When it comes to having a “Profit Plan” for your practice, have you ever even heard of one? Of course not. Not one single doctor reading this has a “profit plan” (maybe an “overhead percentage” or possibly a “budget”), but not a proactive, predictable, purposefully orchestrated and plotted out PROFIT PLAN.
That would be a very big reason why most practices are underperforming when it comes to profit, no matter how much their production is.
Here’s the thing: regardless of how much you love dentistry, you can only do so much before you begin to feel unfairly compensated for the time, energy and effort you put into your practice. It is understandable that you would be frustrated by not having as much to show for your efforts at the end of a month or over a year than you thought you would.
We fix that when we reverse engineer your practice for success. Last week, we identified your magic number so you know what your daily performance must be to make your life work.
To keep that in perspective, you can take your monthly overhead and divide by your average clinical days and then by your average clinical hours per day. You will now know whether or not you are losing or making a PROFIT each and every day you are in your office.
This is your benchmark to gauge your progress from the baseline to the ultimate goal (which was your magic number for your desired profit in order to achieve your objectives).
Even still, the point is not to stop at the goal. The point is to run up the score every month as much and as fast as possible for this very reason – you can’t get that month back.
Now that you have these two opposing numbers that represent what your practice MUST (baseline) and SHOULD (goal) do, we can segment out your performance metrics to create a practice formula that will always work. One that you can rely on.
Most doctors are so obsessively focused on production that they miss the fact that the production in your schedule had to come from somewhere. That is, of course, your diagnosis; which comes from patients in the schedule in the first place…
New Comprehensive Exams
Emergency Patients
Hygiene Visits
Patient of Record in the Operative schedule
If you are a Specialist, where the majority of what you see or all of what you see are new patients, then you have categories of sources of where these patients come from.
We can take the average number of visits per day, week and month to determine what the NEW TREATMENT OPPORTUNITIES through existing diagnosis already charted or newly diagnosed treatment must be in order to pace you out at a total diagnostic value that will give you the number you need to surpass your baseline and achieve your ultimate daily goal which yields your Ultimate Practice Profit Plan.
This leads me to a question so many Doctors ask me, “What should our case acceptance be?”
And while it’s a decent and smart question to consider, there is no set percentage answer because it all depends on how you diagnose, how large the values are per patient and where they patients are coming from. It also depends on the insurance make up of your practice, along with several other variables.
The good news is: we can always improve case acceptance in any practice by following my principles that have been laid out in some of my most vital reports and publications.
For the purpose of today, we are going to say we can get a yes on 33% of every dollar of treatment presented. That is conservative but it takes into account that most of my loyal and serious followers are doctors that are comprehensive in nature and doing advanced dentistry.
This means that you must have at least 3x the amount of presented treatment every day than your stated daily goal – not minimum baseline, but your magic number.
Once you know what that is, we can now divide and conquer with every team member and every department within your practice.
You may think all this talk about numbers and stats and doing math has little to do with dentistry and you may even be surprised that I of all people (who talk endlessly about putting the patients first and the money will follow, and relationship based dentistry and everything else BUT the numbers), am the one advocating for this.
And you are right in that making these numbers happen is where the real action is at and that is the HOW to do it. I will circle back to that in just a couple sentences.
Over the past couple weeks, we have been talking about making your practice more profitable. Next week, I will make a very big and incredibly bold promise related directly to this but it would be an empty promise if first I didn’t layout for you the specific way to identify three key items…
1. What you need your profit to be to achieve your overall personal goals
2. Your overhead and daily objectives are within range of reality
3. The most important # of all if we are going to make #1 & #2 actually possible
And that is what we have done right here.
If you don’t have these as your target then you are really just flying blind, tolerating whatever you walk in to see on the schedule and accepting whatever you end up with at the end of the month after the bills are paid.
At this point in your career, you should expect more for yourself and with expectations must come a plan to achieve them.
That’s why, with 2019 rapidly upon us…
I’m going to guarantee you a specific plan to double your income in 2019 by taking these numbers and bringing them to life in the form of actual action items that you can take to align your practice to achieve the growth FIRST in patient opportunities, SECOND in diagnosis value, THIRD in case acceptance, FOURTH in your collections and production, and FIFTH (most importantly and finally) in your PROFIT.
This is the foundation to Your Ultimate Practice Profit Plan; where never again will these numbers be the outcome by accident.
Prepare yourself for my biggest gift of the year and it will lead to your ability to double your income in 2019 (even while working less once you learn to actually create and control the outcome of these numbers)!
December starts tomorrow. That means 1 Month left to maximize 2018. Then onward to the New Year we go. You’ll be ready like never before as long as you stay tuned in next week.
