How To Breakthrough Limitations and Win On Purpose

I know you have heard the expression, “Stack the deck in your favor.”  Of course, frowned upon in card games but incredibly smart in real life.

You absolutely want to stack the deck in your favor.  You want to leave as little up to chance as possible.  Always.

You don’t get lucky by accident – at least not consistently lucky.  You will have something that appears random happen to you but only because you put yourself in a position to allow it.

When it comes to your team work and success in your practice there are challenges that you have to find a way to overcome.  Otherwise you will remain in a plateaued state or worse yet you will have ups and downs leaving you with inconsistent results.

As you know success takes discipline.  Why?  Because the same things that led to success once, will lead to it again.  It requires focus and consistently on the same principles over and over and over again.

Imagine a team member (or worse a doctor), who says, “You know today I really just don’t want to talk to patients about dentistry – I’m tired,” or, “Yesterday was so good that today we can just ease up,” or, “If they don’t accept treatment, it’s okay we’ll see them again sometime.”

Of course, this sounds ridiculous.  The problem is: we all are only human and while you might not say this out loud, you might say it in your mind or your actions, attitude, focus, energy might be saying it.

Success requires discipline because you have to do what works with every single patient every single time.

There are things that we know are going to happen…

You will run late.

Patients won’t show up.

Patients will use insurance as excuse.

Some new patients may not be ready for treatment.

Insurance will continue to discount your fees (they will never offer to pay you more voluntarily – remember that).

There will be snow days (hopefully not any more this year).

The challenge is to not accept things ‘happening to you’ but to be proactive and instead do something about it.

You can more effectively manage your schedule or at least control expectations of patients.

You can get deposits on appointments or better yet all the money paid in advance.

You can be transparent with patients and set goals so that they know you are not here to do insurance dentistry for them but achieve optimal health which they will have to take responsible for.

You can follow my retention protocols of relationship-first treatment-second and keep patients in the practice so that you can cultivate more case acceptance over time.

There is always something you can do.

Snow days?  Make ‘em up like they do in school.  You have goals to achieve.  Everything is possible – maybe not to prevent – but to always win.

Here is what I would challenge and encourage you to do this week…

Ask every team member to come up with a typical setback that you face.  Could be an empty hour in hygiene, could be patient cancelling, could be new patient not accepting, could be many other tiny things that you notice and maybe not no one else does.

Then I want you to discuss how you can prevent this setback, challenge, problem from happening.

Then I want you to talk about what you can do to be proactive if and when it does happen so that not all is lost.

Always ask yourself: where is the opportunity in what just happened?

With all problems and limitations – first try to prevent, preempt and avoid them.

If that can’t be done, mitigate and minimize damages and look for the profit, potential, positive and opportunity in it.

Then get back to stacking the deck in your favor and having expectations that match your goals and actions that are congruent with your expectations.

You will create your own success – not accidentally.  And it will not be without limitations, challenges and problems.  Every day, great teams and practices win in spite of variables, circumstances and limitations because they are built to win and so can you.