in the success and direction of our business. There was no handbook available (nor is there now) on how to run and grow your medical billing business. We learned by trial and error. But many of our lessons came as a complete surprise. Things happened that we thought would make a huge difference to us and it turned out the opposite. Small things that happened turned out to be huge.
We find our readers love to hear about issues we have gone through, how we handled them, and how they turned out. So we decided to write about the three things that have happened to us that really turned our business around. This month we will tell you how getting rid of our office manager made us much more profitable and
turned our business around.
Michele and I are very easy going. We don’t like confrontation. We had gotten to a point where we didn’t want to handle all the issues that come up with hiring three employees so we hired an office manager thinking it was going to end all our problems and allow us to get back to the job of running the business. Unfortunately we kept this office manager long after we knew we she needed to be gone. You aren’t going to believe this but we had to hire an executive assistant to get rid of the office manager.
When we brought in the assistant she assessed everything that was going on in the entire office and saw that the office manager was the problem. She just kept confronting her on what she was actually doing – what work was she accomplishing. We didn’t realize that the office manager was really doing almost nothing except causing problems. When she realized this was discovered she called our largest account and made a deal with them and turned in her notice to us. She went to work for our largest account and within a few months they left us to let our former office manager handle the billing in their office. Many lessons learned here.
Michele was quite worried over the workload that she would have to take over with no office manager any longer. It was a very pleasant surprise to find that there was no work load to take over. The new assistant took care of the employee issues and we took back over the end of month billing and everything went much smoother. Our phones stopped ringing as much with problems from our providers. The fires we were always putting out stopped. We couldn’t believe how much difference this made. Life was much better. We also figured out that we did need an office manager, we just had the wrong one. Hiring the right people for the job is huge.
Next month we will tell you about what else happened as a result of this situation that made our business even better.
Solutions Medical Billing's Weblog 
September 20, 2017 at 12:03 pm
What was the difference between an ‘executive assistant’ and an ‘office manager’?
September 20, 2017 at 2:18 pm
Our office manager manages the office. She makes sure all employees have work, trains new employees, monitors attendance, deals with any employee issues that arise, and handles accounts as well. Our administrative assistant helps Alice and I with anything that we need help with. He handles provider issues, credentialing issues, billing issues that are more involved than an employee can handle, projects that arise, reports, ERAs, starting new accounts, and more. He also can handle overflow work as well. It’s only the fourth week but so far it is better than we could have expected!
September 20, 2017 at 2:20 pm
Just a note, the assistant in the blog post was different than the one we just hired. The first was a woman and she worked out great but needed to move to take care of her parents. We didn’t replace her right away but we recently hired another and it is also working out great.
September 28, 2017 at 1:48 pm
Hi,
I appreciate hearing your story. You are so right, there is no handbook to warn you about all of the problems and obstacles that will arise while trying to run a successful billing service. Myself and my 2 business partners have been running our billing service for 22 years now and I have a similar story. We offer billing and transcription, about 12 years ago when transcription was a very profitable business our now former business partner and best transcriptionist both gave their notices within 2 weeks of each other. We were stunned but then things became clear when 2 weeks after that our biggest transcription client, a hospital gave notice to end our contract. We still had friends at the hospital who told us that our former partner and transcriptionist started their own business and had signed a deal with the hospital.
We went through stages of hurt and anger and unfortunately we did have a solid law suit, but financially we just couldn’t afford the costs.
We did have the last laugh though, it was not even 2 years later that the hospital converted to an EMR system and they were out of business.
September 28, 2017 at 2:18 pm
We feel for you. It was terribly hurtful to us as well in the beginning. But we worked through the anger and hurt and went on. It turned out to be the best in the long run!
March 3, 2018 at 11:36 am
Hi. I have a non compete clause in my employee manual, as well as a no hiring clause for any of my accounts for a period of 18 months. It works like a charm!
March 7, 2018 at 8:07 am
For us it speaks volumes when someone refuses to sign or even hesitates.