One “New Year’s Resolution” I hope you make every single year is to reign back in your schedule. At least take a hard look at it, analyze where you are on track and where you are not, where you are efficiently hitting necessary hourly values and where you are lacking (or completely disorganized in your consistency, flow, productivity and profitability) in your schedule.
Fact: your schedule will dictate your income…it will act as formula and math equation for the cash-flow of your Practice. It will create and provide opportunity or it will squander, suppress and strangle the potential treatment available every day with every patient.
Fact: most practices are at the mercy of their schedule, not in control of it. They are dictated by what happens to be in the columns for the day, not in control of it. They are achieving their daily goals (or not) by accident, not in control of it.
When it comes to your schedule – it is not ‘the business’, it is a tool used to create the dentistry in a way that has been orchestrated, designed, deliberately, and specifically chosen based on the capacity, personnel, space, providers, and above all else – your goal for financial results and experience in the day, based on your desired dentistry and practice model, vision, and mission.
I can tell you this, you will live and die by your schedule.
Good days: schedule went well, you made money.
Bad days: schedule didn’t go well, your day was not worth the time and energy you invested, the life you gave up, the dentistry you did.
If you want to know the obvious sign to your success…it’s if you are creating more dentistry per day than you are producing…if you are diagnosing, treatment planning and SCHEDULING more dentistry than you are producing.
I have long used the “Schedule as Bank Account” analogy. Production is a withdraw from the bank account, money made now getting spent to pay your team, your practice, you, and whatever else. You made a withdraw. Production is money made and spent, now gone forever.
The only way to grow is to SCHEDULE more dentistry today than you produced today so that you are depositing more into the future than you withdrew.
This is a very easy concept to understand and it’s the number you should be focusing on. The problem with most practices is they are solely focused on ‘production’ otherwise withdraws – instead of creation, scheduling, and tracking THIS number every single day.
If you want a paradigm shift, as simple as it sounds, it will be the most profound, dramatic and significant thing you will ever do. This 180 degree turn towards future-focused (instead of desperate in the moment of the day) dentistry.
This breaks you of the cycle of hand to mouth production to create momentum, build demand, and pushes you over the hump of your goals. You will find a place where your “goal” or minimum or baseline or whatever silly inadequate, uninspiring number you are targeting is PRE-SCHEDULED weeks (soon even, following my method, a month or two in advance), so that you can end every day with a victory over and above your standard goal and star producing for growth.
Here’s a tip… If you want to produce for growth – you have to schedule for growth first.
How do you schedule for growth…
1. With controlled, disciplined, daily targeted minimum numbers managed by hours and procedures, ops and providers daily.
2. With a strategic value-based approach to column-izing your production and holding the integrity of high production so that the doctor’s time is sacred until number one is completely met.
3. With a team approach to the creation of dentistry following my 5-buckets of production income stream system.
4. Making the most of every patient visit and never letting anyone (patient or team) dictate or break apart your scheduling protocol, of course leaving room for very few exceptions but always building and planning for the ideal.
5. By tracking daily results, instead of waiting until the month ends to look back at it in retrospect, to stay on top if it using number three to make sure your practice is firing on all cylinders.
Well this is a start for you to at least get the wheels turning. If you want to talk through this and value my expert guidance on this, which you should, then this week I’ll open up a few Custom Profit Blueprints and we’ll analyze it together and crack the code on what’s best for you.
You can request Your Custom Profit Blueprint right here >>>
If you are sitting back saying… “Well Scott it all sounds good…but how do I get the dentistry to put in the schedule so my days can be filled with what I want instead of just what I get and settle for?”
Have no fear my friends…because I tackled that in excruciating detail just a few days ago in my feature presentation of the 4-Pillars of Patient Focus. If you missed it, go here, right away and immerse yourself in this because in it lies the secrets to creating an overwhelming abundance of life-changing, high-dollar, profitable dentistry to have your productive schedule dialed into ideal and hitting daily values you’ve only day dreamed about before.
Watch the On Demand Replay right now >>>
(or copy the link and save for later…don’t forget it won’t be up long)
Lastly – please – do your homework, assess your schedule and challenge your thinking. Ensure you schedule for money, not just patients and that you are maximizing your time, space, people, opportunities and columns in the schedule.
Yes, your schedule should not dictate your income…your income should dictate your schedule. Now get to it.
