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Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Delivering WOW Dental podcast. I am super excited to have you guys here. Today, we're talking all about team bonuses, how do we create bonuses for our team members, when is the right time to be able to provide a bonus and what is the most efficient, effective, and profitable way to be able to provide bonuses to our teams.
And so we're going to cover all of that. If you've not yet had a chance, I would love to invite you to join us inside of our dental boss entrepreneur Facebook group, where we have thousands of dentists coming together to be able to learn how to better run, grow, and scale their businesses.
To join us there, you can head on over to dentalbossentrepreneurs.com. So inside of our Facebook group, we did have a question come in that was asking about team bonuses. How do we incentivize our teams? What percentage of production should we give to be able to bonus our team members?
And so I wanted to spend some time answering this because there are specific strategies that we can use and things that I want you to actually consider that perhaps you might not have considered. Now, I will tell you, I remember being that practice owner early in my career, making a lot of mistakes.
And the mistake that I made was that if I want to have team members do the things that I'd like for them to do, which is to be able to have patients follow up and schedule treatment. If I want team members to go out and help me with marketing, if I want team members to help to hit our practice goals that are in our whiteboards, I would need to just give them extra money to do the things.
And I really had that mindset and I was telling myself that story of that is how I can actually get them to do the things. Until I remember one of my early coaches coming to me and she said, "Anissa, let's look at your numbers. Let's look at your profitability."
And once I did that, I realized that, and I really knew it to be honest with you as well, that I really didn't have the money to be able to do that. In fact, at that time, I was actually not really paying myself much of a salary. But I love my team members and I wanted to be able to do more for them.
And again, I had the belief that in order to get them to do things, I'd actually have to pay them bonus. And so again, I was just taking money out of basically my own pocket, what was not even there, and paying them. And so maybe you're that doctor right now that is paying team members bonuses.
That's looking at production and saying, "Okay, I'm going to give them this amount." And maybe you don't know your numbers yet. And so I want to make sure that this episode really serves you and that you understand exactly how to know when is the right time to give a bonus, and again, how do we actually provide a bonus?
Because believe it or not, the lie has been told that we are to give a bonus on production. And oftentimes many of you might have even heard me tell my lemonade story of when I was back eight or nine years old, I had this idea to get a Rainbow Brite doll. And my mom said, "Okay, we can get it for you at Christmas."
And I said, "I want to get it sooner. Can I go out and have a lemonade stand?" And so we went to Winn-Dixie, we got the sugar and the ice and the cups. And the next day I literally went around knocking on doors and I said, "I'm Anissa. I love around the corner. I'm wanting to get a doll. I'd love if you could come out."
Gave them my address, "At 12 o'clock and support me so that I can get this doll." Well, 12 o'clock came and the line was down the street and I actually sold all the lemonade. And I got really excited. I'm like, "Mom, I'm going to be able to get my doll." And she said, "Anissa, I'm so proud of you. You had a great idea for a business.
You actually had a great product, and your marketing was great. All of your lemonade was sold. But I really need you to understand that today you did not make 17 dollars and 58 cents. Today, you made three dollars and 24 cents because the rest, the cups and the sugar and the ice, that's actually what it actually cost you to make three dollars in your business.
And so I remember back to that time when I was giving bonuses based on production, not knowing what my numbers were. And guys, if that's where you are right now, it is actually a little bit dangerous. And so as we start thinking about, "Okay. I get it, Anissa. My eyes are open.
My ears are open and hearing you, how do we do things differently?" One of the things that we want to look at is how do we know our profitability. How do we understand what our business is actually making?
And what's really interesting is that as I'm asking practice owners, when we're going through our business boot camps, what I'm discovering is so many people really just have no idea what their business is making on a monthly basis or on a weekly basis or on a daily basis.
And at a minimum, you really do need to know how much your business is actually making. And this is not production. This is not collection. And so the question is, well, how do I know how to do that?
And so one of the things that I encourage you to do is to have a process where you have a team member that every single Monday, for example, they're pulling a report from your practice management software, that now allows you to be able to see your production and to be able to see your collection month to date.
So every Monday, for example, that number's being put into a template or to an Excel sheet or written on a piece of paper or written into a whiteboard. From there, what's also really powerful is having a process, where as your bills are coming in, those bills are being put in place as well into that template.
So even if you're not paying the bill that particular week, it's being entered in. So now you can look at your cash flow ahead of time, you can see what's coming in and now you can subtract the outstanding that is due for that month, from what's actually come in for that month on a weekly basis.
So you can actually see where you stand for the business. This is pretty powerful. If you've not yet been a part of our business acceleration boot camps, I highly encourage you to get in there. We actually provide the template. We actually teach you exactly how to do this, which is really, really powerful and insightful for you to have that information.
But now, you know how much you're actually profiting. And it is off of that number because that is the money that you are actually making after all of your bills are paid, after your team is paid, after your lab bill is paid, after your rent is paid, after your utilities are paid.
And now off of that money, off of that amount, you can now go ahead and say, "Well, you know what? I'm going to give my team 5%, 10%." Right? And what I also encourage doctors to do is to actually have this calculated and do this calculation quarterly. Because there will be months where you will have more profits and there will be months where you will have less profit.
And so it's really nice at the end of a quarter to do an average of your actual profit and to go ahead and set your calculation there. All right. So that's one thing that I highly, highly recommend.
The other thing is really helping your team to understand that profitability is actually what allows you to be able to give them additional earnings so that they can do more and take care of their families, have those vacations, and to be able to buy their dream homes and all the things that they're working for, just like you're working for things to be able to do for your family.
And so as we're looking at how do we increase profit, it is yes, increasing our high-value services, it is looking at ensuring that those insurance payments are going in, that statements are going out. It is really understanding what profits are actually coming in from different PPOs that you're using.
Because now that you have that knowledge, you can see if it makes sense to be able to go with this PPO.. Or maybe you're doing specific services, for example, ortho, so we're going to choose one PPO over another. Okay. So that's something that we want to look at.
Another thing that I highly recommend is for your team to understand that profits don't mean that's how much your doctor is making. And so as I'm working with teams, as my team is aware, profit is not what the doctor makes, profit is where we can now have the ability to make decisions about taking courses, and buying new pieces of equipment.
And of that profit, you can actually allocate a set percentage that goes into an expense account for travel, or that goes into an investment account for the business so that money can be compounded, or that can go into that rainy day fund.
And of course, as a practice owner, you do have the benefit of being able to take dividends out of the profits that are coming in as well, which is obviously one of the benefits of making a decision to own your own business. All right.
So as you are thinking about building your bonus system, the first thing again, that we want to look at is how do we understand our actual profits versus just understanding our production and our collection. We also want to have a system to be able to know how to calculate that number. And again, not you, your team.
You've got people for that. Really simple processes allow them to be able to calculate that. And then having a way for you again, to decide, okay, we're going to go ahead and give out whatever percent. It could be 5%, 10% to your team. And that's done typically on a quarterly basis. All right, guys.
So hopefully that was super helpful for you. If you've not yet had a chance, we'd love to invite you to join us inside of our next business acceleration boot camp, where we'll be sharing more strategies for you to grow your practice, as well as helping you to understand how to get to those numbers to be able to grow your practice, provide more earnings opportunity for your team, and to be able to build that practice of your dreams.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the Delivering WOW Dental podcast. Now the next step is to join us inside of our next free business acceleration workshop. And to join us, head on over to deliveringwowbootcamp.com.
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Hi everyone and welcome to The Delivering WOW Dental Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Anissa Holmes. And today, we're talking about how to effectively analyze your team and get what you really want out of your practice. This podcast really was inspired by a doctor who posted inside of our Dentalbiz Chiks Facebook group that she had a team member that came to her and said that she was offered more money in another practice and if the doctor would match it and would give her an increase in her salary. The doctor thought about it and the doctor said, okay yes, we'll go ahead and match it. And on Monday, the team member didn't show up for work. And so I don't know how many of you have been in this situation where you have had something similar happen to you. But I actually want to talk to you today about the analysis of team members and really looking at how do we build and scale that multimillion-dollar practice and what sort of team is it going to take to get there?
And how do we analyze a current team to see if they are at the point where they have the capacity to support us in building our practices? Do they want to be there? Have we been clear with them on what we want? And so I want to take this time to really focus on really analyzing our team, because oftentimes what we discover when we have team members who leave, is that we will actually go through this process of frustration. Why? Because we have to now look at getting another team member. But what I often hear is after the fact, it was the biggest blessing because the person that came after them was the best person that they have ever had in that position. And so I actually want us to start looking at, and I'm going to give you a process today, to actually evaluate your team because perhaps the team that got you here is not the team that's going to get you there.
And so I want to talk to you about how we build that team that's going to get us to that next level of growth. Being able to grow, scale, and serve more patients. Being able to grow in a way that you don't have anxiety, that you're able to be really happy, doing more dentistry that you love, and earning way more money so that you can support your team, so that you can support taking them on trips, giving them those benefits, being able to purchase equipment cash, being able to have way more money to put into your retirement account, your investment accounts, being able to take care of your family and take amazing vacations without apologies. And so, as we start looking at our team, what I want you to start doing is to really ask yourself three specific questions, right? And the first question is, does your team, and I want you to do this, take a sheet of paper out and write down each team member's name and ask yourself these questions.
Number one, does this particular team member understand what you are having them there for? Does the team member understand their role? Does your team member understand how to be the most effective in their job? Does your team member understand what the deliverables are, and what guarantees that they're being successful in their role? Have we been clear? And one of the biggest things that I see oftentimes is, because we are so busy that we don't have the ability to train our team, or we don't have the skill set in the knowledge of how to be able to have our team to be able to step into being the highest performers within their role. Oftentimes what happens is that our team members really are not clear on what they are supposed to do. And so I really want you to ask yourself that question is, does your team member understand their role, right?
Do they get what they're there for? Have we been clear about what they're supposed to do? What are their measurables? What are their deliverables? If they are a treatment coordinator, do they understand that X percentage of patients that come in, that they're talking to about scheduling treatment, we want to have actually scheduled, or are they just there every single day, just doing their best, right? So I really want you to analyze that. The second question is, does your team member actually want to be a part of your practice vision that is growing, that is serving patients, and is allowing them to grow personally and professionally as well? And you know, I will say this, as I am onboarding new teams into our coaching program, one of the biggest things that I ask them, or one of the first questions I ask them is, how many of you guys want more for your families than you had growing up, right?
Like, I don't care if your doctor's watching, like just it's okay, I'm giving you permission, raise your hand and let me see. And then I will say doctors, how many of you want more for your kids than you had growing up, right? And what we discover is that we all want the same things. We all want to be able to take care of our families. We want to have them have more than what we had growing up. And so, as we start looking at that, what I often share is that if we had a table and the doctor was trying to pick up the table by themselves, it would be really heavy. If the office manager came to help, it would be a little bit easier. But if everybody picks up a piece of the table, then we can all move across the room really, really fast.
And so one of the things that I often talk about is this concept of being on the bus. And if we want to go from say Miami to LA, one thing that I've shared with my team, I remember when we first did vision boards when I shared my vision of my practice is, I said, guys, we're going to be there. And anybody who's with me, I promise you, I will never forget. And when we get there, we are going to celebrate. We are going to be able to be so excited about what we've done together. And so for me, for you, for your team, I want you to evaluate them and ask, the second question is, do they want it? Do they want to be a part of a practice that is really serving patients hard and collectively you are growing so that you collectively can be able to have the business grow so that everybody can benefit from that, right?
And I often tell this story as well, when I'm talking to team members, is I'll say, when we first started my practice with our first coach, I remember our coach having us do exercises, similar to what I have teams do within our programs, right? And I remember the team member coming to me and she said, you want us to write down what we have to do daily, weekly, and monthly. You're asking us to do vision boards. Like, this is silly. This is not going to work. And I remember going to Nicole, my team member and saying, you are a great assistant. I think you're amazing, but I need you to know that we are going there and so if you are not wanting to do the things, it's okay, and she was like, well, my last doctor didn't make us do this.
And like, this is not going to work. And I said you know what, we're going there. And so I really want you to understand that in order to get to the next level of growth, it really does mean having to make next-level decisions. And it also means really looking at the current team, because if you have team members that are coming in, that are saying, you know what, this other doctor is going to increase my pay, I just want to go over there, can you give me more money? That's not solution-based. Being solution-based is how can we all come together to be able to have more same-day rollover so that we can all make, not just a little bit more, but a lot more. How can we have the ability now to be able to trips together as teams? How do we have the ability to serve our patients hard?
And I will tell you, I have been able to, within my dental practice, within our coaching programs, I'm really proud of it, build cultures where team members really want to be able to serve the people that we serve. And so within my practice, it's all about, guys, this is my vision, I want to be able to be the number one practice. I want to have the latest technology. I want to be able to offer services that nobody else is offering. Right? And that's why we're looking at putting in sleep apnea and really investing the time in the training. Because for me, I know that we can save so many people's lives. But guess what? I can't do it alone. I need a team. I need people around me that are going to help us to be able to serve all of our patients. And you know what, you're the right person to be here on the team.
And I'm going to train you. I'm going to empower you. I'm going to inspire you. And collectively we're going to be able to help more people. Right? Same thing in our coaching program. I go to our accountability coaches and I say like, I want to support you. Tell me what's important to you. You want to have your first home, your first car, like as a business, I want to be able to support you and your personal dreams. And let me tell you the vision of our business, like our business model, what we're really all about, is helping doctors should be able to grow and scale. I want to be able to help hundreds more doctors to be able to build multimillion-dollar practices, women to be able to grow amazing businesses while being able to maintain a household, and have a ton of time for their self-care. That's what I want to do.
And so now what happens is I've got a team who's like, oh, oh my gosh, I love your vision, I want to be a part of it. And so, as you're looking at your current team, again, do they want it? Because it is so amazing when you have people that are collectively growing for one purpose and one cause, right? And if you have people on your team who are just clocking in, clocking out, being negative Nancy's, talking about other team members, guys, they're never going to be the right fit. And what's going to happen is, it is going to start your growth and it is going to delay you from building the business that you're meant to build. Okay? So the third question that we need to ask ourselves is, do our team members, individually, do they have the actual capacity to do what we are requiring for them?
And I often tell a story of one of our coaching clients who came in initially and she actually had her mom, was her only employee and her mom was doing insurance. And so the question again, asking these three questions, does mom understand that she's supposed to call the insurance company, what she's supposed to do? Yeah perhaps, perhaps we've given mom that knowledge that she's the insurance coordinator. Does mom want it? 100%, mom wants to be there to help her daughter be successful. Does mom have the capacity? Right? And the question is, mm, maybe, maybe not. Because mom keeps making mistakes and no matter how much we keep training mom over and over and over and over again, she's getting frustrated, she doesn't have the capacity. And so as we start looking at that, then we can do a few things. Number one, we can move mom into another role.
And so you move mom into the scheduler. So now she's scheduling appointments, she's confirming appointments. And now you have a team member who's thriving, right? So I want you to think about that. We've had lots of shifts in my practice where we've had people who were really slow in terms of assisting the doctor, but who had a ton of knowledge, dental knowledge, to be able to help patients. So they now came in as a new patient coordinator to actually find out from the patient their chief complaint, to have conversations, because they were actually able to use their slowness as a strength to actually be able to slow things down and have great deep conversations. And so we want to look at our team and analyze like, do we have people in the right seats? But also the capacity, a lot of it is, are team members trained as well as they can be trained?
Like, are they masters in verbal skills? Are our teams understanding the power of being leaders and not going to make excuses or being in denial when things are slipping through the cracks? Does your team have the skillset to be able to come together and problem solve? If you have broken appointments, how can everybody come together? If you have one of the team members whose goal is to be able to start three, $10,000 cases a month, does the team have the capacity to be able to understand how to support that person with what they're doing individually as their role, right? And so capacity a lot of times really comes into training. Are you getting your insurance coordinators the training that they need to be the best, right? Oftentimes we are not investing in our teams. We are winging it. We are hoping that they just get it through osmosis, but the fact guys is that's not how it happens.
And so investing in our team, looking at how can we give each team member continuous training. If they're the scheduler, how do you become better at scheduling? If you are a dental assistant, how can you become the best dental assistant to be able to create systems and processes for consistency so that you're staying in budget so that you are being as efficient as possible? So these are the things that we want to look at. And so, as we start looking at those team members that are coming in that are saying, I want to go somewhere else because they're giving me more money over there, what are you going to do? I want to empower you to not be pushed up against a wall and say, you know what? If this practice is not the right fit for you, it's okay, because we are building a family here that we work together and we are going to continuously grow and celebrate together.
If you have negative Nancys who are going against your core values of building a positive team and family spirit, it's never going to work. You will want to have 100%, A players. Now, how do we get those A players? It really comes into the process of how are we hiring. There are frameworks for hiring. Really looking at asking specific questions during the interview process, looking at having group interviews, looking at including in behavioral style assessments so that you can match the position that you are hiring for with their behavioral style. So if you're looking for an insurance coordinator, for example, you want someone who's detail-oriented. You're looking for somebody who's going to be at the front desk, you want somebody who's outgoing. Who's going to ask how's your family doing? So there are processes for hiring that again, oftentimes as practice owners, we don't understand. I didn't always understand this until I actually invested time learning how to effectively hire.
And that is why now, I have not one but two businesses where we've got amazing team members that I'm able to leverage and have them to be able to be the best of their role. I often will say, in our practice, in our team, we want every team member, no matter if they are in sterilization, if they're your assistant, if you're cleaning the office, to be the director of your position, where you can come in, where you can offer suggestions of how to grow. But that comes in with building your team to become leaders and helping them to understand the power of their role in the practice, empowering them. All right? So hopefully this was a really helpful podcast for you. The key really, in getting what you want, is really analyzing your team. Is really starting to understand how to build leverage in your business and verbalizing that what got you here, won't get you there. All right? Take care, guys. Enjoy the rest of your day. And I will see you in the next episode.
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Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of The Delivering WOW Dental Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Anissa Holmes and today I actually want to talk to you about something that is pretty dear to my heart, and it really is all about building leverage in your business through associates. Now, I know some of you who are listening to me right now, you perhaps have associates in your practice. Some people who are listening, you might be thinking, "Well, is now a good time to bring in an associate or what's the benefit of having an associate?"
And so I actually wanted to talk to you to address this because what's been really valuable, instrumental and transformational and allowing me to grow my business, my dental practice allowing me to be able to earn a significant amount of income, grow my wealth, and honestly be able to serve our patients at a much higher level has been by bringing in associates.
Now, some people bring in associates and their thought process is, "Well, I can now bring in associates and I can do more high-value procedures," which is really, really great. But I actually want to challenge you to actually think a lot bigger than that. And I remember when I hired my first business coach, one of the things that I really ask myself is, "What do I want in terms of my business? What is my business going to look like a year from now, three years from now? How am I going to be able to build the ability to have time to spend with my family If I wanted to work three days a week, how could I do that without apologies? How could it take a month off in the summer? How can I build a business that actually serves to me versus me slaving and doing all of the things in my business?"
And what's really interesting is a lot of times because we especially as women have never had an opportunity to learn how to run a business effectively. We are doing our best. We are running our business, we are at the same time managing a household, looking after our partners, taking care of our kids all of their schedules. And we actually have a very unique situation where we are really trying to manage doing all of the things. And unfortunately, what happens is oftentimes time for us comes up short. And we don't have the ability to go to that yoga class or sit down by ourself and read that book.
And so for me talking about this topic for all of you, especially for all of you who are women is really to understand that it is not only important and valuable, but it is almost like oxygen. Something that we need to really start understanding leverage, what leverage is, how we can build leverage in our businesses so that we can have the ability to collapse timeframes in terms of growing our wealth, growing our plans for our retirement. How can we have the ability to duplicate ourselves so that we can have more procedures being done and offered in our businesses so that we can serve way more people at a higher level?
How can we have the ability to have other people doing things so that we as a business owner have the benefits, the true benefits of being a business owner, which is being able to choose how we're spending our days, what services we're providing? What are we doing with our free time? Are we able to make a decision to go into work at 10 o'clock because we want to be able to have some personal time every morning for meditating or going to the gym or going to yoga, being able to and work at a certain time. And again, while we're there be able to do the things that we want to do.
And again, just going back to me, my mindset when I hired my first coach because I didn't know how to do it. I said, "My goal is I want to be able to take a month off every summer with my kids." And in order to do that, I have to be able to build leverage. I have to be able to have somebody who is making sure that things are not slipping through the cracks who's not me. I have to make sure that systems are in place and I need other people that are producing in my business so that if I'm not there, it's not a big deal.
