The worst part about being your own boss is also the best part… no one tells you what to do. Sounds so good, doesn’t it? Except when you are trying to figure out what to do next. Or first. Or change. Or improve.
Who doesn’t love to be in charge? A person without any direction or plan or goal that’s who. As long as you have those things, then you are going to be in great shape.
The entire point of reverse engineering (the secret I shared with you last week, that is the key to business success and to acceleration), is that it prevents waste, frustration and detours along your journey.
How can you possibly know how to make decisions or adjustments to your business if you do not have an exact place where you want to end up or a specific goal you are trying to achieve.
Like building a house without a blueprint or creating a treatment plan without a process or doing anything without clarity of the future vision.
An aside, real quick, there is one way to be sure to hurt your case acceptance and that is to go presenting treatment that has not been asked for by patients. Forcing things on them or telling them what they need is going to make them keep their guard up, push away or (at best) make them delay because they will not have first decided what their goals are and where they want to end up.
No matter how good you are, no one wants to do treatment for the sake of it. They only want dentistry if there is a real purpose and benefit – an accomplishment they will achieve.
This is the same for your practice.
Exactly like you reverse engineer your treatment plans, you do the same for your business. If you are just going through the motions, you are going to be disappointed, you are going to end up further from your goals and most certainly you are going to work way too hard for what you are getting.
If you first know what you want, then you can create it.
There are some things I’m asking you to deeply consider this week before we go another step forward.
What do you want…
Your Schedule To Be?
Type Of Dentistry To Do?
Daily Responsibilities You Have?
Amount Of Your Income?
Your Lifestyle Structure (hopefully balanced)?
Now, you can go in this order or backwards or whatever you want but you can’t disconnect these items away from each other.
The two most important are reassessing Lifestyle and Responsibilities because they both link together. Then you have to determine your Income and then build the Schedule and get the type of Dentistry you want to support all of this.
Most people show up, see the patients in the schedule and hope there is money at the end of the day. No reserve engineering.
We can pick the type of team you have and the patients you serve. Everything can and should be determined, not just accepted and dealt with.
You might have a sense of what you want this to be one year from now or a few years from now. You might want to change it based on your reality of what and how it is right now in this moment in time.
The key is that you know what you want – first. Determine this and then we can work backwards to align all components and parts of this for your success.
I can promise you, when you start with a blank page and you outline your state of ideal, you will be more excited and invigorated in your daily execution than if you are just grinding it out and living through it instead of taking control over it.
Hey it’s spring time these days so why not do a little spring cleaning in your habits, your life, your schedule and your dentistry to clear all of the anchors in the way of your state of ideal. This is just like I talked about over the past two weeks – letting go and stopping yourself from sabotaging your own success.
The biggest and most critical way you sabotage yourself is by not enjoying what you are doing or not having things set up exactly the way you want them to be. This way, you are never feeling or acting from a standpoint of resentment or disgust.
This happens to all of us and it changes over time often (more frequently than we realize). It is very easy to stay in the same routine and get callous to the feeling that you aren’t focused, engaged or excited by what you are doing.
And even if you are, that is only half the battle. Now you have to be happy and accomplish your goals, and not just one or the other (which is very common in our world, now isn’t it).
Your homework is simple: layout the structure you wish to have for the items I have listed above. Rethink this at least once a year and probably more often. The key is to get ahead of it, not behind it. Be thinking about the future now so you can work backwards into today and be headed in the right direction and progressing towards where you want to end up.
Lifestyle, Income, Responsibilities, Schedule, Dentistry. Next we’ll tackle the team and of course finally the patients – the two most important things and people you can’t live without.
Make no mistake about it though: they fit into your structure, not the other way around. There are the ‘right’ ones for every part to make it all come together.
