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The most widely accepted fallacy amongst small business owners is that productivity is the key to viability. It's not.
The secret to a business' viability and profitability is the ability to control expenses, especially in recessionary times.
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There's a void in our training and we all know it
While we all were taught the mechanics of doing dentistry, we were never taught Management strategies, Business protocols or the Application of these skills in dental school.
Dentists could learn a valuable secret from the tradespeople—the value of an apprenticeship. While both occupations require 4 years of training whereby the student toils under the watchful eye of a senior instructor, the trades offer a distinctive advantage. In an apprenticeship the trainer, or “master tradesperson” not only shows the apprentice how to use the tools of the trade, the master also teaches the apprentice everything they know about running the business side of the trade. When an apprentice graduates, they are truly equipped with all the “tools” of the trade.
Dentistry has associateships but it needs apprenticeships
The apprenticeship training model is really more of a mentorship model, with only a fraction of the training spent in the classroom. The majority of the training is spent on the job, experiencing real-life problems, and learning how to solve those problems from the mentoring of the master who has already made the mistakes, and learned from the experience.
What's of even greater value in an apprenticeship program, is that the master tradesperson teaches the apprentice how to avoid problems by sharing all the mistakes they have made. This is where dentistry and the trades are different. When we think back on our dental school training, how many of us can recall hearing a dental prof admit to all the mistakes they made in the business aspects of running a private practice—or for that matter, admitting to any mistakes?
The most expensive mistakes are the avoidable mistakes
In a real sense, our problems begin the day we take possession of our own practice. With pretty much zero business training, we are vulnerable to a myriad of mistakes we can't foresee because we don't even know where to look. Unfortunately, the mistakes are often expensive. Even more unfortunately, the mistakes are avoidable. Yet every dentist is going to make the same unavoidable mistakes because we're going to face the same problems every other dentist faces.
Except unlike an apprenticeship, we are at a serious disadvantage.
We haven't been trained, equipped and prepared to know how to deal with all a variety of business challenges. Like when a supply rep is overcharging us. Or when an insurance company is refusing to pay. Or when some slick sales person is trying to suck us into buying something we don't need, won't need, and will never use so it just takes up space in our fridge or on our shelves.
We haven't been taught the intricate dance of “staff management”
It's hard enough when people outside our practice are working against us, but what about when troubles come to roost under our own roof? We haven't been forewarned about what to do when staff don't get along, we don't want to have to deal with inter-office cliques and we haven't been taught how to hold employees accountable to accomplish certain tasks that they'd rather ignore. Things like doing recare calls when patients are behind in their perio or doing collection calls when Mrs. Jones has “forgotten” to bring her checkbook the day you deliver her C&B, but then she doesn't keep her promise to return "the next day" and settle her account. These kinds of problems either create voids in our appointment schedule, voids in our bank deposits, or both.
It's one thing not to have the work to do, it's quite another thing to actually do the work, but not get paid. When you own your own business, the business owner always gets paid last. Somehow, this economic truism was never part of the dental school curriculum.
If we want things to change for the better,
then we are going to have to get better
That's why you need to attend Recession Proof Your Practice and that's exactly why we call this an MBA workshop.
We teach dentists how to be more empowered in the Management aspect of staff dynamics, more equipped in the Business skills of dentistry, then offer ongoing mentorship to ensure that dentists will be able to Apply the principles that older dentists have learned the hard way, that is, the expensive way. But with this program, you won't have to.
This is a once in a lifetime crisis, and possibly the largest financial crisis of its kind in human history.
Public demand for dentistry drops by billions!
In the first five months after the Crash of 2008, demand for dental services in Canada dropped by an estimated quarter billion dollars a month (and then it got worse). If you have concerns about your immediate future and if your staff has concerns about their futures, you're in good company. Economists are now predicting it will be several years before the North America economy limps back to a place where consumers will have the confidence to increase discretionary spending on elective services like dentistry.
How's your weather?
While in some areas we have seen various degrees of recovery since the Crash of 2008, most dentists are suffering compared to three years ago. While the majority say they are surviving, we all know of some who have been diving. Yet remarkably, there has been the rare practice that has actually been thriving in the midst of the worst economic storm since the Great Depression.
It ain't over yet!
By now we all know that the recession isn't over. Based on the problems in Europe and continued unemployment in the US, things don't look too rosy. For the past three years, economists and market analysts were foreboding that we should not expect to see the economy or consumer spending return to anything that could be described as "robust" until at least 2017-2020. That was before the Greek debacle and also before the Obama administration decided to print an extra $2.4 trillion out of thin air. The bailout programs simply didn't work, and now all we have to show for it is deeper government deficits which can only be paid for by deeper government cuts. And that means more unemployment in the future.
