When I transitioned from automotive retail to healthcare, people thought I was crazy. "What does selling cars have to do with medicine?" they asked. The answer: more than you'd think. And the lessons from one of America's oldest retail industries helped me transform some of its newest healthcare companies.
Automotive dealerships are fascinating operations. They're high-volume, multi-product, service-intensive businesses that live or die on customer experience and operational efficiency. Sound familiar? Substitute "clinic" for "dealership" and "patient" for "customer," and you've described most healthcare organizations.
"Healthcare often acts like it's too special for operational discipline. It's not. Patients deserve the same relentless focus on experience and outcomes that any well-run business provides."
Lesson 1: Measure Everything That Matters
Walk into any successful automotive dealership and you'll find dashboards everywhere. Sales per employee. Service bay utilization. Customer satisfaction scores. Time to close. Every metric that drives profitability and customer experience is tracked daily, discussed daily, improved daily.
When I arrived at my first healthcare organization, I asked for similar dashboards. The response: confused looks. Clinical outcomes were tracked (eventually, through slow chart reviews). Financial results came monthly. Patient satisfaction was surveyed occasionally. Nobody could tell me, in real-time, how the business was performing.
We changed that. We built operational dashboards that tracked patient flow, provider productivity, satisfaction scores, and clinical outcomes—updated daily. The visibility alone drove improvement. When people can see how they're doing, they naturally want to do better.
Lesson 2: Customer Experience Is the Product
In automotive retail, we understood that buying a car is emotional. It's often the second-largest purchase people make. A great experience creates loyalty; a poor one creates enemies who tell everyone they know.
Healthcare is even more emotional. Patients are scared, vulnerable, often in pain. And yet, healthcare has historically designed experiences around provider convenience, not patient needs. Long waits, confusing processes, impersonal interactions, surprise bills—we've normalized experiences that would be unacceptable in any other industry.
At Amen Clinics and Biote, we redesigned patient journeys from scratch:
- What does the patient feel at each step?
- Where are the friction points?
- What information do they need, when do they need it?
- How do we make them feel cared for, not processed?
Simple changes—pre-appointment calls, comfortable waiting areas, clear pricing, follow-up check-ins—transformed patient satisfaction and referral rates.
Lesson 3: Train Like You Mean It
Automotive manufacturers invest heavily in training. They understand that the person at the dealership IS the brand to the customer. Every interaction matters.
Healthcare training often focuses narrowly on clinical skills. But patients interact with everyone: front desk staff, medical assistants, billing coordinators. Each person shapes the patient experience, yet most receive minimal training on service, communication, or empathy.
We built comprehensive training programs that went beyond clinical competence to cover patient communication, conflict resolution, and brand standards. We taught everyone—not just providers—to see themselves as caregivers.
Lesson 4: Standardize the Mundane, Personalize the Meaningful
Great dealerships standardize processes that should be consistent—paperwork flow, service scheduling, inventory management—so they can personalize what matters: the customer relationship.
Healthcare often does the opposite. Administrative processes vary chaotically by location and person, creating errors and inefficiency. Meanwhile, clinical care becomes standardized to the point of feeling robotic.
We flipped this. We built standard operating procedures for administrative and operational functions—one way to do it, the right way, everywhere. This freed providers and staff to spend their energy where it mattered: connecting with patients, understanding their needs, personalizing their care.
Lesson 5: Challenge "How We've Always Done It"
Automotive retail went through massive disruption—from the internet killing information asymmetry to Tesla reimagining the dealership model entirely. The survivors learned to question every assumption about how cars should be sold and serviced.
Healthcare is in the early stages of similar disruption. Telehealth, AI diagnostics, retail clinics, direct primary care—the old models are being challenged from every direction. Organizations that cling to "how we've always done it" will be replaced by those willing to reimagine care delivery from first principles.
Coming from outside healthcare was an advantage. I didn't know what we were "supposed" to do, only what made sense for patients and for the business. Sometimes that meant challenging sacred cows—and weathering the pushback from people who insisted change was impossible.
The Bigger Picture
Healthcare isn't selling cars, and I would never diminish the profound importance of what clinicians do. But operational excellence isn't about treating patients like customers in a trivializing sense. It's about recognizing that patients deserve the same thoughtful attention to experience, efficiency, and outcomes that well-run businesses provide.
The tools of operational management—measurement, process design, training, continuous improvement—are not foreign to medicine's values. They're expressions of those values: caring enough about patients to constantly get better at serving them.
Terry Weber served as CEO in both automotive retail and healthcare, including leading Biote Medical, Amen Clinics, and multiple automotive groups.