Over the past several weeks, we’ve talked about combating the different economic situations we are experiencing and decisively heading into in the only way we know how… offensively, proactively, and positively.
We began first with the aspect that matters most of all, which of course is, your mindset. You can choose to succumb to the negative headlines and constant barrage of bad news or you can decide to be immune to the noise around you and be determined to soundly defeat any challenge that arises.
Then we talked about patient mindset. Specifically, I gave you two different psychological approaches to express better empathy and have more effective influence with your patients. You can quite literally come across as if you are reading their minds; after all, you do know precisely what they are experiencing and thinking.
The trick (which, I hate to call it that because it’s not trickery), is to use their objective or potential objection as exactly the reason why they absolutely should move forward with treatment.
Your commitment to mastering the ability to enter the conversation in the patients’ minds is the critical if you want to never retreat at the first mention of any excuse or objection or recession or price or insurance pushback. It’s all a matter of confidence which starts with practicing your responses so it becomes engrained.
Today, I want to add a third defense element against the detrimental forces working against you right now from the economy. This is vital, without it you will begin to question your mission, vision, strategy, value, diagnosis, treatment planning, and many other things.
If you aren’t careful, you’ll end up with longer days, later nights, for less profit, with more stress and unwind everything you’ve worked so hard to achieve and build up over the past several years.
But we aren’t going to let that happen. I have two money principles to share that will help your practice continue to thrive. In fact, as counter intuitive as it might sound, there is some good news to be found.
These are two principles that take on even greater significance, now that we are entering a stage of recessionary money math. Done correctly, they will actually allow you to create a more profitable practice – right now.
They are not principles that ever change. However, instead of them being casual conveniences most stages of your career, today when times are tough and money is tighter, these become even more impactful for your plan to protect your practice prosperity.
First, the obvious… the patients who have money, still have money.
So, you have two choices… 1. You can either ask each patient if they have money and pre-judge them, or 2. You can just give every patient the benefit of the doubt as you diagnose, educate, treatment plan, present the most comprehensive pathway to health possible, and give them an opportunity to receive the care they deserve.
It is always odd to me (and you might say ironic, I guess), that most doctors I talk to always say they don’t want to be selling dentistry or they don’t want it to be about the money because it’s always about the patient first. Yet, nearly every single one makes it about the money.
Doctors and team alike are guilty of making it about the money.
When you pre-judge or short change or diminish treatment or focus on insurance coverage or you pick out ones to go all-in on or ones to spend less time with – you make it about the money. Instead of just treating every patient like they are the best patient and that they deserve the best from you every time all the time.
Now, how does this fit into the recessionary practice math?
Because it always comes back to the same underlying concept in dentistry… you can either get a little from a lot or a lot from a little. You can either go high-volume or you can go high-value.
And whether you have three chairs or thirteen chairs or thirty chairs the exact same concept applies. It’s a matter of quantity-in must equal quality-out. It should all the time but it must these times.
The formula is simple, you will always win bigger and more often if you give every patient the opportunity to get completely healthy every time. Then you have to follow-through with the corresponding concept of getting them healthy in as few visits as possible.
I’m not going to go into the whole money flow aspect today with pre-payment and how the game-changing secret of all of dentistry is to break free from capacity limitations of time, space, and people by separating production from collections.
The point I’m making here is to go aggressively against the volume tendency, the temptation to discount, the urge to diminish treatment, and fall right back into an insurance dependent cycle that ruins any precedent you’ve set for your patients because you are feeling desperate.
Either it’s about the money or it isn’t it. If it isn’t, then don’t let it be – not for you or for them. Get it out of your mind the same way you do insurance and care for the patient not the pocketbook. It should never ever matter what’s going on outside in the world because you create your own sacred place inside your practice where health is all that matters.
The reasons why this works in your practice is that you’ll always get more out of your patients then you thought and you’ll discover the top twenty percent of patients will result in eighty percent of your collections.
By the way, if that dynamic doesn’t exist in your practice automatically, then you should know other aspect are way off course. However, that presents its own opportunity for you to find new ways prosper, work smarter, and help more people in more meaningful ways.
The next recessionary practice math principle is where the profit is actually found.
This might sound odd at first because you’ve been lied to – big time. Probably by everyone and you’ve believed them, why wouldn’t you? After all, these people were purporting to be on your side. As a result, you’ve chosen how to run your life and business based on this myth.
All your life you’ve heard of the “bottom line” and that your profit is what you get at the end after everything (and everyone) else is paid.
In reality, you should “pay yourself first.” You might have heard this before and yet you wondered how on earth does that actually happen. How can you pay yourself first if you don’t have enough money left to pay everything and everyone else?
Instead, it’s better said to “prioritize your profit first.”
This is not a bad thing, it’s quite healthy. No different than prioritizing your health, your daily routine, your time, your family.
You can’t take care of all of these things after everything else because we know what happens – they consume all resources and there is nothing ever left over.
There is no doubt that you have felt there just isn’t enough of you to go around, or time in the day, or money in the bank, or anything else.
There is, however, always enough patients, treatment, opportunity.
So why then – if there is enough of all the things necessary to achieve your goals and live your dreams – is there not enough of profit in the practice?
It’s because the business has been built upside down. Just like life, time, schedules, and priorities are all often completely wrong-side-up.
Here’s why… it all comes back to expectations because that is what sets goals, decides strategy, creates system, and drives focus.
The greatest lesson in all of business you will ever learn is that the bottom line really comes from the top. The profit is not found at the end, it’s created in the beginning. Everything ‘left over’ should not be an accident. In fact, it should be pre-decided, pre-calculated, pre-determined, and pre-planned.
Both in terms of your goals but also more importantly as an actual business objective. If you understand, as an owner, that you make money off the top (not from the bottom), you give yourself the power of what business ownership is all about. Far above just doing things on your own terms or being your own boss – it’s about being your own banker.
And when you control the money, you control it all. You make different decisions, you act more boldly, you have more confidence, and by the way you have more peace of mind.
It is critical at any time but especially this time in a recession – where everyone already is or soon will be squeezed from all sides – to control these two money math metrics in your practice.
I’ll break this down and take you behind the scenes to the top-line-profit to see how the money should actually flow in your practice – next week.
