By now, you’ve read about the corporate problem in your group dental and orthodontic practice and the first part of the solution to that problem. We continue our discussion on that topic.
Not every corporate problem relates solely to the number of people in the office. In a number of cases, problems arise from a lack of focus, training and simple disorganization. Here’s what I see a lot: you hire someone, or start a new system or engage a new outside service and then wipe your hands of the situation and let things happen. That almost never works. You run a practice and there are certain ways you want things to be done – and we all know that there are dozens of ways to run a successful practice. If you don’t communicate those things and keep the business on track, you have mass chaos and a business going in the opposite direction of what you anticipated.
Here’s what you need to do:
Keep everyone focused on what’s important
As an example of what I mean, let me give you an example from our business. In Japan (and previously in the United States), our advertising staff tends to set up our ads to maximize the number of inquiries (the number of potential new patient calls). The problem with that is that no one cares about inquiries. What matters is the number of new contracts or production. We regularly ask the question: would you rather 15,000 inquiries and 1,000 new contracts or 10,000 inquiries and 3,000 new contracts? The clear answer is the latter. Yes, we could continue to advertise in high response areas like paying for Facebook clicks, but the vast majority of those people are not in our target market. Money is just being thrown away because simple inquiries from people who are not consumers of our product will never become patients. 1 million inquiries, 0 patients and $1.25 will get you a ride on the bus.
And so it goes in other areas. Purchasing needs to focus on getting products accurately and timely and not necessarily always on extracting the very last penny of discount. Your accounts receivable staff needs to balance patient satisfaction and discounting against the need to get everything that is due now.
Stay in touch
Even if you have the best people and systems in the world, you cannot just leave things to run by themselves for extended periods of time. You have your own ideas about how the business should be run while your team may have a different concept. If you do not communicate regularly, your view and what is actually happening will diverge and messes can result. Even if you and your team are on the same page, you will have to stay in touch with the group.
Everyone has their own unique way of staying in touch. Some practices do morning meetings. Some do more formal get-togethers with longer agendas on a regular basis. Others just head to the bar next door after work and conduct discussions in a more informal setting. Or, any combination of the above. The method should match your culture and thought process. However you handle it, by all means, include unscheduled trips to visit the group handling your corporate function. This is not about sneaking up on people. Rather, it gives you a chance to see the operation in action on a day-to-day basis.
During these sessions, be on the lookout for problems and projects/people veering away from the practice goals. Then, bring those back in line.
Provide incentives
Just because those handling corporate functions don’t see patients every day, it doesn’t mean that they cannot participate in an employee incentive program along the lines of the ones we’ve described earlier. Ultimately, what these people do should result in improved practice performance. You simply need to tie their incentives to areas they can control and that help your business.
For example, in a couple of our departments, we have an incentive tied to the total cost of the department in addition to improved performance. So, if, for example, the purchasing staff wants to hire someone new, but gets a bonus for keeping costs low relative to previous periods, they will consider ways to solve the problem without a new hire to have bonus money come to them and not paid to a new hire. They cannot let the performance of the team simply decline to save money because they will then fail on the performance part of the incentive. Everyone should be tied to the success of the practice in some way.
Reporting, reporting, reporting
Again, good information lies at the heart of this. Whether you monitor results online, on your mobile device or stick to good old paper (please don’t stick to good old paper), you absolutely have to know what is happening with regard to results in each of the areas of your business. While you obviously want to track collections and new patient activity, make sure your reporting tools help in other areas by giving you data on spending, performance of individual advertisements and the like.
This goes back to the change in your role as you build a group practice. Not only do you have more office, more staff and more patients to handle, but you also have more business processes to oversee. Without quality information and effective communication with your group, you’ll get buried under an avalanche of responsibilities. So, the reporting needs to be concise and directed, communication needs to focus on the issues at hand (no “bitch” sessions) and you need to make sure that you are organized as possible.
As with a lot of things, these topics can get involved and we’ve just given you an overview here so as not to bore you to death. If you want to discuss any of these topics more in depth, please let us know.
No comments:
Post a Comment