Lee Iacocca is famous for his leadership roles at Ford Motor Company [1946 to 1978] and at Chrysler [1978 to 1992].
His visions at Ford saw him participate in the successful designs of the Ford Mustang and the Ford Escort.
At Chrysler, he brought ideas to fruition that had been rejected at Ford, that ultimately turned Chrysler around from the brink of bankruptcy. These included small compact front-wheel drive cars [K-cars], and the minivan.
He was also responsible for Chrysler purchasing America Motors Corporation and acquiring the Jeep Grand Cherokee design.
He was a business visionary.
Lee Iacocca is quoted as saying:
“There’s no great mystery to satisfying your customers. Build them a quality product and treat them with respect. It’s that simple.”
And it is that simple.
And this philosophy works in any business.
So long as your business delivers a product or service of exceptional quality, and treats its customers with the respect they deserve, your business will be successful.
In dentistry…
In dentistry it’s pretty simple.
Your dental services need to be performed well, and need to be delivered as painlessly as possible, and they need to last a long time.
Alongside this, your customers must be made to feel valued and important, and they must feel respected.
You must always seek to solve your customers’ problems, and you must make sure that your customer fully understands exactly what their problem is, what you are going to do to solve their problem, and they must understand fully what will happen to them if they choose to delay their treatment away from the time frame that you have recommended.
When your dental clients and patients understand fully what their best course of action needs to be, and when they understand the urgency of that treatment, then you have created the necessary strong foundation for an ongoing relationship of mutual trust and respect between you and your patients.
It really is that simple….
*****
Need your phones monitored?
Are you concerned about the number of calls that are not being answered as best they can be?
You need Call Tracking Excellence.
For the cost of a less than one cleaning per week, you could have your phones being answered much much better….
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.
From time to time in dentistry and in dental forums the discussion arises as to whether dentistry is a profession or a business?
Dentists who own their own practices are considered to be business owners.
By the government.
By the regulatory authorities.
By the tax office.
By other businesses.
By their employees.
And by the general public.
And frankly, if a dental practice is not a business, or considered a business, then it must be a charity.
And a charity it is not.
So therefore, a privately owned dental practice must be a business.
So by definition:
By definition, a business is described as “the activity of making, buying, selling or supplying goods or services for money”.
What that business does with that money is important:
Some businesses invest in employing more people.
Some businesses purchase more equipment and assets.
Some businesses pay their owners dividends.
Putting it simply, the money made by the business fuels economies both locally, and distant.
The money made goes around.
Businesses need to be regulated:
A business needs to operate to certain pre-determined standards.
It must pay its fair share of tax.
It must operate with safety and follow regulations that are set and determined to be the SPECIFIC STANDARD as determined.
People who work for that business need to be confident that the business is operating safely and ethically.
Otherwise…
Otherwise without regulation, it’s not a business, and it’s not a charity.
It’s at best, a hobby.
And at worst, it’s a free-for-all.
Some consider the practice of dentistry in private practice to be a profession, and not a business.
I don’t.
There’s a lot of effort and sweat equity that goes into the education required to qualify for dental school, and there’s a lot of effort and sweat equity that goes into getting through and finishing dental school.
On a balance sheet, to me, that’s a debt that needs to be repaid.
And speaking of debt, now students graduate from dental school with a government imposed “education tax debt” that needs to be repaid…this education debt is the graduating dentist’s DUTY to repay to the state for the opportunity of being educated… ???
And this despite the fact that as high earners and high achievers anyway, dentists as a whole will earn more and therefore pay more tax throughout their careers anyhow just as a result of becoming dentists…
Step 2:
So after graduating and being employed for an amount of time, a dentist then either buys and takes over an existing practice, or they pick a site and establish a brand new dental practice.
These are decisions that both of which can at times be speculative and risky…
And with risk comes….
And of course with all risk, there should come a degree of reward.
A reward for effort.
A reward for taking a risk…
The reward for the effort needs to be financial.
The reward for taking that risk needs to be financial.
Commendation and applause are not a good reward.
Commendation and applause are pleasant, but you can’t buy food at the grocery store with a wheelbarrow full of commendation.
