Dr Phillip Palmer, April 2016
In the famous economics class ‘The Wealth of Nations’, Adam Smith described the workings of a pin factory, and how, if each individual worker focused on a simple part of the production rather than the whole, it would create a dramatic increase in efficiency.
In dentistry today, we are all doing something much more complex than creating pins, yet the principle is certainly worth following.
Over the years of helping dentists, I’ve met many who choose to run their entire practice themselves. To some this might seem like an insane idea, yet they somehow ‘manage’ to be their own clinical team, front office team, hygiene team and assisting team.
Many dentists would be terrified if they had to answer their own phones, or setup their own trays.
Yet, when it comes to other areas of the business, they try to do it all themselves.
I believe that if you are willing, you can, in fact run your entire practice yourself. I actually met a prosthodontist once who told me he had solved all the problems of running a practice: he fired everyone and decided to do it all himself. He worked on patients alone. During breaks he would pick up messages and return calls, he did the sterilization himself, set up trays, sent accounts and did the banking, etc, and he was very proud that he no longer had any problems! The fact that he couldn’t see more than 1 or 2 patients a day didn’t seem to bother him.
However in my case, to preserve my own sanity, I chose to outsource a great deal of the tasks outside of the clinical work, and ran a fairly profitable practice!
From my own experience, there are several key tasks that you need to either get a really good handle on (which can be a full-time job in and of itself), or decide to outsource so you can better focus on what you are the expert in - the dentistry.
Human Resources
HR is by far one of the most stressful parts of managing your business. One of the key factors to a successful business is employee satisfaction. Without engaged, happy employees, productivity, profit and enjoyment goes down very quickly.
I have personally found that working with dental industry HR experts takes the guess work out of managing your team and can limit any potential problems and litigation with unhappy team members.
For example, here are some of the ways you can outsource your HR activities:
- Team selection processes and core interviewing skills
- Employee contracts that meet all compliance standards
- Up-to-date HR policies and procedures
- Performance reviews for team members
- The exit process for non-performing team members
Team Selection and Recruitment
The ever changing landscape of the dental industry can be a minefield when it comes to proper recruitment and team selection. However, knowing the proper hiring process gives you an edge when selecting a quality, sustainable team for your practice.
Having a solid recruitment process in your practice requires these attributes:
- a deep understanding of the dental market
- a clear definition of the requirements of each role within a dental team
- access to a database of candidates
- a resume sifting process, conducting interviews and reference checks.
Financial Tracking, Reporting and Benchmarking
Probably the biggest blindspot for most dental practice owners is financial clarity. They may see a lot of cases on the books, they may be billing for large amounts, but that doesn’t mean they are keeping much of the profit.
To successfully manage this part of your business, you need direct access to up-to-date numbers. In my experience, it seems that the most successful dentists tend to do this by using the following tools:
- Cloud-based dashboards
- Customizable management reports,
- Dental-specific analysis tools, such as unit and cost-per-hour tracking
- Automated transactional and payroll tools
You might want to also consider real-time, online bookkeeping. Doing it this way means no more waiting until after year-end to know whether you are on track.
Another area that needs professional advice is marketing. Dentists assume that because they are consumers, they can do their marketing themselves. You wouldn’t try to do clinical work without training, so why try to do your own patient acquisition?
I have found that working with dental industry marketing experts has helped me and many dentists I know to grow their patient base.
The key areas of marketing that you need clarity and support with are:
- Tracking your monthly and yearly marketing spend
- Having a clear content strategy with frequent relevant updates
- Being aware of the latest online marketing trends, and knowing what is useful
- Testing new and different approaches as the market changes
The goal of any marketing consultant should be to provide a holistic view of your practice, and track the success of every marketing dollar you spend.
One of the key trends I have seen is that more and more businesses are sticking to their core business strengths and then outsourcing whatever they can to experts in other fields.
These four areas are all worth having some knowledge in, but also referring to experts about.
In most cases, the savings from outsourcing these functions are considerable and can have a major impact on decreasing stress, smoothing out the day-to-day life of a dentist.
For many dentists, the knowledge that these functions are being handled properly enables them to sleep better at night.
Prime Practice have been helping dentists and their teams to grow successful dental practices for the last 20 years. Having previously been a successful dentist for over 30 years, founder and Chairman of Prime Practice, Dr Phillip Palmer has a deep understanding of all the different management, financial and professional issues that face dentists and is regarded as Australasia’s leading expert on the business of dentistry.
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