Way back in the old days when I was teaching martial arts and earning a respectful living while still in my teens, I learned very quickly that the greatest challenge in every business is ONE key factor.
It’s called: SHOWING UP.
I used to compare the challenge of getting a patient back to your practice 2-3-4 times a year and my challenge of getting students (and really the students weren’t the problem, it was the parents), to show up for lessons 2-3 times per week.
Now, my advantage was they paid whether or not they showed up. However, there is no value in NOT experiencing something so that would only last so long.
In your Practice, they only pay if they are going to get the work done and in order to do that they have to show up in the chair.
Your competition, as I have pointed out over the last few weeks, is NOT other dental practices – it’s the perception of value patients feel, see, believe and apply to dentistry. Even after insurance, discount ads, patients’ reluctance to do dentistry (let alone pay for it), none of these are the biggest challenge you face.
YOUR GREATEST and MOST FRIGHTENING reality that ought to scare you into doing something about it is…
The challenge of getting your patients to show up in the first place.
And I don’t just mean LITERALLY walk through the door for their appointments, but that is a big part of it.
I’m talking about making sure they see value, stay mentally engaged and are compelled enough to act at every single step of your experience.
Website
Phone
Paperwork
Interview
Exam
Treatment Presentation
Pay
Schedule
Come Back to Actually Do the Work
And then we have the recurring visits whether follow-ups for certain types of specialty practices or hygiene visits for general practices.
If the patient isn’t in your office you got nothing.
No chance to wow them.
No chance to help them.
No chance to re-educate and influence.
No chance to increase their value of dentistry.
No chance to get a referral.
And around and around we go.
Now, before you go thinking you have no problem with patients showing up, take the last 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 even up to 10 years or more if you are willing to do it and factor in every new patient, every emergency patient and look at that total versus your active 6 month recare visit count. Then you can tell me how you are doing.
Still, the fact is, that’s not enough because we need to know how much they are each worth, what has actually been done in their mouths and how many others they have referred.
You see, this is why I am so adamant and damnably tough on you when it comes to paying attention to all of the holes in your process and the leaks in your practice.
People complain to me about not getting enough new patients but they miss phones, don’t return calls timely, answer questions improperly and don’t control conversations.
Then we have patients in the practice that delay treatment with no real reason and they have no structured follow-up or system to keep the patient in motion and at least coming back for something.
I see more waste in calls that are missed, treatment that walks out the door, patients that are lost in any of the different compartments of your practice than there are the ones that we capitalize on and keep.
The point is not to pick on you but to get you to realize that the single greatest and most important aspect of what you do is GETTING YOUR PATIENTS INTO YOUR PRACTICE. Then you must keep them in the flow of treatment and coming back in order for you to continue cultivating their commitment to health and building a personal relationship.
Realize that more attention paid to this and more focused structure put on it, the more you create a thriving, robust, compounding impact of treatment and patient opportunities that will lead to amazing growth potential WIHTOUT you having to work harder or see more.
