So how many of you have slept through meetings at work? I can imagine almost all of you sheepishly nodding your heads. We’ve all been there. Meetings can be dull and unproductive. Because of this bad reputation, most small businesses avoid meetings because they’d rather do something more ‘productive’ with their time. Meetings are important alright; you definitely need to integrate them into your business practices, provided you hone the skills required to conduct successful and productive meetings. And that’s exactly what we are covering in today’s blog.

Why are Meetings so Crucial for practice success?

Without timely meetings, team members can feel disconnected and misaligned. They wouldn’t know what their goals and objectives are; they would lack motivation and purpose. However, meetings provide an opportunity to seek feedback from team members, to learn what is going on in the practice and to realign team with your purpose and goals.

Meetings Gone Bad

Having meaningful and productive meetings require interaction and purpose, respect and discipline, and most importantly understanding and skills. You cannot just get a bunch of people in a room, state numbers, share to-do lists and expect to yield positive outcomes and generate results. Usually meetings end in more confusion and egos crashing because nobody knew what the purpose was, nobody felt motivated to focus on similar goals and nobody felt like their views and ideas were respected.

A successful meeting needs to be well structured; everyone needs to have a voice, the purpose needs to be aligned and people who are working with you on your business need to be given the opportunity to participate.

Learning the Skills for Effective Meetings

Needless to say, you need to learn some skills on how to hold purposeful meetings that achieve goals. And unlike general belief that some people have it in their DNA to be great leaders and negotiators, it is quite the opposite.

You need to learn how to understand and define the purpose and the outcomes. How do you get people engaged? How do you manage time so that it’s respectful to your work and to the people involved? How do you take notes? Those are basic skills.

Meetings are this confluence where people and work come together. So you need to work on yourself to develop skills like negotiation, hiring, selling, product discovery, de-escalating anxiety. And all these skills need to be sharpened and developed in a meeting context.

Embedding Culture

Culture is extremely important. Culture is the habits and values of your team; so if your culture is one of team work and camaraderie, then you need to reinforce repeated enactment of the things that tell you who you are together. And the best method to do that is through meetings. Dedicating just the first five minutes of a meeting can help achieve that goal beautifully.

One example of a business that incorporates this tactic effectively is Starbucks. At the beginning of every meeting, they offer coffee tasting for their team members. Doing so allows the team members to interact with each other, voice out opinions and suggestions and more importantly make them feel like they are truly connected to the product they are selling to their customers.

It also helps to give your meetings a name. Doing so embodies the culture and boost employee morale. It enables them to understand what it is that they are getting together for and be motivated towards that purpose.

The what’s and why’s of Meetings

You need to know why you are having the meeting in the first place. What goals are you trying to achieve? Some metrics that you may be trying to hit, maybe trying to increase patient satisfaction or revenue per patient. Whatever your growth metric is, you’ve got to be trying to hit some numbers and you can have timely meetings to discuss those metrics.

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There

Any business owner will understand the importance of evolving over time. To do things a bit more differently than they did yesterday. Meetings are no different. What works for a team of ten people will not work for a team of fifty. You will need to continue reassess and evolve with each little leap in your practice.

Scheduling Your Meetings

It is highly important to schedule your meetings that they are neither too long nor too short. You need to leave a good amount of time on the calendar for people to complete the goals that you set for them. If they are spending way too much time discussing what they need to be doing and very little time available to actually do it, they will lose motivation.

You keep the meetings too short and you run the risk of not listening to your teams’ contributions. Time blocking is a great tactic. It should be a little chunk of everyone’s time dedicated to meetings and meetings alone.

Listing Priorities

Prioritising is rule one of good business and great meetings. You’d have dozens of different things that will need to be done on any given day or at any one meeting; but you cannot focus on all of them. There is only so much you can achieve so try to only bite what you and your team can chew on. There shouldn’t be more than two or three main tasks or concerns that you focus on in a meeting.

Also make sure that you hold your team members accountable for what they take responsibility for. It is very common for team members to take responsibility for something, only for them to later realize they don’t really have the time for it. The best way to hold them accountable is to have it in writing and to follow up on it from time to time. You can also build in follow up on the tasks discussed last meeting. Do minutes of meetings and distribute them to everyone.

