As you enter the final stretch of 2023, it’s time to firmly plant a stake in ground that there are certain things you will no longer accept as “standard operating procedure” within your practice for 2024 and beyond.
Last week, I explained the critical importance of NOT allowing yourself to progress into the future without understanding and embracing your “Magic Number” – the value every day must deliver in order to make your practice and life work. If you haven’t yet gone through the exercise described in last week’s message, I strongly recommend you set aside the time to do so. You shouldn’t even consider NOT going through this process an option.
Today, I’m going to explain another “marker” to set in stone, one tied intrinsically to that “Magic Number” and equally important to know and embrace. It relates to making sure that in 2024 you double your focus, attention, and energy on taking the steps necessary to increase the VALUE of every single patient who walks through your door.
I’m not merely talking about fees, however, to ensure we’re all starting from the same place, let’s begin with a quick refresher on that specific topic.
First. Did you know that more than 80%, seriously, of all Practices do not ‘formally’ present and ask for treatment purchases? Instead they allow patients to check out at the front desk in front of everyone like they are ordering something at a fast food restaurant.
Let me ask you…
How many big cases, $20,000+, $40,000+, $60,000+ have you checked out by exiting a patient in that way? Doubt it’s many, if any at all.
Some dentists would think they haven’t sold large cases because their patients don’t have any money. They would be wrong. It’s always because of the way the money was presented and the method, environment in which the patient experienced it.
Remember…
Rule #1: just because the patient says they can’t afford it, doesn’t mean they don’t want it… usually it’s the fastest thing they can say to avoid a further discussion.
We are trained to think like this… Saying “I can’t afford it” usually gets me out of anything and everything when it’s uncomfortable in any way.
Rule #2: never ever attach money to health – make a treatment decision first, then a money decision second.
This is critical, of course if you say, “To get healthy it’s going to be $50,000,” even if it’s just $5,000, most aren’t going to want to do it. However, if you say, “Do you want to get healthy? Do you understand how important this is? Do you realize the implications long term on both your health and your finances if you are not proactive about this right now today…?” (Read that paragraph again.)
Then they have emotionally BOUGHT into the Treatment.
And they do so because you have framed this, along with the everything else involved with that patient’s total experience relative to your practice and the services you provide, around something both of you truly VALUE.
Let’s now go into what that term actually means and entails, but first, have you registered for…
“The Formula For Making 2024 Your Best Year EVER!”
A Paint-By-Number Plan to Experience Time Freedom, Economic Prosperity,
and the Lifestyle You’ve Always Wanted In 2024 and Beyond – Guaranteed.
Live Practice Success Whiteboard Session:
Friday, Dec. 22nd at 11am Eastern
Having a prosperous, lifestyle-driven practice requires thoughtful design, just as you engineer a patient’s journey to a glorious, life-changing smile. That’s why Scott has prepared this important, end-of-the-year Whiteboard training, where he’ll reveal:
— A paint-by-number plan to custom-create and design your BEST YEAR EVER in 2024 in lifestyle, time freedom, financial success, and autonomy of choice.
— How to increase your “I Deserve This” level of awareness and acceptance – without it, you’ll never be able to conquer self-limiting beliefs holding you back from achieving your greatest potential.
— The exact method to reverse engineer YOUR number – the KEY Value that drives every single measure of success you have for your practice and your life.
— A systematic approach to optimizing practice growth through diagnosis and acceptance, leading into collections and production.
— How to design a nurturing patient experience that affirms the value of optimal healthcare AND enables you to easily hit your financial goals.
— The key steps to maximizing the effectiveness and value of every single component of your practice – making every system, every procedure, every team member worth a whole lot more.
— And that’s only the beginning…
Get ready to reinvigorate every aspect of life to make 2024 your very best year EVER…
The secret to understanding VALUE starts with the realization that’s it’s not merely a number or variable you’d find in some kind of math or even an economics textbook.
VALUE is your North Star, the fixed point in the universe at which everything you believe, think, and do aligns.
VALUE is the overarching principle of how you understand, present, and deliver comprehensive health solutions.
If you’re not seeing the kind of value you’d wish to see from your patients, then you must understand that the fault does not lie with them. It’s there sitting on your own front doorstep. You must start refusing to use your patients as an excuse. Some patients may not have the right mindset to accept what you’re doing, and that’s okay as long as YOU have the right mindset.
Now is the time to educate your patients and as you educate them, those excuses will just fall by the wayside, because they’ll be excited about what you can do for them.
Educating them means saying things in the right way to them as well as presenting information. So you’ll need to watch how you verbalize things. Get them excited about what you can offer. Build rapport – the way you talk to them establishes their connection with you.
