Mastering The Five “P’s”

You’ve heard this…but how does it apply to every single day in the operations of your Practice.

Proper
Planning
Prevents
Poor
Performance

I’m going to take this backwards to help you understand and fully execute an aggressive and effective overall approach to your daily success.

If there was one thing that could make an incredible difference in the doubling of your results, it would be this – how you prepare for your days and follow the 5 P’s.

First things first…this is an EVERYONE concept. Not one person, certainly not just the doctor. And, while you can have a specific Team Member with more focused time and allocation to support this idea, it is a shared responsibility over the patients and outcomes that each Team Member should and must be responsible for.

In most Practices, there is no person who has specific accountability over the daily results and what happened to achieve the goals of the practice. Pretty much, it’s about going through the motions, seeing the patients in the schedule, answering phone calls that come in and being reactive.

That’s right… Reactive.

And it makes me so furious because it’s pathetic and the lowest form of any type of professionalism on earth and it darn sure isn’t the way you run a business or care for the health of patients.

In control. Deliberate management. Proactive responsibility. And tactical strategic execution of daily operations to achieve a stated, agreed upon, known outcomes that makes the day itself and the investment in your people, practice, and patients actually worth it.

So, the 5P’s in reverse

Performance – define it, what are the results, how do you determine performance

Should be very simple. To have a viable practice where everyone reach their goals as individuals and as a team, we are going to achieve X$’s / Day of created dentistry diagnosed and accepted into the schedule to help our patients get healthy.

That number per day multiplied by the days we work gives us the goal for the month that provides the practice with its growth objective and team bonus to actually have prosperous careers. Plus of course, the profit for the practice and doctor which is the entire point of owning a business – if not – then get out and get a job.

Every person then has a piece of the daily goal that is their sole responsibility to manage and oversee based on the patients they are going to engage, care for and interact with.

Poor – well this one is very easy…if you don’t achieve the definition of performance then you are poor. The point of the 5 P’s is to prevent that from happening. It should not be pushed under the rug or ignored, if in fact ‘poor’ results happen everyone must be accountable and called out on it; and then discussed and decided on how to make it different – NOT NEXT MONTH – but tomorrow.

That’s the difference between champions and habitual losers. One doesn’t tolerate losses or take them lightly, the other expects to underperform and takes no responsibility for it.

Prevents – they say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, I’d say it’s more than that, that is an understatement. When you are proactive by nature, you create momentum in a positive way.

Quick example, when you let patients make decisions based on insurance you are doing nothing to help them or yourself; instead you are enabling the profits of your practice to be eroded.

If, on the other hand, you were focused on preventing that scenario you would preface the discussion, purpose, and idea of insurance before, during and after the treatment is presented and take control over the conversation so the Patient now has a structured method of how and why to make the right decision instead of you waiting to have to defend and justify or worse yet just give up and give in.

You prevent things by planning…

Planning – as I have told you here before, you plan the day before for the next day, then you action plan and execute strategy in the morning huddle.
Planning in dentistry is knowing your patients, is identifying opportunity, and is working as a team to understand the “playbook” for the day. This ensures everyone is in the right places, owning the right outcomes and dividing-and-conquering effectively to maximize each patients visit and opportunity to get healthy.

It’s not about reciting the schedule and going through what already is known and in front of everyone’s face or talking about treatments for the day which should already be second nature and memorized.

You plan to win, to succeed, to perform and do well. Whatever it takes to make a day ideal and successful, well that’s what you should be doing, every one of them.

Proper – what is proper planning…it’s all of these things combined.

Specifically, it’s analyzing whether Patients have treatment plans existing or they have nothing and they need to be formally diagnosed. It means you are firing on all cylinders and each bucket of production income stream is alive and well.

It means your team is focused, aware, well trained, motivated, and inspired. It means you don’t settle for less than the standard of excellence in performance; the one you must have, you desire to have, and you have built your practice around.

There is so much that goes into this little saying that has been around for generations and sounds so simple in theory but is so powerful in application.

Go after it – get it done – and live it out daily in your dental practice business and watch your growth explode and the consistency of your team be rock solid. You watch just how effortless and systematic true, successful practice operations can be.