Focused meetings lead to amazing business. They enable the team members to feel a part of the growth and remain updated and motivated on how their contribution in the business is taking it to greater places.

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

What is behaviour change and why is it so important for you to know about it?

How many dentists do you know who pay very close attention to how they make their patients’ feel?

Many dentists say …my job is to fix their dental problems, not do an analysis of how I make them feel before, during and after the process.

This approach might make you a decent practitioner, but I can tell you one thing for sure- it doesn’t make for a successful dental practice. In order to achieve the latter, you must know and learn about your prospective patients’ behaviour and how you can have an impact on it.

Below are some clear strategies on making behaviour work in your favour.

Have a Clear Vision about Who your patient is.

So before you can know more about your patients’ likes and dislikes or even influence them, you need to know where you want to take your business and who your patient is.

People Don’t Want to Change

Change may be the only constant, but people are not very excited about it. How would you feel if someone asked you to use a different style of equipment than you are used to? Or drink your coffee at a different time of the day? Your patients are no different. So if you will be asking them to floss at a different time, or eat from the other side of their mouth more often, they will not jump up and down with joy, they will be reluctant to change. Same is the case with your prospective clients; they wouldn’t want to change their current dental practitioner until you give them a really good reason to do so. And this is where behavior change comes in. You need to understand your patients and assess their behaviors and apply tactics that will make them more accepting towards the ‘change’ that you want them to adapt to.

What’s in it For Me?

One major factor that will make people accepting of change is if they are convinced that there are greater benefits and incentives attached to that change. When exposed to new ideas, products and/or services, consumers’ first reaction generally is ‘what’s in it for me?’ so to sell a service or concept to an existing or new patient just answer this question for them.

Emotions Vs. Data

Now this is where consumer behavior really gets interesting. If I know that having an apple a day is much healthier than munching on a good old apple pie daily, why do I still select the latter almost every time? It’s not because I don’t know any better (data) but because apple pie is my little sweet reward after a tiring day (emotions). And this is one aspect of business that not many business owners acknowledge or work on.  So when selling focus on emotions and not data!

Why Do People Pay More for Luxury Services?

Most businesses make major decisions based on data; not to say that isn’t important, but that’s not what your patients are really interested in or responding to. They want to come to you not because of statistics and facts but because they want to feel better about themselves.

And this ‘feel good’ emotion is the reason why consumers are willing to pay hundreds of dollars for a plain white t-shirt with a designer tag than one bought for a few bucks from K Mart. You could swear similar materials are used for both the products, but for some consumers the ‘feel good – exclusivity emotion’ of wearing a designer label attached to the expensive shirt is not attached to a bargain retail product.

And if we see the same example in a dental practice setting, then it is the reason why patients choose one practitioner over the other for exactly the same procedure.

The feeling of security that since I’d be paying more, I’d be made to feel more comfortable. Whether it be on more luxurious sofas in a better equipped waiting area, fancier surgical chairs or the overall boutique experience.

Be Consistent with the Market You Are Serving

Now you may not want to provide a boutique experience, and that is totally fine. If every dental practice started offering boutique experiences, then who would cater to patients looking for basic dental services on a budget?

The idea is to decide what market you would like to cater to and then be consistent with your message.  For instance, if your message is that you cater to all your patients personally, then you can’t have your assistant do a follow up call; because that’s not what you promised. Similarly, if you are offering a message of having the best prices, then you can’t go ahead and start charging extra just because you installed a new coffee machine or better televisions in the waiting area. You have to remain consistently loyal to your promises.

Research, Research, Research

Invest some time and effort in knowing what motivates your patients, current and potential. Research your competition and what trends exist in the dental marketplace.

We all know the four P’s of marketing- price, promotion, place and product; and you will need to create a mix that speaks to your target group

The Frequency Distribution Curve

The frequency distribution curve is the bell shaped curve of anybody in a target audience. It could be your customer or patient, or groups of teams or people who work for you. If you think about that frequency distribution curve, we know that generally in any market that is between zero and 15% for your evangelists or lovers. And for your haters, the numbers are again between zero and 15%. So who are the rest of the 70% or more? They are the people who have other things to do and aren’t really paying much attention to you. This is the are you need to channel your focus. It is this 70%, who are the ones who are open to change and influence. They will provide unbiased feedback, whether they are your patients or your employees.

