Attention Dental Practice Owners:

What Is the Best Use of Your Time As a Practice Owner?

Hint: It’s not running on the clinical treadmill, forever grinding at chairside.  It’s vitally important to recognize that your practice is a small business, and, like every other business organization, it requires leadership.  Without deliberate, focused leadership, your practice is doomed to underperform.  Michael Gerber stated in his groundbreaking book, “The E-Myth” that most small business owners are too busy working in their business to take the time to work on their business.  This is certainly true of most dental practice owners.

It is often said in business that every problem is a leadership problem.  Consider what this means in the context of practice ownership.  For example:

v  Low conversion to appointment of new patient calls – leadership problem

v  Inconsistent patient experience – leadership problem

v  Poor collections – leadership problem

v  Underperforming and needy staff – leadership problem

v  Lousy practice culture - leadership problem

v  Financial stress and worry - leadership problem

You get the idea!  I could continue with this list ad infinitum.  The implication is clear – as you think about each and every problem in your practice, the first question to ask is, what can I do as the practice leader to address/solve this problem?  I would take it one step further and suggest that all practice improvement starts and is dependent on your learning how to become an effective leader.  Not an easy task.  After all, your training in dental school provided precious little in the subjects of business and leadership.

Begin by educating yourself.  The following list is a great place to start.  Become a voracious reader of all things leadership and, more broadly, business.

Some of the best books on leadership are¹²:

·         Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek

·         Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg

·         The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John C. Maxwell

·         Dare to Lead by Brené Brown

·         The Mentor Leader by Tony Dungy

·         Minority Leader by Stacey Abrahms

·         The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

·         Primal Leadership by Daniel Goleman

It is within your power to design and create the practice of your dreams. All it takes is deliberate focus and the ability to make decisions and act.

Making this mindset shift of thinking of yourself primarily as the chairside dentist who treats patients to practice leader will catapult your practice to a whole new level.

Another pathway to making the “leadership leap” is to take advantage of coaching/mentoring from someone with a proven track record of helping dental practice owners in this regard.

One of my favorite business writers of all time, Dan Kennedy, is fond of saying that if you are guilty of doing the same things as everyone else in your industry, then by definition, you will only achieve average results.  My question to you is – do you want to be average, or do you want to be exceptional?  The choice is yours… your decisions made in the present will determine your future.

I submit to you that only a very small percentage of the readers of this article will internalize the advice and seek to make positive changes.  The vast majority will do nothing.  Which are you?

More to come on creating a better dental future in upcoming issues of this newsletter.