A few discussions that I’ve had this week have all led back to a similar theme… and that theme is the theme of generosity.
In discussions with coaching clients, we’ve broached the subject of employees having immediate permission to be able to MAKE THINGS RIGHT when service defects occur in your business [as they do from time to time] without having to go running to the boss to double check on what is needed to be done.
When things go wrong [occasionally] the best thing that a business can do is to seamlessly make things right as quickly as possible.
This means that employees often will need to be able to access funds if needed.
In a similar vein, employees also need to be able to access funds for those occasions where a significant Above and Beyond WOW!! moment can be created for their customers and patients, without having to seek permission and delay the impact of their intended surprise.
My son began a new job this week, and as part of his induction, he is given two hundred dollars to purchase anything he needs to help him do what he needs to be able to do at work.
And when that two hundred dollars is exhausted, he’s then given another two hundred dollars to use, which simply saves him having to go cap in hand to the work accountant each and every time that he needs to do or get something.
What a simple and effective idea!!
What gets rewarded gets improved upon.
Back in the day, your reward for doing your job well was that you used to be allowed to turn up for work the next week.
But these days, things are a little different.
Doing your job is fine, but I believe that consistently achieving various production and performance goals for your department or for your employer does deserve reward.
Sure, it’s always nice to be verbally recognised for your achievements at work, but if what an employee achieves has a direct and measurable POSITIVE IMPACT on the bottom line of the business, then there is every reason that the employees that help achieve those improvements should be financially rewarded for their positive contributions.
After all, in these situations, these bonuses are paid out of increased profits. And those increases wouldn’t be increases without the extra efforts and performances of employees.
There are always many small ways to add rewards for performance in your business that create further significant improvements and significant results.
And it is these regular expressions of gratitude to employees that do get noticed, in just the same way that a LACK OF gratitude does not go unnoticed.
*****
LIVE Workshop: Dr David Moffet and Jayne Bandy:
“How To Easily Run, Maintain And Grow The Ultimate Dental Practice In 2021”
If you’re sick and tired of drilling all day long, and not having anything close to what you deserve, to show for it… or if you’ve ever wondered, “What can successful dentists POSSIBLY know, that I don’t?”… then register for this LIVE workshop Friday July 30, 2021 in Melbourne, VIC.
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.
People often ask me what is the point of providing Above and Beyond Customer Experiences in your dental practice.
These people say that your customers really don’t expect great customer service and so their argument, or point of view is that if it’s not expected, then delivering great customer service is really just a waste of time or an exercise in futility.
These same people say that if people don’t value it then what’s the point of offering great service?
And my point would be:
If what you did each day made a difference of significance to the day of just one customer each day, then that would mean that each year you could MAKE THE DAY of two hundred and fifty different people each and every year.
And over the course of a forty year career, doing that only once each day would change the day for some TEN THOUSAND people.
That’s significant.
You really don’t know whose lives you are going to impact positively upon, and what ongoing benefits will be felt by that person who you reached out to.
But what I do know is this:
Failing to reach out to someone, or anyone will have ZERO EFFECT.
There will be no positive effect whatsoever resulting from inaction.
And if that’s the case:
And if that is the case, then it makes perfect sense to then try to orchestrate a plan that results in significant memorable moments being created consistently for your customers in your business, each and every day.
What are you and your team doing to create a consistent plan, or modus operandi, that creates and delivers repeatable schedules of magical moments that will have all of your clients, patients and customers exclaiming:
“Wow!! You guys are different!!”
And even now….
Even now, some six and a half years after leaving the dental practice that I owned and operated for twenty-eight years, I am still in contact and communication with a significant number of [previous] patients who have stayed in touch.
Because, after all is said and done, our relationship was really so much more than being “just about the teeth.”
It was a relationship built first and foremost on trust, and respect and appreciation of each other.
And when we strip everything back to bare bones, that’s really what life is all about.
*****
LIVE Workshop: Dr David Moffet and Jayne Bandy:
“How To Easily Run, Maintain And Grow The Ultimate Dental Practice In 2021”
If you’re sick and tired of drilling all day long, and not having anything close to what you deserve, to show for it… or if you’ve ever wondered, “What can successful dentists POSSIBLY know, that I don’t?”… then register for this LIVE workshop Friday July 30, 2021 in Melbourne, VIC.
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.
Have you ever met someone who thinks that they’re doing everything well, when in reality, they are so out of touch with reality, that you think to yourself:|
“What the heck?”
Or, have you ever been that person yourself, thinking to yourself:
“I’m doing alright….”
only to find out that your version of alright is really all wrong.
Have you?
Well, I have…
In 1996, I thought that my dental practice was doing alright.
After all, I was collecting double what the average dental practice in Australia was collecting, and I’d been consistently doing these numbers for the previous four years.
