When you hear the words intelligence thrown in with competitiveness, your mind wanders to the other dental practice down the road or that shiny new clinic in town with the enormous signs offering lower fixed priced treatments right?  You might make a mental note to run a whitening special leading up to the Christmas party season, or look into updating your reception with new chairs and bigger better screens. 

But the reality is a lot harsher and more bitter than that. And it all stems from the wrong perception around being competitive. And it is these misconceptions that competitive intelligence debunks.

Competitive intelligence focuses on the important information regarding the market in general, and how you can compete with the changing trends of that market. You could be a monopoly, the only dental practice in your area offering new age technology in the practice, but if you aren’t focusing on the market trends, you could easily find yourself struggling to stay relevant in the very near future. Let’s look at the factors that you need to focus on when considering any aspects of competition.

What Decisions Are You Making?

Being aware of what is going on in your the market is important, but what is more important is to focus on the information that serves your long term goals. Where do you want your business to be in five or ten years from now? What steps do you need to make to get there? What market analysis do you need to conduct that would assist in making those decisions? 

Focus solely on those elements in order to yield productive results. Don’t seek data for the sake of data. It is like checking the price of every product when you enter a supermarket for the sake of knowledge. As long as you don’t plan on purchasing a new toaster any time soon, you don’t need to know anything about toasters. You can use that time more productively. 

Focus on Your Consumers

The market for you is defined as the patients you want walking into your practice – those you would consider your ideal patient avatar. They are the ones you need to attract and be acutely well informed about. What are their likes and dislikes? Where do they hang out? Who do they ask about references for medical concerns? What technologies are they using? What is their decision-making process when searching for a dental practice?

Trend Analysis

Think about the changing trends around your suburb and within your communities, region, across Australia and even the world at large. What are the technological impacts that are going to affect your business and your business model? What are the economic issues that will in turn affect the government’s policies, health care programs the income of your patients? 

All this analysis empowers you with the knowledge to make sound decisions regarding your practice.

You have got to keep yourself alert to the changing landscape, look at the trends and understand where they are leading for the next 5, 10 or even 15 years from now. Uber, Airbnb and Samsung did not take over their competitive markets overnight. 

There are great resources that offer trend reports about the future. Read up and do your research. 

The VUCA Strategy

Anybody with a military background understands the impact of the VUCA strategy. Similar strategy is also applied in business. The only difference is, where it stands for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous in the military, it stands for Vision, Understanding, Clarity and Agility in the business world. These four strategies are of extreme importance when it comes to planning a business’s growth.  And to plan your growth you need to be aware of what changes will impact on your patients and the communities they live in.

The Blind Spot

The key element during any strategising process is to challenge the biases, your blind spots, your assumptions and the limiting beliefs you have around your practice and your patients. Businesses like Nokia, Kodak and Blackberry are great examples of organisations that, though incredibly competent, did not see the changes coming. They did not empower themselves with the knowledge of the changing landscape around them. And thus, failed to remain relevant in the market in the long run.

Get a Business Coach or Mentor

Now, for a dental practice owner, all this information can be overwhelming and a little too much to handle. Even if you jot down tips or make mental notes, you probably don’t have a plan that you can immediately apply to your business.

Sure, you need to learn more, but it takes time and trial and error to successfully implement competitiveness into your business.  A business coach or mentor can serve as that sounding board and provide a protective armour for any possible decisions which might be bias or blind spotted.

Its comforting to have another head – one external to your business – but on your side – working through your decisions with you to caution on factors you may not have considered and to reassure you of those good opportunities.   

Becoming a Good Leader

Leadership is often associated with large organisations having multiple teams to handle. It doesn’t matter if it’s just you and your DA at your practice, smart leadership can help create a system for future growth. You can’t just let your skills as a technician guide your way to success, you need to plan out and purposely pave the way to a successful business. 

Competitive intelligence helps you stay relevant in the long haul, and it starts with small steps towards lifting your own market awareness. I challenge you to build daily habits which will assist you to learn more about your patients, your market, your community, the products and services in your dental field, the broader global business of dentistry and the issues – be they local or global – that impact on the lives of the patients you have now and those you will want to attract in the future.

It doesn’t have to be very time consuming. Build habits around reading the local newspaper and school newsletters, subscribe to community and industry blogs and informative podcasts.  Sign up for local government publications, industry apps, dental industry, business and product websites and catalogues and plug into platforms that distribute information that is relevant to you.  The way information is delivered you can have all the data you need coming into your business inbox.

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

Introducing a new surgical process can be exciting and nerve-wrecking. It takes a lot deliberation, education and above all hefty investments to put a new surgical process on the table. However, many a time, in the flurry getting it out to your patients, you forget the most important component- on how to make it a success. 