I often time hear inside of the Facebook groups I'd love to be able to take a week off and be able to go on vacation or, "Man, I haven't taken a vacation in multiple years or I'd like to be able to go and take this CE course. But if I do that or if I take my team to this training, we're not going to be able to see patients during that time. And all of a sudden we're going to lose income, and we're not going to be able to pay our bills." And guys, I'm here today to be able to tell you that it doesn't have to be that way. There is another way, there is another solution. And it really does come by adding in leverage.
So what does leverage mean? For me, I am a big proponent that you can have every single thing that you want in your business and your life. You just need to set the goal, you reverse engineer it and then now you just start following out the steps of your action plan. And so for me, I said, "Well, if I want to take a month off, what does that mean? If I want to be able to take time whenever I want, what does that mean?" That means that I need to have other people producing.
Now, what's really interesting in terms of associateships, and again, you might be in that position where you already have associates. And oftentimes I hear people saying, "Well, I want to be able to do all of the things and the high-value procedures, and I want to be able to give them just the fillings and all of those things so I can focus on doing all of the big cases." And I'm not saying that that's wrong, but I'm actually challenging you to think a little bit differently.
I can tell you inside of my practice, I remember thinking, "Well, what are the things ..." And I'm going to challenge you to build this list. What are the things that you're not doing in your practice yet that you'd like to be able to offer your patients, but you have no desire to do? And as you start thinking through that list, I know for me when I started to build that list and that list has changed and evolved throughout the years is I remember saying, "I love to be able to offer clear aligners in my practice. I want to be able to offer sleep and be able to create sleep appliances." Why? Because there are patients who have crooked teeth. There are patients who are snoring in my business.
And so not having the ability to help them is not what I want. I want to be able to help all of my patients. And I ask myself, "Honestly, are these things that you want to do?" And I'm going to tell you inside of my practice we do clear aligners. We're in the process of having training right now for sleep. We do laser treatment in our office. And I can tell you I never learned. I went to the course, but I've never done a clear aligner case. I will never do a sleep apnea appliance in my practice. In fact, in my practice, I don't even know how to use the TRIOS and iTero scanner.
And the fact is that I don't have to. I have team members who have been trained by the best. I have when we brought in laser, I had someone who came in and trained my team for clear aligners. I had my team go through, my associates go through training. I had coaches that held their hands through ClinChecks until they were confident. And so as we start thinking about leverage and bringing in more and offering more, I want you to start thinking differently and start thinking, "What are the procedures that you can bring an associate in for and you can actually have them to be able to be trained?"
The last associate that we hired, she actually was a past nurse before she went to dental school. And she was an older student because she had already had her first career. And so coming into my practice, I actually was looking for somebody that we could invest in and be able to get the training for sleep. And because I knew that was the purpose, I was able to be very specific in my recruiting process. And we went through many people until we found this amazing doctor who has compassion and who had a desire to be able to create in our practice this Blue Ocean Strategy.
And so what it looks like in our practice is that one of our doctors has a tremendous skillset in doing cosmetic dentistry, All-on-4 complex restorative cases. And so what happens is we've actually created within our practice a little situation where she does those procedures. Another doctor is really good at doing clear aligners so she's doing clear aligners. So you have one doctor who may be really good at doing extractions or doing endo. And so what I want you to think about is how can you not create a situation where you're feeling like you have to do all the things, but actually start reversing the process to say, "How can I interestingly do less, but bring in other people to do those high value?"
I often hear sometimes too, "Well, how much of a budget do you have for your associates? Like what if you pay for things and they leave?" So again, we're talking all about leverage. So even if you were to spend $10,000 having a team member to go to an institute, maybe a Spear or a Pankey to be able to go to clinical mastery and you spent even 10 grand, the question is, "Would you get a return on that investment of that 10 grand?" I find would a too many times the mindset is really so closed in terms of, "What if I make that investment?" And I'm like, "My mindset is completely different. It's like let me get you in. Let me find somebody who wants to grow with a company and I invest in you. "And at the end of the day, again, I invest in you. You are happy, you are growing."
And now what happens is that you're able to do, again, a one $10,000 case that will now pay for that. And the practice will continue to benefit month after month after month. So again, I really want you to start thinking about leverage. And for me, the question is how can I be able to get to the point where I can have associates actually producing to the point where I could choose to work if I wanted to or not? And so that's actually my challenge for all of you to be able to think about that. How can I bring in one associate, two associates? And for me, it was like if I bring in two associates, then I would be able to earn the current income that I'm currently earning and even more if they're doing high-value procedures.
So I really wanted to share this message with you to have you to start thinking a little bit differently. And as you start bringing in associates, now you can look at being able to have more time to do those things that you love. And that could be, "You know what? I no longer have to do root canals. I no longer have to do dentures." As I started bringing in associates in my own practice, I really, really enjoy doing complex restorative cases, restoring implant procedures.
And so I essentially stopped doing all of those other things. And I said, "You know what? You do those extractions. You do the clear aligners. You do the endo." You do all of those things. And now what happens is you're able to create a situation where you're doing the dentistry that you love without apologies.
So what I would say your action item for today's episode is to really think about if you have an associate, what are the things that can be handed over to your associates so that you can do more dentistry that you love? Making a list of services that you would like to perform in your practice that you're not currently performing and really look at can you bring in an associate to be able to do those procedures for you. Or if you have a current associate having a conversation to say, "You know what? Let's create some Blue Ocean opportunities in our practice for you to be able to thrive."
And in essence, become a mini specialist to be able to do that inside of our practice and invest in them, invest in their training so that they can be successful so that they can get up and running as fast as possible. And then you want to make sure that you're using the frameworks that we're teaching you inside of our programs to be able to create goals, to be able to use the whiteboards and the scorecards to be able to track performance. And ensure that your team members are actually hitting the goals so that now you have the ability, again, to be able to earn more, to be able to accomplish more, to be able to grow your business without apologies. All right?
So hopefully that served you. If you've not yet done so, guys, I would encourage you highly, highly, highly to join us inside of our Dental Boss Entrepreneurs Facebook group. We're going to be having a lot of really cool things happening in there coming up within the next few weeks. We will be having a get more testimonials challenge, helping you to understand how to be able to build more trust and loyalty with your existing patients, so much so that they're actually creating video testimonials that you can use for your social media, for your marketing.
We're also going to be having an upcoming wealth workshop so that you can understand what's your number, how much money do you want to start putting in now so that you have a set amount ready and available for you five years from now, 10 years from now. And understanding how to build in passive income that can grow tax-free. So really, really excited about that workshop that's going to be coming up and having you to be able to create your game plan of knowing what you want to set aside and how specifically do we budget for that within our practice so that we can ensure that we're hitting our wealth goals.
Definitely want to make sure that you're inside of our Facebook groups, so that you can get access to all of the amazing things that we're helping you with to be able to grow your practice. And if you've not yet joined us, you definitely want to make sure that you're joining us dentalbossentrepreneurs.com. All right, guys. So that's pretty much it. Thank you so much for listening and we will see you next time.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the Delivering WOW Dental Podcast. Now your next step is to join us inside of our free Facebook group Dental Boss Entrepreneurs where you'll be able to connect and collaborate with like-minded dentists. And if you're looking for help to be able to grow and scale your practice faster, we invite you to join us inside of our Dental Boss Academy where your first month is free. To join us, go to dentalbossacademy.com. Take care, guys, and we will see you in the next episode.
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Delivering WOW Podcast with Dr. Anissa Holmes. We'll catch you next time.
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Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Delivering WOW Dental Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Anissa Holmes. And today we're actually going to talk about how to have a team that does their job without being told. So this was actually a question that came into our Dental Boss Entrepreneur Facebook group. If you're not yet a member, we'd love to have you in our community. We have lots of amazing doctors that are getting together that are connecting, collaborating, and communicating. But again, we had a question that came in, and it said like, "How do I get my team to do those things? I'm feeling a little bit overwhelmed. I'm feeling like I am not having accountability. I'm to telling people what they need to do and they're not doing it." And so I actually wanted to address this because it's something that is extremely common as we all probably can imagine.
And it's something that I can tell you, I'm extremely proud of that we have inside of my practice and that we've been able to actually create frameworks for practices, to be able to implement certain tools, certain systems, to be able to have that accountability, which is really great because a few things happen. The team members actually become happier in their positions. They see that they're being able to give their feedback and come up with ideas that are actually being listened to and supported. And what happens is, as a result of it, we have more things happening because we have more people working together for a common goal and for their personal goals within their role in the practice. But as a result of it, the doctor can now focus more on what they really love to do. And what they're really, really good at, which is the dentistry or saying, you know what? I really want to take this course and learn a new skillset, or I want to invest in upping my knowledge of how to run my business.
And now that I have my team, that's taking care of these other things, I can feel focused on my learning, my personal development, my professional development. Again, really looking at doing what you really love to do the business and being able to have more time as an owner of a business, to be able to reap the benefits of that, which is being able to not have to work extremely long hours after work doing things, because now you have leverage built-in.
And so one of the first things that I always say when I work with colleagues is we definitely want to look at having three separate steps. So there are three things that we always want to be able to look at in terms of being able to get this accountability. Number one is we want to have the right people in our business. So we have to have people in order to have leverage. If we're trying to do everything ourselves, or we say, you know what? I asked my team to do this. They didn't do it. I got frustrated. I just did it myself. You're never going to have freedom that way. You're never going to be able to take a vacation. You're never going to be able to take time away because everything's dependent on you. So you definitely want to make sure that we look at the people component.
And the first step really is people because without having a team that you can empower to the next level and I get it right now, a lot of people are saying, well, we can't get team members. I'm not talking about necessarily having to hire people to do this. I'm talking about the people that are currently within your organization. How can we elevate them to actually become leaders within the organization, to have specific things that they are accountable for and they're actually doing it? Okay. So we're going to talk about how that process works, but we first need to again, have the right people.
The next thing is we want to have the right processes. So this is something that is done consistently every single day, every single week. A process is something that is not something that we choose to do one day. And then we kind of do it next week. And it's kind of random. It's something that we do every day or every week or every month or every quarter. And we do it consistently at the same exact time, or the exact same day, or the exact same day on the exact same time. And that way becomes a pattern and it is not something that's going to slip through the cracks. Okay.
So the third thing that we want to look at is making sure that we have tools because what happens is that if we have tools to be able to hold us accountable to the goals, and to the processes that we're setting, then now the tool is going to prevent us from having behavioral changes come in. Oh my gosh, we started this new process and we completely forgot. Or we set this goal, but we really didn't have something to be able to track it. And so how do we get that accountability? I can tell you one of the tools that I actually put into my practice that we've helped hundreds of practices, probably thousands now actually, to be able to implement is this process of number one, inside of our morning huddle, having a daily whiteboard, where we can put our goals, where we can look at historical numbers, where if we're starting a new procedure, we can actually look at that and we can see, have we hit our goal? Have we not hit our goal?
It's really interesting about a week or so ago, I was talking to a doctor, interestingly, that's been following me for a while. And she's implemented a lot of systems that we have put into place with frameworks within the coaching program, the Platinum Coaching Program. So she joined the coaching program, she's getting some progress, but honestly, she's not getting the ultimate process or the ultimate result. And so I started reviewing some things with her and I said, "Okay, let's start back to business foundation. Like, where are you with your scorecards? Do you understand why you're using them? Or is this just an exercise?" Because she said, "I'm feeling like I'm having to do all the things." And she said, "Honestly, I kind of feel like it's an exercise." And I said, "Okay, well that means that clearly I've not communicated or you've not been clear, your team has not been clear in terms of why we're actually doing this."
Nothing in your practice should ever be something that you do without understanding why you're doing it. If it's not giving you an outcome that you desire, you have to figure out, am I doing it correctly or does it even make sense? And I can tell you, like at a morning huddle for me, at one point we were reading out charts. We were saying, "Oh, this patient has mitral valve prolapse. So we need to pre-medicate them" which really wasn't really getting us anywhere. It was just something that we were doing just for the motion. But what I told her is that whiteboards are not that. Whiteboards are when you go in and you say that you want to start doing a new procedure and you're not, then now it actually opens up a conversation for you to be able to have within your weekly meeting an opportunity to say, you know what? We are consistently not being able to get patients started with clear aligners. What's the real issue?
And so the team members can say, well, we're talking about it, but we're just not yet being able to have the patient convert. And so now you're able to have a conversation and you're able to realize that your team and you really do need to invest more in verbal skills training. Or you may discover through this process that, you know what? You said you were going to do a marketing campaign and you didn't. So the first piece is being able to have this tool or being able to use a tool such as a weekly scorecard, where you can track your doctor production per visit, hygiene production per visit, accounts receivable. And you're able to look at all of these different metrics. How many are being rescheduled? What's the hygiene reappointment percentage?
And what happens is that when you have goals, the scorecard is something that we teach our doctors within our academy, as well as in our Platinum Coaching Program, we actually have performance scorecard dashboards built into our e-learning platform. And we create a process where every week a team member goes in. So that's the people part. The process is that they are going in and updating the scorecard. Again, production collection, doctor production per visit, case acceptance percentage, hygiene reappointment percentage, hygiene production per visit, AR over 30. And so now what happens is that the team members doing that, not the doctor. Okay. So that's the process every Monday.
And then the tool is actually the scorecard itself. The scorecard is where you're able to go in and you set your goals. If you hit the goals, great. If you hit them three weeks in a row, how I train within our academy and within our Platinum Coaching Program is once you hit the goal three times, then now you give yourself permission to increase the goal. And it actually shows you when you look historically at the scorecard, it actually turns blue in all areas where you actually changed your goal.
And if you don't, are not hitting a specific KPI, it actually points you to training within our platform that your team can watch. And you can watch to be able to get that number up. So if your case acceptance percentage is flat, we're going to point you to the training to be able to increase that number. So now that you have the person, you have the process and you have the tool then what happens, is that the tool is actually holding us accountable. So if your accounts receivable goes up from one week to the other, you know about it, it's not slipping through the cracks. And you have a specific team member who does your collections in your practice, the treatment coordinator. If you don't have that, the person who is taking care of the payments up front, perhaps this is your front desk team member, your office manager. Now they have a tool that if the number goes up, it can alert them. And now they can go and research that insurance claim, or they can say, well, what happened? And they realize, oh my gosh, the statement was not sent out.
And because of this tool, now they never want to see that happen, so they're going to make sure that statements are sent out and insurance claims are not having those errors. And as a result of it, you'll never get yourself in a situation where your accounts receivable accumulates because you're looking at it. But then are you looking at it?
And so the next tool that we really love to teach and help you to implement in your business is actually having a weekly leadership meeting where you can do some connection within your team where you're getting together, sharing what went really well for you in the last week. What are you proud of? Personally, what are you proud of? What's going on with you? Really giving a core value, highlight who's that team member that really over-delivered to a patient or helped you calling them out and giving them those kudos and that appreciation. But really within that actually weekly leadership meeting, that typically I will say should happen every ... Ours are actually on Tuesdays, right before our first patient, right after morning huddle, again, a consistent day, a consistent time where everybody shows up. And now what happens is that you're able to have that time that's dedicated for the first five minutes or so even, five to seven minutes reviewing that scorecard and saying, okay, well, what really took off? What goal that we have that we really hit?
And then you can now celebrate your team for coming together and hitting that goal or say, you know what? It's time to increase it. Or you say, oh my gosh, we've not hit this goal consistently for the last three weeks, but now not only have we not hit it, but it's dipping, it's dipping. Or the AR just keeps rising and rising. Or our doctor production per visit. Maybe it's not dipping and dipping and dipping, maybe it is. And then now you can, later on in that meeting structure, you can actually have a discussion to brainstorm and strategize about how you're going to improve it. And maybe it's improving your verbal skills. Maybe it is actually doing some role play. Maybe it is doing that marketing campaign that you know that you want to do. And now it's like, okay, well, I really have to just go ahead and do that now. Or maybe it's really tracking now back on your whiteboard, the number of same-day add-ons that you're going to do.
Again, being able to use tools that are first fueled by processes, meaning this is what we're going to do to be able to get that information. And then again, having that once a week time where you can get together and you can ensure that you're going to review so that you can again, see what's flat. And if something's flat, you can improve it. For example, in my practice, we saw that hygiene production per visit was flat about two or three years ago. And so we made a decision just based on that data to look at how can we increase it? We put in lasers, we put in [inaudible 00:13:52] protect. And all of a sudden we were able to increase that number, but if we weren't looking at it, we would not have known that was a sore thumb in our business.
So again, a lot of times people ask me like, what's the key to people, processes and tools? Or what's the key to getting my team to do things and I don't have to do them? And I will typically ask, are you using these tools? Are you using a process that it's done consistently? Nothing in your business should ever be done as an exercise. And I'll tell you, like I'm really very, very proud of where my business is, but here's the thing.
Like I had to make a decision to really focus on implementing these people, processes and tools in my practice. I had to go to my team and say, I give you ownership of this particular number. And so it's for you to come up with brainstorming ideas of how can you get those unscheduled patients rescheduled. This is your role in the business. I'm hiring you because I think you're awesome. Give me your ideas, give me your strategies. Let's talk about it as a team, within our weekly meeting and maybe focusing on each person's individual high goal that they have for the quarter, their rocks, things that are what's most important for them to contribute. And we all support each other through that process.
But again, if you're not having this weekly meeting or if you're not having the tools to hold you accountable, then now you're just taking things day by day by day. So hopefully that serves you. And again, people ask me like, what's the key? How do you have your team doing all of these things? How do you have your office manager running your business for you? And you don't have to really have micromanaging going on? I can ensure you that although I may not be looking at my profit and expenses sheet every single day or my scorecard every single day in my practice. If I log in, my scorecard's being done, my expenses and profit sheet's being done, my team understands how to run ... Any one of my team can run one of these meetings to identify cracks. They didn't know this at first. How would they know?
It's because I took the time, first, to learn it. Secondly, to develop processes and systems. And thirdly, to teach my team. And now they're able to follow the flow, follow the process and we don't miss. We don't miss a morning huddle with the whiteboard. And we've been doing this for probably about 15 years, some of these processes, and we don't miss having that scorecard updated weekly. We don't miss that weekly leadership meeting so that we can review and see what the real issues are. If there are real issues going on and you identify that even in your huddle, that you're not hitting a particular goal, then now you can go back and say, well, let's talk about that in our weekly meeting and strategize on how we can get those patients coming in or how we can figure out what the real issue is about a new service.
Maybe the real issue is just that the team doesn't feel clinically competent. And so we can talk about that. We can leave, and the whole purpose of those weekly meetings is not to go and sit down and just have a discussion. For me, it's all about leaving with a list of items, a list of to-dos and who's going to get those to-dos done. Each individual person, what are they going to work on that week? And that will be done by the end of the next week. What's going to be solved? And it's not just, let's just get together and talk. Otherwise, it doesn't make sense. And so hopefully this is serving you, this is helping you. I'd love to be able to continue to help you guys, if you fear or feeling like, oh my gosh, I need this inside of my practice and I know I'm not where I'm going to be, I'd love to be able to help you.
Our Platinum Coaching Program allows us to be able to work one on one with training your office managers to take this off of your plate so that now they can lead your team, working with you to really have those one on one strategy calls, to be able to grow your practice, looking at helping you and your team with training, on scheduling, on hygiene production and productivity, the marketing, the insurance. So we are able to help you and support you one on one and with a one on one coach within our platinum coaching programs.
But within our Dental Boss Academy, we have created the number one online training platform to help you and your teams with the business side of dentistry. And so we'd love to give you an opportunity to first get started with us, perhaps, even in the Dental Boss Academy, where we do have 24/7 online training to help you and your team to put in these systems, giving you again, the online training, giving you access to a group coaching call every month to be able to get support, teaching a new system to you and your team, helping you with those verbal skills, through the training, marketing, marketing calls. We'd love to be able to support you.
If you're ready to get started, we'd love to see you inside of the academy. If you go to dentalbossacademy.com, your first four weeks are actually completely free. So we'd love to be able to help you get started right away. After the four months, if you decide that you are wanting to stay in the programs, continue with the program, which we'd love to be able to help you do, then the monthly investment is only $297, which you can cancel at any time. So again, I'd love to be able to help you in your teams to be able to add in that accountability, getting these things off your plate. And what I often tell doctors when I speak to them is how much would it be worth it to be able to not have to do all of the things in your business, to be able to have that leverage, to be able to know that your case acceptance is high, your marketing is working, that you have team members that are being empowered to get to the next level. Well, that's actually what we help doctors and colleagues do every single day.