Yes, I thought that I was doing ok.
After all, my practice was not in a ritzy part of Sydney.
My practice was located smack bang in the middle of the western suburbs of Sydney, where people lived in average homes and had average jobs and earned average incomes and drove average cars.
So I thought my results were pretty darned good…
But….
Then I met a dentist who had a dental practice in the far western suburbs of Sydney where the population there lived in smaller homes and had lower incomes….
And his dental practice was doing double the collections that I was.
Suddenly I realised…
Suddenly I realised that I had a lot more to learn.
Suddenly I realised that my practice and I had been coasting, or flatlining, for the previous four years.
I thought to myself, if this dentist is doing double the collections that I’m doing, I need to find out what he’s actually doing.
What I worked out was this:
What I worked out was that on my own, I did not know all the answers.
Despite the fact that I thought that I was doing OK, what I found out right then and there was that there was a better way.
I just needed to find out what that better way was.
Here’s what happened:
Here’s what happened next.
I hired a coach. I knew I needed extra assistance.
The first coach I hired was a disaster and a nightmare.
For six months I worked with this coach and I struggled with his suggestions and methodologies.
And the business relationship did not end well.
But then I did this….
So I went and hired another coach.
And over the following five and a half years, I worked with this second coach and I was able to grow my dental practice and triple my collections…
And from there only got better and better and better…
Recently I met the owners of a dental practice:
This week I had the opportunity of speaking to the owners of a dental practice who thought their newly started practice was going really well.
So well in fact, that all they thought they were in need of was to add an online booking facility for patients to schedule their own appointments.
When I asked them about their collections from the previous month, their answer was this:
“Oh, we haven’t looked at those numbers yet.”
And yet we were already onto the sixteenth day of the following month.
When I probed a little further they told me that their staff were all great, and they didn’t need any assistance, and yet their dental practice collections were averaging about $1000 per chair per day, for the month of March…
With 70 New Patients making appointments that month…
I don’t know what you think, but I think that this practice could be doing a heck of a lot better?
Yet the owners seemed to think that they were doing everything very well.
Sadly, sometimes, some people just don’t know what they don’t know.
In my travels, I see a lot of opportunity wasted in dental practices, simply because owners feel that they know it all, and they don’t need any advice at all.
And yet the same owners are literally tearing up hundred dollar bills of missed opportunity through their blind arrogance. These owners just keep heading on regardless, and not stopping for a moment to think:
“You know what, there might be a smarter way of doing this?”
To me, no matter what I’m doing, I’m always acutely aware that somebody else can help me. There will always be someone out there who can do, or will know of, a better way of helping me to reach the end result that I’m aspiring to.
It’s just a matter of finding that person and utilising their valuable IP.
That’s the difference.
As my good friend Dr Ron Arndt said to me:
“None of us are smarter than all of us…”
*****
LIVE Workshop: Dr David Moffet and Jayne Bandy:
“How To Easily Run, Maintain And Grow The Ultimate Dental Practice In 2021”
If you’re sick and tired of drilling all day long, and not having anything close to what you deserve, to show for it… or if you’ve ever wondered, “What can successful dentists POSSIBLY know, that I don’t?”… then register for this LIVE workshop Friday July 30, 2021 in Melbourne, VIC.
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.
One of the things I learnt very early on in my career as a dental practice owner was that to grow a practice, I needed to have enough phone lines available for those moments each and every day when multiple callers wanted to contact my office all at the same time.
And these moments do indeed happen…
And when those moments happened, I needed to be able to put some of these callers on hold, while my office team served each and every one of those valuable telephone enquiries.
And here’s the kicker: you just can’t dump callers onto chimes, and bells, and mind-numbing tunes. Nor can you put them on hold listening to a radio station playing music that you have not chosen, and playing adverts about erectile dysfunction, or worse still, playing adverts for one of your competitors.
And you can’t have callers listening to messages that are all about how wonderful you think your dental practice is. Messages like those are only to be played to impress your mother when she rings.
Your on-hold phone messages need to be inspiring and uplifting, and need to have your patients and callers coming off hold and asking:
“Can you tell me more about how you can help me with _______”
Your on-hold messages need to be focussed on being solution based.
Since selling my practice and retiring off the tools, I now consult to dental offices, and work closely with Australia’s leading dental front office phone skills trainer.
What we see is that 38% of all calls to a dental practice never even get answered, with the call either ringing out or going to a recorded message begging the caller to leave their details in the HOPE that they may be silly or lame enough to do so.
Most callers do not leave messages when this happens. They just hang up, scratch out your practice’s name from their list, and then phone the next dental office that is on that list.