And nor can you divide up your applause and commendation and pay your employees with it.
Dentists who are owners of their own practice need to be paid in three ways:
1- They need to be paid by their practice as an associate dentist working in that practice.
They need to be paid for doing the dentistry.
Most owners do not pay themselves this way.
Most owners need to pay themselves this way, because if they are ever absent from their practices, they will need to hire someone else to come in and operate as an associate dentist in their practice, and the practice will have to pay that associate in this way.
2- They need to be paid for all their management roles.
Similarly, if an owner performs management roles, such as HR, payroll, marketing, if these duties were not being performed by the owner, they would be tasks that another employee would be being paid to perform.
3- They need to be paid a dividend as a shareholder in the business.
If the business cost say, $1Million to purchase or set up, the dentist owner needs to be paid a dividend for the investment of that $1M, in the same way they would receive rental income from a $1M property investment, or a dividend from $1M worth of shares.
To underpay on any or all of these three roles is at best charity, and at worst, stupidity.
To not consider practice ownership as a business…
At the end of your life, in retirement, if a dentist owner falls on difficult economic times, those people that he’s ever been charitable to along the way will be conspicuous by their absence from the line of people forming to offer a helping hand.
As a dental practice business owner, it is your duty, to yourself, to your government, and to your family and to your community, to earn sufficient profit from your business career that you are never ever going to be a financial burden to anyone or anybody during your twilight years.
The purpose of being in business is to provide for a comfortable life and to provide for a comfortable retirement.
Any profit beyond that can and should be invested wisely.
That investment could provide for housing, or could provide for investment in other businesses that stimulate employment and further investment.
Or that profit can be donated to charities.
Or it can be taxed and that taxation money can be used by governments to pay for infrastructure and welfare.
*****
Need your phones monitored?
Are you concerned about the number of calls that are not being answered as best they can be?
You need Call Tracking Excellence.
For the cost of a less than one cleaning per week, you could have your phones being answered much much better….
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 know sometimes I tell you that you can’t make some of this stuff up…
Well, it’s happened again.
Just when you think that dental practices are getting the message about delivering Five Star Customer Service and an Ultimate Patient Experience, you find out that there are some practices out there that are implementing the most RUTHLESS short cuts in their practices to save pennies, that are causing their practices to BLEED tens of thousands of dollars from their top line….
And maybe that could be hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Per year.
Every year.
Let me explain…
It’s a well known fact that nobody really likes going to the dentist.
And even the toughest and strongest people are apprehensive when it comes to simple things like walking in the dental practice front door, and then sitting calmly and patiently waiting for the dentist to see them.
It’s certainly not a TOP TEN way that I’d choose to pass the time of day and relax…
Yet some dental practices forget this mental discomfort and anguish that their patients may be feeling, each and every time they have a dental appointment scheduled…
What doesn’t help…
I know of dental practices that prefer their front office team members to be transactional cashiers rather than receptionists.
These dental practices employ someone to process payments and to schedule appointments for patients, but if there are no patients leaving the practice, these receptionists are expected to leave the front desk un-manned and are required to go down the back and assist with instrument sterilisation and other clinical duties.
And while the front desk is unattended, often a small bell is deemed by the practice owner as being the most perfectly adequate way of greeting an arriving patient.
You have to be kidding me?
What sort of a message does that send to the arriving patient?
Really?
Imagine you are arriving at the dental practice to spend a few thousand dollars right there and then on your dental health, and there’s not a soul around to greet you because they’re down the back scrubbing blood and debris off dental scalers?
I know if I was that patient I wouldn’t be enamoured by this display of apathy from the dental practice…
It gets worse…
Did you ever hear the story about the restaurant where the phone rang, and the caller asked if they could order their meal to be delivered…
The restaurant wrote down the food order, and when they asked for the delivery address, the caller said they were sitting in the restaurant by the window… they just hadn’t seen a waiter for a while to take their order.
As you know we listen to recordings of incoming phone calls at our clients’ dental practices.
