Open Your Mind And Say Ahhhhhh

Ad agency owners and creative entrepreneurs can learn a lot from dentists. While their job descriptions seem wildly different, many dentists have mastered their business operations in a manner worthy of agency principals’ emulation. The question is, “Are you open minded enough to borrow best practices from a completely different type of professional service provider?” If so, the dental industry has figured something out that most other small business owners haven't.

Both the dental and marketing/advertising industries reward practitioners who have truly mastered their craft. And neither dental nor marketing/advertising professionals receive formal business training when studying their chosen discipline. Instead, each training focuses on the tools and techniques of their trade, not business management or entrepreneurship. Yet, the majority of dentists seem to thrive while most marketing/advertising agency owners seem to struggle with unpredictable business development, inconsistent resourcing, and declining profit margins. Why the difference?

Dentistry has become one of the most lucrative professions in North America. Dentists – on average – earn more than their professional peers, such as family doctors, chiropractors, optometrists, pediatricians, or psychologists. Their financial success is largely the result of living by one key paradigm:

Every minute a dentist’s hands are not in someone’s mouth, they are not making as much money as possible.

Dentists understand that there is one specific thing they can do to maximize their earning potential, so they delegate everything else.

Think about it...

When you arrive at the dentist’s office, a receptionist - who may or may not be on the dentist’s payroll because a host of 3rd party services offer office management service to dentists - checks you in. When you get in the chair, a hygienist does most of the cleaning and X-rays. A dentist usually has multiple hygienists working at once, oftentimes as independent contractors leasing chair time. Dentists simply jump from one patient to the next, spending the least amount of time possible with each person, but sufficient enough time to charge maximum billings.

Upon leaving the dentist’s chair, patients interact with a non-dentist to provide payment, and a non-dentist may attempt to upsell various products or services, and/or schedule the next appointment. Many dentists even outsource marketing and appointment reminder services to ensure their lobbies are always full of waiting patients.

Dentists are FAR better at delegating and outsourcing than marketing/advertising professionals are. The marketing/advertising industry has adopted the false belief that the owner(s) needs to do everything. Or, if they do delegate, they hire in-house personnel to assist with operations, client management, new business, and service delivery. Ironically, despite convincing their clients to outsource marketing/advertising tasks that aren’t within their client’s core competencies, agency principals themselves outsource hardly anything. As a result, they spend most of their time doing things they aren’t very good at, managing full-time employees who are liabilities – not assets- when unbillable, and wondering why they aren't as happy or as successful as they thought they would be.

Marketing/advertising agency owners must learn how to delegate and outsource more. They must become far more comfortable relying on contingent workers with discrete subject matter expertise to compliment ideally a very narrow set of in-house capabilities. Doing so actually reduces overhead expenses and increases job satisfaction.

If you’re margins are low and your frustrations are high, reconsider not only what you’re doing, but how you’re doing it. The most successful ad agencies and freelancers I know have taken a page out of the dental playbook by maximizing the time they spend on the things they do best and outsourcing everything else.

Do dentists outsource so much because they are wealthy and want to enjoy lots of downtime, or are dentists wealthy and enjoying so much free time because they outsource? I think it's the latter. As a small agency owner myself, I've used tools like www.communo.com to boost my profits and quality of life through outsourcing. I encourage you to be be open minded enough to try it out.