Something I hear brought up a lot in the dental world lately is the idea of creating a “true business”. I’m all for that.

Let’s dive in…

The Three Kinds of Dental Practices

I really see three kinds of practices that come across my path. The first is a start-up practice still in its infancy. The dentist may be working there part-time and supplementing their income by working at another practice. That’s not on my radar today.

I will be talking about dentists with established practices that are making money. The biggest challenge I hear is that even if they are making money, it’s at the expense of their time. These dentists feel like the practice owns them instead of vice versa. Now it feels a whole lot like a job. The problem with this practice business model is that it’s not really a business. It’s self-employment. It’s creating a job.

For some dentists, that’s okay. Many people love their clinical work and want to continue it. For those practice owners, the key is to make sure you build a great support system around you so you can do what you love – clinical work.

What is True Business Ownership?

What I want to talk about is true business ownership. The fundamental difference between self-employment and a true business is that in a self-employment situation, it’s key person dependent. Meaning that if one person stops going to work, the whole show comes to a standstill.

The risk here is that if that one person burns out, gets sick, or gets tired and frustrated, the practice can’t reach its full potential.

True business ownership, rather than being key person dependent, is systems and team dependent. The fundamental difference is that the owner isn’t tied to the business. If the owner is away for whatever reason, the business continues to thrive.

Changing Gears Keeps the Engine from Burning Out

Imagine you’re driving from Sydney to Melbourne. You put the destination in your GPS. Then you try to drive there in second gear. You hit an upper limit. You’re going to hit a speed where the engine’s burning.

A dentist practice based on self-employment is the same way. You will hit a plateau. You’re going as fast as you can, but many practice owners will begin to burn out.

Making a gear change is switching a self-employment practice to a true business ownership. Instead of being the person that provides great care to patients day in and day out, they become the person who’s now able to build and lead a high-performance team. That’s a very different skillset to dentistry. This isn’t something that’s taught in dental school. Most people learn it through osmosis.

But there are 5 keys to making the gear change from self-employment to business owner.

Key #1: Model Over Mindset

I’m all for making sure that we’re thinking positively, associating with good people in an upward spiral, and developing ourselves. It’s a critical part of success. But – here’s the big ‘but’ – you can have the best mindset, but if you have the wrong business model, you’re enthusiastically climbing up the wrong ladder up the wrong tree.

What I mean in terms of business model is make sure you know what you’re creating from the outset. If you want a true business, work towards that from the outset. If you want to create a true business, it’s about making sure you have the infrastructure, the resources, and the team to take you there. The question you should ask yourself is, “Who do I need to help me achieve this?”

Key #2: Business Growth Never Outstrips The Growth of the Owner

Building the skillsets you need to be able to curate and lead a high-performance team is fundamental. The rate-limiting factor of business growth is always linked to the growth of the business owner so invest in yourself. Invest in your ability to lead, your ability to manage and delegate, your ability to grow a team and inspire them.

Key #3: Focus on Focus

Understand that as a business owner you only have 24 hours in a day and two hands. Use your time wisely. It is the only non-renewable resource. This goes back into the ‘who’ question from Key #1.

If you mapped out all of your tasks and categorised them, where are you spending your time? If you’re doing admin or clerical work, it can be outsourced for around $30 an hour. There is where you change gears. Take your foot off the accelerator. It’s about finding people who can deliver great care to your patients.

Key #4: Remember Business is an Intellectual Sport

Take time to think deeply and critically. Your business will require analysis. Set aside just an hour a week to ask your unasked questions. Brainstorm answers. When you are doing this, review your assumptions. We all have them, but it’s important to be aware of them.

One of my favourite exercises is to ask, “What am I not seeing? What am I missing? What could blindside me? How do I mitigate the risk?”

Key #5: Running a Business Is Not a Science

Unlike clinical dentistry is very precise. It requires a high degree of perfectionism. This is something I see applied to the business side of things incredibly frequently. However, businesses are much less precise. Running a business is like raising a family. There’s got to be room for play, a bit of chaos, and someone skinning their knee.

