In this Weekly Report, I want to turn our attention to the people in your practice and apply the exact same concept, philosophy, and principle I challenged you with last week as to what type of owner, doctor, leader you want to be.
Thank goodness dentistry is still a people business. It will always be. No matter the advances in technology, the integration of artificial intelligence, and difficulties hiring, at its very core dentistry will always be about people by way of relationships and interactions to realize optimal health and enhancement to patients’ quality of life.
With this in mind, the ultimate objective is thinking more deeply about how we inspire, motivate, develop, and grow the people in your practice. Both your team and your patients.
Most every aspect of dentistry has been based around an idea of being reactive…
Reactive to patient questions.
Reactive to insurance restrictions.
Reactive to team situations.
Reactive to problems in patients’ mouths.
Reactive to rising overhead.
Reactive to advancing technology.
Most dental practices are completely driven by the “watch things happen” or “wonder what happened” and only then react accordingly. Instead of deciding and committing to making what you want happen!
This is why doctors get frustrated. This is why turnover happens. This is why, at best, incremental rather than substantial growth occurs. This is why patient values, average appointment size, production, and pretty much every other statistic is historical instead of future focused.
Over the next series of Weekly Reports, I’m going to be taking you behind the scenes of the actual practice shifts I have made common place in dentistry over the past nearly two decades. These have been applied to every different style, size, location, or structure of practice you can imagine – each achieving bullseye-like predictable and sustainable results in growth, in profit, in team longevity, and coupled with significant case size increases, 5x-10x patient value bumps, and best of all dollars per hour establishing a new precedent in our industry for Independent Private Practice Owner Doctors.
That translates to an enhanced lifestyle for you through your practice, just like you are providing to your patients through your dentistry and to your team through your leadership.
The best news of the day is that none of this is dependent on where you live, how many chairs you have, number of new patients you get, hygienist you house, or procedures you do.
My original book, THE DENTAL PRACTICE SHIFT, is as true as ever and always will be because it takes your practice and looks at it through your eyes first instead of everyone else’s and uses my masterful method of reserve engineering to build a far superior practice model that can’t be compared to any other.
On the surface to everyone else, you might have a Dental Practice or a Sleep and Pain Practice or an Ortho or Perio or Oral Surgery Practice but behind the scenes and from the foundation through every aspect of your business – you have something altogether different – a business that runs on purpose, drives outcomes instead of being dependent on variables, has proven principles of success, and a practice profit formula that creates the best of everything you want.
I’ll begin with some broad-brush strokes today about your team and your patients and then we’ll take a journey together through each of the major shifts from random and inconsistent results to intentional and controlled outcomes.
First and foremost, with your team we begin always but especially today with three key fundamental truths that must be rock solid, never questioned, always committed to by you in order to be proactive instead of reactive to building, growing, keeping, winning with the best team possible.
You have to view them as an asset. Therefore, they are an investment – not the biggest percentage on your “expense report.”
Your team will be as good as the investment you make in them and the structure and systems that support their development, growth, and success.
At the end of the day, it is time, training, resources, and of course money that you invest into your people as assets that makes them worth more to you. This is always why every minute must be maximized and every training should move the needle for performance. It’s about caring for your people because their pride, self-worth, communication skills, personal fulfillment, and self-esteem are as important to making them worth more as any skill you could give them.
Everyone must be appreciated and that’s probably their biggest complaint; not being recognized or acknowledged when they do well instead always reactively when things don’t go right or mistakes are made.
However, all the praise in the world and the happy culture won’t go as far as you need it to go to keep the best team members and grow them to their potential.
You know what I am going to say and, for some doctors, it is the single greatest thing standing in your way of your next breakthrough. You simply must be able to pay your people more money than they can get elsewhere.
This means you have created such a profitable practice dynamic that you can accomplish more with fewer and be not just competitive but market leading in compensation for the most valuable team members you can find. Being not just at peace with this but actually want it, working to make it happen, and setting your team up for that level of success.
There are dozens of ways to make this happen and not just giving raises for longevity or matching the market demand with a number that’s hard for you to swallow. That’s a topic for a different time.
Finally, the third principle: if relationship and experience matter to you when it comes to your patients then it has to matter for your team too.
Most owners just take this for granted because they are “paying them” and thus they are treated like employees, and as I always say, that’s why they act like employees.
Culture, relationship, personal development, and genuine concern for your people is important. You can judge for yourself your own mentality, approach, and investment with your team.
The point is to set yourself apart and not look like an ordinary dental practice to patients but to do that you first have to do it for your team.
We of course help with that as Dental Success Today is really a human potential and personal growth company that happens to do it through engineering the business of dental practices beginning first with you, then your people, and then your patients.
Which brings me to your patients.
For the sake of this Report, I’ll cut right to the chase on the three principles for this other group of assets in your business that you and your team are responsible for growing, developing, caring for, and maximizing.
Again, we’re going big picture here because all the same principles apply though they have different strategic applications.
First, not all patients are created equal because you do actually have finite time, space, and team members in your practice. If we keep all parts equal today then the most significant factor that leads to greater profitability and success is to control the value of the patients who use up your inventory of those limited resources.
Coupled with “not all patients are created equal” is the principle that we are either leaving it up to chance or controlling the value of these patients. Since you own a business and it’s not gambling in Vegas then I would guess you’d like to be able to not just predict but guarantee the outcome.
That requires you to take ownership over building better patients. You can create the customers you have and must accept responsibility for who gets in and how much they are worth to you. Patient value drives practice profit; I could go further to say visit value but we’re staying high level here but we’ll get to that later.
So that leads to the next patient principle about deciding to be a leader and guide, an authority and expert on what patients need, want, and deserve based on what’s in their best interest for optimal health.
This is opposed to the normal method of problem-based dentistry that is just taking orders from patients or their insurance instead of rewriting the rules of engagement by redefining what dentistry is, what health looks like, and setting a different standard of care for your patients.
Once you make this decision, you simply educate and elevate your patients up. You take control over how they value health and dentistry and how they make decisions about their investments and responsibility for it.
Finally, related to the patient principles, we are not just treating them like a customer trying to please them. You get to create an experience that delivers greater belief and value in dentistry.
If you give them the average dental experience, they’ll give you back average patient value. If you take them through something extraordinary, they will return an extraordinary value (and referrals, reviews, and everything else).
The willingness to accept the fact that you do actually determine the value, the yeses, the final outcome by way of your patient educational experience is a different level of ‘ownership’ most doctors aren’t willing to acknowledge.
Most just make excuses that they need more and/or better patients or they abdicate everything to the team and they just show up to do the dentistry in the schedule.
There’s a different approach to dentistry where the team, the doctor, and the patient are all in it together each living up to their role to realize great health and quality of life.
This all comes down to one decision: do you want to be comparable to any other ordinary practice for the place your patients call their dental home and your team call their life’s work? Or do you want to create something altogether different, unique, and unrivaled by choosing your own design that puts you in a category of one?
We’ll find out in the Weekly Reports to come. Stay tuned.
