Today, we begin talking about making your practice worth more to you in less time by driving up profitability. Regardless of your general or specialty practice model and your clinical philosophy, there are foundational principles that must be in place to achieve more from less and bring to life what you worked on last week.
This is what I call being structured for success.
Unfortunately, most practices aren’t. They are set up just to be a machine that requires the doctors and team to robotically go through the motions of a rinse and repeat cycle. Start day, go through a routine, finish day, waking up tomorrow, and do it again.
You end up living for the weekend without any real objectives or goals because they don’t think they can achieve goals on purpose.
Here is where we take your vision to a more tangible level…
If you’ve studied me carefully and read my Weekly Reports (or my book “The Dental Success Secret”), you are familiar with my term and application of Reverse Engineering to everything inside of your practice as well as your life.
None the less, it is one thing to have a formula (and yes, the math does have to add up), but you can’t stop there. You must have your practice structured to achieve the results that you want.
So many people get caught up doing things that do not drive actual results. This is where Doctors go wrong: thinking that the problem is volume or capacity or time or space or people instead of realizing that the practice is set-up to deliver exactly the result you are most consistently receiving.
What we have to do is define and then match the execution of each of the core pillars within your practice to create the results that you want by working backwards – both in terms of your daily value of collections coupled with your overhead staying under control so you can spin off enough profit to achieve your actual goals.
The structure for success must contain these five core elements that every practice has and if any of them are out of whack, underperforming, or misaligned then you will be disappointed in the financial result.
You might mistake these for inefficiencies, and there will be those, but instead what it is more likely are deficiencies; which in lies a vast difference.
Here is what a practice structured for success must have control over and deliberately execute according to the vision and future-focused objectives you came up with last week.
Value Based Schedule plus Time and Capacity Management
High Performing Team and effective Communication
Purposeful Patient Education and Verbiage
Customized Patient Experiences
Managing the flow of Treatment and Money
Of course, I could unpack each of these, first you should do it. You should sit down and methodically review each of these five and not just rate yourself on a scale from one to ten but look at just how ideal each of these are and how you would define your approach.
Moreover, you should ask yourself is there something that should be done differently based on your goals today versus what they were years ago or months ago.
What gaps or deficiencies can you point to in any or all of these areas? You won’t have to look very hard to find one-thing or maybe some-things in each of them that you would consider your sticking point – the things that are holding you back from your potential.
This should give you peace of mind and confidence that if there are things that could be and should be done better and improved upon, than you can achieve a better result.
Of course, the structure for success is not all that matters. It is what must matter first if you are going to build on top of what you have and grow from the foundation you’ve built in your practice for the future.
At the end of the day, the greatest plateau and also leverage point comes from the origin of where the dentistry is created first.
I’m talking about the actual vision of the clinical dentistry and how it all comes to life. It first must be clear in your mind and then you align all of the five areas of the practice to match and to serve as catalyst to get the clinical outcome you want.
When this happens you no longer need volume to win and you can achieve more with less.
Where most doctors go is expanding their technology or doing clinical team training. All of that can be great, however the real issue is either you know what to diagnosis and you choose not to, or you don’t convey it effectively to the Patient. No matter what you want and feel is important won’t make a difference if the patients doesn’t feel the same.
That is why the greatest breakthrough in every practice is the origin of where dentistry comes from and it’s not just the mouth of your patients.
When you master this, you have unlimited leverage and you have no limits at all to what can be achieved in any given amount of time you choose to work and how you want to run your practice.
The ultimate secret is not difficult nor is it rocket-science. It is to have fun engaging your patients in what you really want to do for them, the vision you see in their mouth, and making their lives better.
Next week, in one paragraph I will give you the clearest, most concise way to present complete, comprehensive, and optimal treatment every single time that will have your patients willingly and excitedly ready to take responsibility for their health, invest in their future, and accept optimal treatment.
Just remember, done right it does actually and always begin with you first – the patient follows the doctor’s lead – not the other way around.
If you are getting less than you want and you are plateaued by case acceptance and size of appointment (always the greatest limiting factor), then it is important to look at how you are doing and ask yourself if you might be undermining what your patients truly deserve (whether deliberately or subconsciously).
Which ever it may be, we’ll fix it next week. Then we’ll move on to all the other people around you who are involved and can move forward (or deter) what you want to accomplish.
This is where the greatest leverage is at and where the origin of profitable growth comes from. That’s where we’ll take the focus next.