Lay-offs and cutbacks are not the answer
Socio-economic studies and researchers of past recessions have shown that when we cut service availability and reduce the amount of hours our front line personnel have to serve our existing customer base, we only cut our own throats. It's a descending spiral that curtails our business opportunity, leading to less business, which causes more cutbacks and leads to reduced consumer spending…it's not very pretty. While reducing staff overhead may seem like a viable answer in the midst of dwindling revenue, it's our front desk staff who get us booked, process the paperwork and help us bring in crucial revenue by allowing us to focus on what we were trained to do—dentistry. Cut backs and lay-offs are not the answer, we simply need "new answers".
We need new tools and new strategies
The only way we can maintain our revenues (without cutting staff hours which only cuts our customer service) is by learning how to retool our existing protocols in serving our existing customer base. The "answers" we are looking for involve strategies for increasing efficiencies with our existing resources, so we can adapt to recessionary economic pressures. While it may seem reasonable to ask "How can we increase our dwindling productivity?" that's the wrong question to ask in a recessionary climate. In a recession, demand drops while competition increases. To thrive in recessionary times requires a paradigm shift in our business strategies. Let's face it, we weren't even taught business strategies for when times were good, forget about when times are bad.
It's time to learn new strategies. We need a dental MBA.
You didn't learn this in dental school
Which is why the choice before you is black or white. Either you learn the MBA's of how to manage your way through a recession now, or you do the same things you've always done and somehow hope that you will weather the storm, a storm that economists are saying is going to last a long (long) time. Yet some practitioners are not only weathering the storm, they're thriving in spite of it.
That's what this program is about. It's about being taught the right navigation tools to steer your practice in the right directions, based on wet-gloved experience gained from several previous recessionary periods we've seen since the 1980's. It's about having a senior "tradesman" share past experiences, past mistakes, and how to avoid these mistakes with a junior "apprentice", thus empowering and equipping you with the knowledge you need to create, control and maintain fiscal efficiency.
This training involves strategies to optimize efficiencies. It's about what everyone learned to do in the Depression and every Recession since, namely "economizing". It's not about layoffs and cutbacks, it's about learning how you can do the best you can, with what you've got, which will be a great relief to the economic concerns of your staff! By the way, this is precisely why your staff are going to be enthusiastic about the training in this particular workshop—it's also about their personal security, not just yours.
It means you'll learn how to position your practice so you can make the best of whatever the economy is going to bring your way, by maximizing the effectiveness of your existing staff and resources you've already got. There are only two things that can increase your bottom line—decreasing your expenses and increasing your productivity. This workshop will show you how to do both! It will do that by focusing on the following:
No more no-shows!
We all know that an empty hole in the schedule means continued expenses but zero revenue. It's more than just a hole, it's a black hole that sucks up your profit margins. We also know that patients can think of a number of reasons to cancel an appointment on short notice or else not show up at all. This puts your front desk staff under major pressure and stress trying to fill these last minute cancellations, while you stress over the lost opportunity to provide the services you needed to do, and how to pay the bills.
This part of the training will teach you why people bail on appointments and how to retrain your front desk staff so you can stay afloat.
Slash your supply bills in half
There are a number of reasons why some suppliers will sell the exact same supplies at substantially lower prices than the competition. The black-and-white of it is, dentists who do not have a strategy for inventory control are simply going to pay more, and dental suppliers know that. Dental school simply didn't teach us anything about inventory control and comparative shopping.
This part of the program will teach you how to implement your own inventory control program, plus give you the tools to train your staff members to rise to the challenge of saving your practice money.
For those who take this particular part of the training to heart and are prepared to invest the time (minimal) to gain the financial savings (maximal) you can EASILY cut your supply bill by as much as 20-50% compared to that of your colleagues.
Evolution of a 50% overhead practice
Speaking of 50%, is the 50% overhead practice a myth, magic or is it simply just a mystery to those who have never been trained in how to achieve it?
This program will provide you with strategic protocols that will guide you on the road to bringing your overhead to 50% and even below that. But once again, we need to be black-and-white about this—there's no "magic" in the formulas you'll learn that can transform your overhead to 50% (or less), so it won't happen “overnight”. But it can happen and it will happen if you take advantage of the strategies presented in this workshop. When you do, it will probably double your after-tax disposable income down the road and depending on your age, you could benefit from that kind of multiplied gain for upwards of twenty years of practice.
