Now, if you didn’t get excited for my three weekly actions for 2022 last week, there might be bigger issues than what we can address in the Weekly Report.
Just the statement about “Successful Ownership Habits” should have been powerful enough to make you stop everything you were doing, sit down, and make your own list.
Far too many doctors see ownership as a burden rather than a benefit. And you know, they get exactly what they perceive it to be.
If you want benefits from being an owner then you have to have the habits that make those benefits possible.
One of my Martial Arts Mentors was a master at “how to teach” others. He would always bring up the quote about there being three kinds of people…
Those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who stand around wondering what just happened.
And in practice ownership, you get to choose exactly which type of owner you are going to be…
A wonderer.
A watcher.
A maker.
The power of ownership is all about the power to create, the power to design, and the power to make things happen for yourself and for others. There’s no greater force for good because feelings and intentions will only get you so far.
You’ve got to be a driver of change, a facilitator of progress, a catalyst for others in order to get the effects that you desire.
You’ve had the opportunity to completely and totally reset yourself, refocus your team, and refresh your vision for this year. Now it’s time to get to work.
Here’s some advice: no matter how it went last week or yesterday, it can go better this week and today. Don’t just know that, expect that and more importantly deliberately make it so.
In order to take this to the next level, you need to commit to greater, more proactive and diligent Future Focused Activities this year and build those into your normal routines.
This is pen and paper planning out of the numbers for the year down to the ideal daily goal creation and hourly run rate but it is also about being future focused with creating the most comprehensive treatment plans for your patients and executing an opportunity based morning huddle. Future focused takes the ‘make things happen’ attitude and put its into action.
Most doctors (those who haven’t found their way right here to the most positive, prosperous, proactive place for practice owners), wait until their month is over with and they wonder exactly as the saying goes, “What just happened?”
They don’t know why the number is what it is. They might not even know the number.
You, on the other hand, know exactly what outcomes will be without seeing the patients or knowing the treatment opportunity available because in your mind you have already created the vision before the day has arrived.
So, what’s the most Successful Ownership Habit?
Practice on Purpose.
If we know what outcome we want, then don’t we automatically know exactly what actions to take, what direction to go, and what decisions to make?
Pause now, briefly, this midmonth of January 2022 and take a look back at the last two weeks and ask yourself what could I and my team have done with more purpose?
Phone calls
Preparing patients for their first visit
Thorough diagnostics
More purposeful photograph
More purposeful patient questions
Treatment planning for complete pathways to health
Morning Huddles
Team meetings
End of day debrief
Follow-up with unscheduled treatment
Here’s the good news – as I wrote about to my high level Doctors inside of our DST Universe this week – it is not about just doing more of the same, it is about doing better with the things that matter most.
When you upgrade ownership habits and you allow less time for waste, less time for meaningless tasks, and less time for distractions, you give yourself more time on things that move the needle.
It is one of the bigger reasons to shift to be ruthless about insurance not just because of the discount you take, but the time wasted on chasing money instead of caring for patients.
Ownership isn’t entitlement to anything, ownership is responsibility to choose outcomes, directions, and how you are going to operate.
So, yes, the purpose of every action and decision in your business and every system and protocol of your team and each person’s responsibility must be tied to the desired outcome of what exactly you are wanting to make happen.
This is how I designed the structure around engaging patients on the phone not to take an order and schedule an appointment but to connect with a patient and establish emotional rapport to build trust and gain their commitment to showing up with purpose.
It is the difference between problem and principle based diagnosis. The difference between possibilities of optimal health as you design their path forward instead of just triaging obvious work that needs to be done.
It’s funny, or maybe not, that the three types of people describe exactly the three types of doctors and correlate directly to the three levels of success.
For the most part there are one, two, three million dollar producers in Dentistry and it doesn’t matter whether it is what you could classify as general without any specialty procedures (though I don’t say it like that because I think it’s all specialty in the sense of the clinician) or sleep, TMJ, oral surgery, perio, or ortho.
It is not about what type of practice you have, it is about what type of doctor you are. It is not about what type of business you have, it is what type of owner you are. It is not about what type of team you have, it is about what type of leader you are.
You can do five or ten or fifteen or twenty or twenty-five a day doing any ‘type’ of dentistry or any ‘style’ of practice. The difference isn’t in the ‘what’ it is in the ‘how’ and the ‘who.’
The bottom line is that most business owners and doctors are trying to figure out how to win “out there” in this “environment” under these “circumstances.”
Instead of doing what the ultra-successful doctors and owners do…
They create their own environment.
They set their own circumstances.
They control their own outcomes.
They make their own reality.
The hard part is deciding, not doing. Most just never commit to one direction and see it through. They get stuck in indecision, in self-doubt, in feeling daunted not by what to do but by figuring out what they want.
Some out of fear of missing out on something else, some out of fear of actually achieving it, some out of fear of failing, some out of fear of what others will think of them, some out of fear of the work or rejection or whatever else – but always out of fear.
I challenge you this year, right now and forever more, do not make decisions out of fear; make decisions with power, with confidence, with conviction, with enthusiasm.
Are you a leader, doctor, owner that wants to wonder what happened, watch what happens, or are you going to make something to happen? It’s your decision to make.
