Bobbleheads are a lighthearted and memorable gesture that shows your appreciation while keeping your practice top-of-mind. These personalized bobbleheads are sure to spark smiles (and maybe even a little desk envy).
CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER
There are a lot of theories floating around about success. Literally thousands of books have been written on the subject, each with their own insights or approach on what creates and drives success.
You could spend a lifetime studying everything, digesting all the advice and terminology. Most people don’t have the time or interest in doing that. So, when faced with success limitations, they often attribute the cause of their limitations to certain popular myths about what it takes to be successful.
The myths of success
Myths are driven by highly publicized stories or examples in our news or culture. Think about everything you have heard or read about the success of tech billionaires, blockbuster movies or shows, superstar musical artists, etc.
The myths behind these stories often emphasize that their success has been driven by one of the following:
Certainly luck, talent, skill and perseverance can all be great contributors to any success story. It’s a romantic story where the underdog succeeds against all odds. But it’s equally true that lucky breaks can be squandered, talent can be undiscovered, skill can be unrewarded, and perseverance can be a no-win scenario.
The truth of success
Taylor Swift is arguably the most popular and successful musical artist in the world right now. Her Eras Tour generated over $2 billion in ticket sales, the highest of any artist tour ever. If you look at her rise to stardom, you can find elements of luck, talent, skill and perseverance throughout. There’s no arguing that she is gifted.
But the truth of success, behind that fairytale story, is that there is a highly efficient and effective business “machine” driving her success. And that machine is driven by systems and people.
No business can succeed without systems that structure and focus energy and actions to achieve goals and results. It doesn’t matter if you have some of the success myths supporting you. There are lots of clinically excellent endodontists who are in practices that are vastly underperforming their potential for growth and success.
Systems and practice success
Endodontics is a relatively simple business model. The doctor’s time utilization is key, and the financial success of the business is straightforward. Because most cases are of similar value, practice success fundamentally depends on the number of cases that a doctor completes in a day, month and year.
If you know what your overheads are, and you know what level of success and profitability you want to achieve, then it is relatively simple to calculate what your revenues need to be. Then it’s all about your systems:
Most doctors have the clinical ability to complete enough cases to achieve their highest goals. However, they haven’t built out the practice systems to make that level of productivity easy and stress-free. If you are feeling limits around growth and financial success, the solution is focusing on your systems.
ENDO MASTERY PRACTICE COACH
Careful onboarding of a new team member is a vital step to preserving and improving team success and building a foundation for long-term employee retention.
Industry trends show that dental assistants tend to stay in their role 1 to 5 years and admin team members stay 2 to 6 years on average. However, companies with a successful onboarding program can boost long-term new hire retention by as much as 82%!
New team members arrive with unfamiliarity about the practice’s procedures, expectations, and team culture. They also arrive with a skillset that can have gaps for their new job role, or assumptions that your practice works the same as previous practices where they have been employed.
An organized approach to onboarding a new hire is the best way to set them up to be successful in their new job, as well as to smoothly integrate them into your current team dynamics.
Here are 8 tips to make onboarding more effective:
OWNER & CO-FOUNDER DDS, MS, ABE Diplomate
I don’t have a crystal ball to predict the future, but I do know that whenever there are questions floating around about the direction of the economy, people get concerned.
Business owners especially get concerned because, as we know, we are the last to get paid in our offices. We take care of our patients. We take care of our team. We take care of our operating costs. What’s left over—our profits and personal income—is where the economic cycles are felt.
Whenever those cycles are putting downward pressure on profits, there is a reflexive instinct to tighten the belt. I call it the phenomenon of hard costs.
Hard costs are real, tangible costs in our cashflow. They are not like the tax optimization expenses such as depreciation that our accountants put in our financial statements. Those are expenses we don’t feel or write checks for as they occur.
But team salaries, supply bills, utilities, occupancy costs … that’s real money. There is a gut feeling from signing checks every month. When we feel pressure financially, the act of signing checks prompts us to scrutinize cash outflows for every scrap of savings.
Economic temptations
I don’t know any doctor who is consciously or deliberately negligent in managing their practice expenses. Expenses almost always have a level of due diligence attached to them, and so renewed scrutiny often produces meagre results.
Take supplies for example. You could rigorously examine every supply order and pour over online catalogs for suppliers to find the absolute rock-bottom price available for every item. In the end, how much savings would you find? Some, yes. A substantial windfall? No, because your past supply choices were not unreasonably costly.
Where doctors are often tempted to economize are things that seem discretionary in the moment or can be put off temporarily. Marketing costs for example. You could pull back on marketing expenses and just coast for a while. But remember, coasting is only as fast as the stream you are in. Coasting a slow economic stream prolongs the situation.
The hidden cost that you miss
The phenomenon of hard costs is that because it’s real money, it’s the first thing we look at even though the potential gains are generally small. So where are the big gains found?
The answer is in your opportunity costs. Opportunity costs are found in your practice’s potential for growth, but it hasn’t been acted on yet. Because it’s revenue growth that hasn’t been achieved, doctors don’t think of it as a genuine cost.
An easy example is the value of one case. If you take your collections for last year and divide it by the number of cases completed last year, you get an average “business value” for each case.
That average value bundles in all the little procedures and fees that happen routinely in the practice, but we don’t usually count as a “case”. For the sake of this example, let’s assume the average business value of one case is $1500.
Most coaching clients, when we begin with them, are routinely completing 3 to 5 cases per day. But when we do a patient flow timing and schedule analysis, we find that usually 30% or more of the doctor’s day is open time or under-utilized time. That’s a very real cost because time is money.
That level of inefficiency in the schedule means every doctor could complete at least one or two more cases per day if they were scheduled properly, had the referrals coming in, and had their team optimized to support them.
One case a day for 180 days per year works out to $270,000 more revenues. Two cases per day yields $540,000 in revenue growth. Almost all those revenues flow to the bottom line as increased profit.
Start thinking about your opportunity costs as hard costs, like money you are leaving on the table and walking away from. That’s where your attention and focus should be. Bringing in that money vastly outstrips any other avenue of business savings.
