Farmers and dentists aren’t really talked about in the same sentence. You are probably wondering about the correlation between these two careers! Today I am talking you through  strategies a farmer uses from the process of sowing a seed, nurturing a plant, to identifying and weeding out the hazards and then harvesting the fruits of labour with patience and diligence. So yes, farmers have a lot to teach us about hard work, growth and wealth creation. 

The Crop Mix

Some crops take as little as three months to get ready, some as much as even two years or more to fully grow. A smart farmer knows how to invest a little in each crop so there’s a healthy cash flow through the year, and also understand the climatic and even economic conditions to select the right kind of crops. Your investment portfolio should be similarly diverse. As dental practitioners you need to have a healthy cash flow from various sources. So that in case, for any unforeseeable reasons, you aren’t able to practice, you’d have a stable backup. 

Sowing Diamonds- Have a Goal

But before you run off to the market to get seem seeds to sow, you need to have a plan. I talk about planning ever so often, and it is only because the most profitable of investments, without proper planning, is as good as flushing money down the toilet. You need to understand what a healthy cash flow is for you? The number for a steady income and savings is different for everyone. You need to define that number for you. You also need to understand the timeline for the ROI. Can you invest in mutual funds and forget about them for the next five years or do you need a steady cash flow within the next six months? Having a plan and jotting down the steps makes it easier to follow those steps and achieve your goals.

Learn to Hold the Tools- Start Small

Bitcoins are all the rage. Some really smart investors have made really smart choices with bitcoins and yielded great monetary benefits. However, the story is not the same for everyone. There are just as many, if not more, stories of loss and resentment associated with the cryptocurrency. The fact is, any investment is as good as your knowledge of it. You need to learn the trades and take it slow. Initially invest as much as you can overcome by the end of the day. The good thing about small investments is, the struggle and methods are the same, just that you learn the trade at a lower cost. It is like playing at low stake poker tables. You learn to understand the game play, but without losing a big pot. And once you understand all the ups, downs and decision making processes of your choice of investment, you can make higher leaps. 

Planting Season- Have a Process

This is considered to be the most crucial step of any investments. A farmer needs to plant the seed at the right time in order for it to grow properly. If he plants the seed too soon or too late, the weather conditions would no longer be in his favour. Similarly, investors need to learn about the markets and wait until the time is right to invest. Timing is considered to be one of the most crucial components of smart investing. 

Don’t Let the Wind Blow You Away- Be Persistent

From politics to weather conditions to even a tweet by the President of the United States could affect markets greatly. Does that mean you start buying or selling haphazardly? No, it means you need to learn to hold your horses. Understand the situation and make smart decisions. Do you when the best time to invest in a market is? It is when the market is bad; when novice investors, driven by fear and greed, make hasty decisions.  

Let it Grow- Patience is Key

Unfortunately, we live in times when hundreds and thousands of people lose hundreds and thousands of hard earned cash on get-rich-quick schemes and the same number of people still wait in line to lose their money to similar schemes dressed in different avatars. It is like sowing one strawberry seed and expecting it to grow a hundred plants of bamboos or diamonds. Investments take time to grow. But we all wait for a compound effect and double the money every passing minute. The odds are highly against such riches, it’d be wiser to ride the tide and make some cash rather than work against such unfavourable odds.

Weed Out the Over Confidence

The good thing about farming is that the weeds are fairly visible. You know when the crop is leading to infestation or unnecessary weeds growing in between the crops that would suck out the necessary nutrients from the primary crop. In investments, these weeds are difficult to identify and pull out. One of the biggest ‘sucker’ of investments is overconfidence. More so, because when you are so involved, you don’ know whether it is your experience making the decision or your overconfidence. It is like are you investing because the odds tell you it’d be a good decision or because you don’t make bad decisions as a rule. If it is the latter, you may want to spray in some good old humility to get rid of the infestation before it sucks the life out of your crop. 

