Stop Looking at the Car – Blockers Episode 1
BLOCKERS Episode 1 – Stop looking at the car
BLOCKERS — a weekly series on removing obstacles to success in your practice.
Every day, you separate a presenting complaint from the actual problem to be addressed. It’s what clinicians do best.
This series is about turning that same skill on your own business — finding the one blocker that is actually preventing your practice success, and getting it out of your way.
A short video caught my attention recently of a man, standing in the middle of a street, about to be dragged away by a fast-moving car. He’s bound by a rope wrapped around him. The other end of that rope is tied to the car.
There’s still some slack left on the road. He can see his time is running out.
He’s panicking.
He’s shouting at his friend —
“What do I do?
The car!
There’s only so much rope left, how long do I have?”
Every word out of his mouth is about the car.
His friend says calmly:
“Stop looking at the car. Focus on the rope.”
It doesn’t matter how far away the car is. Or how much rope is left. There’s no math problem here. If the rope is still around him when the slack runs out, the outcome is identical.
The car was never the problem. What’s blocking salvation is the rope. That’s the blocker. And not addressing it first is what causes failure.
I’ve watched people run businesses this way my entire career. I’ve done it myself. You fail to just take off the rope. Instead, you focus on a perceived problem (I don’t have enough business, I don’t know what to do next, I’m not ready).
Are you stuck in your practice? Blocked? Let’s identify why this happens.
The car is more interesting than the rope
Here’s why this trap is so effective: watching the car feels like working.
The car is dramatic. It’s measurable. You can calculate it, discuss it, build a spreadsheet about it, complain about it to your spouse. You can spend three weeks analyzing the car and honestly believe you were productive.
The rope, however, is boring, and it’s close to you, and getting it off is uncomfortable and probably embarrassing — because if you’d dealt with it on day one you wouldn’t be standing in the street right now.
So people watch the car. And the slack runs out.
The healthcare version
Let me be direct about how this shows up in my world, because I see it constantly as the founder and CEO of a practice management system that serves thousands of providers.
A clinician signs up for a patient management software or EMR platform — mine or anyone’s — and six months later they decide to stop using it. When we ask why, the answer is often some version of: I don’t have enough patients right now. I’m building my business first.
Or it might be that you do have business but you’re failing at scaling and you blame everything but what’s really the problem.
That reason you’re proposing as the problem is like the car analogy. That perceived problem feels like a real thing, and it keeps moving, and it’s genuinely worth worrying about because you’re not making any progress in your business (that car keeps driving away).
But the excuses you’re verbalizing are not the rope. They are not the blocker.
The rope (your blocker) is usually that you have no system in place, and it’s often exposed by a single question:
If ten patients called you tomorrow (or ten thousand), what would actually happen?
Not what would you want to happen.
What would happen?
Who takes the call?
What do patients get enrolled in?
What does week one look like?
Who checks in on day nine when the patient goes quiet?
What are you charging, and what does the patient get for it?
For most practices I talk to, the honest answer is: nothing would happen. Or “I’m working on it.” But usually, there is no program. There is no system to receive people. There’s an interest in having one. There’s a login to a website or a portal. But there’s no thing to sell or no easy way to buy it and no easy way to receive what’s included in your program, service offering, etc.
Which means getting patients isn’t the blocker — that’s really the car — your perceived lack — the excuse that lets the car keep driving away.
You could hand a practice a hundred qualified leads and it would change nothing if the rope is still on. They’d burn the leads and conclude that patients aren’t interested in them or what they have to offer.
Excuses are just blockers you’ve decided not to touch
The other answers I get sound like this:
The platform I chose didn’t have the content I needed, or the functions I needed.
I don’t have time to build my content, forms, notes.
I can’t afford to pay you to build it out.
There’s too much setup.
I’m too busy.
Busy doing what?
I want to be careful here, because I’m not calling these lies. Every one of those is a real constraint. Content takes time. Setup takes time. Budgets are finite and staff is stretched.
But notice what all of this has in common: the excuses, blockers that are in the way, are stated as realities of the universe rather than as items on a list.
