Here's what your patients are thinking

In previous posts, we’ve discussed polling your patient base via an e-mailed or in-office survey to gauge how they feel about important aspects of your practice.  That feedback can then help guide your future decision-making to provide the best possible patient experience.  

In our practices in Spain and Mexico, we recently surveyed a fair number of patients in anticipation of managers’ meetings in each country.  So that you can combine with your own surveys or get a feel for what patients are saying, here are some key findings that may apply in your own case.

At this point, just before the jump, I’d love to throw a little linkbait at you by telling you that the results are absolutely SHOCKING, but they aren’t.  

To share or not to share

One of the most frequent questions I get from owner doctors relates to whether or not critical information should be shared with staff.  The argument usually goes something along the lines of the following: “If I show my income statement to my office manager – who is making $20 per hour—and they see that the net profit in the practice is $250,000, they’ll wonder why I am making $250,000 per year while they are making $40,000.  I’ll either get constant requests for a raise or I’ll have to replace my office manager.”  

On the other hand, you can’t expect a manager or key person to make important decisions for your practice while flying blind.  If you ask a person to handle your purchasing, you cannot reasonably expect a person to buy supplies without knowing the budget, historical spending or important product costs.  If you make decisions without information, you’re pretty much asking for bad decisions.  Also, if you are too guarded with information, the people in the office may think you are hiding something shady.  

Here are some guidelines for information sharing:

New office construction: When does "nice" become too nice?

One obvious observation: you want your office to look nice.  Patients want to spend their appointment time in a comfortable, inviting environment.  Not only does this enhance the patient experience, but it also encourages patients to want to come back and refer their friends for appointments.  On top of that, you and your staff spend a lot of your waking hours in that office and for purposes of morale and energy level, you don’t want to walk into a dump every day.  

The overriding question is what constitutes “nice.”  For some that means Herman Miller chairs, fountains and chandeliers in the waiting room and Italian marble wherever you can put it.  For others, that means clean carpets and a minimum of fingerprints on the walls.  The best solution usually lies somewhere in between those two.

A number of practices operate under the notion that “if you build it, they will come.”  That only works in the movies and only if you build a baseball diamond that people can visit for free.  An uber-fancy office does not necessarily mean that patients will flow in.  This is because patients need a reason to come to the office BEFORE they see the fine interior.  It’s not like a retail store where some great signage and buzz is going to generate walk-in traffic.  For most practices outside of malls, walk-in traffic does not exist.

For some evidence of what I am discussing, a story:

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Getting your new patients to show up

As we mentioned in our last post, one key to getting a patient to show up for his or her new patient appointment is to limit the time between the call for the appointment and the actual appointment date.  After 7 days, potential patients begin to get antsy and look elsewhere for a provider of services.  

Sure, in a perfect world, it would be nice to tell every potential new patient, “Hey come on in today.  We’ll see you whenever you get here.”  And if you happen to have a nonpatient hole in your schedule, you should certainly try to get that space filled with an interested consult.  Of course, the world is not perfect and the reality is that you have days that are full of patients eager to see you.  Simply fitting in an appointment as vital and time consuming as a consult just isn’t always doable. 

So what to do.  Here are some potential methods to ease that backlog:

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New patient consultations: how long is too long to wait for an appointment date?

In doing some deeper analysis on data in the US and abroad, we looked more closely at the percentage of patients that show up for their consultation appointments (i.e. the show up rate) and the percentage of consultations that actually start treatment (i.e. the batting average). 

Intuitively, we would guess that certain events would cause a patient to be more or less likely to show up for his or her appointment and then sign a contract after going through a consultation.  Specifically, if a patient calls for a consultation appointment and is scheduled to be seen that same day, the chances of that patient showing up are much greater than if the patient’s appointment got scheduled 6 months from the date of the call.  Pretty simple, right?  If you make someone wait 6 months for an appointment, they will probably find another provider.  Even if you are a major star in the industry, folks want to get started when they want to get started.

