How To Make "Change" Your Friend!

When the time comes to grow your dental practice, the process can be exhilarating and terrifying simultaneously. The single most common major barrier to dental practices growing into the success they are seeking is often fear of change. 

Change is often intimidating.  Staying in your comfort zone feels safer, but in reality if you keep doing the same procedures year over year, you will end up like Polaroid, Kmart and Sears; extinct or irrelevant. Ask yourself, as the world transforms around you, what is stopping your growth? Change is inevitable, but your ability to incorporate that change is not.

Let’s assume that you have decided to embrace the fact that your team and your patients are looking for you to grow and because you've established a successful practice, expanding your little office into something larger, to increase your capacity and more profitability is a critical step in your growth.

It is likely that expanding your practice is actually overdue, but let us examine some of the advantages and drawbacks of expanding your practice before making the big choice. 

The first thing to consider is why you wish to expand. Getting clear on the purpose of what you are looking to accomplish will set the path and determine how to effectively address difficulties and unlock opportunities so that you can reach your objectives efficiently.  Without knowing where you are going, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to get there.

The overall cost of growth is the second factor to examine, both in terms of time and money.  Costs should be factored into both short-term and long-term so that you will proceed with a good idea about the feasibility of you hitting your goals with the resources you have at your disposal today.  If not, you may need to find more time or money (which are likely both possible to obtain).

One of the most effective strategies to grow your practice is to provide additional procedures for your patients. When looking at new procedures and/or technology, however, make sure to focus on ones that supplement what you are already doing in a positive way, both from the perspective of increased quality of care and profitability.  

Patients prefer to have all of their operations performed by the same dentist (or at least the same dental office), so leveling up your skills or bringing in a specialist into your practice both expands your quality of care and is more convenient for patients. 

But there are reasons why incorporating change into your practice often hits barriers. Improvements take time, money and often both to successfully bring to being.  You have to train your team, educate your patients and, fundamentally, slow down in order to see the positive results of whatever you are bringing to light in your practice.

Elevating your practice may also require additional equipment, space or team members.  So, when estimating what it will take to bring a new technology or procedure to your practice, make sure to “overestimate” the time and money required to reach your goals.

Other factors to consider include increasing your office hours, the time required to achieve a positive return on investment and updating, maintaining or replacing what you are purchasing for the future (especially when it comes to technology). 

The prospect of growing your business is exciting and often rewarding, but make sure to consider as many of the variables as possible before starting implementation. Before you move forward with any major changes, try to  understand why you want to expand, whether you can afford it, if now is the perfect moment to do it, what success looks like and what the best strategy is to achieve success. 

With all the factors considered, then it is time to take action. Thinking does not improve your practice, it is the action we take from the intentful thought that does.

Remember, it is usually the pain of not changing that bears a heavier sting than the one of inaction.