Imagine the kind of freedom this training will give you.
What forms of advertising are a total waste
—and why.
Our speaker, Dr. KJ Orieux, has a unique background. Prior to going back to school to become a dentist, he had a prior career as the Vice President of an advertising and marketing company. In his twenty years of dentistry, he has provided consulting on marketing expertise and written articles for the Canadian Dental Association, the Academy of General Dentistry and the American Association of Dental Schools. What you'll learn about marketing in just 60 minutes will forever change the way you contemplate what "marketing" means.
The science of consumerism
—Why they buy (or don't)
How would you change your practice modalities if you could accurately predict what direction dental consumerism would take in the next 5 years? Imagine what kind of marketing advantage you would have if you were ahead of the curve, rather than playing catch-up? In the early 1990's, Dr. Orieux was teaching audiences who were "addicted" to amalgam restorations that they needed to change their mindset and embrace composite resins for posterior teeth. Then in the mid 1990's, he predicted that dental insurers would cut back their coverage for 6 month recare appointments to once every 9-12 months. At the time, he took a lot of flack from conference attendees for both of these predictions, but the fact remains—he was right. In what was perhaps his most controversial prediction, he told dentists to stop paying for Yellow Pages ads. He hasn't had one for almost ten years.
Though some would consider him a futurist, he says anyone could have come to the same conclusions, if they simply learned to incorporate the same scientific consumeristic principles he uses into their practice. Find out how you can make your bottom-line skyrocket by positioning yourself way ahead of the consumeristic curve.
Eliminating bad debt & write-offs
Before you fix a problem, you first have to admit the problem exists.
Most dentists have been conditioned to believe that “bad debt” only accounts for a fraction of one percent of their production. Dr. Orieux will tell you the damage to your bottom line is probably in the realm of 1000% higher than that, it’s just that the whole realm of accounts receivable is so convoluted that it’s often extremely difficult to identify all the different ways in which losses are occurring. For those who have the courage (and the stomach) to do their own investigative research according to what you’ll learn in this workshop, many will find out they are losing tens of thousands of dollars a year. What's worse, many of you are still paying taxes on non-existent revenue. Bad debt is a much larger problem to the typical dental practice than what we've been led to believe.
In this part of the program, Dr. Orieux will teach those who want to learn to diagnose the truth about why their "bottom line" seems to "bottom out" far lower than they think it should and how to gain control over bad debt.
Overcoming “only if my insurance covers it”
Your treatment plan is sound, your recommendations are patient-centered and you have spent the last half hour explaining to your patient why their fractured lower left first molar needs a crown, yet the patient says “Only if my insurance will cover it”.
How many of us have heard patients use this phrase more often than Vancouver Canucks fans saying “Maybe next year”? Yet if you were studying Craigslist last spring, you would have found that Vancouverites were paying upwards of $3000 per ticket for seats in the nosebleeds because they (desperately) wanted to see their team skate off with Lord Stanley's silverware (and no, their ticket price was not covered by their dental insurance).
He's an author, consultant, keynote speaker and corporate trainer in workplace dynamics. More importantly, when he's not doing that, he's a practicing wet-gloved dentist…
Just like you.
As a consultant, Dr. K.J. Orieux, has helped thousands of professionals reposition their practice in good times and bad. What makes Dr. Orieux unique amongst other practice management trainers however, is that not only is he a dentist, but he was also the Vice President of a marketing and advertising company prior to attending dental school.
Having spent years gaining expertise in the corporate world of marketing and sales, he learned invaluable business management skills. When he applied his expertise in the dental realm, this competitive edge enabled him to establish a private practice ranked in the top 1% of efficiency BEFORE the onset of the recession.
But now things are even better.
Since the economic Crash of 2008, Dr. Orieux's practice has thrived, growing by an unprecedented 27% during a time when more than 8 out of 10 dentists have seen patient flow, productivity and prosperity take a pounding.
In 2006, he began teaching audiences how to prepare for a major global economic downturn. In 2007 he backed this prediction by writing a book called “What's Your ROI? ” which was a veritable survival manual for what we now know as the Crash of 2008. This book provides corporations with the navigation tools to create the kind of synergy and teamwork required to weather any storm.
Dr. Orieux publishes “The Pinnacle”, a practice management e-journal that provides dentists with proven strategies for practice building, sociological and psychological insights into dental consumerism, as well as easily-implemented protocols that increase efficiency, productivity and profitability.
More recently, he has written a book called “Survive, Thrive or Dive” that shows any business owner, but especially dentists, how to position themselves to not just survive our current recessionary pressures, but thrive.