But exactly how quickly do things drop off when it comes to the time a patient has to wait for a new patient appointment.  Like banana left in the refrigerator, things tend to go downhill pretty fast.  Here are some specifics:

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3 tips for hiring and training to maximize staff performance

Unless you’ve hired James Bond, no member of your team is great at everything.  Running your business takes a wide range of skills and finding that absolutely perfect person to handle every single thing is damn near impossible.  Marketing talent may come at the expense of skills with collecting money from past dues.  

We recently had one office manager who had years of experience in the dental field.  She was outstanding in building relationships with patients, handling billing disputes and staying on top of the day to day glitches that befall every office.  But this person did not have a comfort level with the latest tech (like the nuances of digital x-rays) and did not want to push the practice’s social media efforts.  

Clearly, the solution here is not to terminate such a valuable person.  Rather, the answer is to complement the person’s skill set with either the other people or systems.  Note that I did not say to hire someone just because that person may have a skill that no one else has.  Your first consideration priority needs to be on having a properly sized staff.  

Let’s look at some of the considerations in ensuring that your staff has complementary skills.

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3 qualities to look for in your office manager

Throughout the life of this blog, we have discussed the size and significance of the staffing and employee cost in your practice.  Over the coming posts, we are going to dig deeper into the human resources component of that cost.  We’ll talk about components of costs, characteristics to look for in a new employee, hiring, firing, discipline and much more on incentives.  

Today, we look more closely at one of the key people in your practice: the office manager.  Over time, this person can develop into your right hand for carrying out the business operations of the practice and a trusted advisor on matters of future practice development.  They’ll usually oversee the front desk area, monitor marketing, receivables, cash management, payroll and a host of other tasks.  This person may also be responsible for other hires so his or her personality and preferences will touch every piece of the practice.  

In this segment, we look at some of the characteristics we feel are most important when considering what type of person to put in this key position (aside from the obvious things like not being a psychopath).  This characteristics are ranked in order of importance:

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5 acquisition warning flags

We’ve recently come across several acquisition deals that had real potential when reading the basic description of the practice (who writes those?  Most of them are fantastic).  But at some point in the process, red flags got thrown up that caused us to pack up our bags and head in the other direction.  

Here are some of the things that we’ve seen recently and over the years that should immediately sound warning alarms all throughout your head.  Please note that not all of these are necessarily deal-killers, but they should cause you to give extra thought and do extra homework before making a deal.

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5 ways your practice is like Bar Rescue (even if your practice doesn't need a rescue)

If you watch basic cable TV, you may be familiar with the show Bar Rescue on Spike.  In it, consultant Jon Taffer visits a failing bar and turns it around.  Generally, this involves upgrading the menu, correcting some operational problems, weeding out unruly staff, remodeling the interior and renaming the establishment.  Add a healthy dose of drama and yelling and you’ve got a recipe for a successful turnaround.

As an unabashed fan of the show, I am regularly amazed by the parallels between the rescue projects on the show and the operating challenges for dental and orthodontic practices.  How could I possibly compare the average watering hole with a professional practice?  At the essence, you’re simply running a business in both cases so key similarities are present.

Specifically, and without any yelling or drama, here’s what I’ve seen:

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Marketing strategy: social media updates

We all know that there are thousands and thousands of articles out there about the best way to advertise on social media, but let’s take a closer look at some recent developments within the big 3 – Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn – to see how dental and orthodontic practices might be impacted.

To the news wire:

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Process simplified: generating important numbers

Over the last couple of months, we’ve thrown several computations and numbers at you.  Taking the time to compute things like the batting average, conversion rate, show up rate, etc. can benefit your practice and help you make effective, efficient decisions.  But a savvy practitioner may ask, “Those numbers are all well and good, but do you expect me to spend all of my time summarizing results and making computations?  Not only is that boring, but it also takes away time from analysis and focusing on my practice.”