And when your busy receptionist dumps your callers into a less than adequate on-hold system, what you will find is that by the time the receptionist gets back to that caller, they’ve hung up and called another dental office.
People are calling dental practices because they are looking for someone nice to talk to who can solve their dental problem.
And let me tell you this:
If you have some whiz-bang phone system that begins with a recorded greeting message for your practice, and then is followed by “live person” coming on the line, that too is another mighty TURN OFF for any caller just wanting to speak to a real live human being.
Now….
there will be times that callers will sometimes need to be placed on hold.
If your on-hold messages are boring and lousy, then you’re literally capturing a VALUABLE new patient enquiry and burning it up, right before your very own eyes.
In my opinion, if you want to provide all your clients and patients with The Ultimate Patient ExperienceTM each and every time that they phone your dental practice, then you need to have your front office team trained on the best things to say when placing the callers on hold, and you need to have the best possible on hold message service that you can.
Anything less than best in these instances is purely and simply, killing your business.
So easy to fix, but yet, so many offices do not take the time to fix these easy-to-fix glaring errors.
They just blunder on, hoping that the silence they are witnessing from their callers may be blind acceptance, when in reality it is the stunned silence of shock.
*****
LIVE Workshop: Dr David Moffet and Jayne Bandy:
“How To Easily Run, Maintain And Grow The Ultimate Dental Practice In 2021”
If you’re sick and tired of drilling all day long, and not having anything close to what you deserve, to show for it… or if you’ve ever wondered, “What can successful dentists POSSIBLY know, that I don’t?”… then register for this LIVE workshop Friday July 30, 2021 in Melbourne, VIC.
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.
What is an hour of clinical dentistry worth to you?
The calculation is simple:
Work out how much dentistry you produced personally in a certain time frame [usually three or six months], then divide that dollar amount by the number of days you worked and there’s your daily rate.
Divide your daily rate by the number of hours you work each day to calculate your hourly rate.
Knowing your hourly rate is very powerful:
When you know your hourly rate for being a dentist in your dental practice, you can soon be able to work out those tasks in your practice that you SHOULD NOT BE DOING and should be delegating to someone employed or hired on a lower hourly rate.
You can also work out those tasks that you could hire someone to do in your office instead of you so that you as a dentist could concentrate on working and generating more income for your dental practice by doing more dentistry.
Here are some tasks in the dental office that you can pay someone a lower hourly rate to do:
Fill out lab sheets
Type up clinical notes
Mix plaster and pour up models
Here are some tasks in the dental office that you can pay an expert a lower hourly rate than you earn, to do:
Bookkeeping
Dental hygiene
Front office phone skills training
Customer service training for your team
Here are some tasks you do at home that you can pay someone a lower hourly rate than you earn, to do:
Mow your lawns
Wash your cars
Clean your house
Trim your hedges
Dr. Omer Reed said that in the USA, 95% of dentists reaching the age of 65 cannot afford to retire because they haven’t been able to put away enough money along the way to fund their own retirement.
They simply haven’t looked at the efficiencies of better time management and better time utilisation in their dental practice.
There’s no point employing a dental assistant and then putting your own matrix bands together, while the dental assistant sits there beside you twiddling her thumbs.
Similarly, why not employ an extra dental assistant to transfer the completed patient to, and who then transfers that completed patient and hands them over to the front office team, while you the dentist move into the next treatment room and begin doing dentistry immediately on the next patient.
You don’t see Lewis Hamilton filling up his own Formula 1 race car?
He’s paid a lot of money to drive that car.
Mercedes can pay other people a lot less to fill the tank of Hamilton’s F1 racer.
Similarly, I bet you don’t see Hamilton teaching the pit crew how to change tyres…. I’ll bet that Mercedes hire specialists to do that sort of training.
The other thing about Mercedes is that when they hire someone to help their pit team improve performance, they really make sure that they are getting the best available.
They do their research.
What they don’t do is train their pit team on what they the owners THINK needs doing.
They hire someone with a proven track record.
And it’s still a lot less expensive than training the pit crew themselves.
And it’s far more sensible than NEVER TRAINING their pit crew.
How’s things in your dental practice?
How are things in your dental practice?
Are you doing a lot of lower paid tasks in your practice yourself, instead of performing the dentistry?
And do you have dental office team members performing crucial roles in your business, who have never been trained on those roles?
*****
LIVE Workshop: Dr David Moffet and Jayne Bandy:
“How To Easily Run, Maintain And Grow The Ultimate Dental Practice In 2021”
If you’re sick and tired of drilling all day long, and not having anything close to what you deserve, to show for it… or if you’ve ever wondered, “What can successful dentists POSSIBLY know, that I don’t?”… then register for this LIVE workshop Friday July 30, 2021 in Melbourne, VIC.
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: 
You can order your copy here: 