If this is something you struggle with, I discuss how to learn to live with perfectly imperfect in this blog post.

Final Words…

For anyone who is thinking, “I really want to make that gear shift,” these 5 key points are food for thought.

I’d encourage you to take heed because, in every journey that we’ve helped people on, these five key things have been what have separated the people who made the gear change and accelerated to a true business and those who stalled midway before retreating back.

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

  1. 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

  1. 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

 

    

When we transition from dental practitioner to dental practice owner, quite often we just create a job for ourselves. Our business ends up being key-person dependent and depends on us to keep the whole thing running.

However, that’s usually not the future we dreamed of when we bought or started our practice. We thought we’d get more freedom. More time to ourselves.

Where did we go wrong? And how do we fix it?

In this episode, I share with you the 5 key things you need to consider to transition from self-employment to true business ownership. These are things that I suggest to my clients time and time again. These 5 keys will help you finally change gears and begin a whole new journey as a true business owner.

In this episode, I discuss:

  • 2:41 The difference between true business ownership and self employment
  • 3:00 The risks of the self employment model
  • 4:02 How to change gears from self employment to true business ownership
  • 5:34 Transitioning from key-person dependent to team and systems dependent
  • 9:35 Why you need to be able to build and lead a high performance team
  • 10:38 How to find great team members
  • 11:35 How to ensure you have a structured training in place for new team members
  • 12:56 Secrets to appreciating and support your team
  • 13:57 Finding the people to outsource your low-end tasks to (asking WHO not HOW)
  • 16:30 Working out your effective hourly rate so you can use your time more wisely
  • 18:13 How to get an advantage in business with critical thinking (with guidelines on how to do it well)
  • 20:35 How to manage the messiness of business (and ditching perfectionism)
  • And more.

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We’re rounding up on the end of the financial year here in Australia, which means that businesses across the country are turning their attention to taxes. When we think about our dental practices as a vehicle for wealth creation, it’s important to ensure that you have all your ducks in a row. If you don’t have a comprehensive financial plan and an experienced advisor, you are likely paying too much in taxes and opening yourself up to future problems.

These are the most common accounting mistakes that dentists make – not only when tax time comes around, but all throughout the year.

  • You haven’t hired a bookkeeper and accountant.

There’s a great philosophy that can work in any area of business: do what you’re good at and pay others to do what they’re good at. Not only does then ensure that you maximise the time that you do have to bring the biggest benefit to your business, but you’re also ensuring that every other area is equally well managed.

Most people dread adding up long columns of numbers, balancing accounts, and the other tedium that comes with bookkeeping. Chances are, if you’re a dentist, your passion isn’t numbers. So if you’ve been staying up late to get the bookkeeping done, it’s time to put down the calculator.

  • You think bookkeepers and accountants are interchangeable.

The bookkeeper and the accountant both play a crucial role in your affairs. The bookkeeper is the details person. She tracks everything your doing. The account is the Big Ideas person who is in charge of the overall strategic direction of your business’s finances. Three big core ideas your accountant can counsel you in is tax effectiveness, risk reduction, and asset protection.

To have a comprehensive financial team in place, you’ll want to hire both a bookkeeper and an accountant.

  • Your protective structures are not in place.

When you set up a business, you’ve got to factor in the worst-case scenarios to everything you’re doing. Then set up everything around that. There needs to be a contingency plan in the event of death, divorce, or illness.

For example, quite a few businesses have two directors. You don’t need that. From an asset protection point of view, it is risky. It’s important to make sure that you have one person that effectively runs the business on paper. The other person sits back, does the work, and is considered an employee, and who is legally, on paper, not involved in running the business. That’s really important.

