This week, a quotation from five years ago by my friend James Malinchak appeared as a memory on my Facebook wall.
“Always remember – you are NOT in business to run a business! You are in business as an entrepreneur to create FREEDOM for yourself!”
A very simple and yet powerful and relevant comment.
Over the years I’ve met dentists who as business owners have forgotten that this is their purpose.
What’s the point of being in business and owning a Dental Office if all that you’ve done is bought yourself a business that worries you sick for eighteen hours a day and seven days a week and barely provides you with enough money to support your family?
What’s the point of that?
You may as well go work as a dentist for someone else and have to worry only forty hours a week, and even then not have to worry or concern yourself with anything else than thoughts of your own about yourself.
You would not have to worry about paying the rent.
Nor would you have to worry about whether or not you were going to make payroll for the week…..
Seriously, if your business is not making you a profit that you can be squirrelling away to create freedom and lifestyle with, then ask yourself this:
“Why?”
Why are you creating all that negative energy and emotion just to break even?
Why are you putting yourself through all that?
Here is what I hear:
“My patients are different.”
“My area is different.”
I’ll let you in on a little secret….
No they are not.
Here’s a tip….
In all areas, twenty to twenty five percent of the population are happy to pay extra to receive better service and a better experience.
Our job is to find those twenty to twenty five percent of the population.
It makes sense that if we are going to be doing something, if we are going to be performing a duty or providing a service, then why not do that, why not provide that service to someone who will be appreciative of that service rather than someone who is not?
And be compensated and rewarded accordingly to do so?
When you apply this filter, this principle, to your Dental Business, to any business, certain things begin to happen.
Your business becomes less stressful.
It’s amazing how this works, but what happens is that “more of the same breeds more of the same.”
By this I mean that when you have your eye out for customers who are nice, who are willing to pay a little more to receive a little more, then a shift happens.
Your clients who are hagglers, your clients who apply their own personal pressures to you, in your business, these people start to self-sort and filter themselves away from your practice.
But they are replaced by customers who are looking for better service.
And so you are dealing with a better type of patron.
And that in itself is less stressful.
Your business becomes more profitable
This is simple math.
If you charge a little more, because you are providing a better product, you will make more profit for the same effort.
And even if you lose a small percentage of clients and are still only collecting the same total amount at the end of the week, your overhead will be less and your stress level will be less.
That’s a WIN-WIN.
Here’s what I found at my dental office in working class Western Sydney:
As we provided a better service, as we provided a better product and as we charged or billed accordingly, our collections increased and our bottom line profit rose.
And our stress levels were reduced, because we were serving a more appreciative clientele.
In an area where people worked in average jobs and earned average incomes and drove average cars and lived in average homes.
Those that wanted to be cared for in a pleasant environment based on care and respect and on gratitude were happy to come to a place where they were treated accordingly.
And were happy to pay a little more for the privilege.
If you deliver a good product and you treat people well and you charge accordingly, you will create a business that does create freedom for yourself and not shackles and leg-irons.
If I can do it then you can do it too.
If it has been done it can be done.
The choice is yours….
*****
My next public speaking presentation showing Dentists how to grow their Dental practices will be in Melbourne Australia on Saturday 1 April 2017 with Jayne Bandy and Wolfgang Hofbauer.
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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It’s February, and it’s time to review our progress on those New Year Resolutions.
How have you been going?
Are you making headway with the changes and improvements that you are so keen to implement in your Dental Office?
Or have those ideas and plans been shelved?
Have they been put on the back-burner?
“We’ll get around to them…. one day….”
And one day never comes.
More of the same breeds more of the same.
Firstly, we need to know what we want to do and achieve before we begin doing and trying to achieve anything.
We need to look at the big picture first.
And then break that big picture down into its component parts.
As opposed to starting with the component parts and then trying to tie them together.
By looking at the big picture firstly we will then have a common purpose for all employees in our organisation to refer to.
This will then be our anchor point, our point of reference.
Julie Andrews sang:
“Let’s start at the very beginning. A very good place to start….”
To begin, we need to make sure we know why we are in business.
We need a purpose for ourselves and for our employees.
What we need is a Customer Service Vision Statement.
A Customer Service Vision Statement serves as a clear purpose as to why your business exists.
“A company’s Service Vision serves as a rallying point across the organisation by being the one thing that all employees have in common no matter what the individual job or title may be.”– Disney Institute
Disney knows it.
The Disney Vision Statement is the central focal point that every employee is able to refer to on any occasion to clarify the reason why the business exists and also exactly what the business is trying to achieve.
When James McManemon, General Manager of The Ritz-Carlton was asked:
“If you were starting a new business, any business, and wanted to make customer service your value proposition, what would you do first?”
He replied simply:
“The first thing I would do is create the Service Vision for the Company. Be crystal clear with what the company’s vision is, and be able to articulate that extremely well. Then I would hire talent based on that same belief, only adding employees that share those service values, and finally create the processes and training to achieve that Service Vision.”
It is only once we have everyone on our team aligned with our vision that we can then begin implementing the multitude of pieces of customer service magic that we know will be impactful upon our valued customers, clients, and patients.
We must never put the cart before the horse.
