The thing about a great business is it is built on the principle of covering all bases.
It’s very difficult to create greatness when you are failing to monitor significant pieces of your business and its processes and operations.
Many times in dentistry I see dentists looking at only one part of their business, trying to improve or perfect that piece of their practice, while other significant and important pieces of their dental practice are deteriorating, struggling, and self-destructing.
J. Willard Marriott said:
“It’s the little things that make the big things possible. Only close attention to the fine details of any operation makes the operation first class.”
The operations of your dental practice do need to be clearly defined so that they can be managed and grown.
Sadly, most dentists don’t do this.
Most dentists have parts of their practice running on autopilot, but without a pilot.
Some dentists have their WHOLE dental practice running like an out of control locomotive…. A train wreck just waiting to happen.
It’s usually a little bit of this, and a little bit of that.
But not much of anything.
So where are the big areas of failure?
There are several areas of dental practice that feature regularly as being problematic. Here are two of the biggest:
Dental practice staff.
Have you ever heard the phrase:
“The tail wagging the dog.”
Dental staff are important for the running of a dental practice.
But, sometimes I see dental staff strangling the growth potential of a dental practice with their unrealistic demands.
This is where the scales have tipped….
Because there are plenty of jobs out there where the employer dictates the roles and conditions.
Like school teaching. When you take a job as a school teacher you take vacation during school holidays.
You don’t take vacation during school term.
When you work as a fireman, you are part of as unit.
That unit works to the roster.
Two days on. Two nights on. Four days off.
Six months on. One month off.
No exceptions.
In dentistry we need to realise that our “unit” depends on us to produce our best product.
And when we fail to consider the “product” we are providing, our customers, or patients suffer.
And those patients who notice, will either tolerate our lack of care, or they will go elsewhere.
If you have team members who put themselves ahead of their customers, and the product your practice offers, then you are better off finding those team members a position in a different dental practice.
Scripts and dialogs
I listened to some phone call recordings from a dental practice recently.
On one day, a person phoned the dental practice twice in ten minutes with the same enquiry.
And each of the calls was answered by two different team members.
Who each gave the caller two completely different answers.
To the same question.
This is not good.
There needs to be consistency and uniformity in what is said to patients and enquiries in a dental practice.
How the phones are answered, how arriving patients are greeted, what gets said to patients when and where, when the patient is being transferred, handed over, farewelled, appointed, making payments…. The list goes on.
Most practices don’t have a list of what to say, and when, for anything…
And its really sad to see this…
Dentistry is a business.
Owned by one person or entity.
And employing other people.
And it is the employees who need to know what to do and say.
And what not to do and say.
So that the business has consistency.
Because its not about winging it.
Yet so many dental practices don’t have a PLAYBOOK when it comes to what to say when this happens and what to say when that happens…
Most dental practices operate using the MUSAWGA principle.
Most dental practices follow the MUSAWGA principle when it comes to scripts and playbooks.
They don’t have one.
They haven’t gotten around to putting one together.
So they wing it.
Their philosophy is to “Make Up Stuff As We Go Along”.
Not a good plan.
When you fail to plan you actually plan to fail.
If you don’t have clearly defined plans of your own for your business there’s a good chance your business will end up becoming part of someone else’s plan.
Don’t let your dental practice become an attrition accelerator, letting patients walk out the back door while you spend your hard-earned money desperately on trying to acquire new patients.
Because that’s not too clever…
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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