And recently we heard a patient phone the practice to let them know that they [the patient] had arrived at the practice for their appointment and they had been sitting in the dental practice waiting room for the past five minutes …. obviously the front desk at this dental practice had been left unattended for that amount of time …
You would think…
You would think that the staff at that dental practice would have had a schedule of patients for that day, along with a list of times those patients were due to arrive.
And as a result of having that information, these staff would have been able to have liaised with each other to ensure that no patient ever arrived to a dental front desk situation that was not guaranteed to be manned for the arriving patient.
Not having a receptionist there at your front desk to greet arriving patients and to keep them at ease while they wait for their appointment represents a metaphorical slap in the face for all those clients of the dental practice who would be arriving at that practice and would be expecting some degree of human interaction and human service.
Dentistry and the provision of dental services is a very personal process. All dental services and patient interactions need to be delivered as personally and as personably as possible.“
And that’s best done by a human being.
And not by a sign. Or by a bell.
An unattended front desk at a dental office says this to arriving patients:
“We take you for granted.”
No patient arriving at a dental practice should ever have to feel so abandoned that they need to phone in their arrival to the practice….
Remember, the number one reason that patients leave their [previous] dental practice and go elsewhere for their dental treatment is because of APATHY and the feeling of PERCEIVED APATHY that the patient receives at their [previous] dental practice.
Don’t allow perceived apathy to be the reason that your patients start marching out your doors…
*****
Need your phones monitored?
Are you concerned about the number of calls that are not being answered as best they can be?
You need Call Tracking Excellence.
For the cost of a less than one cleaning per week, you could have your phones being answered much much better….
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.
Say the word “chainsaw” to a lot of people and the movie “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” immediately comes to mind. The iconic film that was filmed on a very low budget ended up being a box office success and is now regarded as being one of the best and most influential HORROR FILMS of all times.
Now, as you all know, Jayne and I have lived on acreage in rural NSW Australia for the past eleven years. We bought our farm as a weekender in 2022, and decided to move here full time in 2018, after I retired myself from practicing clinical dentistry in Sydney Australia because of arthritis in my hands.
And now, as successful coaches and speakers working primarily from home, it really made more sense to us that we didn’t really need to live in suburbia, and that we could actually live anywhere that we wanted to.
We now live on sixty eight acres, where we raise beef cattle.
From time to time on that acreage, we have tall trees that come down or lose branches. Often when this happens, we have an arborist come in to help with the fallen trees and tree limbs. Where possible, the arborist turns them all into serviceable pieces of firewood. Or, if it’s not practical, we simply pop the big pieces onto a burn pile to be ignited at a later date.
From time to time, there are occasions when these fallen branches do need to be dealt with more urgently, or quickly, rather than booking the arborist and then waiting for him to have availability.
And it’s for this reason that I decided it might be wise for me to get a small chainsaw for myself, for those rare occasions that I would need to do some urgent tidy-ups of fallen tree limbs, or to do those non urgent tidy ups of branches that are lying around some of our paddocks and just simply getting in the way.
The trouble is chainsaws can be very dangerous.
Like really.
Really. Dangerous.
If you’re using one, and you’re not concentrating, well, you could easily cause serious damage to yourself.
And so, I’d bought this small Ryobi chainsaw a couple of years ago from the local hardware store, and because of my “fear” of it, and of my respect for what it could do [for good and for evil], it had sat in its box all that time and never even been unpacked.
Meet Mick the Fencer:
I’d like to introduce you to Mick the fencer.
Mick comes around our place from time to time and builds fences and repairs gates and latches and fences on my property.
He used to live locally and is an old school friend of Dan the arborist. But now Mick lives and works a couple of hundred kilometres away, so he’s not around as often as he used to be, but he’s a very handy friend to know.
The good thing about Mick, is that he can operate a chainsaw and a wood splitter really well, and from time to time he comes around and helps convert fallen trees into useable pieces of split firewood.
So here’s what happened last weekend.
I received a phone call from Mick that he was going to be in town, and asking whether I had any work for him.
And of course I do… there are a couple of fences with broken wires, and I’ve got a handful of gates that need longer chains on them due to settlement and movement of gate posts.
So, I asked Mick to come over and do some work.
When he got here, I also thought I’d ask Mick if he could give me a first hand lesson on using the chainsaw, and I’m so glad I did.