Introducing is more difficult than it seems at face value. You need a certain skillset to get people to accept it, opt for it, and pay for it in order to make it successful. This week, we discuss the three important skillsets that need to be mastered in order to make a surgical procedure a success. Let’s break these skillsets down into components:

• To be able to attract patients
• To be able to develop the case presentation skills required
• To make the workflow efficient

Now, let’s discuss these three in a little more detail.

How to Attract Patients

You probably already have an extensive patient database. These include your existing patients, luring in new patients and reactivating patients who may have slipped through the cracks. At the base of this skillset is marketing. Not a lot of practice owners give marketing its due diligence, or aren’t doing it correctly.

You cannot just be spreading out pamphlets around your neighbourhood in the hopes that someone will need the new procedure that you are offering. And then also holding your breath or crossing your fingers in hopes that they would select you for the said procedure. All this hardly worked in the ancient times that it was popular, let alone in current competitive markets. 

Following is a breakdown if important marketing tactics to help you get the right word out to the right people:

Three M’s of Marketing

The three M’s of marketing are the market itself, the message and the medium for delivering that message. 

Your Ideal Patient Avatar- Your Market

This is inarguably the most crucial component of your marketing strategy. If you get this wrong, everything else will fail to have an impact. You need to understand who your ideal patient is? What their hopes and frustrations and aspirations regarding dental services are? Now build your patient avatar around this.

I speak a lot about the patient avatar because it really helps you design your marketing strategy around it and thus increase your chances of success. Say your ideal patient is a 50 year old retiree looking for restoration work. Do you think you’d have more success on Instagram or Facebook with it? Should you opt for a newsletter or newspaper? Perhaps both! Should you use words like ‘longevity’ or ‘popularity’ to have more impac?

Having a patient avatar helps you design your marketing strategy down to the T, giving you better chances of success.

What Makes them Sing?- Your Message

Once you understand your market and your needs, you can design your message accordingly in order to hit right where it hurts, or doesn’t hurt! You need to make your service unique and valuable. The problem for most dentists is that the services they offer are really valuable, but they are not unique. And for this reason they become commoditized. This is where you really need to brainstorm and come up with ideas to do it differently. 

• 

How Do You Attract Your Ideal Patient?- Your Medium

As discussed earlier, you need to communicate with your targeted patients through means that they best resonate with. Social media and online marketing have quickly become undeniably impactful. However, the internet is a  sea of information and you need to fish at the right places to attract the right fish. Say you are going fishing, then you need to have a good understanding of what type of fish you want to catch. You also need to know the right kind of bait to attract that specific fish and you need to know where that fish hangs out to increase your chances of success.

Make sure you have a stellar, fully functional, user-friendly and highly informative website. Also include newsletters, be active on social media and interact with prospective patients to increase your visibility and chances of success. Basically keep evolving with the marketing trends and demands online.

Case Selection

Wrong case selection kills efficiency by a large margin. Every case selection should go through rigorous criteria to determine what type of a case it is. There are typically four types of cases. Imagine a little grid; on the vertical axis at the top are the easy patients, on the bottom vertical axis are the difficult patients. On the horizontal access on the right hand side are the easy cases and on the left hand side are the difficult cases.

You should begin your procedural journey with the top right box that consists of the easy case and easy patient. Once you gain more confidence, move on to the bottom right and top left cases which are the difficult ones. They are the easy patient with difficult case or the easy case with difficult patient. Both these offer a lot of opportunity to master your skills. On the bottom left side is the danger zone, this is the difficult case with a difficult patient. I can only warn you against these and strongly recommend that you stay away from them. These could do more harm and no good to your dental practice’s reputation in the long run. 

Case Presentation

This is another extremely important and often overlooked component of introducing new surgical procedures. How you present your case can make or break a deal. A lot like how and when you propose someone for marriage. You need to gradually make them realise that you are the best candidate for the position. 

You can’t just offer a solution to their problem off the bat and expect them to jump right on the surgical chair. Invest some time to understand your prospective or existing patients, build trust and then offer the solution. Give them space and time to deliberate and make informed decisions.

• 

Build out The Workflow

The success of your newest procedural additions depends as much on your team as it does on you. What this means is, you need to ask yourself if you and your team members are prepared for all the steps of the procedure. What short of procedural checklists do you need in place for each of those steps? What instruments might be required? Is there training required for any of the staff Are there conversational frameworks that need to be in place? How do you know it is successfully completed? You need to build your workflow extremely well in order to make the procedure successful.