So again, feel free to check out Dental Boss Academy. We have lots of fun things that we're doing. Currently, we are starting an out of network challenge. So we're actually going to be a helping practices who want to come out of network, come out of network. We're going to be teaching and empowering the teams to understand the real cost of running a business. What does it really cost to do a filling, or to do a crown so that they can understand the cost of materials and that we're not necessarily making what they think that we're making on the procedures.
In fact, we may or may not know. And so excited to be able to teach that, to be able to teach the case acceptance frameworks around coming out of network. To be able to do something different, we have to have new skill sets. And so developing that through our verbal skills within our academy and Platinum Coaching Program, again, in our out of network challenge. We're actually going to be doing some role-playing with case acceptance with teams also helping you to develop the out of network marketing plan, as well as giving you the templates and tools to help you to be able to better communicate with your patients and what out of network means to them. All right. So hopefully this was a good episode for you. You got lots of value out of it, and I look forward to chatting with you again, really, really soon.
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Hi everybody, and welcome to the Delivering Wow Dental Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Anissa Holmes, and wow, it feels really good to be here podcasting. It has been far too long as many of you may have noticed. We haven't had an episode in a while, and honestly, it has been a very busy last four months. I have been focusing on quite a few things. Number one is just building out the most incredible experience for our platinum practices that are in our platinum mastermind. We have been focused on our dental entrepreneur Facebook group, by the way, if you're not yet in that group, I definitely recommend that you get in there. It's a great place to be able to connect with other doctors, to be able to have a great community of people who are there inside of your back pocket, cheering you're on and really being there to help support you.
And we've also spent the last six months actually building out our CE modules and our messaging platform for our Dental Boss Academy. And so it's been a really, really great last six weeks. Some of you guys might have even been in our boot camps. We had our first business acceleration Bootcamp, free Bootcamp back in November. Had it again in February and so that was honestly one of the most impactful feelings I had. We had about 300 practice owners that joined us on both bootcamps and a few nights we were on until 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock at night, and it was just pretty special. And so today what I'm actually going to be doing, and what I'm going to doing over our next episode is I'm actually going to be answering questions that were asked inside of our Dental Boss Entrepreneur Facebook group. And so the question that I ask is that, if I had a magic wand and I can give you anything inside of your business, anything inside of your practice, or if there's something that you would want to learn, what would that be?
And so we actually had a ton of responses. And so over the next episodes, what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to take time and I'm going to help you to understand what it really means to be able to grow your practice, or how do you build a business that scales? And so if you are a beginning practice owner and you know, I want to be able to take my business to the next level, I don't want to take a lot of time, I don't want to make mistakes or if you are a practice owner that's been practicing for 20 years, maybe you are not where you want to be yet still, or maybe you've even had some coaching in the past or a lot of coaching in the past. And you want to learn new things. This is definitely going to be a really great episode for you.
So today we're talking about profit margins and how do you understand profit margins? And so before we even get to understanding profit margins, I really want to help you to understand why this is so critical. Now, as many of you guys know, as many dentists are coming out of school or starting their practices or acquiring practices, one of the first things that oftentimes people do is say, "Well, how do I get new patients?" And so what I want to do is go ahead and sign up with a bunch of insurances because now I will be able to have patients and I can go ahead and have an opportunity to treat them, to be able to help patients and to be able to earn income for the business. One thing that I say to coaching clients inside of my Platinum Coaching Program, and also within our Dental Boss Academy, one I teach inside of the academy is that, what's most important inside of your business is having information.
When you have information, then now you can make decisions that will allow you to scale, make decisions that there are certain things that you may want to stop and you can actually create a roadmap and plan. And so, as it relates to profit margins, I'll tell you a quick story. So one of the doctors that I was looking at her last year's revenue, her last year's production, collection, her profits, we were actually having a circle of focus call. This is something that I feel is really important to be able to look back at your last 12 months to be able to say, "Okay, well, if we want to grow by 40% this year, or 100% or 30%, or if we want to come off of PPOs, how do we actually create a strategy and a roadmap to do that?" So looking back at again, the last 12 months saying, "Okay, well, we said we wanted to do sleep, but we only did four cases."
What if we really focused on it and we focused on case acceptance and we focused on making sure that our team had the verbal skills and we had the verbal skills. What if we were tracking it on a whiteboard? What if we made sure that everybody really had clinical competency, what would be the outcome? And so we start looking at that. We start looking at where revenues coming from. And so I had a doctor and we were doing a call, circle of focus call and when I looked at her production, it looked really amazing. In fact, she had about $2 million in production for a practice. Now, for many dentists, if you or a practicing as a solo practitioner, or maybe even with an associate, you'd say, "Wow, that's great. I'd love to have a $2 million practice," right. But what was really interesting is that I looked at it and I said, "Oops, uh-oh we got to talk about this."
And she's like, "What?" And I said, "I am so excited that you did 2 million, but your collection is only in relation to the production, only 1.3 million." And so before I give you the strategy based on what I see from last year, to be able to increase your revenue, we've got to fix this because if you're making $2 million, that means that your marketing is probably working and your case acceptance is working, right? Patients are accepting treatment. In fact, your team probably thinks that you're super rich, as well as your friends and family who come to the practice because the practice is really, really, really, really busy. However, based on this, I know that the financials are not exactly matching up. In fact, you might, based on what I see here, not be taking home much money. And she said, "Yes, I agree."
And so what we did was I said, "Okay, before we look at anything, I need you to understand what your profit margins are for your procedures. In fact, let's just start with something simple, like a filling." And so we went through this process of having her to be able to lay out all of her fixed expenses, all of the things that you have to pay, whether you see a patient or not. We taught her what all of those different items were. We went into looking at the team costs, not the doctor and hygienist, because we're looking at a filling. And then from there, what we did was we actually came up with a cost per hour for the fixed expenses for the team cost. And then what we did was we now looked at the cost of supplies. And so one of the things that we provided, in fact, if you're in Dental Boss Academy, if you navigate to the resources and go to forms, you'll actually see the profit margins template there.
But inside of that template, what you'll see and what she saw was a sheet like an Excel sheet or a Google Sheet where I actually did the work because I'm a geek like that and actually made a sheet and put in the materials that we often use for filling where you put in the cost of that material that you're using. And then it actually puts in how many uses you have for that material and the costs per use. And so based on that, adding that up with the cost per hour of your team cost per hour of her fixed expenses, again, that is your rent, that is your phone bill, your power bill, all of those different fixed expenses, what she noticed is that it was actually costing her about $110 to actually do a filling. And so my next question to her was, "Okay, well, how much do you charge?"
And it was really interesting because for the PPO that she was on, she said, "I'm actually only making $108, or maybe it was 120, I can't remember, but essentially either she was upside down or she was only making like 8 or $10. And so my next question was, "Okay, well, let me ask you a question. How many of your PPOs are you on?" And she said, Anissa, I'm only on one." And I was like, "Okay." Right. It's really interesting because you look at that and many people, I don't know about you, but there was definitely a time in my practice when if a patient balance was less than $10, I didn't send out a statement. And there was definitely a time where if somebody came to the office and I knew them from outside of the practice, maybe they were a parent of a child that my kids were friends with.
Or maybe I saw them out at the supermarket, right. Any reason I was giving people a discount. Why? Not that they asked for it, but I felt in my mind I was supposed to, or I needed to, or I felt bad until I learned profit margins, right. And so all of a sudden, you start to say, "Well, if you're giving a discount and also worst case, you're not sending out statements, you really, really are upside down." And so again, really powerful to be able to understand your profit margins. Now, in this case, she's like, "I do want to become fee for service," and so now we can say, "Okay, let's create a plan. Let's look at the services and decide what we're going to focus on for Q1 and what we're only going to focus on."
So it might be clear aligners that the practice is actually very comfortable doing, but if you focused on it again with your verbal skills, with learning our case acceptance frameworks with focusing on, also the marketing, maybe you do an Invisalign flash sale. I know recently we helped a practice. They actually showed up to our marketing office hours for Dental Boss Academy and they were like, "Well, we want to do an Invisalign flash sale." And we're like, "Okay, well, we can help you. I mean, that's what we do." And so we actually shared how to be able to do the campaign, how to market the campaign. We actually provided even templates to post around the office from CAMBA, emails to send out to the patients. And that practice did about $90,000 within one day and became a platinum Invisalign provider, right? So now as the practice says, "Well, I want to come off," we can create that plan. Or we can say, "What else do we want to implement this year?"
And perhaps it might be something like sleep, right? There are so many patients in our own practice that's snoring and if we're able to provide an opportunity to be able to help them with sleep appliances, then now we have the ability not just to be able to help patients, but to be able to bring in that additional revenue, which, sleep appliances is about $8,000 on average, right? So as we started looking at the gaps in the practice and looking at the circle of focus, now we are able to create an opportunity for the doctor to actually collect and not just produce $2 million. So it's pretty exciting stuff. And I'll say this, like knowing your numbers, knowing your profit margins could also help you in a different way. I had a practice that interestingly helped that was a $2.5 million producing PPO practice, which is a great PPO practice.
And what was interesting is that when we did their profit margins, they actually had an orthodontist that came in a few days a week. And so even though the fee was low for a filling because they have expanded services and do ortho, one of their insurances had a very high benefit for ortho. And so it made sense to keep that particular PPO because of the ortho benefit. Okay. So as I'm speaking, I want you to start thinking like, "Do you know your profit margins?" Because it is very frustrating as you know to put effort into growing your business and go to work every day and finish seeing patients and then you have to focus on running the business as well. And at the end of the day, you're tired, exhausted, and you're not sure where you are. And again, this is something that I feel is incredibly important for you to understand and it is a game-changer.
I have been fortunate enough to have been able to help many, many, many practices to understand our profit margins and when you get to this point, all of a sudden you become more confident when you discuss your fees, because you know what your fees actually are. You have accountability for your collections. Your AR is no longer a problem because you and your team really get it. So hopefully this has been an informative episode for you. And I can tell you, profit margins are extremely important for you to understand for your practice. Once you do, then it actually allows you to unfold other things, for example, looking at your schedule, because if you are scheduling a patient for fillings and they have, for example, four or five, six fillings, you can do it in one visit instead of four visits.
Then now you're able to decrease the supplies so you have more profits, or as you start focusing on training for you and your teams, again, learning case acceptance frameworks, then now you'll be able to have an increase in your doctor production per visit. And of course, using the tools, the whiteboards, the scorecards that we do provide inside of our academy are going to be extremely effective for you to be able to set your goals, to be able to look at what's happening from week to week and month to month so that things are not slipping through the cracks. All right?
So hopefully that was super helpful for you. Guys, if you know that you are needing help with profit margins, I'd love to be able to help you. This is something that we do every single day inside of our Platinum Coaching Program, as well as inside of Dental Boss Academy.
And if you've not yet gotten your four weeks for your access to Dental Boss Academy, I encourage you to go to Dental Boss Academy now, and go ahead and claim your free access. We actually are not only providing training for you and your entire team with individual training tracks, but we also have a monthly systems call, a monthly marketing call, as well as group coaching. We also have a bonus call for startups, full marketing content, and over 150 hours of included free CE. And again, as a listener of this podcast, we'd love to be able to help you to understand your profit margins, getting access to our templates and our training so that we can help support you as you're growing your dental practice.
All right? So thanks again, guys, for listening to this episode. It was amazing getting back on this microphone, I have really missed it, and I look forward to chatting with you in our next episode. Thanks for listening to today's episode of the Delivering Wow Dental Podcast.
Now your next step is to claim your four weeks free access to Dental Boss Academy by going to dentalbossacademy.com. We look forward to seeing you in our next episode.
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Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of the Delivering Wow Dental podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Anissa Holmes. And today, we're talking all about how to keep your patients coming back to your dental practice. Now, this is something that's actually pretty important and I'm not sure if you've thought about it recently, in terms of how many patients are actually leaving out of the back door or how many patients are actually leaving every single week without being scheduled. And I can tell you this is something that you're definitely going to want to create a system for because it's really interesting. A lot of people are focused on new patients, new patients, new patients. But if you are focusing on new patients and you have patients who are not scheduling, then essentially your business is not going to grow. It's going to be flat. And so, today I'm going to talk about how you can really think about making sure that your patients are coming back.
So, obviously we can look at marketing and not marketing from the standpoint of getting new patients but marketing to our existing patients. And I absolutely love to think about this and to really focus a lot of attention on marketing to my existing patients. Why? Because they are already trusting us. They have already had great service. They know what our culture's like and they can be walking advocates for our practice. And so, as we start thinking about even external marketing campaigns, we want to make sure that we're always involving our patients.
So, what does that look like? Well, maybe you decide that you want to do a clothing drive. Well, you definitely want to make sure that you're posting that on social media but you want to make sure that if you're doing, for example, a Facebook live video talking about it, on your social media pages, you're also taking a photo of that. You are sharing that link to that video, to your patients in an email and they're seeing what you're doing to serve the community. And also, of course, you're inviting them to participate. You are putting up flyers so that your patients will see what you're doing inside of your community.
And what I love doing inside of my practice and what I love helping practices with is actually having these monthly community engagement campaigns. So, now you can go ahead and really be consistent with marketing internally to your patients.
And as we start thinking about how are we marketing to our patients, we want to make sure that we are 100% being consistent. So, that is looking at having a monthly newsletter where you are sharing what you did last month for the community and what you're doing this upcoming month. Sharing an educational article that is talking about a new service or a service that you want to focus on for that particular month.
And of course, having that link for people to go ahead and schedule online or sharing your phone number or asking that they email you back to go ahead and make an appointment. So, that's another thing that you definitely want to consider.
Another thing that you want to look at in terms of making sure that your patients were coming back is making sure that when they're there, they are scheduling their next appointment. And a lot of times, what I hear from teams is that they are giving patients an option to schedule maybe even for a hygiene appointment and the patient says, "I'll call you back." Well, what I need you to understand is that most times patients are saying that because they don't know where they're going to be in six months. And so, now if you can create a system that says, "Okay, I would love to go ahead and make your next appointment. We can do it at the same time of day on the same day, if that works for you. We'll give you a call a week ahead of time. And if that time doesn't work, we can always move you."
Now, your patients know that they're not going to disappoint you if they are not able to make it. Maybe they're going to be traveling for work. And now what you can do is you can create a system so that every Monday, now your team member at the front desk can call patients who were pre-booked six months ago. And go ahead and remind them that they scheduled that
appointment. And again, if there are any conflicts, now you have a week or a little bit over a week to actually go ahead and get someone else into that timeframe. And you can now just move them. You definitely want to never remove a patient from the schedule. You just go ahead and move them.
The other thing that we can look at in terms of, how do we keep our patients coming back, is really looking at our patient experience. What are we doing so that our patients will become those raving fans, right? And really, really important. One of the things that we look at when our patients are coming in is we want to think about how can we ask them three different ways or three different times, how has their experience? So, the hygienist will ask, the doctor will ask and then the patient goes to the front desk and the front desk team member will ask. Well, what that means is we're constantly thinking about how can we create those touch points so that patients do have an experience that they remember. And it could be things such as having your kid go to the toy box first or having hot chocolate for your kids when they come into the office or giving them an office tour and showing them your core values on the wall. It doesn't have to be something that costs a lot of money but it's something that people will want a hundred percent remember.
So, that's something that you want to also think about. The other thing that you want to think about is, do you actually have a system or tracking system for ensuring or actually knowing how many patients are actually not scheduling each week? One thing that we put in place for our clients, as well as inside of my practice, is a customized scorecard. And one of the numbers that we're tracking in terms of metrics is how many patients who came in last week that did not actually schedule for their next visit and taking it to the next level. What's really nice is that if you can have your scheduling coordinator to go ahead and fill in these metrics inside of your scorecard and now what happens is that they can actually have that time on a Monday to go back into the ledgers of those patients and find out why is it that they didn't schedule. Was it that they were referred to another doctor and they're going to be coming back?
Was it that we need to follow up with them to ensure that we have financial arrangements with them. So, definitely want to make sure that you're having notes when patients are not scheduling and then also have systems so that you can actually track it. Because of course, once we start tracking things, then all of a sudden, it's not going to be okay for us to have patients that are not scheduling. So, now we can go in as a team, we can have conversations about how can we improve and how can we get that number down? And so, that's really, really powerful.
So, hopefully these tips help you to be able to put some different systems in place and to be able to start stirring up some ideas. But you definitely want to make sure that in addition to focusing on your new patients, you're really thinking about your existing patients. How is it that we're creating that great experience for them? How are we putting in those touch points? How are we focusing on internal marketing and how are we creating that system that allows us to hold ourselves accountable to actually getting our patients scheduled.
So, hopefully this helps you. I absolutely love talking about this stuff. It's really, really important. Again, a lot of times we're focusing on marketing and we have so many patients leaving out of the back door, which means that we can sometimes not only have flat growth but we actually have negative growth.
All right. So, hopefully that helps you. If this is sounding like you and you're feeling like you're needing a little bit of help with this, we'd love for you to reach out to us at www.DeliveringWow.com.
You can schedule a free 30 minute strategy call and we can discuss how we can help you to grow your practice and scale it to the next level.
All right, guys, that's it for today. Take care. And we'll see you inside of the next episode
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Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of the Delivering Wow Dental podcast. So, excited to be here today. So, today we're going to be talking about the truth about why patients are not scheduling. Why are patients saying, "We will call you back. We will think about it," and how do we actually overcome that obstacle so that we can actually help our patients get the treatment that we're recommending for them.
So, I remember back inside of my office when I would have so many patients say, "I will think about it. I want to talk to my husband." And as we started to look at why patients were not scheduling, I would ask my team "Guys, do you know what's going on?" And they would say, "Well, you know what, they don't have the money," or "The real thing is that right now, they just don't have a lot of time." Like, "They're really busy right now." And as I started to really think about it, I started to say, "There's actually probably something else."
And so, I actually went on this journey a few years ago to really understand advanced psychology and understand why people actually make decisions and why people don't make decisions. And so, I actually invested in working with some psychologists and also working with coaches who actually teach sales and neuro-linguistic programming outside of the dental industry, interestingly to real estate agents. And I went there with this idea that I wanted to understand, how could framework be created for my dental clients so that they could increase case acceptance. And so, that within my own practice, we could do the same. And what was interesting is once we learned what was the real secret, then all of a sudden our case acceptance skyrocketed. And so, I want to talk a little bit about that process and why our patients oftentimes will not actually schedule and why they probably will never schedule. So, no matter how many times we're actually calling them and saying, "Hey, you remember doctor says that you have that bridge to do," or, "You have that implant to do."
And so, the first thing that I want you to think about is the reason why a lot of people are not scheduling is that they are really confused about how they're actually going to fit it into their budget or how they're going to find the time. And so, what's has been really interesting is understanding this process, that once we are now providing the answer to that question that's actually confusing them and how it has actually worked for other people to solve that same problem. Then all of a sudden, that problem essentially goes away or that issue essentially goes away from them. And so, you might be saying, "Okay, Anissa, what are you talking about?" And so, as we start looking at case acceptance. So, one of the things that we teach in our different frameworks. We've got about five or six different frameworks that we teach for different aspects of case acceptance.
But as we start looking at presenting treatment, one thing that I will always ask the doctors that we work with in the teams is, "If you had to go to the dentist seven times or five times, would that be hard for you or would that be easy for you?" And for many of them, they say, "You know what? That would be really hard for me because I have to see my patients. I'd have to find a time to come in and not have patients scheduled." Or if they work for the dental practice, they say, "It would be really hard because I work in a small business and I have to find somebody to cover for me and that would be really hard." And so, as we start looking at, why is it that patients are not scheduling? I started to really think about the time factor and think that, really, patients are just like us.
They're a business owner. They work for a company. They're self-employed and it's really hard. And so, as we started looking at letting patients know that we recognize that this is hard and letting them know how patients are able to get their work done anyway, all of a sudden, a light bulb started to go off in our patients' minds and in the minds of our clients where all of a sudden they said, "Oh yeah. It's true. It's really hard for me to come for seven visits or five visits." Right. Or even four visits. And so, we started to look at one of our frameworks to really discuss this
and say, "Lots of our patients find that it's really hard for them to come in multiple visits."
"And for you, would it be easier for you to come in one or two visits or five or six?" And letting them know that most of our patients have said that it's easier for them. And so, letting them know that you listened to your patients and now you're offering longer appointments where people can just essentially come, one or two visits, if it's possible, depending on the treatment plan and get it all done and out of the way because the fact is that people really don't want to come to the dentist a lot of times. We get that, right. Then now we let them know that we found a solution for them. Right? You don't have to come in five visits. You could come in one or two. And then from there, in terms of the time, now that you've helped them to overcome that challenge of trying to figure out how they're going to actually get it done, the next thing is to think about the money aspect, right?
