A non-conformist’s view on growing a dental practice with Jeff Gladnick

Quotes & Notes:A non-conformist's view on growing a dental practice with Jeff Gladnick

  • I do think it is a trend [of digital marketing] that will continue and I do think it is a national trend.
  •  If you really want to do it right, you really should track it.
  • It’s useful to have a website so your patients can download forms so that they can have a very easy way to contact you. People have an expectation you will have a website or some way to contact you.
  • Websites are kind of viewed as a piece of technology and a bar of professionalism. It’s like you hand print your business cards on your home printer. You could have a state of the art office, everything could be beautiful, but you cheap out on the business cards.

Take a smartphone, and bring up your office’s website. It should at least function. You should be able to navigate the site and click links. If you have flash you need to change that ASAP.

  • All the sites we make are responsive, which means they will adapt to a smaller screen. If you want to impress them or convert someone who is doing research, you want to update to something that is responsive.
  • Anything that you can promote that will positively impact the impression of the practice [should be put on social media].
  • There are two kinds of ways that your practice will appear on google search results and one of them is the local results. Part of the algorithm is the number of reviews and the quality of reviews that you have.
  • One thing we want them [clients] to do is have a video for every single service or procedure that they provide. And what we want them to tell patients is what is their unique training for this? What are the special materials they use?
  • The other two bits of content that we’ll twist our clients’ arms is a little bit are pictures and copywriting.

If you would like to learn more from Jeff Gladnick, you can go to greatdentalwebsites.com, call his company with (415) 814-0078, or email him at [email protected]. You can also find him on Dental Town.

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Why every dentist needs a Mastermind group with Dr. Graham Dersley

Quotes & Notes:dersley

  • Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.
  • The possibility of being more of an entrepreneur as a dentist was really what made me go that direction [of being a dentist].
  • There are a lot of different models in dentistry. I think one of the more popular models is to build your practice the first few years to a comfortable size and then basically maintain that exact practice for 30 years and then retire. For me, I just sort of push into the next level every year and try to do something new and different.
  • I found a good, nice visible location, and then had a marketing plan in place, made it into a nice attractive practice, had smart insurance participation. A lot of planning went into it to make the practice look different from the rest of the practices out there.

For the dentist that is struggling to get into ownership, one of the things that I have learned over the years is pursue multiple paths at the same time.

  • In my career, the two points of frustration were definitely when I first graduated residency and did not have a very successful associateship path and during my first startup, I really learned a lesson. I found this area that had high demand, but they’re really weren’t commercial spaces available.
  • What are you scared of? The little old lady who has been wearing her dentures for decades and just wants a nice replacement.
  • What have been the main barriers to your success? Mainly mindset, what’s in between my two ears.
  • Go out there find the dentists that you want to spend time with.
  • Dr. Graham Dersley would recommend that every dentist read How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, as well as The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox.

If you would like to learn more from Dr. Graham Dersley, you can reach him with his email, [email protected] or even on Dental Town. If you would like to learn more about the meeting you can go to practiceonfire.com where you can also register.

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Secrets for a happier practice with Judy Kay Mausolf

Quotes & Notes:Secrets for a happier practice with Judy Kay Mausolf

  • There is lots of research out there to support that happier people are more productive, more successful, they are actually smarter, more creative, and they are healthier.
  • When I work with teams, probably the most important thing that I work with is shifting their mindset on ownership of the culture (the happiness culture): that each one of them is a part of that culture and they own that.p

We have to understand that happiness is our choice.

  • Someone does not create our happiness for us. Situations, circumstances, or people don’t have that power over us.
  • If someone comes in and they are in a bad mood and we let them bring our energy to their level, that’s who’s going to control it, that’s who has the power.
  • If we have a few happy people that are willing to stay, they can actually help motivate happiness in the practice.

I always carry three things that I am happy about in my pocket. For me, it’s my health, my family, and my career.

  • There are positive celebration patterns that help us feel happy very quickly, which is why I wrote the book Ta-Dah, Get Happy in 5 Seconds or Less. Take a moment to breathe, to regroup to run to the lunchroom, crank on some music, dance, and sing, those are positive celebration patterns.
  • Probably the biggest positive celebration pattern is the victory pose. When runners run across the finish line and throw their arms up in the air. And they don’t do it because someone says “Hey when you run across the finish line, throw your arms in the air for it will look great for the photo.” They don’t do it for that. They do it out of celebration for a victory of making it across the finish line.
  • I start out my day with “Good things are happening today.”

If you would like to learn more from Judy Kay Mausolf, check out her two books, Ta-Dah, Get Happy in 5 Seconds or Less and Rise and Shine. You can also go to http://www.practicesolutionsinc.net/ or email her at [email protected], or even call her at (612) 701-4922.