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

Dealing with kids can be fun, exciting and nerve-wrecking, all at the same time. Now add surgical chair and needles to the mix and you are just waiting for a small volcano to erupt. Paediatric dentistry is not for everyone. You need to have a lot of patience, be a great communicator and apply strategic planning to successfully deliver treatments. 

Dealing with small kids may not be the only challenge; dealing with their parents can also be difficult at times. They have the best interests of their kids at heart of course, but you will be managing their anxiety and their child’s sense of fear all at the one time.  

Following is some extremely useful information and tips, tricks and tactics to help you better deal with younger patients.

Do a Consultation First

Consultations are extremely important for all cases, but more so for smaller children. Imagine bringing a small kid directly on to the chair. Surrounded with huge lights, needles and other surgical instruments and the kids are bound to get nervous and finicky. It can become a point of no return where no amount of reassurances would convince them that the needles will not be used for them.

It is wiser to go through a consultation first so that you can help talk the process out, thoroughly check for the problem and discuss treatment methods and processes. This will not only help prepare the parent and child for what is ahead, but will also give you a good idea about the kind of a patient and parent you are dealing with. 

Train Your Staff  

Your staff should also be trained to assist parents and kids through the process. They should be able to deal with anxious parents and fearful children. Their job should be to explain the process and debunk any reservations or apprehensions they may have. It’s great, where possible to introduce a bit of fun and game play. Staff who have lived with younger siblings will be really good at this strategy.

Think about your Practice decoration and design

Your practice décor and design are important when looking to make adults feel comfortable and reassured that they are in safe hands. It is the same for kids.  Many practices I know who consult with a high volume of children have a well-designed fun kids cave. One surgery dedicated making kids feel engaged and relaxed. Some dentists dress up as Batman and other heroes. 

Speak to the Parents

Parents are a huge part of the challenge when dealing with young patients. You really need to get them onboard and explain to them what their role in the treatment process will be. It is very common for parents to say to their child something like ‘It will only hurt a little’ or ‘it’s just a small needle;’ and while they have good intentions at heart, it ends up doing more damage than good. 

Many parents also come with preconceived notions and specific reservations about some forms of dental treatment. For instance, many parents aren’t happy about the use of fluoride. And while you can explain to them the need for fluoride in current times, you cannot make the decision for them. At times you will need to educate parents and let them make their own  judgement. There may be times, when the parents will leave the surgery stating your treatment values aren’t aligned with their own. And that’s ok. Or they may ask their preferences be respected, and that is also fine.  

Should You Keep the Parent in the Room?

There are a lot of different opinions regarding this. Primarily, it should depend on the parent as well as you. If you are more comfortable with the parent in the room, then by all means. Though do give them a little briefing about who is in charge and what they can and cannot do in order to lend help.  Let them know that you’d be the person in control of doing all the talking and they should refrain from saying or doing anything that could make the treatment difficult.

On the other hand, there are dentists who believe kids behave better when the parents aren’t in the room. They are comparatively calmer and more relaxed knowing that there is no one around who would heed to their tantrums. Know what works for you best. 

The Right Number of Visits

Kids may not be too enthusiastic about coming to the dentist again and again. Try to limit treatments to two or three visits. However, getting a kid to sit in a chair for forty minutes in one go is a challenge on its own. Again, speak to the parents to see what they would rather prefer. You can opt to do half the mouth in one go or keep to a quadrant. Many paediatric dentists prefer doing a quadrant and then preparing the other quadrant for the next visit, this way, the number of visits drops down to three or even less.  

Following are a number of other useful tips and tricks to successfully treat small children:

• The use of rubber dams also helps speed the process up and get treatments done much quicker. 
• Many practitioners don’t use local anaesthetics for kids as they are just dealing with baby teeth. However, in case the kid ends up feeling something, then it could be almost impossible to make him sit through the rest of treatment peacefully. It is better to get things done pain-free and relatively faster.
• Opt for stainless steel crowns whenever possible as they have an annual failure rate of 0.3%. Compared to composite resins’ rate of up to 15% and 25% for GICs, it only makes sense to go for steel.
• Don’t make hasty decisions. It is alright to tell the parent that you don’t have the best answer at the moment, but would be able to better assist you with more assessment. 
• Be prepared for little kids to act up, and train your staff to lend a helping hand.
• Do all your preparations in advance so that the little patient does not have to sit in the chair any longer than absolutely necessary.

There you have it! Treating high a volume of small children requires team alignment, a great set up and the ability to deliver clear treatment options and instructions to parents. And the personality to deliver a little fun along the way! 