Most doctors are so obsessively focused on production that they miss the fact that the production in your schedule had to come from somewhere. That is, of course, your diagnosis, which comes from patients in the schedule in the first place…
— New Comprehensive Exams
— Emergency Patients
— Hygiene Visits
— Patient of Record in the Operative schedule
If you are a Specialist, where the majority of what you see or all of what you see are new patients, then you have categories of sources of where these patients come from.
We can take the average number of visits per day, week, and month to determine what the NEW TREATMENT OPPORTUNITIES through existing diagnosis already charted or newly diagnosed treatment must be. This is important in order to pace you out at a total diagnostic value that will give you the number you need to surpass your baseline and achieve your ultimate daily goal, which yields Your 2024 Formula For Your Best Year Ever.
This leads me to a question so many doctors ask me, “What should our case acceptance be?”
And while it’s a decent and smart question to consider, there is no set percentage answer because it all depends on how you diagnose, how large the values are per patient, and where the patients are coming from. It also depends on the insurance makeup of your practice, along with several other variables.
The good news is that we can always improve case acceptance in any practice by following my principles that have been laid out in some of my most vital reports and publications.
For the purpose of today, we are going to say we can get a yes on 33% of every dollar of treatment presented. That is conservative but it takes into account that most of my loyal and serious followers are doctors that are comprehensive in nature and doing advanced dentistry.
This means that you must have at least 3x the amount of presented treatment every day than your stated daily goal – not minimum baseline, but your magic number. Once you know what that is, we can now divide and conquer with every team member and every department within your practice.
If you want to make it easy on yourself, divide your monthly costs by your normal crown fee. Then you can figure out what you’ve got to do in a day to achieve an extra million dollars over and above what you’re already making. If you’re already making a decent amount of money each month, stretch yourself by adding $5,000 a day.
I guarantee that you can easily find the opportunity to make this happen within your practice in 2024 and beyond. It’s not pie-in-the-sky, it’s reality. I’ve watched it happen over and over again.
You also need to properly execute the way dentistry is done during all the visits. Focus on the value of what you’re doing, because the value matters most. Then you can consider ways to deal with limitations set by insurances, coupons, and other ideas that reduce what you can bring in. At this point, it’s important to eliminate those restrictions from your culture. This doesn’t necessarily mean eliminating it from the way you’re paid, but you do need to remove it from your mindset.
Remember, no one but you can decide how much you bring in, because you’re the doctor in charge.
Integrity in Dentistry means understanding that what you diagnosis, present, and suggest to the Patient is a healthcare prescription of treatment that should be taken seriously, should be adhered to, and should not be optional. It needs to be congruent with the patients experience in the practice from start to finish and all the way through the presentation of fees, money, their investment, and financial plan.
Watch, listen, record, video, practice, role play with the people in your practice who ask for and handle the money and deal with all treatment planning issues for patients and make sure you are following these guidelines.
What you will discover is enough money falling through the cracks on a daily basis to double your retirement investments in a year, possibly double your entire income, and maybe even double your production scheduled in your practice.
This is big. Your leaky faucet of money being left on the table is more like a firehose and you just don’t know it. I am confident you will see a giant change in your cashflow from these simple steps right here.
Constantly think about ways to expand opportunities to serve patients. Work painstakingly on improving diagnosis and building an environment that nurtures and cultivates patients what want and value. Commit to building better patients through experiences, education, and communication.
Next week, we’ll talk about the systems within your practice, but starting today (and everyday), I want to challenge you to value your patients, yes, but also to VALUE yourself more in every way.
With your positive self-talk. With your optimistic expectations. With your grander goals and objectives. With your health and peach of mind. With your selfishness towards protecting what matters most to you. With your vision of the future, your ambitions, your desires, your dreams, and your aspirations.
The first, best step you can take to embrace these values into your life and practice, is to make sure you’re there for my upcoming whiteboard session revealing how to make “Your 2024 Formula For Your Best Year Ever.”
I promise you will walk away with a new, revitalized appreciation of the VALUE OF WHAT YOU ARE WORTH…along what you SHOULD BE earning…raising up your deserve and belief levels so that you can attract opportunity into your life and enjoy more prosperity.
Don’t allow 2024 to merely “just happen,” seize the moment to set your course and determine your future on the terms only you can and should determine.
“The Formula For Making 2024 Your Best Year EVER!”
A Paint-By-Number Plan to Experience Time Freedom, Economic Prosperity,
and the Lifestyle You’ve Always Wanted In 2024 and Beyond – Guaranteed.
Live Practice Success Whiteboard Session:
Friday, Dec. 22nd at 11am Eastern