Attention Dental Practice Owners:

Just Like a Recipe In a Cookbook Details Needed Ingredients and Step By Step Instructions, Practice Owners Should Document Internal Operating Procedures in the Same Manner

What do I mean by that?  Think about McDonald’s french fries for a moment.  You can go into any McDonalds anywhere in the country and order the fries, and they will taste and look exactly the same, no matter the geography.  It’s not a function of some kind of voodoo magic!  It’s because they have a detailed process that precisely dictates how they are prepared.  That detailed process delivers a consistently predictable result whether the person doing the frying was hired yesterday or has been employed for five years, is in Maine or Idaho.  How powerful would it be if your team were equipped to consistently deliver the optimal result in every area of your practice?  I have one word… amazing.

Many, if not most, dental practice owners are plagued by inconsistent results and underperforming teams.  Why is this so?  In a recent issue of the newsletter, I talked about the role of the practice owner as CEO and leader.  Developing systems and processes and training your staff on the same ensures consistent, predictable outcomes.  Further, it provides the structure for your employees to self-manage.  This reduces your stress as well as your team’s stress.  Establishing procedural protocols is a leadership function.  Staff should be involved and assist in these activities, but like Harry Truman said, “the buck stops here,”  meaning that you, as the practice owner and leader, are ultimately responsible.

There was a TV show recently that was very instructive on this issue.  It was titled “The Profit”  and starred Marcus Lemonis, a very successful and wealthy entrepreneur.  The premise of the show is that he would invest in underperforming or failing businesses with a view toward turning them around, not uncommonly with great success.  His mantra was always to focus on “people, process, and product.”  The people part was making sure that the right people were in the right jobs and that there were incentives to reward high performance.  The process focus centered on making sure that there were systems in place to ensure both efficient and consistently high-quality outcomes.  Lastly, the product focus centered on ensuring that the product or service always met the targeted quality thresholds (largely by getting the people and process components managed).

The “people. process, product” approach to managing an enterprise is directly relevant to how you think about optimizing your dental practice.  At risk of unfairly generalizing, I submit that most dentists don’t think about managing their practice this way.  No surprise there; by virtue of their profession, they are most comfortable in the clinical domain and most often think about practice improvement in the context of expanding clinical services or raising clinical outcomes.  While valuable in the grand scheme of things, it is a self-limiting approach.

Look for more on this subject in future issues.