21. June 2010 by Ivan F. Alvarez.

The medical field is pretty important. If ever we should put our collective heads together and figure something out, it’s how to make sure independent practitioners can make a nice living while helping us all live happy, healthy lives. It is with this thought that I marvel at how an efficiently run medical practice can thrive in a tough economic climate where everyone is broke, insurance pays less and less to them and the value of healthcare may be even further devalued through legislation.

I go to a guy I’ve known for years now. He’s part of a collective of a dozen doctors who all have their specialty and refer patients to one another. I now bring my dad there.  With my dad, I’m going a bit deeper in to the system than I needed to for myself and that has opened up a world of insight that I had not seen before in spite of going there at least a dozen times over the years for check-ups, illnesses, etc.  These guys have their s*#+ on lock. Their appointment books are held in an electronic calendar like many of us but does yours call a day before to remind your client of your appointment?  That has
to bring down no shows and increase billables without taking up a second of staff time.  Does yours link the visit with methods of payment and history?  These guys get paid every penny they can honestly squeeze and have access to your entire history on a laptop. Yeah. They all walk around from room to room with laptops where they both review and enter info.  Gone are the days of a pile of carefully hole punched papers and ekg streams. It’s all scanned, jpeged and accessible from a server.

Now I look at my own business. We work in various sectors of the music business but they all involve dealing with creatives. Dealing with creatives, especially in Miami, means missed meetings (dude was that today?) And a lot of conversations about how to get around an anemic (read non-existent) budget while tackling a declining market.  Well, I
meet with people, I help make their lives better and I’m dealing with a full-on assault on cash flow. So what can I learn from an indy medical practice?

First, cut the bull. You have to be selective about who you meet with. If you spend your day chasing pipe dreams and random thoughts instead of executing a cohesive plan and entertaining legitimate new projects, you are leaking valuable time like the broken pipe spewing oil into the gulf. Second, be as efficient as possible with the management of information.  Just as in the doctor’s office, history means something and can help you make better decisions. I deal with a lot of people
and new ones all the time. It’s good to be able to recall what has transpired in the past, digest it and draw inferences from patterns instead of just from vibe. Instinct is great but it’s accuracy goes up when you complement it with solid history. Third, always be going somewhere with something. The doctors bounce from one room to another executing their appointment and furthering the whole health thing.  From diagnosis to treatment, they are always moving things forward on a massive scale. I like that as a premise and try to make sure that every minute I spend working is a means to an end.

So, doctors spend their time wisely (with patients who actually pay something), track their usage of time expeditiously and are always moving issues forward. I think I can apply that to any business, even to something as erratic as my precious music industry.

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27. December 2008 by Ivan F. Alvarez.

Hangovers are not just alcohol related…although alcohol helps.  Here it is the 27th of December and I am wondering what happened to the 26th.  Christmas day we had two families over with their kids.  Wonderful people and wonderful food carefully prepared by my wife.  My contribution was the side of a pig I was to prepare and it came out great.  A couple of hours in the oven and then on to the BBQ filled with wood charcoal for that wonderful earthy flavor.  Add some wood chips and you have a smoked pork complete with crispy skin (chicharrón)…too bad my dog ate ALL the leftovers.  Turn around for a minute and then…gone!!!  Oh well, less to clean up.

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24. December 2008 by Ivan F. Alvarez.

I went to the opening of the Normandy Shores Golf Club today.  What a great place.  The fairways and greens are gorgeous even though the day was pretty brutal as South Florida weather goes.  The clubhouse, which is nothing more than a modular while they build the new permanent one, is surprisingly nice.  There is a pro shop, bar and decent hot menu.  It was kinda like those cartoons where you go in the small tent and the space inside is huge.

I live and work on this island so it was a pretty short commute for me.  The whole thing is starting to feel very clubby and thoughts of taking a lunch at the clubhouse during the week are pretty appealing.  I’m starting to get a sense of community.

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22. December 2008 by Ivan F. Alvarez.

So I have this really “clever” contact system which I use to reel in my unwieldy database of close to 5,000 contacts.  Now, I have spent years  (since 1992) building a contact database using Act! for Windows then, because I can, I switch to Mac which is 99% better except that I can’t use Act! in the Mac environment.  After using a few contact databases, I settle on Daylite.  It has some great features and is powerful enough for my needs but the synch feature, well,  sucks.  I need my stuff on my crackberry so I have to have a web of Exchange and Enterprise servers to get eveything in line…still does not work well.  Even tried a subset of contacts…still not very good.

So why am I talking about this under the heading of holiday crunch time?  Well, my clever system does email merges which lets me set up and send close to 600 emails in a fraction of the time and personally addressed to each contact (shh, don’t tell anyone).  Trouble is, the system screwed up and they are now all named Javier…Oh well, another thing it can’t do right.  Act! for Mac anyone?  C’mon, it almost rhymes!

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22. December 2008 by Ivan F. Alvarez.

First entry…So I have been venturing deeper and and deeper into the virtual world.  This quest is for both personal and professional purposes as I am on a mission to re-define how music gets nurtured, created, marketed and sold.  Overall, I hope to change how the money gets made and distributed.  Equity is key…

To that end, I present to you, my blog.  No idea who reads this crap or how I even tell people to read it but for thos who do find and follow, I hope that my missives are helpful, thought provoking and stimulate a smarter industry in some small way.

Ivan

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21. December 2008 by Ivan F. Alvarez.

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