Today, we dive into 8 ways to grow your Practice and get more out of your Dental Business than you have ever before. I promised to debunk your beliefs and what you have been lied to about throughout your entire career.
Now, here’s the most important point, you need to stay with me through the next couple weeks to fully understand the options on the menu, as we say, so you can have the full spectrum of growth potential and opportunities. Then after that, I will help you to make a healthy decision about the best ways to grow your practice based on your personal and specific circumstances and your future goals and objectives right now.
The first and most obvious way to grow is through getting more new patients.
More Patients.
Has the easiest impact on your overall production value ON THE SURFACE.
It seems, fewer white space in the schedule, more humans through the door, a larger variety of mouths to look at, automatically leads to more money, production, growth in your practice.
Of course, that’s just a stupid lie and a very bad, elementary and basic business mistake. More patients is NOT always the answer and it is NEVER the only answer.
In fact, just defaulting to the idea of “more patients fixes everything” automatically proves that you are either lazy or ignorant. Which is an okay excuse up and until now; now that I’m debunking this garbage to you.
Over the past decade the shift in the industry has been to try to make every single practice the same. To try to force you to compete against corporate big box store, cookie cutter dentistry by going VOLUME – bigger, faster, more patients – which ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS equals less dentistry…less getting patients healthy…and more transactional churn ‘em and burn ‘em, in and out the door dentistry.
Here’s the thing… MORE PATIENTS is of course a wonderful thing and very important as long as you do not lose the integrity of your mission and purpose in practice.
And by the way, I am not here to (nor do I ever) intend to dictate YOUR clinical philosophy. I simply want to inform you of the opportunity cost and the sacrifice going the volume route by default WITHOUT strategy in place.
Good news. ALL THE REST of the 8 Ways to Grow Your Practice will make having more new patients a healthy and positive thing.
See, I am not against getting hundreds of new patients IF THAT IS WHAT YOUR PRACTICE IS engineered to do.
What I am against is you mistaking volume for value. Lots of patients for lots of dentistry. Sacrificing quality, personal, COMPLETE patient care and productive, positive, EMPOWERING team working environment and above all else your own sanity, healthy, and PEACE OF MIND for thinking that cramming as many patients as possible into your practice is going to be the rainbow that leads to the pot of gold.
Here’s how we make this ‘okay’…
We move on to the 2nd and perhaps MOST IMPORTANT of all 8 WAYS TO GROW YOUR PRACTICE…achieving more value, more dentistry, more production for each and every Patient in your Practice.
You can call this complete care, comprehensive dentistry, whatever you want.
I call it MAKING PATIENTS HEALTHY – and I believe this is the most important obligation of our industry and any Dentist who disagrees, devalues and commoditizes themselves is putting their team and their own financial stability at the risk of failing margins, vicious cycle of volume based dentistry, and above all else the need every single month to spend MORE of the profits than should be necessary just to feed the machine.
This is really about making sure every patient counts and every patients is moving forward with some type of structured treatment plan.
Here is where you get the icing on the cake that I always talk about, this is how Profit becomes possible and begins to multiply. Because when you add more new patients eventually you run out of space, capacity, hands on deck and you have to start increasing your overhead to accommodate more new patients –you have a diminishing return.
And you run patients so fast through Hygiene or you take up all of your productive prime time seeing people you have no idea whether they even care or want to be there and actually are serious about investing in their oral health, which leads to you diminishing your value of time and miss all the real profitable treatment because everyone is too busy seeing so many patients they forget to do any dentistry.
You should be laser focused and committed to this Growth Strategy right here…helping each patients move forward with more dentistry.
This is the fun part and what it’s all about it.
The next two are quite simple so I’ll cover them very quickly and then next week we’ll get to the really advanced strategies for growth.
You can grow your practice by having your patients visit more often. This could be for many different things, the most obvious would be some form of your perio program and perio maintenance, doubling the visits per year if your practice is set up for this.
It could be phased in treatment planning that goes in conjunction with “more treatment per patient” strategy we just discussed. When patients come back more often they will have an overall increased lifetime value.
Many dentists are now doing things with laser therapy or ozone or botox or many other ancillary services that allow you to build more of a membership or boutique Practice within a Practice to generate repeat “customers”. Again all of this is fine as long as you are not doing it at the expense of, neglecting, or sacrificing Strategy number 2.
This does not mean having them come back for step by step dentistry, this means increasing the frequency of visit with a purpose over and above their comprehensive Treatment Planning to get healthy in the first place.
Finally, to conclude part one, the most overlooked concept in every single practice in the world…fully optimizing and valuing the number of REFERRALS per patient in your Practice.
Do you realize that a patient is worth more to you by the number and quality of the referrals they stimulate, bring in, have influence over than any possible value they bring in terms of their own individual mouth?
Yet we never ever even stop to consider how much “gold” they say can be mined from within the existing patient base…not just for new treatment but for new patients.
You have to have three things in your paradigm…
First, a strategy, a focus, a plan.
Second, a dedicated person and/or your entire team working on this.
Third, a culture that cultivates the referrals and referral opportunities from each patient.
Very simply, we overlook this because we are so focused on hurrying through the dentistry in one patient’s mouth and moving on to the next to embrace the reality that this one patient can be responsible for several or even hundreds more new patients.
They could have friends and family, they could be what I call an “A Patient”, they could be a center of influence, or they could be the leader of many others…
Business Owners. Community Leaders. Other Healthcare Professionals. Customers of others who could be customers of yours.
The list goes on. Guess what, it costs you nothing really, some thought, time, maybe a little effort, but every patient walking in and out of your Practice has relationships in their life that could be a steady, consistent and rich stream of new patients for you.
This ADDS and enhances the patient value of that person and when you multiply a new patient into many new patients you accomplish all of your growth goals at once.
There you go, the first 4, very basic growth strategies…question is how are you orchestrating each of these 4 into your Practice right now, today and even before you answer that, what is your philosophy, your practice principles, your “business plan / model” for each of these 4 concepts?
Again, I’m not here to dictate, only to educate, inform, provoke, facilitate and encourage you to get all that you deserve out of everything you’ve got, to optimize your practice to grow to it’s potential based on the ideal and dream lifestyle practice blueprint you desire to have.
Both as a Dentist and as a Dental Practice Business Owner.
Until next week…then 4 more strategies…take care.