Will what is bothering you right now be relevant in twelve months’ time?
So many people waste so much energy worrying about trivial matters that won’t be of relevance in a week, let alone a month, or God forbid, in twelve months’ time…
And if that’s the case, and I mean truly, if that is the case, then why not let the matter go through to the keeper, so to speak, right this moment, and just move on?
I see so many people give themselves a conniption worrying about minutia that in twelve months’ time will really be about as big as a pimple on an elephant’s rear side.
That’s correct.
They are worrying about things that really will be totally irrelevant in as little as a few weeks’ time.
Way back when….
I learned this lesson way back when, when I owned a couple of investment properties where the body corporates were both run by mean and nasty little old men with nothing better to do than write letters about who took a pen that went missing from a common area.
Seriously, I’ve seen grown men give themselves medical episodes controlling organisations with an annual budget of less than what a dental assistant earns to evacuate spit out of patients’ mouths.
After all, that’s a lot of small business matters that are a lot less relevant to the grand scheme of things when compared to the goings on of the United Nations… and yet people can nearly burst an artery worrying themselves to death about something that they really should just simply turn their cheek towards, and walk away.
Life is too short…
When you come across people like this, here’s what you need to do…
Go online to your nearest K-Mart or toy store and order yourself two plastic bucket and spade sets, and one indelible marker.
When those buckets and spades arrive, take the indelible marker, and on one bucket, write the name of the person or organisation that is concerning you, and then take that bucket, along with one spade, and hang it up on a hook in your shed.
Then get the other bucket and spade, pop them back in the box they were delivered to you in, and re-address the parcel and send it to the person who has caused you this concern, simply letting them know, that you’re not going to be playing in their sandpit any more.
And wish them all the best.
Life is too short to be worrying about the behaviour of these small minded people.
There’s a whole big world out there
Take a big breath, and step forward and enjoy it, and leave the small minded behind.
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LIVE Workshop: Dr David Moffet and Jayne Bandy:
“How To Easily Run, Maintain And Grow The Ultimate Dental Practice In 2022 and Beyond”
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 Thursday November 25, 2021 in Sydney, NSW.
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.
With lockdown ending for us here in NSW, it seems as though some businesses need a brush up or a refresher lesson on some of their customer service principles.
During the lockdown, restaurants have been closed, so it was great to have the opportunity to be able to return to dining out again.
My wife booked online for a local restaurant, and as you do, after booking, she checked the online menu to create some “anticipated excitement” leading up to the evening.
There was a slight hitch…
Jayne said to me:
“There isn’t anything on the main course menu for you.”
Which appeared odd.
Now as you know, I choose not to eat red meat or poultry.
But I do eat fish, and seafood. And gnocchi, and pasta.
And did I say I eat fish and seafood?
This was an Italian restaurant. With an unbalanced menu.
There were no seafood choices on their list of main courses.
To the restaurant’s credit, there were a number of seafood choices on the starter menu. But nothing for pescatarians on the main course menu.
So Jayne phoned the restaurant the day before our booking to see whether there was a workable solution to our impending dilemma.
And the owner came up with this.
He said:
“Yes. I am going to get some fish in for the main course.”
And then he said:
“But I can’t guarantee there’ll be any left by the time that you guys come in.”
Our booking was for 8:30pm.
Jayne asked if there was an earlier sitting.
The owner said:
“Yes there is. It’s at 5:30pm.”
Now let’s get a couple of things clear….
The restaurant was holding a $200 deposit for our booking.
We told them our dilemma, they told us their solution, but their solution was not a solution.
So Jayne cancelled the booking. We ate elsewhere instead.
What the owner should have said, is this:
What the owner should have said, is:
“I’m happy to put a piece of fish aside for your husband if you like?”
Or better still:
“Please don’t worry about anything, I’ll make sure that your husband has two different servings of fish or seafood to choose from tomorrow night.”
And Jayne would have said:
“Thank you so much for being so helpful. We’re looking forward to coming to your restaurant and eating out again, finally.”
Will we be booking again at this Italian Restaurant?
Will we be booking again at this Italian Restaurant?
Most probably not.
Can you imagine how many people we would have told this “feel good” story to, had the restaurant tried just a little bit to accommodate my pescatarian husband?
And now we’re telling lots of people this less than flattering story about the restaurant’s one star customer service problem solving skills.
And yes I know….
And yes I know that a lot of restaurants are precious and the menu is what the menu is…
But there’s no point being precious if you’re serving to a less than full restaurant.
What most successful restaurant owners will tell you is that they have regular long term customers who are happy to eat the same dish on a regular basis, even when that dish has been “retired” from the menu.
And the restaurants know this… because a great customer is a great customer.
And that’s where the gold lies….
