Written by: Scott J. Manning, MBA
You probably don’t realize it, but the most important aspect of profitability for your dental practice is the power to become fully liberated and operate on your own terms.
Have you broken free from your dependency on insurance, volume, and basically being a commodity at the whim of economic conditions, current trends, and everything else?
You may be fighting back against this with more marketing, insurance plans, discounts, and other processes just to make it easier to obtain new patients. If so, you are attempting to fix the problem with more of the problem, and you simply diminish the value of the impact for your patients.
Instead, make it easier, better, more meaningful, more compelling, and more valuable to your patients. Then, it will be easier for them to be committed to getting healthy and owning their responsibility to invest in their own well-being and long-term health.
To start, ask yourself if your patient experience, active relationship building, human interaction, and deliberate trust creation move your patients forward by elevating their desire and deserve, value and belief, and connection and attachment to you and your clinical philosophy.
How does this loop back to profitability for your dental practice?
By diminishing value, you diminish the experience, and if you diminish the experience, you diminish everything else. A profitable dental practice is a powerful practice that becomes a force for good in the community and in the lives of all the people involved. To fully reap the rewards and benefits that private practice ownership can provide to you, you need to engineer your practice to become a better business owner.
After all, when you are in a position of power, you have the greatest difference-maker in building demand for your dentistry as opposed to being in a state of desperation. High demand also allows you to have patients interact with your practice at your standards and avoid watering down what you know is in their best interest.
Specifically, when you focus on my 3Rs for practice stability—Retention, Reactivation, and Referrals—you need fewer new patients. Because you need fewer new patients to support your goals (you have less capacity for new patients since you’ve kept overhead low), you get to be more selective and dictate the rules of engagement. With fewer patients, you can slow down the pace and actually establish rapport that will lead to a committed pathway to health.
In contrast, if you try to be all things to all people or you try to flood your practice with any and every new patient, you are forced to accept whatever walks in and are at the mercy of the patients’ pre-existing expectations of how your dental relationship will work. Plus, you have limited time and resources to spend on a meaningful patient experience that can elevate the value of dentistry in the patient’s mind. Thus, you aren’t very busy doing any dentistry of great value or significance.
Now, if you have a specialty modality practice where you thrive on new patients because there isn’t the same type of hygiene or follow-up, re-care, or maintenance approach to the backend, the same concept applies. It’s important to keep patients in the flow of treatment, reactivate past patients who didn’t convert, and have more effective follow-up.
Also remember that referrals—usually happening without any methodical, predictable, experiential, or purposeful plan—create a dependable system instead of a downward cycle of discounting. This same concept of power and demand also applies to comprehensive diagnosis. Set this up accordingly, and you’ll require fewer patients to achieve your goals and reach your practice potential.
When you incorporate these strategies, this is when you really arrive at the position of power and can further elevate the standard of excellence and experience for your patients.
It all comes back to understanding that there are only three limiting factors to growth and maximization of profit in private practice: Time, Space, and People. Here, “People” refers to your team members and not patients. You can’t have a giant team because time and space preset your capacity. Therefore, you need to set a precise roster of team members. This needs to make the most sense for your chosen practice model based on your goals and objectives for your life—all reverse-engineered into a math formula and business system.
Once you figure this out, you have a very specific responsibility as a private dental practice owner. You must maximize your ability and potential within these parameters while remaining aligned with your standard of excellence and your own integrity of how you want to operate your business, care for your patients, and perform your dentistry.
This brings us to the single most valuable superpower of private dental practice, and what being an independent dentist is all about…
Instead of your life having to fit into your practice, you get to decide how your practice fits into your life.
If you give up this advantage, then you give up all of your independence and liberty. You are now at the mercy of your practice, the industry average, and worse, the status quo of the economy around you.
This is what being an independent doctor and a private dental practice owner is all about. You get to stay true to your purpose, live your passion, and earn your profits. Once these align, you will experience the grand victory of life you’ve dreamed about. You’ll fulfill the privilege, the honor, and most of all, the responsibility that you sacrificed to have—that is at the heart of being an independent doctor and owning your own private dental practice… the pathway to prosperity.
This is your power and opportunity, should you choose to accept it, embrace it, and live it. It sure doesn’t happen by chance or on its own just because you are your own boss. You must engineer your profit and take action with your power in order to deliberately become a master of practice ownership—to really discover what you are truly capable of and the life and practice that is within your grasp.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Recognized by thousands of dentists across North America, Scott Manning is an accomplished author (“The Dental Practice Shift” is the #1 most requested book in dentistry) and highly sought-after public speaker. For almost two decades, he has dedicated his life to inspiring and motivating dentists worldwide to create wealth and lifestyle-based practices. Today, when he is not sharing his positive messages worldwide, he loves to travel and spend time with his beloved wife, Kristen, and daughter, Saylor. To learn more, visit https://dentalsuccesstoday.com.
FEATURED IMAGE CREDIT: Fitsum Assefa from Pixabay.
