Your Single Greatest Investment

Last week, I gave you five of the most impactful leverage points for every practice.  Most doctors and teams simply leave allow too much leeway for themselves.  It diminishes (often without even being realized), the potential of your practice.

When you take each of those five practice growth components and provide yourself, your team, and your patients more structure you will leave less room for error and achieve your monthly goals on a consistent basis.  All because you embraced the discipline of the math formula for success inside your dental practice business.

The amount of time, effort, thought, and commitment to these will proportionally correlate to your ability to grow your profitability.  Which means, of course, ultimately helping more patients in a more comprehensive, life-changing way.

Some doctors are, both clinically and as the owner of a business, just too casual about the whole thing.  Perhaps it’s laziness or a lack of confidence or complacency or deserve level or distractions or belief in what’s possible or a little of all of the above.

Now, you take that paragraph and our conversations around meaningful specifics (instead of wandering generalities) and you’ve got the greatest breakthrough dynamics you could ever find.  You have the ability to expand beyond your current levels of dentistry and profit without more time, space, team, or patients.

By the way, I do a deep dive on this inside of my new book.  I can’t imagine that you haven’t received it yet.  However, if by chance you missed it, you can still grab a free copy.  It’s already been called the most no-nonsense tactical dental practice profit information ever put together in one place.  Every page is packed with useable and valuable information and you’ll end up with take-action-strategies and decisions to bring everything we are talking about here into reality.

Grab Your Free Copy of My New Book:

Creating A Highly Profitable Dental Practice (That You’ll Actually Enjoy!)

Today, I’d like to move this same concept outside of your practice and merge it together with your lifestyle structure.

Here’s the thing… the place where doctors are truly being too general is with their own daily routines, their life structure, their vacation schedule, their exercise and commitment to health, and their personal time that is not controlled by their clinical schedule.

The question is not are you guilty?  It’s with what, when, and how often?

Let’s call it: Practice Creep.  The practice, ever so slightly, begins to creep more and more into your everyday life and thoughts and schedule and time.  It might be for you that you turn off your practice when you go home, you aren’t bothered by work, team, patients, treatment plans, chart notes, or anything else – which is fine but it’s the thoughts and emotional energy about being present that takes the bigger toll and usually tends to blur the lines.

Look, a business owner who is a serious entrepreneur and doesn’t just want a, hopefully, high paying job understands and accepts the responsibility.  They even embrace the reality that business and personal will mix and overlap.  To a degree, it is what you signed up for when you became “your own boss” – and more importantly “your own investment,” which we’ll get into.

Yes, doctors and teams leave too much wiggle room in their treatment planning, the way treatment is bundled and schedule, how money moves through the practice, with insurance coding, rushed phone calls, time meant for diagnosis, and everything in between.

Yet, the discipline required starts far beyond the dental dynamics that we’ve been talking about.  It goes to how you manage your own mind, health, time, personal schedule, daily routine, sleep, exercise, and of course money.  All the things that either make you a better investment for yourself or a worse one.

If you want to get a greater return from your business, you won’t just work on your business – you will work on yourself.

If you aren’t most excited about who you are and what you are doing in life, we’ve got bigger problems to address and you really need to get to the root of it.

However, the majority of doctors here reading this (because to be here with us you are obliviously an ambitious minded individual who believes in your own potential), see the bigger picture.  You own the responsibility, not just the business, which is far different and greater.  Anyone can own a business but very few, the smallest percentage, own the responsibility that comes with it.

That responsibility begins outside of the business and having a meaningfully specific, not a wandering generality, of a life plan and a personal modus operandi complete with what you will and won’t tolerate, how you will and won’t work, what your goals are and aren’t, and what you are in pursuit of and what you won’t allow yourself to be distracted by.

I talk or write about this every single week in form, and possibly every single day.  That is the power and really necessity of focus required to really get to a higher level in life, wealth, health, family, dentistry, you name it.

It’s not enough to have a goal or be committed in general.  You must define as specifically as possible what you consider success, what exactly you are committed to, and most of all how you will operate, execute, carryout, live, and work in order to bring it to realization.

Clarity is nothing new to you or to our work here together.  None the less, it is also something that isn’t gained once and done – it constantly evolves.  Those that fight this reality miss opportunity and underperform against their potential because they stay stuck working on the wrong things or just spinning their wheels caught up in a repetitive game where the point of winning has been forgotten.

 
So, what do you need to be more specific about in your life, with your routine, your relationships, your approach to your balance, your schedule, your work?  How as your vision changed and evolved over the past few years?  Where you can find new clarity to replace to stale version in your mind?

You don’t have to blow things up for the sake of it or change just because.  However, don’t settle for anything less than being guided by your own firmly set meaningful specifics about what really makes you happy, what you really want to achieve, what you really want to do with your future.

The main point of this is to reassess where (there is always somewhere) and in what ways (there is always at least one) that you need to sharpen your clarity and more precisely establish specifics around how you live and practice – and manage the overlap in between.

This goes all the way from waking up to going to bed and the day that hopefully you make happen in the middle.  It applies to your calendar year, your bucket list, your wealth building, and future plans.  It reaches how you manage your practice as a business as well as your pursuits as a doctor with your clinical career.

Yes, you see, there is a lot to this, to you.  You are one very complicated investment –just be sure you are ‘reinvesting’ enough into that which makes everything else (and everyone else) come together.

We’ll pick up right here next week where I’ll, acting as your advisor, break down you as investment and show you just how important this is.  I’ll give you some more specific things that you’ll want to explore and in doing so I’ll uncover for you the exact strategies to make certain you get a greater return on your time and effort in life and business.

Returns are often talked about as past results but your best returns are yet to be had; they are in the future you are in the process of creating right now.  You get to decide: do you want that significant meaningful specific success controlled and defined by you or simply a wandering generality of stressful uncertainty and peace of mind robbing unpredictability.

Once you decide the key is of course to act and execute accordingly, to live and practice in alignment with this, with you – your single greatest investment.  

To Be Continued…