Because, by the time that Mick had explained a few things to me, and it was time for me to start using this little chainsaw, I was terrified about what bad things could happen if I didn’t fully concentrate on exactly what I was doing with it.
The good news is that I now feel confident on being able to use the chainsaw to do those small jobs that I bought the chainsaw to do for me.
But the best lesson is this:
I could have swatted up on YouTube videos and taught myself how to use a chainsaw, but it was the personal tuition from Mick that really made the big difference.
You see, despite the fact that everything that I might ever need to know about chainsaws and their use is probably available on YouTube or available online, the simple fact is that having Mick teach me his way, and his BEST WAY for me to use this chainsaw properly was invaluable to me because it meant that I avoided making any stupid errors while I tried to figure out the DIY side of the instructions.
Sometimes when you’re learning how to do new things, having a coach there to hold you accountable and also to stop you from making silly mistakes that you might be unaware of, is invaluable.
The last thing that I wanted to be was a human headline on the six o’clock news.
And having Mick there as an onsite coach and mentor was invaluable in this instance.
He saved me time doing research and he was there to give me great advice as I needed it.
And he kept me focussed on avoiding those silly errors that I could have made that might have put me into an ambulance…
And that personalised advice is priceless.
In your business…
In your business, are you wasting valuable time trying to research “how to” and “better way” information, when what you really need is a coach or a mentor that has the knowledge and the ability to keep you streamlined and in your lane, and focussed on the end goal?
Because most of the time, dinking around trying to work stuff out on your own can cost you a fortune in lost opportunity, and lost time, while you try to save yourself pennies on instructional costs…
And really doing it that way doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense…
*****
Need your phones monitored?
Are you concerned about the number of calls that are not being answered as best they can be?
You need Call Tracking Excellence.
For the cost of a less than one cleaning per week, you could have your phones being answered much much better….
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.
This fabulous quote reappeared on my feed this morning.
It’s from Jerry Garcia, principal songwriter, lead guitarist, and vocalist with the rock band Grateful Dead, who said:
“It’s not enough to be the best at what you do; you must be perceived to be the only one who does what you do.”
I’m not a fan of the Grateful Dead. but I am a fan of insightful thinking, and that’s what this quote is all about.
In business, the successful businesses are the ones that have customers buying and returning to buy more, because those customers are of the belief that nobody else does, or will do anything, as well as that business is able to do it.
It’s the reason why people prefer to purchase the name brand pharmaceutical medication over the generic brand medication, although chemically and pharmacologically the two medications are identical.
The perception is the reputation of the name brand.
The name brand is presumed by more to be better purely because it is perceived by the public to be better.
How is your business perceived?
When people came to work in Parramatta, and they asked at the Parramatta Chamber of Commerce monthly events:
“Where’s the best place to go to the dentist?”
they were told, without hesitation:
“The only place to go is Active Dental. You’ll pay a little more there, but it’s worth it.”
This was because at my dental practice, Active Dental, we strived to be the best at what we did, and we also made sure that we were perceived as being THE ONLY DENTAL PRACTICE IN TOWN that did what we did.
And what we did at Active Dental was that we provided a memorable Five Star World Class Customer Experience to each and every patient at each and every one of their visits.
Most dental practices believe that their patients come to them because of the technical excellence of their dentists, but I’ll let you in on a secret….
At dinner parties, cocktail parties, and barbeques around the world every weekend, people aren’t pulling back their lips and cheeks and saying to each other:
“You should be going to my dentist. His crown margins are only fifteen microns.”
What these people are telling their friends is how their dentist and his team of dedicated staff go out of their way to make them, [and all of their patients for that matter] feel valued, and understood, and appreciated, and respected.
Because the staff and the dentists at these great practices truly do understand that their patients really do believe that no other dental practice around will treat them with the same care and respect.
Because ultimately, for these patients, it’s not about the dentistry….
*****
Need your phones monitored?
Are you concerned about the number of calls that are not being answered as best they can be?
You need Call Tracking Excellence.
For the cost of a less than one cleaning per week, you could have your phones being answered much much better….
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.
