So I’ll leave you with a concept one of my clients taught me many years ago:  Write your own obituary today as though your life were to end suddenly.  As we all are caught up in the day to day routine, it’s easy to lose track of the bigger issues in life.  What would you want to be remembered as having achieved in your life?  It’s likely not for being the last one out the door at the clinic every night, or for having achieved the highest profitability in your department or your hospital last year.  More likely, it’s for the doctors or staff you mentored, the children you raised, the volunteer work you did, and the lives you touched by helping others achieve their goals.  Your crowning accomplishments may have nothing to do with work or family, and instead reflect the artistic or athletic interests you’ve pursued over time.  No matter what your passion, if the obituary you write for yourself today wouldn’t include the ways you want to be remembered, you might want to rethink how you are living your life.

Here are some steps you can take to help manage and diffuse potentially harmful reviews if you sense a client is getting upset or frustrated during an appointment.

• Don’t let them leave upset.  Sit with them and talk.  Take the time to work out any issues and make sure to spend enough time with the client so they know you care about what they are feeling. 
• Keep up with online reviews.  If something negative comes up, try to resolve those reviews immediately.
• Don’t be afraid to ask the clients that you know are happy with your service to post positive reviews!  You’ll be surprised at how willing they’ll respond to your request.

You may be spending thousands of dollars on advertising, but the best advertising you can get are client referrals, and those are free!  A good client referral from a friend or family member always goes further and is more loyal in the eyes of an individual than paid advertising.

At work, we have employers who hired us, agreed to pay us for our efforts, and have expectations about the quantity and quality of those efforts.  Not surprisingly, they want to get the most for their money, while employees would like to do a reasonable amount of work and then leave for the day without feeling guilty. 

We all have interests and responsibilities outside work – families who expect our attention, religious and charitable obligations, mundane household tasks that can’t all be hired out, hobbies we’d like to pursue with more energy, etc.  And in today’s busy practices, there is no end to the work that needs to be done.  Nor is it possible to avoid the emergency cases that come in at closing time or the clients who show up late and put everyone behind schedule. 

What about the owners and managers who can’t leave work at work?  They go home each night with a few projects that didn’t get done during the day.  Some of those tasks come back the next day untouched, as life got in the way of that extra work.  But they still worry about leaving work with the tasks undone and then worry about going back to work the next day, having made no progress overnight.  That’s not work/life balance.

Malcolm Munro, a management coach and president/CEO at Hired Guns Consulting, LLC, suggests that there is no way to maintain a work/life balance.  He says your only hope is to strive for work/life separation.  In other words, no matter how much you love your work, compartmentalize your day into work and life.  When you’re at work, give it your best shot by devoting your time and attention to the tasks at hand.  But when you leave work, let it go.  Shift gears and focus on your non-work life.  Don’t take work home and don’t spend your time outside work planning what you’ll do the next day or week or year. 

I can’t say I’m very good at creating this separation, but in the short time I have tried it, I can see that doing so reduces stress, makes me more productive at work and better company at home.  Try it and see what you think.

One of my responsibilities was checking a card file (yes, it was quaint) to see if a prospective student had an application on file.  hat meant looking for an index card in the file, and if there was no card, making one to record the student’s name and contact information.

After doing this for a while, I thought it was inefficient to check for the card, not find one, and then not mark the place in the file where the new one would be filed, since that meant going to the same spot twice. With a large number of inquiries and many applications in various stages of completion, there were lots of cards. Why not leave a place holder where the new card would go whenever I discovered a card didn’t already exist? 

I brought the suggestion up to my supervisor and was flatly and rapidly turned down. She said that while I might put the place holder in the right spot, she didn’t trust everyone to do that, so it was better to have us all go through the drawers to find the right location for each new card each time. What could I do but accept her response, though it didn’t make a lot of sense to me? Seems like the card could be misfiled at any point in the process, and taking more time to file new cards wouldn’t improve accuracy. 