As a business owner you do need to be firm in principle, but you will benefit from being flexible in procedure.
Inflexibility, or not stretching sufficiently, could be a business’s downfall.
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LIVE Workshop: Dr David Moffet and Jayne Bandy:
“How To Easily Run, Maintain And Grow The Ultimate Dental Practice In 2022 and Beyond”
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 Thursday November 25, 2021 in Sydney, NSW.
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.
Last weekend I was chatting with the owner of a bookshop who, because of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown and isolation orders, was basically forced to close his business and wait and not re-open until these orders were lifted.
A period of some four months.
During that time his staff were not working but paid by government subsidy.
The impact of the lockdown and travel restriction laws upon his business were devastating.
How many people out there could go from income to ZERO INCOME and still survive?
It would be tough…
The good news is that lockdown in NSW is now ending and the people of NSW are allowed to return to “shopping” and other parts of normal life.
It has been a very trying and stressful time.
Owners of businesses that are deemed as non-essential and are forced to close during pandemic times of restriction have really taken a financial hit.
During the first wave of the pandemic in early 2020, dental surgeries were also forced to close as regulators struggled with the methods of spread of the COVID-19 virus, and whether or not aerosols used in the provision of dental treatment would increase the rate of spread of the virus in the community.
Thankfully this has not proven to be a valid concern, and the dental industry as providers of health benefits to the community have been permitted to practice under less onerous restrictions.
But with restrictions none the less….
Which brings me to my next concern…
How’s your balance sheet?
It’s been said that fifty-nine percent of Americans are only one pay cheque away from homelessness.
And the Federal Reserve reports that thirty-nine percent of Americans don’t have enough money on hand to cover a $400 emergency.
In fact, most people out there worldwide are skating on very thin ice when it comes to putting food on their table and a roof over their heads.
Recently I engaged a fencer at my farm who literally used to email me his bill for his work for the week, and then phone me and ask me to transfer the funds to him immediately that afternoon…. this behaviour later changed when he started invoicing me daily and still was calling me [straight after sending the invoice] to transfer the funds to his account….
A couple of years ago…
A couple of years ago I was talking with two dentist friends who were similar in age to me, and the question came up as to what sort of cash reserves each of us were holding in our superannuation retirement savings.
And the thought was between us that it would be advisable to have access to at least a year’s supply of cash, to avoid having to sell off growth assets during a down market or a dip market.
Which brings me to my point….
When the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020, stock markets across the world went into a freefall wiping trillions of dollars of value from people’s portfolios. [the market since rebounded from this freefall and recovered its losses]. Many investors sold as the market fell, and then lost assets as the market then rebounded.
Those investors who held out and weathered the financial storm because they had access to cash reserves and did not need to sell assets were obviously rewarded for their foresight.
Were they lucky or were they cautiously prepared?
Farmers always know that there are four seasons to a calendar year, and that there will always be winters, and to reap your harvest in springtime you need to plant before those winter hit.
You need to prepare. You just can’t party all year round like there’s no tomorrow.
So how do you prepare yourself for financial downturns?
Dan Kennedy said this:
“Building a ‘financial fortress’ these days is a difficult and complex process. But it starts with the disciplines of living below your means, saving, and investing. Far too many people with the ability to earn large incomes never keep and accumulate any of it.”
And never a truer word was spoken.
Owning a dental practice is a gift.
The income and profit that come from owning a dental practice allow those owners to choose where they live, where they send their children to school, where they retire to, when they retire, and what they do in their retirement.
But it all comes from having a plan.
And without a plan, you end up becoming part of somebody else’s plan.
The tragedies of failing to plan are borne out when I see dentists continue working on way past the age that they should have retired themselves. Or I see them selling up their family home and “downsizing” to a smaller home in another community…
Whatever you do, draw up a plan.
And make saving part of that plan.
You never know what’s around the corner….
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LIVE Workshop: Dr David Moffet and Jayne Bandy:
“How To Easily Run, Maintain And Grow The Ultimate Dental Practice In 2022 and Beyond”
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 Thursday November 25, 2021 in Sydney, NSW.
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.
Why isn’t your business providing a world class experience to each and every one of your customers each and every time that they do business with you?
Is it really that difficult to do?
One of the BINDING PRINCIPLES of providing World Class Customer Service to your clients ,customers, and patients is the principle that you, your employees, and your business are always striving to make the experience that you deliver to your customer on their visit to you today EVEN BETTER than it was the last time they did business with you.
How can we be better tomorrow for our customer than we were for them today?
How do we make their next visit with us more memorable next time, than this visit with us was today?
These are the questions I would repeatedly ask of my team as we strived to be THE BEST Dental Practice that our clients and patients had ever experienced.