Read the Weather Forecast

It may seem like the farmer looks up at the sky to pray that all goes well with his crop; but he is smarter. He looks up to check the weather conditions to make decisions accordingly. If it looks like it is about to rain, he may avoid watering the crop, or even if the wind is about to blow, because the wind would flatten out the crops if it has been recently watered. So even if the crop needs watering, it is smarted to wait out the weather conditions in order to mitigate risk. 

Same goes for investments. You may believe that you ‘need’ to make decisions based on your personal concerns, but the market conditions may not allow you to have desirable outcomes. 

So there you go! Some really valuable tips from professionals who sow a small seed that would gradually grow to a beautiful and valuable crop. If you want to learn anything about risk management, process and patience, you just have to look at a farmer at work!

P.S. Whenever you’re ready …. here are 4 ways I can help you grow your dental practice:

1. Grab a free chapter from my book “Retention – How to Plug the #1 Profit Leak in Your Dental Practice”

The book is the definitive guide to patient retention and how to use internal marketing to grow your practice – Click Here

2. Join the Savvy Dentist community and connect with dentists who are scaling their practice too

It’s our Facebook group where clever dentists learn to become commercially smart so that they have more patients, more profit and less stress. – Click Here

3. Attend a Practice Max Intensive live event

Our 2 day immersive events provide access to the latest entrepreneurial thinking and actionable strategies to drive your practice forward. You’ll leave with a game plan to take your results to the next level. If you’d like to join us, just send me a message with the word “Event and I’ll get you all the details!  – Click here

4. Work with me and my team privately

If you’d like to work directly with me and my team to take your profit from 6 figures to 7 figures …. just send me a message with the word “Private”… tell me a little about your practice and what you would like to work on together, and I’ll get you all the details! – Click here

Running a successful business is hard enough, running a sustainable and successful business would be much harder right? We all want to serve higher purposes, but we just don’t have the resources, the time, the equipment or the team to support such practices. But what if it doesn’t take all that to be more conscious.  What if I told you just small changes on your end could have greater positive impact on the world, and within your practice? 

Running a dental practice is no easy business. So at times, even when you truly want to make the world a healthier place, you believe you don’t have the right tools in your arsenal. However, it doesn’t require as much time, and definitely not as much money as generally assumed to give back to the community. Following are a list of all the considerations you would need to think through before taking that first step towards a sustainable dental practice:

Redefine Your Stake Holders

Who are your current stakeholders? Your patients? Your staff members?  Your partners? What if you added the community to the mix? And even the planet as a whole? Does that add too much pressure? But think of these as just two additional questions that you’d need to ask at every major or small meeting? 

Does your decision impact the community? Is it harmful for the planet? Say you are going to purchase supplies, will disposing of those supplies make it a little more difficult for the fish to survive in the sea? Or make it harder for the birds to breathe? What are the alternatives? Can I afford them? If not, what can I do to cut down the usage of these harmful materials in the next five years or two years? What do I need to do today to make my workspace more environment friendly in the long run?

It doesn’t sound as difficult anymore does it? You don’t have to make major changes instantly. Just being a little more aware of your decisions can help make the small changes have a big impact in the long run. And all this begins with one simple step of redefining your stakeholders. 

Have a Mission

Every business, no matter big or small, needs a mission to thrive in the long run. Everyone needs to know what they are walking towards, and by just adding sustainability to the mix, you automatically become more conscious of your efforts to make the planet a greener place. Conscious capitalism consists of four tenets. Primarily, it focuses on the movement that an organization can have a higher purpose; a purpose that has a transcendent quality to it, that really calls us to serve something beyond our own individual interests and that can be kind of perpetually served. 

The second is the involvement of community and the planet as a part of the stakeholder mix as previously mentioned. Third is about conscious leadership, including qualities like systems-level intelligence, emotional intelligence and spiritual intelligence. Finally, the last tenant is the conscious culture.

Having a Conscious Culture

A thriving culture is the sign of a healthy business growth, however, in many cases, businesses let the culture develop organically based on their core values, mission and principles. However, if you invest some time and effort in to create an enriching and meaningful workplace, you automatically take everyone on board with you. 

Having a culture that thrives on empathy, passion and fulfilment offers a well-rounded approach to your practice and life in general. 