And so, asking them, "Now that we know that fewer visits are better for you, is there any reason why you wouldn't be able to come in one or two visits?" And so, for many people, they say, "I'd love to do that but I just don't have the money." And we know that already. And this is all a part of advanced psychology. Again, really understanding the psychology of why people make decisions, which a lot of times, it's just that when you just are confused about what to do, you do nothing. It's almost like, "I've been thinking about painting my house for a while now. And I'm not sure what colors to use. So, I just do nothing and they're still white." And so, that's the same thing that happens.
And so, if now you can have someone to come in. If I had somebody to come in my house and say, "Okay, here's a painter who can do the job for you. Here's different colors that you can select. And by the way, we're going to go and get all of the paint. And then we'll have the painter show up with the paint." Guess what? It's done now because we actually have a solution. Somebody has made it easy for me. And it's the same thing with our practice, right? And so, as we start looking at treatment planning, one thing that we can look at is giving those solutions. So, saying, "We know that most of our patients are just like you. They're not sure how they can fit it into their budget in one day but how they're able to do it anyway is, number one, they realize they have a credit card, perhaps even a zero interest credit card. And so, they're able to get it done that way."
"Or number two, maybe they don't have that solution. And so, we've created a plan where you can just pay a little bit over time." And so, that's another great option or a third great option is that we just make a plan today and decide what you're going to do on each visit, when you're going to come, which day of the month and look at how much you're going to budget for each appointment. And now you have a solution. And in fact, we can actually go ahead and pre-book all of your appointments to actually hold you accountable to getting this done. And so, now you provide three options, which are all really good solutions. And now you can ask the patient, "Which one of these options works best for you?" And so, essentially now, instead of them having to decide and come up with a solution, they're just choosing one and either one of those three works.
Okay. So, I wanted to share those pearls with you. There's lots of different frameworks that we teach that have been really transformational for practices. But I wanted to at least share this one framework with you today here, inside of this podcast, because guys, the reason why people are not scheduling a lot of times is that they just don't know exactly how to actually get it done.
All right. So, hopefully that's helpful for you guys. I look forward to chatting with you in our next episode and if you haven't done so already, make sure that you're joining us inside of our YouTube channel, www.dentalbosstv.com. Lots of great videos and tools for you there inside of our channel.
All right, guys, we'll chat soon. Take care.
Thank you so much for listening to another episode of the Delivering Wow Dental podcasts. Now, if you haven't done so already, we invite you to join us at www.deliveringwow.com to take
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Delivering Wow podcast with Dr. Anissa Holmes. We'll catch you next time.
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Hi guys, and welcome to another episode of the Delivering WOW Dental Podcast. Today, we're talking all about the best marketing for dentists who are wanting to grow a successful practice. So I absolutely love talking about this topic. As many of you guys know, we have done some pretty cool things inside of my dental practice with marketing. We have for years now been able to get over a hundred patients a month, which is crazy. We obviously keep growing and we've been adding on associates. But the great thing is that we are at the point now where we're not having to really look at much in terms of marketing. So what I'm going to be doing today inside of the episode is actually sharing how you too can get to that point where you have more patients than you perhaps need and more patients coming in without you really having to think about a lot of paid marketing, expensive marketing.
So let's talk a little bit about the journey of a patient and that journey typically will start with them not knowing who you are. As you're bringing them into your world, they are first becoming aware about your practice, about what makes you different about, how you serve the community, about the services that you provide. From there, we are looking at taking people along a journey, from awareness to making a decision to pick up the phone and call to coming in and having a great experience to becoming a patient who's a raving fan, and then ultimately, ideally a patient that will be with us for life, for them and their families, right?
So as we start looking at building out these raving fans, people who can't stop talking about us, because to be honest with you, if we can focus in terms of marketing on creating an army of raving fans, then again, marketing gets really, really easy because they're actually doing the work for us. So the first thing I want you to think about is number one, are you providing a great experience? Are you doing dentistry that you can really be proud of and that people will want to talk about, right? So if not, then obviously that's where we want to start. But once you know that you're providing a good service, then what we want to look at is how can we start the process of getting known in our community?
Many of you guys know, I'm a huge fan of Facebook marketing for a few reasons. Number one is the target demographic of who we are wanting as ideal patients are primarily using Facebook as far as their social media channel. So what do I mean by that? I'm looking at patients who are between the ages of maybe 38, 55 people who are at a point where they are able to take care of investing in themselves in terms of the investment, the financial investment. They're starting to perhaps see their parents age and understand that right now is a time to take care of yourselves, right? So I love using Facebook marketing. It's also super, super cost effective as well. Honestly, I've never seen anything work like it.
We have worked with hundreds and hundreds of practices and what's really cool is they start to build this following in the community where people are coming up and saying, "Oh my God, aren't you the doctor at so-and-so." Or they are having patients coming in and saying, "I've been following you for a while and I've been telling everybody about you." That's so cool and we can get to that point. So you definitely want to look at number one, are you utilizing Facebook marketing? Are you using Facebook effectively to actually showcase what your practice is known for and to get out there and start doing some community service events as well, really showcasing the culture of your practice? Because let's face it, dental practices, many of them, they'll all provide hopefully a similar level of quality of care.
What makes your business stand apart is the culture. It's what people see when they walk in, the smells. It's how you make them feel, right? So utilizing social, you're able to essentially put a lens of the outside world to what's actually happening in your business. So one thing that we love to do for doctors that are in our platinum mastermind and also within our training program, our Dental Boss Academy is we want to make it easy. We want to make it easy for you to do marketing campaigns. So getting out there and doing a community-based marketing campaign
every month where you are using social media, where you are integrating in internal marketing and you're involving your patients and you're putting up flyers around the office, and you're sending out emails, really enrolling, again, not just your potential patients, but also your existing, because once you start focusing on how to effectively market to your existing patients, and all of a sudden, they now start doing the marketing for you, which is really cool, right?
So a few things that you can look at doing in terms of the internal marketing is, again, if you are doing something, maybe you're having a coloring contest, then you want to be able to have an online version. You want to be able to involve your patients, have them to participate. Now, you can get out there and you can talk about it. You can do Facebook lives. What's really cool is that any of these campaigns, again, these are awareness campaigns where people may or may not have heard about you before. All of a sudden, you are doing videos. Maybe you're doing a small makeover competition. You're talking about it. Maybe you're implementing a new service and you're talking about that. Then now you can take anybody that's watched those videos.
Again, there's some strategy there that is really, really simple, a few little steps. Then from there you start to build, and anybody who's watched those videos or have comment on your posts, now you can start to show them Facebook ads for those high value services, which is really, really cool, right? So again, for me, the best marketing that we want to look at is how do we build this funnel, right? How do we take people from awareness to raving fan, but also how do you create marketing campaigns that allow for this organically happen? What's been really cool is seeing practices that we've worked with have a budget of a few hundred dollars a month and they're now bringing in $50,000 cases or having an extra 20 grand coming in because they are getting people in who already believe in them before they walk in.
But what's, I guess, really most exciting, all of this if you really think about it, is how many more lives we're serving, how many potential lives that we're literally saving. If we start looking at doing sleep appliances and things like that. I mean, imagine doing a Facebook live effectively with the correct targeting where now all of a sudden you're talking about sleep apnea, you're talking about what happens when people snore and how do people stop breathing and you can talk about CPAPs versus oral appliances. Again, with the effective targeting now, anybody who is seeing those videos, they can see specific ads for sleep apnea, which is really, really cool, right? So hopefully those tips are helping you. But again, as fast as possible, I do recommend that you start thinking about how can you build out your marketing strategy where you can continue to not only get the community talking about you, but your patients as well.
All right, guys. So hopefully that helps. So if you have not done so already, I'd love to invite you to get access to our free marketing plan, training and templates. To do so, you can head on over to deliveringwow.com/marketingplan. Within that training, we're actually going to show you how to create your marketing plan. We're going to give you tons of ideas to be able to do that as well and to give you some video training to help you get started. All right, guys, that's it for today. I look forward to chatting you in the next episode. Until then, keep Delivering WOW.
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Delivering WOW podcast with Dr. Anissa Holmes. We'll catch you next time.
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Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Delivering WOW Dental Podcast. So excited to be here with you today. Today, we're going to be talking about effective team meetings, why you should have them, how you should have them, and the components of an effective team meeting. Now, the first question that I want to ask you before we even get started is, are you having consistent team meetings? The majority of people that I talk to, they are actually not having team meetings. They are saying, "Well, we meet once a month, and at the end of the month, we'll review everything," or, "We meet quarterly," or even some practices say that they're meeting annually. And the reason why you definitely want to implement an effective weekly meeting for your team in addition to your team huddles is that now you can actually have a time for your team, if you're the doctor, to come and have your devoted attention, where they can ask you questions.
And that way, you're not getting bombarded with questions throughout the week, you're able to look at your metrics in the middle of the month as it's actually happening, and you can actually make changes based on what is happening, what's not happening. You can also look at actually having a new team initiatives that are getting started, whether it's a marketing campaign, maybe you decide that you want to implement a new service, and so now it's a time to come together collectively as a team to be able to decide what is it that you're going to be working on? Who's going to own the task by which date? And what's also really effective and powerful inside of a team meeting is that it does allow you and your team to be able to connect, not only professionally, but also personally. Inside of our Platinum Mastermind, one of our foundational tools that we look at when you're joining for the first four months is to help you to make sure that you are effectively having a team meeting.
And not just following an outline, but you're actually having accountability. It's actually a tool that will allow you and your team to be able to come together and change "I can't" statements. "I can't have multiple $10,000 days." "We can't have effective team meetings." Whatever the issues, it's a way for you to be able to come together, have that accountability, and again come together collectively so that you change those "I can't do it" statements to "how can I" and you are looking at, how can you do it together? So as you are looking at implementing a weekly meeting, the one thing that you want to look at before you even get started, if you've listened to my last episode on the podcast I talked about, before you start looking at putting in systems, before you start working on the business, you really do need to be able to connect with your team. You need to be able to have that way to be able to open up and be able to communicate, to understand outside of what's happening in the practice what's going on personally.
Because, ultimately, if you have a team member that may be having a family issue, maybe they have a parent who is aging and is not doing very well. Perhaps you're having stress at home with a child or within your marriage. These things actually do affect our practice. And even though we say, leave that stuff at home, it's really important to really understand that we are connecting with people in our practice and that life is actually happening. And so a lot of times when we actually know what's happening, we understand why our team may be showing up in a way that's not ideal, or why even the doctor as well? I mean, we're all people, and so when you're able to connect in your meeting, the very thing that you do at the very beginning is say, "What went well this week? What went well this week at home? What are you proud of?" And you may find somebody who says, "I'm really excited I got to spend time with my husband. We had a great weekend together. It was amazing."
Or they may say, "You know what? I had an opportunity this week to be able to help a patient. Who's been thinking about treatment for a few years and we had a conversation and they decided to move forward." Now what happens is that the doctor can celebrate and acknowledge the team. Lots of times our team members are doing great things, we don't even know it. And so it allows us to be able to really show that appreciation and to let them know that we really do
care about them, and we see and we notice and we recognize their efforts. From there, inside of our team meetings, what we want to look at is we want to be able to look at our numbers for the last week. So what is our doctor production per visit? Our hygiene production per visit? What is our case acceptance percentage? Are we hitting our goals or not? And, again, if we are, celebrating our team.
If we're not hitting our goals, we want to be able to, again, within that meeting, have a conversation about, how we can make sure that we're actually coming together collectively to be able to hit the goal. And there's typically about 10 different metrics that we recommend that you're looking at weekly. And once you do, you're going to start to see some pretty significant changes happen inside of your practice. The other thing that we want to look at within our meeting is we want to look at, what are the things that we're working on, not just this week or not just this month, but what are we doing quarterly? A lot of times you may hear people talk about creating a 90 day plan or creating a quarterly plan, and that's all really good and fine, but what accountability is there to make sure that you're actually hitting it? And so, as you're having your meetings every single week, it's a great opportunity to check in and say, "How are we progressing to actually hitting our quarterly goals?"
And if you are progressing, and it's not just the doctor goals, by the way, the doctor may have their personal goal, maybe they want to be able to increase their personal case acceptance, or maybe they want to be able to start doing more high level services, maybe they want to be able to grow and have a new associate, that's one thing that's really important to them by the end of the quarter, but the team members also, we want to make sure that they have their quarterly goals as well. So that could be, again, how many $10,000 cases are we going to close? And maybe the practice right now is not doing any, and so that allows you to understand where you need to focus, and that would be case acceptance training or focusing on making sure that you're actually doing procedures that will allow you to be able to generate those higher revenues, whether it's going to be sleep apnea, placing and restoring implants, et cetera.
As we start looking at what else we're doing inside of the meeting, we have an opportunity to actually go in and anything that we said that we were going to do in the last week, maybe you have decided that you want to have your team do KPI calendars, which is one of the things that we help practices implement, well, now you can say, "Who's going to own downloading the template? Who's going to go ahead and collect the daily, weekly tasks that everybody is writing down and place it in the template? And who's going to make sure that it's printed out so that now we see that in the break room and now the office manager and the doctor has a copy?" Well, what we want to make sure is that these tasks are not actually being done by the doctor. Again, as I spoke about in the last podcast, the best use of the doctor's time is actually doing the dentistry. And so we really want to make sure that pretty much every other tasks that can be delegated out to another team member is actually being done.
And so now that we are delegating it, we have this opportunity to be able to check in with our meetings that we're having every single week and say, "Did it actually get done?" If not, the team can say, "Well, it didn't get done and this was my challenge. I had a challenge with this." And so now you can discuss it as a team and you can get back on track and you can now actually get that task actually completed. Really, really powerful. As we start getting further down into the meeting, we also want to make sure that we have time to discuss any issues that we have that are happening in the practice. Maybe we have a new service that we're implementing, but patients are actually not scheduling. We need to discuss, what's the issue? Is it verbal skills? Is it mindset? How can we correct this? Maybe it's clinical competency of the team or the doctor.
Now we're able to look at, "Hey, guys, let's go ahead and plan a CE trip. Let's go ahead and talk about that trip. Where are we going to stay? How many days are we going to close the office? Who's going to go ahead and book the flights?" Right now, you have that opportunity to be able to discuss that within the actual meeting. At the end of the meeting, we also love to be able to
say, "How was the meeting?" And the team can actually check in and say, "We had a great meeting," or, "You know what, it was a good meeting, but we didn't start on time. And so if we had started on time, we would have rated it to be a 10 or 100. But because people showed up late, we're going to go ahead and give it an eight out of 10, or an 80%."
So as you start looking at building out your meetings and effective meetings, and these are some tips that you can use to be able to implement your weekly meeting. But I 100% recommend that you go ahead and put in a weekly meeting inside of your practice, and that way you can now have a way to be able to connect as a team, to be able to check in on your quarterly goals, to make sure that you are discussing any issues, and to really look at your practice week by week so that you can change the dynamic of the month. So hopefully that helps you. I absolutely love sharing these tips and tools with you inside of our podcasts. And if you know that you're looking to be able to get help with growing your practice, I invite you to reach out for a free practice strategy call by going to our websitedeliveringwow.com. All right, guys. That's it for today. Take care. We'll chat soon, and keep delivering WOW.
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Delivering WOW Podcast with Dr. Anissa Holmes. We'll catch you next time.
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Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of the Delivering WOW Dental Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Anissa Holmes. And today we're talking about how to build your dental practice from the ground up. So recently I've had quite a few people reaching out to me for practice growth strategy calls who are telling me that they are overwhelmed, they are exhausted. Some people have just been in practice for a few years. Others have been practicing for quite some time and still feel like they don't have a grip feeling like they're doing all of the things, feeling like their team is not yet the right team to be able to grow and scale with them.
And so I wanted to spend a little time today talking about how is it that we are able to build an engaged team, a team of leaders who get us, who want to be able to grow the business with us? How do we get people who are becoming leaders? How is it that we have a roadmap to be able to follow, to be able to grow our businesses? Whether it is to implement new services, to be able to increase our revenue, to be able to save for a rainy day, how is it that we're able to also look at making sure that things are not slipping through the cracks and we have accountability?
And so I wanted to spend a little time talking about these different areas today to give you some insight of what you want to start thinking about as you are wanting to remove the overwhelm inside of your practice. And so the first thing that we look at before we even put in any systems into play with any of the doctors and teams that we work with is I want to be able to really empower the team. I want the teams to understand that the practice is how they can not only be able to grow professionally, but how they're able to also achieve their personal goals.
And so one of the things that I will commonly ask doctors and team members collectively is how many of you want to be able to not only impact your patients' lives, but to be able to do more for your families? And I will say, "Let's be honest here. It's okay, doctors, it's okay to share in front of your team. Doctors, it's okay to be vulnerable. Team members, it's okay to let your doctors say, 'How many of you guys want more for your family's growing than you had growing up?'" And I will typically put up my hand really high and I say, "I know that I am."
And so what that means is that we have to serve our patients hard. We have to be able to work in a healthy business so that we can be able to achieve that impact and change lives, but ultimately so that we will have a business that will allow us to be able to all earn more. And what I will often say is that there are many pieces that make up having a successful case accepted. So it's not just the doctor doing the treatment. It is the scheduling coordinator scheduling the treatment. It is the financial coordinator making payment arrangements and getting that payment and getting that patient scheduled once that's done.
It's also the assistant making sure that everything is set up and also following up with patients in the lab. It's collective effort. But my question that I always ask is who is there to be able to cut the teeth that no one else can? Who can actually do the procedure and that is the doctor. We have the skillset to be able to do that. And so with that being said, I will always ask is it the best use of the doctor's time to be able to do all of the things? Should the doctor be, for example, answering the phones or should the doctor be ordering supplies? And the answer is no.
There are a lot of mouths that have to be fed inside of a dental practice. For me in my practice, we have about 18 team members. If you multiply that times their spouse and their kids and perhaps they have a parent living in the home, that's perhaps 80 or 100 mouths that are being fed. And so what we look at as far as setting our practice up for success is really making sure
hat our team members that are doctors as well understand that the best use of the doctor's time is actually doing the dentistry.
And so when we look at that, then now we can look at the roles of the team. We can make sure that they understand what is it that they should be doing daily, what is it that they should be doing weekly that's really going to allow for the businesses scale? And from there, we actually look at executing and helping them to be able to implement systems so that now there is accountability.
So the first thing that we always want to look at is do we have the right people? And all our people or all our team members understanding that our practice is how they can achieve and grow personally. Because as a business owner, ultimately, our number one responsibility is to empower our team is to get our team coaching, is to get our team training. Because once our team has training and they understand how to be able to grow and to become a better leader, then now we can take things off of our plate and we can focus on those things that we really love to do and we're really good at.
So as we start looking at building our practice from the ground up, we want to start thinking about how can we empower our team? How can we get the right training for our teams so that now they can grow into that leadership and we'll honestly will feel very comfortable and confident that they can actually get the job done? I find so many times what happens is that doctors are doing things like ordering supplies. Why? Because they had a team member that maybe made a mistake and now we don't trust them. And so instead of taking on doing tasks ourselves, we need to focus on creating systems and training processes with accountability.
We need to focus on creating ways that our team can communicate with us so that we are not getting text messages and getting interrupted multiple times during the day as we're seeing patients. And so there's definitely these sort of systems that you're going to want to put into your practice so that now you can have that communication thread. Now your team knows exactly what day of the week that you're going to be there fully committed with them to be able to answer their questions. And again, making sure that you have people that are there to help you to take that training off your plate. Okay?
The other thing that we want to look at as we are building our dental practice from the ground up is making sure that we actually have a roadmap to be able to follow so that we now have direction. Now it's really, really clear. One of the things that we look at in terms of what holds people back is looking at our internal fears saying, "Can I do this myself? Am I going to be overwhelmed? Am I going to be exhausted?"
And because of internal fears, a lot of times we just simply don't do the things that we know that we actually need to do. A lot of times we also just don't understand what exactly is happening. We don't have a plan. And so we have these external fears as well. And so once we focus on having help with creating that roadmap or we focus on creating that roadmap, then now we can grow. And so you might be asking, "Well, what does that roadmap look like?" Well, what I absolutely love seeing practices do is to take some time, to be able to create a strategy where now you can look at the last 12 months, you're able to look at what went well, what didn't go well in terms of revenue per service.
