Congratulations to the 2026 World Series Champions, the Milwaukee Brewers! Every October, baseball reminds us of something that business owners sometimes forget: the team that spends the most money doesn’t always win.
In Major League Baseball, teams like the Milwaukee Brewers and Tampa Bay Rays have shown that smaller-market organizations can compete with franchises that have dramatically larger payrolls. They may not have the same financial resources as the Yankees, Dodgers, or Mets, but they can still build competitive teams, develop talent, make smart decisions, and find ways to win.
How? They focus on what they can control. They allocate resources intelligently. They maximize the value of every player. And they build systems that allow them to compete without spending like the biggest teams in baseball.
Sound familiar?
For independent ophthalmologists, the same principles can make the difference between owning a thriving medical practice and feeling like you’re constantly working harder just to keep up.
1. You Don’t Have to Be the Biggest to Be the Best
The Yankees and Dodgers can afford to sign superstar players to enormous contracts. Smaller-market teams have to be more selective. Every roster spot matters. Every dollar has to produce value. That financial discipline can become a competitive advantage.
Independent ophthalmologists face a similar challenge. Large, hospital-affiliated groups and private equity-backed practices may have substantial resources, centralized departments, and significant negotiating power. They can spread administrative costs across multiple locations and employ entire teams dedicated to operations, billing, and management.
But bigger doesn’t automatically mean better.
A smaller independent practice can offer personalized patient care, make decisions quickly, maintain control over its operations, and avoid the layers of administrative expense that can weigh down larger organizations.
The goal isn’t to build the biggest practice in town. It’s to build a practice that performs exceptionally well.
In baseball, winning isn’t about having the biggest payroll. In medicine, profitability isn’t about having the biggest office or the most employees. It’s about making the resources you have work harder for you.
2. Keep Your Overhead Low, but Never Confuse Lean With Cheap
The 2026 Tampa Bay Rays and Milwaukee Brewers have become well known for finding creative ways to compete with teams that have far greater financial resources. Their approach illustrates a powerful principle: spending intelligently matters more than spending indiscriminately.
Independent practices can apply the same thinking.
Every additional employee, every piece of equipment, every square foot of office space, and every new administrative responsibility has a cost. Some investments generate significant returns. Others simply increase overhead.
The question isn’t whether an expense is justified in isolation. It’s whether that expense helps your practice deliver better care, improve efficiency, or generate a meaningful financial return.
For example:
- Staffing: Build a team that matches your patient volume and workflow rather than hiring reactively.
- Office space: Invest in a functional, efficient clinical environment without taking on unnecessary real estate costs.
- Technology: Choose systems that improve productivity, reduce errors, and save staff time.
- Administrative functions: Before adding another full-time position, determine whether a specialized outside partner can perform that function more efficiently.
Of course, keeping overhead low doesn’t mean cutting corners on patient care, understaffing the office, or delaying necessary equipment purchases. It means being intentional about where every dollar goes.
A lean practice can be a highly productive practice. And a highly productive practice gives its owner more options: greater income, more time with family, additional investment opportunities, or the ability to grow without adding unnecessary complexity.
3. Your Billing and Revenue Cycle Are Your Farm System
Baseball teams don’t win simply by signing players. They need a system that identifies talent, develops it, puts players in the right positions, and turns their abilities into runs on the scoreboard.
For an ophthalmology practice, your revenue cycle serves a similar purpose.
You can see 30 patients a day, perform cataract surgery, order diagnostic testing, and deliver excellent care. But if claims are submitted incorrectly, documentation doesn’t support the services performed, denials aren’t appealed, or outstanding balances aren’t followed up on, some of the revenue you’ve earned may never reach your bank account.
That’s the equivalent of putting runners on base and never bringing them home.
Collections aren’t just a billing metric. They’re the financial scoreboard of your practice.
A well-managed revenue cycle involves much more than submitting claims. It requires accurate coding, clean claim submission, timely follow-up, effective denial management, payer-contract awareness, and consistent monitoring of accounts receivable.
It also requires understanding your numbers.
Are your claims being paid correctly? Which payers generate the most denials? How long does it take to collect? Are patient balances being addressed? Are recurring problems being identified and fixed?
You cannot improve what you don’t measure.
For an independent ophthalmologist, even a modest improvement in collections can have a meaningful effect on profitability. When your practice operates on a relatively fixed cost structure, additional revenue collected from services you’ve already performed can flow disproportionately to the bottom line.
Instead of automatically trying to see more patients or add another surgical day, start by asking a different question:
Are we collecting everything we’re entitled to collect for the work we’re already doing?
That is often one of the most valuable questions a practice owner can ask.
4. Stop Trying to Do Everything Yourself
One of the greatest advantages a well-run baseball organization has is specialization. The manager doesn’t negotiate every contract, maintain the stadium, analyze every pitch, and handle every aspect of player development personally.
Everyone has a role, and the organization creates systems to make those roles work together.
Yet independent physicians frequently find themselves acting as the doctor, employer, HR manager, billing supervisor, technology troubleshooter, and financial analyst—all in the same week.