Team Loyalty

Have you ever asked yourself what you wake up and go to work every day for? Where are you headed? What is your purpose to life? Is this all your life is going to be about? We all seek contentment and fulfilment, and a life without a greater purpose hardly enables you to find it. And that’s not just you, it is almost everyone involved in your practice. And many a times employees leave not only because they aren’t being paid well or aren’t happy with the practice, they leave because they can’t seem to find a purpose to their life. They don’t find fulfilment.

Having a sustainable business practice will help increase loyalty and retention among team members.

The Patient Equation

What if someone told you about a dentist who plants a tree for every three visits a patient makes? So that’s no added cost or effort on your end. You have to go to a dentist anyway, why not go to someone that would, in a small way, make an impact on the environment? Sounds good doesn’t it? Having a sustainable dental practice will not only attract patients who believe in similar initiatives, but will also help increase loyalty and retention among existing patients.

Take the First Step

The first step is always the most difficult. We all get a little hesitant before doing something that requires us to step out of the way a little. However, it is the first step that leads us to our goals and fulfilment. The first step to giving back to the community would be to initially understand what causes you believe in the most? It would be easier for you to follow through in the long run if you would truly be passionate about the cause that you follow. 

Take smaller steps, rather than revamping your entire practice, make smaller, achievable goals. Say you want to use environment-friendly products or look for ways to use renewable energy, then make a plan of incorporating a little more energy-efficiency each year. Also always invite your team members in for suggestions and inputs. Having everyone on board will make them feel responsible and accountable.

The Resource Centre

Following are a few important resources for you to check out regarding sustainable business practices:

• B Corporation: The Certified B Corporation is an organization that associates itself with businesses who meet ‘highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose.” You can check out more at https://bcorporation.net/
• Conscious Capitalism: Conscious Capitalism is a network of entrepreneurs and business leaders who are ‘dedicated to growth through conscious leadership.’ It is a great platform for finding other conscious business owners and interacting with them to find better ways to give back to the planet. You can find more information at https://www.consciouscapitalism.org
• Firms of Endearment: This is a great, resourceful book that highlights stories of how some of the most profitable companies do business with passion and purpose. 

P.S. Whenever you’re ready …. here are 4 ways I can help you grow your dental practice:

1. Grab a free chapter from my book “Retention – How to Plug the #1 Profit Leak in Your Dental Practice”

The book is the definitive guide to patient retention and how to use internal marketing to grow your practice – Click Here

2. Join the Savvy Dentist community and connect with dentists who are scaling their practice too

It’s our Facebook group where clever dentists learn to become commercially smart so that they have more patients, more profit and less stress. – Click Here

3. Attend a Practice Max Intensive live event

Our 2 day immersive events provide access to the latest entrepreneurial thinking and actionable strategies to drive your practice forward. You’ll leave with a game plan to take your results to the next level. If you’d like to join us, just send me a message with the word “Event and I’ll get you all the details!  – Click here

4. Work with me and my team privately

If you’d like to work directly with me and my team to take your profit from 6 figures to 7 figures …. just send me a message with the word “Private”… tell me a little about your practice and what you would like to work on together, and I’ll get you all the details! – Click here

No matter what future plans you have for your practice, the chances are you never know what’s around the corner. Opportunities can come out of nowhere. You may decide to move to a bigger, fancier location, take a space in a new shopping precinct, have a potential buyer knock on your door, make a tree or sea change with your family. Regardless of your current thinking, the ongoing value of your practice should always be front of mind. 

Every step forward should be a step taken in the right direction to increase its value and sales worthiness. Whether you decide to sell it or not remains a question for later times perhaps, but you don’t want to start from zero whenever you do. The fact is, dental practices can sell for two times the multiple or even up to five or six times the multiple-and the major difference between the evaluation is based on preparedness.

Just because you have a successful practice doesn’t mean it is a great investment, maybe it doesn’t have potential for growth, maybe it has hit the cap. The investor will conduct thorough investigations and screenings to check for profitability; they will see things that you fail to see. 

