Blog - Page 30 of 55 - Dr Jesse Green

In this world, there are two currencies: money and time.

Money can grow near infinitely. Time, on the other hand, is the only resource that isn’t renewable. It cannot be replenished. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

The purpose of this blog is to create a business and a life you love!

But often, the life piece of the equation gets lost because we become consumed with delivery, or sales, or profits.

In fact, the $64 million question I hear all the time is, “How do I know when to change gears? I’m stuck in delivery. I’m afraid that if I’m not delivering, it will all fall apart. How do I get off this treadmill to create more time?”

Even though many business owners can see the goal of creating more free time as doable, the irony is often that we invest more time – we grind even harder – to create a successful business. So many entrepreneurs try to scale their business through more effort and time on the tools. The problem is that eventually, you will plateau. A person can only work so hard. You will hit a level where you can’t work any harder. You will likely begin to feel burnt out… And the business will slow down.

If we’re staying stuck in this cycle of working harder/plateau, then nothing will change. This is a pattern we’ll maintain to the end of our lives. And if we’re not happy today, we won’t be happy then, either.

The key is to work toward a business that prioritizes not just profit, but time.

The Entrepreneur’s Hierarchy of Needs

There is a hierarchy of needs for entrepreneurs and businesses much like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

It looks just like a pyramid. The foundational level is sales. Every business needs sales. Sales bring in the cash and cash is like oxygen to a business.

The next level in the pyramid is profitability – the nourishment. The food and water. This is a step up from sales.

Once a business has a consistent flow of profitability, the next level of the pyramid becomes time. Time equals freedom. Time gives entrepreneurs the ability to do what they want, when they want, in both their business and in creating a lifestyle.

If you don’t have the first two stories of the pyramid in place, you will struggle to create the time you wish.

However, if you’ve plateaued at sustained profitability and you’re wondering how to create more space and time around yourself to enjoy your accomplishments, here are a few suggestions to consider.

Make small changes that will stick.

When I’m excited about a new idea, I’m guilty of throwing myself into it head over heels. Often, this isn’t the right approach. Making big changes in your life – whether that’s personally or professionally – can often be best accomplished when they’re done in small steps.

Just like overhauling your diet and exercise regime on January 1st to meet your resolution to ‘get healthy’ is quickly abandoned for being ‘too hard’, the same can happen when you decide to make changes to your business.

Massive changes are bound to fail because they’re too abrupt. Ease into these changes and see what works for you and what doesn’t. Each business is different. Instead of hiring 5 new employees to help you free up time, try hiring one person to take on a very segmented piece of your business. Perhaps you hire someone to handle your insurance claims.

Once that is working, consider finding another piece of your business you can hand off and go from there.

“Trying to do it all in one fell swoop leads to that Oh-My-God moment. How do I do this? And then you risk retreating back to what you know.” —Dr. Jesse Green

Recognize that you’re not great at everything.

As entrepreneurs, we often have to wear all the hats. From dentist to receptionist to accountant to marketer, it tends to fall on our shoulders. Just because we can do everything, doesn’t mean we should.

I’ve found in my time that most people have something that they’re innately good at. This is true for business owners and entrepreneurs and dentists alike. The key is to focus your effort on what you’re best at.

If you’re a rainmaker and you love networking and bringing in new business, maybe it’s time to consider finding clinicians that love treating patients. If you love treating patients, maybe it’s time to find someone who can be the smiling face of the business while you focus on technical and medical excellence.

This can be a great way to target your small changes. What tasks are worth moving to someone else’s plate?

Learn the right way to delegate.

At the end of the day, the only way you will create more time for yourself as a business owner is to delegate. However, the vast majority of businesses will likely never surpass hiring two or three employees. This is often because the business owner hasn’t learned how to successfully delegate tasks.

It starts with getting over our own ego. When our business is our brainchild, it can be hard to let go of the feeling that we know best. We have this idea that we know our own business so intimately, that no one else can match our skillsets. But when we believe something is true, we make that belief a reality. Subconsciously, we might not be making the space for our employees to succeed.

And when they inevitably fail, it gives us the excuse to take back the reins. And then we’re back where we started wearing all the hats and with no time.

