How To Keep Your Practice From Plateauing [Part 2]

Last week, we talked about the fallacy of chasing other people’s dream instead of intentionally pursuing your own.  While it’s okay to find out what fertilizer or technique a person is using to have greener grass, it’s never good to swap yours for someone else’s because you never really know what lies beneath the surface.

Certainly, you know the acres of diamonds story and that’s my point about your dental practice too.

The point is to get clarity about what you really want and be aware of your reasons why.  This includes the way in which you want to practice and the clinical philosophy for your patients.

It’s no mystery why some practices do better than others even when they both say they want the similar things.  Why a practice with the same number of ops, team members, patients, and ideals of dentistry both get dramatically different results.

Even when everything else is the same, you can still get more out of what you’ve already got.  There is no accident to success and the same goes for plateaus – there is always a reason why you haven’t been able to breakthrough.

Let’s dive into the fastest ways you can make a difference to achieve your own success and explode past whatever plateaus you are experiencing in your practice right now.

I’ll give you one from each pillar…

The first plateau is always in thinking, not doing.  Most ‘do’ plenty of work and make enough effort.  So what gives?  It’s the thinking.

If you have already achieved goals you once thought not possible or if you are reasonably satisfied and happy with where you are at – then that is a plateau.  You get to choose if you want to change it but if you desire something more there is only one way to fix it…

Set higher goals!

Yep, it sounds so obvious but it is the very first thing that must happen.  You must expect more out of yourself, your team, your patients, your practice.  You have to believe you deserve more and that more is possible.

It is, I assure you.  It always is.  You may not like what is required to get more out of it – but that’s another story.  I have yet to meet a doctor that I could not show them exactly how to achieve the goals they want on their own terms and in the style in which they want to do it.  Often, this is a result of limited belief.

To accomplish bigger, better, more significant goals… you’ve got to believe in them, set them and then back them up with action worthy of the goals.

The next plateau that piggybacks on goals are numbers, actually ‘quantifications of success.’  You must pay attention to the right numbers; and the keyword there is of course ‘right’ because not all numbers are created equal.

For example: if you are plateauing in production and collections – then you can’t possibly break through the plateau by looking at your production and collections.

Common sense I know.  At least once it has been read out loud.

You must go beneath the surface of the numbers that created the production and collections.  Again, obviously, case acceptance is a contributor and the top line in all of dentistry, diagnosis.

If we are going to win in your numbers we need to know where the numbers are coming from – not where they ended up.

I see practices all the time that have “good” case acceptance but it’s because they are only presenting the first step, tooth, quadrant of work and getting insurance money.  Not very tough.  Or practices that say they want to do x dollars a day but they aren’t even diagnosing enough to get there.

And there are all kinds of ways to grow diagnosis, but that’s a Weekly Report for another time.

And then there is the next plateau that I find most often in practices that are stymied for growth, aren’t having fun anymore, have lost their way or have fallen into a volume trap.

And that’s being reactive instead of proactive.

Yes, the fastest thing to fix ‘tactically’ that will change the previous two and make any goal possible is to get out ahead of the variables and the root cause (both in dentistry and in business) of your setbacks, holdups and sticking points.

Be proactive with everything…  Your schedule, phone calls, insurance, collections, team member issues, patient complaints, whatever.  Don’t wait to react, take action before so you don’t have to constantly be playing defense.

We want to be scoring points all day long, not putting out fires or doing meaningless tasks that have nothing to do with helping patients by creating and delivering dentistry.

I could go into great detail here because it’s every part of the practice.  Doctors who watch and wait (which train patients to be emergency-minded).  Team Members who over emphasize insurance and present it first instead of big picture, health-based dentistry.  This culture even reaches patients who don’t show up because they don’t value their appointment – they prefer a reactive solution instead of proactive prevention.

You get the idea.  You can play a game with your team and pick out every single area of the practice that you want to go differently.  Work backwards until you find what you could have done proactively.  Then make new protocols to fix it and stick to it.

Finally for today, breaking through your next growth level and preventing any stagnation comes down to what you give your patients a chance to say yes to.

As you know, my mantra is, “We only help the people who say yes.”  When I see practices stall out it always comes down to getting back to your core principles and keeping the main thing the main thing.

That main thing is helping your patients get healthy based on your philosophy.  Unfortunately, there are only a handful of doctors I can think of in my lifetime that truly presented everything they could to every patient in order to help them achieve optimal health.

Now, I’m not talking about bulldozing over every patient with big case full mouth as-seen-on-TV-you-know-who-I-am-talking-about-style-pull-em-before-you-lose-em dentistry.

I’m simply asking you to stop sabotaging yourself.  I hear it every day from doctors I meet.  I ask what kind of dentistry do you want to do?  Then I say what kind are you doing?  Then I ask why?  And 99 out of 100 times there is some blatantly obvious means of sabotage on the phone, in the office, with the materials, spoken by the team/doctor or simply just in the way the diagnosis is delivered to the patient.

This is why the average value of every visit is still at best a few teeth and usually one tooth at a time.  Just take your typical daily performance (back out hygiene) and then divide by the number of patients you see in a day.  You tell me how that makes you feel and what it says about keeping the main thing the main thing.

I’m not accusing you, of course.  I’m talking generalities here.  We can let the numbers speak for themselves.  None the less, it’s good news because it means there are a whole lot of reasons why you are plateaued, which in turn, means we can explode through it like never before to achieve your next level of growth, profit, fun and dentistry very quickly.

Ultimately, you have to decide to push the limits if you want more out of your practice.  I did not say work longer or see more patients or get bigger.  Nope, I said push the limits – yours, your teams, your patients – and that begins right here with these four key factors.

We’ll pick up right there next week as we move into our five key areas of practice success and your daily actions in order to do exactly that.