Practice rescue: the nightmare opening

Our next story delves into what I consider to be a practice’s worst nightmare.  Here’s the basic situation: a practice puts big money into a great location, builds out that location with no expense spared, spends big dollars on a high profile marketing campaign, opens the doors and…crickets.  You can see the visual right? Nothing but tumbleweed rolling by the office.

We had this very case in a fine Midwestern city. A brand new strip mail had opened up and this practice had put a gorgeous new 4,000 square foot orthodontic and general dental practice in there.  The initial marketing campaign was strong with TV ads, a nice price promotion, radio promos and a semi-formal grand opening (one can only assume that the champagne was Korbel).  With 8 operatories, this place was ready for the flood of patients that would surely be on the way.  

Except that there was no flood, or a nice stream or even a small babbling brook.  The practice had 0 new patients in month 1, 1 in month 2 and 2 in month 3.  Not exactly a rousing start.  On top of that, the practice was fully staffed anticipating a great start so costs were substantially higher than one with a more modest opening.

Practice rescue: Where did all the patients go?

One of the most perplexing problems for any practice is one in which new patient flow was strong for a period of time and now that patient flow has steadily or suddenly dried up.  

From my perspective, this is even more challenging than the office that throws open its doors and no one shows up from day one.  In that case, you need to change everything up and try a fresh approach.  In the case of a declining practice, you are tempted to hold onto what worked for the practice in the past.  Maybe that’s a good idea and maybe it isn’t.  Figuring out what to change and what to keep in place is a challenging exercise.

To discuss this problem, I’d like to introduce a orthodontic practice that I’ve worked with recently.  In the late 2000’s the practice was humming along nicely signing 20-25 new patients per month.  In 2010, that number dropped to 15-20, and by 2012, the office was consistently under 10 new patients per month. 

In mid 2013, results weren’t getting better so our group took a look at things.  Here are some details on our practice rescue:

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