Is your practice providing everything that you want or desire? Do you have enough new patients?
Do you do the kind of dentistry you want to do?
Is your income where you want it to be?
Do you get enough time off and enough vacation time?
You can take control of your business to make it provide what you want and need. By focusing on specific success factors, you can build a rapidly growing multimillion dollar dental practice.
Dentistry is a great business model that provides what most other “regular” businesses cannot. Just think about dentistry for a second. Anyone who is alive is your “customer”.
A cardiologist can’t say that because not everyone has heart problems. A plastic surgeon can’t say that because not everyone wants plastic surgery. But, everyone who has teeth, or who doesn’t have teeth, is in need of your services.
Dentistry is also somewhat of a monopoly. In most states only a dentist can own a practice. Also, the state’s dental governing body controls the number of dentists allowed to practice in that state.
Although dentistry is a good business model, it is very difficult to build a successful multi-million dollar practice. Unlike other businesses, the owner dentist is not only responsible for running the business, but must also generate the revenue for that business.
It is therefore hard to find the time to “work on your business” because you must always “work in your business”. Since you are generating the revenue for the business by doing dentistry, it is hard to find the time to work on all of the other aspects of growing your business.
There are many “pieces to the puzzle” that we need to master to grow a multi-million dollar practice. We can simplify the business of dentistry “puzzle” by organizing things into 8 major interrelated success factors. They are:
1. Number of phone calls (marketing) – When you market your practice, the phone should start ringing from potential new patients. How many phone calls are each of your different forms of marketing generating? This is a number you need to know in order to evaluate the performance of your different marketing efforts.
2. Call conversion (new patient appointments) – How many of these marketing generated phone calls are being converted to new patient appointments? Unfortunately, we find that the average conversion rate for dental offices is only 30%. This means that 7 out of 10 new patient phone calls are not being scheduled. The conversion rate should be 80-90%. This will increase the number of new patients, increase your revenue, and decrease your marketing costs.
3. Number of new patients – How many new patients do you need every month? A good healthy number is around 70 per month, per doctor. If you calculate your average revenue generated per new patient, then you can easily determine how many new patients you need to reach your revenue goals.
4. Converting new patients into long-term patients – It is extremely important that our new patients become long-term patients. The lifetime value of a patient is much more important to the health of a practice than just the one month or six month value. We must always exceed our patients’ expectations with an awesome experience every time they come to the office to retain them long-term.
5. Maximizing the number of visits per day (efficiency and capacity) – You only have so many hours in the day. Increased productivity in a practice is not necessarily about speeding up the dental procedure. It is about working with greater efficiency, which creates more time to do more dentistry. This can be from more effective scheduling, more treatment rooms, more staff, efficiency in procedures, etc.
6. Maximizing value per visit (range of services) – Are there other dental services that you can incorporate into your practice? This could be you learning new procedures instead of referring, or having a part-time specialist come into your practice. Your patients are happy that they don’t have to go somewhere else and your revenue increases.
7. Case acceptance rate (team case presentation) – The average case acceptance rate for dentists is 23%. It should be 80%. This will happen when your team becomes more involved in presenting the dentistry to your patients. Two other important factors are: 1. Not teaching your patients dentistry. It doesn’t work because all buying decisions are emotional not intellectual. 2. Presenting too much dentistry too soon; creating treatment plan “sticker shock”.
8. Repeat business (hygiene recall) – Having a strong hygiene program is crucial to the health of your practice. You should be pulling a lot of “undone dentistry” out of your hygiene recall. Most folks prefer to do their dentistry in stages, over time, for financial reasons. You should see around half of your restorative revenue coming out of hygiene.
If you can improve your performance in these key areas, your practice will experience rapid growth.
You are probably wondering how you are going to find the time and energy to get better in all eight of these factors. How much better do you think you need to be in each of these areas to experience rapid growth in your practice?
If you try to think about getting better in all of these at once, it can be overwhelming. The good news is that you don’t have to get 100% better at all of the 8 success factors. In fact, you don’t even have to get 50% better … or even 30% better in every area.
Believe it or not, if you get just 15% better in only five of these interrelated factors, your practice revenue will double!
Why is this? The effects of these interrelated success factors on your business are not additive; instead they multiply on top of each other. They are exponential because they are interrelated. It works like compound interest … 72/n = % per factor needed to double.
So, if you get 15% better at marketing to generate more phone calls, and you increase your incoming call conversion to new patient appointments by 15%, your case acceptance by 15%, the number of patient visits per day by 15%, and your hygiene recall by 15% … you will double your practice revenue!
It also works if you do better in some factors than you do in others. For instance, if you get better in one factor by 25%, three factors by 10%, and another factor by 17% (25+10+10+10+17 = 72), this will also double your practice revenue.
This makes the process sound a little easier and is a little more encouraging, but I encourage you to get help from another dentist who already has a multimillion dollar practice. If you could build a multi-million dollar practice by yourself, then you probably already would have.
Having help from someone who has “been there, done that” will dramatically decrease the amount of time it takes to be successful. This will save you a lot of time, money and stomach lining!
Turn your practice into a multi-million dollar business that provides you, your patients and your staff everything they have always wanted.
Dr. Mike Kesner’s practice ranks on the Inc. 5000 list as one of the fastest growing companies in America. He is author of the book Multi-Million Dollar Dental Practice and CEO of Quantum Leap Success in Dentistry. Dr. Kesner teaches dentists across the nation how to have more production, higher profits and less stress. No hype…just results! Learn more at www.QLSuccess.com.
