Do you have only one mouth mirror, one dental tweezers, probe and scaler lying around your practice? The chances are the answer is ‘No.’ You probably have a couple of extra tools hanging around in case one goes missing. You can’t just leave your patient sitting vulnerably in the chair while you go find or buy yourself a probe.
Now consider yourself sitting in that chair, enjoying a lucrative dental practice until something unfortunate leads you to close that practice down. What if you develop shaky hands and cannot perform specific procedures. What would be your number one concern in that case? It definitely should not be financial worries.
Fact is, we all need some sort of a backup plan to power through life. And investments are a great way to secure yourself financially in these economically unstable times. However, with multiple options available, the decision can become pretty overwhelming pretty fast. This blog post has been designed to help you through the process, regardless of what you plan on investing in.
Your Appetite for Risk
You must have had heard of the term ‘risk appetite’ time and again. It is your own capacity for dealing with risk. However, online quizzes and questionnaires are quite generic and don’t provide targeted results. You will need to calculate your individual capacity to take risk. This is done by making personal and financial assessments. How much money can you put in an investment without losing sleep? What are your long term goals and how much are you willing to invest in them? What is your capacity for loss? Answering all these questions will give you a clearer idea of what investment options are more suitable for you and how much you could invest in them.
Do Not Invest in Something You Don’t Understand
Just because someone you know made great money with bitcoins doesn’t mean you will too. That someone probably invested their time and effort along with their money in it. Unless you are willing to invest the same kind of effort in understanding the plan, you will not garner the same results. And this is true for any form of investment.
Millions of people heavily invest in mutual funds each year, without first assessing and comparing the different types of mutual funds or the expense ratio that a specific institute might be charging them; hence, the results for the same are drastically different for every investor. The term ‘passive income’ is coined to define your attitude towards a specific income stream AFTER you have done your due diligence and researched on it; before that you need to be anything but passive in order to yield desirable returns.
Have a Diversified Portfolio
You know what they say don’t put your eggs in one basket? They are pretty right! Economic conditions are constantly fluctuating. Real estate, stocks, bonds, commodities, they all have their highs and lows, and by investing in any one of them, you go through that rollercoaster with them. Invest in different asset classes and deal makers. Invest in different streams of strategies so that you bring multiple levels of diversification. And if you can diversify in terms of strategy, geography, frequency of payments, overhead costs and other terms and conditions, then you will create multiple pillars of wealth.
How to Deal With Losses
We all have our fair share of cuts and bruises when dealing with investments, or pretty much any other aspect of this ride called life. It is the part and parcel of it all. What is important is how you lift yourself back up, dust the loss off and start from point zero or point minus ten if that’s what it takes to get things rolling.
Almost all investment opportunities go through turmoil; there will be times when the market will fluctuate. Instead of making hasty decisions, you should stay put and ride the storm out. This is another reason why investing in a diverse portfolio is more lucrative. It is easier to ignore a small investment going bad rather than when you invest hefty amounts in a single opportunity. For instance, real estate markets in the home ground might be going through a difficult time, however, it may be booming somewhere abroad. It makes sense to invest abroad in an industry that you are familiar with rather than opting for a new opportunity that you are not very knowledgeable of.
Learn From the Experts
What better way to earn what successful people earn other than doing what they are doing? You can learn from scratch, or have a mentor who has made the mistakes you are likely to make and let their experience guide you through the process. Seek help from mentors and financial and investing advisors whenever possible. Also have a network of people within the industry that you are investing in. Rubbing shoulders with the right people will give you the inside scoop on matters concerning your investment. You don’t want to be the last person knowing that the real estate market is about to crash. Rubbing shoulders with people doing the same thing will enable you to learn from their mistakes, hear about their journeys as well as updates from the economic and governmental fronts.
Have a Process
If there is one key point you can take from this blog, take this- don’t invest in an opportunity based on someone else’s advice, gut feeling, investment trends and flimsy research. So many people invest for the wrong reasons and based on half-baked processes. It is not a robust methodology. Have a process, a questionnaire of sort if you may, where you ask yourself the right questions, do the survey, educate yourself, weigh out the options and then make decisions. Having a process ensures that every decision you make is thoroughly assessed and investigated.
Be Flexible
There is a major difference between letting economic fluctuations lead you to make hasty decisions and breeding white elephants. Know when to call it quits. Again, weigh out your options and expect things to take unexpected turns. Don’t hang on to an investment if it isn’t generating the desired returns.
A diversified investment portfolio isn’t just a way of building wealth, in many cases, it becomes a requirement to survive through the economic crunches and curve balls. So rather than only focusing on scaling your dental practice, you should also consider other investment options.
P.S. Whenever you’re ready …. here are 4 ways I can help you grow your dental practice:
1. Grab a free chapter from my book “Retention – How to Plug the #1 Profit Leak in Your Dental Practice”
The book is the definitive guide to patient retention and how to use internal marketing to grow your practice – Click Here
2. Join the Savvy Dentist community and connect with dentists who are scaling their practice too
It’s our Facebook group where clever dentists learn to become commercially smart so that they have more patients, more profit and less stress. – Click Here
3. Attend a Practice Max Intensive live event
Our 2 day immersive events provide access to the latest entrepreneurial thinking and actionable strategies to drive your practice forward. You’ll leave with a game plan to take your results to the next level. If you’d like to join us, just send me a message with the word “Event and I’ll get you all the details! – Click here
4. Work with me and my team privately
If you’d like to work directly with me and my team to take your profit from 6 figures to 7 figures …. just send me a message with the word “Private”… tell me a little about your practice and what you would like to work on together, and I’ll get you all the details! – Click here