But it’s important to realize that mistakes are learning opportunities. As entrepreneurs, we’ve likely made our own fair share of them in our time. Our employees will too. And that’s okay.

In fact, it’s expected.

Giving our employees the space to fail empowers them to own their own work – which ultimately frees up time from you. Now you have a piece of the business you no longer have to worry about.

Final Words…

Everyone starts a business with one singular goal in mind: freedom. Whether that’s financial freedom or the freedom of time, creating a self-sustaining business is a worthwhile pursuit.

Let your business become the key to your freedom.

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

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

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

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 “Evou’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

In this episode, I’m speaking to Mike Michalowicz, author of many books including Profit First about how to design a business that runs itself.

By his 35th birthday Mike had founded and sold two multi-million dollar companies. Confident that he had the formula to success, he became an angel investor… and proceeded to lose his entire fortune.

Then he started all over again, driven to find better ways to grow healthy, strong companies. Among other innovative strategies, Mike created the “Profit First Formula”, a way for businesses to ensure profitability from their very next deposit forward.

Mike is now running his third million dollar venture, is a former small business columnist for The Wall Street Journal; is the former MSNBC business make-over expert; is a popular keynote speaker on innovative entrepreneurial topics; and is the author of Profit First, Surge, The Pumpkin Plan and The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, which BusinessWeek deemed “the entrepreneur’s cult classic.”

In this episode, we discuss:

1:49 Understanding the hierarchy of needs for you as a practice owner
3:12 Tips for how to get off the delivery treadmill and make time to delegate in your business
3:53 Why you shouldn’t believe the myth of switching from working in to on the business
7:07 Tips for making that leap from working in your business to on your business
9:42 Why putting more effort and more time into your business won’t continue to grow your business
10:43 Understanding that it’s the delegation of outcomes not tasks that achieve growth
13:50 Ways you can empower your team
15:23 Tips for creating a balanced team
18:33 Why you need to focus on your strengths as a business owner
20:05 How to focus on what you’re good at without the wheels falling off your business
22:02 How to delegate slowly, but effectively for optimal scaling.
24:17 How to implement Profit First principles in a structured way
And more!

Find out more about Mike Michalowicz

Business Author & Speaker

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The only way we can become the best versions of ourselves – whether that’s dentist, businessperson, husband, wife, friend – is to take care of our physical and mental health. Unfortunately, as a whole, dentists are prone to depression and have a suicide rate twice as high as the general population. That means it’s even more important for us to take some time to reset and recharge so we can continue to be the best dentists and people we can.

As high achieving individuals, it can only be expected that we will have to deal with setbacks in our careers. Learning how to cope with change is extremely important for our wellbeing. Often, opportunities can come to you dressed up as problems, so learning how to turn stumbling blocks into stepping stones can help propel you forward in your career and in life.

You’re not alone.

When something goes wrong, it can be easy to get caught up in the feeling of, “Oh, my goodness, my world has ended.” It feels crushing. Maybe nothing will ever be the same. At that moment, it’s hard to see through the clouds to where the sun might shine again.

You have a wide support system beneath you. Whether that’s your family, friends, or professional mentors, there are people you can turn to for support and advice when you are struggling or when you are ready to take a chance.

Often, we feel we need to live out this narrative that we’re put together and can handle everything ourselves. But everyone needs help at some point. Even your professional mentors and idols had setbacks. While we might wish it, no one’s career trajectory is straight up. There are dips and plateaus through our careers and life in general.

Create the time to stay healthy.

Our mind and bodies are the vehicles that help us meet our goals. When I feel like my head is barely bobbing above water, I also tend to feel like I just need to keep pushing. I need to work more and more to stay on top of it. But in reality – that’s a fast road to burnout.

We can only put out what we put in – meaning we need time away from work to rest and recharge. Whether that’s taking a walk in the mornings, making time for your lunch smoothie, or taking a 10-minute meditation break, creating breaks in your day to prioritise your health doesn’t have to mean a three-hour commitment to head to the gym every day.

You will mentally feel better when you physically feel better.

Create a paradigm change.

