Dentistry Uncensored with Howard Farran

Profitability begins with the Financial Arrangement and ends with increasing account receivables, sending statements, then resending again with scary ‘Past Due” messages stamped on it with red ink made from a single drop of blood from your CPA, collection agencies, bad debt, negative cash flow, and high overhead. The Financial Arrangement at McDonald’s begins with clear prices so you can decide exactly what you want to order, and then you pay in full or you will not get your Happy Meal with McVodka. If Doc Ronald McDonald did give it to you first, and you never did pay for it, assuming they had average dental overhead of two-thirds, then they would have had to buy the all natural ingredients, which I assume was the human hair, from the profit dollars of two previous sales. This is why financial arrangement impacts profitability more than price. If you want to boost profitability i'm lovin' McDonald’s order, pay, food. If you prefer lovin' the Profit Hamburgler use Dentistry’s order, food, and pray.

If you want to keep your promise you should Underpromise and Overdeliver. The First Law of Customer Service is Satisfaction = Perceptions – Expectations. The Second Law of Customer Service is it’s hard to catch up once you are behind! When you over promise and underdeliver you are raising your patient’s expectations which is setting up a trap that you could eventually step in. If you under promise to lower their expectations and then over deliver with a fantastic experience you will satisfy your patients by successfully managing their expectations. You should always keep your promise but if in doubt, under promise and over deliver. When a patient breaks their front tooth off and asks you if you can match it, why would you say absolutely! I tell them God made the tooth next to it and you want me to match it?!? I will try my very best, but no one can perfectly match your natural human tooth. Their expectations have been lowered and then they are delighted when they see the final result because I exceeded their lowered expectations. The same with post-operative pain; will I feel any pain afterwards and can I go back to work? I say, “When the anesthetic wares off you’re probably going to want to jump off a cliff.” When they come back in, they are all happy saying, “I was fine afterwards. That didn’t hurt at all.” Then I tell them they’re probably married with children and they’re used to pain and suffering, they chuckle and we’re all good. At the Fortune 500 level they almost never pick an extrovert salesperson for CEO because that person has spent their entire career over promising and underdelivering and that never works from the top. They always want an introvert because they listen, think, and then methodically set out with a doable plan.

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I’m sorry, we can’t see you today. Please wait in line and give us your money another day. Having your customers wait in line to give you money is an idea that given enough time will make your business obsolete and dead as a doornail from some competitor dentist who doesn’t have lines. If I can’t come in today and give you money then hit your gas pedal to add capacity, operatories, associates, hours, or buy the technology that allows you to work faster. Or, you can hit the brakes and raise your prices. This will shorten the line by making the people who value you less and are unwilling to pay you more to see you today, to get out of line, so the people willing to pay more are allowed the freedom to pay you more money for the extra value of being seen today. Same day dentistry is the fastest way to increase your case acceptance. If you sell a bottle of water for $1 and your profit margin is 10 cents (represented by the bottled water cap) then your profit margin is 10%. If you raise your price one dime (which would add another cap) you just raised your price 10% and doubled your profit margin from 10% to 20%, reduced the number of people waiting in line, and now have more profit to take home or reinvest in your business as retained earnings. Another way of raising your price is to drop your lowest paying dental insurance PPO. I don’t care which pedal you hit as long as you do something. What is not acceptable is to do nothing. Shit or get off the pot but don’t sit there all day while your customers are looking around to see if someone else can see them today. When your patient does find another dentist who will see them today they are not going to take the time to call you back and cancel their appointment with you, they will most likely extend the same curtesy you gave them and just not show up without notice known as the “No Show” which comes from you telling them “No” so they give it back as a “No Show” known in my 30 Day Dental MBA as “No Shit, Sherlock.”

Is your house in order? Are you poised forward growth? The first Dollar General store opened in Springfield, Kentucky in 1955 and today has 16,368 stores in the U.S. which is 3.5 times as many as the 4,743 Walmarts. They locate their 7,500 square foot stores and plan their merchandise selection to best serve their target customers of the low and fixed income households who are underserved by other retailers, with 75% of their stores in towns with less that 20,000 people. Going where your completion ain’t is the antonym of being just another me too product and service. In the past Dollar General had trouble with mergers and acquisitions and found starting their own de nova stores worked better, measuring their success with the final metric being same store sales growth. If your only dental office, or all of your offices are shrinking in same store sales the. you need to stop, adjust and get back to growth before you start expanding. Dick and Mac McDonald, now you know why they call it McDonalds, spent six years starting in 1948 experimenting with hot dogs and BBQ before perfecting their business model and selling their six franchise locations to Ray Kroc in 1954. Krispy Kreme started in 1937 and in the first 63 years only had 142 locations now have just over 1000 locations today.

