Well…Your Luck is coming early. Think about it, Friday the 13th and St. Patrick’s Day all in one month, how cool is that.
Actually I love St. Patrick’s Day, it’s just fun. I don’t drink green beer or even go out to goofy parties, not that I judge you if you do either of the above. At the same time I just like having fun and I think you and your staff and your patients should be having more fun too.
Do you know the best way to get more referrals…GIVE YOUR PATIENTS SOMETHING TO TALK ABOUT!!! Make visiting your office FUN!
That’s right, today, I’m here to blast you outside of your box and share with you some obvious and some major unobvious breakthroughs that will help you accelerate the growth of your Practice.
I’ve promised this for weeks and now will deliver.
This week’s Profit Report: your 7 opportunities for growth of untapped potential in your Practice, and even if you ARE doing these, I’d wager to say that you could do more to optimize these 7 accelerators and you would quickly reap the benefits.
Here we go…
Practice Growth Accelerator Number 1: Increasing Hygiene Production
Of course this is a no-brainer. Here is the thing, Hygiene is NOT a highly profit-producing area of your practice, it is however a CATALYST for higher production and it is always under utilized very very seldom optimized.
If you’re Hygiene Department isn’t producing $2,000 a day per Treatment Room you aren’t maximizing your investment.
Look, you are already paying your Hygienist and even if they are on straight percentage, you are using up the space.
The three ways to grow your Hygiene is to a) provide a more complete experience for your Patients, depending on your philosophy (which we can debate I suppose) on perio treatment you should at least have time blocked, set aside, and some realistic stated expectation of how your Hygienist handle each of the services.
I work with my clients to ensure there is a FORMALIZED “ideal Hygiene visit Checklist”; that way there is strict accountability and performance driven results on a visit by visit basis.
b) Really the key however is Patient Education and setting up “options” for expanded treatment without the Doctors involvement.
You have standard ops talk with the Dentist, Patient, and Hygienist and then you have Hygiene induced “interests” that can move the Patients from Hygiene into the Consult Room or Operative side of the Practice. They should be helping facilitate this.
c) lastly, Hygiene is the second most important place where efficiency can be gained or lost, if you aren’t scheduling for optimization and managing your checks with your desired flow or work, you are doing yourself a disservice and starting the day in the one-down position.
Have fun with this, put someone in charge of this, get out of the way of this and make something happen. It’s important for your patients and it’s important for the profitability of your practice. Hygiene in and of itself should more than pay for your overhead completely if done probably and set-up proactively.
Practice Growth Accelerator Number 2: Selling More Comprehensive Treatment, Bundle, Present Big Picture
Yes I know. This is the obvious one. But is it really?
Know this, out of my Top 100 Dentists of all different styles of practice models who I track, know personally, follow every single New Patient number, treatment recommended and treatment accepted, scheduled, and paid for, and could predict their clinical answers to questions and their verbal articulation of how they suggestion treatment to their patients…
None one of them (well maybe 3 of them) would say every single time they tell the WHOLE story, show the COMPLETE picture, and explain fully all that is POSSIBLE for the Patient’s mouth.
It’s really as simple as this, do you prejudge your patients, are you often in too big of a hurry, do you give them a fair chance to understand and buy into the personal reasons, the health implications, the physical outcomes that you can produce and provide for them through your treatment.
I challenge you to start using more photos, start giving more live demonstrations and examples, start treating every patient equally and walk them through the continuum of oral health layer upon layer and do not deny any person the right to know what a functional mouth, a beautiful smile, and overall optimal oral health is and why it matters.
You will see magical things happen when you start presenting more treatment.
Up to this point no doctor, not one, has ever come to me and said “I can’t find patients with work in their mouth, no one needs anything, what do I do?”
Nope. Never happened. It’s always missed opportunities and not telling a complete enough story about dentistry and what’s relevant and possible for this individual patients.
There is a whole lot more that can be done here. But. This is a big step and it will make a major difference, it affects every area of the practice and every single point of contact, communication and interaction with your patients.
