Case study: turning production into collections

A short case study involving a common problem for practices.  Your production in a practice is a certain amount, say $80,000 per month.  If you maintain that performance over time, you would reasonably expect to collect somewhere near $80,000 on a monthly basis.  What do you do if those numbers don't match up?  Perhaps this illustrative case study can give you some helpful information.

Dateline: Milwaukee, Wisconsin

The situation: A 3 office practice generating $130,000 per month in new patient contracts was collecting $70,000 per month.  Of the contracts being signed, about half of that was turning into collections.  Clearly, this was not acceptable to

Marketing Monday: Bonus time!

Incentive programs take on a number of forms.  It can be something as simple as, if we knock out this afternoon load of patients by 5 pm, drinks are on me.  It can be a formalized program with rules and a very regimented distribution.  But one that generated a lot of interest for our affiliates during the summer selling season was the summer production/contract contest.  Essentially, each office had a set of tiered production goals.  Depending on the level achieved, certain or all employees were eligible for a bonus.  This was the contest that had people calling months before the start to get their goals to start preparing and strategizing to win.  During the contest, we fielded regular requests for updates and additional support to help everyone achieve their goals.  In sum, everyone was united in their focus on selling cases to qualified patients.  

As mentioned in the last post, this is the time of year when patient demand is generally the highest so everyone in the office has the opportunity to make a real difference in the results.  By contrast, during the holiday season, even the best conceived and executed plans may not make much of a difference.  The potential demand simply is not there.

Here are some guidelines on setting up a plan of your own:

Marketing Monday: The most wonderful time of the year

As you probably know, in the orthodontic business, there's a lot of seasonality.  In other words, new patient demand tends to be substantially higher during certain parts of the year than others.  And clearly, the peak points tend to come when children are out of school for an extended period and have available time to be seen for lengthier appointments like consultations and initial bandings.  And children tend to be out of school for those extended periods during spring break and summertime (there's also a bump for a lot of practices during Orthodontic Health Month in October, but that is for another day).  Even though children are out of school during the holidays toward the end of the year, household finances tend to be geared toward holiday shopping and activities are pointed toward holiday festivities.  Not good times for new patient contracts.  Not good times at all.

If we turn our focus to the summer period and examine it even further, NOW is the prime part of the prime season for signing new patients.  Usually, in early June, right after school lets out for summer, families take vacations, enjoy quality time, make divorce related-arrangements or engage in other family-related matters.  As a result, historically, we have not seen a substantial increase in June new patient contracts  when compared with other months for a given practice.  But, as June expires, so do those family obligations.  That means that the summer selling season is upon us.  Now, you may say, "Isn't this post coming a bit late?  Haven't all the patients who are going to sign a contract already made new patient appointments in June, July or August?"  The answer is no.  Remember from last Marketing Monday that patients most typically want to be seen within 14 days maximum.  Those that haven't been seen are probably looking to move on if a better offer arises.  Plus, quite a number of people haven't sat down and made that appointment yet.  Here's what you need to be doing to take advantage of the opportunities presented during this important time of year:

Podcast 1 - Taming the beast: managing your employee costs

Here at MyPracticeEngine, we like to bring you information in a variety of ways.  One such is the podcast.  In this particular discussion, we discuss what is generally the largest, most significant cost in a dental or orthodontic practice: employee costs.  Within the verbal goodness, we discuss what makes up employee costs, how to tell whether or not your employee costs are too high given the size of your practice and techniques -- not including firing people -- to bring things under control if costs are too high.

Enjoy the podcast and let us know if you have any comments, questions or suggestions for future topics.

Marketing Monday: 3 ways to get more patients just by tweaking your office schedule

Welcome to Marketing Monday.  We know how important new, paying patients are to the success of a practice so here at MyPracticeEngine, we try to dedicate Monday to strategies for attracting those patients.  We'll hit on topics like advertising ideas, operational changes and other methods to increase the flow of new patients.

Today, I'd like to discuss 3 simple, changes to your office schedule to attract more new patients to your orthodontic business and increase the signup rate for those who do come in:

The 5 most important numbers to know

 To expand on item #1 from our post on the importance of information in your practice, here are the 5 most important values we have seen that drive success in dental and orthodontic practices:

1    Collections – No matter how you practice, the end result is collecting money from patients and insurance companies.  If you do great work, sign lots of patients and don’t collect the funds, you will end up with lots of good memories when being evicted from your office.  As such, ensuring that you are paid for your efforts deserves your attention.

The single most important business task you have

When you run your dental, orthodontic, dental specialty, or any small business for that matter, you have literally thousands of concerns, issues, problems and opportunities to handle.  But as you take care of the business side of your practice, no duty is more important than having information.  And not just any information.  You need relevant, useful information. 

So many practices have been doomed to failure simply because the doctor, staff and related parties did not have timely, quality information to analyze and utilize for decision making.   So many people with whom I have worked simply have no idea of where their practice stands when it comes to data that really drive the practice.  These people either grasp onto one number or nugget that they repeat for months and years on end or think that one good day yesterday somehow paints an overly rosy picture of a successful practice.

When considering the information for your practice, consider 3 important questions: