Happy Halloween! I sure hope you are doing something fun today for your patients and for yourselves. You deserve it.
One of the most powerful referral catalysts you will ever discover is doing fun, theme-based engagements with your patients. The type of things that move you from being seen just as ‘people taking care of teeth’ to ‘people taking care of people’.
You do that by getting into the ‘real stuff’, the things your patients are doing in their life that they are interested in. I call this humanizing the visit, the experience, the relationship, the dentistry, the practice.
Whether you want to go so far as to have a Halloween party for your patients, for each other or for your referral sources, that’s up to you; but certainly doing things that are fun for all of the holidays make you more personable.
And above all else, it makes you more referable because patients will have things to talk about and tell others.
Now, back to the topic, what’s really scary is dealing with the same problems over and over again without every doing something about them.
This past weekend, we hosted one of our most successful practices in all of north America and specifically the single most integrated biological dental practice. It is growing very fast and adding 2 new associate doctors this year. They are preparing for something close to the doubling of their practice growth in the next 12-15 months (and they are already pushing a multi-million dollar practice, with ‘multi’ being more than just a couple).
They did an amazing job. But, even the best can get better and that’s of course why they were here.
They had a lot of scary things going on in their practice…things that team members had been struggling with; training that needed to be done; and even common questions that all patients ask that we didn’t have a real consistent, systematic, guaranteed way to make sure every team member would answer them the exact same way the founding Doctor would.
As I said, they are already incredible and having unprecedented growth; so can you imagine what would happen if all of these challenges and areas of improvement would get corrected and dialed in … BAM!
Here’s the thing: there will always be these types of challenges but you don’t want them to be the same ones over and over again; that’s when it gets scary.
Your homework with your team this week is to make a list of every question patients ask, every item that anyone on the team needs more training on and all the little daily frustrations that keep coming up. Then set a day and time to go to work on each area in order to remove, overcome or correct them in your practice life.
I’m very proud of our dear friends and clients from this past weekend. They walk their talk and practice with more principled conviction than anyone I know. I can’t wait to see where they go next.
Every item left undone, ignored or neglected will play tricks on you and your team. However, when you are proactive and you remove scary things from your practice, your patients will reward you with lots of treats by doing more dentistry and bringing more friends.
Enjoy your day, doing something fun, Happy Halloween.
