In a downturn, manage your management
“If your practice results are beginning to swirl down the drain, you need to consider managing yourself and your staff like there's a hole in the bottom of the boat. In a recession, you recalibrate and you reconsider. You look at what you must do to make that bottom-line number.” Dr Marc Cooper from the Mastery Company, explains how to adjust your mindset to survive in an uncertain economic climate.
First, let me be crystal clear! If your practice is doing well, don't change your management. If you are sustaining strong numbers of new patients, your case acceptance rate is solid, your cancellation rate, no show rate and reschedule rate aren't spiralling downward, do not alter your management. If your receivables are consistently greater than 97%, don't adjust your management. If all is well, leave management alone. Don't change a thing!
However, if your practice is showing clear signs of trouble, I suggest you reconsider how you are managing. If the practice is noticeably slowing down, you need to shift how you manage your staff, how you manage your patients, and especially how you manage yourself.
If the practice results are beginning to swirl down the drain, you need to consider managing yourself and your staff like there's a hole in the bottom of the boat. You need to take full command. All hands on deck. No time for lollygagging. Be focused, highly intended. No room for fluff. No excuses. Carve out the result. Do what you need to do to make it happen. Urgency. Press, exhort, compel. Up the intensity. Short-term requests and promises.
If the practice is in observable decline, you need to take management totally into your own hands. To begin, you need to explain to staff: "It isn't that I don't trust you, but the practice is headed for the cliff and I need to make sure it doesn't go over." Establish yourself as the commanding officer. Institute daily meetings. Ask for daily reports on activities and results.
In business, you get what you measure. When your practice is in a downturn, change what you measure. In the past, you measured elements that fit the context of growth and profitability. But when your practice is sitting in the context of recession, when the practice is in decline, the numbers measured should be aimed not at profitability, but at viability.
Viability is about what you need. Profitability is about what you want. For example, when you were focused on profitability, generating a 10% growth would require you to collect $110K per month. But the number to keep the doors open without radically changing the structure of the practice, is $92K. Adjust your goals to the $92K number.
In a recession, you recalibrate and you reconsider. You look at what you must do to make that bottom-line number. What does hygiene need to produce? What do you need to produce in restorative? How many patients do you actually need to make this bottom-line number? Adjust your goals to survive, not thrive.
Block scheduling was great when the volume and demand were soaring. Now, it's whatever you need to do to make those revised daily targets. What's more, break the viability number into smaller, clear daily objectives. Don't just set goals for the final result, i.e. $92,000 collection and 18 new patients this month. Set daily goals, $5,750 per day with $1,400 coming from hygiene and one new patient. In addition, create actionable measurable targets that if fulfilled, help deliver the desired result. "I want everyone to hand out one business card and ask one patient to refer a friend or family member each day."
Whatever you focus on expands. Whatever you measure you focus on. Focus on those areas that are crucial to your viability. Measure things like frequency of no-shows, cancellations and rescheduled patient rates in hygiene and your column. You can't afford to have hygiene no-shows and a cancellation rate of greater than 30%.
In an economic crisis people are unsure of what's coming next. When people don't know what's next, they get anxious. As a manager, you need to give your staff "What's Next" to decrease their anxiety. By formulating short term goals, daily goals, you succinctly define what's next. Make sure the goals are reachable. Make sure the daily goals are doable so the staff feels they are achieving, accomplishing, able to keep their word.
When the staff achieves their goals, they'll feel empowered and motivated. When they can give their word and keep it, they'll feel more confident. When they do what they say, staff will feel more solid about their jobs and their future. Making and keeping short term goals and fulfilling short term requests produces confidence, assuredness, poise, self-belief, which powerfully enhances the staff's ability to produce results and decreases their anxiousness caused by the constant ‘noise’ of the financial crisis.
Make your huddles not only about the patients coming in, but also about how each staff member did yesterday in achieving their goals, how the practice did on achieving its goals. Complete yesterday. Re- promise for today. ‘Hands-in. Let's go team!’
Check in mid-day. ‘How are we doing? Did you ask a patient for a referral yet? Anybody cancel? Did you do your confirmation calls?’ You need to drive the practice. Stop hiding in your private office. Stop pretending the new economy will not last. When the practice is headed for trouble, take things into your own hands and you, yes you, manage management.
And don't be a baby about having so much more to do. Stop whining about how bad things are. If you don't do it, you might not have a practice in a few months. Suck it up. When times are bad, you take things back into your own hands. It's your practice and if it's in danger, you're the one. So be the one.
Marc Cooper is President and Chairman of The Mastery Company. He has been a consultant to the health care industry for over 25 years, at the practice management level as well as at the corporate and organizational levels. Dr Cooper has been an academician, basic science researcher and practicing periodontist. For the last seven years, The Mastery Company's work has focused primarily on dentists in private practice using its exclusive online technologies and transformational methodologies. He is co-inventor of Mastery online practice management surveys and assessments - proven tools for dentists to appraise the performance of the human assets of the practice - staff, patients and themselves. In addition, he is the author of two books, Mastering the Business of Practice and Partnerships in Dental Practice; Why Some Succeed and Why Some Fail.
Copyright © 2004-2010 Marc B. Cooper & The Mastery Company - All Rights Reserved.
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