I speak with a lot of dentists every day and we talk about scheduling opportunities in their practice and ways that they can be more efficiently scheduled and have more consistency throughout every day. The one thing I hear more than anything else is that the office does not have a goal set. There are several reasons why you should have a goal set and why you should be scheduling to achieve that goal daily.
1. Your office, your dental practice, is a business. A business needs to know their overhead percentage, how much it costs them to be open, and be able to plan on a set amount of income every month. If you are not tracking these things and you are not planning to meet and exceed a goal, you are planning to fail.
2. If you work with the thought process of I want to serve my patients and not worry about the money, you need to have an excellent plan in place for where the bill money will come from if you come up short that month. This type of thought process does not allow for inclement weather days, equipment breakage, or vacation.
3. Not paying attention to your numbers does not make you a more service focused dentist. It makes you a poor businessperson. I get it, you did not go to school to learn how to run a business. But knowing your numbers and what your overhead is helps you make sound decisions when it comes to hiring, raises, equipment purchases, and time off. I know many offices where things come up – for example the doctor is sick, but doesn’t choose to stay home, primarily because they can’t afford to pay their team if they didn’t have any money coming in. Again, that is poor planning and poor business practice.
4. The money that the practice takes in reflects the quality of service that you provide. There is no way for your practice to grow year over year if you do not have a plan in order to do that. Setting an annual goal with growth built in and then reverse engineering down to an hourly goal will allow you to see the potential for growth in your practice.
Setting an annual goal for your practice and breaking it down into hourly for doctor and hygiene is not a difficult process. If you need help or would like to see how to get started, feel free to reach out and i will share a production planning tracker with you.
If your office needs help with Phone Skills and Customer Service training or Goal Setting and Scheduling to Goal, Dental Concierge Coach can help. Contact us for more information on coaching and innovative team training.
