Dr Phillip Palmer, July 2006 - According to an ancient curse, whoever the gods wanted to destroy, they first punished with 20 years of success. Without a doubt, long business growth and success usually leads to excess and complacency. And when practice growth comes to be taken for granted, it covers up a multitude of sins: inefficiency, bad business practices, a certain amount of carelessness, and/or a lack of foresight.
In Australia, we’ve had about 15 years of practically uninterrupted business and economic growth, led by extraordinary performance of a multitude of small businesses, with most being in the provision of services (such as dentistry). But inevitably, unless the powers that be have found the secret of creating eternal boom (an economic factor that has been unable to ever be maintained in any country), the time will come when the country slows down and people tighten their belts and slow down their spending money on discretionary items such as dentistry.
When this time comes, the sins of growth will come home to roost and be counted. First you’ll hear about slow quiet times anecdotally from dental labs, from salesmen of high–price ticket products and occasionally from fellow practitioners. Whether or not you go down the same path at your practice will depend on your approach to decision-making now.
I am convinced that many dental practices (those with good leadership and intelligent decision-making) are far from being at the end of a period of growth. In actual fact they are just in the early part of a ‘golden age’. So what are some of the secrets of intelligent decision-making? As a student of leadership and management in business, general business as well as the business of dentistry, here are 6 rules to assist you in making those intelligent business decisions.
Rule 1. Try not to make monetary decisions from a place of largesse.
Don’t ever show a sense of fiduciary largesse to your team. Don’t make purchases as if there are oodles of money for anything and everything. Staff will almost certainly respond in kind, by not effectively evaluating and showing cause for purchases and by asking for raises. I am not saying that you have to show mean-spiritedness or tightness, but behave so that everyone understands that all business decisions have to be properly assessed and evaluated.
Rule 2. Don’t try to please everyone.
To do so is to confuse popularity with leadership and to handover the control of your life. If you let patients decide:
Imagine what your practice would look like if you had to let each team member decide what tasks he or she did at work, when he or she would do it, and how much he or she want to get paid.
Look at whose name is on the door? Exactly whose practice it is? If the answer to that question is you, then start creating the practice that you want based on what works for you.
Rule 3. Maintain a clear and constant view of your metrics.
Your business KPIs (key performance indicators) are critical to the success of your practice: no matter how unpleasant, study them, analyse them, look at the trends and make decisions based on them. Be prepared to change what you are doing and make new plans if necessary for your practice.
Waiting for an accountant in October/ November to tell you how you were doing in the year that finished on June 30, is just plain crazy. It’s too late to make any changes to either rectify problems, or take advantage of any good figures that are coming through.
Looking back on the key decisions that you have made in your life, how many times have you wished that you waited another 6-12 months to make this or that decision?
Rule 4. Do not become complacent with behaviour/standards or protocols.
Often during the good times in our business we will accept unacceptable behaviour or standards from staff. Maybe it’s because, with our success we feel a little invulnerable. Maybe it’s because confrontation feels like too much effort. Whatever our reasons it’s a sure fire way to ensure that the good times don’t last.
Degradation of standards can be something difficult to notice from inside the practice. It’s as if a grain of sand slips from an hour glass every day—it’s so slow that you never notice it, or feel any pain. Often what starts out with not confronting a bad attitude from a D.A, poor phone manner or skipping staff meetings can diminish a practice and turn the general feeling from controlled professionalism to chaotic stress.
To maintain a low stress practice with a high–spirited and unified team, you will have to maintain standards and protocols at a high level and be prepared to change the people who cannot or will not change, or who cannot or will not act as team players.
(For those of you who haven’t done so, I recommend that you read the modern classic parable “Who Moved My Cheese” by Spencer Johnson. Get team members to read it also).
Rule 5. Keep up to date clinically, managerially, culturally and with respect to equipment.
Don’t think that just because you are experiencing growth and the business is doing well that you’ve stumbled onto the magic formula for dental practice success and shouldn’t touch anything. New developments are happening all the time in every area of your practice responsibilities.
Your decisions need to come from a place of confidence in your knowledge of all the options available. When you are presenting options to patients, you need to know that you are at the leading edge in clinical skills and have the equipment to match. If you aren’t confident in this knowledge it will probably come across to your patients.
The price of not keeping up to date with your facility and décor will also be reflected in difficulty in keeping staff, difficulty in keeping patients and at some stage, a jaw-dropping amount of money that will need to be spent to bring it up to speed.
Rule 6. Approach your career with a positive attitude, and have fun
There is no end to the pleasure one can get from feeling successful in one’s careers. There is no end to the despair one can feel from feeling like one made the wrong career choice.
Celebrate the successes in your practice and career. Life is short, you can’t afford not to be enjoying what you are doing. Dentistry as a profession can be as exciting and as much fun as you want it to be as long as you approach it with the right attitude.
Don’t use practice financial success as an endpoint in the development of your practice and yourself or you’ll find that it is fleeting. Use the 6 rules above as a guide and you will end up having more sustained success and be a part of the golden age long into the future.
[Published in Australasian Dental Practice in July/August 2006]