I could have talked to Dr. Howard Farran for hours. Thank you Howard for my fifteen minutes of fame. My friends and family that listened to the podcast made me feel smarter than I actually am.
I feel like I share his enthusiasm and his mentality when it comes to owning your business and doing dentistry. And it's not a normal thought process...actually...it goes against the normal dental waves or current that are embedded in your brain during dental school. But I never said I was normal.
But if we all kept the same mentality in dental school throughout our careers, we wouldn't be very successful at all.
Think about it.
You had 2 appointments per day during your third and fourth years of dental school. Those appointments were 3 hours long and you usually got one filling done, a crown prep, an extraction, or the next step in your denture or partial case. Can you imagine only seeing 2 patients a day??? Or those appointments taking 3 hours each (sometimes longer)???
We graduate school and immediately start improving our skills, get faster, try new procedures, and fill up our schedules with a whole day of patients in 30 to 60 minute intervals.
And then we stop....
We get comfortable and dare I say...lazy...
We don't schedule as many patients in a day as we could, and if a patient cancels or no-shows, sometimes we are ok with that; it's an extra break or longer lunch. Maybe I can get out early and go golfing. For the patient's that do show up, we don't do as much work as we could on them. If a patient has two fillings on the top left, let's say #13 and #14, and two fillings on the bottom left, let's say #20 and #21, why not do all four in one appointment and be done??
Excuse #1: It's too much for the patient to tolerate
Solution #1: No it's not. If you were the patient, would you rather have an hour and a half appointment at the doctor's office and be done with treatment in one visit? or... have two one hour appointments that are spaced out about two to three weeks apart that actually take up even more of your time in the long run?? You have to include a 2nd commute to your office, another wait in the waiting room, getting numb.....again (everyone's favorite part), waiting for the anesthetic to kick in, as well as other miscellaneous time that your patient spends waiting in the chair. Doing four fillings instead of two fillings is not going to cause the patient more discomfort. You actually have less discomfort overall because there is only one post-operative recovery instead of two.
Excuse #2: It's too costly for the patient
Solution #2: That's not their problem, it's yours! There are all types of financing options you can give your patients if they can't pay in full the day of treatment. The vast majority of your patients can qualify for financing to pay for treatment $500 or less. I sure hope you are not charging the patient more than $500 out of pocket after insurance for 4 fillings, and if you are, your prices may be too high. Another option I do occasionally (in the right situation) is if the patient cannot pay in full, but they can pay for a good portion of their co-pay, I will do the treatment and bill the patient for the remainder of the balance. Worst case scenario is you are out a small amount of money if the patient never pays, but some money for treatment is better than no money at all, and that will decrease your overhead.
Let's look at an example of that:
Let's say your patient's co-pay is $250 and the total cost of the treatment is $1,000. So the insurance is going to pay $750. The patient can only pay $150 today. DO THE TREATMENT AND BILL THE PATIENT FOR THE OTHER $100! If you reschedule that appointment there's a chance that patient may not come back to your office. Even if the patient never pays you, you still are going to collect $900 for the treatment you provided, and last time I checked, $900 is more than $0.
Let me know if you have other excuses as to why you don't want to do extra work, or same day dentistry, and I will give you personalized solutions. The point I'm trying to make is that there is no excuse as to why you cannot work a little harder in order to improve your bottom line and make your office more successful. When it comes to lowering your overhead, you have to do many little things in order to see a big decrease. By treating one more tooth everyday, you can lower your overhead by at least 1-2 percentage points for the year.
Let's look at an example of this:
Let's say you have a million dollar practice, so you produce $1,000,000/year. If you decide to treat one more tooth per day (an extra filling, an extraction, or 1 more quad of SRP, etc..), let's pretend that brings in $150 extra income per day on average for your office. If your office is open 4 days a week, that is an extra $600/week of production. That is $2,400/month of extra production. If your office is open 48 weeks out of the year (you take 4 weeks off throughout the year for vacation/holidays) that is almost $30,000 of production for the year. If your overhead stayed the same, at the end of the year, you would increase your profit from $350,000 to about $370,000 (assuming your office has the ADA average of 65% overhead). The best part is your overhead would actually decrease by almost 3% giving you even MORE profit! And if you don't have a million dollar practice, this is one simple way to get you there.
One more easy suggestion to see a change in your overhead is to have more office hours available to see and treat patients. Our office is open 66 hours a week, the typical dental office is open 30-40 hours a week. Now, I'm not working that 66 hours a week. I have other partners working when I am not. We typically work about 35-40 hours a week on average. That means we have 26-36 more hours per week to do dentistry than a typical office. The more dentistry you do, the lower your overhead is, plain and simple. By just opening your office one evening a week or one Saturday a month, you can increase your production dramatically while watching your overhead get smaller and smaller. You will also see your new patients and total active patient numbers increase. More people will want to come to your office because you have more convenient hours available for them. Your patients will thank you for being open when they don't have to call off work or pull the kids out of school to go to the dentist. Friday night and Saturday morning are our busiest times of the week! Evenings after 5pm are crazy busy!!! Just try it if you don't trust me.
Every single dentist can do these two things starting TODAY to become more successful. All it takes is a little more hard work from you. So let's get to work.
For more tips and strategies on business and life please check out my other blogs and podcasts available at http://dds-dad.blogspot.com/. Not all my posts are about dentistry, some are about the general principles of running a business, saving for retirement, keeping a positive mentality, and being the best parent and spouse you can be while having a full time career. I want to help you improve in ALL areas of life, not just what you do between people's nose and chin.