The ability to build assets is incredibly important to your success in business and practice ownership. In fact, every headache, frustration, bottleneck, and pain in the backside that you experience in your practice, can be traced back to a deficiency of assets.
Now, when I say assets, I don’t just mean your cash or how many chairs you have – although those are certainly important.
There are actually several different types of assets, including:
1. Physical assets
The physical assets that I’m talking about is plant and equipment, your fit out, your plumbing, your walls, your cabinetry, instruments, materials, all that sort of stuff. We want to be able to take all of this gear and get the most out of it.
If you’ve got a physical asset like your surgery or your chair, and it’s underutilized, you need to explore how you can use it to its fullest advantage. If it’s sitting there doing nothing, it’s not earning money.
A great analogy is that if you owned an airline, it would be in your best interest to have as many planes running as many flights possible. A plane on the ground isn’t generating revenue, it’s just taking up space and maybe even costing you. So, you want to get really efficient at a turnaround that allows you to have your assets up and running, and making you money.
2. Goodwill assets
Goodwill assets refer to your reputation, brand awareness, and patient base, both active and inactive. Now obviously, we’d prefer to have all active patients – but I don’t want you to write off your inactive patients just yet.
There are very real and effective ways to reactivate inactive patients. The longer you leave it, the more difficult it will be to re-engage them, but it is possible. Now, that’s a topic I’ve addressed in previous blogs, but I still want you to treat them like an asset that should be nurtured and protected.
If you can reactivate just 10% of your patient base, that’s going to make a big difference in your profit margin and cost you considerably less than attracting new patients.
3. Intellectual property
Intellectual property assets are only becoming more and more important as the dental industry evolves. Intellectual property would include your branding, operational systems, email sequences, communication frameworks, reactivation protocols, sales processes etc.
I’ve spoken before about how important it is to nurture your branding and stand out from the crowd – but you also want to make sure you’re legally protected and covered in case any copycats come your way. It’s one of the most effective ways to establish your brand, so you want to take the necessary precautions and treat them like a precious asset.
4. Human resources assets
Human resources assets refer to all things team and culture. If you are clear about your employee value proposition, that’s an asset. If you have an onboarding process, that’s an asset. If you’re good at training and you’ve got your training processes documented, that’s an asset. Same with your culture creation telescope, being clear about your values, your vision, the stories, the habits, the behaviours, they’re all assets.
So, when you sit down and think about the last problem you had in your practice, you can see that it was likely to do with a deficiency of assets. Whether it was the lack of an asset, not training to use an asset properly, mismanagement or misunderstanding around an asset – they’re what sets up the foundations for your practice.
For more information on building and protecting assets in your practice, check out this podcast episode:
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