This week we begin the next steps forward… the execution plan to the your reopen. I’m calling it your comeback. It sounds powerful and it is what it is. Champions are built for comebacks, it’s what they do. It’s what you will do. You will come back bigger, better, stronger, more focused, and more in control than ever before.
As a quick aside, and I’ll talk more about it later, I’ve been busy putting together my most elaborate and in-depth online video training course packed full of resources and applicable tools that you can use to help you right now on your way back into your Practice. I’ve called it The Invincible Dental Practice and it will help you create exactly that.
You can gain access to the 5-part video training series right here >>>
If there were one thing left to do before you re-open and get busy in the trenches again with patients it would be this. You’ll see why – there is nothing that can give you the most complete perspective, the most important actions, the most profitable steps to take to make a successful comeback out of the gate and secure a prosperous future fast than this.
Your Invincible Dental Practice awaits…
Now, today is very straight forward, so before I get to that, let’s recap:
Before you did anything else over the past couple weeks, you should have thought long and hard about the practice of the future and compared it against the practice of the past. You get to decide what all you might want to see or be different than what once was. You can use this time to reset and reorganize life, team, systems, even philosophy, or clinical protocols. You get to take some of the reflections and experiences from the past few weeks back into practice with you.
As every smart Doctor has said to me, they can’t believe how much they’ve gotten accomplished and yet the action list still seems so long (and, by the way, I don’t care if it’s personal or professional, hopefully a little of both).
Then we’ve moved to tactics of getting your team rallied, your safety protocols set, and your schedule structure for going back in. Over the last two weeks, I have bullet pointed out each of the key areas that require decisions and actions for your practice’s comeback plan that you must think about.
Specifically, I divided it into four areas…
Safety and Mindset: how you are going to communicate to your team and your patients to ensure everyone is on the same page and comfortable and confident.
Schedule Structure and Strategy: how you are going to rebuild your schedule to help your patients while hitting your goals and restore profitability. This is for Doctors, Hygiene, our Specialists with varying categories of visits, and all types of patients and procedures. Find the balance of doing and diagnosing dentistry.
Outreach and Education to Your Patients: I have been talking about this for weeks. Videos, phone calls, emails, social media, direct mail, do it all. I have encouraged four different videos, at the very least, of a rolling campaign to the reopen that I outlined for you last week.
These will allow you to have a fast start and to get your patients to rally around you; done right, should lead to dynamic referral opportunities and a steady flow of new patients quickly.
Finally, there is the Divide and Conquer for the execution of the comeback plan with your Team. Time is limited and critical, you have to get everyone involved to cover as many of the highest level actions as possible.
There was a lot more to unpack over the past couple weeks leading up to this final week before you reopen where we have three key focuses…
1 – Preparing the Practice
Preparing the Practice from the Personal Protective Equipment position, posting protocols, and creating your special safety video you can send out to patients. Of course, cleaning the practice again and having things set-up the way you want to.
You also must do training and review with your team on all of the above.
2 – Building / Solidifying the Schedule
This is about taking inventory of what is in the schedule, what has been displaced from the weeks that were lost, and with the game plan from last week you are now making sure the that all days are set-up properly and that you are making the math work.
Any schedule changes or questions need to be walked through so you can visualize the flow. I suggest planning for a 2 week rolling start… what our schedule will be for the first 2 weeks, the second 2 weeks, the third 2 weeks, and by then equilibrium should be reestablished completely.
I’m not advocating one way or another on schedule (heavy or light). I’m just saying to picture the building of the schedule in 2-week increments and most of all be prepared to diagnosis and be in creation mode more than ever before.
Your focus on proactive preventative health and your responsibility to be your patients’ leader and advocate is going to be more important than ever before and we’ll be going into great depth and details on that in the coming weeks.
3 – Connecting with your Patients
Finally, my favorite, it’s time to call all of your patients with the good news. Now you get to engage with them for what really matters, getting them back into your practice and doing what you do best – taking care of them.
In short order, I’m dividing this into five key categories with some outliers as well – and all of this depends completely with what you have done over the past six weeks during the shutdown, what type of patient visits you’ve seen, if you are doing virtual consults, if you finished all of your restorative work or procedures in the schedule, or completed your post-ops and deliveries, etc.
