The 5 elements of scaling your dental practice - Part 4

By Dr Jesse Green

When it comes to scaling a dental practice, it can be a bit confusing knowing where to start. You obviously want to grow as a business and see more patients, more cases and more profits... But this is virtually impossible without having the fundamentals in place to ensure your business is built on strong foundations.

And of course, in the process of growing, you want to make sure that you’re actually working towards goals that feel fulfilling to you. After all, what’s the point of a much bigger practice if it doesn’t ultimately provide you with more time, more money and more meaning?

So if you’re looking to scale your dental practice, it’s crucial to do some pre-scaling planning and ensure you have these five key elements in place. They’ll help ensure your growth is sustainable and that you scale into a practice and a life you love.

1. A winning strategy

To take your practice from profitable through to scalable, you need a strategy that sets you up for success.

You want a strategy that allows you to be the chess player, rather than the queen or king on the chess board. It’s not about having all the moves; it’s about making sure you can utilise all the pieces on the board for best effect.

That means instead of getting caught up in the minutiae or stuck on the details of daily practice life, you take a step back and look at the big picture. You want to take a bird’s-eye view of your business, your goals and the assets at your disposal and then make decisions from there.

A rock-solid strategy should always include: • Long term outcomes with a clear end goal; • Measurable results that you can use to stay accountable; and • A SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses,

Opportunities, Threats) analysis and regular risk analysis and mitigation.

If you don’t have those, then you don’t have a strategy.

2. Be building assets

If you’re encountering bottlenecks and roadblocks in your practice, it’s almost certainly due to a lack or inefficiency of assets.

Every headache, frustration, pain in the neck, pain in the backside, burr in the saddle, pebble in the shoe (or whatever you want to call it) can be traced back somewhere to a deficiency of assets.

Assets can come in the form of physical assets such as your fit out, plant and equipment, chairs, etc. You can also have database assets, so patient bases, or if you’re a specialist, referral bases. Or even intellectual property assets, team assets, financial assets.

Long story short, there are numerous different types of assets you’ll require in your practice.

In order to keep the practice running smoothly, you want to constantly be building and growing assets.

But as the practice owner, your ultimate responsibility is to turn those assets into cash flow. This is really the best measure of business efficiency and effectiveness.

Once we’ve got that net cash flow, there are a few things that we can do with it. Keep it, pass out a dividend, reduce debt, buy more assets... What’s important is that you have the option and the freedom to do so.

3. Self-managing team

Every dental practice owner dreams of a self-managing team. A team that knows what to do in their role, that doesn’t need to be micromanaged, that comes with “batteries included”.

You want to be recruiting and retaining people who are very clear about what tasks they need to complete, how to do them and they go ahead and do them well. Without the right people, you’ll continue to struggle with key person risk, taking time away from the practice and increasing your capacity.

One of the greatest sources of leverage you’ll have in your practice is a team who is really engaged, onboard, knows what to do, are a culture fit, can do what they need to be able to do and they’re clear on what success looks like in their role.

And honestly - I am yet to meet the person who comes in to work knowingly, willingly, trying to do a poor job.

Most people are internally wired to want to do their job successfully and want to do it well. But the fact is, sometimes they just fall short. When this happens, you need to run diagnostics on where things have gone awry. Is there a miscommunication in the priorities and expectations of the business? Have you failed to onboard and equip them adequately? Or are they simply not capable of delivering what you need them to?

Once you have clarity on this, you’ll find yourself much closer to having a selfmanaging team.

4. Data driven decisions

In dentistry, we’re trained to look at the evidence before making an educated and informed decision. We look at the data, we diagnose the issue, we compare

different courses of action - we measure twice and cut once. But why don’t we apply that same intellectual rigor when it comes to our dental practice?

Most dental practice owners will lean towards gut feel and intuition over datadriven decisions. Of course, there’s a time and a place for going with your gut (especially when it comes to your values, workplace culture and the people you work with). But it’s always worth your while verifying your intuition with facts and figures.

Now, there’s no one size fits all definition of the data that you should be keeping, but you should consider what’s right for you and your practice. It might be profit per chair, EBOC (Earnings Before Owner Compensation) per chair, EBOC per employee, case acceptance rates, marketing ROI, etc.

What’s important is that you identify the KPI’s that align best with your strategic goals, identify the data that will help you make informed decisions, track your metrics regularly and then USE IT.

Remember - you can’t manage what you don’t measure!

5. Effective implementation

The most common thing that stops us from implementing plans is simply having too much stuff to do.

We all know what it’s like when you have an endless to-do list, a dozen different projects in the works and way too much mental clutter bouncing around your head. The key here is to do less, but do it better. You need to accept the fact that there are lots of things you could and maybe even should be doing - but you can’t always do it all.

Sometimes you have to let some of the fires burn, because other issues are simply more strategically important and actually require your time and attention much more. And that can be really hard. It does go against our nature, especially amongst dentists who are typically perfectionists and hate giving up that control. But once you master it, it will ultimately set you free.

If you can’t learn to let things go, you will constantly be playing whack-a-mole with an endless stream of tasks and jobs.

So, you see why those five elements are key to scaling your dental practice as effectively as possible. If you can: 1. Develop a winning strategy; 2. Build the right assets; 3. Cultivate a self-managing team; 4. Make data-driven decisions; and 5. And implement effectively. ...then you’re miles ahead of the competition! This ensures that you’re scaling sustainably, profitably and mess-free.

About the author

Dr Jesse Green is a leading business coach for dentists, author of Retention and a sought-after speaker. Jesse shares his knowledge, skills and experience as a practice owner through the Savvy Dentist Academy, a digital hub of training, events, courses and resources for practice owners who want to earn more and work less. Get your personalised plan to grow and scale your practice by booking a Practice Growth Call. To book, call the Savvy Dentist team on 1300-668-384 or visit https://savvydentist.com/growthcall