I am always asking my clients – What is it you don’t see?

Here is everything you need to read about boosting practice value and your levels of preparedness.

Calculate Your EBITDA

Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization is calculated to measure a dental practice’s profitability before the deduction of factors considered unimportant and irrelevant in a purchaser’s decision making process. All in all, it is the net income a business is making and is used to estimate whether a business really is profitable. 

You probably already calculate this, but calculating it with the intentions of evaluation will put greater light on whether the EBITDA is in the right direction to serve your long term goals. Also ask yourself if at the current EBITDA you can get a desirable price for your practice. If not, what numbers do you need to reach to get there?

Have a Growth Plan

Growth plan is extremely important to make sure you and your staff members have a direction and a goal to move towards. An increase in the net income is a component of growth, but it is not growth in itself. You need to have a clear vision of what you expect from your dental practice in the long run and what are you doing to contribute to its growth in that direction? 

A growth plan is also important for a profitable sell. Most investors will assess a practice’s potential for growth, and by having the information handy, you not only make the process time-efficient, but also the potential for meeting your demand price.

Key Man Dependency- Your Role in the Practice

Whether you are selling to a corporate or a private seller, they want to know how dependent the success of your practice is on you. Do you bring in most of your patients? What if you are not around? Do you have locums in place that help meet the bottom line even in your absence? Investors will ask you to get your medical done to ensure you don’t have any health concerns that could restrict your time at the practice. Even if you sell, a corporate investor will want you to hang around for a good few years until the practice becomes a stand-alone entity.

The Equipment

So everything looks great at the practice. You have an amazing referral system, clients on repeat and the numbers on your financial statements rocketing. Everything but the equipment looks amazing. If there is need for a lot of renovation and upgrade then do expect the price to slope down a few notches. 

Same is the case with the premises. Can the current space accommodate growth without having to break down the walls? Will it go from 4 chairs to 6 chairs without major remodelling? No? The investors will take notice. These are some of the things you should consider when scaling your business; that eventually you may decide to sell and your premises need to accommodate that kind of growth.

Emotional Readiness

Selling your practice can be exciting and profitable, but it will also be an emotional roller coaster that most owners do not prepare themselves for. Know that the practice is about to change hands and authorities; and while you may still be an integral part of it with great value placed on your opinions, you are no longer the decision-maker. The practice moves on from being your baby to you asking mommy and daddy if you could get a new toy. 

You should also prepare your associates and staff members for the change. Do not let it be a last minute surprise, it could be very demotivating. Explain to them the reasons for doing it and they would be more than understanding, accommodating and assistive during the process.

Private Versus Corporate

‘Whoever pays the highest price right?’ Maybe not. It is of course a very personal decision but one major factor that may affect the decision is your role in the practice. Would you still like to continue working or would you rather move on to the next chapter of your life? With a private investor you would very likely just hand over the keys and move on with your merry life, a corporate on the other hand would want you to remain involved. So the day to day operations would still be either handled by you or the person you set in-charge instead of the head office. 

Another major factor that an investor would look at is preferred provider status. Most corporates don’t look as closely at the preferred provider status as private investors. If there is a heavy reliance on them, then it might become a value detractor. 

Before You See a Broker

So you have decided it is time to sell? Before you even get to the phone, you should assess all the above factors and get the documents ready. You don’t want to hold a conversation with broken pieces of information. You want to get your financials in order and make your entities clean. Also speak to your advisors including your accountants and lawyers. Don’t rely on your family and friends to guide you through but get professional help.

Be flexible in your approach. Don’t go with a stiff mind set about how you want things to rollover. Flexibility allows for room to take their due course and adjust any changes of mind in the future. Say you end up selling to a corporate and tell them you will work no longer than two years but end up enjoying it. You want to have the space to make adjustments for the offers presented to you. 

So there you have it! All the necessary considerations and drivers of value that you need to factor in. Make a mental note of being more conscious of them in every little decision you make for the practice’s future. 

