If you’re gearing up to expand your practice or dental group, you’ll need to get your business operations running as smoothly as possible. And one of the most effective ways we’ve found (seriously, we’ve used this approach when growing our own businesses) to do this is to identify and work through your restraints.
A restraint is any issue in your operations that is standing in the way of your growth. This could include things like hiring, new patient flow, capacity… or all of the above.
So first, you’ll want to figure out what your specific restraints are. Talk this through with your team.
If there is a recurring problem area (or several), well, bingo! There you go.
Next up is fixing them. Where to begin?
Here, we like the metaphor of an assembly line. Consider your practice operations: New patient marketing feeds into phone conversion and scheduling which leads to initial appointments which leads to case conversion which feeds into retention and patient re-care.
We may be missing a few details, but that’s the big picture.
Now, here’s the thing: There’s little point in dealing with the restraints at the front of the assembly line (those affecting new patient marketing, for example) until you’ve made sure that everything is running smoothly further down the line. What’s the purpose of generating new patient leads unless you’re able to convert them and convince them to come back for a follow-up appointment?
So when you’re working through your restraints, we suggest starting at the far end of the assembly line — re-care, for example, and then working backward towards new patient generation.
This will help you see more bang for your buck every step of the way.