Not working to increase revenue holds dentists back from realizing the ideal practice
Let’s break down how you spend your business life: You probably spend anywhere from 25-40 hours a week working on your patients while stealing glances at your iPhone to see if you missed any e-mails between appointments. You spend a few hours managing the books, about an hour talking to your staff, a few hours talking to patients and following up after procedures. You take an hour or two each day to have lunch.
You schedule your patient time so you have time for a personal life, which is spent watching television or reading, going to the gym, enjoying friends and family, relaxing and surfing the Internet. But how much time do you actually devote to actively creating your dream business, or increasing your practice income? If you’re like most of us, it’s not very much.
Skip the Trial and Error by Implementing a Proven System
It’s not that you’re wrong for doing things the way you always have, or for focusing strictly on treating your patients. Patient care is the heart of your practice, but unfortunately, it doesn’t create much opportunity to attract new patients. How can you expect to grow your business if you’re not devoting time and money to bringing in new patients?
Consider anything that you’ve invested in – learning to play a musical instrument, mastering the ski slopes or golf – even becoming a dentist. All of those things required trial and error and frustration until success was finally achieved.
But when it comes to things like increasing patient flow, we don’t expect or want trial and error. We want our skill at dentistry to be the driving force. We expect that as long as we treat them well, our patients will continue to refer friends and family to us.
Stepping Out of Your Comfort Zone to Attract New Patients
Anything that’s worth having requires work. Increasing practice income is no different. That’s why the first thing you should do is assess whether increased income is truly your top priority.
If it’s not, that’s okay. Just know that your future success depends on a steady flow of new patients, and that the best way to attract new patients probably isn’t what you think. If you want to grow your practice, you need to put yourself out there and do something you haven’t done before.
The Solution:
Allocate time to finding innovative solutions. Remain open to new ideas and make good business decisions, and you can make your practice turn around in ways you never thought possible.
Implementing common sense solutions that complement your existing business practice, seeking out marketing coaches and business mentors who have already successfully implemented innovative solutions, shifting your perspective from tried and true into trying new things. If you want to increase your practice income, you first need to create the opportunity for it to improve.
If you never innovate, never implement effective new systems, and adhere like super glue to what you think you already know, your business may run smoothly, but you’ll never build the ideal practice you’ve always wanted.