To be truly effective we need to have our Vision Statement clearly defined as our business’s point of reference prior to the implementation of any ideas or thoughts or systems.
Because your clearly defined Vision Statement for your office is the reason why we give all patients a warm towel *ALWAYS* each and every time regardless.
Our Vision Statement is the reason why we greet *EVERY* arriving patient as if the were our long lost friend coming over to our home for a Sunday afternoon roast dinner.
No matter what.
Our Vision Statement defines who we are and how we are perceived in the greater community.
Lone points and actions scattered incidentally throughout our day are merely cardboard or papier-mâché unless we have a clearly defined Vision Statement as our defining purpose.
And that’s where it all needs to start….
*****
My next public speaking presentation showing Dentists how to grow their Dental practices will be in Melbourne Australia on Saturday 1 April 2017 with Jayne Bandy and Wolfgang Hofbauer.
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.
Did you like this blog article? If you did then hit the share buttons below and share it with your friends and colleagues. Share it via email, Facebook and twitter!!
Can you imagine two Dental Offices in the same town, in the same street, side by side, but with two different results?
What about in the same building?
Case #1: Parramatta. NSW. Australia.
In 1996, I decided I wanted to sell my dental office.
I had recently renovated my suite, and my collections had flat-lined for the year, and the three previous years, at an average of AUD$400,000.00 per year, which at the time was 250% more than the average dental office was collecting.
I was getting bored…
But as you know from my story, I could not sell my practice.
Nor could I “give it away” for AUD$160,000.00 Sale Price.
One option that I considered back then was the purchase of a neighbouring Dental Office located two doors down the road in a reasonably more visible street-front location.
This office for sale was owned by two older dentists who I knew personally, and who were ready to retire.
However, I did not purchase their practice, because they also wanted to sell me the very old and very small upstairs-downstairs building where they housed their practice, and to put it politely, the building was “antiquated” to say the least.
What interested me was that although these two dentists had worked four and a half days every week *EACH* for the previous forty years, their annual collections from their patients were a combined three-quarters total of what I had been doing on my own hidden away from the street in the building two doors up the road.
Yes together the two dentists were collecting only a tick over three hundred thousand dollars annually.
Despite their highly visible location and their solid longstanding reputation in the community.
Me?
I’d only been in my dental practice for nine years.
And within the first five of those nine years I had increased the collections of that practice by nearly three hundred percent.
And yet I felt dissatisfied with my lot….
How could two dental offices located side by side [bar one small building in between] in the same street in the same town and with the same longevity [my office had previously been owned by a long term retiring dentist] have two strikingly different amounts of collections both in total as well as in dollars per dentist per hour?
How Could This Be So?
Fast forward to 2017…
Case #2: Any Town. Some Town. Upstate. East Coast. USA.
A friend of mine works for a dentist in a non-capital city on the Eastern Side of the United States of America.
It’s a one doctor office and for reasons known only to him he chooses to work only three days per week and only for six hours each day.
This dentist works only eighteen hours each week.
Last year in 2016 his Dental Office collected USD$706,000.00 by choice working only eighteen hours per week.
By contrast, another Dental Office in the *SAME BUILDING* on a lower floor has three dentists working eight hours per day for FIVE days each per week.
That’s a total of 120 hours of dentistry being done there each week.
And that three dentist office collected the grand total of USD$575,000.00 last year.
Yes. You have read correctly.
A dental office working only fifteen percent of the hours that a neighbouring dental office is doing is collecting twenty three percent more!!
Same town!
Same street!!
Same Building!!!
In both of these cases, Case #1 and Case#2, it is very difficult to blame the economy as being the major factor in the difference in performance of the two very different Dental Offices.
SO WHAT CAUSES THE DIFFERENCE?
Well, in the 2017 story right there on the East Coast of the USA, the major difference between the two offices was that the three doctor office was doing a lot of “Insurance Work” while the single doctor office was doing primarily Fee For Service Dentistry.
And I’d suggest that back in 1996 back in Downtown Parramatta, I was doing exactly the same.
I was doing no “Insurance Only” work on my patients.
In Parramatta in 1996 I was doing fee for service dentistry, yet I was doing it in an average town on average patients who lived in average homes and worked for average incomes.
My belief now is that in every town in every city in every state, you will find a percentage of people in the population who are happy and educated enough to want to spend whatever is necessary to receive the dentistry that they need.
Without compromise.
And these two stories prove that point.
So long as you back up your exceptional dental services with a caring and sharing disposition and world-class customer service systems, you’ll build a following of patients happy to continue seeing you and more than happy to receive from you the dentistry that you highly recommend.
In any area no matter what the economy.
How do I know?
In 1996, when my office was flat-lining at AUD$400K per annum collections, a dentist friend of mine working in a lower socio-economic area of Western Sydney collected AUD$880K in one year.
I learnt right then that anything was possible…if you believed in it…
“You can’t do nothing that you can’t put your mind to…” – Robert Palmer
*****
My next public speaking presentation showing Dentists how to grow their Dental practices will be in Melbourne Australia on Saturday 1 April 2017 with Jayne Bandy and Wolfgang Hofbauer.
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.
Did you like this blog article? If you did then hit the share buttons below and share it with your friends and colleagues. Share it via email, Facebook and twitter!!