The Three Rules of Marketing

The first rule of marketing is to understand what you are famous for? Why do your patients prefer you over your competition? What is it that you are offering functionally and emotionally that gives you an edge. Do you make your patients feel pampered, confident, clever, protected?

The second law is to make sure that whatever it is that you are famous for, make sure you offer it consistently.

The third rule of marketing is leveraging. So you know what makes you stand out and you are offering the same quality of service consistently. The next step is to leverage it to expand your practice.

Final words…

Now let’s go away and consider firstly… what emotion is my patient feeling… and how can I make them feel better about themselves. Then – get out there and sell that to them!

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

Patient is king. He is always right. He knows best. A happy patient is a flourishing practice.

As business owners, we hear this all the time.  These statements are considered a given for the success of any practice or business in any field; yet they are seldom applied with purpose and can be frequently forgotten. As a result, not only business suffers, but its reputation too.

Below are 15 Golden rules for top notch patient support that you need to understand and incorporate into your business immediately. Doing so will not only enhance your patient experience but will generate surprisingly greater monetary rewards.

1. Treat Technology as an Enabler Rather Than a Replacement

We live in the Digital Age. This fact can neither be ignored nor overlooked. We need to incorporate newest technology in our business practices in order to stay relevant. However, this technology should be used to support rather than replace parts of the overall customer/patient experience. Human to human interaction is extremely important.  So while an automated email can be used for sharing news or information, it should not be used for patient follow-up.

2.Don’t Just Focus on the Core Product

So you know how to fix a crooked smile? Great! But so do thousands of other dentists. What will set you apart from your competition is the value that you offer along with the basic services. Why a potential patient will choose you over other practices is the quality of service and other incentives that you may have to offer.  

3. Don’t Be a Price Taker be a Price Setter

What this means is, don’t be in a competition with others based on price, or try to match their offerings and services. Rather, you should focus on setting the prices by offering your own unique set of products and services.

4. Compete for Value Not Commodity

Similar to the previous point, you shouldn’t only focus on problem solving, but rather the overall patient experience. So as a dentist, rather than investing in the priciest surgical chair as an upgrade, you could focus on more customer related investments like maybe a play area in the waiting room or charging docks (like I personally have done) or even a small café on the side.

5. Managing the Intangibles

What is the first thing a dentist would do if you asked him how can he help you? More often than not, he will tell you about the school he went to, or the number of years that he has been in practice, or the expensive equipment he uses. That’s all great right? But what, as a patient, you really want to know is how will he calm your nerves before a procedure?  So it’s important to focus on the intangibles, because that is what your patients are really interested in.

6. Patient Comfort- Going the Extra Mile

Customers are not just looking for a product or service, they are always on the lookout for solutions to their problems. You wouldn’t just go to a hairdresser and tell them you want a haircut get it done and leave. You want to know that you can trust the hairdresser to give you a style you will be happy with, give suggestions if need be, heed to your nervousness and confusion, provide support if something goes wrong, and most importantly, make the whole experience worthwhile.

And that’s just a pain-free experience of getting your hair cut which will eventually grow back. For someone coming to a dentist, all that nervousness and confusion will be multiplied several times. So you need to be able to convince patients that you’d heed to all their queries and confusions with utmost dignity and respect.

7.Offer More than Your Competition

Being in business is not just about opening a shop and waiting for a sale. It is about waking up every day and asking yourself what you can do to make it better than yesterday. Don’t try to level up with your competition but rather offer more. This doesn’t have to be just about better products, but, as discussed before, a better experience.

8. Talk about Your Value Added Services

Do you offer childcare services for patients who can’t leave their small kids at home? Awesome! Do your potential patients know about it? More often than not, businesses fail to capitalize on the services and incentives that they offer or simply fail see what it is that they can offer!.  Even if you offer something as basic as a few board games or an activity center for children, make sure you mention it on your website, pamphlets or while marketing your services.