You're able to look at your production and not only production and collection, but your collection percentage. What are those things that prevented you from actually producing? Also looking at all of your expenses. And from there, you're able to understand what your profitability is, you're able to put in cashflow projections and you're able to really understand what a healthy business
looks like. Okay? So as we start looking at growing your practice, you want to be able to create that circle of focus. You want to be able to say, "Okay, what happens if we increase our case acceptance percentage without doing anything else?"
What if we now fully commit to that service that we said that we were going to start last year that we actually did not start or we did not actually execute the way that we intend it? What if we were to start looking at and increasing the number of high value services that we're doing so we're focusing on clinical skillsets? And how would that allow us to be able to serve more people as well as to be able to become known in our community for that service, as well as to be able to increase our overall revenue.
Okay? So that's one thing that we want to look at. The other thing that we want to look at as we are building our practice from the ground up. Not only do we need the right people and processes, but we definitely need to have the right tools. And these tools will allow you to be able to have accountability. And so looking at having, for example, a weekly scorecard where you're able to put in your metrics, where you're able to look weekly and say, "Have we actually hit our goal? If not, let's talk about it in a weekly meeting and say, 'How can we achieve that goal?'"
And as we start looking at assigning tasks, new things that we want to implement in our business if we want to be able to take a training, if we want to be able to implement new marketing, who's going to actually own setting these things up, who's going to help them and by when will it be done? Okay? So putting in accountability, putting in processes so that you can discuss what's happening in your practice from week to week is extremely powerful. And it's going to help you to be able to scale your practice extremely fast as well as to be able to reach your goals. Okay?
So hopefully this was super helpful for you. And you've got some pearls that will allow you to be able to grow your practice. I love being able, as you guys know, to be able to have this podcast to be able to share lots of valuable insight with you as we have worked with hundreds of practices and have been able to see what actually works to be able to allow practices to be able to grow from the ground up. We do invite you if you've not yet done so to be able to schedule a free practice strategy call with us. Go into our website at deliveringwow.com. We'd love to be able to help you to be able to grow your practice.
And if you haven't done so already, we love for you to join us inside of our free Facebook Group, dental bossmovement.com. We look forward to seeing you there. And guys, we look forward to hearing from you if you have any questions or any thoughts that you have in terms of our podcasts, anything that we can do to be able to help you, please make sure that you reach out to us at [email protected]. All right, guys, take care, enjoy the rest of your day and we'll chat soon.
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Delivering WOW Podcast with Dr. Anissa Holmes. We'll catch you next time.
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Hi, everyone, and welcome to another episode of The delivering while dental podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Anissa Holmes. And today we're talking about teaching your dental team, how to get your patients to come back. Now, this is one of those topics that I absolutely love. Because a lot of times, as many of you guys know, we're focusing so much on what's happening day to day, we're focusing on marketing, and we have a huge back door problem. Patients are not necessarily making their recall visits, they're coming in or setting treatment plans, they're not scheduling. And so this is a topic that's really extremely important for us to consider.
So as we start looking at having our patients coming back, creating a process for that, the one thing that we want to look at is do we have a system to actually track what happens with our patients week to week, how many patients do we have that came in last week, that actually left without an appointment? Now what you're going to want to get to, you're going to want to develop a system, that now your team can actually come to you in a weekly meeting and a weekly meeting. And they will say, Doc, letting you know, last week, we had 10 patients who were unscheduled, and this is why they were unscheduled, this patient went to see the endodontist, this patient didn't have any additional restorative treatment, this patient is going to go ahead and apply for financing. I'm going to follow back up with them next week, Monday, right, you want to get to that place.
So as we start looking at getting patients to come back, the first thing that we actually want to do is see how many patients are actually leaving out of the back door. Right? Really, really important.
So obviously, that's one of those things that we want to look at, as we're looking at building out our systems, we also want to look at as well, what is our AR looking like week to week, right? Is it going up? Is it going down? I actually had a call yesterday with a doctor who was looking at coaching, and she was saying that they had a huge accounts receivable issue. In fact, statements had not been sent out in over a year and she had no clue. And so that's another system, as many as well as many other systems that you're going to want to put in place that you're tracking week to week. But as we're getting back to getting your patients to come back, once you have that system in place to just see where you are, then now you can actually go ahead and create processes to improve. So as we're looking again, as how we're going to train a team, one thing that I hear a lot of and I see it a lot in Facebook groups are people saying let's have a morning huddle and see which patient that comes in that we can ask for a referral.
Okay, now, that's all great and fine, where we're actually having that discussion and asking for referrals. But the first thing that we want to do just to kind of push it back a little bit, is to actually think about why would somebody want to refer? Right? What is our what is our culture and our practice look like? What sort of experiences are we providing for our patients. And one thing that you're going to want to make sure that you put in place is a system, again, a way to be able to make sure that you're giving consistent, great experiences to your patients.
And so definitely those different touch points I've spoken about in the past, having coffee table culture books, where patients are coming in, they see how you're serving the community, they see what you're doing, in terms of taking care of your team doctors, they see that you're doing continuing education they're seeing before and after pictures of the great work that you're doing. Perhaps you're offering complimentary coffee, tea, perhaps you have, you have a toy box where kids actually go to the toy box first, right? That can be an experience for the kids. you're offering a tour.
You've got your core values on the wall, perhaps you're offering a warm peppermint sentence, how at the end, right? What experiences are you having with your patients because at the end of that process, what you can actually do is now when the doctor comes into the room, the doctor can say, how was your experience today? There are so many people that are afraid to go to the dentist that we want to make sure that you have an amazing experience, right? How was that warm peppermint-scented towel?
So you have our dental assistants who have been trained in hand and arm massage. And so they're able to actually offer that service to patients, right? So we can ask, you know, how was that? How was your experience?Did you enjoy the Did you get a cup of hot chocolate or the freshly brewed Blue Mountain coffee, right? So we can ask those questions. So as we're planting seeds in our patient's heads, reminding them of the great experience, how was the tour right? Then now what we can do is as they're going to the front desk, now we can have that extroverted team member to ask that patient again, how was your experience today, and when that patient says it was great, it was amazing, then now they can say, wonderful, we would love if you'd be willing to share that experience.
There are so many people that are afraid to go to the dentist, it just might change someone's life, that now we're able to get that video testimonial that now we can add to our website, or now we can upload to Google My Business or now we can upload to Facebook. And we can actually create some ads so that now we have not only hundreds but 1000s of people hearing about that patients experience. Okay, so as we start looking at how can we get our patients to come back? Number one, we have to think about what are the experiences that we're actually providing for them.
Okay, the other thing that we want to look at in terms of how we're going to get our patients to come back, is to really think about what's the real issue in terms of why patients are actually not coming back.
And a lot of times, so what it really is, is that we don't yet have the training, we don't yet have the skill set to actually be able to have conversations that will lead our patients to actually go ahead and get started with treatment. And a lot of times, honestly, is that we have this fear of being objection blocked, right? So we have spoken about procedures to a patient and the past. They've said, does my insurance cover it?And we say, No, insurance doesn't cover this, or it doesn't cover all of it. And so the patient says, Well, let me think about it. And we say, okay, and why do we say okay, because that is the skill set of where we are. So what we want to start focusing on in order to be able to get our patients to come back is investing in training for you and your team. So that now you can be able to have the conversations that when you're presenting a treatment plan, you can say something, for example, here's the thing, insurance is not going to cover all of this. But why are patients choose to do this anyway, is number one, they know that it doesn't take a lot of time, or it's going to save them time, or it's going to save them money or it's not going to cost that much money. And it's going to give you that peace of mind. Right.
So there are some verbal skills, definitely want to look into training. So that now you can get you and your team to the point where now you don't have patients leaving because you have not yet developed the verbal skills for case acceptance. So that's definitely something else that you're going to want to look at as you're looking at creating a process to make sure that you don't have a back door issue. Okay. So again, the three things that you're going to want to look at is, do you know how many patients are leaving out of the back door, the second thing that you're going to want to look at is of all of the patients that are coming in, are you providing a great experience so that they will actually want to come back and not just so that they want to come back so that they will actually tell their friends and their families. And they will actually be able to provide things like video testimonials, that now you can again, utilize in your marketing so that you can attract more amazing patients just like them. T
he third thing 100% you're going to want to focus on verbal skills, and case acceptance that is extremely, extremely powerful. We've actually worked with hundreds and hundreds of practices, helping them to be able to grow to be able to scale to be able to put in systems to be able to fix these backdoor issues. And again, one of the things that we definitely want to look at is are you getting your team trained, right?
And as the doctor you may have an understanding, or you may think you have an understanding, you may say well, yeah, I think case acceptance is pretty good. And then I say okay, well what is your case acceptance percentage rate doctor, so that we can now go ahead and create opportunities to be
able to train and get that hire a lot of times, practice owners just don't know. Right? So we definitely want to start looking at where do we need to focus.Again, as doctors, we are the C II O's. We are the owners of our businesses. And as we're looking at growing businesses that are healthy businesses that allow us to continue to grow and serve people, we want to make sure that we're focusing on providing those great experiences, focus on training our team and focus on again, creating those experiences that will last and we'll allow our patients to share.
Alright guys, so hopefully, this was super helpful. If you have any questions about growing your practice, about setting up these systems, feel free to reach out to me, DM me on Facebook, go to our website delivering well.com we'd love to be able to help you to be able to grow your practice. But again, thank you so much for listening to another episode of The delivering wall dental podcast. I look forward to seeing you guys in our next episode.
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Hi guys, and welcome to another episode of The Delivering WOW dental podcast. Today, we're here talking all about treatment plans do's and don'ts and how can we increase our case acceptance rate? How can we present treatment plans in a more concise way. Things that we definitely need to consider. And things that we don't want to do with our treatment plans. And so, so excited to be sharing this episode with you. So as we start looking at treatment plans, some things that we want to start thinking about is number one, do we have a way to be able to communicate so that our patients are doing as much treatment in one visit? I'm not sure if you've ever thought about that but think about it. If you had to go to the dentists five times or seven times to be able to get your work done, would that be easy for you, or would that be hard for you?
I can tell you, for me as a business owner it would be really hard to be able to pull away from my business. If I were working for a company, it would be really difficult as well to have to keep saying, "I'm so sorry I have to go to the dentist. I have to go to the dentist." So, as we start thinking about treatment plans and presenting treatment plans, one thing that I want you to think about is how can we make it easy for our patients to actually complete treatment? And that has a lot to do with the verbal skills that we're actually saying so that our patients will understand that we can actually get all of their treatment done within one visit and how we're able to do that.
And to share a little pearl one thing that we coach practices to do within our mastermind and what we're also doing inside of my practice is as we're presenting treatment plans, we're actually asking the patients, "Would you like to do this in many, many visits, maybe five or six visits, or would it be easier for you to actually get this done in one or two visits?"
We find that most of our patients either work for a company or they're self-employed, and it's a lot easier for them. So what we have actually done is we've created longer time blocks in our schedules, listening to what works better for our patients so that we're able to go ahead and book everything in one or two visits. Would that be easy for you, or would you prefer to do that? Now, as we're doing that we know that we do have patients who will ask a question, for example, "How much is that going to cost? I'm not sure if I can afford to do everything in one visit." So as we start having that conversation, we already know that that's going to come up and so we are prepared. So now we can say something like, "Most of our patients are just like you. They're not able to fit everything out of pocket in one visit. But here's how they're able to get everything done in one visit anyway."
Number one, they have a credit card. So they will use a zero-interest credit card or a credit card that they have so that they can go ahead and get their treatment done and they can pay it off over time. What other patients may do is that they may want to go ahead and get everything done in one visit and they can actually pay it off over time with low monthly payments. So that's another option that works extremely well for a lot of our patients. And number three, what a lot of our patients do is we can actually go ahead today and see all of what needs to be done. And we can actually go ahead and pre-book all of your appointments so that you now know your budget for every visit. And you can go ahead and block the time so that now you have a way to go ahead and get everything in place.
And now we have a way to hold you accountable for getting everything done. So, as we start having these conversations, one thing that we definitely want to do is we want to let people know the benefits of getting everything done in one day, they will say, "You know what? That really makes sense." And then by using the verbal skills of, "Here's how our patients just like you are able to fit it into one visit." Now they see what's possible. What's really interesting as I've studied communication and neuro-linguistic programming is that we want to make sure that we are letting people know that they're not alone. We want to be able to help people see that there are solutions and giving them multiple solutions that all work for them that now they can find a way to be able to get that done.
So again, [inaudible 00:04:58] my 100% does nothing. Okay? As we start looking at presenting treatment plans really important as well to also have different options in terms of payments. So we've just spoken about that before. And to be honest with you, a lot of patients have not thought about it. They do have a credit card, or they have a zero-interest credit card that they may be able to use to go ahead and finance treatment. And if not, then you want to make sure that you have multiple payment options that are available inside of your practice and also consider having options for prepayments. So definitely want to make sure that you're checking what is possible where you are located. But I can tell you where we're located we actually have prepayment courtesies. So if patients are prepaying for their dental visits, we're able to give them a courtesy where they're able to save 5%.
So we say, "You know what? We want to be able to help you. So we are going to actually reduce the costs by 5% if you pre-pay." Or sometimes we'll say, "Once you're financing, we will actually help you out a little bit with the interest because we want to make this easy for you. So we'll actually reduce the treatment plan by 5%. And from there now you'll have a lower cost. We'll pay some of that interest for you. And now you can go ahead and get that finance." And that is if the patient is paying the interest versus the practice. So that's another thing that you definitely want to consider. The other thing you want to consider when you are doing treatment plans, and what you don't want to do is you don't want to have the patient leave without a good follow-up system.
So one thing that we help practices do within our mastermind is actually utilize a tool such as Asana where any treatment plans, especially treatment plans over a specific dollar amount you're able to now track the patient, and track the conversation, track what's happening. So if they're going out to financing, what's the process? Have they been pre-approved or are they looking for someone to co-sign? What's the follow-up process? Are you supposed to reach out to them on a specific date? And if so, what's possible is going ahead and putting that specific date in so that now you can have a reminder when you're logging in that you have to contact that patient and what the conversation was about. And this is actually a really great software that you can use to be able to not only be able to follow up with unscheduled treatmentbut also to look at communicating about projects, marketing campaigns, being able to facilitate weekly meetings, lots of amazing things that you can use once you start utilizing these tools.
So hopefully that's been super helpful for you. Another thing that we want to look at as we are getting into improving our treatment plans is making sure doctors that you and your team have training on verbal skills and case acceptance. It's so interesting to see how many dental businesses do not focus on sales training, or case acceptance training, or verbal skills training. And if you look at restaurants, if you look at car dealerships, if you look at furniture stores, if you look at Bed Bath and Beyond, right in the mall, they're constantly learning and working on how can we communicate with our customers, in our case our patients, so that they can get to the point of saying, "Yes, I actually want to get started with engaging in that service," or in our case, our dental practice." So that's another thing that you want to 100% definitely want to make sure that you're focusing on as well.
And again, if you need help with that, feel free to reach out. We love helping practices with verbal skills, case acceptance, doing workshops, getting in there, and training you and your team. All right, guys. So pretty much that is it for today. Hopefully, this episode was super helpful and gave you some pearls and some things to think about.
I look forward to seeing you inside of our marketing and practice growth challenge. That's going to be coming up. To learn more and get access to that challenge and to get access for free as a listener of this podcast, you can enter in the code PODCAST and you can go to http:// deliveringwowchallenge.com. All right, guys, that is pretty much it. Chat soon. And I'll see you inside of the next episode.
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Hi guys, and welcome to another episode of The Delivering WOW Dental Podcast. Super excited to have you here today. Today, we're here talking all about low-cost dental marketing strategies for startups or new practices. So excited to be here today with you talking all about marketing strategies. As many of you guys know, I absolutely love marketing. It is a way that we are able to have all of the people who are there out in our communities who need dentists to actually find us. And so, again, so excited to be talking today about what actually works for startup marketing.
So about four or five years ago, I started working with startups to be able to understand how to be able to bring in new patients before they open the door. And what that looks like is having patients not only scheduled but have patients who know what we're known for so that when they're coming in, they're actually telling their friends and family so that when you're out at the supermarket, at the gym, they're saying, "Aren't you that dentist? Aren't you that dentist that just opened a new practice?" Getting you to a place where you have other businesses that are actually sending patients to you, having people in your community who are sending patients to you, that's the type of marketing that we're talking about.
Now, as we know, there are many types of marketing and as startups are looking to get new patients, and a lot of times what happens is as you're getting your practice loan, the banks are saying, "Well, this loan is contingent upon you actually having a marketing plan, knowing exactly how you're going to be able to get customers," or, in our case, patients into our practices. And so that's the first thing that we want to look at, is creating your marketing plan. How are you going to get patients in? How are you going to get patients to refer to you your community? What are you going to do in terms of external marketing, whether that's going to be building out your website or it's going to be building out business cards, if you still are looking to do business cards, right?
What's going to be your Google strategy, your Facebook strategy? It can be very, very overwhelming. And so what we've actually done is we want to talk about how can we simplify this process? Because as we know, there are so many moving parts. As you have a startup, you're looking at the build-out, the equipment. And at the same time, you do need to think about where are you going to get patients coming in? And so, one thing that we want to look at is how can we, again, create a marketing plan that allows us to be able to get patients in without having to spend a lot of money. Now we've got a few options. Number one, we can go ahead and drop down $5,000 and do a mail drop. Now I am, a little bit, not the biggest fan, to be honest with you, of mailers.
Not that they do not work, but the problem with mailers a lot of times is that they are very expensive. And if you are doing mailers, many times it does take two or three months to kick in which means that you've spent about $15,000. The other thing with mailers is that because a relationship is not built, a lot of times you have to provide a gimmick or a freebie or some sort of hook that's going to get people to actually call. The other thing with mailers is that if you stop putting out that $5,000, a lot of times what happens is that your leaves dry up. And so what we want to do instead is we want to create marketing solutions that allow us to be able to do the work once and essentially have the results or get paid forever. And that's the type of marketing that I'd love to be able to help you guys with implementing for your startups.
So the first thing that we are looking at with our marketing is number one, having that marketing plan. Number one, you want to make sure that you have that in place. The next thing that we want to look at is how do we build rapport in our community as fast as possible with the lowest cost. And what I'm talking about is not only the lowest cost, but how do we build rapport for in our community so that they see exactly what we're doing so that they are, number one, ready to come in and ready to tell other people. And as we all know, the best way to do that is by using
Facebook marketing and Instagram marketing. This is going to allow you to get out there, let people know what you're known for, take people behind the scenes of your practice build-out and it's going to allow you, as well, to be able to start talking about dental topics so that you can show people how much that you know about the dental topics.
And so, as we start looking at marketing through Facebook, we want to make sure that we have a plan. We want to make sure that you know exactly what to post. We want to make sure that you have a strategy so that you can not only post your, if you call it, to talk Thursday videos but how do we get people to see them? And that's the biggest thing that a lot of people are not aware of as it relates to Facebook marketing or startup marketing. They're getting on there, maybe they're doing some good posts, but what I've seen, the mistake that so many people make, is that they've actually invested the time into learning how to boost effectively.
And what's really cool about boosting Facebook posts is that now you're able to spend $30, $50, and you're able to have a lot of people who see it, who live in, for example, a specific street, a specific neighborhood. You're able to target based on location. Perhaps there's a country club in your area. You can target people who have recently visited that country club. If you're in the US you can target people who are in the highest net income. Once you start doing your videos that is allowing you to become that expert and talk about dental topics, now what happens is that you're able to, again, have people who have previously watched your videos, people who are within a certain mile radius, who live in certain neighborhoods, see those videos.
And now that people are starting to watch your videos, what happens is that now anybody who's watching your videos, you can retarget those people to see your additional videos. And so what happens is that you start to build this rapport where people start to see you coming on over and over and over again. And as you're building your startup, you want to make sure that you're taking people behind the scenes. What sort of tile are you picking out? What sort of team are you looking for? How are you going to serve the community? What's going to make your practice different? And as we start looking at startup marketing, what's really cool is that you're able to get the marketing done at a really low cost.
I would say nine out of the 10 startups that we work with, with delivering, while they're able to launch their startup and their total budget is between $700 and $1,000 for their total marketing, I do recommend that you start marketing at least three or four months before you open your startup. And what if you say, "Okay, Anissa, this is great, but I'm already a startup, I'm already opened. The best time to start is now, right?" Because it does take a little bit of time to go ahead and have that awareness. Imagine if you are seeing a commercial on TV, you see it one time, you probably don't even pay attention to it. But after it shows up two times, three times, four times, all of a sudden you start taking notice, you start singing the jingle.