When you own a practice, it’s tempting to believe that doing everything yourself saves money. Sometimes it does. But it also consumes time that could be spent seeing patients, performing surgery, developing the practice, or simply enjoying the reasons you chose independence in the first place.
There is a difference between controlling your business and personally performing every business function.
The most successful independent practices recognize that distinction.
They maintain control over clinical decisions, patient relationships, and the strategic direction of their businesses while finding efficient ways to manage specialized administrative functions.
That’s where a partner like Independent Practice Partners (IPP) can make a difference.
IPP helps independent practices with billing, revenue cycle management, and the business support needed to start and operate a practice. Rather than every physician having to build and manage every administrative function independently, the practice can leverage specialized expertise and established systems.
The result can be a more efficient operation without having to build a large administrative infrastructure in-house.
In baseball terms, you don’t need to spend like the Yankees to build a winning organization. You need the right people in the right roles, supported by the right systems.
5. Maximize the Players You Already Have
A smart baseball team doesn’t evaluate success by looking only at how much it pays its players. It looks at the value those players produce.
Independent practices should think the same way about their existing resources.
Consider your current patient volume. Before deciding that the only path to higher income is to add another clinic day, hire another physician, or expand into a larger office, evaluate how efficiently the practice is operating today.
Could your scheduling process reduce unused appointment slots? Could your team improve patient flow? Are you capturing appropriate diagnostic testing? Are surgical opportunities being managed effectively? Are claims being paid accurately and promptly?
These are operational questions, but they have direct financial consequences.
A practice that improves its scheduling, reduces avoidable denials, and collects more consistently may be able to improve profitability without a corresponding increase in fixed expenses.
The same applies to staffing. A well-trained team with clear responsibilities and efficient workflows can often accomplish more than a larger team working without consistent processes.
The objective isn’t to squeeze every possible dollar out of every employee or patient encounter. It’s to eliminate waste, reduce preventable errors, and ensure that the work your team performs translates into the results your practice deserves.
That is how you improve productivity without simply increasing the workload.
6. Don’t Let Revenue Growth Fool You
A team can spend more money, acquire expensive players, and still fail to win a championship. Similarly, a medical practice can grow its revenue while becoming less profitable.
More patients can mean more staff. More locations can mean more rent and administrative complexity. More services can mean more equipment costs, training, and operational demands.
Growth is valuable only when it creates value.
Independent physicians should pay attention to the relationship between revenue, overhead, collections, and owner income—not just the number of patients seen or the size of the practice.
A useful way to think about the business is to separate three questions:
- Production: How much clinical work is the practice performing?
- Collections: How much of the revenue earned is actually being collected?
- Profitability: How much remains after the costs required to operate the practice?
These numbers tell different stories.
If production is increasing but collections aren’t keeping pace, the revenue cycle may need attention. If collections are strong but owner income remains disappointing, overhead or staffing efficiency may be the problem.
The solution depends on the underlying numbers. Throwing more volume at a practice with inefficient operations can make the problem bigger rather than solve it.
A disciplined practice owner looks at the entire picture before making the next move.
7. Independence Is About More Than Making Money
There is another lesson in baseball’s smaller-market success stories: an organization doesn’t have to imitate its wealthiest competitors to build something worthwhile.
Independent ophthalmology offers a similar opportunity.
You can build a practice around your own clinical standards, your relationships with patients and referring doctors, your preferred working environment, and your personal definition of success.
For one physician, success might mean a high-volume surgical practice. For another, it might mean a smaller office, a manageable schedule, and more time with family. For someone else, it might mean eventually bringing another physician into the practice or building an organization that can operate without the owner managing every detail.
There is no single winning formula.
But financial discipline gives you more choices. Better collections give you more flexibility. Lower unnecessary overhead gives you more control. And efficient administrative systems allow you to spend less time managing the business and more time building the life you wanted the business to support.
That is the real value of independence.
8. Build Your Practice Like a Winning Team—with IPP
At Independent Practice Partners, we believe independent physicians should not have to choose between running a successful business and maintaining control over their professional lives.
You don’t need the payroll of a major-league franchise to compete. You need to understand your numbers, control your costs, build efficient systems, and get the most out of the resources available to you.
That means taking revenue cycle management seriously. It means knowing whether your billing operation is collecting what it should. It means questioning administrative expenses that don’t add value. And it means recognizing when specialized support can help your practice operate more efficiently.
IPP was built around the idea that independent practices deserve access to the expertise and support that help them succeed—without assuming that every physician needs to build a large administrative organization of their own.
The Milwaukee Brewers and Tampa Bay Rays may not always have the financial firepower of baseball’s biggest spenders. But their approach demonstrates why smart resource allocation, effective systems, and disciplined decision-making can keep smaller organizations competitive.
Independent ophthalmologists can apply those same principles.
You don’t have to be the biggest practice in town. You don’t have to hire an army of administrative employees. And you don’t necessarily have to see more patients to improve your bottom line.
You have to run your practice intelligently.
Because the goal isn’t to have the biggest payroll. It’s to build a practice that wins.
And in independent ophthalmology, that means delivering excellent patient care, collecting the revenue you’ve earned, controlling unnecessary overhead, and creating a business that works for you—not the other way around.
Written by Dr. Deepak Grover, D.O.
