Is Your Business Ready for the Holidays?

The holidays bring a boom to many marketplaces. Toy stores and retail experience massive growth and profit. This may not be the case with medical or healthcare businesses throughout the country. The holidays can potentially slow down otherwise busy and successful medical businesses. These pauses lower business profit substantially, which can obviously hurt medical businesses in a big way. It never hurts to have backup cash just in case any decrease in revenue occurs during holiday season. Here are three reasons your business might experience a slowdown during the holidays.

The Holidays Can Be a Cash Flow Nightmare

You don’t have the big name to reel in the patients like medical giants Sentara and Patients First (among others). Your brand has yet to establish notoriety or weight in a manner that allows for you to make a seamless and profitable transition into the holiday season. You have to be able to come up with the money to foot all of the bills. Not only are you funding medical expenses, equipment management and employee upkeep, you are also relying on fewer resources for management. Let’s face it, with the significant reductions in profit during the holiday, it’s harder to be financially prepared for incidents such as mechanical malfunction or the upkeep of electronic devices such as applications, software, computers and servers. The inability to effectively maintain systems such as payroll, patient management systems, payment services and communicative applications directly affect your rapport with patients. Since technology is the foundation of most medical practices, one of the first things you want to have backup cash for is repairs, maintenance and upkeep.

Failure to Cover Medical Costs

Slower business means less money to cover costs of services rendered. Many patients pay for service using some sort of medical insurance or monthly billing. While this is a great practice for businesses, it also means that there is less expendable money to play around with. Practices rely on payments to buy equipment, offer medicine and all around provide their services. Acquiring cash to cover any delayed reimbursements so you can keep your business running at a stable level is not an uncommon practice in the holiday season and is recommended. Unfortunately for medical business owners, this slow period can last for months on end. Unless you have thousands of dollars saved up your business will sink quicker than you can imagine. The problem is that new and growing businesses often do not have enough money saved up to make it through these periods. What makes a defining difference is having the extra cash flow on hand to keep the doors to your practice open!

The Bills Need to Get Paid

If the first two reasons hit close to home, then this will nail it all the way in for you. New business owners are not unaccustomed to digging into their personal finances to cover business costs. Having extra cash flow will allow you to cover the cost of getting your business out of a financial rut and keeping the lights on. Without having a solid financial plan and multiple resources to rely on to pay the bills, you are bound to end up stuck between a rock and a hard place. Let’s face it— running a successful business is easier said than done. Often times you will need to rely on external resources to get the job done and to keep your business growing and thriving like a successful business should be. Turning to alternative financing platforms for extra cash to get you through a slower holiday weeks can help alleviate all three of these cash concerns. Having cash on hand is vital to the maintenance and growth of a business.