So what we're going to want to look at as well with your marketing strategy are what are other things that you can do. How can you leverage YouTube? How can you leverage Google My Business? There's some really cool things that you can do to actually get all of your videos seen for free on Google, so that when people are searching for your practice, they're seeing those videos. As you start opening and you're getting patient testimonials, there's actually a really cool feature where you're able to get those videos on Google, again, at zero costs, which is really cool. So these are some tips that we want to look at as we are marketing our startup practice. I'd love to be able to help you guys. What I would recommend that you do 100% is get started, get into our marketing and practice growth challenge.
That's going to be able to help you to be able to kickstart with a social media campaign. And if you know that you're ready to get started with marketing your practice, we'd love to be able to get you inside of our Delivering WOW marketing Program. We have a program just for startups. We actually have a startup call for our startups, where we help you along the journey, helping you month to month of what to do. We have monthly marketing calls. We have all of the marketing content that you need to be able to run your campaigns as you are opening up and
you're wanting to go ahead and promote your high-value services, your implants, your Invisalign, your cosmetic dentistry. Maybe you're an orthodontist, maybe you're a pediatric dentist, we actually have high-value ads that you can actually use and implement and execute right away.
If you're looking at doing marketing funnels to be able to grow your email lists, we've got everything already ready for you, built out for you as well. And what's really cool is that our program is extremely affordable. You're able to get in there and get started right away. All right, guys. So I would love to be able to help you in any way. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. But again, looking forward to seeing all of you guys grow and be able to take your practices to the next level. What we do absolutely matters. And as we're building a business, it's really important to think about our marketing strategy, how are we getting our patients into our practice? Are we're getting patients based on patients who are discounting? Or are we getting patients who are going to come in, who are going to have a great experience and refer their friends and family?
And this right type of marketing is not just about getting patients from Facebook. It's about how do we do internal marketing? How do we get our patients to tell other people? And again, how do we get relationships with other businesses so that they can market for us as well? All right, guys, that's it. Take care. We look forward to working with you and your teams to be able to get your startups to the next level. Again, to learn more, deliveringwowmarketing.com. All right, guys, take care. I love chatting with you guys inside of this podcast, and we will see you in the next episode.
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Delivering WOW Podcast with Dr. Anissa Holmes. We'll catch you next time.
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What's up, everyone? It's Anissa Holmes here with a new episode of the Delivering WOW Dental Podcast. And today we're talking about how you can add an additional million dollars of revenue to your practice this year. I'm so excited about this. We have been over the last few months working with doctors as we are in the beginning of a new year, looking at how we can create this Circle of Focus. And as we're going into these meetings, I am sharing, okay, let me go ahead and say this. You have probably heard me say in my practice that I've been able to double profits in my practice. I've been able to double revenue in my practice and it may sound like a marketing thing, but actually, I'm going to show you exactly how you can do the same thing too. And so that's what we're going to actually be doing within this call.
And so, as we're creating our Circle of Focus calls, what we're doing is we are creating opportunities to look at what was done last year and to decide what was most profitable? What were our bottlenecks? What is it that we need to focus on in terms of additional services training for our team? And now as a result of it, guess what happens? The doctors are able to say, "Oh my gosh, I see that I don't have to be overwhelmed. I don't have to be stressed out if we just focus on this one thing and this other thing, this particular quarter, then all of a sudden, Oh my gosh, the compound effect of that for Q2 Q3, Q4 and the compound, that effect for the year is going to be exponential."
And so I wanted to take you a little bit behind the scenes of what we're actually doing in these calls and share how this can again make a huge difference. Now I've been in practice for over 20 years and over the last few years, we've actually doubled our profits multiple times. And it's actually as many of you guys know not very uncommon to increase profits if you have a startup practice. But if you have a seasoned practice, that's not quite as easy.
So what we're going to be talking about is a sneak preview of the process, okay? So the first thing again is that we're going to be looking back at the previous year and we want to make sure that we're working out the opportunity gaps that could have a massive impact on your practice. For example, if you look at even X-rays a lot of times we're thinking, "Well, we're too busy to take X-rays." But the thing about it is that as we start focusing on providing the best patient care, the question is when we are having our patients coming in if we're not doing X-rays, are we missing out on seeing if there's pathology or are we seeing if there are infections that are going on or are we missing that? Are we seeing if there are issues with cavities on second molars because of impacted third molars?
A lot of times we don't understand that these things are really, really important. And so we say, "Well, you know what?" Or we say that we're too busy, we don't have enough time. Again, not really focusing on the best patient care, but from a profitability standpoint, if we're able to focus on even things like X-rays then now what happens is that we can easily add an additional 50,000 revenue into our practice for the year. Or they've been many examples when I've asked the question of, "Do you truly believe that a sealant can prevent a cavity?" And the doctor will say yes and I'll say, "Well, I certainly believe it. I have sealants on my teeth now. I'm an adult. Why is it that we're not talking about sealants to our patients?"
And it always boils down to, "Well, the insurance is not going to cover it." And the real issue is that our team doesn't want to be an objection block because they've presented sealants before and because insurance doesn't cover it and patients say it's okay, they stopped presenting it. And so if we started looking at how can we focus on training our teams for verbal skills so perhaps putting out there, there is something that we can do to prevent cavities. Would you like to learn more? They say yes. We say, "It's a sealant. How it works is that we painted on your tooth and once we do, sugar, food and bacteria cannot get through. As a result of it, we're able to reduce your chances of getting cavities by up to 80%."
Now here's the thing. Insurance doesn't always cover it, but why our patients choose to do it anyway is that they know that number one, it doesn't take a lot of time. In fact, it actually takes about five or 10 minutes. We can get this done for you while you're already here today. Number two, it doesn't cost a lot of money. In fact, it's actually a fraction of the cost of a filling. And number three, it will give you that peace of mind. We do have time today to go ahead and get started. Would you like to while you're already here? Go ahead and take care of all of your sealants today. So as we start looking at focusing on having the conversations, the behavior of being consistent and having the right verbal skills. Now, what happens is that it asked doctors, "Do you think that if you were using this verbiage or your hygienists or your team was using this verbiage, do you think that you could do five more sealants this week?" The answer is yes. What about 10? Absolutely.
And if you were doing even 10 more sealants like two patients alone at $30 a sealant, then now what happens is that you have the opportunity to be able to, again, bring in over 50, $60,000 of revenue into your practice. Now you may think, "Well, that's not a lot of money." Think about it. What if you had an additional $50,000 that now you could pay cash for that next operatory? I just got a message, a boxer just before I came on this podcast with a member of our mastermind saying that she has made a decision to go ahead and pay cash and get a new operatory at $18,000. This is how we're able to do that. What if you had that $50,000 now that you're in that earning stage, you're able to put into your retirement account an extra $50,000 into your retirement account? How would that affect you as you are now getting older? What if you took that $50,000 and you put it as a down payment on a property that now you can get rental income?
You look at $50,000. Again, people are saying, "Well, I'd love to be able to get better team members, higher pay team members or be able to get higher, more skilled team members, or I'd love to be able to pay my team members more." This is how we're able to do that just by doing two patients a week with sealants. So as we start looking at Circle of Focus is extremely valuable.
Another thing we want to look at is looking at the past year, looking at month to month to month, what was the service that allowed us to have the best month? Was it crown and bridge? Was it ortho? Was it that we introduced sleep appliances? What made that happen? Because again, as we start looking at month to month to month, a lot of times we see if we're not looking at this information on a monthly basis, what happens is that behaviors are changing and we have no way of knowing it. And so say, for example, you say, "Okay, we're going to go ahead and implement Invisalign or the best month we ever had, we did Invisalign." And maybe you did 10 cases or you did 20 cases, or you did 40 cases, whatever the number is. And the next month, all of a sudden that drops in half, then all of a sudden, now you have a lower month in revenue and you're not sure exactly why.
And so as we start looking at change of behavior, then now if we saw that dip, then now we can say, "Okay, guys, something has happened this month. We either did not have conversations. We did not have a good follow-up with our patients. We slipped on our marketing this month." And again, now behaviors can change from month to month. So I always love to look at what was that procedure that allowed us to have the best month. And a lot of times it may not even be what we think it is. I have been able to work with doctors and realize that the biggest revenue opportunity for them in their highest revenue month in the past year might've even been dentures. And then I'll ask the question, "Okay, well, do you want to do more dentures?" And they may say, "Actually I would like to do more dentures" and I'd say, "Okay, great, well, let's talk about dentures. Are you currently doing All-on-4? Do you have that skillset?" And they'll say, "No, not yet."
And I'll say, "Okay, well, what if this year we focus more on dentures because you want to do more. And what if we focused on getting you training so that now you can implement All-on-4 in your practice this year?" And we say, "Great, let's do that. When are we going to do that? What month of the year are we going to go ahead and implement getting that training?" And based on that, when we start actually doing All-on-4, what's going to be the revenue for that first case? What's going to be the verbal skills for that first case? What's going to be the marketing for that first case?
And now that we have that first case, then now we can carry that revenue if we did just one case every month for the rest of the year, what sort of impact would that have on our business? Not even doing two or three or let alone five cases. What if we did just one case? What if you're All-on-4 was an extra 20, $25,000 and you're able to do eight cases this year? That would add an additional 200, $300,000 a revenue into your practice right there. Okay? And what if you were now after that first month able to take some of that money and dump it into marketing so that instead of having one case come in, you actually have two, or you have three because you have more people that are coming in?
What if you started focusing on your Facebook marketing, your Tooth Talk Thursdays, which we help practices to be able to really get great results with that now people are seeing that you're actually known for that new service. What if you started focusing on a new service for their hygiene team or your hygiene team, whether you are looking at implementing laser, whether you're implementing a Perio Protect, what would that look like?
Another thing that I love to analyze is looking at current case acceptance. And what we see a lot of times is no matter how good you think that you're doing in case acceptance, you can always improve. And so when we start looking at coaching you and helping you with neurolinguistic programming, which understanding how to be able to get patients to get to that emotional state, being able to actually present cases that are not logic-based that are emotion-based. Asking the questions of what are your goals with your smile, your teeth and your health? Why is this important to you?
Asking specific questions and again, working monthly with your team every single month to be able to keep expounding upon your case acceptance, even having an opportunity to come into your practice and do two-day workshops where we're working directly with your team, training your team on verbal skills in case acceptance. What if we were to be able to improve case acceptance, even without increasing new patients? What if we were able to do more of those Perio Protect cases or perhaps you're doing Invisalign now, what if we were able to actually have more of those cases actually closed? What would be the result of increasing case acceptance?
And so a lot of times we're looking at let's create a Circle of Focus. Let's look at Q1, we're going to be focusing on verbal skills. We're going to be focusing on making sure if you have other issues, maybe you have an accounts receivable issue. We're going to focus on AR this quarter. And we're going to focus this quarter on getting you trained in All-on-4 or getting you trained in laser or sleep apnea. Getting your team trained in XYZ.
And so now we have a solid plan. Once we execute and implement that plan, what happens is that, again, we have already increased case acceptance because we've previously been focusing on that. We're able to go ahead and start executing the new services. We have a scorecard, we have on our whiteboard how many services that we are actually setting as our goal. And now we have an opportunity to see the results that happen every single month. What's really cool with the Circle of Focus calls is that we're actually mapping out what the actual revenue is going to look like once we implement these changes what the profits are going to look like as well for the business.
And what's really exciting is that at the end, the doctor says, "Oh my gosh, I don't have to focus on everything." And I show them, even if you did not change revenue in fillings, you did not change your revenue that you're doing even in crown and bridge. Although it would, if your case acceptance increases, you just focus on one or two or three things and be consistent with one or two things. Then now you're going to have a major compounded effect in terms of the results in your business, in terms of, again, profitability, being able to make sure that patient care is not slipping through the cracks, and making sure that you have, again, that healthy business.
All right, guys. So hopefully this is super helpful for you. We absolutely love working and coaching our clients to be able to be successful to be able to get to the next level in their businesses. If this is something that you feel would be helpful for you, we'd love for you to reach out. Feel free to reach out to me, DM me on Facebook, send us a message, or go to deliveringwow.com to schedule your free strategy growth call. All right, guys, that's it. Thank you so much for listening and we look forward to seeing you in the next episode of the Delivering WOW Dental Podcast.
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Delivering WOW Podcast with Dr. Anissa Holmes. We'll catch you next time.
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Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Delivering Well podcast. Super excited to have everyone here today. So today we are actually talking about something that's going to be pretty exciting for you, and hopefully we'll share some pearls that you can implement in your practice right away. But today we're talking about systems you need to put in place to grow your dental practice. Now, one of the areas that I see a lot of people struggling with is actually having accountability in their practice, having all of their team rowing in the same direction, and really having a proven plan and process to be able to grow their production and to be able to serve more patients at the same time.
And so the first system that I actually want to talk about is making sure that you have a system to create your morning huddle with a purpose. A lot of times I hear people saying that within their huddles they're focusing on making sure that they're prepared for the day, looking at what patients are coming in that are having medical issues, things that they need to look at. They are looking at financials, who owes money to the practice. They're also looking at what patient can we talk to, to ask them to refer another patient? And while all of those things are well and done, I think there are actually better systems for making sure that you are being held accountable to those things. One thing that I would love to make sure that everyone is focusing on is being very intentional in terms of adding in accountability, in terms of empowering your team when they're successful, and making sure that you are on track to hit your practice goals by what you're doing daily.
And so one system that I love to help practices with is actually implementing in a whiteboard. This whiteboard will allow you to, number one, look at all of the services that you're providing in your practice, make sure that you're having the conversations, make sure that you are actually empowering your team to help you to hit your goals or to help each individual team member to be able to hit their goals. And also have an opportunity to be able to look at when you're hitting your goals, what can you do to change the dynamic? And so you might be saying, "Okay, Anissa, what do you mean by that?" So what's really interesting is over the last few weeks I've been working one-on-one with our coaching clients, mapping out their plan for 2021. What's going to be your roadmap so that you can double your revenue this year or double your profits issue or grow 40% or whatever the goal is of the doctor.
And so it's really interesting is looking at doctors who say, "Well, I want to start implementing a new service this year. I want to start doing more dental implants." And so now that you've declared that goal, if you have a whiteboard, it is now your circle of focus to focus on dental implants. And so you can now say, "You know what, we want to start doing four cases a month, or we want to start doing 20 cases." Maybe you've been doing implant cases and you want to really focus on it this month, or you want to do 40 cases, whatever your number is. Now you have a way to hold yourselves accountable to the behaviors that will happen. And so what that means is what sort of marketing are we doing? Are we implementing Facebook or are we implementing Google ads? What are we doing to be able to have conversations with our patients?
Do we need to focus on our verbal skills and our case presentation? Do we need to make sure that we have our schedule set up so that we can accommodate new patient consultations and making sure that we're time-blocking for actually completing and scheduling these high value services? What is our financial policy like? And so the first thing that we want to look at, and what's the one domino that can actually knock down the other dominoes, is actually having this metric, having this goal, represented on a tool or a whiteboard that you can look at daily. And so, as you are setting your goal, if you're hitting the goal, then now you can look at what are the elements that allowed you to hit that goal. Maybe you changed your marketing, maybe your verbal skills improved. Maybe you have a better system for follow-up that you put in place. And now, because of it, you can identify what made that happen. And you can continue to focus on that circle of focus so that you can continue to grow.
And so this is one service, implants. A lot of times we look at things that we may not see that are that critical in our business. And it could be something like even x-rays. Are we being comprehensive? Are we really doing the full mouth series when our new patients come in? If our patients are coming in, are we doing the bitewings? Or are we saying, "You know what? We're really, really busy. We'll do them next time." You would not believe the impact on our practices when we start focusing on consistency with the little things.
And so if you know that you're not doing x-rays or you know that you are ... Even sealants, so you're not having conversations about sealants with patients, if you believe in them as an option, focusing on that is going to make a huge difference. For example, even if you were to have four patients that did four sealants a week, now you can bring in, in many cases, depending on your fees, an extra, $2,500, $3,000, $3,500 a month, that can now be reallocated back into education, taking another course or investing in more marketing for your practice to be able to bring in more patients.
So that's one thing that I definitely want to make sure that you're doing, is you're creating your huddle with a purpose. And if you're interested in learning more about these whiteboard strategies, I encourage you to participate in one of our marketing and practice growth challenges, where we actually help you to be able to implement this particular system in your practice.
So the other thing that we want to look at is making sure that you actually have systems where everyone in your practice has actually has their number. They have their KPI, they have their metric. And what's been really exciting as well is looking at practices that have intentional focus within each individual team member. And it could be for the scheduling coordinator how many 10K cases are they going to actually have patients accept? Or it could be for your scheduling coordinator, how many patients are being rescheduled? Or looking at last week's schedule and saying, "What's the minimum number of patients that we're comfortable with actually leaving without an appointment?" Or it could be your marketing coordinator saying, "Well, let's go ahead and have a number of how many patients that we're getting from this particular traffic source," whether it's going to be Facebook or it's going to be your Instagram or your Google ads. Being very, very intentional.
And so as again, you start to be intentional and you start to track the now as a team, you can actually come together and you can say, "How can we support you so that you can hit your goal?" And so say, for example, it's a treatment coordinator and she's not been closing 10K cases, then you can say, "Well, how can we support you? What can the doctor do to support? What can the hygienists do to support?" And so when the patient's in the chair, what is their role in case acceptance, maybe identifying that the real issue is that the team needs to have in-depth training on verbal skills. Maybe it's mindset, understanding that, you know what, there are verbal skills and ways that we can communicate with our patients that will allow us to provide solutions.
So a solution is number one, many of our patients are able to start big cases because they have a credit card, maybe even a zero interest credit card, or number two, patients are able to get their work done in one or two visits because they're able to pay it off a little bit over time, and so you're giving them that solution. Or solution three is that we can create your treatment plan. We can split it up over multiple visits. We can plan ahead of time what your budget is, so that we can go ahead and pre-book your appointments. So now you're providing solutions for patients versus having a patient say, "Well, let me think about it." Because quite frankly, they're saying that most times, because they just are confused of how they're going to fit in into their budget. And we start shifting our focus into training on verbal skills and understanding how we can move patients into understanding their options of how they can actually fit dentistry into their budget. And next thing you know, they're actually scheduling.
So that's something that we want to focus on, making sure that every team member has their number. If it's your hygienist, looking at what is their hygiene reappointment percentage, making sure that they're focusing on that. So now their behaviors will move in a direction of not having a patient leave without a next appointment, because now they're looking at it, they're tracking it weekly. One thing that we love to help our clients do within our delivering while coaching programs, is to actually have these scorecards where you're setting goals, you're looking at it weekly. And now that you're looking at it weekly, again, we are able to ensure that our behaviors do not change. Because a lot of times that's what it is. We get excited. We start focusing on something. And next thing you know, we totally forget that our intention was for example, our hygiene reappointment rate or making sure that every patient has the next appointment. And next thing you know, our behaviors change and our results change and patient care slips through the cracks. And so that's extremely important.
The other thing that I want you to focus on in terms of a third system and the third system that I'm going to share today, and believe me, there are hundreds of little pearls that we could talk about, but the other thing you want to make sure is that you have a system for having a weekly meeting where you can look at what are the things that you're focusing on. So if you have a new service, are you really getting the traction and results that you want? If not, identifying as a team, how can we best support each other so that we can hit our goals?
If you have for example, case acceptance and your case acceptance percentage is not where you want it to be, or your doctor production per visit is something that you're focusing on this year, then you can say, "Okay, well that is our circle of focus. And what we're going to do is we are going to have as our circle of focus with everyone has a number, looking at our doctor production per visit, then we can say, well, how can we increase that? Well, maybe we need to take a new course. And so once we are increasing our clinical competency or we are learning how to do a new service or procedure, then now what happens is that we are going to drive that number. It's going to move forward."
And so having that weekly meeting to say, "Okay, well have we actually scheduled that course? Have we scheduled that training? Or maybe what we need to focus on is again, verbal skills. Then now we can create that circle of focus. So we can look at looking at all of our patients who've been unscheduled, filtering them by highest treatment plan. And we can go ahead and get those patients in." Or we can say, "You know what, we're circling our focus this particular quarter, on making sure that when patients are there, we're providing those solutions so that they can go ahead and get scheduled."
And having that effective meeting allows us to be able to not only look at production and collection, but what is our AR? How did that change last week? Why did it change? Why did it go up? And so when we start looking at that, we can ask better questions, "Is it that we didn't send out statements? Is it that we have checks that have not been entered? What's going on with our AR?" And now when you're having this weekly meeting, you can dive in, you can have that hour of focus to really look at what's working, what can you improve on? And collectively as a team, you can actually create those solutions of getting to faster results and success.
