Business Plan: Practice of Nurse Practitioners, Essay Example

Overall, I believe that the business plan I developed with my group would be effective in practice, however I would change a few aspects of this plan if I were working on my own or decided to develop the plan with a different group of people. In this project, I was primarily responsible for researching and evaluating the projected expenses for the business proposal. It is important to note that different projected expenses may be necessary if I were to launch this plan with a colleague rather than my classmates.

In my submitted business plan, I stated that I would need to include expenses that are required in order to establish the family practice. One of the most significant expenses on this list was the monthly and yearly rent required for the office space in addition to the overhead costs of operating in this space. In the assignment, I explained that it is expected that “1,750 square feet of office space is required for the practice startup at a leasing cost of $8.00 per square foot”. This would ultimately lead to a total cost of $14,000 per month or $168,000/year. Although our group decided this would be an optimal office space and overhead cost for this new practice, different business partners may disagree. Personally, I believe that since this is a new office, we cannot be certain of the number of patients that we will see monthly and yearly and how much profit will be able to generate. As such, it might be in the best interest of the business to find an office rental space in a medical building that has many office sizes available. It would be in our best interest to start out in a smaller medical suite to begin our practice and only expand or move to a larger office if we see that doing so is clearly needed and will benefit the practice and the patients. This is the simplest method for doing so; if we need more space, we will be either to expand or office or move to a different location in the building. This way, patients will know where to find us more easily after the move and be more likely to remain loyal to our service. Furthermore, this will significantly lower our overhead operating costs during the first few months of practice which will enable us to invest more of our money in important, permanent expenses, such as medical equipment.

Furthermore, our current expenses model suggests that the physician we hire will be working slightly more than 40 hours a week. It is important to understand that while we may be able to find a physician who is willing to work these hours, we cannot expect that he or she will never need to take any time off. Therefore, it would be useful to hire 1-2 nurse practitioners to also work in the practice in the likely chance that the physicians will need sick days and vacation days. Since the additional nurse practitioners will not needed constantly, they can be both employed as part time workers, 20 hours a week, with a yearly salary of $60,000. Therefore, we will be investing a total of $120,000 a year to hire them. The two nurse practitioners will never be working at the same time; either one will be given a morning shift and one will be given an evening shift, or one will work 2.5 days of the week while the other one will work the remaining days.

Lastly, I would change the salary of the medical assistant from $21.00 an hour to $17.00 an hour; this salary reflects the median salary of medical assistants for Fairfax and is still considered competitive. This way we will have additional money in our budget to hire additional help if we determine it is needed after the opening of the clinic. The administrative assistant’s salary can also be cut to $15.00 an hour; I believe that we may have been too generous with this job as well because this salary is significantly greater than other administrative assistant salaries in this field in Fairfax.