P.S. Whenever you’re ready …. here are 4 ways I can help you grow your dental practice:

1. Grab a free chapter from my book “Retention – How to Plug the #1 Profit Leak in Your Dental Practice”

The book is the definitive guide to patient retention and how to use internal marketing to grow your practice – Click Here

2. Join the Savvy Dentist community and connect with dentists who are scaling their practice too

It’s our Facebook group where clever dentists learn to become commercially smart so that they have more patients, more profit and less stress. – Click Here

3. Attend a Practice Max Intensive live event

Our 2 day immersive events provide access to the latest entrepreneurial thinking and actionable strategies to drive your practice forward. You’ll leave with a game plan to take your results to the next level. If you’d like to join us, just send me a message with the word “Event and I’ll get you all the details!  – Click here

4. Work with me and my team privately

If you’d like to work directly with me and my team to take your profit from 6 figures to 7 figures …. just send me a message with the word “Private”… tell me a little about your practice and what you would like to work on together, and I’ll get you all the details! – Click here

Have you ever tried stacking a bunch of boxes together and moving them from Point A to point B? We all have at some point. And we all have tried to squeeze just one more in. Stack one more, and then just one more; it is more about the challenge than saving time and energy. Because it does take more energy and definitely more time to balance more than you can handle than it does to just go slow, take your time and move the boxes in a methodical manner. But who wants to go slow when you can actually just keep stacking? But there is a bit of a problem with that. 

How are you going to carry all that weight forward when the stack is so high it is blocking your view and so heavy that it is unbalanced and stumbling right within your arms? You want to control it, hold it a little tighter, balance it a little more but it finally gives in! AND comes tumbling down on the floor. You can of course bring the pieces back together, be more strategic and get things under order, but until you do, you would have lost your most valuable and irreplaceable source that is time. 

The Difference between Growth and Scale

This is exactly the same problem many businesses face. They are just so busy stacking up that they don’t stop to assess whether the foundation of their business is strong enough to hold that much weight. And then to match it up, they just hire a few more arms that may or may not be suitable for the job. 

Growth is great for any business, but if it isn’t planned, then you will hit the ceiling sooner or later and you may have to get back down to make the foundations strong. This is why more and more successful businesses focus more on scaling than they do on growth. And if you believe both these terms are two sides of the same coin that you need to take a closer look at your coins.

Scaling is when you take a 360 degree view of your business, plan the next step, focus on the infrastructure and your human resources and then make the leap. The difference would be that of someone who ‘runs really fast’ and someone who ‘runs really fast AND trains’ for a marathon. While the former too would get a great start, might even get ahead of everyone, but he will soon have to slow down because he didn’t pack up his energy drinks, slowed down to replenish his energies and really strategically map out the race. Compared to that, someone who did consider all these things may take a slower start, but he will reap greater rewards at the finish line; or at least will make it to the finish line in time!

Following are the major three considerations and factors that can be game changers for your dental practice’s growth:

Just Stop for a Moment

Before you can even begin working on your practice, you need to work on your goals for that practice. What are your goals? What do you expect your practice to look like in five or ten years? Now you may want to grow at a pace of 30% each year, but do you have the infrastructure and the workforce to healthily grow that fast? Having a plan is not just about getting to point B. It is about jotting down the little details that will get you there. To break it down into little doable chunks so that you can hold yourself and your team accountable for the little things that will contribute to the bigger picture. And it’s not just you that needs to be aware about that plan, your team needs to be on it too.

You need to sit everybody down and let them know what the plan is, designate tasks and give timelines. A good way to do that would be to take your team out of town for a few days and really spend the time to build that plan and then divide it into quarterly, monthly and even weekly chunks. This enables everyone to be on the same page and actually feel like a part of the growth.

Human Resources

These are your most valuable assets. From your receptionist to your dental hygienist and dental assistants, they are all an integral part of your growth. And the most costly expense too. If they aren’t really contributing enough to validate their salary, then it is time to re-evaluate. Sometimes even a competitive employee may be detrimental to the practice’s culture and could hinder other employee’s performance, because of which it could really bring down his own value. Businesses, in the flurry to continue growing, end up hiring aggressively without screening employees; due to which, end up hiring people who are more of a liability than an asset. 