And this, savvy practitioner, is an excellent point.  There are quite a number of ways to get to these numbers without burdening you with a green visor and a bunch of 7 column paper.  Here are some of your options:

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Avoid these information errors

If you’ve read this site before, you know that we preach the importance of information.  But what seems to be lost in the discussion is the fact that the information needs to be pointed, simple and useful.  Practice management software companies and other services are perfectly capable of generating reams of data.  But who has the time to look through all of that stuff?  And does all of that information have meaning?  

Today, we’ll discuss those and other fallacies that come with the generation of information and the usage of those data.  You don’t want to be presented with information that consumes excessive amounts of your time to understand or that lead you in the wrong direction.

Here are the potential mistakes you want to avoid:

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Marketing Monday: Positioning your practice for success

In a previous post to Marketing Monday Bart did an excellent job of identifying the most attractive segment of the orthodontic market.  In his blog post Bart pointed out that through extensive research and real world experience working mothers aged 35-45 years old is the best segment of the market to focus your advertising and promotional efforts.

In a much broader perspective identifying the target market is one part of an overall marketing plan.  Technically speaking developing a marketing plan is a 6 step process resulting in a plan that effectively communicates the value of your services to customers, builds a relationship with your customers and differentiates your organization from competitors.  The most critical step in the marketing planning process occurs in step 3; segmentation, targeting and positioning (STP). 

The fixed cost nature of your practice

        Following up on a recent post, one of the most frequently asked questions we receive is “if I do increase my volume with a lower monthly payment, won’t the increase in cost from servicing these additional patients consume any potential profit?”  The answer is no.  The reason is because most of your largest costs are fixed in nature.

As we examine this more in depth, let’s look at the definition of “fixed cost.”  In standard economics-speak, a fixed cost is a cost that does not vary with the number of transactions or volume in a given practice.  To see how this affects your practice, I will take you through some of your major expense line items:

Marketing Monday: Monthly payment down, profits up

         Despite the occasional positive economic news out there, the world economy still is not flourishing.  Growth in the US is still slow and uneven.  Europe is getting its house in order.  Growth in China and India have generally slowed.  And if you are located in a place with a thriving economy, your practice growth is still potentially limited by competition.
  

So what can a practice do to achieve material long term growth in profit without investing funds in a potentially expensive and uncertain marketing campaign on electronic media?  Reduce your monthly fee and watch profits grow.

Tool Kit: Stats Analyzer

        At times, your practice reaches a certain size, level of stagnation or difficulty that you decide to bring in outside help.  Or, you may simply decide that you want to focus more on patient care and have others handle some of the business aspects of your practice.

Whatever the case and regardless of whom you decide to bring in, a part of the fee you pay will invariably be for that person to take your practice results and perform some analysis.  They will then provide solutions for you to implement.  But why pay for any of that when you have MPE Stats Analyzer?

Introducing the MPE Tool Kit

Any good engine needs a set of technicians and tools to run smoothly. To this point, we’ve given you some insight and data from the technicians. Now, it’s time to bring out the tools. Today, we officially introduce the MPE Toolkit to help you improve results if they are where they are not where you want them to be or to give you a hand in taking results to another level if things are good, but could be better. Today, we will re-introduce one of the tools and introduce a new one. Over the next several weeks, we’ll add new ones to the kit. As always, if you have an idea for a new one or a suggestion as to how we can improve the current ones, please let us know. Check out the new set of links to the right. We’ll keep the links to our toolkit items there and add to the set as we introduce new tools.

Want patients? Here's who you need to impress.

In today’s exciting Marketing Monday installment, we discuss a fundamental concept underlying your marketing and how you design the business side of your practice.  You cannot advertise, market or effectively do business without knowing to whom you are directing your marketing or your services.  In sum, who is your target market?  Who will be the people that make decisions about whether or not to utilize your service and what factors push them to selecting one service provider over another?  This doesn’t affect just marketing.  I taught a small business startup class and in the 10 week period covering a broad range of topics, we discussed knowing the target market in about 8 of them.

In today’s post, we answer the question, “Who is my target market?”

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: