If You Want To Have a Successful Dental Practice Just Do This One Thing….

Those of you who know me or know of me know that I attribute a lot of my success to the fact that I’m a contrarian.

What that means is that instead of following the herd, or the blind lemmings, what I’ve done in my business career is that I’ve researched things from outside the box and then applied those things to what I’ve been doing.

And that’s been a game changer for me.

On so many occasions.

You all know my story… I purchased my dental practice in 1987 and tripled its turnover in the first five years of ownership.

But from 1992 to 1996 my practice turnover flatlined… and when I asked people in the industry about this they told me:

“Don’t worry David. You’re doing OK. Your practice is doing double what the average practice is doing.”

But I knew my practice could be doing better…

I understood what people were telling me.

But I knew that each week I had unfilled appointments in my schedule, and I knew that this was something that needed my attention.

And then I met…

And then I met a dentist whose practice was doing DOUBLE what my practice was doing, and I said to myself:

“He’s no better than me.”

And I said to myself:

“I need to find out what he’s doing, and I need to do that in my practice…”

And so that’s what I did…

I found out what he was doing, and I did that in my practice, and the rest, was history.

In the following six years from 1997 to 2002, I tripled the turnover of my practice.

And in the next five years after that, from 2002 to 2007, I doubled the turnover again.

And from 2007 to 2011, I added another $1M to my practice turnover.

And I did all of this…

And I did all of this by looking at things that were working well in other industries, and applying those concepts to dental practice operations.

Dan Kennedy once said…

Dan said, that if ever he wanted to start a business that was going to be successful, he would look at what all the other businesses in town [that were his competition] were doing, and simply do the opposite.

He said this because he believed that if what they were doing was successful then the success would be apparent.

And because the lack of success was more apparent, then it was easier to learn WHAT NOT TO DO and to do the opposite, than to duplicate what was being done, and hoping that it might be remotely successful.

Oh and by the way…

In 2006 when remodelling and renovating my dental practice, I took a chainsaw to my reception desk and surgically removed the upstand from it … so that this archaic piece of furniture from the 1960s could be buried into an historical oblivion where it belonged…

Recently I heard about…

Recently I was told about a patient reactivation process that was being recommended to dental practices by a dental scheduling software company because:

“This is what most other dental practices are doing”

When I looked at what the programme involved I was horrified, because there was no way this programme would ever achieve any degree of reactivation based on the time frame of communication recommended. And the methods of communication…

The other thing that this reactivation process failed to address was the problem of what was causing patients of the practice to fail to complete their necessary treatment in the first place?

Were the patients not being explained the consequences of their inaction?

Were they being allowed to leave the practice without booking another appointment?

Were patients being allowed to cancel appointments and not reschedule?

Medical doctors will tell you that it’s easier to prevent illness in the first place rather than to cure illness after it has occurred.

It’s the same with reactivation…

There is no magic script out there that you can phone or SMS a dental practice patient that’s going to magically have 100% reactivation success.

And of course if your reactivation process involves SMSing overdue patients rather than phoning them and talking to them, then yes, that will be more popular with dental staff, but will also be way less successful in getting overdue patients to reschedule.

But staff will like the SMS option because nothing sends staff running for cover more than when the practice owner says:

“You know what? We need to jump on the phone and start doing some reactivation…”

The other couple of things about this recommended reactivation process…

The other thing about this recommended reactivation process was that:

• the contact intervals were spread out over an eternity of time
• the message was totally practice focussed and was 100% NOT PATIENT FOCUSSED. [and that won’t ever reactivate anybody]

But it was supposedly what most other practices were doing…

Go figure….

Really?

I don’t think so….

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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?[email protected]