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

Do you have only one mouth mirror, one dental tweezers, probe and scaler lying around your practice? The chances are the answer is ‘No.’ You probably have a couple of extra tools hanging around in case one goes missing. You can’t just leave your patient sitting vulnerably in the chair while you go find or buy yourself a probe. 

Now consider yourself sitting in that chair, enjoying a lucrative dental practice until something unfortunate leads you to close that practice down. What if you develop shaky hands and cannot perform specific procedures. What would be your number one concern in that case? It definitely should not be financial worries. 

Fact is, we all need some sort of a backup plan to power through life. And investments are a great way to secure yourself financially in these economically unstable times. However, with multiple options available, the decision can become pretty overwhelming pretty fast. This blog post has been designed to help you through the process, regardless of what you plan on investing in. 

Your Appetite for Risk

You must have had heard of the term ‘risk appetite’ time and again. It is your own capacity for dealing with risk. However, online quizzes and questionnaires are quite generic and don’t provide targeted results. You will need to calculate your individual capacity to take risk. This is done by making personal and financial assessments. How much money can you put in an investment without losing sleep? What are your long term goals and how much are you willing to invest in them? What is your capacity for loss? Answering all these questions will give you a clearer idea of what investment options are more suitable for you and how much you could invest in them.

Do Not Invest in Something You Don’t Understand

Just because someone you know made great money with bitcoins doesn’t mean you will too. That someone probably invested their time and effort along with their money in it. Unless you are willing to invest the same kind of effort in understanding the plan, you will not garner the same results. And this is true for any form of investment. 

Millions of people heavily invest in mutual funds each year, without first assessing and comparing the different types of mutual funds or the expense ratio that  a specific institute might be charging them; hence, the results for the same are drastically different for every investor. The term ‘passive income’ is coined to define your attitude towards a specific income stream AFTER you have done your due diligence and researched on it; before that you need to be anything but passive in order to yield desirable returns.

Have a Diversified Portfolio

You know what they say don’t put your eggs in one basket? They are pretty right! Economic conditions are constantly fluctuating. Real estate, stocks, bonds, commodities, they all have their highs and lows, and by investing in any one of them, you go through that rollercoaster with them. Invest in different asset classes and deal makers. Invest in different streams of strategies so that you bring multiple levels of diversification. And if you can diversify in terms of strategy, geography, frequency of payments, overhead costs and other terms and conditions, then you will create multiple pillars of wealth.

How to Deal With Losses

We all have our fair share of cuts and bruises when dealing with investments, or pretty much any other aspect of this ride called life. It is the part and parcel of it all. What is important is how you lift yourself back up, dust the loss off and start from point zero or point minus ten if that’s what it takes to get things rolling. 

Almost all investment opportunities go through turmoil; there will be times when the market will fluctuate. Instead of making hasty decisions, you should stay put and ride the storm out. This is another reason why investing in a diverse portfolio is more lucrative. It is easier to ignore a small investment going bad rather than when you invest hefty amounts in a single opportunity. For instance, real estate markets in the home ground might be going through a difficult time, however, it may be booming somewhere abroad. It makes sense to invest abroad in an industry that you are familiar with rather than opting for a new opportunity that you are not very knowledgeable of.

Learn From the Experts

What better way to earn what successful people earn other than doing what they are doing? You can learn from scratch, or have a mentor who has made the mistakes you are likely to make and let their experience guide you through the process. Seek help from mentors and financial and investing advisors whenever possible. Also have a network of people within the industry that you are investing in. Rubbing shoulders with the right people will give you the inside scoop on matters concerning your investment. You don’t want to be the last person knowing that the real estate market is about to crash. Rubbing shoulders with people doing the same thing will enable you to learn from their mistakes, hear about their journeys as well as updates from the economic and governmental fronts. 

Have a Process

If there is one key point you can take from this blog, take this- don’t invest in an opportunity based on someone else’s advice, gut feeling, investment trends and flimsy research. So many people invest for the wrong reasons and based on half-baked processes. It is not a robust methodology. Have a process, a questionnaire of sort if you may, where you ask yourself the right questions, do the survey, educate yourself, weigh out the options and then make decisions. Having a process ensures that every decision you make is thoroughly assessed and investigated. 

Be Flexible

There is a major difference between letting economic fluctuations lead you to make hasty decisions and breeding white elephants. Know when to call it quits. Again, weigh out your options and expect things to take unexpected turns. Don’t hang on to an investment if it isn’t generating the desired returns. 

A diversified investment portfolio isn’t just a way of building wealth, in many cases, it becomes a requirement to survive through the economic crunches and curve balls. So rather than only focusing on scaling your dental practice, you should also consider other investment options. 

