Only those tough enough to survive in business will survive.
As economies change, adverse conditions will drastically affect those who have not prepared for those changes.
It is often said that any fool can make money when times are good.
But some fools can lose money when times are good.
But in tougher times, when conditions tighten up, it’s only the astute who emerge out the other end without being adversely affected.
In the olden days, owning a dental practice or dental office was a license to print money. There weren’t so many dentists around and there was plenty of supply of people in need of dental services.
In 2016 there seems to be an oversupply of dentists.
Here in Australia, there are too many dental schools operating with scant regard for the laws of supply and demand, graduating dentists every year who are trying desperately to find a place in the dental workforce,.
On top of this, the professional regulators seem hell-bent on registering an additional number of overseas trained dentists who sit for an entry examination each year.
These additional members of the dental community enter the dental marketplace and are left very little choice than to and compete hard for their share or at least for some share of that market.
And in what way?
Most of the time in any industry, or relating to a service or commodity, when supply exceeds demand, the only means of competition left to those supplying is to compete on price.
“I can do that for you for five percent less than they will”
And an oversupply of a service then results in the consumer asking:
“Is that your best price?”
Both of these responses are indications to the consumer that prices are arbitrary and are open for downward negotiations.
Any discussion on price tends to imply that the vendor is trying to charge as much as they can.
And any question by the customer implies that they do not believe that the set price is appropriate.
My belief when I am a customer is always this:
I believed that if I wanted the best product and the best service from my vendor then I would pay the ticketed price.
If the product and the service I received then failed to match the fee or price that I paid, then I would question the vendor after the fact rather than negotiate with the vendor ahead of time.
Similarly, when I was a vendor, I set my fees to be a true representation of the service that I provided to my clients.
And I stuck true to those fees.
They were never open for negotiation.
What I also did religiously was that I reviewed and adjusted my fees on a regular basis to reflect inflation within the economy as well as reflecting market forces such as rent increases, currency fluctuations, and cost of raw and processed materials and supplies.
On top of these factors regarding overhead, it is important for every business to be profitable.
What’s the point of being in business at all if as a business owner all you do is pay yourself lastly?
And in so doing, you pay yourself hardly at all?
What’s the point of wearing out and traumatizing all of that heart muscle and stomach lining looking after the welfare of all of your employees and all of your suppliers, while at the same time neglecting the futures of your family members and of yourself?
If you DO NOT run your business as a business then what the heck has been your purpose in life other than to be exploited by some or all of those who see you as a patsy to take advantage of?
Don’t spend your life as a wilting wallflower.
Be strong.
Set your goals and take action to maintain your course toward those goals.
You MUST arrive where you want to arrive and not where you end up arriving.
The Ultimate Patient Experience is a simple to build complete Customer Service system in itself that I developed that allowed me to create an extraordinary dental office in an ordinary Sydney suburb. If you’d like to know more, ask me about my free special report.
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I’ve just started back playing regular competition golf after three years away from the game due to my shoulder injury and my shoulder re-surfacing operation.
Three long years….
So, I was playing golf yesterday. And one of my playing partners I had not met before.
When he asked me what I did for a living I told him that I used to be a dentist and now I consulted to dentists.
His response, which is somewhat typical, was:
“You consult to dentists? On what?”
I told him that I help dentists to keep more of their patients by helping them with their customer service skills and also by helping them build better relationships with their patients.
And he said:
“You need to talk to my dentist.”
I asked him who his dentist was.
And he said:
“You know what? I can’t remember his name.”
As stupid as this story sounds it is a story I hear repeated time and time again by various people that I meet.
It’s tragic because as the dental profession on a whole feels as if it’s making inroads and doing well, there’s a considerable section of society out there where members of the dental profession are not hitting the mark.
And by this golfer’s story, the profession could be missing their target by a long, long way.
My golf partner then went on to tell me that his dentist doesn’t even operate any active maintenance programme for regular checking and cleaning of his patients’ teeth and gums.
Or at least not for my friend, anyway.
My golf friend said that the nameless dentist relies on the patients remembering that they are due for their hygiene visits and check ups.
This dentist puts the onus for that back onto the patient.
And funnily, all my golf friend wants is for his dentist to contact him and make him an appointment when he’s due.
Oh heaven.
Give me a database of patients like my friend!
The tragedy of this story is, as I said, that this behaviour by this dentist is a repeating and recurring occurrence across the country.
There are too many patients who do not know the name of their dentist off the top of their heads.
And this is simply because the dentists are not taking the time to build camaraderie and rapport with their patients.
They are not connecting sufficiently for the patient to bother to commit the dentists name into their memory bank.
Ask yourself this.
Have you ever been to a party or a barbeque where you’ve met someone interesting and yet you couldn’t be bothered to find out their name, or more about them?
Of course not.
Because that’s not what we would do.
Whenever we are in conversation with someone of interest it’s only common follow on behaviour to find out more about them so that we can commit them to our memory.
Unless they are as boring as bat caves, and then all we want to do is run away.
Based upon what my golf friend was telling me, his dentist really does seem to have a connection problem.
Now I’m not sure whether or not this dentist in question had a line up of microscopes, lasers, CAD-CAM machines and post graduate workshop certificates that he was hoping to impress with, but whether he did have those things certainly didn’t matter one zac to my golf friend.
What that dentist needed was a personality transplant.
I’ve spoken before about my friend in Florida whose dentist spends next to zero time connecting with him when he comes in for his regular cleanings.
