Everyday you and your team have a choice. And in this choice lies the real difference between teams who succeed at practice growth by evolving into a real championship level and those who stall out to ultimately suffer frustrating, monotonous, perpetual problems that repeat again and again never letting you get ahead.
This is the same whether you are one million or two or five or even ten million dollar practice. The same ‘reason’ for plateauing exists, just on a more extreme basis compounded in different ways.
If you are a smaller practice then you sabotage your schedule, you give in on your treatment plans, you let patients pay on their own terms instead of your terms. These things can (and will) cripple your growth and leave you stuck in a hand-to-mouth working every month for the same or less money.
If you are a larger practice then your same challenges multiply. The magnitude of this can destroy your profitability putting yourself into a position where you have to accelerate volume. You are forced to go deeper and deeper into accounts receivable, you swell with greater overhead, and you sign up for more insurance plans just to try to keep the ship sailing.
These two types of practices think they are different and yet they have the same fundamental problems.
To summarize why these problems occur: you confuse serving patients for being at the mercy of patients – big difference.
The goal of your practice should be to decide how you want to operate, in what way you want to serve patients, the treatment philosophy you have and the strategy for every aspect of your practice. This includes phone, greeting, website, information, clinical exam, treatment presentation, referrals, asking for money, billing… all the way down to your protocol for when someone sits in the reception area and the décor in the restroom.
This also includes how you schedule, how you triage emergencies, how you transfer treatment from operatory to the front desk.
You get to decide.
To the extent at which you determine and commit to your own modus operandi of practice operations and patient engagement will be the extent at which you succeed, eliminate all stress, remove frustration and set yourself up for exploding past your goals.
This week, I want you to do a reflective and self-assessing critique over your entire operations, patient flow and daily execution with your entire team.
It will only take a few minutes to come to the realization that you are at the mercy of your patients. The source of every major frustration, the ruining of your momentum, the messing up of your daily flow, the decrease in your profitability and otherwise sabotaging your ability to do more dentistry every single day… stems from this.
Go ahead, ask each other ‘during a week in the life at our practice how many times do we go against the rules we have set, go against the state of the ideal, go against what we know is best and go against what we have committed to doing?’
Then go to work to recommit, decide, adjust, have dialogue about it and set checks and balances to make sure you stay true to your vision. Of course, if you don’t have these rules to live and operate by, then select the major frustrations you live with every day and figure out what can be done to eliminate them.
Now, one more piece of homework for you this week, if you haven’t already and surely you have, but I want to make sure… you simply have to register for my first presentation of the year. It‘s all about getting more out of your practice with the effort you already exert (without adding any patients or time to your practice life).
This, an advanced and behind the scenes look, is what champion practices are made of: maximizing every part of their practice and getting the most out of what already exists.
I’ll be handing you your own 5 Keys to uncovering and capturing the hidden opportunity, treatment and money in your practice. You, of course, would want all of those three things especially when you are already doing everything to earn them…you’ll see.
Register Now and Unlock the Hidden Opportunity in Your Practice >>>
