Anything that's new to us involves going through what is called a learning curve. It might be installing new window shades, putting together your kids' new Christmas toys or learning more complex and layered skills in your current business or even completely new skills involved with launching a new business. Regardless the complexity of the project, your brain must go through a process of learning that involves experience and time.

If you look at it on a graph, you might see the rate of learning going up along the left side and experience(time) going across the bottom of the graph. You certainly went through this process years ago when you launched your new practice. This involved a very layered and complex learning curve. As your experience grew over time, your learning(and success) increased accordingly. It certainly wasn't a straight line that always increased your learning and success. There were times when it took more time and experience to fail, learn, fail and finally learn to do it the right way, eventually increasing success. 

Whenever we work with Doctors who are pursing new ventures outside of their practice commitments, "cutting your learning curve" is consistently at the forefront of our planning and focus. By investing certain assets into the "Experience" section of your learning curve graph, you can exponentially increase your learning, decrease your time/error, resulting in a dramatically increased ability to achieve success sooner. 

The assets we teach our Doctors to invest into the "Experience" portion of their learning curve graph begin with understand transferrable skills. Many docs tell us "I have no skills outside of my practice. This is all I've ever known, seeing patients and running this business." However, when we help them back up and look at their experience with a different perspective, they quickly realize how many transferrable skills they've mastered in their craft over the years. Consultative sales, direct marketing, risk mitigation, handling objections, leadership, financial statements, lease negotiation, online marketing, inventory control and customer revenue cycle management are just a few skills Doctors realize they have significant skills in that transfer to many other industries. 

Another asset we teach our client Doctors to invest into the Experience portion of their learning curve is other people's experience. It's funny how we tend to instinctively strive to re-invent the wheel...every time!! We need to change our thinking and learn to leverage others' wisdom they've learned in their own learning curves. An example might be if a Doctor decided to start another business lane outside his/her practice by investing in income producing real estate. Obviously this is an arena he/she knows very little about. So a strategy might include online learning from reputable income generating real estate blogs, articles, videos and paid online learning courses. Another part of the strategy might include asking a local connection if he or she would consider being a mentor. The last part of this strategy would be hiring a coach for accountability and further learning. This might come through a real estate firm or another similar organization. By creating a diverse source of others' wisdom and experience, both paid and free, our Doctor can expect to leverage significant resources to the Experience portion of the learning curve, thereby creating less mistakes, decreasing time to success while exponentially increasing the rate of learning and success. 

What does this mean in simple terms? By investing time, energy and money on the front end to increase Experience, you create higher levels of success with decreased time and decreased expensive errors and stress. Do you have new lanes either inside or outside your practice you'd like to see more success? Create a strategy to get there by shortening your learning curve!