Because to us, as their dentist, it wasn’t about the dentistry.
And we didn’t want it to be about the dentistry.
We wanted their visit to our dental office to be about the EXPERIENCE.
We did not want to be considered as “just a commodity”.
We wanted our patients to leave our dental office in awe, with the realisation that their appointment was not about the procedure, it was about them as human beings and their RELATIONSHIPS with us, with our team members, and with our dental practice.
We considered our patients to be our friends, our family.
And we hoped that the respect that we showed them was appreciated as a friendship, as a relationship, and not just simply as a transaction.
As a business, and as team members in that business, we all strived for improvement each and every day that we went to work and went about our daily duties.
We were never ones to rest on our laurels.
Complacency was not in our vocabulary.
Art Linkletter summed it up when he said:
“Do a little more than you’re paid to. Give a little more than you have to. Try a little harder than you want to. Aim a little higher than you think possible, and give a lot of thanks to God for health, family, and friends.”
I used to tell every prospective employee at their interview that I believed my patients of my dental practice were my friends and that I would be more than happy to have 95% of them as guests in my home.
It is having this relationship of respect, and this striving for continual improvement in your business that truly separates those businesses that are providers of World Class Customer Experiences from those that are not.
And picking your lane is easy….
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LIVE Workshop: Dr David Moffet and Jayne Bandy:
“How To Easily Run, Maintain And Grow The Ultimate Dental Practice In 2022 and Beyond”
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 Thursday November 25, 2021 in Sydney, NSW.
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.
When I’m talking to dentists about coaching and training their teams, I’m sometimes confronted with the answer from a dental practice owner that he wants to get its team [members] sorted firstly, and then he will get them trained.
Other dental practices implement our coaching systems firstly, and then recruit new team members and additional team members to come in and work there using already established protocols and systems.
These second lot of dental practices realise that creating the “perfect practice” firstly is great ideologically, but is often a very illogical ideology.
Some dentists say:
“But what if I train people and they leave?”
To which I reply:
“But what if you don’t train them and they stay?”
Failure Is Not An Option
Gene Kranz was the flight director for Apollo 13, the NASA space mission that encountered near catastrophic issues on its journey. Kranz and his Tiger Team in Houston had to help the space crew repair damage to their spacecraft and help them get back to earth safely.
Kranz is famous for his statement to the Tiger Team:
“Failure is not an option.”
It’s the same with coaching.
Nobody hires a coach to break even
Every business hires a coach to see a positive impact to its bottom line.
Therefore fees paid to a coach need to be considered as an investment and not as an expense.
An expense is a cost.
An investment returns a multiple on the amount invested.
Coaching your team and your business to perform better is therefore meant to create an increase in production, and with that, an increase in profit.
“I’ll begin your coaching programme once I get my business in order…”
That’s like saying:
“I’ll get myself fit first and then I’ll go join the gym.”
Usually the reason the business isn’t in good shape is the reason why it won’t ever get in good shape on its own.
[It’s very rare for people to get fit without joining a gym.]
There needs to be a change for things to really change.
Every practice we work with improves their monthly production way more than the amount they pay us each month, simply because there is so much “low hanging fruit” for us to identify in the practice and improve upon.
This is because these are the things we see across a broad range of clients, and working with those clients.
It’s why we are coaches.
Because we have the toolkit to identify these weaknesses and we have the track record of fixing these weaknesses.
As seasoned coaches we see more success for practices that implement our services firstly and then bring new recruits on board with
“this is how we coach our team members”
compared to those practices that engage new recruits and induct them and then say:
“now we’re going to bring on new coaching”.
We also see the importance of the coaching consistency in practices where for whatever reason, they have unexpected loss of key people. [maternity, caring, partner relocating…..]
Lastly, delegating and outsourcing the coaching and skills training for your dental team rather than having team members try to teach, will certainly remove significant stresses.
Practices that attempt to internally train rarely do a great job and often never get around to getting all the training that is needed done…. something always seems to come up and get in the way….
Interestingly, what we’ve seen with COVID times in lockdown affected states in Australia is that every time a lockdown ends dental practices have a rush of activity and demand for dental services that results in lost opportunities on their phones… you know what I mean… that assumption that
“I don’t have to make every caller an appointment because there’s so many people calling and wanting to come in at the moment”
results in a slipping regarding NEEDED attention to detail about the appointment types being not made and being cancelled.
And even in non-COVID times, whenever there is an increase in demand, we always hear the same response “styles” on the phones…
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LIVE Workshop: Dr David Moffet and Jayne Bandy:
“How To Easily Run, Maintain And Grow The Ultimate Dental Practice In 2022 and Beyond”
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 Thursday November 25, 2021 in Sydney, NSW.
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.
