When it comes to scaling a practice, it can be a bit confusing knowing where to start. You want to grow, but you need to have the fundamentals in place to ensure your business stays on strong foundations.
If you’re looking to scale your practice, it’s crucial you have these five elements in place and that these are the areas you look to develop throughout your scaling journey.
Winning Strategy
You need a strategy that works, a strategy that’s going to help go from profitable to scalable and beyond, and a strategy that allows you to be the chess player, rather than the king or queen on the chess board.
It’s not about having all the moves; it’s about making sure you can utilize the pieces on the chess board for best effect. So that means taking a 30,000-foot birds-eye view of the business, rather than being in the weeds all the time, and we need to know how to use the assets at our disposal for best effect.
A rock-solid strategy should be focused on long-term outcomes, measurable in terms of results, and contain a SWOT analysis and risk mitigation.
Build Assets
Every headache, frustration, pain in the neck, pain the backside, burr in the saddle, pebble in the shoe, whatever you want to call it, can be traced back somewhere to a deficiency of assets.
Assets can come in the form of physical assets, plant, equipment, chairs, et cetera. You can also have database assets, so patient bases, or if you’re a specialist, referral bases. Or even intellectual property assets, team assets, financial assets – long story short, we can have all manner of assets.
You want to be building and growing assets – but it’s crucial to be able to turn those into cash flow. This is really the best measure of business efficiency and effectiveness.
Once we’ve got that net cash flow, there is a few things that we can do with it. Keep it, pass out a dividend, reduce debt, buy more assets… what’s important is that you have the option and the freedom to do so.
Self-Managing Team
A self-managing team is a team that knows what to do in their role. They’re very clear about what tasks they need to complete, how to do them, and they go ahead and do them well. They don’t need to be micromanaged. They don’t need to be monitored. You don’t need to look over their shoulder.
One of the greatest sources of leverage you’ll have in your practice is a team who is really engaged, onboard, knows what to do, they’re a culture fit, they can do what they need to be able to do, and they’re clear on what success looks like in their role.
I am yet to meet the person who comes to work knowingly, willingly, trying to do a poor job. Most people are internally wired to want to do their job successfully, and want to do it well. What you need to get clear on is if the issue lies in your ability to communicate what’s expected of them, or their ability to deliver what you expect.
Once you have clarity on this, you’ll find yourself much closer to having a self-managing team.
Data Optimisation
In dentistry, we routinely look at the evidence before making a decision. We look at the data, we look at the evidence, we look at everything, and yet, we don’t apply that same intellectual rigor when it comes to our business.
We use gut feel, we use intuition, we use anything but data. Now, there may be a time and a place for that, for trusting your gut on certain issues – but verify that with facts and figures.
Now, there’s no one size fits all definition of the data that you should be keeping, but you should consider what’s right for you and your practice. It might be profit per chair, EBOC per chair, EBOC per employee, case acceptance rates, marketing ROI…
What’s important is that you identify KPI’s, you identify the data you need to know, keep track of it, then use it.
Effective Implementation
The most common thing that stops us from implementing plans, is simply having too much stuff to do. The key here is to do less, but do it better.
Sometimes you have to let some of the fires burn, because other issues are simply more strategically important and actually require your time and attention much more. And that can be really hard – it does go against our nature. But once you master it, it will ultimately set you free.
If you can’t learn to let things go, you will constantly be playing whack-a-mole with an endless stream of tasks and jobs.
P.S Want to scale your dental practice and take your profits to 7 figure success?
Me and my team can work with you directly to get you there! Simply book in your FREE 1:1
strategy session, and we can get started on a game plan for you and your practice.
