The World is your oyster….

Where’s the best place to set up a Dental Office?

If you were going to start a new Dental Office, would you start in a town where there was a scarcity of Dentists, or would you start in a town where there was an abundance of Dentists?

This poses a very interesting question, and like the colours of the clouds, there are probably more than fifty shades of answers.

So what’s the answer?

Well I guess the answer depends upon the type of dentist you are, the type of person you are, the type of dental office you want, and the type of dental office you are willing to allow the market to create for you….

Amongst a whole pile of other questions.

Begin with the end in mind.

Know what type of Dental Office you want to have in five years time.

And in ten years time.

And in twenty years time.

Because allowing outside forces to dictate the direction of your business will more often than not result in a business that you are not one hundred percent happy to be in.

I still keep hearing of dentists who don’t like their location, their clients, their practice arrangements [PPOs etc.], and don’t know exactly how to turn things around…

And it is indeed difficult to undo somethings that have been just done wrong from the beginning. Often without thought…

One of the best pieces of advice I was ever told in dentistry was to run your business from day one in the way you want it to always run.

When I purchased my Parramatta one chair one dentist one nurse practice from Dr John Martin in 1987, these were his prophetic words.

And great words they were.

And so I did.

From day one I always had one day off per week from the duties of drilling teeth.

But I worked dang hard the other four days of the week.

Which was great, because the days I worked were very very productive.

I learned that just because I wasn’t there at the Dental Office on Wednesdays didn’t mean that my patients couldn’t wait one more day to see me if needed.

And same thing happened when for personal reasons I chose to discontinue Saturday work. Nearly all the Saturday patients switched to weekday appointments.

If you’ve got a good product, people will beat a path to your door.

It’s so true.

In any business.

I marvel when I walk past overcrowded cafés where people line up for eons just to sit outside on noisy dirty streets on plastic stools next to busy traffic, and even dogs, while sipping coffee out of paper cups with infant sippers on them?

So the product must be not only good, but also great!

And it’s the same with a Dental Office.

If you can offer great dentistry with Consistently Above Average Service then clients, customers, and patients will beat a path to your door.

But they’ll need to find out where you are first of all.

So location and marketing are key.

Great location and exposure are key factors in getting your dental business noticed.

But exposure, and location won’t keep the people coming to you and through your door if your dentistry doesn’t stack up and your service is average or ordinary.

If your location and exposure are less than ideal then good marketing will also attract new business.

And again, no amount of marketing will keep the public coming if your service is lacking and your dentistry is not up to scratch.

And don’t I know it. My Dental Office was three floors up with next to no street front exposure except for a setback light box.

And yet, with good dentistry and a passion for delivering World Class Service I was able to turn a $140,000.00 per year Office into an Office doing over $3,000,000.00 in just over twenty years.

That’s a twenty plus fold increase in revenue in just over twenty years!

So what would you do?

I guess if you’re a little less sure, then you’d think that setting up in a place where there are little or no dentists might be for you?

Like a new subdivision?

Well that might be good, but there’s bound to be a demand on your hours.

Because you’re the only dentist around…

Or the first….

They’ll want your time at all times, Saturdays, late nights, even some Sundays.

And of course being first doesn’t mean you’ll be the only.

There’ll be a second. And a third. And maybe more…

And you can’t stop that.

So you better be darn good…

When I was looking around to buy in 1986 the agents selling equipment and Dental Practices would say to me how crazy it was [to them] that dentists would still keep coming and setting up Offices from scratch in both Chatswood or Bondi Junction [two of Sydney’s most dentally populated suburbs].

Nearly thirty years on it’s still the same story and the same two suburbs!!

Brand new Dental Offices are still being started in Chatswood and Bondi Junction!

All this tells you is that these are large populated areas and areas where there’s plenty of dental dollar spend.

And with that, it’s only logical that a good location, with good marketing and good dentistry and great service will do well.

The advantage of setting up shop in a heavily dentally populated area is that you don’t have to compete on price and on availability.

You don’t have to be the cheapest and you don’t have to be drilling teeth on Sunday nights.

But you do have to be competitive on your quality of your dentistry.

And you do have to provide exceptional consistent World Class Service.

Provided you can do those two things, that is, provide great dentistry and exceptional service, you’ll always be able to carve yourself a piece out of any local market.

A piece as big as you want to choose…

The Ultimate Patient Experience is a simple easy to implement system that I developed that allowed me to build 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: david@theUPE.com

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