In times of economic hardship, there’s often a lot of negative thought that THE END OF THE WORLD is upon us…
And in times when there is no thought of the end of the world, business owners are often seen displaying a LAISSEZ-FAIRE approach to business, an attitude that things will be OK, and there is no need to improve on what seems to be OK…
Sadly, both of these attitudes are extreme polarities of what needs to be done at all times and should be being done at all times in business.
When my mother was ill and battling ovarian cancer, which is in itself, sadly, a death sentence, my father would say:
“We hope for the best, but we are prepared for the worst”.
which is a spin-off from a famous quote from Maya Angelou.
I believe the whole concept of life, and business is summed up succinctly in the book “The Seasons of Life” by Jim Rohn.
Rohn said that there are always four seasons, and that they always come. And that their cycle repeats.
He wrote:
“The seasons will neither speed up nor slow down because of our needs. The springtime will only appear, but it will not wait….”
He continued:
“We cannot ask nature for an advance… to neglect once again because of our demeaning circumstances is to assure a continuance of the current conditions…. Take full and complete advantage of the spring.”
Too many times…
I hear dentists tell me over and over that they are “doing OK”, but when I seek to clarify what it is that they mean exactly when they say “doing OK”, all I hear is crickets because they have no accurate definition of OK…
Is “doing OK”
another way of saying:
“I’m hanging on for grim death by the skin of my teeth”
because one person’s definition of “OK” may be completely different to another person’s acceptable level of what “OK” actually really is…
Years ago….
Years ago, in 1996, I felt that my dental practice had flatlined.
The annual collections had not improved for four years. They had hovered around at a level of production of $400K annually for four consecutive years … and yet my colleagues and people within the dental industry kept telling me that I was “doing OK” because my practice was doing double what the AVERAGE dental practice was doing….
And so I believed this, until I re-met a dentist I had known from my student days, and his dental practice was doing a turnover of $800K annually!
His dental practice was producing double what mine was doing!
And his practice was located in an area of Sydney with a lower socio-economic level than the area where my dental practice was….
What this lesson taught me was:
What this lesson taught me was that all of these so called advisors who believed they knew the market well, really didn’t know the POTENTIAL of the dental marketplace at all.
These so called experts had no clue as to what could truly be achieved from THE GIFT that dentists were being given…
And that gift was the OPPORTUNITY that owning a dental practice gave to dentists who accepted that gift, and nurtured that gift, into a successful small business, that generated an income for them and allowed them to live where they want, and send their children to school where they want, and retire where they want to, and when they want to, and to do those things that they wanted to do, in that retirement…
But you can’t wing your way to success.
Success needs guidance.
But true success needs the right guidance.
Don’t follow the masses.
The right guidance and assistance and advice are omnipotent if you want true success.
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The Ultimate Patient Experience is a simple to build complete Customer Service system in itself that I developed that allowed me to create an extraordinary dental office in an ordinary Sydney suburb. If you’d like to know more, ask me about my free special report.
Email me at david@theupe.com