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Howard Speaks Howard Farran, DDS MBA, MAGD Publisher, Dentaltown Magazine

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Quality, Service or Price – Pick Two

Howard Farran, DDS
MBA, MAGD
Publisher,
Dentaltown Magazine
 You can’t be all things to all people; especially in business. You simply cannot have the highest quality, the best service and the lowest price; it is completely impossible! As a small business owner, you can only truly focus on two of these features.

Let’s take a look at McDonald’s. I know you have eaten at McDonald’s. Why do you eat at McDonald’s? For health reasons? No way, José! You eat there because you get great service (e.g.: a hamburger in under five minutes) at a really great price! What if McDonald’s introduced a $20 hamburger and tried really hard to add quality to its mix? It would fail in a minute! McDonald’s is a multi-billion-dollar business because it focuses on two things; convenient service and low prices. McDonald’s forgoes quality so it can focus on price and service!

Let’s look at Costco or Sam’s Club. They sell you the high-quality name-brand products at the lowest price. The floors are concrete, the stuff is stacked 20 feet high, and your body is constantly in jeopardy of getting run over by a forklift! The place looks like a warehouse (because it is a warehouse), the check-out lines are a mile long and you’ve got to camp out at the service desk for days until someone comes over to help you! Do you think that’s good service? No! Costco and Sam’s Club are billion dollar companies because they focus on two things: price and quality.

Now, how about BMW? You know you want one! What does BMW focus on? You guessed it: quality and service. BMW wants to make a car so great with the best customer service available that it forgoes price. BMW knows a certain segment of the market doesn’t care about price; they want to buy an awesome car so they can feel hot, cool and sexy. See, you can’t be everything to everyone!

So what is quality? What does quality mean to you? I’ve met hundreds of dentists who tell me that they run a high-quality family practice. Um, OK. What is a “family practice,” anyhow? What would a non-family practice look like? Someone who only works on orphans? Isn’t everyone from a family? Saying you are a family practice is a given since everyone is from a family. But getting back to my original point, if I ask 100 dentists where they rank in quality, 90 percent say they are in the top 10 percent. That just isn’t mathematically possible.

When it comes to dentistry, our patients do not even know or understand “quality.” Have you ever finished a root canal and the patient asked you if he could see the final PA X-ray? I’ve been in practice for more than 22 years and it has never happened to me. Not even once! What do you think the patient would ask? “Aren’t you a little short of the apex?” or “Are you sure there wasn’t a fourth canal?” or “Did you miss the MB2?” Yeah, right! Patients only know two things, “That hurts,” and “What does it look like?” That’s it! But when you study why patients think you are high quality they often mention stuff like CEREC 3D or E4D CAD/CAM technology; Diagnodent or PerioLase lasers; laser bleaching like Zoom; a completely paperless office; and digital X-rays! More than 18 percent of new patients pick their dentist based on technology, according to the UCLA Anderson New Patient Study conducted and paid for by New Patients, Inc. (for more information visit www.newpatientsinc.com).

What about service? Do you have a million-dollar staff? Do they dive for the ball? Do they play to win? Do they love to talk to the patients? I want a staff that talks so much if you taped their mouths shut they would scream to death! In my practice, Today’s Dental, the front office desk is a low counter with two different places to pull up a chair and sit down so you can talk to your patients. I cringe when I think of all the dental offices I have seen that build a wall between their receptionists and their patients. You know what I am talking about – those offices where you walk in and you’re greeted by a sliding glass window, and you’ve got to knock and be made to feel like you’re bothering them! That set-up is downright asinine!
Howard Live

Howard Farran, DDS, MBA, MAGD, is an international speaker who has written dozens of published articles. To schedule Howard to speak to your next national, state or local dental meeting, email colleen@farranmedia.com.

Dr. Farran’s next speaking engagement is August 14, 2009, at Keating Dental Arts in Irvine, California. For more information, please call Colleen at 480-718-9914.

Seminars 2009
August 14 • Irvine, CA
Keating Dental Arts
Call Colleen at 480-718-9914

August 23 • Litchfield Park, AZ
Arizona State Dental Hygienists’ Association Meeting
www.asdha.org
602-254-7210

August 28 • Fresno, CA
Fresno-Madrea District
Dental Society
fmdds@cvip.net
559-438-7284

September 18 • Fort Worth, TX
AGD Fort Worth
www.tagd.org
817-924-1111

September 22 • Iselin, NJ
Asteto Dental Lab
www.asteto.com
559-438-7284

September 23 • New York, NY
Dental Resource Alliance
973-812-2188

September 25 • Ft. Lauderdale, FL
Nova Southeastern University
www.dental.nova.edu/ce
954-262-5327

Oct. 3, 4 • Honolulu, HI
ADA Annual Session
We also target ethnicity at Today’s Dental. Our office is in Phoenix, Arizona. More than 25 percent of the people who live within a five mile radius of our office speak Spanish. I have two staff members who are fluent in Spanish! This is a great service! Go to Google.com and type in your zip code plus “demographics” and see who lives in your back yard. Do they speak Spanish? French? Farsi? Cantonese? Mandarin? Focus on ethnicity. More than six percent of new patients pick their dentist based on ethnicity and language capabilities, according to the UCLA study.

What about price? Do you have the lowest prices in town? Do you take insurance? Do you take PPO? Some of the biggest companies in the world – Southwest Airlines, Wal-Mart, IKEA – are solely focused on price. Price is the number-one deciding factor for males in choosing a new dentist, and more than 33 percent of new patients, overall, pick their dentist based on price, according to the UCLA study. If you’re going to focus on this element, you need to position your price the right way in order to get more new patients. Other factors for new patient decisions were distance (12 percent), dentist recognition (10 percent), extra services (six percent), experience (six percent) and being a specialist (six percent).

So now that you know that you have to pick two of the three – quality, price and service – you have to get that message out to your patients by communicating with them in the office, internal marketing, or advertise these features in your external marketing such as your Web site, patient newsletters or direct mail.

(A quick thought on external advertising: Web site effectiveness is skyrocketing! Last month Google.com had more than 60 million searches in just 30 days! Wow! The Yellow Pages are being slaughtered by the Internet. Ask yourself and your patients, “Do you search on Google or the Yellow Pages?” and you will see for yourself that the Internet rules!)

After you have chosen two of the three attributes to focus on, and you are ready to rev up your marketing to three to five percent of collections, then you are ready to grow your practice. According to Mike Massotto (www.staffdriven.com), one of the top in-office dental consultants in the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut area, there are only three ways to grow your practice:
  1. Attracting more new patients,
  2. Increase the frequency of your existing patients being seen, or
  3. Having patients spend more money when they are under your care with services such as bleaching and/or veneers.
Once you have done all of the above, you then need to focus on the four commitments we need from our patients.
  1. Having the patient say yes to something
  2. Having the patient sign something
  3. Having the patient pay something
  4. Having the patient schedule something
Just remember, once you’ve picked your game plan, you’ve got to stick with it! Consistency in care, message and practice philosophy go a long way in maintaining a steadily growing practice. Remember, again, you can’t be everything to everyone, but you can pick your target market and then set yourself apart from the rest of the pack!
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