Decision Making: Building a Decisive Approach to Change in Your Private Practice

Episode 65

A 2025 Deloitte study found that practices with decisive decision-making processes are 2.5 times more likely to outperform peers in growth -- with 68% reporting faster strategy implementation. As Theodore Roosevelt said: in any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The practices that thrive are not the ones that avoid hard decisions -- they are the ones that have built a system for making them well.

The Change Readiness Mindset

Brandon opens with a reframe: decision-making in private practice is not a solo intellectual exercise -- it is a change management process involving your team and your patients. Before any major operational change, you need to build change readiness at every level. That means cultivating adaptability, articulating a clear vision of where you are headed and why, and running a rigorous SWOT analysis on every significant decision: strength of the change, weakness, opportunity created if implemented well, and threat introduced if executed poorly. Connecting every change to your long-term goals -- improved patient outcomes, operational efficiency, financial resilience -- is what transforms a decision into a direction.

Data-Driven Decision Making and Team Buy-In

Brandon is explicit: decisions made by reaction destroy organizations. Decisions made from data build them. His framework: monitor your financial KPIs, patient satisfaction trends, and operational efficiency metrics before deciding, not after. Then bring your team into the process. The employees who are angry, fearful, and then finally accepting of change are displaying a normal human pattern -- but you have to move them through it with transparency, context, and genuine acknowledgment of how the change affects their daily experience. One example from his practice: changing his team from exempt salary to billable-with-indirect pay. He created a six-week side-by-side scorecard showing both models and the data earned buy-in that his words alone never could.

Ten Strategies for Becoming a Decisive Change Leader

1. Develop a clear change vision and communicate the why before the what.
2. Use data to drive all decisions -- never act on reaction alone.
3. Engage and train your team before implementation.
4. Build a phased change management plan using frameworks like the Kotter 8-step model.
5. Stay informed on industry trends including AI, telehealth, and regulatory shifts through subscriptions to publications and professional associations.
6. Gather patient feedback through surveys and reviews before implementing patient-facing changes.
7. Build financial resilience through diversified revenue streams and optimized billing before, during, and after any transition.
8. Cultivate a culture of continuous improvement with formal suggestion channels for staff and patients.
9. Leverage external consultants, peer networks, and conferences.
10. Prepare for resistance as a predictable stage -- anger before fear before acceptance before adoption. Designate a change champion within your team to sustain momentum. Celebrate small wins publicly. And recognize that change is not desired -- it is necessary. Your job as a leader is to make it inevitable and survivable.