Now, get ready for an explosion – to your mindset and to the amount of treatment that you get accepted all at once.
As you know, my famous Value-Based Scheduling approach (that orchestrates your daily goal achievement while protecting your time and people), is plateau breaking and record setting. It finally allows you to make money all day long and have a predictable, controlled method to exceed your goals every single day.
The question I get most often about this though is, “How do we get the dentistry to fill it?” Usually the question is more along the lines of, “How do we get more patients to fill it up?”
And it is a bad question because it is never about the number of patients but the amount of dentistry. Sure, we need new patients, any business would and does. However, very few practices are to the point where they do not have enough opportunity moving in and out of their practice every day to achieve their goals. You should NOT be dependent on new patients unless you are in a specialty practice or doing only full mouth makeovers without any hygiene at all.
And we do have many people like that reading this. In which case, you do have a single business model driven by new patients and that’s fine. Yet, what I’m about to say, is even more important to you.
This brings me to probably one of the most overlooked and yet easiest ways to change the way your patients look at treatment and how they say yes. Finally putting the control into your hands of how much you schedule (ideally all of it), at least a half or a quadrant of their mouth but never less than that; except with they have only one tooth to do something with.
Case Acceptance Destroyer and Sabotage Trait #3 of 5…
Is all about using treatment plans and stair stepping visits in front of the patients’ eyes so they immediately diminish the big picture outcome you worked so hard to create with your photographs and discussions with them.
Big cases are broken down by steps on a piece of paper and therefore destroy the patients’ vision of “comprehensive” and they begin to immediately going back to “optional treatment” and making decisions on one step at a time.
This is what creates patients’ skepticism and lack of desire to even come back into the office, because now every visit they show up for you have to resell them on the next step of treatment. Instead of doing a better job of getting a comprehensive “YES” to the total plan based on their desire to achieve the outcome you have illustrated to them.
Even if you get the ever important clinical yes before you move to money and treatment plan, you can undo that by outlining the steps of the visits.
Many people (and I know it is hard to believe), do not even offer anything to the patient except the next step. Often not even telling them about the future and subsequent steps that are going to be required. Which is the worst.
But it still isn’t good to have visits broken down on paper until AFTER the patient has fully committed, ideally invested and then moves on to scheduling. This allows you to cluster and bundle as much treatment as possible into as few visits as you can so that you dramatically increase your hourly value and achieve your goal faster every day with much fewer patient bodies required.
I can give you example after example of doctors with $400, $800, $1,200 average hourly values for their clinical days which we DOUBLED simply as a result of implementing this. Now they control the value based scheduling because they control the structure and treatment of each visit. You sabotage yourself by telling or showing them the breakdown before the deal is done.
And it doesn’t matter if you are at the low end or the high end of your hourly value. Mastering this will result in dramatic increases. Eventually you will be able to do it again and again – until we get your hours to your goal.
Your practice is always plateaued at the total amount of revenue you have made possible by how you structure your day and the hourly value you accept. This is a result of how you have managed this critical part of the patient experience and case acceptance process right here.
Dig deep on this one… think through every sabotage trait so far and see how they link together. And remember each one builds on the next.
If you need help let me know. I love receiving your questions, examples or feedback. No matter what level you are at, I promise I have the strategies to achieve your next sustainable breakthrough. I can see inside of what you are doing and where you are sabotaging yourselves. By fixing this and realigning it, it will make your lives easier and your patients healthier faster.
It all comes down to comprehensive and complete case acceptance and turning the production over in as large amounts as possible.
Next week, we talk about the dirtiest word in dentistry… get ready!
