By Ken Runkle
In high school and college I ran the quarter-mile race, which is one lap around the track, including four turns. If you’re not a runner, you may think that in order to do well, runners should run as fast as they can from start to finish. But, if you are a runner, you know there’s a lot of strategy involved during each turn of the race, including pacing, position in the pack, and kick as you round that fourth turn.
The strategy of running the quarter mile aligns with the success strategies of the four-quarter year in a dental practice. Everyone, including dentists and their teams, has a finite amount of resources, time, and energy. If you don’t pace correctly, you may find yourself running on empty as you round that important fourth turn.
In fact, how you perform during the fourth quarter will determine whether you have a great year or not, and whether or not you set a foundation for success in the coming year. It’s that last stretch—the fourth quarter—where you have to give your all. Unfortunately, in dentistry, the fourth quarter has many hurdles, including vacations and expiring dental benefits.
Avoid the end-of-year rush
October is the beginning of the holiday rush. To finish the year strong, you want to help as many patients as possible get the most out of their benefits. However, you don’t want to be scheduling when holiday distractions peak, which may lead to cancellations and no-shows.
Determine the final day your office will be open for appointments. About 50% of my clients take vacation the last week of the year, so their last day to treat patients is December 21. Second, send out a proactive benefits letter no later than the first week of November to remind patients they have benefits that they will lose if they don’t use them by the end of the year, and tell them your schedule.
The message should be something like this: “Don’t miss the opportunity to optimize your benefits this year. Many of our patients wait until mid-December to try to schedule an appointment. Our last working day of the year is December 21. We want to make sure we can get you in, so please call and schedule an appointment now.”
For patients on the schedule in the fourth quarter who have limited benefits remaining or whose benefits have already run out, you can choose to help them get the care they need now (finish strong), or get them on the schedule for the first quarter (start strong). The best option is for patients to take care of needed dentistry immediately. If there’s a gap between their remaining benefits and the cost of care, or if they have no benefits to contribute to the cost of care, proactively offering a financing option such as CareCredit can be part of your fourth quarter “kick” to meet your production goals. If patients are adamant about phasing treatment and want to walk out with untreated needs, make sure they walk out with an appointment for January or February.
Finally, fourth quarter is the time to set goals for the coming year. You should set a primary goal of yearly production, and also analyze your monthly production trends over a three-year period to develop quarterly or monthly goals. This will help you better determine how you are pacing in your race based on predictable trends and seasonality.
When setting your yearly growth goal, it’s important for the goal to be achievable and sustainable. The key here is to achieve sustainable growth. A practice may enjoy a growth spurt of more than 7% in a given year, but most practices are not able to achieve this same growth year after year. This is because external influences change, such as the local economy, competition, and more. I believe it’s highly achievable for most practices to grow by 7% each year, which means they will double their growth every 10 years.
Once you’ve set all of your goals, share them with your team. They can’t help you reach the finish line if they don’t know where it is or how fast you, as a team, need to go to get there.
Start strong
If you have a large benefits component to your practice and you’ve scheduled patients who need dentistry but have used all of their benefits in the fourth quarter, the first quarter should be either your single best or next best quarter. If, like many practices, your second quarter is consistently slow in terms of production, you should do a focused marketing push to augment your ongoing marketing strategies, such as your web and social media presence.
As a rule of thumb, this marketing push should happen twice a year, from January 1 through Memorial Day and from Labor Day through Thanksgiving. This hard push should be targeted marketing based on what you need to do to achieve your quarterly and yearly goals. Maybe you need to attract more patients, increase your production per patient, increase your recall and retention, or all three.
Your marketing push should be both internal (to existing patients) and external (to the community) and should include radio, television, direct mail, email, promotions, and community events. These plans should be implemented in the first quarter, when you’re busy, to impact the second quarter so that you stay busy.
One final thought: As a clinician who is also a practice owner, you contribute greatly to the success of your practice when you are chairside delivering dentistry. But, to be successful, you have to find a balance between the two roles, similar to what a student athlete must do to succeed in both sports and academics. It’s not easy. However, with the right proactive strategies in place and the support of your team, a great finish and a strong start are in sight.
Ken Runkle is a speaker and consultant for dental professionals throughout the US. Runkle consistently motivates audiences toward higher levels of achievement and practice profitability. As the founder and president of Paragon Management Associates Inc., he presents on personal and practice development. Based on 30-plus years of consulting with more than 1,000 dental practices, Runkle delivers strategic and common-sense solutions upon which dentists can build an efficient and consistently growing practice.
