Success Strategies for New Dentists
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Building Your Foundation
Are you considering opening a new office and wondering if it is the right move for you? Are you a new dentist starting your practice and feel overwhelmed?
Do you want to establish a fee-for-service practice and just don’t know how to do it?
Have you had challenges finding the right staff? Is your advertising or marketing bringing you the type of patients you want?
Being an entrepreneur — because, after all, that is what an independent doctor or dentist is — can be challenging, but it can also be a gratifying personal experience. Clearly, you have worked hard to get where you are in your practice, made enormous investments, and spent a lot of time.
As your team specialist, we can provide special services to help you build and support a growing practice. We offer various tools, training, and coaching to help you overcome some of the common challenges of setting up a new office or growing an existing one. Whatever your dreams are for your business, it is important to build a foundation that will help you fulfill them in a predictable and timely fashion. We can help.
Realizing Your Dream
The three most important questions when starting a new practice are:
Who are you?
What do you do best?
Who do you want to do it for?
Your vision and dreams will be built around the answers to these questions. For many, these are not easy questions to answer, but crucial ones that require a great deal of thought and personal discovery. The answers to these questions will help you hone in on your identity, your marketplace, your personal X-factor of success, and your path for growth.
One-Page-Strategy
Your one-page strategy is like a road map to where you want to go in your business. Using the transportation metaphor, arriving at any destination requires: planning (choosing a mode of transportation, getting tickets, and finding a dependable car, etc.); paying close attention to your progress (using a good map, watching the road, or depending on a pilot to fly the plane); overcoming obstacles (such as weather, road closures, or turbulence); and using realistic metrics (like speed, number of stops, and traffic). Growing your practice and achieving your dreams is no different.
A one-page strategy will provide you with the answers to:
- Who — daily requirements
- When — schedules evaluated weekly
- How — actions required evaluated quarterly
- What — your goals for the year
- Where — targets evaluated 3-5 years
- Why — your purpose during your life
- Should — addressing core values forever
We can assist you in answering these questions and building a plan that is realistic, understood by your team, and sets out the road map for where you want to take your practice.
Your Team of Specialists
Closely collaborating and forming alliances with specialists is an integral part of your success and growth. But you must choose carefully and consider important variables. A specialist’s participation with dental insurance or their office location, however, are actually not critical in growing your practice, supporting you in your professional life, and creating loyal patients. Instead, factors such as the following are important to consider in choosing which specialists to add to your team:
- Area of expertise
- Availability for emergencies
- Approach to difficult patients
- Staff and their service to patients
- Treatment philosophies
- Payment options
- Services for patients with special circumstances
- Surgical results
- Educational programs
- Communication style
- Implant system
Thorough and mutual understanding is crucial in optimizing treatment acceptance, creating loyal patients, and preventing complications. Which is why we offer our referring dentists a culture of transparency, friendship, and support to help you grow your practice and build patient loyalty.
Acquiring New Patients
When you are beginning your practice, acquiring new patients is crucial to generating cash flow, sustaining operations, and building your foundation. We have several programs to help you acquire new patients and get your business started. We can:
- Feature your practice in our online vehicles
- Host you as a guest speaker or contributor to an article to help you gain public recognition
- Feature your office on our website as a trusted practice
- Team with you for patient prospecting programs at the community level
- Direct patient referrals right to you — we meet a lot of people who need good dentists
Discover Your Strenghts
Thriving practices are practices that recognize they cannot be everything to everyone. Too often, when dentists decide to engage in procedures outside of their expertise and training, they realize a decline in productivity, an increase in stress and complications, and, ultimately, lost patients. Practice management and business development experts consistently recommend that companies discover their true strengths, products, or services and focus their strategies, marketing, and team energy on developing those strengths for success.
Successful and growing practices are ones that have identified their true strengths, found what they are the best at providing, and developed strategies to streamline those services for ease, predictability, and profitability — while minimizing stress and loss. It is important to define your strengths for success and share them with your team and the community.
Working 'On' Your Practice
Successful and growing practices constantly work ‘on’ their practice rather than ‘in’ their practice. Working ‘on’ the practice consists of establishing detailed systems and protocols that is understood and followed by all members of the team. These benchmark protocols create a turn-key operation that lets you focus on your patients and treatments rather than managing your staff and practice.
Key steps:
Identify every operational aspect of your practice. Examples are telephone answering, scheduling, patient reception, forms, communication between front and back, office set up, opening, closing, etc.
Write a ‘How to’ document on each operation or task. It should be detailed and clear so that it can be easily followed.
Begin office training with your staff reviewing each item. Modify as necessary to make it work for everyone and easy to follow.
Make the documents easy to find and refer to. This may be in form of a manual or data in a specific software that allows easy search.
Revisit key operations regularly and ask if it’s working. You can always improve on systems and make it better and more efficient. Ask you staff about their experience and feedback.
Finding and Retaining the Right Staff
Once you have made great sacrifices and investments in setting up your new office, hiring the wrong staff can cause more damage and lost opportunities that any other factor. Your team is crucial to helping you achieve your goals and dreams.
But how do you find the right person? Who is a right person for you? How do you discover the true strengths of potential applicants and avoid hiring a person who could be very costly to you?
Utilizing the strategies of many successful companies in finding the right people, we have had great success in hiring the right staff, putting them in the right position on our team, and setting course for the right destination.
Dr. Kazemi can share these techniques and protocols with you to help you find the right people and save enormous amounts of wasted time, resources, and money.
Effective Marketing
Public relations and marketing are important components for any dentist starting a new practice. You are looking for new patients and you must market yourself and your practice in order to attract them. However, financial resources may be limited at this time, and advertising may have already proven ineffective (as is very often the case). The new rules of PR and marketing must be understood and followed for success in today’s world of information overload. Internet technology has spurred amazing marketing and growth for many practices…and it costs absolutely nothing.
Dr. Kazemi has evaluated many marketing campaigns and developed a program for maximum return on investment. This program builds on what is unique and special about your practice and shows you ways to match your unique offerings to the niche patients who are looking for them.
Implant Growth Strategies
Dental implants have forever changed dentistry and what we can offer patients in the way of dental health for life. It is a startling fact that more than 70% of dentists do not offer implants as a viable and realistic treatment option; but this creates a great opportunity for you. When you are starting a new practice, establishing and developing dental implant services can greatly contribute to your growth.
We offer a step-by-step program to our colleagues on developing a thriving dental implant practice. We also have programs that you can use to help your team learn the facts about dental implants and how they can play an important role in your patients’ treatment acceptance.