As you can imagine I am asked all the time what are the differences between successful (and profitable) practices and those who are not. In other words, why do some struggle to ever move past being a dentist as a job with no real value of business ownership rewards.
While there are many reasons and details about this, I can lump them all into four big overriding categories or what I’m calling Practice Profit Pitfalls.
These are fundamental to all success no matter what type of practice you have or want and no matter what type of dentistry or specialty you are doing.
The most obvious profit pitfall is not paying attention to the money.
This sounds obvious because if you don’t pay attention to the money you won’t have any money to pay attention to.
However, most Doctors have it all wrong, because I did not say “focus” on the money (in fact that is the surest way to ruin your practice). Instead, we believe in focusing on relationships, health, helping patients and then you will have a plentiful supply of cash-flow far over and above your overhead. As you know, I call this icing on the cake and the entire point of being in business is to have as much icing left over every single month.
But you can’t leave it up to chance. You have to pay attention to it.
If Doctors pay attention to money at all they do it backwards. They look at it at the end of the month, hope they got paid, then take care of other things they want to use it for and finally hope there is some profit still in the bank.
The key to everything in business is to get ahead of the money, ahead of the schedule and ahead of the cash-flow; which you only can do by paying attention to money in advance.
Without question, most Doctors suffer the pitfall of not understanding money, not managing the flow of money and not being proactive when it comes to taking responsibility for controlling the money. You control the money by taking the time to reverse engineering it from start to finish. That’s the only way to never be disappointed.
The next big pitfall in any practice that really separates the winners from the losers (and even the world champions from the ones that are ‘pretty-good’), is the pitfall that comes from not fully utilizing your team.
I would go as far as to say neglecting the team…
Weak team members.
Gaps in communication.
People in the wrong places.
Poor performance.
Wasted time and talent.
The list goes on. And sure many people would say that they have a great team and that’s nice but what does that look like? How are they great? What are their results? What is the potential based on and how close are we to breaking through to the next level of growth?
Your greatest leverage in your practice is your people. Plain and simple. You can’t leverage time, you can only leverage the people to make the time more valuable.
Every part of your practice is made better or worse by the execution of your team. Most, at best, take a haphazard approach of take what you get and then try to motivate a little more the next time; or they just live and accept complacency.
Do not let yourself experience the Team Pitfall. It can come from a bad personality ruling the practice, from personal problems reducing morale (yours or theirs), not having the right priorities (see profit pitfall #1) and so on and so forth.
Your greatest investment (not expense) should always be in your people. Therefore it is the “thing” that has the most impact to grow substantially or diminish consistently your profitability.
These are just two of the major four pitfalls.
Assess yourself. Think about it. And if you’d like more specific information on how to avoid the team pitfall, I’m happy to send you a copy of my book on the topic. A little back to school gift for you…
Get a Free Copy of The Dental Team Transformation Book >>>
In the meantime, get ready for next week and I will walk you through how to avoid the other two pitfalls that will be the difference in you working for your practice or your practice working for you.