I took two messages from that incident. One was that suggestions weren’t welcomed – it was better to keep doing what had always been done. The second was more subtle but just as damaging:  I now knew my supervisor didn’t trust her assistants to work accurately, and she wouldn’t hesitate to let them know that. Eventually, I left that job for more responsible positions in other departments and eventually to get my own accounting degree. 

The moral to take from this? If those who report to you bring you suggestions or comments, take the time to consider them and explain your rationale, whether you are for or against the idea. I had other suggestions and ideas about how to improve processes within that department, but I never again shared them with my supervisor. I just moved on.

 Even if you don’t like an idea that’s brought to you, praise the person for being creative. Hold brainstorming sessions among the people actually doing the work to let them tell you where the bottlenecks are. Those are obvious to the ones who do the work, but not so much to the rest of us. 

Remember too that the people who hold back in these sessions are often the ones with some great ideas. They just aren’t as comfortable voicing them unless they believe it’s a nurturing, safe environment. So make it safe to voice new ideas. And remember that one person’s idea can spark other people’s creative juices and morph into a great new process or procedure. 

What are you looking for?

• Do some of these forms reside on your network and are printed only when needed?  Or is a supply of paper copies used by some or all of the doctors and staff?
  
  
• Is there more than one version of the same item, which can occur because updates are made but the old version still hangs around on a shelf or in a drawer?  Are all of them up-to-date?
  
  
• As a group, do these forms look like they came from the same practice, i.e., are the logo and font consistent with the ones on your building sign and website?  Do the colors align with your practice’s image?  
  
  
• Does every piece include the practice’s name, phone number, mailing address and website url, if there is room?  Are all the data current?
  
  
• Are all handouts visually pleasing and professional-looking, or is one or more a photocopy of a photocopy that has gotten more crooked each time a new batch was made?
  
  
• Is the content accurate?  If you aren’t sure, have someone else in the practice read the piece to review its message.
  
  
• Are you still using all these documents or is there a new protocol to give the client the same information in a different format (such as general information posted on your website)?

You may be surprised at what you find. This project could lead to another one to update some of these pieces.  After all, the goal should be to provide accurate, useful and professional looking information to your clients that reflects positively on the practice overall. 

First, the history:  For some reason which always eluded some tax preparers, the IRS ruled previously that Medicare premiums withheld from Social Security payments (or paid by check by those who had not retired but were eligible for Medicare coverage) could not be deducted as self-employed health insurance premiums, even when the taxpayer was self-employed.  So who’s treated as self-employed?  Those who file Schedule C reporting income or loss from owning a business, as well as partners and some S corporation shareholders who also own and operate all or part of a business. 

Why would these taxpayers prefer to deduct Medicare premiums as self-employed health insurance on page 1 of Form 1040 instead of as itemized medical deductions on Schedule A?  Many seniors don’t have enough of the right kind of deductions to file Schedule A and, therefore, were not getting the tax benefit for these Medicare premiums.  A deduction that reduces adjusted gross income, not just taxable income, is more likely to reduce income tax, and this new deduction now is available to more self-employed taxpayers than in the past. 

I’m not sure exactly when the IRS changed its position and started allowing Medicare premiums as self-employed health insurance for eligible taxpayers.  I also don’t recall that the change got a lot of publicity, but IRS Publication 535 on Business Expenses confirms this new position and even points out that taxpayers impacted by the change can amend returns still open under the statute of limitations to claim a refund.

The moral here?  If you own or operate a small business, are treated as self-employed for at least a portion of your income, and are receiving Medicare benefits, check with your tax preparer to be sure you are correctly claiming this deduction.

Then again, those skills got me a job as a proofreader in college, and I actually worked on the university’s bulletin, including proofing individual course descriptions with words I can spell but still have no idea what they mean.  Of course, that may have made me even pickier.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand that text messages and email have a life of their own and have spawned new words and new spellings for old words.  That’s fine as long as they don’t creep into our more formal writings. 

