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.
