As promised, we are going to dive right in to the four specific things you can do with your team to become more profitable.
We are going to begin with my ‘work smarter, not harder’ theme that I share with every team on our first rally call. For twenty years, I’ve been emphasizing that there is a way to actually achieve jumps in efficiency and performance.
People often act as if working smarter is some elusive ideal that can’t be realized – some utopian way of life. In fact, quite the opposite. It relies on the most basic of all common-sense methods to accomplishing bigger goals easier and faster.
First, before we start, I want to remind you about my extremely rare and limited virtual experience I am hosting for ambitious doctors ready to breakthrough and make the dramatic shift to working smarter not harder in their practices…
If you want to tap into the most powerful team-focused strategies that have the ability to change your practice from a doctor-dependent to a team-driven practice then you won’t want to miss my all-new Team Transformation Masterclass for a Self-Managed Practice. I’m conducting specifically for Private Practice Owners who want to become better leaders and get more out of their team while also getting more out of their practice.
Live Masterclass: The 5-Step Gameplan for a Self-Managed Practice
For today, let’s begin by talking about the objective of the team.
If you were to ask them or likely even observe them at any given time – they are busy. In part, that’s because our world is compulsively busy. Even when they are not, they find a way to be to occupied.
The first transformation in any practice is to switch “busy” with “productive.” And not just in the dental sense, the clinical concept of production, but in terms of actually achieving the highest value priorities, actions, patient engagements, meetings, huddles, all the way down to photographs and diagnosis.
I can say the same thing for your non-clinical time. In fact, the more productive the non-clinical time is, the more productive the clinical time and patient engagement can be.
You are making an investment in your team. Is that investment just to purchase hours of their time or is that investment to result in some benefit to the patients, the practice, and the doctor?
If your team sees ‘being busy’ (by filling their time with whatever they choose) as success then you are in world of hurt. On the other hand, if they see ‘work smarter and be productive’ (by focusing on the highest value priorities) as success, that will lead to a dramatically different result.
In Hygiene, as example, is the priority treatment or cleaning, education or cleaning, moving patients forward with opportunities to enhance their health or just run them through the visit?
Let’s take Ortho, Sleep, Pain, Surgery, Perio, or any other specialty modality of care. The same applies… is it a visit for what’s in the schedule – or is it an opportunity to engage a patient for family referrals, to build a stronger relationship, to drive value and create opportunity?
The common-sense factor is the visit will take the same amount of time no matter what is accomplished and thus the value of the outcome of the visit has more to do with the value of what happens during it – not the time that it takes up.
Elevate the use of everyone’s time and you can multiply the return on the same investment. Now, this often requires detailed discussions, reprogramming the vision of success, and creating clarity over outcomes.
This circles us back to my reverse engineer principles applied to the profitability of your practice and your team’s return on investment of their time, talent, skills, roles, and responsibilities.
In order to track your progress, you must pay attention to the right statistics and focusing on the right goals. Done properly, this is a self-monitoring action taken up by each and every individual team member.
The exact ‘how to’ is a huge part of what I will be laying out, my playbook for private practice success with your team by flipping it 180 degrees to a self-managed practice instead of a doctor-managed practice. My team driven systems for practice success will instantly give you more lifestyle, financial freedom, and peace of mind by increasing both the effectiveness and consistency of your team.
If you are ready to win in more meaningful – and profitable – ways and desire getting your practice to work for you instead of you having to work for it, then you are exactly who I’m hosting my upcoming Team Transformation Training for…
Register for the 4-Hour Live Team Transformation Masterclass
The next transformation to work smarter, not harder is to avoid the volume trap. A higher quantity automatically generates a higher level of stress, urgency, and pressure – essentially the harder way, not smarter.
Volume leads to playing the averages, averages lead to an acceptable (though it shouldn’t be) level of mediocrity, and mediocrity leads to complacency. I’m talking about volume of phone calls, visits, new patients, emergencies, hygiene, consults, etc.
When your team treats every patient opportunity as the most important one, you not only elevate the value of the patient to the practice but you increase the value of the practice to the patient.
This is why your systems should be the constant, not the variable. This includes relationship building on the front end, screening and scheduling effectively, putting proper enhancements in place to move patients from C to B to A (instead of watering down the experience and doing the exact opposite), and building a better patient.
Instead of the outcome of a visit being the result of the patient and insurance; it becomes the patient being the result of the team and experience.
In summary, our first two Team Profit Principles are to prioritize the highest use of each team member’s time (rather than just being buys filling the hours of the day) and focusing on quality of quantity so that every opportunity can be treated as the most important.
The same principles can be applied to your Morning Huddles, End of Day Debriefs, Pathway’s to Health, Referral Partners, Case Values, Pre-Payment Strategy, Value Based Scheduling, and just about every other aspect of the practice.
Next week, we’ll tackle the next two Team Profit Principles with some ABC’s of a different kind as well as pure ‘payroll and wages’ ROI to your practice percentages with one little secret that you will find transformative.
And remember, it’s not what you read or what you know, it’s what you apply and do more of that really makes a difference for profit for your practice and impact for your patients. A true win for all, when you master working smarter not harder.
I have three spots available for the first Team Transformation Masterclass where I show you exactly how to get more out of your team and more profits out of your practice. The result are more empowered, fulfilled, loyal, high-performing team members.
Get ready to rapidly elevate your prosperity and dramatically enhance your lifestyle through a Self-Managed Practice…