This matters because, for example, a lot of people potentially own their homes jointly. This puts the home at risk should the proverbial you-know-what hit the fan. Ensuring there’s a distinction between who runs the business and who owns the home and other assets is proactive risk reduction and asset protection.

  • You don’t have enough insurance.

In addition to structuring your business to minimise risk, it’s also important to have insurance for future problems. That includes life insurance, asset protection, business insurance. All the insurances. Depending on if you have an event that blindsides you, you need time to recover from that. Sometimes people don’t have time. Insurance can help offer a little breathing room because you have that safety net.

  • You don’t have the right legal protections.

Everyone should have a will, but when you’re running a business, it is especially important to ensure that the business and your family are protected. Make sure you’ve got quality wills, powers of attorney, testaments to trusts, deeds of mutual wills, or whatever else you may need.

Once you’ve set up all this paperwork, review it every few years. Situations and assets change, and it’s important to ensure those additions are captured in your will. Do it right the first time. You’ve got to get it all done and do it properly and then just go, “Right, breathe, my family’s looked after if something goes wrong here from all levels.”

  • You are leaving money on the (tax) table.

Most businesses do not claim anywhere near what they’re able to claim legally. These businesses don’t get advised on maximising legal deductions through their business year-in-year-out. Again, finding a good accountant will help ensure you are claiming everything you are legally allowed to claim.

Small businesses making less than $10 million a year, especially, have a lot of options for how to legally claim more tax deductions. This can make a big impact on your taxable income for the year.

Feeding the Golden Goose.

If you are guilty of any of these, maybe you even already knew it was something that needed to be handled, great! Today is the today.

In the short term, now is the perfect time to seek appropriate advice and the appropriate advisor so you can put whatever strategies in place before 30th of June to minimise taxes this year. Claim what you’re legally able to claim.

In the longer term, it’s time to start thinking about your situation and finding the right advice to ensure you’ve got the best asset protection, whether your assets are owned as best way they can for asset protection, whether your structure has got the most tax minimization and flexibility.

Ultimately, your business is a vehicle to generate cash. So the most important thing is to have the right structure in place for asset protection and tax minimization and efficiency and effectiveness.

Finally, have a strategy in place to create wealth long-term for you and your family. At the same time as you’re doing all that, make sure you’ve covered up on all the downside in your business. Review all your insurances, business and non-business. Make sure you’ve got the appropriate powers of attorney in place. Review your estate planning and will.

Final Words…

A good accountant is an invaluable advisor that can offer counsel, support, and advice, but she can also hold you accountable. Finding the right accountant can help you ensure your business’s finances are bulletproof, protect your family, and see your business turn a good profit year after year.

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

  1. 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

  1. 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 joined by accountant Adrian Hill to discuss his end of financial year tips for dentists who want to grow their wealth.

Adrian Hill is accountant with over 25 years experience. He is one of Australia’s leading experts in the art of protecting hard-earned assets and legally reducing tax. Adrian is also a highly sought after speaker who has presented nation-wide on Tax Minimisation, Asset Protection and SMSFs.

In 2009 Adrian was approached to write a chapter on Tax Deductions and Asset Protection for the book ‘Think and Grow Rich in Property’ and in 2012 Adrian published a chapter on Tax Minimisation in the book ‘The New Way to Make Money in Property Fast!’

In 2016 Adrian became a published author in his own right with ‘Investment Property + Time = Wealth’.

In this episode, we discuss:

  • Common mistakes individuals make with their tax affairs (and how to avoid them).
  • What areas can people improve in when running their businesses?
  • The art of structuring your business to minimise personal asset risk
  • Bookkeeping mistakes small business owners make
  • Risk mitigation strategies
  • The difference between small and large enterprises (and which one your business is)
  • EOFY tips for dental practice ones
  • Understanding Personal Service Income
  • And more

Find out more about Adrian Hill

https://www.superioraccountinggroup.com/our-founders/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrian-hill-9986a4a8/

https://www.superioraccountinggroup.com/shop/

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Any marketing efforts need a strong, well-built foundation to rest on. Often, I see dentists that put the cart before the horse.

