Dental Analogies: A Collection of Descriptive Dental Analogies Based on Ideas from Practicing Dentists by Dr. Rick Waters and Dr. Bill Powell Everything is Marketing: The Ultimate Strategy for Dental Practice Growth by Fred Joyal It's Okay to Be the Boss: The Step-by-Step Guide to Becoming the Manager Your Employees Need by Bruce Tulgan Guerilla Marketing: Easy and Inexpensive Strategies for Making Big Profits from Your Small Business by Jay Levinson The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done by Peter Drucker The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business by Patrick Lencioni The One Minute Manager by...
Many dental practices can appear very busy, but over the years, when I have drilled down into my client's numbers (pardon the pun), I have found many were underproducing by as much as 40% or more based on their production capacity. For a practice to produce at the highest level it is capable of, the key has everything to do with your staff and your skills in leading and managing them. The practice owner From a management viewpoint, the biggest problem in most dental offices is the practice owner. Why? Because most dentists want to be Dr. Nice with their staff....
The Achilles' heel of many a dental practice owner is to avoid dealing with unpleasant staff situations. A good example is a recent new client of mine. I found him to be very congenial, so I had a hard time believing this guy was the "dental devil incarnate” described by the majority of his staff. I asked each of the staff members in his practice the same question: "Has anyone in the practice been treated unjustly?” All fingers pointed to one person—we'll call her Sally. Sally had apparently been going around telling other staff members about how the practice owner was...
Not knowing how to run an effective staff meeting can have some negative consequences in the overall health of your dental practice. We’ve found that many offices don’t have meetings at all. When they do, we often find that nobody gets anything out of them since poorly organized staff meetings can easily turn into gripe sessions that waste everyone’s time. Staff meetings, or team huddles, should be useful and routine, not organized as emergencies because someone is upset or a team member has made a mistake. Calling a meeting for these reasons is usually ineffective and can actually be damaging. Staff meetings that aren’t...