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

So what is the big difference between a profitable practice and a scalable practice anyway? Business owners mistakenly use these terms interchangeably, and limit their business’s growth as a result. A profitable business is one with healthy cash flow and a great Profit and Loss Statement and Balance Sheet.  But that doesn’t represent scalability. Good profits can take a dive with the slightest change in your revenue, or even your marketplace.  

A scalable business on the other hand relies on efficient team work to grow. You don’t just look at the numbers on your balance sheets but rather at the structure of your business. You assess how many chairs you can bring into your practice without having to relocate. How many more team members you need to support that growth and what would be the roles and duties of those team members in order to make them worth the investment? More like a Jenga tower, where you carefully place each block over the other in order to make it sturdy. You also understand the importance of each block and its role in maintaining the strength of that structure. 

But in order to make it possible, you need to leverage that through efficient team and effective systems. 

The Performance Culture Matrix

When it comes to building a great team, I have a grid based system that I call the Performance Culture Matrix. This two by two grid works like a dental quadrant. On the vertical axis, we would have performance, and culture fit on the horizontal axis. The top right-hand quadrant houses the A player- a competent player who does his work at high standard and is also a great culture fit. In other words, he gets us, he knows us, he likes us, he is on board with what we’re trying to achieve. 

In the bottom right-hand quadrant we have the B player. This one is also a great culture fit but requires some training to develop skills. This doesn’t necessarily mean they are incompetent; it just means they are either new or settling in to new roles in the organisation and need some training and time to adjust. 

In the top left-hand quadrant is the C player; this player is extremely good at the technical aspects of his job but isn’t a good culture fit. This player also needs some training and you need to try and encourage them to become a culture fit; however, if they don’t settle well, then they need to be moved to the lower left quadrant which is the D player. A D player is neither technically competent nor a culture fit. The D players need to be gradually moved out of the practice. 

In order to maintain an efficient team, you need to have as many A and B players in your practice as possible. 

Have an Organisational Structure

So how do you identify these players? Working in a systematic manner enables you to monitor progress and performance. An organisational structure is extremely useful in workforce planning, mapping out the structure of your current practice and also in mapping your future growth plans. You can easily identify ways you can get the most out of your team members and recruit the right people to fill in any responsibilities and roles that you foresee being needed in the future. 

Have the Roles Outlined

It is extremely important to define the roles each team member needs to fulfil to effectively meet your goals. Don’t let your receptionist or dental assistant figure out their job description and priorities on their own. Specify their roles and have them mapped out. You need to have very clear metrics for success that will also serve as performance indicators. 

Key Person Risk

You need to assess each player’s performance and see if your practice is heavily dependent on any one team member. You need to mitigate this risk by acknowledging the person’s head in terms of documenting systems, processes and how things are done at the practice. You also need to adopt the Noah’s Ark principle- you should have two people who can fulfil a particular role. An organisational chart would really help with this. 

Also avoid designating tasks to individual people. Rather than saying this is Bob’s role or Susie’s role you should be using terms like this is the hygienist’s role or dental assistant’s role. 

Recruitment 

You need to have a systematic and methodical approach to recruitment. Your workforce is one of the highest expenses of your practice; you need to ensure you hire the right people for the job. Don’t just look for people with glorious work experiences, you should be looking for someone who would be a good fit for the job description you’ve laid out and will also be a good culture fit. Know the salary you can afford for someone working on that specific role. Here are a few tips to help hire the right people:

• Create a compelling job opening description based on your ideal applicant avatar. This ensures only the most suitable applicants apply.
• Market your job openings. Your workforce is as important as your clients. Make your job postings attractive and enticing so as to find ideal applicants for the particular role.
• Prepare targeted questions for your interview process. You need to assess whether the person is going to be a great fit for the team. Do they have the requisite skills? Ask them to describe what a value means to them and equally, if we paint a vision for our practice how are they going to be able to support the practice to bring that vision to life.
• Once the candidate passes through the first interview, conduct a second interview. 
• When you have made a selection craft your magnetic job offer. This is to make sure that you put the odds in your favour to entice them into taking the job. 

Personal Improvement Plan

Once you have the right people working for you, you need to provide robust training opportunities to make the most of their skills and experience. This is only possible when you help the employee grow with you. They need to be able to answer ‘what’s in it for me’ in order to efficiently help meet your goals. One of the most commonly used coaching frameworks is a model called the GROW model which stands for Goal, Reality, Options and Way forward. 

This method allows you and your employees to continually assess the growth chart and take action to further polish those skills in order to move forward. Your team members are your practice’s greatest assets, and it is only when you truly invest in them can you scale your business, creating a business and a life you will love!  

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