Friends from university would come to me and say, ‘Hey, you know what a website needs to look like. You know how to get traffic to a website. You know what a crown is. You know what a bridge is. Can you build us a practice website?’

Before too long, I was doing marketing as a service. We could make the phone ring. Our marketing was working.

But what ended up happening is the phone rang so much, the practice fell apart at the seams. The team couldn’t handle the volume.

We found when the volume of business multiplies it amplified the little cracks, the little faults. These fault lines make a practice brittle.

The same dentists would come to me and say, ‘Jesse, we’ve got 20 patients. How do I do this? How do I build a team? I need another dentist. I need to hire more people. Now I’ve got more people, it’s really complicated. I thought I wanted new patients, but it turns out that it’s just made other things more fragile.’

How do we build this foundation? There are a few keys to building a foundation that will make your practice marketable, scalable, and viable long into the future.

Lifetime value.

The value of all relationships comes later. It gets stronger with time and age. This goes for personal and professional relationships, by the way. One concept I come back to is the idea of ‘emotional equity’.

Dentistry is personal. We are literally in our patient’s faces and they trust us enough to do that. With each visit, we should be working on building a bedrock of trust, this emotional equity. Year on year as the relationship with the practice grows, the likelihood of a patient accepting treatment increases and then revenue follows.

In Australian dentistry, the lifetime value can run into the tens and tens of thousands of dollars. For example, if someone joins your practice in their mid-30’s, typically by the time they’re in their 40’s, they’re starting to need some restorative work. There’s some units of crown and bridge. Maybe a root canal.

It can be well over $10,000, maybe even closer to $20,000. In my practice, I view patient relationships in a five-year value basis. To be candid, the five-year value for patients is at the $15,000 mark on average. While it’s significant, most of that spend comes in Year 4 and 5.

Numbers like these make it easy to realise how fast you can grow if you can plug the holes in the retention bucket.

When other dentists ask me about the most effective marketing strategy, retention is my go-to answer. Until you’ve fixed your retention leaks, any marketing efforts will be largely wasted. While you’re opening the front door really wide for new patients, you’ve also left the backdoor open and people are leaving.

If you pay attention to retention and referrals, you can increase your patient value and decrease your marketing spend.

It’s a no brainer.

The middle squeeze.

Here in mid-2018, I see two extremes. I see the small practice that offers ultra luxe, high-end services for exclusive clientele like Dr Paddi Lund on one end. Then on the other end, there’s the large practice with multiple locations and a large staff. There are more than two doctors. Maybe 4, 6, 10, or even 20 doctors.

We’re seeing a concentration of ownership – health insurance companies are buying up practices and the middle ground is eaten away. You either need to really get a degree of scale or really get a tight niche.

There is a lot of pressure on the margins. For many, price is a consideration so we’re seeing a race to the bottom in terms of who can offer services at the lowest prices. It’s a common form of marketing we see from these largest corporations.

Now is the moment to survey the surroundings, take an assessment of what’s happening, and adjust the strategy accordingly. Now is the time to choose a segment to cater to. Whether you chose to go big or small, understanding your ideal patient will help you to build those lasting lifetime relationships that produce revenue in the long run.

You can’t live in the middle so it’s time to pick a side.

The reality congruence.

Everyone is looking for that silver bullet.

There’s an idea that if I pay a marketing firm, they should be turning that money into so many new patients a month. Of course, it doesn’t always pan out that way.

As dentists, evidence-based dentistry, evidence-based medicine is drilled into us. We’re so willing to look for evidence in our clinical day-to-day procedures, but so many of us fly by the seat of our pants when making business decisions.

To do this, it’s important to pay attention to reality.

For example, you have to be in the right area. If you want to become a more boutique, high-end, high-touch practice, location becomes essential. You can’t pull off something like that in an area where the average income is below the national poverty level. You can’t just do it.