Dr. Doug Depew has been practicing in the Northwest suburbs of Atlanta Georgia since 1990. He graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of Georgia, received his dental degree from the Medical College of Georgia, and received his certificate in orthodontics and master's degree from Baylor College of Dentistry at Baylor University. Dr. Depew is the founder and Academic Director of Trapezio, which provides formal training for orthodontic staff members and is endorsed by the American Association of Orthodontists. As the program creator, Dr. Depew is frequently invited to speak at professional meetings around the country and overseas. Dr. Depew is also proud to have served as a member and chairman of the AAO Council on Technology. Join the community on Dentaltown at https://www.dentaltown.com

Female-friendly Lowe's started in 1946 and has 2,197 locations. Home Depot started in 1978 and has 2,296 locations. Home Depot focused on men because 90% of the 11.4 million U.S. construction industry workers were males while Lowe’s focused on females because they knew home improvement decisions are made by women, who also make 75% of all dental appointments. OB-GYN became a specialty in 1880 and was founded by the horrible unethical man James Marion Sims who is credited as the “father of modern gynecology”. The word hysterical comes from Latin hystericus "of the womb" thought to be exclusive to women sending them into uncontrollable and neurotically insane owing to a dysfunction of the uterus, the removal of which is still called a hysterectomy to this day. Today women comprise 58% of practicing OB-GYNs and 84% of residents, with males down to 16%. Today 52% of pediatric dentists are female up from 14% in 1998. Today dental school graduation classes are now 51% female vs 46% in 2009, 35% in 1999, 27% in 1989, and 11% in 1979. If you want to be a cosmetic dentist it really helps to be hot, and if you want to be a pediatric dentist it really helps to be a mom. So, if you’re one of those unfortunate bastards like me who’s mother was fined for littering whenever she dropped me off at school and always had me hold the camera to take the family photo, you should focus on dental implants since ugly goes all the way down to the bone.

Hire on attitude and train for skills is what made Atlanta based Chick-fil-A started in 1967 by S. Truett Cathy. They do $11 billion a year with only 2605 locations, averaging $4.8 million per store, compared to McDonald's $2.7 million. The franchise fee is only $10K, the average franchisee earns $200K a year, you can only own one store, all because they want long term happy employees that stay twice as long as the average fast food employee. They say “My pleasure” instead of “Thank you” which is probably why S. Truett lived to the ripe old age of 93, when he died September 8, 2014.

What can dentists learn from the UFC - Ultimate Fighting Championship? You think dentistry is tough? How would you like to go to work and get punched in the face, literally? When Dana White and the Fertitta brothers, Frank and Lorenzo purchased the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) in 2001 for $2 million, it was banned from Pay Per View and every major television network. Even right here in Arizona the late Arizona Senator John McCain did everything he could to block the UFC referring to their brand of violence as human cockfighting which is laughable coming from a man who never met a war he didn’t want to the USA to fight in, and today it’s worth $7 billion, and you can't pull the trigger on buying your own dental office. Avoid the naysayers and focus on your true core customer patient fans that want to only see you just like they want to see Nate Diaz fight tonight despite his 12 losses. You know why he has 12 losses? Because he never turned down a fight and you turn down, quit, and give up on every rootcanal you refer to the endodontist and every extraction and implant to an oral surgeon. Precision Beats Power. You don't need to bench press 250 lbs. to pull a wisdom tooth. Timing Beats Speed. It doesn’t take an hour to pull four wizzies or do a molar root canal. Find a highly disciplined mentor like Royce Gracie or Bruce Lee. Spend More Time on Promotion and marketing. Everyone understands fighting but not necessarily the difference between boxing, wrestling, karate, and Ju-Jitsu. Everyone understands teeth but not the difference between a crown, bridge, partial, denture and implant. Fighting is a Mind Game. Discover Your Opponent’s Weaknesses. Have you looked at every dental website when you search dentist near me at your own office? Find a Need in the Market that Needs Fulfilling.

The secret sauce at Blockbuster was the experience, what is your everyday patient experience like? Blockbuster started in 1985 renting VHS movies for 70% of sales and 30% for merchandise, popcorn, candy, and late fees. They peaked in 2005 and went bankrupt in 2010 after steadily declining to subscription services like Netflix that comes to you, instead of you going to them which is a much better experience, paying per movie at Blockbuster, or going to one of the 40,000 Red Box locations which was started by Mitch Lowe, SVP of McDonalds in 2003. (In 2000 Blockbuster declined a deal to purchase Netflix for $50 million) were both killed by a better experience at home, streaming video technology like Netflix, and getting too expensive unlike Arizona ice tea which kept their price at 99 cents by printing it on the can.