In general terms, I would divide the calling blitz to rebuild the schedule and patient communication like this:
1. Patients you owe dentistry to that have already paid (if you haven’t already made good on it during the past few weeks), and things that need to be finished up. You have to balance how you get that done; you should have already cleared it out of the way as it’s going to really slow down your ramp up.
2. Patients that should have or needed to close on treatment plans, pay, and schedule. Get the dentistry done that was freshly diagnosed.
3. Personally calling all patients of higher risk with underlying health conditions with unscheduled treatment. You should have already called just to check but now we move to help them with their health, offer them concierge times, and express how important it is that they move forward with their pathway to health now.
4. Now we move to build the schedule with other unscheduled treatment opportunities throughout the patient base and all of the patients that have already been displaced, rescheduled, or cancelled from before.
5. Of course, we have confirmation of existing hygiene patients, follow-up visits, or ortho, sleep, tmj, etc. You have to have strict confirmations of these patients to make sure if they are already in the schedule they are going to show up. If they aren’t, you don’t force it. You meet them where they are at, you follow-up accordingly, and then you go to your list of patients that need to get in and you fill the holes.
The bottom line is that it should not be difficult to fill up two productive weeks of dentistry in your schedule, you’ve got at least a month if not nearly two months of demand that has been waiting in the wings.
Lastly, don’t forget about all the new patients that have called that should have been very intimately nurtured, followed up with all along, and have been at the very least had place holder appointments if not virtual interviews already.
Please sit down with your team and layout every category of patients and build the schedule to create your own plan. This way, you will hit the ground running.
You have to get through the safety and mindset stuff and move forward into actual business operations. It’s time to get serious as you prepare for your re-open.
There are endless combinations, opportunities, actions to take. Just get started and build it one day at a time, one patient at a time – just like you always do.
And if you want some bonus points: I would get back to role-playing and run through patient experiences, phone calls, questions, insurance objections. Plus, you have to add in communication and answers to questions about the virus, safety, and the benefits of dentistry on total health.
It is very important to dust off your people and break the rust off the practice. If weekly zoom calls aren’t accomplishing that, then you have to get people back together and get down to business. Run through every possible play, sharpen the mind, hone the skills, and get ready. If it was the off season, it’s now preseason and you don’t get too many days before it’s game time. Your opening day is upon you and it’s your responsibility to get your team ready and to have them get your patients ready – just as I’ve gotten You ready!
In closing, it’s fair to say there are many lessons that have come from these past several weeks. There have been lessons learned from the coronavirus, the shutdown of the economy, time with family, reflection about dentistry, and so many other experiences all during this time of crisis.
Of course, lessons are good; the problem is they usually wear off as time passes. They become like the scene in your rear view drifting further away as time elapses until pretty soon the vision of where you have been is gone. Most people’s reality is while they might remember lessons when called upon to do so but very few really make a lasting impact.
Those that do, well, they change the course of their future. They become the pivotal difference makers that lead to happier, healthier, more fulfilling and prosperous lives.
One of those lessons, perhaps the one that will define every decision you make in the future about your practice will go something like this:
Never again do you want to have a practice vulnerable to any variable outside of your control – that creates instability in your life, uncertainty in your financial independence, and imbalance to your peace of mind.
You want a practice that can withstand any and all disruption of any kind. Because the one thing we have no doubt about is that this won’t be the last challenge you face, this won’t be the only difficult time, and there will be circumstances outside of your control in the future. The only question is will your practice, your patients, your team, your income, your life remain in your control and protected? Ultimately, that’s all that ever matters.
To do that, there is but one thing required above all others – you must ensure you have built an Invincible Dental Practice…
Register For the 5-Part Video Training Now >>>
It’s my gift, my way of giving back, and doing my part to make absolutely certain that we never forget the greatest lesson of them all – that your independence is up to you.
As you prepare to reopen, to restart, and to make your great comeback, let this be the time you build your practice to be Invincible!
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I’ll be back next week with some very powerful next steps as we turn our sights on where we go from here – for the first part of your Great Comeback Story!