You want to look for congruency with your plans and reality.

There’s riches in niches.

If you are interested in a high-end practice, then that’s a good space to move into. Corporates aren’t likely to ever cater to that segment of the market.

There will always be consumers that want a high-touch experience. They care greatly about how they are treated, what their patient journey is like. If you want a solo-style practice like this, you need to think strategically about where you move, what market you’re dealing with, and all the finer details.

When moving into a high-end market, retention becomes even more critical as the value of each patient is higher. You’ve got to get the details right.

Once you have the details right, you can create a marketing plan and deliver on it.

Final words…

The key to building a dental practice is not to create a job, but a business.

In 2018, dentists need to be savvier than ever to plug up any retention leaks, build lasting relationships with patients, and think critically about the trajectory of our practices as the middle continues to disintegrate.

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

  1. 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

  1. 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

  1. 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

    

In this episode, I’m chatting to Jerry Jones, a top expert on professional practice management and marketing about the keys to patient retention, management and more.

Jerry Jones is a top expert on professional practice marketing with well over 20 years experience. 

His company, Jerry Jones Direct, is the #1 internationally recognised Membership-based boutique dental marketing and advertising firm focused on both patient retention & turn-key new patient solutions, with clients in the US, England, Australia and Canada.

While not a dentist, starting in 2003, Mr. Jones opened a start-up, “from-scratch” multi-doctor dental office, Wellness Springs Dental of Salem. He later held interests in as many as three offices. In May of 2018, Jerry sold his last office, completing the journey he started in early 2003. For over 15 years, Jerry and his team conducted research and experiments with a variety of cutting-edge marketing and management techniques.

Mr. Jones knows what it takes to successfully own and operate a dental office in an area with high competition and in the ever-changing dental landscape. For example, for several years during and after the 2008 financial collapse, his dental office maintained double-digit year-over-year growth while surrounding practices were going under.

In this episode, we discuss:

  • 12:08: The current landscape for dental practices (which type is yours?)
  • 18:54: Current trends in the US and Australia (and how to use international trends to manage risks)
  • 20:40: Lessons learned from scaling mishaps (and how to avoid them)
  • 22:53: What is a regional domination strategy and can you use it?
  • 28:18: What are the key metrics in your business that you should be keeping an eye on?
  • 37:32: Why patient retention is the key to growth and stability in a practice
  • 40:35: How to understand and utilise emotional equity with patients
  • 44:31: The lifetime value of a patient and what it means for your practice
  • And more

Find out more about Jerry Jones

http://jerryjonesdirect.com

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As a successful businessowner, you’re likely asking “How do I get a scalable business worth $3 million?”

A lifestyle business is built around the skillset of a founder; it’s a business that’s operating well.

And it’s a business generating enough money for you to have all the things you and your family need; as well as providing you with the financial freedom so you can have regular holidays, pay staff decent salaries and are able to implement new business – all without stress!
Glen Carlsen was the ideal podcast guest for talking about scaling up a profitable business to a lifestyle business worth up to three million dollars.
Read on for how to build a scalable lifestyle business the savvy way…

#1 A Scalable Business isn’t for Everyone!

 

If you’re reaching your lifestyle goals with your small business, then don’t try to fix what isn’t broken.

Otherwise it can lead to unhealthy growth, growth in areas that you didn’t desire or predict, and growth that causes more problems in the long run.
Glen shared, “-businesses that are doing more than 15-million revenue in Australia, are profitable something less than 0.01%. It’s a minute fraction and that’s including all the corporates.”
For you, growth may include less hours operating, more profit, but also more time away from the working environment doing the things you want to do.
Remember, time is currency too!

#2 Be Willing to do the Work

 

Having a dentist skillset is so valuable, but you still have to do the work if you want to scale your business up.
Luckily, most dentists are accustomed to hard work and long hours; we just have to take that ethic to the next level.

