Growing your practice relies on innovation, creativity

Key Points

To effectively build your practice, it's important to look at a growth plan in the context of the factors you encounter every day.

Leadership involves clearly owning a category-and you define what that category is. For instance, Heinz owns the word "ketchup"; the company showed true leadership by isolating what it wanted to communicate as the most important ketchup attribute with the tagline "slowest ketchup in the West." What does your practice "own" in the market?

The more unyielding your market, the more crowded the market, the busier your patients and potential patients, the more you need a purple cow. Effectively building and executing growth strategies hinges on understanding the uniqueness of the purple cow.

What differentiates your practice:

Offering more to patients has to be an explicit understanding conceptually. In offering patients more, "differentiation is one of the most important strategic activities in which companies must constantly engage," Ted Levitt says in Thinking About Management.

Michael Porter from the Harvard School of Management says that, as companies seek to benchmark each other, they end up, ironically, becoming more alike. "Companies must find a point of differentiation that is unique and meaningful in your industry," he says.