9. Recruit the Right People

You may have great people skills, but not all potential patients would be initially interacting with you. They’d first be speaking to your receptionist, and if they aren’t friendly, helpful and welcoming, the chances are your potential patients would not be calling back. When recruiting focus more on a candidate’s personality rather than experience. You can teach skills but not personality.

10. Customer is Right, Preserve their Egos

This is the underlying rule for all great businesses. A patient comes to you to want to feel better, and that’s exactly the kind of experience he should walk away with. Avoid the need to correct them, regardless of how badly you want to. They should be walking out that door with their egos preserved, that is very important for them and extremely crucial for attracting repeat bookings for your practice.

11. Accept Your Mistakes

Mistakes will happen. You need to accept that. As humans, we are wired to be defensive. Fear of having unhappy patients can be debilitating.  And that fear in itself makes us defensive and unwilling to accept our mistakes. Just saying ‘I am sorry you are in pain’ will help make patients feel better.

12. Be Kind

The success of your business does not just depend on how good of a dentist you are but how good you are with your patients. The most successful dentists aren’t those that went to the most lauded dental schools or the ones with most experience; they are the ones who know how to treat their patients well. Be kind to them, ask them if they have any concerns or confusion that they’d like to speak to you about.

13. Follow Up With a Call. Your Job Isn’t Done Yet

A little follow up call wouldn’t take much time, but it would go a long way in terms of retention and referrals. Personally following up with patients going through major treatments or parents of younger patients, is great for relationship building .  

14. Spend On your Existing Patients

If you have been reading my work, or listening to my podcasts, you’d know how strongly I feel about the retention of existing patients. Rather than spending thousands of dollars and endless time and energy chasing new patients, you should invest in looking after the patients you have. If only you’d spend a fraction of that time and effort on your current customers, they’d do all the marketing for you. Value your existing patients and let them bring in more business.

15. Do Not Ignore After Care Support

Okay this might sound like a moot point, but it’s surprising that most practices don’t understand   the value of aftercare support. An unhappy patient can end up a great advocate for your practice. Listen to complaint and fix the issues as quickly and kindly as you can.

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 know how to be your own dental assistant? Can you handle all the jobs that most of your staff members do? What if your receptionist takes a day off, would you be able to pick up the phone and let the person on the line know about your charges for getting a crown fixed or removing a decayed tooth?
Now, let’s lets flip the coin. Would you let any of your reception team speak to a potential patient to sell them a complex treatment plan? These might sound trivial questions. But if you don’t have definite answers for these then that is a great loophole in your practice right there!
Control is good, it enables you to conduct your business just the way you want it, but sometimes, giving up control might offer you greater strength and room to scale. And that’s what I have decided to discuss today. The small things that lead to powerful positive changes in the way you do business and potentially grow.

Importance of Culture

Culture is one important aspect of business that is often ignored. It is something that is usually considered unnecessary or inapplicable for startups or small businesses. The common belief is that it takes a team of say 25 employees or above to develop a healthy culture. I, and most successful game-changers in business are of the opinion that culture is as important for a team of five or ten people as it is for a bigger corporation.

It is something that needs to be incorporated at the foundation. But how do you do it? How do you introduce a culture in your business? There are two ways – internally and externally.

Externally, businesses need to have a purpose; it is how they deal with the stakeholders or the external people. But, more importantly, it is something that everyone from the CEO to the cleaner  can buy into. Internally it is the culture between the employees; their values and purpose statements.  It is how the team relates to things like ethics. These need to be easy to remember and understand. Again, it must be something that everyone on the team, from CEO to the janitor can buy into.

Internal values really enable staff members from different teams to bond together and create a feeling of belonging and unity; something that is essential to boost their sense of positivity and enthusiasm in the company.

Giving Up Control

This is a tough one, something that not a lot of business owners are willing to, or are comfortable doing. It is not easy to be in a position of power and yet accept that you know less than someone working under you, even if they have five times more experience than you do. Know that doing so is not a sign of weakness, but rather a sign of humanity and smart business practice. Also, admitting that you don’t know something will make the other person more willing to help you. So by giving up control, you actually strengthen your position further. For instance, if you are doing a task that generates $10 an hour revenue while you can be doing a task that can generate $500 an hour revenue. In this case, wouldn’t it be better that you give up control of those $10 an hour tasks and let someone more suitable take care of them while you take care of the more productive tasks in that time?

