One of the big reasons that dentists want to own their own business is because they want more control of their lives.
But what they often find is that their so-called independence in being a business owner is really just window dressing, and instead of working for someone else, and having to answer to a boss, and having a physical boss, they now have several inanimate bosses.
They have a bank. A landlord. Rules and regulations.
The list goes on….
What they find is that there’s paperwork, and administration, and reports, and all sorts of things to do when running your own business.
And marketing. And advertising.
And while they are still trying to treat their patients and create a wonderful rapport with them, there’s always someone trying to get into the dentist’s back pocket as easy as you please.
Maybe life was better before with just one boss to answer to?
One dentist that I employed thought that the grass was going to be greener out in practice-owning land, despite having a very productive and autonomous associate dental practice within my own office, where all she needed to do at the end of each day was to hang up her handpiece and go home.
After buying her own dental office, she soon lamented that there was a heck of a lot more to do in dentistry at the end of the day [after hanging up that handpiece] than she had ever envisaged .
All of which was energy draining and time consuming.
She told me that she had less money and less time to herself as a result of going out on her own.
Interestingly, some dentists leave employed dentistry and go into their own dental businesses because they don’t like their boss.
But what they find is that once they start working for themselves, they don’t like their new boss either.
How do we make life better?
One of the key things that I did when I owned my own business was to make sure that my dental practice was constantly growing.
Because that growth stimulated interest, and that subsequent interest stimulated more growth.
I tried to make sure that my practice production levels were always on the increase.
I wanted this year to be better than last year.
I wanted every year to be better than the previous year.
I wanted the practice to attract more new customers this year than it did in the previous year.
And I wanted to make sure we were attracting the right type of new customers.
I wanted to make sure that we were answering our dental phone as best as we could, and that our conversion rate of new callers to booked appointments was improving.
And I wanted to make sure that all patients were leaving with a next appointment made.
And that our cancellation rate for booked appointments was as low as possible.
Attention needed to be paid to every patient. No patient should ever be left alone unattended.
I wanted every patient’s visit to be a better experience this time than their previous visit was.
It all came down to setting goals and accountability.
Businesses without clear and written goals, and without accountability, tend to meander considerably when compared to businesses that know what they are measuring, and know what they are trying to achieve.
“What gets measured gets done.”
“What gets measured gets improved upon.”
It’s easier to keep a handle on your weight when you weigh yourself each day rather than when you weigh yourself occasionally.
Maintaining regular checks and balances allows you to keep your finger on the pulse of your business and allows you to see what’s working as it develops, and to correct what’s not working before too much time or money is wasted.
Tracking and monitoring is the new BLACK.
Tracking and monitoring allows you to celebrate your wins and to build momentum on those efforts.
Being accountable to someone for your actions and for executing your business plan is one of the rare adrenalin rushes that a business owner gets to experience.
There is no harder challenge than the challenge of running a successful business.
Omer Reed told me nine years ago that 95% of US dentists reaching the age of 65 cannot afford to retire and have to keep on working to maintain their lifestyles.
That means that only 5% of dentists truly create financial independence in their careers.
I know that having a plan, and being held accountable for your actions and your performances, goes a long way towards becoming one of the truly successful 5%.
The choices are easy.
Staying on track on your own?
That’s hard….
Help is out there.
I can help you.
It’s what I do…
*****
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.
It’s hilarious when people copy my stuff and try to pass it off as their own.
Recently one of my competitors has launched a one-day course in teaching how to create an exceptional experience in your dental practice.
Laughably, the marketing for this one-day course contains phraseology copied from my material that has been out there for years and years.
The fact of the matter is that there is no quick fix to inadequacies in customer service.
Good habits take time to become habits.
And bad habits take time to be corrected.
It is said that it takes 21 days to correct a bad habit or to create a new habit.
Imagine trying to reinvent a whole culture of poor decisions after just one day of indoctrination.
Rome was not built in a day.
And nor was Nordstrom’s. Nor Starbucks. Nor Disney.
These great organisations all began with a vision. A clear vision of what the company needed to be.
And a clear vision of what sort of culture was needed inside those organisations to create those stellar organisations.
It wasn’t a “just add water” style programme.
The beauty of these great companies was that the culture created the future of those organisations.
In a dental practice, trying to create a “few” improvements in significantly flawed processes is like trying to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear.
Integrity.
It is only with integrity and leadership that great organisations succeed in becoming great organisations and in staying great organisations.
If you really truly want to build a great dental practice based on integrity that will possess the ability to withstand economic swings and dips, then you need to look at creating a system based on providing world class service to your patients so that the EXPERIENCE of visiting your dental practice is far more impactful than the dental functions that you perform.
Ask me how I know?
I built a dental practice in a low socio-economic area of western Sydney that was renowned for the service provided.