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Power up your Practice Ownership with Jayme Amos

Quotes & Notes:Power up your Practice Ownership with Jayme Amos - RD Podcast

  • You know you are ready to do a startup when you look in the mirror and know you are ready.
  • A startup is not right for most, because a startup is complicated and it is challenging.
  • Are you a born fixer or a born creator?
  • If there are things, even outside of practice ownership, that are important to you in life, go do it.
  • We always say that a soon to be startup doctor should be very, very intense and intentional about what they want.

One of the most compelling tools is what we call the ideal patient. If we know exactly the kind of patient that you can serve best and you want to be caring for, then we can try to attract those kinds of patients.

  • We go into three different categories: personal vision, clinical vision, and financial vision.
  • There are as many different clinical preferences as there are dentists in this world.
  • Pretty buildings are not all they are cracked up to be in dentistry.
  • There are really good banks that are great at specific startup visions.
  • I think it needs to be at least 2000:1 (patient to dentist ratio) to create a little bit of a safety net.
  • Your landlord, I believe, is much more important than the dollars per square foot or even the town you are in.
  • I am a bit of a contrarian, but I think signage doesn’t matter at all unless you have amazing signage.
  • If you believe you need to say five operatories then each operatory should need on average between 400 to 450 sq feet.
  • Having a break room when possible is that important.
  • When possible you should have a sterilization center that has an in and an out.
  • You can get a free copy of Jayme Amos’ book Choosing the Right Practice Location, at howtoopenadentaloffice.com/free.

If you would like to contact Jayme Amos or find out more, you can go to idealpractices.com and listen to his podcast. If you would like to apply to have Jayme and his team help you with a start-up practice you can go to howtoopenadentaloffice.com/apply.

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Dentists’ Stress Reduction Series with Jen Butler: Part III

Quotes & Notes:Dentists' Stress Reduction Series with Jen Butler: Part III

  • When it comes to coping methods for stress, the first thing is to know what kind of stress you have.
  • Coping with stress is not a blanket where I am going to use coping method A and that is going to impact all of my stress.
  • There are three kinds of stress, one which is situational stress, and this is the most common and most popular type of stress that people have in their lives.
  • Coping methods for situational stress is somehow related to efficient time management.
  • The next kind of stress is psychological stress. Psychological stress is the kind that is most avoided because psychological stress is that type of stress which is self-induced. It is typically the really bad negative, yucky things we say to ourselves.
  • The only appropriate coping methods for psychological stress are psychological activities. The best thing to do to reduce your psychological stress is to increase your curiosity.
  • The third one is physiological stress, which is the kind of stress that people aren’t even aware that they have. And physiological stress is that kind of stress directly related to health and wellness.
  • It’s about diagnosing the problem and the appropriate solution for the condition.
  • A lot of times what stresses people out really comes from that psychological stress because most people have skill in the situational stressors.
  • The top five coping methods are breathing, humor, mindfulness, connecting with people, and make sure you get a minimum of eight hours of sleep.

If you would like to learn more from Jennifer Butler feel free to go to her website, jenbutlerpartners.com. Follow her on Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/JenButlerCoaching.

Go to our Contact Page and ask questions to be answered on a later podcast interview.

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Dentists’ Stress Reduction Series with Jen Butler: Part II

Quotes & Notes:Dentists' Stress Reduction Series with Jen Butler: Part II - RD Podcast

  • Time Pressure is number one. Time pressures can be ranging from too much time to not enough time.
  • Patient demands [the second dental stressor], meaning patients that demand your time, demand discount, demand your personal cell phone number, demand you open on Saturdays.
  • The third dental stressor is uncooperative patients.
  • The fourth dental stressor as identified by studies is the high level of concentration and focus that dentistry requires.
  • The last one is team issues. When you have any more than two or more people working together you are going to have an issue. Issues are normal in a relationship.
  • In the first episode, we talked about the first step, know your stress. Now we are talking about the second step, assess your stress.
  • When someone assesses their stress and know their stress response, they can then look out for their own stress triggers.
  • That stress threshold is very unique to each individual.
  • You can’t be proactive if you are in the crud of things.
  • Stress is a biological reaction that we have implemented over.
  • The most documented, the most researched, the most effective coping method to do for us, is breathing.

If you would like to learn more from Jennifer Butler feel free to go to her website, jenbutlerpartners.com. Follow her on Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/JenButlerCoaching.

Go to our Contact Page and ask questions to be answered on a later podcast interview.

