As a practice owner, you never want to fall into the trap of relying too much on any key player – including yourself.
If the practice and team are too dependent on you as a practice owner, you’ll struggle to take time off, reduce your hours, or scale the practice. If the key person risk falls on another team member, you’ll be left in the lurch should that person ever decide to exit the practice.
In a lot of ways, key person risk is like co-dependency. And this is the last thing you need when you’re trying to grow and scale a practice that can withstand disruptions and not rely on you. So, here are a few ways to minimise, reduce, and eliminate key person risk in your practice.
Living Job Descriptions and SOP’s
Perhaps the most important factor in reducing key person risk, is clear documentation surrounding the responsibilities and tasks assigned to each team member, and instructions so that anyone can take over if need be.
Using a document like a Living Job Description is highly effective – each team member has their own list of responsibilities that they constantly update as their roles adapt. This is incredibly useful for when team members take time off, or move onto a different job. You have a clear list of every task they performed and can divide it up as necessary.
I also can’t stress how crucial it is to document your Standard Operating Procedures and update them regularly. Whether it’s a written out step-by-step or short video tutorial, this will allow different staff members to learn new tasks so that nothing is dependent on one individual.
Upskilling, training, and development
Unless you want your practice to remain static and stagnant, you need to be growing and developing your team.
By investing in education, courses, and training for your team, you’ll be able to create a multi-skilled, diverse team who are trained in numerous areas and have overlapping abilities. This has the dual effect of allowing your team members to cover multiple tasks and responsibilities, but also developing them as individuals which is a powerful aspect of staff retention.
Savvy Dentist offers numerous courses and training options for all practice team members, which you can check out if you’d like to upskill your front desk, practice manager, social media marketing wiz, or more.
Regular updates on ongoing projects and initiatives
Whether it’s your weekly huddles or monthly planning sessions, be sure to devote time to giving a quick WIP on any projects you have in the pipeline.
This rings especially true if you have multiple people across several different tasks on the same project – it’s important that your team know who is doing what, and when.
Trust me, if a team member has a family emergency and needs to take leave, or you have a key player resign, you’ll be grateful that there’s clear and open communication flow.
By reducing key person risk in your practice, you give your practice the best possible chance for growth, scaling and development without being dependent on any one person – including yourself.
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