And even if they do end up hiring great people for the job, they aren’t able to get the most out of them due to lack of communication. The employee may not know what is expected of him or you may not truly be tapping into their maximum potential. If you could even get 1% more value out of them then it could really add up in the bigger picture. So truly invest your time and energy into hiring the right people and then retaining them with great leadership.

The Money Matters

Unfortunately, most dental schools don’t teach money management. ‘How hard could it really be?’ you ask. You just need to decide on a budget, rent a pretty office, get some fancy chairs and latest machinery and you are all set and ready to go. Perhaps that’s a great start. And it’s not the start that is the most difficult anyway. It is about managing a healthy cash flow- and really understanding the importance of it. Your business may be doing great in your accounting books, but if you don’t have a healthy cash flow, then those books or the business isn’t worth much. 

The first step would be to hire a competent accountant; someone who really knows that his job is more than just to keep records.  It is also important to be able to openly communicate fees structures and charges with the patients. Many a times, dentists are hesitant to talk about money matters with the patients. They don’t know how to ask for a down payment for an expensive procedure. And the truth is, most patients are willing to pay if only they are made aware of the fact that they have to. 

The fact is, there may not be enough minutes in an hour or hours in a day, but by making most of the time that you DO have, you can really take your business up a few notches. But it all starts with awareness, understanding and the will to take it slow. 

P.S. Whenever you’re ready …. here are 4 ways I can help you grow your dental practice:

1. Grab a free chapter from my book “Retention – How to Plug the #1 Profit Leak in Your Dental Practice”

The book is the definitive guide to patient retention and how to use internal marketing to grow your practice – Click Here

2. Join the Savvy Dentist community and connect with dentists who are scaling their practice too

It’s our Facebook group where clever dentists learn to become commercially smart so that they have more patients, more profit and less stress. – Click Here

3. Attend a Practice Max Intensive live event

Our 2 day immersive events provide access to the latest entrepreneurial thinking and actionable strategies to drive your practice forward. You’ll leave with a game plan to take your results to the next level. If you’d like to join us, just send me a message with the word “Event and I’ll get you all the details!  – Click here

4. Work with me and my team privately

If you’d like to work directly with me and my team to take your profit from 6 figures to 7 figures …. just send me a message with the word “Private”… tell me a little about your practice and what you would like to work on together, and I’ll get you all the details! – Click here

Let’s say a patient walks in with a taco in his hand. He asks you to take a bite because it ‘literally is the best taco in town.’ You accept the offer and he wasn’t lying, it is super amazing.  A week goes by and you still can’t stop thinking about that taco. You start a little hunt about the ‘best taco in my area’ online. In the course of the next half an hour, you learn a little bit about the history of tacos, their construction and reviews of the best places in your area.  

You like one specific place; everyone everywhere on the internet seems to be talking about it. They have a kitchen tour video on their website and photos of fresh produce they purchase daily on their Instagram page and you are sold! You decide to treat your entire staff to tacos! You may not have purchased the same tacos as the ones you tried a week ago, but you definitely end up buying the ones with the best digital marketing strategy in your area. 

Build Your Tacos Online

Alright that was a long story about tacos, but I hope I made my point. In order to be visible to your prospective patients and let them know that you have something amazing to sell, you need to be available and happening online. Wondering what happening means? It means the same as that kitchen tour, those reviews and the picture of fresh produce for that taco guy.

Just having contact information on a website or some online directory will not make the cut. Digital marketing is as complex as it is simple. You have to continuously revamp your strategies and learn as you go. A marketing strategy that worked for one type of business or even for a dental practice in another part of the country might not be successful in yours. It is best not to DIY your digital marketing practices, at least not in their entirety, because it is an ever evolving platform and requires deep research and consumer behaviour analysis to make it work. So that little post about dental hygiene every fifteen days will not get patients walking in any time soon. 