So much so that my friend believes that if he saw his dentist at the mall, his dentist wouldn’t know who my friend was even if my friend walked up to the dentist and slapped him in the face!
Don’t be like these dentists.
Take the time to get to know your patients and for them to get to know you and who you are.
Including your name.
Because when you do, and you *engage* with your patients, you’ll find that case acceptance and treatment acceptance rates will rise, and the cancellation and reschedule rates will fall.
And then, you’ll get it.
You’ll get the fact that it’s not about the teeth.
The Ultimate Patient Experience is a simple to build complete Customer Service system in itself that I developed that allowed me to create an extraordinary dental office in an ordinary Sydney suburb. If you’d like to know more, ask me about my free special report.
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As regular as night follows day, the ghost of discounting rears its ugly head in the pure annals of the noble profession of dentistry.
Sure, there will always be those practitioners who will happily try to squeeze their neighbours down on price by undercutting the fees charged by their dentist neighbour…
And all this does is create a whirlpool in dentistry that is pulling the dental profession into the sinkhole vortex of bad attitude.
But on top of this point is the simple fact that there are dentists out there who happily reduce their set fees for their dental services to clients without so much as a request by the client for them to do so.
And when the figures are added up the amount of money given away for no good reason is astounding.
Tale of Woe and Irony #1
I had a client for a very short while who was always late with his monthly payments to me for my coaching services, and who moaned and moaned that he wasn’t making any money and that he could not afford to keep me on because he could not afford my fees.
Well, I had encouraged him to increase his fees by five percent, because in the four and a half years that he had been the owner of this practice, he had yet to raise his fees by one penny.
And so fiscal drag was creating an abyss for him to have greater and greater difficulty getting across.
And he couldn’t bring himself to increase his fees, because he believed that patients would leave and go elsewhere.
The kicker was that the dentist told me that during the previous financial year he had personally discounted or reduced the fees on all of his dental services rendered by more than $50,000.00 for that whole year, without ever ever being asked to do so by any patient.
Effectively he had gifted away more money to people who chose to go to this Dental Office than the amount of money required to pay for my advice.
And of course we all know how much business advice this dentist would have received from these patients that he had gifted that $50K+ to.
Not much?
Not any…
Tale of Woe and Irony #2
A dentist friend of mine does locum work now.
Having sold his dental practice, he keeps his hand in by filling in for dentists around the country who are vacationing or who take time off.
In this sort of role the locum often finds that patients will “wait” for their dentist to return, so work loads and types of work can be variable.
My friend was telling me about one office where he worked where he had “finally” had himself a reasonably productive day.
At the end of the day when he went to review his performance and collected his Day Sheet, he found that the reception staff at that dental office had gifted some of his patients a total of $900.00 or more for the day, because the staff felt that my friend had been so efficient with his time.
And so my friend’s skill had resulted in his performance being discounted considerably.
And without his direction or approval.
I see this sort of fee reduction being given away all of the time…
And for no good reason except for some internal guilt owned by the operator or by the staff.
Ask yourself this?
When you go to buy ten tickets to see Michael Bublè in concert, does the ticket office give you a reduced price because you’ve bought in bulk?
What about at the grocery store?
Does the retailer give you some free carrots if you buy more than ten carrots?
Answer?
No.
Prices are set for profit of any business regardless of volume of purchase.
And in dentistry we should never feel a guilt level for being efficient.
I’d prefer to think that our operator efficiency has been of benefit to the patient in reducing their treatment time and for that we should be financially rewarded rather than punished.
How many times have we slaved over a difficult restoration or crown prep on an upper second molar that’s taken an exhaustive amount of time to complete, only to bill the patient the same fee as if we were working on a small simple procedure on an easy access lower first premolar?
Tale of Woe and Irony #3
I’ve a client who’s employing an associate dentist who reduces his billings each and every time for each and every patient, so that the associate dentist is virtually working each day for some twenty percent or more concession in fees than he should be if he simply just billed and drilled and shut up.
I’ve occasionally visited stores where this has been the case for me, and I’ve wondered why the heck I’ve been offered a price reduction, simply because I am there where I am?
There’s a great second hand bookstore that I visit whenever I’m in Brisbane.
And they do it.
When I turn up at the check out counter with a large stack of pre-loved books, I’m given a ten percent reduction in my bill without me even having to ask.
Or wanting to ask.
And so that business has gifted me some of their profits, for no valid reason at all.
It’s economic suicide.
I’m not sure whether the bookstore owner keeps a ledger of how many dollars are slipping out of his business in this manner?
Again for no good, logical reason.
I visit this store because I know they will have a great selection of booksfor me to peruse.
Irrespective of price.
And our patients will visit our dental offices for that exact same reason.
Because we offer excellent service and excellent skills in what we do.
And they’re willing to pay whatever we see fit to bill them for that service.
So we don’t need to be selling ourselves short for no logical reason.
I know, because I owned and operated a high fee, high collections dental office in an average part of Sydney, where people lived in average homes and earned average incomes.
And we were successful in doing so because of the outstanding service that we provided.
Without having to surrender one penny less than what we decided each service was worth.
It is possible to “hold your line” on price.
You owe it to yourself, and to your family and business shareholders to do so.
The Ultimate Patient Experience is a simple to build complete Customer Service system in itself that I developed that allowed me to create an extraordinary dental office in an ordinary Sydney suburb. If you’d like to know more, ask me about my free special report.
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