After last week, I am confident you have put a lot of thought into the next chapter of your life, stage of your career, and act of your dentistry. And you’ve had time to ponder just what you want and as importantly what you don’t.
No matter the practice model, the profit model, the lifestyle structure, the clinical days, or the actual dentistry there is one thing my doctors all seem to want and hold dear – that’s more life… prosperity, autonomy, independence, freedom, and ultimately TIME.
Since we can’t make more time, we have to turn our attention to what we want less of in order to then create what we want more of.
For the most part, this revolves around one simple yet profound and powerful concept: GETTING MORE OUT OF LESS. In other words, simplifying, slowing down, being deliberate, learning to maximize opportunity so you can minimize the amount required. More life, less dentistry; more profit, less stress; more autonomy, fewer obligations; more breakthroughs, fewer obstacles; more time for you, less time for it.
Think about it this way…
Fewer days, less time, fewer patients, less overhead, maybe even fewer team members – heck, maybe even fewer everything.
I was just celebrating with a great couple, who are fantastic practice operators, on the transformation they have made over the past year. And it wasn’t about the numbers you’d expect.
While their collections were on par, that wasn’t the goal of last year. Instead, it was exactly what they accomplished: a dramatic reduction in clinical hours with weekends and evenings eliminated, and an overall tightening up of the schedule. This led to the next reduction… people. It has now become a smaller, more tight-knit team with more balanced lives for everyone.
The result of all of this – you guessed it – was the same amount of dentistry but a whole lot more profit. Working less, making more with less stress, more fulfillment.
Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?
Now, you may need more people to get your goals accomplished, but it’s doubtful. You absolutely never need more hours; only your hours to be worth more.
The beauty of dentistry (among so many other things), is leverage… of everything. That leads to the amazing, and to some even miraculous, growth in the bottom line all while the burden of the business goes down.
I can tell you story after story like this. Another doctor continues to crush it after doubling a million-dollar practice in an 18 month timespan all while working less and adding no additional team members. Simply by being smart and intentional.
Imagine all of the variables being the same yet the business is worth twice as much in just over a year. If the practice doubles and the overhead stays the same, your profit can triple or even quadruple, if you do it right.
The best news is: we can double your income without having to double your practice. That ought to sound even better to you.
So, where do you start? Begin with your own clarity of what you want next in your life and practice. Without defining it, without a target, without a pursuit then you don’t have anything to actually work on.
I don’t expect you to have all of the answers right now and you certainly don’t have to go it alone. I’m setting aside time to help you create a customized plan to reach new these levels of prosperity and independence, where we’ll work together to craft…
Your Ultimate Practice and Lifestyle Freedom Blueprint
Let’s start with primary means to achieve what I have just outlined – that is the cultivation and conversion of more complete and comprehensive dentistry. It focuses on having patients accept, invest, and move through their entire treatment plans in fewer visits.
Ultimately, as simple and elementary as it sounds, the greatest leverage in dentistry (outside of having other doctors do the work and better utilization of your team members), is doing more dentistry at one time.
This lessens expenses and most of all lessens the time which allows you to make your days more valuable.
What so many doctors get wrong when attempting to make their days more valuable is this…
They think about moving faster, seeing more, increasing team members, adding insurance, purchasing new equipment, expanding to more ops, and – worst of all – adding more time with new clinical days and extended hours. It is always about adding MORE, which of course will immediately mean more of everything you don’t want (stress, expenses, debt, etc.) and runs up the overhead with no guarantee of an impact on the bottom line.
…it is what the entire industry says you have to do to survive and it just sounds terrible reading it, doesn’t it?
That’s because it is ineffective and unduly stressful.
Of course, each of these could be strategic investments for certain circumstances. The real issue is the concept that adding more of anything always means more profit.
You get to choose more problems or more profit.
To state the obvious, for those who desire to make more with less, it comes down to making your patients more valuable.