Sometimes our struggles can come from a false story we tell ourselves. Paradigms are a pattern of behaviour or our underlying assumptions. Sometimes to turn a stumbling block into a stepping stone, we have to change our patterns of behaviour. If something isn’t working, it’s time for a paradigm shift.

This might be your belief that you need to work harder to keep your head above water (like I was talking about earlier) when in reality, you need to shift your paradigm to understand you can shift some of your responsibilities to people who are better equipped to handle them. As we’re always picking on accounting on this blog, if you are struggling to get your books in shape – maybe it’s because it shouldn’t be your job, but your bookkeeper’s.

It’s even more true these days because we recharge our mobile phone, we recharge our laptops, but what do we do to recharge ourselves?

— Catherine DeVrye

It’s the whole oxygen mask thing. If oxygen masks deploy on an airplane, you are instructed to put yours on first before you help others. This is a great metaphor for life. You need to ensure that your needs are met before you can stretch yourself thin to meet others’ expectations. Looking after our bodies. Trying to be our best selves. You can’t help others unless you’re in a good shape yourself.

Only worry about what you can change.

Sometimes the most freeing thing of all is to recognise that as much as we might want to, we can’t control everything in our lives. Don’t waste your energy worrying about the things you can’t change. Your power lies in what you can change. Too often we imagine things are much worse than they are or than they might be. This kind of thinking can easily overwhelm us even before something has gone wrong!

Keeping in perspective that you can’t entirely control the future can often help you let go of added stress and enjoy the process.

Resilience and perseverance are qualities which go hand in hand to make a real difference. —Dr. Jesse Green

Final Words…

Nearly every successful person has had more failures than successes. Successful people are those who are willing to try more often, fail more often, and pick themselves up time and time again. Successful people aren’t necessarily the smartest or the most innately talented. They are the most resilient and the most persistent.

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

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

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

Attend a Practice Max Intensive live event

In this episode, I’m chatting to Catherine DeVrye about how to cultivate resilience. In order to have a business and a life you love, you need to excel at cultivating resilience so you can handle whatever life and business throw your way.

Catherine DeVrye was an IBM executive in Australia, Tokyo and Hong Kong with roles in sales, marketing, HR, communication.

The best-selling author of 8 books, translated into over a dozen languages Catherine is an inspirational communicator with proven hands-on international experience in the private and public sectors as both a corporate businesswoman and small business owner. She was named in 2016 by the Financial Review as one of the Top 100 Women of Influence in Australia.

In this episode, we discuss:

11:20: Tips for moving through adversity
13:00: Why resilience is like a muscle and how to exercise it
15:51: The importance of taking care of ourselves
20:03: How to maintain an even keel when the world around you is changing
21:39: Triaging your problems to avoid overwhelm
24:02: The art of focusing on what you can change and being at peace with what you can’t change
26:17: How to spot an opportunity
28:57: Lessons from “successful” people
32:31: Tips for cultivating resilience and perseverance

Find out more about Catherine DeVrye

https://www.greatmotivation.com

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Psychology is the study of behaviour. It helps inform us of why we make the choices we make. When we have a little insight into psychology, it can help us set up situations that are beneficial to our patients and to our bottom line. In short, it can be a game changer.

As clinicians, we can all appreciate hard science. And these tips gleaned from psychology research are science. They’re tested, reproducible, and learnable. Even though it taps into the reasons why we make the choices we make, psychology often isn’t intuitive.

Taking the time to learn the reasons ‘why’ behind choices your patients make can help you become a better dentist and a better businessperson. These are three easy tips you can implement right now that can have a huge impact on your practice.

Technique 1: Reduce cancellations by getting the right commitment.

Asking for a follow-up appointment or next checkup is great. But if you’re getting missed and canceled appointments you need to polish up the commitment from your patients.

Creating a low cancellation percentage begins with getting the right kind of commitment from your patients. This commitment has three parts to it:

The commitment should be voluntary and not feel directed by you.
The commitment should be active.
The commitment is public.

So whenever you want to ask for a commitment from a patient offer them two options. Would you like this procedure or that one? Would you like to come in next week or the week after? If you only present one option, then your patient cannot voluntarily commit to it and will feel like it’s your decision and not their own. They won’t own it!

