Waste in dentistry comes in all shapes, sizes and forms from all parts of your practice. I would say confidently that it would be easy to increase your production by at least 50% (and therefore at a very minimum double your profitability) simply by addressing these four big categories of waste.
By the way, its there, trust me, living inside of your office. There is no arguing it and if you do not believe me, I’m happy to show you. In fact, that is what I use our custom profit blueprint calls for, to help you identify hidden opportunity, gaps and places in your practice where slight adjustments make an immediate impact on your bottom line.
You can pursue that here: PerfectDentalPractice.com if you are intrigued and interested in making more without a single new patient, hour worked, or dollar invested.
For this week’s report, I will focus on the big four categories of waste and then we’ll dive deeper next week into some tactical specifics and expand each of these for your personal follow-through and execution.
First: Wasted Time
Second: Wasted Patients
Third: Wasted Team
Fourth: Wasted Money
Here we go, please pay attention, big stuff here and literally millions of dollars to your advantage if you embrace these. Why wait another day when there just aren’t a lot of them left, if you really think about it?
First: Wasted Time
You know as well as I do that you probably spend half of your time doing dentistry that you either prefer not to do or isn’t worth much to begin with. Or worse yet, it is mismanaged in your schedule so that it impairs your ability to integrate higher value procedures that require more time that isn’t available and you miss out on daily goals that could be much greater and more consistent because of time that is not effectively utilized.
The same concept can be applied to every procedure and every variation of every procedure by how it is scheduled and how your team on both sides of the practice allocates patient time, your time, assistant time, and structures multi-visit treatment plans.
As I often say, we are in a business of minutes, probably seconds, and every one of them count. How they are used or misused on a daily basis is going to be the single greatest predicator and determining factor of your success in terms of dollars per hour and value per day performance.
This is the secret to profitability in dentistry: effectively managing your time.
We call the customized solution to this value-based scheduling. It is not some elementary, one-size fits all template or cookie-cutter approach, rather a specific individualized strategy, concept and method to maximizing everything that happens in practice for you, your team and your patients every day.
It’s what real practices do. To learn more about this and apply it to your situation and desired daily flow and practice philosophy and business structure go here…
Second: Wasted Patients
No one likes wasting opportunity, especially when it comes to the very core reason you do what you do: taking care of people.
There are three big ways patients gets wasted…and often you and they do not even know it.
1. On the phone, missed calls, botched calls, patients not being called back, cancelled or missed appointments that are then forgotten – I could go on and on. You should make your own list.
2. Entering and exiting patients who are coming out of any part of the practice who do not follow-through with their treatment. Usually this occurs when the front desk was busy, someone dropped the ball, the patient is in a hurry or they give us the run around. The burden of follow-up and responsibility is always on the people who are the ones who receive the benefits – that would be you and your team. Assess your gaps and places where patients get dropped, forgotten, missed, ignored and wasted.
3. The other source of patients being wasted is mostly in the clinical arena where we are rushed, not focused or not able to completely diagnosis. We end up delaying treatment discussions until ‘sometime in the future’ which tends to be another hygiene visit. This is not only irresponsible but it is a very bad business decision.
If you had a $100 bill laying on the floor, how many days would you walk past it wondering if it would still be there tomorrow, or waiting to see if someone else would pick it up and hand it to you.
Bottom line, the person who takes proactive control and diligent responsibility is the one who always wins.
For your sake and the benefit of your patients, stop wasting them.
In these areas there is so much to think about and go to work on. I’d challenge you to integrate our ‘no patient left behind’ system of accountability and column-based ownership for your team.
For more on that and a breakdown of what it looks like in your practice and business environment go to: PerfectDentalPractice.com
Next week, we’ll move into the 2nd half of the practice operations where there is perhaps even more waste that you absolutely do not even realize. It’s going to be mind blowing…and there will be good news and bad news, as there always is.
The bad news is, you are going to feel terrible once you realize how much waste has occurred in parts 3 and 4 for every year of your career leading up to this one.
But, the good news is you are going to be able to change it going forward and to embrace both categories of waste. It will make an immediate impact in a very significant way adding profit to your daily cash-flow and giving you an huge advantage to creating future growth with more effortless production increases, all without needing to see more patients or work any harder.
Just to wet your appetite while you go to work on your schedule and your patients; next week in part 2 we’ll tackle these:
Third: Wasted Team
Fourth: Wasted Money
Good luck, and remember to get a leg up, a jump start, a reboot, and if nothing else I’ll listen to you vent and help you refocus on your mission, vision, and future by creating what we call the 3 P’s for your Dental Success Today: Purpose, Passion, and Profits (each of these fits into and directly correlates to these areas of waste we are dissecting right here).
