Can you imagine two Dental Offices in the same town, in the same street, side by side, but with two different results?

What about in the same building?

Case #1: Parramatta. NSW. Australia.

In 1996, I decided I wanted to sell my dental office.

I had recently renovated my suite, and my collections had flat-lined for the year, and the three previous years, at an average of AUD$400,000.00 per year, which at the time was 250% more than the average dental office was collecting.

I was getting bored…

But as you know from my story, I could not sell my practice.

Nor could I “give it away” for AUD$160,000.00 Sale Price.

One option that I considered back then was the purchase of a neighbouring Dental Office located two doors down the road in a reasonably more visible street-front location.

This office for sale was owned by two older dentists who I knew personally, and who were ready to retire.

However, I did not purchase their practice, because they also wanted to sell me the very old and very small upstairs-downstairs building where they housed their practice, and to put it politely, the building was “antiquated” to say the least.

What interested me was that although these two dentists had worked four and a half days every week *EACH* for the previous forty years, their annual collections from their patients were a combined three-quarters total of what I had been doing on my own hidden away from the street in the building two doors up the road.

Yes together the two dentists were collecting only a tick over three hundred thousand dollars annually.

Despite their highly visible location and their solid longstanding reputation in the community.

Me?

I’d only been in my dental practice for nine years.

And within the first five of those nine years I had increased the collections of that practice by nearly three hundred percent.

And yet I felt dissatisfied with my lot….

How could two dental offices located side by side [bar one small building in between] in the same street in the same town and with the same longevity [my office had previously been owned by a long term retiring dentist] have two strikingly different amounts of collections both in total as well as in dollars per dentist per hour?

How Could This Be So?

Fast forward to 2017…

Case #2: Any Town. Some Town. Upstate. East Coast. USA.

A friend of mine works for a dentist in a non-capital city on the Eastern Side of the United States of America.

It’s a one doctor office and for reasons known only to him he chooses to work only three days per week and only for six hours each day.

This dentist works only eighteen hours each week.

Last year in 2016 his Dental Office collected USD$706,000.00 by choice working only eighteen hours per week.

By contrast, another Dental Office in the *SAME BUILDING* on a lower floor has three dentists working eight hours per day for FIVE days each per week.

That’s a total of 120 hours of dentistry being done there each week.

And that three dentist office collected the grand total of USD$575,000.00 last year.

Yes. You have read correctly.

A dental office working only fifteen percent of the hours that a neighbouring dental office is doing is collecting twenty three percent more!!

Same town!

Same street!!

Same Building!!!

In both of these cases, Case #1 and Case#2, it is very difficult to blame the economy as being the major factor in the difference in performance of the two very different Dental Offices.

SO WHAT CAUSES THE DIFFERENCE?

Well, in the 2017 story right there on the East Coast of the USA, the major difference between the two offices was that the three doctor office was doing a lot of “Insurance Work” while the single doctor office was doing primarily Fee For Service Dentistry.

And I’d suggest that back in 1996 back in Downtown Parramatta, I was doing exactly the same.

I was doing no “Insurance Only” work on my patients.

In Parramatta in 1996 I was doing fee for service dentistry, yet I was doing it in an average town on average patients who lived in average homes and worked for average incomes.

My belief now is that in every town in every city in every state, you will find a percentage of people in the population who are happy and educated enough to want to spend whatever is necessary to receive the dentistry that they need.

Without compromise.

And these two stories prove that point.

So long as you back up your exceptional dental services with a caring and sharing disposition and world-class customer service systems, you’ll build a following of patients happy to continue seeing you and more than happy to receive from you the dentistry that you highly recommend.

In any area no matter what the economy.

How do I know?

In 1996, when my office was flat-lining at AUD$400K per annum collections, a dentist friend of mine working in a lower socio-economic area of Western Sydney collected AUD$880K in one year.

I learnt right then that anything was possible…if you believed in it…

“You can’t do nothing that you can’t put your mind to…” – Robert Palmer

*****

My next public speaking presentation showing Dentists how to grow their Dental practices will be in Melbourne Australia on Saturday 1 April 2017 with Jayne Bandy and Wolfgang Hofbauer.

For more information and to secure your seat click this link here.

*****

Have you read my book , How To Build The Dental Practice of Your Dreams [Without Killing Yourself!] In Less Than Sixty Days.

You can order your copy here: Click Link To Order

*****

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

Did you like this blog article? If you did then hit the share buttons below and share it with your friends and colleagues. Share it via email, Facebook and twitter!!