So renowned, that my practice collected millions per annum in dental fees and was able to charge patients significantly higher fees than neighbouring practices were charging, even during the tech wreck of the early 2000s, and the global financial crisis of the late 2000s.
Purely because of the systems we created and the people we employed and empowered to deliver those services.
And best of all, if I can do this, you most probably can do this too in your area.
My coaching and my programmes have been proven to easily learnable and easily duplicatable, working well in Australia as well as in Northern Hemisphere markets.
*****
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.
You need to diagnose the ailment, discuss the treatment modalities, and then decide on a course of treatment.
Much the same as dentistry.
In dentistry we need to diagnose the cause of the pain.
We then need to recommend some solutions.
And then we need to treat.
If we only have one form of treatment modality, and we offer that to all patients, then, by definition, we are deemed negligent for failing to diagnose and treat correctly.
No dentist would do that.
Yet some of these same dentists are out there seeking assistance and coaching in their practice, and are asking their potential coach:
“How much do you charge?”
Even sadder is the fact that there are some coaches out there who offer an answer to this and their services for a flat ONE SIZE FITS ALL fee for those services.
I suppose they say, like a golf coach:
“I’ll treat you for as long as you want treating at this rate until you get better.”
Some dental practice coaches even have a package of modules out there in the market place which they like to plug their potential clients into.
Hoping that some of those modules might hopefully hit the spot for those potential new clients, and that those clients will hang on in the programme for SOME period of time…
Though no two dental practices are really the same, are they?
What really is most important in coaching is finding out and working on the big problem that each practice is trying to solve.
And also the goal that each of those practices is trying to achieve.
In a similar manner, it would be crazy for a dental practice to tell a phone caller that this practice charges “$150.00 for a scale and clean”, without first establishing how dirty the caller’s teeth actually happen to be, or asking what predisposing habits does the caller have [smoking, tea drinking etc.] that could make the cleaning more arduous, or simply asking “How long has it been since your teeth were last cleaned at a dental practice?”
The fact is that to work out where we are going to want to travel to on vacation, we firstly need to know where we are beginning our destination from.
We also need to know what travel method expectations our holiday maker prefers, and also it would be wise to find out from them what their holiday time frame is….they might like to arrive in as short as possible time, or they might prefer a more leisurely style of travel.
You just can’t say:
“This is my fee. Let’s go”.
without first completing a thorough examination of the facts about the client.
Medical status.
Medical history.
Future goals.
Only then as a healer can you offer the client the best possible solution to their problem.
*****
Linda Miles is coming to Australia in August.
Don’t miss this once in a life-time opportunity to see and hear Linda speak first hand…
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.
Jayne and I have just spent a few days staying in Auckland New Zealand educating and working with dental professionals in the shaky isles who want to grow their dental practices.
Our hotel in Auckland has been dramatically amazing.
The employees have really gone above and beyond to make sure that every possible part of our stay has been as impressive and impactful as possible.
For a small boutique hotel they have really stepped up to the plate.
One of the things that I noticed that they do here is really something that they specifically do not do.
And that is what made it so impressive.
Being a small hotel, there were only two small lifts [elevators] for guests to travel up and down in from one of the eight floors above.
The lifts were only made to carry ten people, but I tell you, if you could fit six people in only, it would be a bit of a squeeze.
So here’s what they did.
Our room was on floor seven.
On occasions, the elevator would stop at a floor in between seven and ground, where a hotel employee was waiting with a trolley or with cleaning equipment.
Each and every time, despite the fact that the elevator did have plenty of available room, the hotel employee would decline to join us and wait for another elevator without any hotel guests inside.
So David what is so special about that?
Have you ever been in a hotel where you’ve been made to squeeze up close in an elevator because s porter wanted to jam a luggage trolley inside with all the passengers?
It is not a world class experience.
Or have you ever been tucked into the corner of a lift while a food waiter wheels in a dining trolley?
In this hotel those two scenarios were not something that hotel guests were going to be subjected to.
Interestingly, in the building where my dental practice was, patients and visitors to all of the medical tenants often were delayed while cleaners of offices commandeered the elevator with bags and bags of rubbish.
Imagine just paying a dentist or medical specialist a big chunk of money, and then stepping outside, only to have to battle with piles of rubbish crammed into an elevator that is still meant to be transporting people.
You see, it’s the little things that the business owners miss or forget that can turn off your loyal customers and have them looking elsewhere for their medical and dental services.
How are the cleaning processes at your dental practice?
Are your patients watching your team members clean bins and take out the trash?
Could you do things like this with a lot more discretion?
After all, it is very difficult to offend your customers with things [or processes] that they never ever see.
There really is no need to slap your customers in the face with your back of office processes…
You can do the little things a lot better…
*****
Linda Miles is coming to Australia in August.
Don’t miss this once in a life-time opportunity to see and hear Linda speak first hand…
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.
You can order your copy here: 