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Dentists’ Stress Reduction Series with Jen Butler: Part I

Quotes & Notes:Dentists' Stress Reduction Series with Jen Butler: Part I

  • Jen Butler Inc. is a company that is dedicated to helping dental professionals to reduce stress from working individually with doctors to the office manager or just throughout the whole team.
  • When stress is present in the practices, regardless of who has the stress, it is pervasive throughout the office.
  • One thing that is really important to understand is that people see stress as external events, situations, or problems.  They don’t see it as an internal response to something.
  • There are four key indicators that are really unique to the dental office and stress: 1) Having a loss of energy 2) loss of focus 3) loss of concentration and 4) forgetfulness.
  • Stress comes out, and it comes out in body language, it comes out in those non-verbals, it comes out in just the way we carry ourselves.

There are three main ways that stress can show itself: physically, mentally, and emotionally.

  • The challenge with a dental office is that when someone is stressed it requires everyone else to pick up the slack.
  • The first step I have with every client is to know your stress. You can’t change what you don’t acknowledge.
  • Be mindful of what we personalize.
  • There are no problems, only opportunities.

If you would like to learn more from Jennifer Butler feel free to go to her website,  jenbutlerpartners.com. Follow her on Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/JenButlerCoaching.

Go to our Contact Page and ask questions to be answered on a later podcast interview.

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15 ways to actually measure dental practice success – Part II

Quotes & Notes:15 ways to actually measure dental practice success - Part II

  • At the beginning for start-up practices, typically the biggest thing you can do for your practice is work on getting new patients in, upping the revenue for your patients, upping your effectiveness and efficiency.  Overhead goes away.
  • KPI, if you google it, you will see, the key performance indicator is a financial measure or non-financial measure that goes towards measuring how well an institute of business is doing.  They can tell where you are right now and tell where you are going to be going.
  • We find a lot of practices really struggle with having their hygiene team be aware of what they to be producing, what they need to be offering the patients.
  • We typically say that 75% of efficiency is what you need to be looking at, which means that three out of the four patients reschedules.
  • Every business has a life cycle. There is the growth stage, where it will be an upward slope. Most practices will have six months spurts because that is when you see your appointments come back in for a second time and plus the new appointments coming in. There will be the maturity stage, which means you will still be growing, but you are not growing as fast as in the growth stage. And then eventually there will be stagnation and decline.
  • We usually say for new practices, the magic number to keep growing is somewhere around one to two new patients a day per working dentists.
  • If you are busting that number out of the park, and you are continuing to see your practice not grow, I guarantee that you have an issue with getting people rescheduled back in.
  • This [numbers for accepted cases] is more of a mental grasp, or some type of note, some type of shorthand to write on a piece of paper or spreadsheet that you carry around with you all day. If you are really looking at this number, and say I presented this much money to this person, track that in some type of format, come back in six months and see what has happened.
  • Being able to tell them [patients] about the problem, and tell them what would happen if they don’t solve that problem, and then offering them the solution is very very important. You have to talk in their terms.
  • If you know it is a financial problem, then there are solutions out there: financial payment plans that you can adopt, in house payment plans, etc.
  • Another more powerful communication method is by asking questions at the beginning. You would be surprised at how many people can talk themselves into something just by asking the right questions.
  • Sometimes it is a software problem where the people up front aren’t entering the information correctly for you to track your AR effectively. If the number is that high, and the software is correct, nine times out of ten it is a process problem.
  • A lot of practices will do their billing on Friday, so the patients will get it on Saturday, and then they have two days to forget about it.
  • At one point I was looking at a practice, and I noticed how much they were paying on credit card fees. That one practice, just by changing the phone number that that card service calls, basically is going to save almost $10,000 a year. When I saw that I thought that this must be a problem everywhere.
  • Ideally, you want five percent so that if there are twenty appointments, only one of them is broken.
  • You need to understand your capacity in order to know what you are trying to strive for. If you only have three ops, then your capacity is way different than what a ten op practice is.
  • An active patient is a unique patient that has been seen for the past 18 months.
  • We really tell most practices to strive for 45% in GP practices for a net take home.
  • A lot of people base this (adding new dentists to their practice) by how tired they are . . . The biggest mistake we see is that they don’t know how much this relief is costing them.
  • It really doesn’t make sense to bring in someone as a partner until you get to around the one and a half million points. That means you have a strong base and control over your overhead.
  • Some fast-growing practices I see spend almost nothing on advertising. At the same time, some fast-growing practices I see spend a lot on advertising.

All of the most successful practice owners I have ever met were master marketers in their own right. They understood that marketing is a very essential part of any business.

  • “We always overestimate the amount of change that can occur in two years.  We always underestimate the change that can occur in ten years.” -Bill Gates
  • Marketing and advertising, there are two facets to it. There is external, which is any patient who has never been in your practice before, and there is internal, which is making sure your patients stay your patients.
  • To learn more from Jonathan Van Horn, you can email him at [email protected], visit his website, dentistmetrics.com, or even find him on Facebook or Linkedin.

Download Jonathan’s FREE KPI resource at dentistmetrics.com/relentlesskpi.