Wait until I fill you in on the single greatest breakthrough of all time for any Dental Practice, it’s huge, and not what you think…I will tell-all in Practice Growth Accelerator #7.
Practice Growth Accelerator Number 3: Increasing the Value of Your Time through Proper Scheduling
I know, I have to have a lot of nerve to bring this one up because every single dentist on earth has their own ideas about scheduling and there are hundreds of people out there trying to convert you to some new method.
They want you to block schedule or rotation schedule or they want you to zig zag schedule or cluster schedule and blah blah blah.
Look, it’s like trying to tell an artist when to paint. Hello they are the artist. They will decide. Or like trying to tell a Dentist how to treat…you know what you want to do and you all have some method or philosophy that you have adopted and probably made your own.
No one should dictate to you how to schedule your patients, INCLUDING your Staff – you should be dictating to them and everyone else what you want and working to an ideal schedule.
The problem is most everyone is REACTIVE in their scheduling and because of this they can never get ahead.
For today, I want to point out this – what is in the schedule and what happens ‘today’ is what determines your growth potential.
You can either use the schedule to your advantage or you can put yourself at a serious disadvantage and be fighting an uphill battle.
The principles are this – schedule everyone who has any contact with the patients and affects your income. That means you should be scheduling Treatment Coordinators, Hygiene, Assistants, New Patient Coordinators…you don’t want anyone wandering around daily trying to find something to do or be under utilized…if you have more “producers” you make more money.
Next, for your personal schedule you want to, ideally, get high production goals out of the way the first 3/5 or at worst case 2/3 of your day and over time we can get that to ½ of your day being where your entire monthly goals are met.
If you don’t do it that way you will constantly be rushing around stressed and trying to fit in more patients and production that any one day can handle and you will never be able to fit in the goal you have with the day that is schedule.
WORK BACKWARDS: That’s the key, reverse engineer your schedule. You can’t make changes next week or tomorrow most certainly, but you can make adjustments 2-4-6 weeks and block it out and fill it with a future oriented mindset and structure.
You see what I’m saying. This is critical. Perhaps my greatest work with my clients is in organizing and filling the demand of their schedule with the work they want to do and making room for profitable growth.
We can often DOUBLE, literally, not overnight but in less than 60-days if you actually listen and we massage in the change with the Front-to-Back Patient flow and Team communication. We can schedule you at 2x your hourly value and this forces your success, you simply can’t manipulate the numbers.
Yes, there is a secret here with how we schedule and cycle New Patients through that helps to fill this very very fast.
Anyhow. At least you have some things to think about. Of course same-day dentistry, emergency patients, and other things you see as “good” right now can still be worked in, the key difference is we can’t rely on these things to make you rich, we have to have a FOUNDATION in place to ensure you achieve your Production Goals and then we stack other things on top of it as BONUSES and that is where you get to your icing on the cake, the real profit, and what accelerates, expedites and compounds your practice growth on the fast track.
Whew…I’m exhausted. That was a lot to write and I can imagine even more to take in. I really think we have to stop there for this week. Chances are I should have only delivered one of these at a time for you to digest and deploy some specific actions and initiatives of change.
I’ll save the ADVANCED Practice Growth Accelerators for next week…this is where it gets very interesting and you can start seeing the bigger picture of possibility and speed to a completely different income for you, experience for your patients, and rewards for your staff.
In the meantime get to work. And if there is something you want to talk about, ask questions, or discuss further, let me know.
One other thing – I’m presenting my Lifestyle Practice Blueprint formula this coming Wednesday, which I’ve never done before, where I walk you through the 5-steps to change and transformation in your practice. This isn’t for everyone, specifically if you are looking for more by doing less, or at least desire growth without compromise on your lifestyle, it is a mindset change, it is up to you, I thought I’d offer it up if you are interested. Complimentary of course…
www.LifestyleDentalPractice.com
For the 4 Advanced Practice Growth Accelerators…Stay tuned!
