After working with more than 500 dentists since 2007,
I’ve found commonalities of personal and practice behavior that
can make one’s life a breeze or a tornado. An informal survey
showed that few dentists do more than half of these 24 beneficial
items. How many of these do you do?
Personal
Home:
- Do not engage your computer’s silicon personality unless
you have a 15-year old or know what Minecraft and Call
of Duty means. Find a geek through a nearby university’s
IT department. They love upgrades, glitches and blue
screens. Go to any local campus directory, enter “technology
support” in the search box, call and inform them
of your needs.
Expect to pay $50-$75
per hour—it will be the best
money ever spent.
- Stage home upgrades and major repairs. Two major
areas of doctor financial weakness are expensive mortgages
and frequent upgrades. Keep expensive projects to
no more than 2 percent of your home’s value per year. If
you spend $25,000 on a new bathroom for your
$600,000 home (4 percent), wait two years to undertake
your next project.
- Maintain your heater, AC and sewer system. Set up for
semi-annual inspections and maintenance for HVAC
systems and for annual sewer/septic tank cleanout.
- Hire a yard/landscape service unless you love yard work.
Doc, you make at least $250 per hour at the office; do
not complain about paying the guys $250 per month!
Auto:
- Buy reliable if you drive more than 10,000 miles per year.
Consumer Reports has yearly data on auto reliability
(www.consumerreports.org/cro/cars/index.htm). Don’t
waste shop downtime on status. Jaguar, no; Acura, yes.
- Always receive regular maintenance at 5k or 7.5k miles.
This step can save many hours of breakdown headaches
and costly repairs.
- Hire a great mechanic. Find either through a friend’s referral
or through AAA at aaa.com.
Financial:
- Know your retirement number. A good approximation
can be easily calculated at www.dentaltown.com/
Dentaltown/Article.aspx?i=274&aid=3668.
- Get organized with a dedicated area for finance in your
home with proper files and storage. More information is
in my 2012 Dentaltown Magagzine article at www.dentaltown.
com/Dentaltown/Article.aspx?i=308&aid=4190.
- Go over your retirement accounts yearly with your financial
adviser. If self-directed, pay for an annual session
with your discount broker.
- Talk annually with your spouse or partner about all
loans: mortgage, auto, credit card and school loans. Talk
logistically about prudent changes. More debt strategies
can be found in my 2013 Dentaltown Magazine article at www.dentaltown.com/Dentaltown/Article.aspx?i=314&
aid=4270.
- For any purchase more than $1,000, have both you and
your spouse approve before purchasing. If you can’t contact
that person, wait to buy!
- Annually evaluate these problem financial areas (and
budget them!):
- Auto payments
- Clothing
- Dining out
- K-12 private school
- Home improvements
- Vacations
For more information on cash flow, go to my January 2013
Dentaltown Magazine article at http://www.dentaltown.com/Dentaltown/Article.aspx?i=311
For additional helpful family financial tips, go to LearnVest
at http://learnvest.com.
Family Relations:
Having lost a wife to cancer, I know how important it is to
show appreciation to family. You may not have another chance.
- There is no upper limit to how many “I-love-you’s” are
appropriate. Show appreciation to family members just
as many times as you pet your critters each day.
- Educate your children on your finances. They don’t need
to know every loan rate you have, yet the more they
know about debt and saving, the less chance they will live
with you in their 30s.
- Have a “date night” away from the kids. This has been a
marriage-saver for many.
- Have a “family night” with the whole family. Not only
might this improve a marriage, it sometimes promotes
teenagers to actually talk.
Office
- Meet monthly with your financial staff member to
scrutinize:
- Accounts receivable
- Insurance payments past due
- Problem patient accounts
- Number of new patient exams
This will take an hour. I estimate that 2 percent of all dentists
do this. Other than having too many employees, this is the
dentist’s major source of lost money. Doctors who have this
meeting normally have less than one month’s total AR, collect
98 percent after PPO adjustments and have much less risk of
embezzlement.
David Harris, in January 2012 Dental Tribune, said: “There
have been several studies by the American Dental Association
and others. Collectively they suggest that the probability of a
dentist being a fraud victim in his or her career is between 50
and 60 percent. However, such statistics are necessarily low
because there is an unquantifiable amount of fraud that is
never detected or is detected but not disclosed.”
For late insurance and patient payments, make a definitive
plan of action.
New patients are your practice’s lifeblood. If numbers are
down, evaluate. If you decide on professional help, consider
Scheduling Institute at www.schedulinginstitute.com or hire a
practice consultant well versed in the new patient experience.
- Monitor supply inventory. Take a look at the Henry
Schein Cubix system. It is a high-tech procurement system
that monitors electronically. Alternatively, have your
equipment supply representative use a bar-code system.
Doctors lose thousands of dollars per year on either
redundant or out-of-date supplies.
- Have your equipment supplier perform monthly maintenance
on your compressor, vacuum and dental units. This not only prevents costly down time, it will put
you first in line when you need an emergency repair.
- Have your computers monitored and protected professionally.
Digital Dentist provides an all-in-one
solution for your dental office’s IT needs with information
back-ups, network security and HIPAA compliance.
Go to TheDigitalDentist.com.
- Look at the office checkbook. If the end of month
balance is gradually going up, your “house” is probably
in order. If the balance is stagnant or going
down, there’s a leak. Go immediately to your front
desk financial person. Have her or him investigate.
- Call patients who had more than a simple filling each
night. I hated this, yet dutifully performed the task
each night at 7 p.m. There were normally three or
four calls that took five minutes total. Some docs like
to chat, but the patients don’t expect it. The benefits:
more referrals and you seldom get calls late at night
from your patients of record. In 25 years, I got
exactly zero late calls.
- As with #14, there is no upper limit to how many
“thank-yous” are appropriate in your office. Show
appreciation to your patients. Remember, they have
a choice of where to spend their money. The most
positive experience a dentist can provide a patient
comes from painless injections and thank-you’s. It’s
amazing how many patients reciprocate kindness.
Add just one of these items to your list and see the difference
it makes.
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