#3 Consider your Business Assets

 

A business is made up of various assets, such as sales assets, marketing assets, operational assets and so on.

And tools such as websites and social media platforms are all potential assets, but only if they’re generating leads.

Glen highlights that the stress or frustration you and your team experience will always lead back to “an asset deficiency”.

Subsequently, it would be these deficient assets that require improvement in order to scale your business up.

Sales and marketing assets that attract high-quality leads and help you deliver great value to your patients need to be built upon.

When it comes to operational assets it’s wise to consider where and why you’re hiring, as well as ensuring you’ve taken into account compensation for expanding your team.
Improved profit is when you are able to pay everyone fairly and this includes paying yourself and still having plenty in the pot.

And remember people don’t just work for the money – not any more – employees are looking for culture assets:

Consider your infrastructure and how you can make your practice a place people want to work at: Be inspired by the culture of Google, Virgin or Facebook.

#4 Product Assets

 

Get yourself a few categories of product assets with the intention of capturing the attention of your target or dormant audience. You may have problem-solving products, products to capture data and even products licensed, packaged and on-sale to the dental industry.
How can you ensure customers trust you and your products?

#5 Don’t Just Write To-Do Lists

 

Scaling your business up to a lifestyle business means moving you from operator to owner, right?
Right!
So, stop writing to-do lists and instead make to-build lists…
This solves problems and is productive, compared with just ticking tasks off.
And I’ve said it before… here goes again include – add the tasks you’ll be delegating too! And those operational tasks you’re no longer going to do as you move up to owner status.

#6 Business Improvement

 

Look at your assets from a new perspective.
Just because you’re a small business doesn’t mean you have limited resources – thinking like this will create a low value perception of your dental practice.

Small businesses at around 500 thousand to 1.5 million, can improve areas of their business such as their blogging platform as a source of client information and a marketing tool, and as a result can increase return on investment tenfold.

#7 Slow Down your Hiring Process

You need new team members onboard when you’re upscaling, but much of the value of your business is the people that operate within it… so don’t rush the hiring process!

 

By the time you get to the stage of interviewing potential employees you want to know exactly what you are looking for.

#8 Shake off the “Imposter Monster”

 

You won’t scale up successfully or quickly if you always have doubt about the decisions you’re making.
Glen refers to this as the “Imposter Monster”, something that I’ve heard other people say too, and something I have experienced myself…
But we have to ride that discomfort to avoid stopping just at the point we could grow closer towards success.
At times of fear; notice your thoughts and don’t get caught up in them, remind yourself, ‘Oh, hang on. This whole pattern is playing again. I remember this. This is my old friend. He comes back every time I’m about to do something new.’

#9 Show up with Like-Minded People

If you want to scaleup then go to dentist entrepreneurial workshops, show up at industry conferences and read books by people that have already travelled the journey you have started.
In the dental world there is competition, and there are changing economic circumstances, but there’s also incredible opportunity that surrounds us every single day! And more importantly there’s a community we can all learn from.

Environment dictate performance, so if you’re stuck, just change it up!
Find a new team; and put yourself in a space where people are stretching and growing so that you can too.

#10 Monitoring the Numbers

 

Knowing your financial situation and all the assets is a fundamental thing that we’ve built the Practice Max Coaching Program on… which is essentially based on everything we’ve built our own practice on.
Glen says, “I’d encourage dentists to work their metric on revenue divided by full-time employees with them out of the game as their job is to be chairman almost. Then they’ll get a more realistic [picture] because their income would most likely be skewing the numbers way out because of their deployment of time.”

Final Wise Words from Glen on Scalability

 

“For most people… All the wealth that you want to create out of the performance business, you could create out of a highly profitable lifestyle business over ten years just managing the money; investing the money wisely. If you’ve got the desire to be a Richard Branson, go for it, but just understand, it’s a full-time game.” Glen Carlsen

Listen to the full podcast with Glen Carlsen as he goes into a lot of detail about how you can scale your business up to a lifestyle business, but also how you can take the leap to a high-performance business with high value.