Scaling

Scaling means to grow in a proportional and profitable manner. Scaling is key to great business. But it can be tricky to find the balance between growing and making profits. For instance, if you need to hire two more employees to handle three more patients, then there isn’t a lot of monetary growth, because you are spending almost as much as you are earning. In order to make greater profits, you need to make sure that you are growing without increasing the costs so much.

Do the Job You Want to Get Done

This is essential for any business. It is a strategy most successful businesses apply. You should be able and willing to do the job you want your employees to do.

Market Wisely

Marketing is the art of building trust with a potential customer that makes them walk in through the door and make a sale. Marketing correctly and wisely is essential. The most expensive marketing strategies are not always the best. What works for one business might be ineffective for another. For instance, Pinterest is a great social media platform for marketing products and services with visual appeal like event management, fashion, interiors etc. However, the same platform may not be as effective for services like plumbing and dry cleaning.

Also try to think outside the box. A small white paper animation of your product or services or an educational service message via Facebook or Instagram may turn out to be informative and click-worthy, leading to more leads for your business.

Newsletters are another great platform for marketing if done correctly. The best newsletters are the ones that add value for patients. It doesn’t have to be written by you. Worthy content comes from many places. It doesn’t have to be all about your dental practice.  Let them know something they didn’t know already, offer help and suggestions and then close it with a call-to-action. Call to actions guide potential customers as to where to click next or where to go next with all that new found information.

Look for ways to give up control over every aspect of your business and invite other ideas and team input. This will free up your time and head space, give responsibility to others and open up room in your plans for scaling.

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

How do you make your business decisions? How do you decide what further assets you need to purchase, how much to pay your employees, how to manage your cash flow, and most importantly whether you are just a self-employed dentist or running a successful business? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, this will help you.
Data is a serious business; it can help you understand whether your business has the potential of becoming a successful venture even before you get started. And when you do delve into a business, data driven decisions ensure success and better management. A dental practice is no different. We talk about evidence based dentistry, but we also need to speak about evidence based business.

The Two Types of Metrics

There are basically two types of metrics. The first is the commonly known Key Performance Indicator (KPI), this calculates a business’s performance and how effectively a business is able to achieve its goals . This metric is calculated after the performance or fact. It is a result of how well a business is doing.

On the other hand is the Critical Driver (CD), it is calculated based on the cause that leads to the results. So, though both calculate the effectiveness of a business in achieving its goals, the difference is that CD is calculated before a performance or fact and KPI is calculated afterwards. We will be doing an in-depth analysis of both in running a successful dental practice.

Understanding Your Financial Numbers

Understanding your financial numbers is critical for success.

You must understand the financial performance of your practice. Following are a few numbers and ratios that you really need to keep a close eye on:

Revenue to Assets Ratio

Also known as the asset turnover ratio, it is an important number for measuring the effectiveness of a business. This ratio is calculated by dividing the revenue by assets. For example, calculating the revenue per chair; doing so would help us better understand how well a chair, or any asset of the business for that matter, is performing. Doing so will help you better understand if you are getting the most out of that particular asset. It also helps measure the usefulness or effectiveness of an asset over time.

Let’s say, you upgrade your dental chair, but you still have the previous one that you use for training purposes. So you’d still be using the old chair, but its ratio for effectiveness wouldn’t be the same. Because you aren’t getting the same returns from it that you were when it was being used for treating patients.

Revenue per Employee

This is another important number; a bit unkind or direct, but important. You need to know how effective your staff members are and if you are generating the right amount of revenue from them. Are you over or under staffed? Do your employees have way too much burden to effectively do their job, or too little responsibilities to justify their pay cheque?

Let’s say you hire an embroiderer for a $50 an hour. If you are only giving him, say a bodice, worth $25 to embroider in an hour, then you aren’t able to generate a justifiable revenue from him. Revenue per hour is a key metric for every business and you need to assess yours.

