Dr. Don Deems, the Dentist's Coach - Free Newsletter: Recession Proof Your Dental Practice?

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Recession Proof Your Dental Practice?
October 12, 2008

If you’re anyone like me, you’ve probably been bombarded with salespeople, reps, and gobs of mail and phone calls from people wanting to help your “recession-proof” your practice or sell you goods or services that will essentially help you “make more money”.

If you’re anyone like me, you’re probably not interested in spending money now because you’ve seen your investments go to pot, and you’re realizing that our screwed-up economy is going to take years to heal, and that means we’re going to have to work harder and smarter for a long time.

Here’s an important checklist for you and your team during these difficult economic times:

1. Slow down your exams and relationship building with your patients. They are just as tight with their money as you are with yours, so they need to completely understand what their needs are before you present their treatment.

2. Don’t ‘nickel-and-dime’ patients by tacking on services you never charged for before, or adding products they don’t really need or want, or taking X-rays more often than recommended for their condition. Patients resent that, and they will leave your practice.

3. Use down time to train, train, train, and meet, meet, meet, and brainstorm, brainstorm, brainstorm. Your staff cannot do the job you want them to do without proper training.

4. Have a “Growth Conference” with each staff member. (Email me for a copy if you’d like.) Spend time talking with them how they can take a bigger and more productive role in your practice. Any improvement is helpful.

5. Stop the anxiety. The world is not coming to an end, and your practice won’t, either. MAKE the time for an outdoor walk each day or some sort of exercise to improve your mood and attitude.

6. Challenge yourself and your team to reduce overhead by at least 10% without reducing the quality of care.

7. Resist expensive training courses that purport to add “highly attractive” services to your practice. For example, offering Lumineers does not require a large investment of your time or money. Just do them, or look to a lab like Glidewell who offers Vivaneers and can guide you through the simple process of doing them without any extra expense. Programs like Invisalign are not easily or cheaply integrated into your practice no matter what anyone says, and unless you love ortho AND think people are dying to spend money on ortho now AND think you will have a flow of ortho patients, don’t do it – at least for now. (Just ask your friendly orthodontists about the booming ortho business.)

8. “Stay with the cowboy that brung ya’”. That’s a Southern saying to stick to what you know and be faithful to a solid course of action. Reacting to the current state of [dental] economics in an overboard fashion won’t help you.

9. What do you have in your practice already that you’re not fully utilizing? We dentists always like something different, we’re gadget freaks, and we forget about what’s right in front of us. Run a report of what procedures you’ve been doing the past 6 months and see what you’re not doing. What’s out of sight is out of mind.

10. Clean house. Use downtime to tidy up your office. Your office must make a great impression on people when they come in, and orderliness and cleanliness are usually the most important things. You just don’t need fancy art, opulent furnishings, and the like. Just getting your carpet thoroughly cleaned, dusting the furniture, and cleaning the windows will do wonders.

11. Examine how you and your staff can be more time efficient and effective. What electronic technology do you have at your fingertips that you’re not taking advantage of? How can you stop redundancy in your paper/chart handling? How is time being wasted?

12. Establish a policy on overtime and avoid letting staff members “pad” their time sheet over the course of a week or two. Be firm with this. Your payroll is leaking. Consider cutting back hours. Most dentists are surprised to experience the same amount of production in 4 days as opposed to 5, with less overhead. Some can even do it in 3. Sitting around waiting for a phone call is depressing and unproductive. If you’re going to be at the office, be productive – and that doesn’t mean just having a mouth to work on!

13. Get in contact with patients who haven’t been in for a check-up. Remind all your patients to use unused dental insurance benefits before the year ends.

14. Stop emotional spending. Like food, spending money can be something that satiates us. Take notice how you are responding during these times. Your mindful awareness will serve you well here.

15. Go very slowly on the “big” cases. It takes some people more than a year or two to make up their mind about a large treatment plan. Don’t run them off just because you’re too aggressive.

16. Make sure you are doing everything you can to work with people on completing their treatment plan in phases, if possible, and offering them financing options. (But don’t play bank.)

17. Grow yourself. Attend local personal growth retreats, read self-help books, or hire me! (Seriously) Many dentists can't find the time to do the personal and professional work when they're up to their eyeballs in busy-ness. Now's a good time to focus on working with a coach - not when it's too late.

18. If you’re over-staffed, now’s the time to make the change. Nothing works well when you’re over-staffed. It’s time to get rid of the “low man on the totem pole”.

19. Everything’s negotiable. Yes, everything. You’ll save more money that you thought possible. (Prove me wrong.)

20. Buy my new book! These free newsletters take time and money!

For more ideas, solutions, and discussion for your particular situation, send me an email, give me a call, or better, hire me! (Hey, I can really help!)

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