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

  1. 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

  1. 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

  1. 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

    

In this episode, I’m joined by Glen Carlson to share his strategies on growing a profitable dental practice. And, his advice is not typical. It’s all about recognising what you want out of your business and how to get there by building assets.

Glen Carlson is co-founder Dent Global, where they run structured accelerator programs that produce entrepreneurs that stand out, scale up and make a positive impact in the world. They’re best known for the award winning ‘Key Person of Influence’ program, acknowledged by INC.COM as “One of the top personal branding conferences in the world”.

In the last 7 years, they’ve expanded to the UK, USA, Singapore and Australia, published over 800 books for their clients, and built an epic full time team of 50 across 12 time zones.

With 3 acquisitions under their belt in the technology, media and publishing, Dent has become a ‘one stop shop’ for business owners that want to accelerate their entrepreneur journey.

Glen has been featured in INC.com, the Fin Review, Sky Business News, Entrepreneur.com and his DENT PODCAST is consistently in the top 100 business podcasts in Australia and people watch over 2000 hours of his business tips each week.

In this episode, we discuss:

3:58 How to make the leap into more scale in your business and more leverage
7:16 The journey towards that 2-3 million dollars and what you need to build to get there
9:25: What key assets you’re missing when you’re building your lifestyle business
11:34: The power of having a “to build list” and why you need one
16:37: Why most people don’t actually want a “fast growth” business
20:07: Practical tips for pushing through self doubt
27:46: Why building a performance business is insane (for most people)
35:46: How not all growth in business is healthy. Work out what you want first
37:57: How to make the huge jump from 3 million in revenue per year to more.

Find out more about Glen Carlson

http://www.keypersonofinfluence.com/author/glencarlson/

Steve Job’s address https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA

Key Person of Influence Scorecard http://www.keypersonofinfluence.com/scorecard/

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Being able to connect with people as a leader or a dental entrepreneur is paramount to the success of your dental business.

When it comes to facial expressions, other than the cliché teenage eye-roll, or a predictable cranky expression from a marriage partner, reading people to assess responses or predict outcomes can be tricky business can’t it?

But being able to connect is a key skill for any successful dental leader.

I decided to connect with International Profiling and Communications specialist, Allen Stevens during my recent podcast, and Allen shed some light on the importance of facial-profiling for connection and communication.

So how can you quickly assess a personality? Or understand how your patients and practice staff like to process information?

And how are your stakeholders likely to respond in any given situation?

And, in what ways can you improve your interview technique?

I’ve put together these savvy tips from my conversation with Allen to help you answer these questions on how to connect better with all the people involved in ensuring the success of your dental practice…

TIP #1 Connect with your Self

Knowing more about your self can help you to understand others – What have your life experiences taught you about who you are?

 connect with your self

Allen says, “Know yourself first of all. Know why you do what you do, and why you want to do the things you are planning to do. Understand your own personality and profile first. Then focus on and understand the other person. Then talk to them in the way that they want to be spoken to.”

Aim to learn something new about YOU every week.

TIP #2 Connect with your Patients

Knowing what a patient wants and how they will respond to your suggestions for care or advice is a brilliant communication skill. Facial-profiling is an effective tool to assist you in predicting the outcomes of patient interactions.

Most people dread coming to visit the dentist because it equates to discomfort and expense.

But dentists need to quickly put our patients at ease for a couple of key reasons:

Reason #1:

We want the patient to have a positive, memorable experience.

Reason #2:

When the patient is relaxed, we relax too.

We need to communicate with patients based on how much information they need and want, and in what ways they best process information.

I learnt from Allen that people that have a fold of skin with the eyelid straight underneath when they look forward tend to want more detailed information.

However, people with no fold in this place by the eyelids, simply want the bigger picture; and tend to be quick decision-makers.

