Last week, I broke down for you the significance behind putting math to work in your favor inside of your practice by taking deliberate control over the formula that makes your business work and your profits possible.
All too often doctors become frustrated with a plateau that they experience either financially or clinically (or even with an overwhelming workload outside of clinical hours). As I said last week, they go to work fixing the wrong issues and stressing about stuff that just doesn’t matter in the bigger picture.
That’s because, as I love to say, the numbers don’t lie. It’s very easy to see where the breakdown is at and what’s holding you back… you can’t have a level 10 practice using a level 5 math equation. As an example, if you want a million dollars in income, you can’t have a million-dollar practice. You can have a two-million-dollar practice and net fifty percent by working smarter and executing on a practice success formula to make it happen.
This is exactly what I laid out for you in The Four Freedoms of Dentistry, my newest book, specific formulas that you can use to align your effort with your desired outcome and your practice model with your state of ideal life model.
In doing so, you put to work my single most powerful principle of alignment between your practice and your life so that you can reverse engineer exactly what you want.
I suppose if you had to put a label on it, this is what I do for my doctors; beginning first with expanding mindset, breaking through self-limiting beliefs, and removing all barriers from success (most usually just preconceived ideas). Then absolutely and completely getting rid of working harder by replacing it with working smarter and creating the leverage I talked about last week through proper and effective training, the right systems for sustainability, and most of all getting everyone out of their own way of success.
This always starts with the doctor.
Now, I can’t go through the exact formula for your practice right here because it is unique to every doctor as every practice is different. The point is, and it’s great news, there is in fact a formula for every practice and every doctor and every lifestyle design that anyone wants.
What would make your life better today? What would make your practice more exciting, rewarding, fun, profitable to you, today?
But, the point is the same… to get a result that you want, you have to reverse engineer the problem (formula) to get there.
A quick example: with a general baseline of four days a week to get to the $2,000,000 range, you would do $10,000 a day, with at least four weeks of vacation possible.
If you want to do $10,000 a day, you have to diagnose more than that and get case acceptance on at least $10,000 (ideally paid up front and in full, if you want to break away from the dependence on insurance and the burden of production capacity).
So, to make a long story short, the point is not $2,000,000 or even $10,000 or really anything else. The point is how we set up a practice structure to ensure we get case acceptance on X amount of dentistry from Y amount of diagnosis.
You can breakout hygiene revenue or count it as a bonus as I suggest to our doctors, giving them a little cushion.
There are lots of ways to get to $10,000 but if you just focus on ‘producing’ it instead of ‘creating’ it, you are never going to do it on purpose.
While this sounds very much like common sense – as one of my dear friends says and I often repeat – common sense doesn’t mean common practice. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Very few practices actually operate this way and execute their practice in this manner.
The other element of the equation is you can’t rely on more volume, patients, hours, or time because that affects your overhead and increases our target percentage.
To be fair, most practices don’t get to 50% profit but it’s because of either their growth being stymied or their personal preferences on more team members or taking insurance or a number of other factors.
These variables are all decisions that doctors make – not things that just happen. You are totally and completely in control over your decisions and those decisions impact your practice formula.
Still, most doctors would be thrilled to be at 35 or 40 percent of $2,000,000 or of $1,000,000 or anywhere in between for that matter. To each their own.
Lastly, and this is key, if you want to work less you simply increase the daily target. If you have an associate or specialty procedures or other opportunities, you can see how that creates a variety of different ways to get to the number.
It is all math. Well, almost, all math.
That’s because once we have the math formula figured out, we now need the other part of it, the most important part of it, and that is of course the people.
You have to have people to carry out the practice model you want and that means patients, team members, and the imperative role you play as well.
You can map out your perfect dental practice business and add up all of the numbers on paper, but if your team and your patients don’t fulfill their part of this you will fall short of your potential and the success you deserve.
By the way, what brings the performance level of the people up to the level of the success formula is defined by my two core team performance principles: positional ownership and performance based accountability.
I cover both of these in your Custom Profit Blueprint Strategy Call for new doctors joining me here ready for the next big leap in your life and practice – if you are ready to step up, discover their greatest potential, create your unique practice growth formula and reach your state of ideal.
In addition to our Strategy Call, you will also receive my Practice Prosperity Package. With what’s inside of this package alone I promise you it’ll instantly elevates your vision, capability, and results for the greatest leverage point of them all: the patients desire to get healthy, which makes every patient more valuable to you.
It is the experience they go through that ultimately determines your ability to pull off your success formula without the need for volume based growth.
You know all of this. I get it. The question and the only thing that matters is, what are you doing about it?
How is your patient experience, your practice wide systems, and your team communication engineered to achieve the goals that you have set?
How do you live the formula, bring to realization the dentistry you want to do, build the team you need, design the daily flow that eliminates stress, and facilitate the actions necessary to achieve your goals?
Most of the time, doctors are distracted by minor details or occupied by (seemingly) urgent but not critical nonsense that clutters up their mind, their days, and their time. All preventing them from focusing on what really matters.
It is not easy to keep the main thing the main thing but it has to be done. This is why my definitive statement around how we make decisions in your practice and what we work on is very clear. It goes like this:
“We are only able to help the patients who say yes, therefore, everything we do inside of our practice and everything we invest in should be dedicated to getting more (and bigger) yeses.”
Period. End of story.
Case in point, if the ultimate number that is going to translate to our success is diagnosis – meaning that we can’t present, accept, collect, let alone do a single dollar of dentistry unless it is first diagnosed. Thus, we should do everything we can to facilitate, stimulate, serve as catalyst for, and yield more diagnosis.
That means the phones calls, schedule, clinical team’s ability, time management, patient experience, communication, and verbiage should all be designed with a particular goal in mind.
Is that how your practice approaches each of these aspects? And is it executed every single time?
If we were able to see a day in your practice and check every single person, hear every single conversation, watch every single function, and make every single observation, I’d make a very strong bet that you’d find more ‘undoing’ of this than ‘doing’ of it.
This very topic, where we get in our own way when it comes to patient success or perhaps better titled ‘undoing diagnosis’ is worthy of probably several Weekly Reports. We’ll go there soon, so stay tuned.
Every doctor I have ever had the privilege to meet, get to know, and work with to achieve their own state of ideal, always comes back to working too hard (not just for what they are getting, but in general), by focusing on the wrong things that only create a vicious cycle. Instead of fixing the things that matter by getting back to your core principles, beliefs, and philosophy.
And that’s where we’ll go next, beginning with a little self-diagnosis, some powerful thought provoking questions and you’ll quickly discover how to get your practice working for you so you can stop working so damn hard for it!
You are super smart for being here. This is the place for ambitious minded doctors who believe in what’s possible, don’t want to be told want to do, put in a box by the industry, or at the mercy of the circumstances of the economy or government or world around them. Who value autonomy and prosperity and know that life is meant to be lived outside your practice and the best way to do that is to build a better business inside your practice first to facilitate everything you could ever dream and desire to achieve, experience, enjoy.
Imagine more financial success, more life freedom, more fulfillment and most of all more fun and that’s why we are right here, together. Good for you. Good for us. Now, what’s next, what are you going to do about it, what are you going to create and do with it, that’s the question that matters more than any of the others and it is up to you to decide…
I’ll give you the best idea on where to begin and how to get started moving from exactly where you are at to where you want to be right here, next week!