It also happens to be in complete alignment with doctors, like you, who have a full and complete health focus and actually want to help your patients improve their lives.
You believe it’s about the patient first. Doing what is best for your patients is directly tied to making them more valuable. As I remind you all of the time, you only help those who say yes and accept treatment.
That is why I say you don’t have good or bad patients; you have a good or bad patient experience. The bottom line is if you align the outcome you want with a patient experience that will create it, then you will achieve incredible results.
The difference between a doctor who does $5,000 or $20,000 in a day (not adding in other variables, only the doctor), is in the patient process and the diagnostic experience which all comes back to the value of their patients.
If you can invest more time with your patients you can as result invest less time in your practice because you can make less, worth more and therefore accomplish greater things with less effort, hours, and overhead.
The complicated part of it all is what you do in their mouths, not this. The math is very straightforward. The path to getting more out of less is crystal clear.
This may be blunt but why would you want me to waste your time with anything else… is your focus on patients or production?
Of course, your answer is “patients,” but is it really? How so? What are you doing to actually bring that to life?
What are you doing deliberately, intentionally, specifically to make them more valuable and better patients for themselves and thereby for you?
Here’s a short list of very powerful practice leverage and profit creating principles and strategies for strategic growth.
Because, by the way, I’m not necessarily talking about “small” anything. You can have big practice profits with small team, time, capacity and you can have big cases with few patients and you can have the exact opposite too.
This was the premise from last weeks ‘choosing the right model for you’ and no matter which model you choose the less is more and more from less is always present and important.
Here are five ways to bring it to life…
Through my Value Based Schedule approach to organizing and maximizing time and capacity
A High Performing Team with effective Outcome-Creating Communication
An engineered and extremely purposeful Patient Experience with education and verbiage
Fully customized diagnostic principles and Pillars of Health that embody your clinical philosophy and achieve your desired results
Your own chosen structure for fees, ideally insurance independence and breaking away from production dependent collections, by taking a completely reversed dynamic to controlling the flow of treatment and money whereby collections determine production – not the other way around.
All of this is possible and it leads to more from less. Attracting and creating what you want and removing and eliminating what you don’t.
And I’m here to help you on this process. Let me show you a different way, a better way to realize your goals without all of the unnecessary headaches and frustration. This is your chance to apply my proven formulas to your practice with…
Your Ultimate Practice and Lifestyle Freedom Blueprint
Remember this: what is best for you is always what is best for your patients. When you believe that AND when you stop apologizing for treatment or money AND you aren’t bashful about your goals or lie to yourself as if you don’t actually really want to make more – you will begin to experience a breakthrough.
I know, I’ve heard all of the excuses… “it’s hard,” “I’ve tried everything,” “I don’t want the patients to think it’s about the money,” and everything else to make yourself feel better.
Perhaps it’s not you that’s the issue. If anyone in your practice is in the way of doing what is best for your patients – then it is in your way too. If there is any negativity at any point of the patient experience or business process, it is diminishing and sabotaging your patients’ views and value of your purpose and mission.
I’m not here to tell you what you should want and I never will, nor am I ever going to judge you for your own definition of success – I just want you to have one. I want you to be okay with the fact that you have permission to evolve, to want more, better, faster, different than you once did.
Let’s imagine the life and dentistry you want for your future and then build a business that develops your team and improves the processes to increase the value of your patients to match.
Besides, when everything in our world right now seems to be about getting less for more, you already know to be the contrarian, renegade, maverick and buck the trend, blow up the status quo, and do the opposite of everyone else. Stop tolerating average and start setting the standard and raising the bar for yourself and those around you.
When everyone else hunkers down, waits it out, plays defense and retreats – you know it’s time to charge ahead, go on offense, double down, and aggressively chart a new course to create the future you want with the prosperity and freedom you deserve.
It’s time now to fight for your Private Practice Independence and that’s going to happen by making the most of all you’ve got and achieving a more from less formula for success.
That’s when the real fun begins.
