While 2022 brought great growth for Hayes Locums, 2023 has been a year to focus on development—from our people, to our processes, to our technology.
2022 was a banner year for Hayes Locums: we celebrated our 10th anniversary, and one of our strongest years of growth.
It would have been easy, after that kind of growth, to push for even more in 2023. But one of the things I’ve learned over the past eleven years in the locum tenens industry is that if you’re always focused on the work that pays off immediate dividends, you’re not going to set your company up for long-term success.
A Shift in Focus by Investing in the Foundational Efforts
So in these last twelve months, we focused not on increasing our sales numbers, but on absorbing the growth we’ve already seen, and doing the kind of long-term, behind-the-scenes, work where the results might not be seen immediately, but will set us up for continued, sustainable growth down the road. That meant focusing on our training department, to make sure we’re training people well to carry on the legacy of quality that we’ve built here at Hayes Locums.
It also meant investing in our technology, to make sure our systems are meeting the needs of our clients. And it meant continuing to develop all of our departments, to make sure that they are all working together to serve our clients and providers as well as we possibly can.
Enhancing Efficiency Across the Company for Clients, Providers and Hayes Employees
For our clients and our physicians, that work looked like making our processes more efficient so we can make their lives easier: whether it’s improving our invoicing process, expanding the capacity of our travel department, or being able to provide them better data.
For our employees at Hayes Locums, that looked like streamlining our processes and our technology so they can focus on what matters most: making quality matches that will allow their providers to thrive in locum tenens, and to provide excellent care to the patients they are serving.
Continuing Our Dedication to Quality Matches
That dedication to quality has always been at the heart of Hayes Locums. Our growth is entirely due to our people and their tenacity for finding perfect matches for their physicians and their clients. I could tell you so many stories about folks at Hayes Locums who have gone out and found that unicorn physician who fulfills exactly what a hospital is looking for in a locums job.
That’s why so many clients came to us, and that’s why so many of them stay with us: they want to work with us because we are providing them someone that no one else is capable of finding them.
A Great Restaurant is More than the Chef
We have amazing people who work their tails off to make the best possible match with a physician and a job. But it’s not just about providing an amazing doctor. It’s about making sure we’re bringing that focus on quality to everything we do.
The chef can be great, but if the service is poor, you’re not going to go back to the restaurant.
In the same way, if you send a client a great doctor, but you can’t back it up with great service because you haven’t scaled up to handle the capacity, then you’re not going to last as a business.
That’s what we focused on this year: absorbing our growth, and scaling up our service so we can continue to grow.
Going Far, Not Just Fast
The reality of growing as a business is that there are always going to be things that need fixing, whether that means making tweaks to your processes to make them more efficient, investing in better technology, or training your team to work at an even higher level. It can make you feel like you’re Han Solo, constantly tinkering with the Millenium Falcon. But it’s work that needs doing.
If you want to go fast, you can get away with ignoring the things that need fixing and just keep pushing to go harder and faster and higher.
If you want to go far, you have to take the time to slow down, to make sure that all your systems are working. That’s how you build something that will last.
Similarly, you can’t just look at your bottom line to know whether you’ve been successful. It’s not just about the numbers. It’s about making sure people are being well taken care of, from your clients to your employees. Business will always be there, but if you’re not taking care of your people, then you’ll wind up losing them.
Taking Care of Our People Means They Can Take Better Care of Their Patients
That’s what we’re about: ultimately, we want to make our clients’ and our providers’ lives easier. If we take care of our providers, they can take better care of their patients. And that’s not just about compensation: it’s also making it easier for them to do their jobs.
By making their lives easier, it’s going to make it easier for us to bring those physicians to communities who need their skills––and make it less likely that those physicians will get burned out, so we can keep them in the industry longer.
If we do that part right, we’re going to get to be part of a lot more patient care stories, and help a lot more people.
Looking to Grow On Top of an Already Strong Foundation
I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve done this year. We’ve taken our dedication to quality matches and expanded that to everything we do. We’ve made huge advances in technology by ensuring all of our systems are well-integrated, and we’ve improved our processes to make them easier and more efficient for our clients. And of course, as always, our team has done a consistently amazing job in placing top-notch providers at healthcare facilities where their skills and expertise were most needed. Finally, when we take better care of our clients and providers, they are able to continue better care for patients.
We did all of that, while still continuing to grow.
But it’s not the growth I’m most proud of: it’s the work we did to make sure we’re growing on top of a strong foundation.
I can’t wait to see what we’ll grow into next year.
