Do you have an answer to that question? I’m sure whatever you’re getting now, you may not be satisfied with. Many in our industry would be touting that there can never be too many new patients.
Most of these people saying that are benefiting from you wasting your money on trying to get more and more and more new patients, without any discussion or assessment of what the impact is on your profitability, your team and patient satisfaction and of course, most of all, your own personal preferences when it comes to new patients.
There is an answer to this question – and it’s different for every single practice on the planet – there may be some who have the same numeric goal but arriving at that sum requires a unique, custom, deliberate choice and strategy.
At least it should be.
There are three reasons why taking a hard look at your new patient strategy and monthly goal matters a lot.
First (and absolutely the most important part of this entire discussion), is understanding what your goals and outcomes are.
The only way to judge whether or not your new patient strategy is working is knowing and tracking what the outcome of each of these patients are within a 30-day period of time. From first phone call through treatment completion, what is the value of each and every new patient into your office.
Someone (who will go nameless, at least for today), has for years been lying to Dentists about new patient value as a desperate attempt to create some false sense of obligation and hope that the more new patients the better.
If you are calculating your new patient value by taking your monthly production and dividing it by your new patients then you are mistaken, seriously so.
Your new patient value is the total amount of treatment paid for specifically from new patients, divided by the number of new patients; which gives you a true average.
You can’t factor all of your production or your practice revenue in order to figure out your new patient value. Production comes from many places, only one of which is new patients.
First reason this matters is because it tells you whether or not you are successful with new patients … whether your experience, diagnosing, treatment planning, presentation, case acceptance and money invested is actually doing well or if you are squandering all of the new patients you are getting.
Secondly, we must all agree that all new patients are not created equal. They are not the same. There are emergencies, kids, adults, young, older, healthy, unhealthy, niche specific interests, general restorative needs, just patient transfers, cleanings and so on.
You can’t build and grow a practice without some specific strategy and deliberate decisions on each of these.
Number of new patients doesn’t matter. Value of new patients matters. Which type of new patient matters.
Third, the only things that are guaranteed to go up when you increase your new patient numbers is your overhead, marketing costs, payroll, and time not producing dentistry…
There is no guarantee your profit, collections, production will go up – no guarantee at all – and in fact when new patients are mismanaged and you don’t take care of the first two points I have just made then its almost certain at some point (and you may already be there), you will experience a diminishing return on your new patients.
Today we are going to keep this short and sweet.
How many new patients are enough for you?
Well that depends, now doesn’t it, on several things…
1. What happens when they get there and how much they are worth when they leave
2. Who they are and who you want them to be, clinically and otherwise
3. What your goals are in the first place, when it comes to your practice culture, feel, flow, team make up, lifestyle, time and energy management, schedule structure, and above all else profitability and the dentistry you want to be doing to earn the money
I’d ask you to take a hard look at these things by investing some real time thinking through them … and stop following arbitrary numbers that have no meaning and tell no story about what reality is inside of your practice … and stop following arbitrary people that have no understanding about what you actually want, who you are and the goals you have with your new patients, your practice, team, lifestyle and money objectives.
As I have said right here many times, I’m all about new patients, get as many as you want, please, help more people – but do it on purpose, do it with strategy and reason, do it in a way that is actually going to serve all parties well – not just for the sake of it.
You know what I believe in…I believe you can have it all; I believe you can have the practice you’ve always wanted, use your skills you’ve invested in and sacrificed to learn that you are passionate about; I believe you can’t ever be paid what you are worth, truly, so you must build a practice that can reward you with as much income as humanly possible because you deserve it and it’s your prerogative.
I believe you should practice dentistry on your own terms because its your practice, that no one should tell you want to do or how many patients to see without first listening to and understanding what you actually want.
I believe in making deliberate decisions about your dental practice that actually result in specific goals in a way that you enjoy, fits with your preferences and desired lifestyle and that make it fun again.
You have a lot to think about…if you’d value my listening to you and help talking through it to figure out where to go from here with this (which is perhaps the most important topic and component of your practice and business, one that will either enable you to grow and achieve your goals or debilitate you probably without you even knowing it)…then that’s exactly what we should do.
They say two heads are better than one and especially when it’s something as important as your entire life, business, practice, and career. I’d venture to say there are not two heads better together than the two of ours…
I’m willing to prove that to you and let you be the judge: please accept my invitation here: Creating the Perfect Dental Practice …