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15 ways to actually measure dental practice success – Part I

Quotes & Notes:

First, download Jonathan’s gift for our podcast listeners:  DentistMetrics KPI Guide

  • downloadIf you are not leveraging your time with your CPA, in order to get the most out of them, then you are going to have to find that time elsewhere.
  • No one’s ever going to have the absolute pinnacle business.
  • We focus on the business in order have that have the maximum amount of returns for the owner because in the end it is going to be what funds everything else.
  • There are multiple different approaches you can take with marketing; you can do a shotgun approach, you can do a sniper-rifle approach, you can do a machine gun approach, you can do a lot of different approaches. A lot of this is testing to see what is working.
  • In a dental practice, if you are not at absolute capacity, then it makes absolute sense to fill to your capacity.
  • Try and set your schedule up like the day that was most productive.

KPI –  a key performance indicator.  KPIs can be financial, they can be non financial, they can be actions, they can be a lot of different things.

  • The main number that we look at is two fold. Number one we look at net productions, number two we look at the total of those wages and salaries plus benefits plus payroll taxes. Then we compare that to the revenues. We do not include family of the owner, we do not include the owner’s salary, and we also don’t include associates in this.
  • Startups for the first few months will not really be in these numbers. These numbers really start kicking into gear when you get into around $650,000-800,000 dollars in revenue.
  • There are a few universal truths in the world. One of them is that they think they are busy. Strangely enough, everyone also thinks that they are efficient.
  • The practice as a whole has to really start heading towards a specific path. They have to be set on some type of system, some type of game-plan to be able to get them to that number. Typically when we talk about that it is going to be a production type goal.
  • If you are in a not competitive market then you are probably not in a very good market.
  • We have a general rule on five percent on supplies. There are some practices that aren’t going to be able to reach that.
  • It is very difficult to trade convenience for money. There are a lot of places that you can buy supplies, and they can frame it in a way that you feel like you are saving money but in the end, if you are paying $26 for a barrier, and you can get it someplace else for $19, then you are paying seven dollars more.
  • If you are thinking about saving 20% on your supply costs each year, and your supply costs are $10,000 then you are better off going out and finding three new patients to replace that $2,000 dollars.

Five percent (for supplies) is the number that we always strive for, and for some practices this is not attainable, but you would be surprised at what you can obtain by trying.

  • For the hygiene rule of three, the first level we have is that hygiene typically contribute about a third of the production of the practice. The second three is that the hygiene department should typically be compensated at about a third of net productions or collections in some fashion. The third one is that you like to have less than three hours a week of unscheduled hygiene per hygienist.
  • If you would like to learn more from Jonathan Van Horn, email him at [email protected], visit his website, dentistmetrics.com, or even find him on Facebook or Linked-in.

Again, you’ll find Jonathan’s FREE KPI Guide here:  http://dentistmetrics.com/relentlesskpi

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Is your practice website working for you? . . . or against you?

Quotes & Notes:Is your practice website working for you? . . . or against you?

  • Dentists don’t know what they don’t know, and they are not at fault.
  • Don’t have a dark website.  It’s gloomy and also a dark background with lighter text in front of it, it’s very hard for the eyes to read the text.
  • Get rid of those slider images on the front page.  Let’s pick your favorite one, and stick with it.
  • Over fifty percent of people searching for a local business are searching on mobile.  Find out if your website is mobile [optimized].

The goal of your website is to get a phone call.  The most important thing on your website is your phone number.

  • Put a call to action to the left of the number.
  • The name address phone number has to be the exact same across the web on any occurrence anywhere on the internet.
  • You have five seconds when someone lands on your website.
  • There is no need to have a big image on a dental website.  The main images on the first fold should be one of the dentist, or maybe one of your staff, or even one of your office.
  • On the home page, there should be one or two paragraphs on really what is specific about your practice.
  • A potential patient wants to see your work. It has to be something that will show you will take care of them.

55% of the average internet person leaving within the first 15 seconds.

  • Just imagine a 60-second video.  You just got them on your page for 60 seconds. Google is going to like your page.
  • Another one is an info-graphic.  Infographics are great for they cover quite a large amount of information but in an image format.  If you designed the info-graphic to lead them down a slippery slope, that’s going to keep them on the website longer.
  • If it [videos] looks too commercial, it is going to turn people off.  They might treat it like an ad.
  • People need to be led by the hand.  There should be a call to action at the bottom of every page. Always put the phone number there.
  • The About Us page should have a picture of every one of your staff, and then have them write a hundred-word blurb about them.
  • Dentistry is a medical profession and it is a personal profession.
  • I want every dentist to think when was the last time they updated their website? There are reasons to update your website on a monthly basis.

If you would like to learn more from Mike Pedersen you can go to www.aznetmarketing.com and even get a free report.

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