So these are three systems that I highly recommend that you put into your practice so that you can start making that change. You can create your circle of focus, and you can be very intentional about growth this year. Creating a healthy team, creating traction in your practice, and ultimately being able to serve more people and change more lives as well as create a better business. So hopefully this serves you and that you got lots of value. If you haven't yet already done so, make sure that you are a member of our Delivering Well Facebook group, Dental Boss Movement. If you're on Clubhouse, make sure that you are part of Dentist Club. We have thousands of dental professionals now who are connecting, collaborating, and we have a great community. They are on Clubhouse.
And if you're looking for solutions to grow your practice and take your practice forward, make sure that you're reaching out to us @deliveringwell.com. I'd love to be able to talk to you and discuss how we can help your practice grow. But again, thank you so much for taking time to be a part of our Delivering Well community, listening to our podcasts, getting pearls, taking action, and living your best life through building an amazing dental practice. All right, guys, thank you so much for listening. Take care. And we'll talk with you very soon.
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Delivering Well podcast with Dr. Anissa Holmes. We'll catch you next time.
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Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Delivering Wow Dental Podcast. I am super excited to be here today. So today I'm actually here to share with you something that is perhaps going to be pretty insightful for you, as you are looking at, how can you have an amazing year for this 2021? And one thing that I have had a lot of our coaching clients come to me and say is that they want to be able to grow their practice, they want to be more profitable this year. And one thing that a lot of people have the wrong idea about is that if they increase their production, then all of a sudden they will grow, right, or a production is what's most important. And so I'm actually here to share some insight that production is actually not the most important thing that you want to focus on in your practice.
And so I'm going to be giving some specific examples today of exactly what I mean and exactly what you can start to look at, some pearls that you can think about for your practice as you are mapping out your plan of how you're going to hit your big goals, how you're going to hit your profit goals for this year. And so one thing that we are looking at with our coaching clients is actually looking at historicals from the previous year, and seeing what were the different services that made up the production that we have every single month. And that way we can see were we consistent month to month to month. If we said that we wanted to implement a new service, were we actually implementing the service? What does the report show? Right?
One thing that we're also looking at is not just production, right, and what makes up production, but we're looking at another metric, which is of course our collections, but even further than that, our collections percentage. And so you might be asking, "Well, all right, what does that mean? What is collection percentage? I'm listening here." Right? And so collection percentage is the percentage of the funds that you produce that you actually collected. Okay?
And so what that means is that obviously we want that number to be as close to a hundred percent as possible. And unfortunately, most times it's not. And so as we start to look at our collections percentage, then now it starts to see where things are perhaps slipping through the cracks. And so a few examples of that is looking at your adjustments, right? Are you doing adjustments for friends, for a family, for people that you see out in your community and they come in and you feel like you have to give them a discount, right? Looking at adjustments is a great way to see how you are perhaps not collecting what you really should be, and really analyzing your adjustments.
Another thing that you can look at as well, and if that number is not as high as possible to 100%, is that, are you having statements that have not been sent out? Unfortunately, sometimes people come to me as a new client and I realize, "Oh my gosh, your AR is really, really high." Right? And we look at the reason why the real issue is that statements have not actually been sent out for eight months or 10 months. Right? And so you have patients who are happy to pay their balance, but they just never knew. Right? And so if you're looking at your collections percentage by a monthly basis, month to month to month, then now you have the ability to say, "Wait, we have dipped, why? Why did that happen?" And that would be one of the metrics that you're looking at.
Another thing that you can analyze with your collection percentage is that, do you have your checks, right? Perhaps you have checks that are coming to the practice. Are they being input in a timely fashion? Is it that your team is so busy doing calls for unscheduled patients to get them rescheduled, which is a whole nother podcast in of itself, of why that is not the best way to be able to schedule patients. Then what happens is that they're saying, "I don't have enough time. I'm going to get to those checks." And there's checks that are literally sitting there that are not being entered as they're coming in. Right? And so that's another way that maybe you have money there in the practice, but it's not been entered into the bank, right? And so that's something that's important.
Also, maybe you have electronic payments that have come in, but you've not answered them into the ledger, which means that there's going to be a discrepancy between your bank statements and what you actually have in your practice management software. And so these are a lot of things that we start to look at as we're looking at collection percentage. Another thing that we want to look at is really our fees, right? And are we collecting what we're producing? And how many PPOs that we're on? And what is the amount of profit that we're actually making per procedure if we are taking a PPO?
It was really insightful this week. One of my newer coaching clients, we started analyzing this in her practice and I actually gave her an exercise. And I asked her to calculate her practices profit margins for her different procedures. And what that means is looking at the expenses that you have in your practice, that you have every single month, whether it's your payroll, whether it's your rent, whether it is you're looking at your utilities, and calculating how much you're spending monthly divided into the number of hours that you're working, so that you have a cost per hour. And then from there, what we're doing is saying, "How long does it take you to do a filling?" So say if it takes you a half an hour to do a filling, dividing that by half, right?
And then from there, what we're looking at is, what are the supply costs for actually doing that procedure? And so we help and we show them how to quickly calculate that supply costs. But this one client, what happened was that she realized and we analyzed that she was actually getting reimbursed $80 from one of her PPOs for a filling. And what she realized is that her supply costs, her fixed expenses, her costs to actually do the procedure for a filling was $120. And so she was frustrated that she felt like she was working to pay her team because she wasn't getting paid. But the real issue is that things would never turn around because you are operating at a higher cost than what you're getting reimbursed for.
And so when you start looking at your collection percentage, all of a sudden, you start to realize that there is a difference between your production and your collections. And now you can start to dig into exactly why, what is going on, what is happening there. And now you can go ahead and make some changes so that you can move forward in your practice. So hopefully this serves you, hopefully you got lots of pearls to be able to help you to understand that production is not what's most important. Because a lot of people think that, "If I'm busy, if I have patients in the chair, then all of a sudden we are going to have profitability." Right? And the fact is that, that's not the case. What we want to do is we want to focus on how can we maximize the revenue that we're getting in our practice, and how can we make sure that we're leveraging really great systems, like looking at our collections percentage to identify the gaps.
Thanks again for listening to another episode of The Delivering Wow Dental Podcast. I would love to welcome you to join us inside of our free Facebook group, dentalbossmovement.com. And if you're on Clubhouse, find us inside of The Dentist Club. And if you haven't done so already, make sure that you head on over to our website, deliveringwow.com, to get access to your free practice gap assessment. All right, guys, take care, and we'll see you inside of the next episode.
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Hi, guys, and welcome to another episode of the Delivering WOW Dental Podcast. I am so excited to be here. Today, we're actually talking about the newest craze and social media app called Clubhouse. Within this episode, what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to share what you need to know about Clubhouse, why I'm so excited about it. We're going to talk about some of the features of ClubhouseI'd love to discuss how we can utilize and leverage this particular platform to actually get the word out about our practice and to be able to get new patients.
I'm super excited to be sharing information about this app. Interestingly, I have been on the app for probably about maybe five to six weeks, and what I've seen happen over the last five or six weeks is seeing dental professionals now have a place where they can come together, they can connect, they can collaborate. They can share, they can have conversations in real time. I have seen myself get into different dental rooms as a moderator. I've also been in rooms where I have been a listener of conversations.
And what's really exciting about the app is that this is not obviously a dental app. This is an app where you can learn about all things. I am personally very fascinated in trying to learn a lot more about cryptocurrency. I'm actually in rooms learning, taking tons of notes. Really, really excited about this app. A lot of people are asking, "How can I get access to Clubhouse?" Well, right now Clubhouse is an iPhone only application and how you're able to get access is to go ahead and to reserve your username.
And then other members of the app, once you're reserving your username, your friends may receive a notification that you have requested your username and they may have an option if they have invites. Sometimes they get that option even if they don't have invites to go ahead and get you into the app. If you know people who are inside of the app, you can also have them to get you in by having them to add you in as a contact and by you actually giving them access to your iPhone telephone number.
There's a little bit of a mysterious algorithm as it relates to how are we getting invites. Invites are coming as you are opening up rooms, and this is an engagement app. So as we're opening up rooms for discussion, Clubhouse is giving us more invites. And that way we can, again, get our friends inside of the app. Once you're inside of the app, there's a few things that you're going to want to do. Number one, you're going to want to go ahead and set up your profile. And that is where you can go ahead and put in your information.
If you are a dentist, you can go ahead and put in where you practice, things that you're passionate about. If you're doing some things outside of dentistry, you can go ahead and add those things in your bio as well. What's most important with your bio is to actually go ahead and make sure that your first three lines, that's the preview, that's what people see when they're scrolling, you'll want to make sure that that has a lot of really pertinent information so that people can quickly see what you're known for, what you're doing inside of your bio.
The other thing that's really interesting about this app is that as of this recording, there's no way to actually message people within the app. You do have the ability to go ahead and link in your Instagram profile, as well as your Twitter profile and your settings. You're definitely going to want to do that. I personally have seen my Instagram following grow significantly. As people are in rooms, as you're in rooms listening, as you're in rooms talking, then what happens is that people are looking at your bios.
They're seeing what's on your Instagram, and they have that way to instant message you within Instagram. A few other things to consider as it relates to Clubhouse is, how does it work in terms of the rooms? Typically, how it works is you have rooms and these are discussion rooms that anyone who is using the app can go ahead and set up. I have been inside of dental rooms that were talking about practice culture. I have been in dental rooms talking about the newest technology that you can put into your practice.
I have been in rooms talking about dental marketing, growing your practice, firing your team. Anyone can go into the app, start a discussion room, get some others in there, and you start having that connection. Now, as you're starting the room, you are actually coming in as the moderator. That means that you have the ability to be able to bring people up to the stage, and up to the stage is the ability for them to go ahead and talk.
How it works is followers of that room, once they're getting the notification or they're seeing it's scheduled and they're coming into the room, they can raise their hand to go ahead and come up to the stage. There's actually three different sections. There's a stage, which is where the moderator sits, as well as anyone who's speaking. You have a middle section, which is people who are being followed by the moderator.
These are people that the moderators are following and you'll see their profiles. And then below that, you'll see the section of others who are included in the conversation. Now, some of the best rooms that I have been a part of have actually had multiple moderators.
And it's been pretty, pretty fun and exciting within the dental space for me to actually co-moderate rooms with other dental coaches or dental consultants, being able to collaborate, to be able to share our collective knowledge and experience of what we've seen work with practices, and to be able to get other dental professionals to come in and have their questions asked as it relates to practice management, hiring, profitability, leadership, how do we get our teams aligned, practice culture. I've also been in some rooms as the listener.
Others I've seen inside of our industry do Clubhouse rooms talking about, for example, dental tourism and the risks that come with that. And I've been able to participate as a listener, raise my hand and give input in terms of my thoughts on dental tourism and some of the risks that I've seen as well. A really, really great area, great opportunity to connect. Now, the question is, how do we find other dental professionals? Well, back when I joined Clubhouse, I actually thought, I'm not seeing a lot of dentist.
I'm not seeing a lot of dental professionals, and I want to be able to learn. I want to be able to listen in on their rooms. I want to be able to connect and collaborate. And so I actually reached out to Clubhouse and created the first dentist room or Dentist Club inside of Clubhouse. We have hundreds of dental professionals that are now within that club.
And the value there is that if anyone is in the club who is starting up a conversation, starting up a room, now other members of that Dentist Club will be able to have that notification or be able to see that there is a discussion room going on. And now as we are each starting different rooms, we can get more dental professionals in the room. It's a great way to be able to connect and to collaborate with other dental professionals. If you are in Clubhouse and you're not yet a member of Dentist Club, you definitely want to make sure that you're in there.
This club is not a Delivering WOW room or Delivering WOW club. In fact, we have actually set it up where any member of the club can go ahead and create your own discussion rooms. I've seen dental professionals come in. There was actually a group from Australia, a few dentists that were wanting to connect and discuss topics as it relates to dentistry in Australia, and a dentist there created a room talking about having it entitled Australian Dentist Unite. I highly recommend, if you are a member of Dentist Club, go ahead and start a room.
The power of starting a room within Dentist Club is that you're able to leverage the club, again, to be able to get your message in front of other dental professionals. A few other things that's been really fun actually for the last few nights inside of Dentist Club is a member, somebody coming in and saying, "Hey, let's get on and just chat." Discussions have been starting like at 9:00 at night and we've had people talking about dental events. Are you ready to get back to dental events?
There've been discussions that have been about technology, and the discussions just winds up being like a big group, a three-way or four-way call, or people getting together and just chatting and having a good time. Right now that's what we crave the most, right? We crave connection. And what I typically say is that in our front pocket, we have our friends and our family and perhaps even our spouse. But in our back pocket, we have our people, our tribe, people that get us. That's what this Clubhouse is.
It's a great way to be able to connect with people who get us, who are fellow dental professionals. A few other things as it relates to a Clubhouse. Once you're inside of the app, how it works is that you have the moderators. If you are in the audience, you want to get onto the stage. If you have a question or if you have a comment or a pearl, you can within the app go ahead and raise your hand, and then the moderator can get you up to pull you to the stage. You also have the ability to ping people in.
If it's a discussion room that you are getting a lot of value from, you can actually go in, there's a plus sign at the bottom, and you can go ahead and start pinging in your other dental friends so that they can be a part of the conversation. You also have the ability... The question is, are we always going to be able to get or have notifications going off about Clubhouse?
You have the ability within your settings, you go into your profile and then there's actually a settings gear, and you can go ahead and turn off your notifications in the evening, or you can set your notifications of how frequently that you want to be notified. In case you're wondering, is this app something that you can use to be able to get patients into your practice? The answer is actually absolutely yes. Some students of my marketing program have actually been testing using Clubhouse to be able to get new patients.
Typically, what we are teaching in our marketing program is to do a weekly Q and A, a weekly Tooth Talk Thursday, talking about different dental topics on your practice's Facebook page, which of course, you can leverage and put on your Google My Business. You can use for YouTube. But what we are actually testing is getting out and creating a discussion room about a specific dental topic.
Now, the question is, how are we going to get access to the local people in our community, so that people in our community are actually seeing our rooms that we're setting up to talk about these dental topics? What I would recommend is actually going in and following the people that you're friends with who are in your local community, right? Your friends, your contacts. And that way you will follow them, they follow you. And that way they will see the rooms that you're opening.
But another way that you can get access to people who are local and have them to start seeing what you're doing in terms of your rooms is to actually go ahead and start following clubs that are within your actual area. For example, if I live in Atlanta, there's a club that is about entrepreneurs of Atlanta or any other discussion group as it relates to Atlanta.
Well, if I'm in there and I'm looking at people's bios and I'm seeing that they're in Atlanta, and it looks like someone who I would like to connect with or have a connection with, or we have something in common and they're also in Atlanta, then now you are building a network of more people that are within Atlanta. And again, as you're opening up your rooms, they will see that you have a room.
And once you're having that discussion, you can say, "Hey, if there's anybody else here in Atlanta that you feel would benefit from hearing this discussion, go ahead and ping them into the room. You'll see that plus sign," and then now your network and your following will start to build.
Over time, once you're consistent, if you have a room, for example, every week talking about a different dental topic, how do you beautify your smile with veneers, or how to replace missing teeth, three different ways, or the best time to take your kids to the dentist, or do we really need a filling, or how can we prevent bad breath, or any topic, right? Then now you become that expert. I have seen some of our marketing students have really good success already on Clubhouse in a really short time.
You are able to change out your profile picture as you're discussing or having a room. I've seen some people change out their profile pictures to before and after pictures, so that you can actually see what they're teaching through this app. It's incredible. Definitely encourage you to play around with it, get in there and see what's possible for you in terms of you becoming that expert inside of your community. If you haven't yet had an opportunity to explore or to get into the Clubhouse app, I highly recommend it. You are going to learn a ton.
And again, not just about dentistry, but about all sorts of topics that you're interested in. And as you're joining, make sure that you get into the Dentist Club. You can search for it once you're getting into the app and come and hang out and connect with fellow like-minded dental professionals. All right, guys, that's it for today's episode of the Delivering WOW Podcast. Hopefully this served you well. If you haven't yet done so, make sure that you are going to our website deliveringwow.com, so that you can get free access to your practice gap assessment.
And if you haven't done so already, go ahead and head on over to Delivering WOW's Facebook group, our Dental Boss Movement, by going to dentalbossmovement.com. All right, guys, enjoy the rest of your day and we will chat soon.
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Delivering WOW Podcast with Dr. Anissa Holmes. We'll catch you next time.
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Hi guys and welcome to another episode of the Delivering WOW Dental Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Anissa Holmes. And I am so excited to be here today. Today, we're actually going to be talking about something that is very dear to my heart, and that is how to get dental patients to keep coming back for life. As many of you guys know, I absolutely love the whole concept of marketing. Why? Because there's so many people out there that need to find us. We have a gift to be able to help them to be able to serve them, to be able to make them healthier, to be able to change their lives. But at the same time, we want to make sure that once those patients come in, that we keep them coming back for life. We keep them referring to others.
And so I'm really excited today to actually share some pearls, some tips that I have actually implemented, I've used along the years of my practice, I've been practicing for 22 years. And so it's been really exciting to have patients who've been with us for years and not just patients, but team members that have been with us for a really, really long time. So really excited to be able to share these pearls with you today. So as it looks at, how can we start to get patients coming back for life? What we have to really start thinking about, and I talk a lot about this within our programs. I talk about this a lot here on this podcast and our Facebook group as well is as you're starting your practice journey, as you're opening up your practice, or as you're starting to think about getting your practice out there and becoming known, one thing that's really important that I always ask is what do you want your practice to be known for?
What do you want people to say about you when you're not around? And for me, absolutely, it's all about delivering an amazing wow experience. In fact, at the end of our patient visits, we actually send out an email. And what I'm looking for in that survey is for them to say one word. I'm actually waiting for them to say the word wow. I want them to say, "Wow, I can not believe that my kid was able to go to the toy box first." Or, "Wow. I can't believe that the team was so kind and so nurturing and they listened to me." Or, "Wow. I actually got a hand and arm massage before my treatment." Or, "Wow. I cannot believe that every month, they're doing amazing things to be able to serve this community." Because when you start creating what you want to be known for, what's really exciting is that now your patients will start to tell other people what you are actually putting out there.
So it's really interesting. And as we look at, for example, the demo space. I remember when I first started this podcast, about four or five years ago, I was fangirling on all of these amazing dental coaches, dental speakers, dental gurus that were out there. They were speaking on stage and I just wanted to be able to pick their brains and to be able to learn from them. And so I remember interviewing so many amazing people and when I decided to create my first live event, my Delivering Wow summit that was held in Jamaica, I remember reaching out to a lot of the people that I had interviewed on the podcast.
And one of those people was actually Sandy Pardue. Many of you guys know Sandy. She is the guru of scheduling. And I reached out to Sandy, and I said, "Sandy, I would love if you would be willing to speak at our conference." And Sandy said, "Absolutely, I'm there." And she's like, "I'd love to go to Jamaica." So Sandy's there. And all of a sudden, I start sending out information to all of the speakers. And Laura Hatch was a speaker, many of you guys knew Laura. Elijah was a speaker. Bruce Baird was a speaker that year. We had a lot of amazing speakers. And as I sent out the information to them, one of the things that I started to say that I sent out to them was that this was going to be the dental event of 2018. And I kept saying it. Well, next thing you know, Sandy Pardue was saying it.
Now, this was my first event. And I was very adventurous, trying to get 400 dental professionals to make a decision, to get on an airplane, to fly, stay in an all-inclusive resort, carry their teams. And a lot of people didn't know me at that time, but guess what?They knew Sandy, and Sandy said it was going to be the event of 2018. And so what I want you to understand is that as you're looking at building your practice and having your patients to say things about you, you actually have this really interesting and unique ability to actually manufacture what you want people to say. And so I actually wanted to have the speakers to say that, and that's exactly what happened. And so the same thing happens in my practice. So as I talk about, we want to be known for delivering amazing while experiences as I'm coming on, for example, and I'm doing a Facebook live, maybe I'm coming on and I'm doing a Facebook live talking about that we are doing a new service that we're really excited about called Pero Protect.