Next, you want to encourage your patient to actively commit. This means putting it on their calendar, on their phone, or at least say it out loud to you. Let them write it on a card in reception instead of you writing it down for them.

The more people who know about a commitment, the less likely a person is to cancel it. When you’re running a marathon, this might mean telling all your friends and family. In a dental practice, it usually means saying something like, “Will you please call me if you need to cancel or reschedule?” Once they say yes, you can add, “Great. I’ll let the member of my team know that you will call if you’re not going to make it.”

Finally, try asking at the end of the conversation, “Oh, I am sorry, what was the date of your appointment? I want to make sure we’re on the same page.” What does it tell you if they cannot repeat back the date and time of their appointment? They haven’t committed. It’s better to know now than on the morning of the appointment.

“You are just putting them in a box that they’ve now…And now they’re gonna act in accordance with what box they’ve put themselves in.” —Dr. Jesse Green.

Technique 2: Create active patients with the right mindset.

Helping patients attain an active mindset in regard to their dental health will help the process of ongoing dental care smoother. Creating a mindset for your patients to say ‘yes!’ to treatment is something you can do before they even see you.

Proactive patients are those that don’t want their dental health to deteriorate. They want preventive care rather than extensive treatment later on.

To create patients with this mindset, you can create a new question on your patient intake form.

“When it comes to your oral health, do you prefer to be proactive or reactive?”

Once again, you are giving your patient a choice so they can freely commit to being proactive. Do you want to be proactive means they want to avoid pain, discomfort, and more money down the road. If a patient prefers to be reactive, it means they are saying the prefer to let the wheels fall off the bus even if it costs them more time, discomfort, and money later.

Technique 3: Use contrasts to soften the blow of expensive dental procedures.

People will spend money on the things they want. Most people will only spend money on the things they need when it’s a crisis situation. The key to selling more expensive dental procedures is to turn your services into a want. You can do this by using contrasts.

Let’s use a crown as an example. If you don’t present a contrasting situation, your patient will create them the distinction without your help. If you tell them, “A crown is $1,200,” they will start thinking, “Geez, my mortgage isn’t that much. My car payment isn’t that much. I can’t afford this.” They will mentally shut down and the conversation is over before it really begins.

Start the conversation with your patient by saying, “Here’s your decay. If we do nothing and it gets any deeper than this, it’s going to get to the nerve. It’s probably going to cause an infection and it’s going to cause pain. It might take a couple of visits to fix. You will have to go to a specialist. So, if we wait, we’re looking at a $3,600 or more bills.” Immediately they will start the, “Geez, I can’t afford that” thought process.

But that is perfect because now is your chance to offer them a second option (remember: always offer two options so your patients are freely committing).

“The good news is that we’re not there yet. Option two is if we get to it today, you just need a crown. That’s only $1,200. And after insurance, it’s only $800 and we can do that in two payments so you only need to do $400 this month and $400 next month.”

With this approach, you’re stair-stepping down from the initial cost of $3,600 to just $400. This is also known as down selling. It can be incredibly effective to motivate patients to prioritise their dental care now before it becomes a bigger – and much more expensive – oral health problem in the future.

Final Words…

Psychology is a powerful tool. Simply rephrasing the way you ask a question can assist you with developing a patient’s understanding of their treatment choices and making commitments to achieve their best oral health outcomes.

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

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

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

Attend a Practice Max Intensive live event

In this episode, I chat to Dr Chris Phelps a dental practice owner and an expert in the Science of Influence and Ethical Persuasion. We discuss ethically marketing your practice, decreasing no shows and getting a higher case acceptance rate for your practice.

An entrepreneur and Amazon bestselling author, Chris is also a general dentist practicing in Charlotte NC. In his first seven years of practice Chris grew his practice revenue by a factor of 10X: growing from one practice location to four. After selling two of those offices for profit, Chris focused on maximizing the capacity of his remaining two practices and enjoyed two consecutive years of $1,000,000 revenue growth in each of the two practices, effectively collecting with two offices what he had collected when he owned four.