There’s too much setup is not a blocker — it’s a mood. A blocker is a specific thing that, if removed, would let the next thing happen.
The test I use on myself when I’m blocked and trying to figure out whether the blocker is the one to focus on is this:
Can I say it in one sentence? And does removing it fit into one week of my calendar?
If I can’t, I haven’t found the blocker yet. I’ve found a feeling about the blocker. Or a muddied concept or excuse to help me (subconsciously) not get to the real blocker.
“BodySite doesn’t have the content I need” isn’t the blocker.
“I don’t have a 30-day program for the twelve weight-management patients already in my practice” — that’s the blocker.
And I know this because if a provider lets me probe their reasons, they often tell me that they don’t HAVE a program in the real world. They don’t actually have those forms they think they want to use. They haven’t written their encounter note templates.
They were hoping they would stumble on them by joining BodySite or some other platform.
That problem, I can solve for a provider on a Tuesday.
The practices that come to us and have a program, but just need to digitize, weaponize, automate and systematize that program, have thousands of patients in their accounts. No blockers. Just action.
You can’t see blocker number two from here
Here is the part almost everyone gets wrong, and it’s the reason so many business plans die.
Blockers come in layers. You only ever get a clear look at one at a time. The second one is genuinely invisible until the first one is gone — it’s standing directly behind it.
So people try to map the whole path before they start, run into the fog, decide the project is too big, and quit. Or worse, they build an elaborate plan against imagined problems and then discover the actual next obstacle was nothing like what they prepared for.
You are not supposed to be able to see the whole road. You’re supposed to remove one thing, look up, and find out what’s next. That’s not a failure of planning. That’s how it works.
And you should expect the next blocker after you remove the first one, so you’re not demoralized when it shows up. Finding blocker number two is evidence that you killed the first one.
It’s a receipt, not a setback.
You already know how to do this
Here’s the thing that makes me a little crazy: you’re clinicians. You are professionally trained in exactly this skill. It’s a form of scientific method or of triage.
A patient comes in with a rash, a headache, and an oxygen sat of 82. You do not start by addressing the rash. You focus immediately on airway, breathing, circulation — not because the rash doesn’t matter, but because treating it first is malpractice by sequence. You’d be doing real medicine on the wrong thing.
You triage patients flawlessly and then walk into your own business and treat the rash first. And in the real world every day, we do this because we don’t always want to do the thing that takes a minute to figure out.
The practice
If you want the whole method, it’s four lines.
Name what’s blocking you in one sentence. If you need a paragraph, you’re still looking at the car driving away instead of the rope that has you tied up. (It can be as simple as “I don’t know.”)
Focus on the blocker that is small enough to remove this week. A blocker you can’t clear in a week is a category, not a blocker. Break it down into small pieces. Blockers. Pick one.
Remove it — don’t optimize it. Don’t build the perfect program. Build the one that lets the next patient enroll in something you can charge for. Ugly and live beats beautiful and theoretical, every time. We’ll optimize as we go.
Then look up. The next blocker is right there. It was always right there.
Do that four times and you will be further along than a year of planning would have taken you.
And where I come in
I’ll tell you plainly what I’ve told every practice that’s ever asked: my BodySite platform will not get you new patients. But it will create the environment to attract them, serve them and get more business. No practice management and engagement platform just gets new leads for you. That’s not what we do, and any vendor who tells you otherwise is selling you a car to stare at while it drives away.
What I can do is take a lot of the ropes off that are holding you back.
You don’t have content? We have libraries of it, and if what you need isn’t there, we’ll build it.
Setup is too much? We’ll do the setup. No program to sell? That’s a conversation, not a project, and I’ll have it with you for free.
Almost every blocker I hear from providers is one I can remove in a week. And save them from EMR-hopping for 2 years while that car drives away.
The one I can’t remove is the first one — the honest hour where you sit down and figure out what ropes are actually holding you in the street.
So go do that part. Right now. Not today, but before you open another tab on your computer. Write down what’s blocking you. It’s probably a lot smaller than the thing you’ve been staring at.
Then send me an email and say help. I’ll help you get those ropes off.
John Cummings
Founder, BodySite.com