Spring cleaning isn’t just good for your home; it’s also a great way to super-charge your practice.

While you’re likely familiar with Spring cleaning your home, you may not have thought about Spring cleaning your weight loss practice. Not simply for cleanliness, but as a way to increase team productivity and business growth. Before you decide you don’t have time for Spring cleaning, it’s important to recognize the many benefits of such activities during this and any seasonal transition.

Benefits of Spring Cleaning for your Weight Loss Practice

Spring cleaning has numerous benefits for you, your team and your weight loss practice. Here are a few:

• Improved Health and Safety: Having your cleaning crew deep clean your office and you/your team deep clean your work space helps to ensure your environment has less allergens and clutter. In turn, this improves health and safety for you, your team and your patients. It also helps provide clarity and eliminates unnecessary health hazards.
• Reorganized Operations: As a part of your Spring cleaning routine, re-evaluate your patient flow and on-site/online filing systems. This is a great time to shred what you don’t need and delete/organize onsite and online files. It feels great if you are also able to streamline shared online files so the entire team knows where to find current manuals, procedures, training, patient education and required documentation files all in one place.
• Reduced Stress/Heightened Energy: Spring cleaning can be stressful — but taking it one step at a time and setting a deadline for accountability will help. Cleaning up your environment has been shown to provide you with one less negative thing to focus on and the light exercise/self-satisfaction that goes with a job well done tends to boost the release of endorphins, improve your mood and heighten your energy.
• Increased Focus/Renewed Commitment: When you eliminate or minimize waste and clutter in your practice, it often provides you with a renewed focus, fresh perspective and restored commitment to why you created your practice in the first place. You can solidify your vision moving forward, share it with your staff and create a game plan together that will get you closer to your goals, instead of spinning your wheels.
• Simplification for Leveraged Growth: It is easy over time to get caught up in “what we have always done” or continue to add to your list of services and products until one day, it doesn’t reflect your original vision or intent. Spring is a great time to review your goals and metrics to determine what should stay and what needs to go. With simplified services and products (your bestsellers that reflect your vision), you are in a much better position to leverage your practice for exponential growth.

Essential Ingredients to make your Practice Spring Cleaning a Success

What is the best way to Spring clean your weight loss practice and what are the essential ingredients for success? Your efforts will be much more successful if you and your team embrace the following:

• Importance: While you know there are many benefits, you can easily talk yourself out of Spring cleaning — and so will your team. You don’t have time, there is too much to do, you don’t know where to start. You get it. Now is the time to embrace the benefits and champion the cause. This is easier to do if your team can recognize the benefits that are in it for them as well.
• Teamwork: It will take teamwork for effective Spring cleaning efforts. Identify the areas you want to focus on (commonly time-wasting culprits and other issues that frustrate you and your team the most), ask for volunteers to lead the various focus areas while each team member takes responsibility for their work space.
• Timeline: Allow time in your schedule for Spring cleaning and set deadlines so as to avoid Parkinson’s Law of making a task that could have been accomplished quickly spread out to the allotted time allowed. This can be accomplished by closing for an afternoon or entire day and/or allowing your team time for their Spring cleaning responsibilities separate from their work responsibilities. 
• Celebration: Throughout your Spring cleaning activities, make it fun with music, provided meal(s) or snacks, and consider a bonus or other type of reward your team enjoys or values.

Top Spring Cleaning Activities for Weight Loss Business Growth

In addition to the typical cleaning activities associated with “Spring cleaning,” here are the top activities for business growth:

1. Re-Visit Your Goals: Reassess your business goals and make sure they align with your long-term vision. If you don’t have any written down or being tracked each month, put new ones in place and share them with your leadership team so all team efforts can be focused on goal attainment.
2. Audit Your Financials: Take a close look at your business financial statements, cost center profitability, budget and itemized expenses. Now is a great time to confirm your return on investment for ongoing expenses, determine money wasting activities and focus on ensuring short and long-term financial stability.
3. Declutter and Digitize: Sort through any onsite and online documents to determine what can be shredded and what can be digitized and organized for easier access by you and your team as necessary.
4. Streamline Your Patient Experience: Review your patient attraction methods (marketing), your response time for potential new patients, their onsite experience, onboarding, communication and flow of care. Ensure that you have efficient systems in place every step of the way.
5. Refine Your Marketing: If you are seeing a diminishing return on investment for your marketing efforts, it is time to carefully look at what you are posting online and any other place you promote your practice. Ensure that your messaging and communication resonate with those you seek to serve most and are prominent in the places online and in the community locations they frequent most.
6. Identify Team Training and Growth Opportunities: Your team likely wants to be challenged and grow. Take a close look at your team to determine training and development opportunities. Perhaps it is time for some cross-training or assignment modifications.
7. Seek Feedback: You can ask your patients for feedback as well as your team. This helps clarify what is working well and what may need a bit more attention.

By following these steps, you can help your weight loss practice blossom this Spring. The benefits are many. This may be just the thing you need to attract more patients, improve profitability, increase job satisfaction, and turn business blues into business bliss.