The Call Tracker ROI program he developed played a major role: decreasing missed calls by 90% and increasing team conversions of new patient appointments over the telephone from 24% to over 86% which helped increase his new patient numbers from 60/month to averaging over 300/month; all the while decreasing his marketing expenses by 74%.

In 2016 he launched Golden Goose Scheduling to help practices answer and schedule more new patient calls so they didn’t have to pay more in marketing money to get them.

Dr. Phelps is also an expert in the Science of Influence and Ethical Persuasion. He has studied under the authority in this field, Dr. Robert Cialdini, and is the only dentist in the world to be named a Cialdini Method Certified Trainer (CMCT). Chris uses Cialdini’s Principles to ethically steer patients to more referrals, decreased no shows and higher case acceptance.

In this episode, we discuss:

04:45: How Chris began his early career as a dental practice owner
06:46: How he grew multiple practices
12:34: How Chris took the two worst performing practices made them high performing
23:14: How to ensure patient commitment to appointments and decrease no-show rates
27:39: How to use the contrast and compare method to increase patient case acceptance rates.
28:56: The art of turning someone’s dental need into a dental want
32:15: Why walking people down the price stairs is more effective than up
38:27: One handy trick you can use on your intake forms to encourage a proactive patient mindset
41:45: Are membership models the future of dental practices?

Find out more about Dr Chris Phelps

https://www.strategicpracticeaustralia.com/

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Everyone gets the same 24 hours in a day.

While it’s true on the face of it, a little deeper down, everyone has different responsibilities that whittle that time down. If you ever look around at everyone else and wonder how they get it all done or if it feels like you’re struggling to finish the bare minimum, it might be time to take stock of how you are spending your time.

As business owners, it can be especially easy to believe that we need to be personally involved in every aspect of our business from customer service to finances. However, this can quickly lead to burnout if we’re not careful.

While some people might think the idea of ‘self-care’ is a little indulgent, it’s important for us to ensure that we are being thoughtful about how we spend our time. Is what we’re doing increasing our happiness and energy? Or depleting it?

Burnout can be a real problem for professionals and this is especially true in the dental world.

Running on the treadmill of burnout.

When you are nearing the verge of burning out, it can begin to feel like you have to be working 24/7. You start to sleep less. Sleeping less might actually begin to feel like the solution to your problems. You might get snappy with family and coworkers. You stop doing hobbies that make you happy. You drop habits that give you energy like exercising and making meals at home.

Once you get to this point, you’re teetering on the precipice of burnout.

We can start to believe that others are working harder than we are and that’s why they’ve succeeded. If you peel back the curtain, anybody successful that you know isn’t doing it all themselves. What we see on TV and social media isn’t the full picture. Successful people have a team behind the scenes. They delegate a lot. They have people that support their weak areas or support them by completing the tasks they hate to do, or aren’t very good at.

Unfortunately, pushing yourself to work harder and longer isn’t the key to winning this battle. Really, the opposite is true. You need time away from work to refuel and re-energise yourself. It means getting a good night’s sleep. It means eating healthy food that fuels your body and mind three times a day.

Procrastination comes hand in hand with burnout.

Procrastination is not limited to burnout, but burnout usually comes with an element of procrastination.

When I was feeling burnt out, I procrastinated. I put off doing things that needed doing because I was overwhelmed and already working very long days.

But procrastination speaks to an emotional piece of time management. It’s not just about being as effective as possible, but noticing why you are procrastinating. Procrastination can be freezing or task avoidance.

Are you feeling overwhelmed?

The first step is to recognise what is overwhelming you. Figure out what resonates with you. Figure out what resonates with the emotion behind what’s getting in your way.

These emotions get in the way of us doing things that we know we can do. When we are overwhelmed, it leads to procrastination. It’s this feeling of, “I don’t know where to start. There’s too much to do. I just can’t think straight.” It’s important to notice when this happens. Are you writing the same task down in your schedule over and over again? Is there something you were supposed to do a week ago that’s still not done?

Then ask yourself why?

Be clear about it. Why are you putting it off? If you find it boring or tedious, it might be a good task to hand off to somebody else.