Your staff is an asset of the business and you need to make sure that you are getting the financial return on the wages bill. You not only need to calculate your revenue per employee for present times, but rather look at it like an organizational structure in order to have a better understanding of what decisions you need to make to help your business grow.

Maintaining a Dashboard

The best way to effectively track the performance of your business is to maintain a dashboard. I review my dashboard on a daily basis. It helps us know whether we are moving in the right direction; and in case we aren’t, then what are the factors that are hindering the performance.

Active Patient Numbers

You need to keep track of your active patient numbers and how they are changing over time. Is your patient base growing or lessening? Say the number of your active patients is 5,000 on the 1^st of January, and by the end of June, it is 5,200. Now let’s assume you attracted 2000 new patients in the same period, but only have 200 active patients, then your net growth is pretty slow in comparison. So once you have these numbers, you can then assess what happened to the other 1800 patients that you had through your practice?

Without these numbers, you’d just be satisfied with the 200 that came to your practice, or even if you weren’t satisfied, you wouldn’t know what to compare it to or further evaluate what were the causes behind the rest of them not coming back through those doors.

Assessing Your Marketing Strategies

Marketing strategies are evolving over time. Digital marketing has really turned out to be a game changer. But digital marketing is a very broad horizon; you need to further evaluate which marketing platforms are most effective. How many of your patients are coming from the internet? Whether it’s Google, Pay per click, Facebook ads or just organically?

Understanding this number would further help you determine if you are getting a viable return on your investment. Is the money spent on marketing really generating any returns? There is no right number as to how much you should be spending on marketing, what’s more important is to know is which marketing strategies are really working.

The Recall Success Rate

Understanding how to measure the recall success rate is critical. You can do that through your practice management software, but it’s more important to understand what’s happening at various points in your recall system because it is the recurring profit model of your practice. It’s what gets people back to you.

Let’s say your patients are coming through word of mouth referrals, and you are not utilizing the recall system, then not only are you losing potential patients, but also blocking the ability to generate new ones.

Avoid Incomplete Treatment

This is another leak that you need to fix right away. What’s the dollar value of outstanding treatment? What’s the number of treatment plans sitting on your system that have not yet been converted, or the patients are yet to proceed with? And how do we follow that up?

Tracking Your Record Releases

Have you lost patients? Where did those patients go? Why did they leave? There would be patients who would leave without submitting a records release. You need to assess record release requests. And once you have a records release, try to chat to your patient to get a better understanding of why they are leaving. Exit conversations are a great opportunity for either winning them back or taking measures to prevent more patients from following suit.

Case Acceptance or Sales

Another important metric to keep track of is case acceptance. This measures the ability of patients to accept a treatment that is being presented to them. This number is higher for existing patients compared to new ones; because you already have a stronger relationship with them.

The New Patient Value

The new patient value is calculated by the amount of treatment accepted on a per patient basis for a given period of time. Similarly, new patient potential can be calculated by assessing the amount of treatment diagnosed per patient across the same period of time.

Units of Treatment

This is calculated by checking the number of units of treatment presented per day per practitioner. If you present enough treatment, ethically of course, you’ll get sufficient throughput of patients. And the best way to do this is to diagnose comprehensively.

Effective Hourly Rate

The effective hourly rate is the free cash flow divided by the number of hours worked in or on the business by the business owner. And this rate is key because it calculates the ability to generate revenue and manage other important sections like cash flow, expenses, accounts receivables, accounts payables and inventory.

So based on this, if you are working a lot of hours, you might have a reasonably high free cash flow, but if you are working way too many hours then your effective hourly rate is going to be low. However, if you have leverage in your practice, then the effective hourly rate is going to be higher. This is a key metric for business owners wanting to grow their business.

The Final Word

So there you have it; all the important metrics that can turn your self-employment situation into a profit generating business. These metrics will act as guardrails and navigation points to help you sail through the journey of growing your business.

These metrics are key, especially if your goal is to see your practice grow as a business. Being a great dentist might get people walking in the door, but in order to make sure that they keep walking in, refer you ahead and get complete diagnosis and treatment, you need to learn how to maintain and track data.  

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