 Do a Persona Analysis

Before we even get into how to make digital marketing effective, you need to know who you are actually targeting. You may become the highest ranking site on Google, but if that does not attract the right patients, then what good is that site anyway? Before you can get people through the doors, you need to know who you would like walking in. It is about taking charge and redirecting your business to where you want it to go. 

Who is your perfect patient? Say there were a thousand people seeking dental care and you could pick any one of them. Who would it be? What would he do? What would he look like? How would he speak? This persona analysis helps you, and your digital marketing agency, to create targeted content and marketing strategies directed towards those prospective patients. 

Get a User-Friendly Website with Stellar Features

Your website is your head office. This is where you want all your traffic to eventually come to. You need an amazing website that not only looks great, but offers the information your prospective patients are seeking. There is no point of having a website that does not turn up on Google search, but even when it does, it does not turn your inquiries into conversions. So the idea is to keep your website updated, user-friendly and targeted. Say someone is looking for teeth polishing services, no reason to direct them to your blog or the amazing history of the building you practice in, rather direct them to a landing page that talks about teeth polishing services and why they need to select you for them. 

Also make the call to action clearly visible. Let them know where you want them to go from there rather than making them guess. Say you have a first time discount, don’t just advertise it on your home page, make it pop-up when the visitor comes to the landing page, so that the discount can help them make a decision. 

Also, speak to your digital marketer about having an online booking system. Let’s go back to that taco example. Wouldn’t you rather just click a few more times and get the taco delivered rather than reach for your phone, call up the place, explain your order and your address while your dental assistant eagerly listens in to check how many tacos you’re actually ordering? Online booking is simple and extremely effective in turning leads into conversions. 

See What Works

The thing about marketing is you never know what will work, so you need to keep on experimenting and trying new things to see what you need to do more of and what you need to ditch. Simple things like where you place your call-to-action button or what time you upload a post on Instagram can make a world of difference in the outcomes. This is where Google analytics and other tracking systems like exit pops, scroll tracks and track exits come in. These simple yet valuable information about visitors’ heat maps enable you to check what your potential patients are looking at, what are they most interested in and what information or strategy generated the most conversions. 

It all might sound complex in the beginning. But it is interesting and extremely valuable information about consumer behaviour that can greatly help target your marketing strategies effectively and provide better service and care to your patients. 

Email Marketing

Anybody who thinks email marketing died in the last decade is clearly not doing it right. Email marketing is still very much an integral part of digital marketing, when done right of course! Email marketing enables you to directly contact your potential or even existing patient and market to them in a more one-to-one manner. But the trick is to customize those emails by first understanding the receiver and second valuing their time. 

Don’t spam their inboxes and neither should you send them information that does not add value to their time. Make the emails short, targeted and infrequent- and you’d probably earn more than respect from the receiver.

Any person running a small or big business needs to invest their time and efforts in digital marketing to remain relevant and in business successfully. This is an interesting world with immense potential to take your business to the heights you want to take it to. But it all starts with awareness; because as long as you don’t know what you want, your marketer would keep guessing and he might not always be interested in guesswork or going that extra mile. So get your basics right, learn more about digital marketing and get a competent professional to help you make the most out of marketing your business online. 

P.S. Whenever you’re ready …. here are 4 ways I can help you grow your dental practice:

1. Grab a free chapter from my book “Retention – How to Plug the #1 Profit Leak in Your Dental Practice”

The book is the definitive guide to patient retention and how to use internal marketing to grow your practice – Click Here

2. Join the Savvy Dentist community and connect with dentists who are scaling their practice too

It’s our Facebook group where clever dentists learn to become commercially smart so that they have more patients, more profit and less stress. – Click Here

3. Attend a Practice Max Intensive live event

Our 2 day immersive events provide access to the latest entrepreneurial thinking and actionable strategies to drive your practice forward. You’ll leave with a game plan to take your results to the next level. If you’d like to join us, just send me a message with the word “Event and I’ll get you all the details!  – Click here

4. Work with me and my team privately

If you’d like to work directly with me and my team to take your profit from 6 figures to 7 figures …. just send me a message with the word “Private”… tell me a little about your practice and what you would like to work on together, and I’ll get you all the details! – Click here