We discuss a broad range of topics here in our weekly Monday Morning Huddles. From concepts to activities, philosophy to strategy, and even specific questions to ask or phrases to use.
Today, I’d like to revisit a very important principle and use it to bring together much of what we’ve discussed over the past several weeks in regards to how you communicate with your patients.
If you think about what makes your practice so much different from ordinary dental practices there are what I would consider four major aspects.
Most of all, you, the people. You can’t find all of you anywhere else and your standard of excellence, your personalities, and your positive culture are amazing.
The other is your actual patient experience, this brought to life by the people so of course it would be extraordinary. Still, you choose to deliberately do things at a higher level for both customer (or patient) service but also your perspective of what each visit represents. You treat every visit as the most important one because every patient matters.
Then we have your overall commitment to your patients in terms of actually valuing the relationship, believing in the quality over quantity, and making this a place where people belong not just show up to do transactional dentistry.
Finally, we have the one that makes all the others more valuable and that is your approach to dentistry itself. You have redefined what dentistry is by raising the bar on the standard of health and of how patients make decisions about their health.
These four things come together to make a place that is quite different from what most people believe “the dentist” to be and what occurs at other practices. Technically, if you are doing it right, then you find your practice to be very different than anything you originally thought “dentistry” to be in every way from business, to relationship, from team to patient, from dentistry to health, and all the moving parts and people in between.
It is the marriage between these four components, not just ideas, not just strategies, but really building blocks that form your practice. What else is there? Other than the people, the experience, the patient’s health, and the clinical philosophy of the practice.
Now, if you are doing your homework and you are studying these Monday Morning Huddles, then your mind goes immediately to application of the ideas I’m presenting.
That means you are thinking to yourself… “hmm, out of these four things how well are we doing? Are we on point every day with every patient?”
You could grade yourself from A to F on your culture, energy, teamwork and you could do the same with the experience, the dentistry, and how well you are doing at actually making your patients healthy.
That would be a worthy thing to do and then to ask yourself what would make you an A+ and more importantly what makes you an A+ every single day.
Instead, today, I want to step back even further. Don’t worry, we’ll get there. We are going to call this series over the next few weeks, you guessed it, The Back To School Monday Morning Huddles. What else would you expect right now?
Before we do that let’s back up and let me ask you two multi-faceted questions…
1st – How do you believe your practice to be different? And are you different enough? Are you really living your differences and uniqueness’s? How so?
It’s very easy to fall into a rut or complacency of doing things the way you’ve always done them instead of remembering that you have created something special here. Let’s not lose sight over what makes it so?
2nd – The next big one, which we are going to come back to next week in more depth… have you clearly (keyword) and definitively (keyword) defined how your patients experience and value dentistry as a result of your approach? What is this definition and how can it be improved?
If you haven’t or if you are inconsistent with it, then you are leaving patients up to their own volition, their past experiences, and their preconceived ideas about dentistry (which likely means: reactive, problem based, emergency minded, wait until it hurts dentistry).
I’m going to stop right there because those questions are individually worthy of their own dedicated team meeting and could very easily be a Practice Focus for your team all by themselves.
Do this Monday Morning Huddle justice and have these discussions because next week we’ll go back to school. We’ll be working backwards through the four pillars of success and ultimately differentiation in your practice. I promise you we’ll find exciting new breakthroughs along with tried and true ‘back to basics’ that you can sharpen up to make a greater impact, have more fun, and achieve that perfect report card with all A’s!