“If you don’t create space for those roles then the little, itty-bitty tasks that you don’t enjoy are just going to creep up like ivy, getting into all corners of your life like weed.”– Dr. Jesse Green.

Make space for what’s important by pruning what’s not.

We’ve all had tasks that we’ve had to drag ourselves to do. Sometimes it can feel hard to delegate it to somebody because, “Oh my gosh, they’re going to see this messy part of my life.”

Well, guess what?

When you find the right person for your task, it’s what they love to do. So let them do it. Let them be in their zone of genius so that you can be in yours.

Getting clear on what you can hand off can help steer you away from reaching a place of burnout and exhaustion. Think about what you can hand off. Think about what you procrastinate on. Those tasks tend to be good options for delegation. If you hate doing the bookkeeping, get someone else to do it. Handing off these tasks, as important as they may be, to someone you can trust frees up your time to pursue what’s important to you.

As I said above, you only have 24 hours. Choose how you want to spend that time. If it’s not bookkeeping, then there’s no shame in that. Create space for the things and roles that matter to you.

Final Words…

Break the rules. Do what works for you.

Everyone is different. Some people will thrive on the business aspects of a dental practice. Others will always be clinicians at heart and will love the art of dentistry and not so much the art of balancing numbers.

But the great thing about being an entrepreneur and running your own practice is that you can create your own rules. Don’t stop yourself from doing something that works for your because “that’s not the way it’s done”. The only right way is the way that works best for you.

Building a solid foundation around you with the right team to take on the tasks that are weak points for you is a great way to head off exhaustion and burnout.

You can step off the treadmill and feel truly productive and inspired.

I’m joined by Dr Sarah Reiff-Hekking to share with you proven tips for improving your productivity and focus so you can become a high performance business owner.

Dr Sarah Reiff-Hekking is a Speaker, Coach, and Clinical Psychologist with over 20 years’ experience helping people create and achieve their goals. She’s developed unique systems to help her clients get a grip on their time and step up to the next level in their life or business.

Dr Reiff-Hekking received her Ph. D. from SUNY at Stony Brook in 1997, and Coach Certification from MentorCoach. She was on the facility at UMass Medical School for 6 years. She founded True Focus Coaching in 2005 and, as a business-savvy entrepreneur, she grew her successful coaching practice during a down economy.

In this episode, we discuss:

05:19: What drives entrepreneurs
06:21: What stops people from going from good to great
08:44: How to filter what you should and shouldn’t be doing
12:57: The dangers of modelling other people’s lives
16:23: Whether you be getting up at 5am
19:49: How to transition from burnout to a healthy blend
21.24: The myth of how working harder and longer will make you more productive
25:28: Tips for overcoming procrastination
32:17: Tips for dealing with failures and set backs
38:17: How to set up your physical environment for success
And more

Find out more about Dr Sarah Reiff-Hekking

www.truefocuscoaching.com

www.truefocustips.com

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A significant part of my business vision for the Savvy Dentist is to help dentists create intergenerational wealth for their family.

As dentists, we are often very driven and ambitious. We went into the career because we wanted a stable, high earning job that allows us to help people. However, a high salary does not necessarily translate into a stable retirement without a little bit of forethought.

Investing the wealth we generate now can ensure that we have pillars of wealth creation that will support our families into the future.

If not just wealth creation, but wealth management, that interest you, then investing a part of your earnings that quietly creates value in the background is a great start. For dentists, we have a relatively short time that we are likely to be earning our highest income – that tenuous period between opening our own practice and retiring. Maybe you even wish to retire early or work part-time. This is all possible with savvy investing particularly in the realm of property investments.

Investing in property is unique compared to other asset classes that are more ephemeral like stocks and bonds. But it’s a great option for anyone because property investing can also offer a higher return on your investment for less work. It also offers you higher control and creativity – that space where your investments can really pay off.

We’ll be looking at these three steps through the lens of property investments.

Understand your cash flow.

Analysing your money habits is step one. And this isn’t just about your business’s cash flow, but your own personal cash. What are you earning and spending? What structures do you have in place so that you’re setting aside a percentage for investing?

