So far, we have taken a thorough look at “beginning with the end in mind” for all aspects of your practice and really your life in general with Dentistry serving as a vehicle for all of the other things you want to do.
I’ve broken down how knowing the desired outcome facilitates the decisions that need to be made, what systems need to be in place, and the overall approach you should take within your business. Done effectively, this now makes your path to achievement very clear.
At the point of clarity over your outcome, you then follow my fundamental business structure of reverse engineering every thing you want to see happen. That leads us towards being able to proactively create whatever we want by executing methodical steps to sustainable and predictable success.
We are going to dive into exactly how you operate a business, lead a team, and help your patients proactively next week.
Today, I want to give you some specific examples over how reverse engineering works inside of the four biggest leverage points in the daily operations of dentistry.
First, we’ll take the schedule.
Perhaps the schedule is the easiest thing there is to work backwards on – at least in concept. One of the reasons I never advocate or teach “templates” for the schedule, but instead talk about “guidelines” to setting up the parameters and structure of it, is because real-life can’t be drawn with a stencil. It simply doesn’t work.
Instead, what does work is to understand that to achieve certain goals we have to first have those goals set and then we have to have a structure in the form of the schedule. It is a math problem that is represented by patients and procedures that is worked into the capacity of both time and space.
Once you have these in place, you can then go to the qualitative side of the schedule in terms of flow, style, approach, who, and how based on your preferences.
I’m not going to go into the structure and details of the schedule that works here but just bringing to the surface the necessary order in which you have to reverse engineer it.
Of course, there is the next challenge once this has been decided… where we get the dentistry to put into the schedule you have just created to accomplish your goals.
That brings us to how we fill that schedule and the only way is through presenting of treatment. Obviously, you have to diagnose comprehensively in order to have comprehensive appointments to put in the schedule.
Let’s jump to the biggest leverage point for the value of your schedule: how treatment is presented. This is because we can only schedule the size, value, and timing of appointments based on how they are illustrated to and talked about with the patients themselves.
I can tell you this: more practices are stuck at a plateau because of this one thing right here than just about anything else. The trick to reverse engineering how you present treatment is to do pretty much the opposite of what everyone does. Everyone goes straight to money and/or insurance.
Instead, we go back to the problems, show the proof, talk big picture, and at the same time emphasize goals as it relates to outcomes for the patient. From there we are getting the clinical yes first before the financial yes second. That results in scheduling as large of appointments as possible based on what is most effective and preferred by the doctor.
Summarized like this: do not let the treatment steps, stages, appointments dictate the flow of money; let the flow of money dictate the treatment. Meaning that if we can collect as much as possible up front by focusing on the big picture we can cluster and bundle a lot more treatment at once. Instead of automatically presenting one tooth or even one quadrant at a time and therefore self-limit the size of appointments that are going to be available to build the value in the schedule in the first place.
Okay, so in order to get acceptance on as much treatment as possible we have to reverse engineer the overall patient experience that leads up to the treatment presentation itself.
Since we have talked about the in-op doctor engagement many times, I just want to go all the way out to the front. Here is what we must know: whatever outcome we want to have happen in the patients’ mouths we have to start on the phone, in the welcome material, in the interview, with every triangle of trust and with each team member’s communication.
I always say the battle for case acceptance is won before it ever has to be fought, if you do it right.
If you aren’t getting as much acceptance as you want (but you are actually diagnosing comprehensively as to your own philosophy and you are presenting big picture), because patients object to the money or other excuses, then you have to work backwards as to where you are not building enough value along the way. From phone to follow-through there is something out of alignment with what you want to accomplish for your patients’ benefit and health.
And finally, if we are going to be successful in doing any of these things and we want to “win the day,” as I like to say it, then we have to have a plan for success every single day before the day begins.
This means that you literally start every day knowing how you are going to help your patients get healthy, where opportunity exist, and what each team member is going to do to contribute.
It means that you should be able to see the success of your goals coming to fruition before they happen because you have “lived it” first at the start of everyday. Then you review your progress at the end of the day to ensure nothing is missing and every action, patient, dollar of treatment is accounted for.
That is how you engineer success. Deliberately.
I will also talk about “the future” too and getting ahead of the schedule… don’t worry that’s coming. For today, we are talking about how you can create and control the outcomes you want every-single-day in your practice.
You see, all of these things are capable of being reverse engineered so that there is guaranteed victories and that, as I said last week, you are working with an advantage instead of a disadvantage.
That’s just it, in business and in life, you don’t have to rely on luck or accidents or hoping that things go your way. You can engineer them to happen if you know what outcome you want and work backwards to achieve it.
You do that with every procedure and hopefully with every treatment plan so why would you not do that for everything else.
Next week, we’ll talk about the final step to making success easier for yourself, your team and your patients by learning to be one step ahead.
