Eleven years ago, the great Dr Omer Reed said to me that in the United States, 95% of dentists reach the age of 65 and are unable to retire to an income equal to the income they are making as a dentist…. Basically, they need to keep working to fund their lifestyle.
They cannot afford to retire because they have not saved sufficient and built a nest egg to fund their retirement.
They are tied to their dental drills.
Instead of being able to travel, spend time with family and friends, and enjoy their retirement, they need to ADAPT to retirement and work out what they can and cannot afford to do.
It’s all about planning…
Planning your life and your retirement should be as important a priority as planning a vacation.
But sadly, therein lies a truth…. Most people spend more time planning a vacation than they do spend planning their journey through life.
Let’s compare:
Both a vacation and a life, have a start point and a destination.
And that destination can be reached quickly, or slowly, [or never], and it can be reached comfortably, by travelling in style, or it can be reached by travelling via difficult means and circumstances.
A vacation has a beginning time and an end time.
For a lot of people, with their life, they just make things up as they go along….
And sadly, a lot of people do not have a plan for their own life, and usually in this situation, if they don’t have a plan of their own, they will become a part of someone else’s plan.
And that may not be a plan they like.
Be alert.
Know what’s around you and know what’s possible for you.
I meet so many dentists who tell me:
“I’m doing OK.”
But yet they have no reference as to how they are doing compared to others around them, and whether what others are doing is better than what they have, or is something that they could easily achieve.
They don’t know what they don’t know….
Let me explain:
In 1987 I purchased a dental practice from a dentist who was supposedly retiring.
[in actual fact he sold me the practice saying that he was going to retire, and then went to work for another dentist at a practice near his home… and all those “personal friend” patients followed him to his new location…]
Anyway, in 1992, five years after purchasing my practice, I had built it up to be collecting DOUBLE what the average dental practice was doing…
And I thought that I was doing OK.
For the next four years I prided myself that I was doing double what the average dental practice was doing, until in 1996, I met a dentist whose dental practice was doing DOUBLE what mine was doing, and in a lower socio-economic area.
Suddenly I had a point of reference, and my thought was this:
I needed to know what he was doing, because if he could do that in his area, I certainly should have been able to do the same numbers in my area.
It was a wake up call…
All of a sudden I realised that I did not have all of the answers, and I needed to find out and learn more.
I needed to know if better was possible.
And it was.
In the following six years, I TRIPLED the collections at my dental practice, and in the five years that followed on from those six years, I DOUBLED the collections again.
And in the four years that followed on from there, I grew my dental practice collections by another one million dollars.
And all because I realised that I did not have all the answers, and that I had a lot more to learn, and a lot more to grow.
Over a fifteen year period my dental practice grew from three dental chairs to seven, from one dentist to three full time dentists and three hygienists.
And the collections grew by 8.5X.
How did I do this?
Firstly, I hired a coach to bounce ideas off and keep me accountable.
I recognised that I did not know what I did not know.
I hired a coach who had experience as a dentist, and had other clients, so that he could easily refer me to concepts that had worked for him and that he had seen others make work.
This was invaluable, because it gave me multiple points of reference
Secondly, I worked out a plan. I worked my practice so that I would be able to sell my practice at any point should the right buyer come along.
What I did not want to do was die in my practice, still owning the practice, and leave my wife and family the burden of trying to salvage some value from the practice.
A good friend of mine had dropped dead in his practice with a cerebral aneurism, and I remember looking at the practice, and talking to his wife, and it was as if I was on the set of “A Price Is Right”, and the dollar value of the practice was going down minute by minute because my friend was not there any more.
And that was a situation that I never wanted to put my family in.
I wanted to make sure that should I succumb to an early demise, that the asset of my dental practice had been fully realised, and did not become a depreciating asset for whatever reason.
It was all part of the plan.
Three take-aways:
So here are my take-aways:
- Have a plan
- Have a coach
- Don’t just make stuff up as you go along.
- Know what’s around.
- Do the work.
In the words of Coleman Cox:
“I am a great believer in Luck. The harder I work, the more of it I seem to have.”
Remember, there’s a whole lot more out there that others are doing, that you too could be doing, to do things better.
And isn’t that what it’s all about?
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LIVE Workshop: Dr David Moffet and Jayne Bandy:
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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
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