And it's going to help patients who have bleeding gums and gums that are starting to look long, or I'm doing a Facebook live where I'm talking about the fact that we're going to do a free small makeover and change someone's life in our community. Well, one of the first things that I'll say on that Facebook live is before we get started, let me just tell you a little bit about what we're known for. Number one, we're known for seeing our patients on time. We're known for delivering amazing WOW experiences. For example, when you come in, there's going to be an iPad and headphones to take away the sound, we serve freshly baked [inaudible 00:06:26], kids get to go to the toy box first. And we're also known for the amazing technology that we have in our practice and how we serve our community. And we're also known for beautiful, natural looking dentistry.
Because I'm out there and I'm sharing what we're known for on the Facebook live. Now, what happens is that people who are seeing us on Facebook, they start to hear it over and over and over again. And now they start to share it. And now they start to internalize it. When we have a new patient that comes in and they're calling us on the phone, we're saying, "Thank you so much for calling. What is it that you're wanting to learn more about? Why are you scheduling your appointment?" But then we'll say, "Before you come in, let me just tell you a little bit about what we're known for." We do the same thing when the patient arrives. I walk in as a doctor and I say, "I'm so happy to have you here. Let me tell you a little bit about what we're known for." So we constantly do that.
So the first thing is, if you want to have dental patients to keep coming back for life, I want you to really think about that. And it could be that you want to be known for great experiences. It could be that you are making a decision that you want your practice to really focus on a specific service. Maybe you want to do high end, high level, complex cases. You want to be known for doing comprehensive dentistry. People who have had teeth that are worn down, broken down, missing teeth. You want to be known in your community for being that dentist that has the knowledge and the competency and the skill set to be able to help those people. Well, as you're doing your Facebook lives, or as you're communicating with your patients, you want to let them know, even when they're calling on the phone, maybe they're price shopping, what makes your practice different. Okay? And that's the number one thing. So there's actually three points. That's the first point is that you really want to think about what do you want to be known for?
The second thing that you want to do, if you want to have your patients to come back for life, is you want to make sure that you are involving your patients in all of the marketing that you're doing that's involving the community. So you might say, "Well, Anissa, what do you mean by that?" So, one thing that I really love within my practice and I love seeing colleagues do, it's so exciting, is seeing them serve the community. When we decided to go into dentistry, I can tell you, when I went into dentistry, I wanted to be a doctor to help people. I wanted to be able to change lives. And so when we are doing things where it shows that our community really cares about people, our patients are going to connect with that. They're going to tell other people. And in fact, the type of marketing that I love and what I love helping colleagues with is getting to the point where you don't have to focus on Google ads that are $2,000 to pay Google at an agency. You don't have to worry about $5,000 mailers.
Once you implement doing marketing where your community and your patients know what you're known for, and they're telling others, you can not turn that off. And so it's very, very different where perhaps you have a Google ad and you decide next month, "Oh gosh, I don't want to run it anymore." All of a sudden those potential new patients dry up, with this type of marketing, where you're involving your patients in the marketing that you're doing now, again, you continue to create that referral source and you continue to put out in front of them that your practice is different, and they want to tell people and they want to keep coming back.
And so a few examples of that we have done is actually this month, we are looking at a clothing drive. So a clothing drive could be, Christmas is over. And now a lot of people have gotten new clothes. Let's do something over the next month or over the next two months if you want to have it linger for two months and go for that time. And what we'd love for you to do as a family activity is we'd love for you to clear out your clothes that you have in your drawers, drop into our office and what we're going to do is we're actually going to take those clothes and we're going to donate them to missionaries of the poor. And what we're also going to do is we're just going to have some fun with this. And randomly, we're going to select one person to win a gift card to our practice, maybe a $200 gift card.
Well, now when you're running that type of campaign, what you can do is you can go on, you can do your Facebook live. And remember when you're doing your live, introduce yourself. Also, make sure that you let people know what you're known for. But now what you can do is in addition to doing your Facebook live, for example, on Facebook, then now what you can do is you can email your patients and you can send them the link to watch that Facebook live, which will increase the views and visibility. And part of that is asking people when you're on the Facebook live to actually share this video with everyone that they know who are their Facebook friends, so that others can participate as well.
And that's going to allow, in terms of Facebook strategy, to be able to organically get way more people, to be able to see your Facebook page to your practice and within your page, if you have even before and after photos of the dentistry that you're doing, you're not going to be necessarily boosting these, but they'll see the dentistry that you're doing. If you're wanting to be known for sleep apnea and you've got information on your page about sleep apnea, or you got patients that are creating testimonials of their experience and how their life was changed, or maybe you have a wife talking about her husband and how her life was changed, because he's no longer snoring. That would be great, right? So you're sending people, you're driving traffic to your Facebook page.
And what's really cool about that, is that now, again, your patients are seeing that you're doing something great for the community. You're sending out maybe a little text in letting them know how they can participate. Other things that I also recommend and what we implement with our clients that we have within our marketing program for delivering well is we're actually giving you the flyers. And so we want you to have a flyer. We actually give you a Canva template, so you can go and edit, put your practice logo. But you'll take that flyer and you'll post it around your office. And so we actually have these flyers that we post at the front desk, we'll post them right outside of the operatory. So we make sure that the patients see what we're doing. And as the patients are coming to check out, we also say, "This month, we're doing a clothing drive to support missionaries of the poor. We'd love for you to participate and maybe go home and clear out your drawers and drop them back off to the office."
Now, are your patients all going to participate? Absolutely not. In fact, you may only have 5%, 10% to actually participate, but what will happen is that it leaves a lasting mark in their mind that you're always doing something to serve. And that's why I'm a huge fan, and within our delivering while marketing program, within our clients, what we're doing is we're actually leading and helping practices or team members to implement these campaigns. And so every month we're doing something different. Typically, in February, we're doing a children's free day of dentistry. We also recommend that you send out press releases to your local media so that they know that you're doing this. You can get a lot of free exposure.
I've actually been invited to speak on the local news, talking about our free day of dentistry. It's really incredible, but there are lots of amazing things that you can do every single month to be able to get out and share that you're doing something with the community. And again, you want to involve your patients. Another thing that you can do as well, that we do. And we also help practices within our program is looking at creating a monthly email that goes out to your patients. And that can be photos from last month's community and campaign announcing what you're going to do in the next month or the current month, and also sharing an educational article. And that could be about any procedure, invisalign, All-on-4, sleep apnea. And that way you're serving as giving education and also showing that you're different.
So that's the second way that we can keep our patients coming back for life is to keep enrolling them on why your practice is different, why it's unique, why you care, why you serve. The third way that you can keep your patients coming back for life is obviously you want to do great dentistry. You want to be able to connect with your patients. But even deeper than that, because we've all heard that before. One thing that I want you to think about is when you're creating your patient experiences, when you're creating your practice culture, when you're hiring your team, when you're doing your social media posts, everything that you're doing, all of the different facets, I want you to think in a different way.
I want you to think if I were to ask any patient that walked to the front desk, how was their experience today? And maybe because you're creating content for your Facebook page, is to create such a great experience that you know, that they would give what I call a sliced bread testimonial. And what do I mean by that? I had a patient one time that came into the office and we asked her if she would share her experience. And she said, "This practice was so good it's the next best thing to sliced bread." And so we actually started to call our testimonials sliced bread testimonials, and so on our whiteboards where we're tracking all of our different services and we're holding ourselves accountable to conversations and continuing to learn, we actually have a goal of getting at least five sliced bread testimonials every single month.
Which is really cool because we typically will get way more. And we actually don't share all of them on our Facebook page, but going into the mindset that every patient will be willing to give you a sliced bread testimonial makes you really think about what sort of team am I going to have, to have, to get that. What sort of are we going to have, to have. Again, simple things. We have our kids that go to the toy box first, right? That doesn't cost us anything extra, but it's something that people remember. And now when you have a mom coming in, you can say, "How was your experience? How was your child's experience?" And they'll say, "Oh my gosh, John got to go to the toy box first. And this experience was amazing." Or, "Every time I tell them we're going to the dentist, he always gets excited because he knows that he's going to get that toy. He knows there's going to be his hot chocolate there for him. And he knows that it's going to be a really great experience."
So hopefully those three pearls that I've shared with you will help you to understand the process of getting our patients to keep coming back for life. It's one thing to be able to do marketing campaigns, to be able to get in front of our patients. But the key is how do we keep them and we keep them coming back. We keep them as raving fans and we keep them referring? All right, guys. So that is pretty much it. Thank you for joining us for this week's episode of our Delivering WOW Dental Podcast. If this served you, I'd love for you to continue to listen, make sure that you're subscribed to our podcast. Also, if you haven't done so already make sure that you join us inside of our delivering while Facebook group, dentalbossmovement.com.
If you are a member of Clubhouse, join us in the dentist club. We'd love to have you where we can connect, communicate and collaborate. Go into Clubhouse, start a room, start sharing your knowledge with others. And also we do have our upcoming marketing and practice growth challenge, where we will actually help you to set up your whiteboards, to set your goals. We're going to run a social media campaign together. We're going to help you create your marketing plan for the entire year. And we'd love to get you in and to join that challenge, you can go to deliveringwowchallenge.com. And if you type in the code, podcast, you can actually get free access. All right, guys, that's it. Thank you so much for listening. I look forward to seeing you in the next episode, take care and enjoy the rest of your day.
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Delivering WOW Podcast with Dr. Anissa Holmes. We'll catch you next time.
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Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Delivering WOW dental podcast. Today we're talking all about what to say to your dental patients when they say that the cost is too high. Now I don't know about you, but inside of my practice, sometimes we have people that come in that are saying, "Wow, that much for an implant?" Or, "Wow, I didn't know that Invisalign would cost so much." And so I wanted to share with you, because I'm sure I am not the only one that has patients saying that inside of our practices. And so one thing that I want you to really think about before we start thinking about even verbal skills, is really understanding the actual cost, the actual fee, your profit margin, what it actually takes for you to be able to run your practice and to be able to deliver services.
One thing that's really interesting is over COVID, with our mastermind, we started to have a lot of marketing intensives, and practice growth intensives, and business intensives, and numbers intensives. And so one of the intensives that we did was looking at making sure that every owner knew what their profit margins were. So profit margins are the actual cost to be able to do a particular service, and that is taking into account the supply costs to be able to do that particular service. That is taking into account our fixed expenses and our variable expenses per hour, to be able to do that. And what's really interesting is as we had the workshop, one of the first things I said was how many of you know how much it actually costs to run your practice per hour? And what I mean by that is looking at what are your costs per hour for salaries? What is your cost per hour, including your rent or your mortgage, your costs per hour, including your utilities, looking at your marketing cost, dividing that into the number of hours you work.
Because a lot of times what happens is that when we are not certain and sure of our actual expenses, when we're not certain of what it actually costs to do even a crown, taking into consideration that we have the fee for our materials, that we have the fee for our lab, and not just that breaking down our adhesive or our etchant or our tips or our burrs. Once we are not really understanding what our costs are, then sometimes we get into this whole thing in our mind of, well, maybe our fee is too high, or maybe I should try to reduce it.
One thing that worked really well for me in my practice that really gave me the confidence, and one thing that I teach our clients, is to look at your profit margins, because when you know that, for example, it's going to cost you $140, for example, to do a filling in your practice, then you know that if a patient says, "Wow, $160 for a filling," if that's what your fee is, hypothetically, that you know that you're not going to feel bad about it, because you know what your actual costs are.
It was really interesting, as we started looking at profit margins years and years and years ago, what we discovered is that, wow, it does cost a lot of money for us to be able to deliver a crown. And so when a patient came and said, "Oh my gosh, doc, a thousand dollars," for example, to do a crown, we're able to confidently say, "Absolutely." We know our cost. We know our expenses. And we know that the fee that we have set is extremely fair, based on our expenses. And so because of that confidence, now we had no problem quoting our fees.
And it's really interesting, is a lot of times you start getting into understanding case presentation and verbal skills. And for me, this is a foundational piece that's really important for you to know. And not only for you to know, but for your team, because as we know, many times, they're like, "Wow, the doctor's getting $1,000 for this procedure or $2,000 or $3,000." And without knowing the actual expenses, even when you start getting into full mouth reconstruction, full mouth rehab cases, once you're using a high quality lab, high quality adhesives, and you're taking the time to spend with the patient, which is looking at what are your expenses for rent for that time, salaries for that time, it really does add up. And so once you and your team understand what these numbers are, it's going to go a really long way. And so if you haven't done that exercise, looking at your profitability, looking at what you are actually making on profit margins, I highly recommend getting into our accelerator program so that we can teach you and your team very quickly how to be able to identify this.
Another thing that you really want to consider is how are you presenting your treatment plans? What are you doing to set the stage so that patients understand that there's going to be an investment that they will be making? And what's been very exciting is seeing our clients use our frameworks, where now they're coming in and they're saying, "What are your goals for your teeth, your mouth, your smile?" And the patients letting them know, "I want my teeth to be strong. I want a beautiful smile. I want to be healthy." They're letting you know why they're there, what they want, what they desire. And from there, asking a question of, you know, what else? And they're saying, "Well, I really don't like that there's this brown spot here on my filling. It's driving me crazy." Or, "When I'm eating, food is getting stuck," and we say, "Well, what else?" And they're telling us all of their issues. "Well, you know what? I also have a toothache here." Or, "I don't like the look of that dark line."
And from there, we're able to find out, emotionally, what are the triggers for the patients? What are their desires? And from there, we ask questions like, "What would it mean for you if you got this fixed?" And so now they're saying, "I'm healthier. I have more confidence. I don't have to be annoyed and frustrated with this food that's getting stuck." And from there, you can now offer your suggestions, offer your solutions, because you know exactly what they want, what they need, what they desire, and they understand what will happen for their life, or for them, once they go ahead and make that investment.
And so from there, you can now get their permission. "Is it okay if I take some time and share with you how we can help you and how we've helped other patients just like you?" And of course the answer's going to be yes. And at the end of it, you say, "Now, this is going to be an investment. The great thing is that once you have your smile makeover done, once you have the food that is going, this is what your life is going to look like. You're no longer going to have to have food getting stuck. You're no longer going to have to cover your mouth or have to worry, or even have to worry about your denture getting loose." And so from there, the question is, this is what you have. This is what you want. Do you want me to help you with it?
And when they say yes, then now you present your treatment plan and say, "This is certainly going to be an investment in yourself, and you're worth it. The great thing is that we have ways to be able to help you fit dentistry into your budget, and we're going to work with you and create a customized plan so that you can fit this dentistry that you so deserve and you so want into your budget."
All right, guys. So I wanted to take some time to go through this, because, again, a lot of the challenges that we have is that we don't know our fees. We're not confident in our fees. And so that, to me, would be the first step, investing in understanding where you are and then taking it a step further and investing in verbal skills training and case presentation training. Which, of course, if you're looking for help, we're here to help you with that, as well, within our accelerator program.
All right, guys. So hopefully this helps you. I love talking about case presentation, and how do we get our teams aligned, and how do we serve more people? And that's what we're here for. We're here to help people to get dentistry done, to get healthier, to give them their confidence and to help them live their best life. All right, guys, that's it. Take care. See you guys next time, and enjoy the rest of your week.
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Delivering WOW podcast with Dr. Anissa Holmes. We'll catch you next time.
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Well, hello, everyone. And welcome to another episode of the Delivering Wow Dental Podcast. Today, we're talking all about training a dental team member who's not good with patients. So question for you. Have you ever had a team member that was afraid to talk to patients or was not outgoing or really building connections with your patients? I can tell you, I certainly have had that throughout the years. And so I wanted to share some insight and tips to be able to help you navigate this if you find that you have introverted team members or team members who are just not making that connection. So, in particular, what I'd love to discuss today is really looking at behavioral styles, and how can we assess all of our team members to be able to understand their behavioral styles? And what's really interesting is, as you start to get deeper into understanding and learning how this works, what you will discover is that the same things that apply with our team members in terms of behavioral styles also applies to our patients and why they make the decisions that they make.
It also applies to our family and our friends. And so, what we're talking about today is really looking at different behavioral styles. And what's really interesting is a lot of times we may look at a team member and saying, "Wow, they're not making the connection with our patients," and we start to really investigate why this is happening. And some of it is really just inherent. They may be an introvert, but digging deeper into behavioral styles, it's really interesting because we start to look that there are actually four main types. So you may have heard of DISC assessments. And with this, there are four main types. There is the D, which is the dominant personality style. They tend to be the leaders. They tend to be people who are okay with taking risks. There's also another behavioral style, which is the I. The I is going to be the person who's very outgoing. They are the life of the party.
Really interesting with the I, what we tend to see is sometimes they are not very good with follow through. Not always, but that's something that we typically see with the Is. And also going back to the D, they definitely are that dominant personality, and as a result of it, sometimes they can come off as being pushy. So as we start looking at the S style, the S style are people who are very, very connected to other people. They're very sensitive. They have a lot of strong feelings of connection with people. And the flip side of the Ss is sometimes they are taken advantage of, because they're so kind, they're so loving. And then you have the C, and the C behavioral style is someone who is very detail-oriented. These are people that typically are going to be accountants. They're the type of people that may be surgeons. And the flip side of the Cs is sometimes they are very, very serious, and sometimes they are really slow as well to make decisions.
And so, as we start looking at behavioral styles and the roles of our team members and the roles that they occupy in our practice, it's really important that we really understand where they are in terms of a natural behavioral style. And what's really interesting is sometimes when we get into a work environment, we have an adaptive style. But what I've discovered over the years is, I remember in the early days wanting to have, for example, social media done in my practice. And I gave that task to someone who had more of an S style, so there were very calm natured, definitely an introvert, and they really struggled to be able to ask people for video testimonials. And we switched it up and we gave it to a team member that had more of the I style, very outgoing and very excitable and loved talking to people. And all of a sudden, it was really, really easy for her to make that connection and to get those video testimonials.
And so as we again start looking at building out our team, one thing that I always coach on to my clients is to think about what you have a lot of, and also to look at gaps in terms of behavioral styles. And so if you have a team that is full of I, you're going to have a lot of fun in your practice. There's going to be a lot of extroverts. And something to think about and consider is, again, that flip side of it, where if you're having so much fun and it's the life at a party, we need somebody to be serious and get into the weeds and get things done and make sure that everyone is being held accountable. And so, if you have a team that has an imbalance, thinking about your next hire and which role or behavioral style you're going to put in. The same thing, if you have a team that everyone is very, very sweet, very, very emotionally connected to patients, and they're very, very soft-spoken, and you don't have Ds on your team, strong leaders, then you can have weaknesses there as well.
And so it's really, really interesting how this whole thing works. There are lots of different assessments. We have a particular one that we administer within our Accelerator Program, as well as for our coaching clients in our Mastermind, and it's been really, really insightful to get feedback from doctors saying, "Oh, now I understand why my hygienist, who's very outgoing, struggles with writing chart notes." And so, as team members start to understand their behavioral style and team members understand each other better, then now what will happen is that, as you are assigning tasks to be done, again, maybe it is building a new marketing campaign, maybe it's making a decision to start doing Loom videos to go ahead and document the processes that are happening in your practice, maybe you're making checklists of what you do daily, weekly, and monthly, that particular task would be really easy, creating a checklist, for someone who's a C. You give that to a different team member, they may struggle with it. And so, as we start looking at getting into peak performance and high performance and scalability of our practices, we want to know, what are the strengths?
What are our weaknesses? We want to understand who's good at what. And the other thing that we can start looking at when we really start diving into this and really looking at how can we improve the performance of our teams is also looking at, what is it that each individual team member loves to do and is good at? What is it that they like to do? And they're good at? And then below the line were the things that they don't like to do and they're not good at. And so, as we start looking at that, it's going to be very, very nice to see the results that starts to happen in your practice once you start to assign tasks and really put people in their area of strength and put people in the area of their natural high behavioral style. And once you start doing that, now you're going to have a team that's really working in synergy and working together, again, all for the same goal, to be able to grow the practice very quickly.
So hopefully this helps you and serves you. I absolutely love digging into the psychology of what happens to make practices grow, the psychology of what makes patients make a decision to come into our practices. It's pretty exciting. And so if you haven't yet done behavioral styles, I highly recommend that you do the assessment within your practice. If you're wanting help with it, of course, this is something that we help practices with all the time within our programs. And so if it's something that you're interested in, feel free to reach out to me on Facebook or to have a look at our web site at deliveringwow.com. All right, guys. So that's pretty much it for today. Hopefully, this serves you and we look forward to chatting with you again, really, really soon.
Thanks again for listening to today's episode. Now, the next step is to join our free Facebook group, which is the Delivering Wow Hangout. Inside of that group, you will be able to mastermind and share with dentists and team members. And to join us, go to dentalbossmovement.com.
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Delivering Wow Podcast with Dr. Anissa Holmes. We'll catch you next time.
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