If you ask any successful business owner, they will always credit a large percentage of their success to the people they work with. Dentistry is no different. Leaders and owners need to credit much of their success to their team. Without a committed team, the Super General Dental Practice would not be possible.
I would like to give you 15 staffing “truths” as “Michaelisms”. In most upcoming posts, I will incorporate a few as we deal with the business of dentistry. Each of these “Michaelisms” will be in bold print. I attach lot of importance to these; in the success I have been able to achieve over the last five decades. These “Michaelisms” are hard earned truths that I live by in my dental practices. They all started out as a solution to a problem that I could not find an answer to in the books, articles, lectures, and conversations I had with the leaders in dentistry. These bold typed statements are the result of the “forge and fire” of wet fingered dentistry while running dental offices and helping thousands of other doctors improve their practices. I hope you find them valuable in your journey to the practice you always thought you would have. Good luck. Embrace these truths and shorten your journey while improving your results by consistently not making the mistakes that most dentists are destined to make. They can truly be the proof of concept in running a successful dental practice.
- The number one reason you struggle with making a profit is not having a benchmark or goal to collect $20,000-$25,000 a month per full time employee (that means everyone other than the owner(s). $20,000-$25,000/month/employee is a hard and fast fact based on the reality of “profit”. Every office has a ratio for employee collections each month. The average is about $14,000/employee/month. Average doesn’t ever create the ideal business model nor much profit. So, step one is to self-diagnose your practice. Do the math and understand where you are currently. You can’t manage what you don’t measure (a bonus Michaelism).
Now that you have your ratio, what are you willing to do about it? For all you procrastinators, let me make it even simpler. There are only 4 choices. If you want more profit, greater production, and happier patients, you have to move towards the $20,000-$25,000 ratio. When that ratio is off or below our benchmark, you are either overstaffed or underproducing. So, your choices are to free up the future of a few staff members, or produce and collect more with the same number of team members. Again, what are you willing to do? The third choice you have is doing a little of both. Fire a few and keep the great employees and ramp up production. The ball is in your court. Act or don’t. Things won’t get better until you become accountable for your practice results.
- Policy manuals and job descriptions are essential. While not a Michaelism, they are the basis of learning to manage what you measure. A policy manual contains your operating agreements for the entire office. It memorializes every rule, regulation, and remedy to every challenge in the everyday operation of your practice. Don’t just use some outdated manual you found online or were given from another average office. Take the time to purchase the best you can find (CEDR is one of the best) and add your own improvements. Keep in mind that a policy manual and even job descriptions are never finished. They constantly evolve to adapt to an ever-changing dental economy. They change as things around and within your business change. Job descriptions are the footnote to a well written policy manual. They allow you to manage and measure every position in your office. Don’t miss the opportunity to use these job descriptions to confront and adjust the expectations and attitude for every position in the office. One of the greatest faults I see in good practices are offices that fail to have consequences for team members who fail to follow their job descriptions and lack the commitment to the vision of their office.
- Hire for people skills and self-motivation. From the perspective of “what should you look for”, this is it. Nothing else is as important as finding and hiring those who have incredible people skills and an innate sense of self-motivation. Anything else, anything, can be trained. Without these two traits you are destined to experience the fate of many who tend to hire those who basically came along and “fog a mirror” (proof of life, because fogging a mirror means they are breathing, not proof of an excellent hire). Too many just hire the first Tom, Dick, or Harry or warm body that shows up for an interview, so they can feel like they have a full team. Great culture and teams don’t just happen, they are created by wise hiring protocols and a consensus from everyone in the office that this is the perfect candidate for the job.
- Never hire out of desperation. Looking through the lens of desperation is always the wrong thing to do. Kind of like 30 minutes before the pub closes, those “fives” begin to look like a “nine or ten” (taken from the college attitude of bar hopping). Sort of a drowning man syndrome where anything looks like a solution to your problem if it floats. Surely this makes sense. Absolutely, you understand that this is the wrong thing to do, but __________. The but is you should always be looking for your next hire. You should always be looking to raise the level of employees that you have. The key to this is that your antennae are up and everywhere you go, you look at the potential hire of people you interact with. An example might be the bank teller that you always tend to try to get in her line at the bank. The waitress that makes you smile and handles 5 tables full of people like it was nothing. The world is filled with potential employees until you are desperate and then there is nothing.
- Never hire someone you cannot fire. I guess I am just a slow learner, because it took me 15 years to admit I was wrong and embrace this mantra. From that point on, I have never violated this Michaelism. It is too painful in too many ways. On the other hand, it is one of those common place things doctors do, again and again. You would think we would wake up and realize the error of our ways. Over and over, I see two recent graduates go out and become partners in their first practice. Logical? I hope not. Two good friends that have no track record of competence in clinical or dental business, high debt, no patients, etc. You name it. It going to be a long, rocky road with the most likely outcome of failure and disintegration of what was once a great friendship. How about hiring family members? Seems logical. Probably common place, but it goes against all common sense. What happens when they don’t perform, fail to follow your leadership, and/or abuse your relationship by doing or asking to do things you would never allow in another employee? This can really make Thanksgiving and Christmas difficult after you fire them, or they quit. How about hiring the best friend of an existing staff member? She gets fired and her friend leaves too. Hire your spouse as the office manager? Just to be clear, never work with someone you sleep with. That should be a no brainer. Think through the logic of this statement and try to never violate the intent nor the actual statement. You will live long enough to regret it.
As you read these Michaelisms as well as those that follow, challenge their logic. Try and disprove my proof of concept. You hopefully have decided to adopt each of these as yours. They are, without exception, short rules to run your practice by. They are as common sense as gravity.
Michael Abernathy DDS
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