So, this may be a useful indicator for you when meeting new patients.

One of the key drivers of building and maintaining relationships across all aspects of life, is trust.

Understand who the patient is and what they value. Take the time to really connect and to engage. Then the relationship will develop, trust will develop and patient retention will follow.

TIP #3 Connect better with your trusted key people such as your Practice Manager

Some of us rely on psychometric evaluations when it comes to hiring or promoting someone to a practice management or senior technical position.

And these assessments are effective as part of the hiring process. But your current management strategies can be further enhanced with the use of facial-profiling.

We can glean more thorough information about the people we are working with day-to-day by noticing little facial responses as we engage with them.

And in the long run, this can allow us to understand them better, and communicate and connect more effectively with our staff. This is critical for those we rely on to deliver results within our practice.

TIP #4 Connect with your Staff

Without connection, the people in your practice are disengaged, they just do what they have to do to get through the day.

But, a true leader connects with the people they’re leading – this is how you get the best out of your staff!

connect with people

And ultimately, if you can better connect with your team, they will feel more deeply engaged.

Staff satisfaction may increase too, and with that, their overall alignment with the purpose and goals of your dental business.

As your team grow their connections with your practice, they will make better connections with your patients.  The patient experience will deepen and loyalty will strengthen.

This leaves you with more time and energy to continue your entrepreneurial activities.

Remember… This connection begins as early as the interview process.

connect during interviewing

TIP #5 Connect with your Family and Friends

Lastly, we must connect with our family and friends to create balance in our lives.

This is especially important in the modern world of technology where interpersonal communication is diminished. We can make the most of limited face-to-face time by understanding the facial indicators and nuances that give us hints as to how people are feeling and thinking.

A FEW FINAL WORDS

Ultimately, if you have all these bases covered, then you are going to be well informed about the key players in your life, and benefit from long-lasting trusting relationships.

If you want some more in-depth pointers on how to read facial expressions then make sure you listen to my podcast conversation with Allen Stevens.

And for those wanting more leadership skills, we still have a select few places on the two-day Practice Max workshop in June, click here to find out more and to register: Dr Jesse Green Presents Build and Lead a High Performance Team.

 

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

 

  1. 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

 

  1. 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

 

  1. 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

    

 

People skills are one of the most important skills we can develop as dentists and business owners. Whether it’s putting nervous patients at ease or recruiting with staff, being able to quickly read and communicate well with people is a key skill for us.

In this episode, I’m joined by Alan Stevens, who is an International Profile and Communications Specialist. He is regularly featured on National TV, Radio and in the World’s Press, profiling the likes of our leading politicians, TV and sports stars as well as Britain’s Royalty.

He is an authority in reading people; what they are not saying, what they are attempting to conceal and how they are likely to behave in given situations.  All of this through recognising the unconsciously leaked indicators of concealment and deceit as well as the indicators of a person’s conscious preferred behaviours and personality.

With over 30 years accumulating experience, and skills in training and coaching, counselling, psychometric profiling, neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), body language, micro and subtle expressions and reading personality traits, Alan believes that all aspects of human relations and interactions are improved when you can read people accurately. Having these skills today, more than ever before, can determine the future success of your business and your personal relationships.

Alan conducts training for businesses and organisations in team building, sales training, negotiations and recruitment skills. Alan also works with educators to increase their people reading skills around social-emotional intelligence, and to assist students to find careers that suit their personalities.

In this episode, we discuss:

7:06: What leadership skills you should develop

9:42: How to facially profile someone to better connect with them

11:48: How we as dentists can use facial profiling with our patients, coworkers etc.,

17:36: Ways you can integrate facial profiling with psychometric evaluation

24:31: How to use facial profiling to deal with anxious patients specifically

27:00: Using facial profiling to build trust and improve patient retention

And more.

 

Find out more about Alan Stevens

http://www.alanstevens.com.au

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