We have talked about what it takes to become and be an Entrepreneurial Dentist. The advantage is total and complete control of your life with your practice fitting into your life as you see fit and determine. We call this practicing on your own terms; no different than living on your own terms.
The reason why it takes being entrepreneurial is because it is the only way to have the power to create, arrange and align everything in your practice as a business to be detached from outside forces that try to shape and shift you into being dependent on them.
Dependence on anything is in and of itself a limiting factor and creates lack of certainty and predictable control over outcomes.
Perhaps the greatest of these is the thing that makes your world go round in dentistry – Your Patients. Without them you have nothing else.
So how does one, using the principles of the Entrepreneurial Dentist, become INDEPENDENT from the need for patients while at the same time keeping your practice growing, thriving and profitable?
The answers have been included in each part of our Entrepreneurial Dentist series that we have been journeying through together…
Patient Centric Revisited by making your Practice designed by YOU not others.
The Psychology of Selling and taking responsibility for your patients and your financial outcomes.
Ensuring that you are focused on and built to be about and provide Relationship Based Dentistry.
Still none of these things matter if you have no patients. Independence from patients is realized when you have actually created and achieved a Referral Driven Practice.
Referral Driven is not as it appears on the surface. What it is not is begging and bribing your patients for business and to bring in their friends and family so you have something to do.
The opposite of this is relying on outside marketing and advertising that you have to pay for and that puts you in direct competition and comparison of every other dentist out there that is also trying to get new patients. By the way, that’s all of them.
Either way, when you are dependent on marketing or you are dependent on your patients – you have given up control. You will fell the ebbs and flows of this and often have a feast or famine circumstance. It will have you making a lot one month and then losing all that you made the next month because there is no consistency.
Before I define what a Referral Driven Practice is – let me say I am all for marketing. I came into Dentistry a long long time ago strictly focused on attracting (and creating) A Patients through marketing.
Marketing is good when it is done right. Not what I call stranger danger: attracting anyone at any cost or by compromising your integrity that you worked hard to establish (by means of the first three parts of becoming an Entrepreneurial Dentist).
However, you must not be afraid of deliberately orchestrating new patients into your practice so that you are NOT at the mercy of any one source.
Now, here is the key to this and what really separates the real entrepreneurs from the self-employed dentists working in their own practice totally dependent on accidents and random acts of dentistry to have a good month every month…
Entrepreneurs establish systems that are aligned with their principles and delivery reliable results, ultimately leading to quality patients entering a process that will cultivate high value patients in your chosen practice model.
When you focus on and commit to creating a referral driven practice, you will apply proven marketing systems to your sales (patient) experience before, during and after every single point of engagement. You will therefore create a machine like a patient ATM that never runs out of money because one patient begets another patient which begets another and so on.
To do this, it can’t be left up to chance and you expect to have sustainability month in and month out. Effort, like money, can be placed in a wide varying degree of vehicles and avenues that all give you a better or worse return on your investment.
The Entrepreneurial Dentist considers all forms of patient attraction devices, channels, avenues and strategies that can be controlled and that deliver quality patients seeking something more than commoditized services.
Above all else, the patient-get-a-patient method is superior because you overcome the biggest negative forces: trust (credibility) and reason why (motivation), with those patients who are referred.
Typical advertising does the exact opposite and you have to work even harder at building trust and establishing credibility. You can often have a motivated patient, as long as you aren’t focusing on discounts and gimmicks, but instead substantive and specific context that drives a patient to call you.
Here’s the bad news: even when you desire to create a referral driven practice, most practice owners stop at the most elementary idea of “word of mouth” and otherwise leave it up to the complete dependence of their patients to tell others.
When you become an Entrepreneurial Dentist you leave it up to no one by following my principle of never being dependent on anything or anyone else. Instead, you combine together the systems I talked about with proven strategies that will serve as catalyst to take the idea of patient-get-a-patient and turn it into a multi-faceted, integrated cultural shift in your practice that drives and creates many different streams and sources of patients.
We also expand on this strategy to build team member get-a-patient, referral source (business entity or individual) get-a-patient, practice (as an entity through marketing or other methods) get-a-patient and you end up with a multiplication effect of layered referral driven initiatives that will drive the optimal number of patients. And there should be a RIGHT number for you to make your practice math work. If you have everything else organized properly, you know what your processes will do with x number of new patients.
Best of all, a Referral Driven Practice is fun because patients come to you because of who you are and what you do; not just because you’re a dentist or they have a coupon or you take their insurance or they have an emergency or they need a cleaning.
That is the point and purpose of being an Entrepreneurial Dentist and what defines you. You are building your practice on stable ground with a solid foundation never left up to any one thing or at the mercy of outside forces.
You built it from the inside out because that’s what gives you the greatest autonomy, provides the most peace of mind, and protects your life’s work.
And now, with your business as an asset and a quality base of patients flowing in, we move to the next Entrepreneurial Dentist concept that you can’t live without.
To Be Continued Next Week