Now, this doesn’t mean you have to make incredibly detailed budgets or stress over pennies. This is a high-level look at your finances – where the money comes in and where it goes. Once you know the amount of surplus income you can invest, it’s about looking at small tweaks to optimise how you use it.

When you are first starting out with this, it can be easy to want to go all in. But you likely already have asset classes you’ve decided to invest in. There’s no need to divest everything and start over. It becomes a question of strategy. How should you dip your toe in? How do you want to deploy your capital over the next three or five years?

You can ask yourself questions like: how do I create a portfolio that generates wealth in the background? How do minimise the amount of time I need to spend managing it? These are the questions that will lead you to investments that offer a high return on your investment without a high time commitment.

Create a game plan before diving in.

Property is an expensive asset – especially in Australia where homes in Sydney regularly go for over a million dollars. If you were buying a business valued at a million dollars, you would take time to do your due diligence. You would create a business plan before committing those kinds of funds.

Property investment should be the same way.

This is a great time to evaluate your risk tolerance. How do you feel about losing money? How do you relate to risk? More and more people are investing in property today, but fewer are seeing good outcomes. It’s often because there’s so much advice out in the world and on the Internet about what you should and shouldn’t do. But you can take the time to look across all of the strategies available in the market instead of just picking the first one you see where someone was successful.

The property market is always changing – strategies that worked 10 or 15 years ago may not today. Evaluate which strategies excite you and you see a value in. Create a business case for yourself with each property you consider investing in.

Look where others are not.

The final tip is to look at what everyone else is doing – and then to look somewhere else. That’s where the real opportunities lie. A lot of Australians want to be investors. It’s a crowded space. If you can find pockets of opportunity where you don’t have to compete with dozens of others, you are much more likely to find investments that really pay off.

This is called blending strategies. You are primarily looking for loopholes or opportunities that have been overlooked by others. For example, in regard to property investment, when the United States’ housing bubble popped in the aughts, U.S. real estate suddenly it became a great market for Australian investors. There were some significant opportunities to purchase assets at cents on the dollar without losing a lucrative cash flow stream.

The question, “What else?” can serve you well with this. “So interest rates go up. What else? They’re looking at changing tax laws. What else?” Fostering a curious mindset will help you find those opportunities that will return results higher than the norm.

Final Words…

These steps are high-level thoughts you should be considering when deciding to invest your money, in property or elsewhere. Clarity about the future and how much your desired lifestyle is going to cost are important details to factor in. That might be defining what freedom looks like to you. What do you want your wealth to provide to you? And on what timeline?

Define what you want and use that to drive your decisions on investing. In a nutshell, all plans are reverse engineered to take you from where you are now to where you would like to be.

In this episode, I’m joined by Salena Kulkarni to chat about property investing for dentists. Property investing is becoming more and more attractive to everyday Australians, so it is critical that you give yourself an edge over everyone else.

So many people try to kick off their property investing with little more than excitement and a general feeling that they want to create wealth.

There are many voices in the property industry trying to lure you into buying their definition of a good investment, but the truth is that until you build and understand your own personal map, you can’t distinguish the good from the bad and you could end up at the wrong destination.

Salena Kulkarni works with successful professionals who are time poor, but who want to create real wealth; that is, more money, more time and more freedom.

She is passionate about tailoring property strategies and solutions for property investors to help them achieve their goals sooner. She provides advice which takes into account their means, circumstances and risk profile and gives them a practical plan to get them to their goals.

In this episode, we discuss:

04:44: Whether anyone can learn the skills required for successful property investing
06:29: Whether it’s too late to start investing in property when you’re older in years
06:49: The four seasons of property investing
09:00: What’s so attractive about property as an asset class for investment
13:53: How to start developing your own game plan for property investing
18:37: Finding the right balance for you between investment and lifestyle
25:24: Examining and managing risk
28:00: The importance of building your financial power team
28:37: Common mistakes in property investing and how to avoid them
31:10: The importance of building your network of mentors and advisors
36:13: Why clarifying your vision is a crucial starting point

Find out more about Salena Kulkarni

Phoenix Wealth Group

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