Australasian Dentist Magazine May June 2021

Category 142 Australasian Dentist A quick introduction before you start reading: I’m not a dentist (although my wife is) however our family has been in dentistry for over 30 years. My doctorate is in Business Administration (specifically business strategy) and I have worked with hundreds of practices and practitioners over the years and analysed high performing practices as part of my thesis as well as having day to day experience in practices from a variety of modalities. I was asked to share with you some of the learning over that time. The fundamentals There are three fundamental ideas that I would like you to consider as you read this article. 1. You are the key to your better future – if you want things to change for you, you must change. Life is full of choices and the sum of your situation is often the product of your choices. 2. Design a life, don’t make a living – consider in real terms what you would consider a great life and lifestyle. Now determine the income and life structure required to deliver this to you over time. This will give you a set of goals and focus moving forward. Write this down, visit it regularly. Develop a set of guiding principles on which you will make choices and decisions and apply them. 3. You get rewarded for the value you bring not the time you spend – two people can spend and hour working and receive different rewards based on how society values their contribution. In dentistry you can be rewarded well. Strive to provide quality dentistry and a great patient experience and you can justify being rewarded a premium for your time and effort. Graduates should view the value of learning as critical as the financial rewards. Growing or rotting Dentists as a rule graduate with 15% of the skills for private practice (maybe this is being generous). The reality is that obtaining a dentistry degree did not prepare practitioners to manage people, finances, inventory, information and marketing in a practice. In a discussion with a dentist once he said he tried some marketing and it didn’t work, I responded by saying that I’d give an endodontic procedure a whirl but didn’t like my chances. His response was “you’re not a dentist”, “well you’re not a marketer,” was my response. Point made. If you want a professional job done, get a professional who has learnt their skill, don’t try to be all things. Experience is often what you get when you don’t get what you want. In another case a dentist suggested they had 20 years’ experience in running their practice and could learn little from others. My observation was that they had one years’ experience repeated 20 times. The practice was running him and in reality, the more you learn the more you realise there is to learn. The point is that real success is often a team effort in a practice and knowledge and intelligence is not the exclusive domain of practitioners. Open you mind and watch you practice grow and your quality-of-life flourish. The mind is like a parachute, it works best when open. First principles of planning success After building a number of businesses, reading many texts on strategy and management publications, here is a basic three-step strategy (it looks simple but implementation is everything) 1. Set written goals – what do you want – build a game plan and share it with your family and the appropriate team members at the practice. Any plan is better than no plan. 2. Stick to it – having discipline and persistence is the key – having a plan and actioning that plan – going flat out will mean you’ll be successful sooner or realise the plan could be better earlier. 3. Set priorities based on a core set of principles, once you have worked out what you want focus on, learn to say no to distractions and other people’s priorities. The principles of planning personal success are to determine in short by: 1. Where are you – It’s what you’ve got to build on that counts, think about what you do have, not what you don’t as a starting point. Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are. 2. Where do you want to be – working on yourself is the key – You’re a work in progress, so have a clear development plan both personally and for the practice and your team members. 3. How will you get there – Things don’t change until you do, ask yourself “what am I becoming here, not what am I getting”. Break the journey into small steps such as projects and achieve them one at a time and celebrate your progress. The three practice building blocks 1. Getting the business – from new and existing clients by increasing treat- ment compliance and extending the services and the care to the patient and therefore delivering a great experience 2. Doing the business – consistency is the key to great service delivery where the entire team is working on, not just in the practice 3. Keeping more – It’s not what you make it’s what you keep, so manage your expenses and reinvest wisely in your practice (at a point bigger practices make more profit for every dollar earned by a dentist – called local economies of scale). The future is bright for dentistry and for those involved with a growing and aging population of baby boomers, the rise in awareness of healthcare and improved technologies dental practices of the future can design a great place for ordinary people to do the extraordinary. It is now up to you from the most recent graduate to the most experienced practitioner to work on, not just in the practice and improve personally if you want things to improve for you. u At Acumen Dental we can help you implement dental prescribing and dispensing and have developed Yum Topical Anaesthetic for our own practice. We are constantly learning and growing if you’d like to start dental prescribing and dispensing just go to www.acumen.dental and join for free – we’d love to help you with free information and resources to fellow practice on their own journey. Smarter not harder – designing your perfect practice By Dr Michael Ryan B. Ec, B. Jp, MBA, DBA re ailing Mike Ryan