Read this checklist before you start growing your dental practice
When successfully scaling a dental practice, the key is to focus on the patient experience and the business operations. You can successfully scale your dental practice by creating efficiencies, streamlining processes, and enhancing patient experience and team alignment. Let’s look at five ways you can lay the foundational groundwork that will allow you to scale your business successfully.
Develop a Strategic Plan for Your Dental Practice-
The first step to scaling your dental practice is to create a strategic plan. Start by considering the current state of your practice, your current capabilities, and your future goals. Then, develop a plan to take you from where you are to where you want to go. One simple way to create your plan is to decide what goals you want to achieve over the next 3 years in terms of scaling your practice. Next, and this is the fun part, work backwards to figure out what steps you need to take leading up to that 3-year completion. What Determine what steps you need to take and goals you need to set in each year. Break those years down into monthly goals and then break those goals down into weekly goals and daily tasks to accomplish the weekly and monthly goals. Working backwards allows you to create a plan that you can chunk down with steps that you can create with your team and get everyone on board and excited for this growth phase.
Automate Your Dental Practice Systems –
The next step is to look for ways to automate processes and create efficiencies. Automation can streamline tasks, decrease administrative costs and free up time for both staff and patients. For example, by automating appointment scheduling, billing and follow-up communications you can lighten the load of your team members so they can focus on ‘bigger rocks’ like the daily tasks needed to achieve that weekly and monthly goal chart bringing you closer to your 3-year scaling achievement.
Create and Refine an Excellent Dental Patient Experience –
Creating a comfortable patient atmosphere is essential for a successful dental practice. Make sure your office is clean, comfortable and inviting. Patients should feel relaxed and at ease when they enter the practice, so provide comfortable seating and décor that reflects the practice’s values and mission. Offer convenient and flexible appointment availability. Patients want to be able to schedule appointments that fit their schedules. Offering flexible hours and options for online scheduling makes it easier for patients to set up appointments that work for them. Also, utilize technology. Technology can be a great way to enhance the patient experience. Implementing an electronic health records app and offering other digital tools makes it easier for patients to access their records and schedule appointments much more effortlessly. You can also use digital tools to inform patients about their treatment and follow-up reminders. These automations add ease and control for your patients and streamline activity and effort for your team members.
Invest in a Marketing Strategy –
Marketing is an essential component of scaling a dental practice. As a dental entrepreneur, focusing solely on providing the best possible services to your patients can be tempting. While this is undoubtedly important, you must also investing in marketing to help scale your practice. Here’s why: Marketing helps you reach more people. When you invest in marketing you increase your visibility in the local community. In addition, a robust online presence can help you establish yourself as a reliable and trustworthy practice. Additionally, marketing can help you get the word out about new services, promotions, and other offerings that may attract new patients. Marketing also helps you build relationships with your existing patients and create new relationships with prospective patients. By creating content tailored to your target audience’s needs and interests, you can build a reputation of trust and loyalty in and among your community, both online and offline. Finally, investing in marketing can help you generate more recurring revenue over time.
Build Team Alignment in Your Dental Clinical and Support Team –
Your scaling plan is only as strong as the team you’ve selected to implement and execute your strategic plan. You need a strong team capable of trusting your leadership through some rough waters. If you’ve got a team that can trust and execute in the tough times, that makes the more fluid times easier to navigate. I speak a lot about teams so I won’t go into too much detail here but team alignment and team strength is a fundamental requisite of any scaling plan.
These five essential and foundational activities: developing a Strategic Plan, automating where you can, refining patient experience, investing in offline and online marketing strategies, and building an aligned team all lay the groundwork for eventually scaling your organization successfully.
Once these systems and strategies are in place they are designed to free you and your teams up to focus on the new tasks and goals in your Strategic Plan that will allow you to scale and grow.
Scaling a business is a monumental task. These strategies will free you p to focus on your overall strategic plan. Once these strategies are implemented you, your teams and your whole organization will be more nimble and resilient to meet the challenges of scaling and growing your company. This is what it means to work ON your business rather than simply showing up to the dentist’s chair every day.
You are the leader of your organization and every leader needs a strategic plan.
Are you interested in scaling your dental practice? Do you know if your organization is prepared to take that step?
Take our assessment here to find out: