Everybody should be familiar with the funky postage stamp looking modern art on most commercial marketing. If you have the app for your smart phone you just point your camera at it and it quickly takes you to the product or company web site set up for that particular product. We even have one for Summit Practice Solutions. QR Code stands for “Quick Response Code”, a built in short cut for getting where you want to go.
I want to get you to think about how you could find a QR Code for your practice based on a day, a week, a month, and a year. What short cut to a successful strategy could you implement right now to get you where you want to go as soon as possible? You certainly could come up with an endless number of possibilities but consider these four as a starting point or reference.
- QR Code Each Day. It never fails to surprise me how most offices fail to see success in the little things that they do. It’s almost like they only consider the “home run” type strategies that are probably out of reach for most of us. One way to hit a single every day is to figure out how to add at least one more procedure per day per provider than you are currently doing. For the doctor it might be one more filling, or extraction, or even better, one more crown. The average dentist works 200 days a year. If the average crown were about $1000/crown, you could add another $200,000 of collections each year by working one more in. If you’re a hygienist and a cleaning was $100 per cleaning, it would be an extra $20,000 a year. Think what that would do for your bottom line. Also consider the other side of this. If you let even one patient cancel a day the impact is huge at the end of the year. For example the one more per day crown might end up being the one less per day or $200,000 less for the year in this example.
- QR Code Each Week. Most doctors work four days a week so what could we do each week that would yield a huge result by the end of the year? If you could work in one more new patient a week that would be an extra fifty patients a year. What’s a new patient worth to you? In most offices it is at least $1,100 in the first six months. That would mean an extra $55,000 per year in your pockets, and keep in mind that because it is extra income after all the overhead is paid, you get to keep 100% of it. If you actually inspired the patient, the ripple effect would be more new patients (via referrals) with an added production for them also. If you consider the lifetime value of a patient you get multiples of this production.
- QR Code Each Month. What if you actually followed all the numbers in the practice and decided that you would lower your overhead by 1% each month? You would need clean numbers so you would need to set up Quickbooks to pay bills. Knowing where you were each minute of the day would allow you to share this information with the staff in order to build momentum and consensus in lowering the overhead. Did you realize that an increase in production of 10% will usually lower your overhead by 8-9%? Raising your fees to a normal level for your area will influence the overhead significantly. Being comprehensive in your diagnosis is huge. Inspiring patients, consumer hours, pricing, etc., all matter and will work to lower your overhead that 1% a month. What would an extra 12% take home do for you?
- QR Code Each Year. This one is pretty easy. You are facing National Health Care, Insurance Companies, and Corporate Dental practices. The strategy should be to add one service a year that you never offered before. The number one choice has to be “braces” in one form or the other. The next year add mini-implants, or Botox, sleep apnea, sedation, TMJ, etc. Every year you need to add one service that no one else is offering in your area. The ripple effect of this is almost un-measurable over the lifetime of your practice. It could mean hundreds of thousands of dollars a year with even a small participation by your patients.
I hope you get the idea. Think small. Think making it to first base. Occasionally you will hit the home run, but the strategy is to do something every day, week, month, and year to effect change in your practice to guarantee a decrease in overhead, an increase in production, and a practice that offers more than the doctor next door.
Michael Abernathy, DDS
972-523-4660
[email protected]