The second principle of right technology is Pilzer’s Wealth Formula. With a name like that, it’s got a lot to live up to – and it certainly does.
Last week I talked about Pareto’s Principle – you remember? Where you typically get 80% of your results from 20% of the things you do so. To the most results with the least effort, you want to work out what those 20% are and put more attention on those. We also talked about how this changes depending on whether you are talking about clinical, admin or marketing efforts.
Paul Zane Pilzer
First I want to tell you a little about Paul Zane Pilzer so you know why he might know what he is talking about. Pilzer is an economist by training, the author of 9 best-selling books and dozens of scholarly publications. At age 24 he was appointed adjunct professor at New your University where he taught for 21 consecutive years. He became Citibank’s youngest vice president at age 25. He was an appointed economic adviser to two US Presidents. He’s taken five companies public.
You could say he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to business.
Pilzer’s Wealth Formula
And he has distilled a lot of his research to one simple formula: W = R x T
Where W is wealth, R is resouces and T is technology.
In other words, wealth – of a country, or a company, or a business or an individual – is the product of the resources available times the technology used to leverage those resources.
This is profound. You see resources are finite but technology keeps increasing at a phenomenal rate so the more you apply technology, the more wealth you produce from your resources.
OK, so let’s move from the abstract to something real in your office.
Let’s get some context
Resources is basically you and your team in your office plus your building, electricity and data (the internet). That’s it. You’ll notice that this is typically the largest part of your expenses – particularly wages and rent.
Technology is what you do with those resources and includes your knowledge of Chiropractic, your adjusting table, your telephone, your computers and any software on those computers as well as things like lights and airconditioning.
You can see that without technology, the resources are in fact nothing but potential. Nothing will actually happen at all if you don’t have machines to use the electricity or if you don’t have the knowledge to adjust.
And you can see how technology leverages your resources. Just imagine if every time you wanted to remind someone of their initial consult, you or your CA had to jog over to their home and let them know! Just doing reminder calls would take hours. How about if every time you teach an exercise, you have to draw a diagram by hand because you can’t just photocopy or print a copy out? It would take ages – and if it was my drawing, by the time the patient got home they’d be stretching their hamstrings when I want them to be strengthening their neck!
So both resources and technology are critical. Resources are pretty much fixed unless you rent a bigger place (expensive) or hire more staff (also expensive) but technology you can incrementally increase. Now we have computers, we can get technology in the form of software that you just install and, BAM, just like that, you can do things in seconds that took hours before. For example, you install a word processor and suddenly typing letters is easy. You install bookkeeping software and tracking your expenses and doing quarterly reports is a breeze (still boring though!). But think about it: without that software, you’d need a secretary to type your letters and a manual bookkeeper to keep your books.
Technology allows you to relatively inexpensively get massive leverage on your resources making you far, far more productive in practice with the exact same physical space and staff which results in more ‘W’ or wealth – and that means more healthy people in your community, more fun in practice and more income. So I reckon you want to use it where you can.
W = R x T
Maximizing your ‘W’
So where is the place to apply it to get the most effect? For that we turn back to Pareto’s principle. You can use technology to automate the 80% so you and your team can focus on the 20% that really kicks. Then you can use technology to automate some of that 20% freeing you up to dig deeper into doing what works.
You probably know already, but at Spinalogic we have studied the exact times spent by entire Chiropractic teams so we can see where it was being spent. Sure enough 80% of time was being spent on 20% of tasks so they are the exact ones that we focussed on automating. If you use all the tools we supply with Spinalogic you can reduce CA time by 80% and DC non-core-adjusting time by 80% too.
But here’s the Rub
Of course technology is not all roses. You’ve probably noticed that you can waste a lot of time with it too! I call this negative technology or ‘-T’ and if you have W = R x –T you’ll actually generate less wealth. So it’s essential you are using tech that actually gives you a benefit. Some of it you can reason out but a lot of that is trial and error. I hope with this blog that I can save you a lot of that error so you can spend more time savouring the juicy bits.
Next week, we’ll look at the final of the Three Principles of Right Technology and see how you can get exponential influence in your community.
If you liked this, click the Facebook ‘Like’ button below.
Until next time, have loads of fun in practice, make yours the healthiest community on the planet, and enjoy life fully – today.
Richard Sawyer.