But there are a few things that just drive me nuts, like resumes and cover letters with misspelled words.  Another is writers who don’t know the difference between “its” (possessive, like “my” or “your”) versus “it’s” (which is a contraction of “it is”).  If you can’t substitute “it is” for “it’s” and have your sentence still make sense, take out the apostrophe!

My teeth also clench when I find two sentences held together with a comma.  That’s a comma splice in grammatical terms.  If you are linking two sentences, each with a subject and a verb, put an “and” or “but” after that comma.  Otherwise, make them two sentences with a period after the first one, not a comma. 

Why am I whining about this?  All too frequently I see practices sending their clients home with post-treatment instructions or posting marketing messages that have poor grammar or poor spelling.  In every practice there is likely someone who had teachers like mine, though that person may be getting up in years.  (I’m not sure what they teach in school today. . . .)  Before you send out something that reflects poorly on your practice, have it checked for grammar and spelling.  Microsoft Word© does this automatically and is usually correct, but I find people today blow right by those suggestions because they are too busy or don’t understand the importance of good communication. 

So if you’ve got some slow time in January, pull out those client communications (including your website) and make sure they are written to reflect your practice’s knowledge and your attention to detail.  

“I give myself sometimes admirable advice, but I am incapable of taking it.”
     Mary Wortley Montagu, British writer

 “It is easy to sit up and take notice.  What is difficult is getting up and taking action.”
     Al Batt, American writer

“If you rest, you rust.”
     Helen Hayes, American actress

 “Everyone who’s ever taken a shower has an idea.  It’s the person who gets out of the shower, dries off and does something about it who makes a difference.”
     Nolan Bushnell, American engineer and entrepreneur

 “The illiterate of the future are not those who can’t read or write but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.”
     Alvin Toffler, American writer and futurist 

Remember this:  Only the people you trust are given the power to steal from you.

Here’s what you must keep in mind:  the Fraud Triangle.  All three of these factors must be in place for fraud to occur.

Of these three, the only one you can control is opportunity.  By having good internal control systems in place, you can reduce the possibility of someone stealing from the practice, but you can never totally eliminate it. 

Want to learn how to better protect the practice?  Send an email to info@summitveterinaryadvisors.com with “Fraud Triangle” in the subject line, and we’ll send you information about steps you can take to protect the practice, safeguard your employees, and reduce this risk. 

For some of you, tax filing season was a long time back, while for others, it just ended.  Either way, the close of 2014 is not that far away.  This is a good time to review your income and expenses for the year and take any proactive steps in your unique tax situation.  Your CPA or tax preparer can help you with this.

However, one theme that is common to all U.S. individual taxpayers is that the IRS assesses penalties if you don’t pay enough income tax into the government during the year.  These nondeductible penalties can be avoided by paying in tax equal to (1) 100% of your prior year total tax liability (110% for higher income taxpayers) or (2) 90% of your current year’s tax liability, as long as it’s paid as the income is earned – the “pay as you go” plan.  For most of us, it’s much easier to look up the amount of last year’s tax than figure out what we will actually owe for 2014. 

There are two ways to make those payments happen:  either through withholding from your paycheck/bonuses or by making quarterly estimated tax payments.  However, the two methods are not treated the same as to when the payments are considered to have been made. 

Here’s the takeaway to remember:  Withholding is considered to be paid prorata throughout the year, even if it actually happens largely in the fourth quarter.  Estimated tax payments, however, are considered paid when the IRS actually gets the money, i.e., by April 15, June 15, September 15, and January 15 each year. 

So if you are worried about whether you’ve paid in enough tax to avoid penalties and find you are short, first consider increasing the federal income tax withholding from your paychecks or bonuses between now and the end of 2014 by filling out a new W-4 form.  Once you’ve paid in enough tax to avoid penalties, you can change your withholding again and start saving any additional tax you will owe, knowing you need not pay it until you file the return by April 15^th.