Are You Missing The Most Important Point In Your Practice?

I have said very bluntly right here that many practices (Doctors and Team Members alike), make ‘success’ in Dentistry far more difficult than it is and than it should be.

This is not to say it is necessarily easy.  Is anything worth doing completely easy?

However it doesn’t have to be hard.

When you are looking for your next breakthrough, the only place to look at is what is being diagnosed and accepted by your patients.  There literally is nothing else that moves the needle.  

Your business is built on what patients say yes to and therefore is all about the experience they have, the belief in value you help build in their minds, and how you establish the stated goals of optimal health based on your practice mission and purpose.

Now, to get more of that, we must have team work, scheduling, and patient education.  Still, it is necessary to have doctors that have the confidence and ability to diagnose and influence patients.  Of course, we also need patients.

At the end of the day though, if I just run a big broad brush stroke across the industry, the biggest reason why practices don’t achieve growth and breakthroughs is because their practice isn’t engineered to get more profitable results with these two pillars (of which everything else revolves around and serves as the foundation for the financial results of dentistry).

Most people are missing the point and working on the wrong problems.

They are either delusional, full of excuses, and in their own way so they become distracted by problems that are either symptoms of something greater or truly not going to make a big enough difference.  They focus on the superficial, as I discussed last week about getting beneath the surface of symptoms and to the root cause of why something is the way it is.

This is why the most powerful thing we can work on in any practice is the culture and communication of how you engage with your patients and get them to want to get healthier faster.

I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.  It comes down to what you are focused on and what the point of every day in your mind and the minds of your team members is.

Now the flip side of this is in addition to working on the wrong ‘problem’ or priorities, you can be sabotaging the success of diagnosis and case acceptance in the first place.

Yes, with verbiage but that’s not all.  With team or doctor attitude, with the way money is presented or insurance is discussed, and how diagnosis is done (is it dumped or dictated or what I call self-diagnosed by the patient where they are made part of the experience).

It can be because you are too busy to focus on doing anything other than just talking about, pointing out, and fixing the obvious visual problems.  You don’t have real serious big picture conversations with your patients.

This is why open, honest, complete discussions and assessments from every team member and doctor is vital for clarity of where and how everyone can improve.

There are powerful success strategies to help facilitate the improvement of the most important point of your daily success from quality and personal phone calls to thorough and involved rescreening of patients and giving every one of them comprehensive check-ups.

Showing more pictures and asking patients what they see and talking about them makes your job easier because the patient will talk themselves right into a beautiful treatment plan (possibly better and more big picture than you).

Is any of this rocket science?  No. 

Is it new?  No.

Does it matter if it is rocket science or new or hard or easy or anything else?  No, of course not.  What matters is what works.  


Where you put your focus is going to determine first and foremost how great your results are going to be and how fast you are going to get them.

You can change today’s (your next clinical day) results with one single patient.

A case can make a month in any practice, no matter how big or small you are.

There will always be a lot of things that distract you, all kinds of excuses to get in the way, and plenty of fingers to point in blame – and then there will always be this one important priority, that if improved and committed to, will be the difference maker for everything else.

This is the rising tide.

I’m not sure when I’m going to do it but I will do it – I am going to break down, spell out, and walk you through the Case Acceptance Factors.  These are the underlying elements that give the greatest impact on improving the treatment patients say yes to.

All that said, the thing you can do right now is make sure that every day every person in your practice – most of all yourself – is focused on the greatest opportunities to help your patients in the best way possible.

When your focus is on this, when everything said in your morning huddle drives this forward, when every protocol in hygiene has this in mind, when every triangle of trust is set up to achieve it, and when every team member has individual objectives specific to this then you will see momentum build.  

Still, it can’t stop there.  It has to be in the follow-up and when you close out your day.  Every part of your practice and your team accountability must force yourselves to focus on reality.  What is actually happening – not what we feel or think but what is – and this tells us everything.

I’ll pick a time coming up to take this foundational pillar of success in every dental practice (your engagement with your patients and your ability to influence them to invest in their health), and do a deep dive on it like I explained last week.

In the meantime, next week I’m going to take it to a higher level and explain to you the difference between diagnosing and treatment planning and the bridge that has to be built in between the two in order for your patients to move forward.

There is a switch you have to flip to get bigger yeses faster that will help you bring this week’s Report to life.

Right now, before you do anything else, please check the focus of your days, your team’s mentality, and really think about what you are accomplishing every day.  You can’t be distracted by other things.  Even if they might be important, they sure don’t matter as much as this, as nothing does.

When your daily commitment is this, amazing things will happen… for you and for your patients!