4 Ways to Grow Your Dental Practice
As a dentist, if you’re a solo or multi-practitioner, you likely have big plans for your career. You’ve successfully launched your business, but you probably want to ensure you reach your next goal. Planning for the future can help you grow your dental practice towards that next step, whether it’s a new associate dentist, a new location, or increased collections.
The problem, of course, is in the details. If you’re already busy trying to keep up with the number of patients and administrative work you need to accomplish, finding the time to think about how to grow your business might seem impossible. It is challenging, but with the proper planning, you can implement quick and impactful strategies to grow your business.
Read on to Learn How to Grow Your Dental Practice!
Find the Right Patients
When looking to grow your dental practice, it’s important to not just think about finding new patients. The types of patients you find are a huge part of growing your dental practice. You likely see many patients for routine cleaning. This is an important part of dental health, but it’s not the only way to grow your dental practice.
Improving your marketing to educate your patients about your services and find additional patients is critical. Your existing patients might see you for routine exams and cleanings, but they might not know about your additional services. Educating your existing patient base through your marketing efforts is key to growing your dental practice.
Additionally, you need to find ways to bring on new patients, ideally patients with the specialized needs your practice wants to see. Your marketing strategy, whether through email marketing, Pay-Per-Click advertising, or social media, will be instrumental in helping you achieve your goals.
Put More into Staffing & Hiring
Staffing and hiring are probably not what you think of when you think of growing a dental practice. After all, you might even be asking yourself what these focal areas have to do with growing a dental practice.
In factuality, staffing and hiring are often forgotten but critical elements of a successful practice. You can only be in so many places at once. As a dentist, you naturally want to be doing what only you can do, which is tending to the health needs of your patients. However, without the right staff around you, you might find yourself answering phones, scheduling follow-up appointments, and ordering replacement materials. These are all necessary parts of a growing dental practice, but they aren’t tasks you should do as a dentist. Hiring the right staff to assist means you can delegate these duties and focus on what you need to do.
The challenge, of course, is finding the time to tend to HR issues and hire properly. Hiring, vetting, and training take time, and you only have so much of that. Even once employees are successfully onboarded, you will likely need to serve as Chief Human Resources Officer and be responsible for their career advancement, retention, and routine HR asks. That can be a lot, especially if you are a solo practitioner.
Increase Profitability with Operational Changes
Your operational efficiency is another often neglected strategy for growing a practice. You might be focusing on the number and quality of patients you’re seeing as a dentist, and those are great starting points for a dentist looking to grow their practice. However, it is just as important to focus on your operational efficiency. You likely aren’t an expert in operational processes, but you might need to develop a passing competency in the subject. The reason is pretty simple: your practice’s operational effectiveness directly impacts your bottom line.
Many dentists struggle with the realities of running a small business, and operations can often be one of the first areas to falter. Wasted time spent dealing with IT, logistics, and accounts payable issues can derail your practice. The errors don’t need to be insurmountable to have an impact. Outdated equipment that wastes your staff’s time. Delays in receiving key shipments of supplies. Lost calls from patients when you lack a competent call answering machine.
Again, you likely recognize that you need to think like a business owner – not a dentist – when it comes to optimizing the practice. However, that is easier said than done.
Find the Right Partner
These are great ways to grow your dental practice, but you might struggle to implement them. After all, improving your marketing, hiring the best, and fine-tuning your operational processes requires time, effort, and money. If you’re barely treading water as a practice, you might not be able to implement any of these strategies to grow your practice, and your business will likely suffer for it.
That’s why bringing on a business partner can make a lot of sense.
The right dental support organization or dental partner organization can be a great additional resource to bring alongside your practice. A good dental support organization can …
- Help Recruit and Hire Top Talent
- Offer Additional Resources for Practice Updates
- Manage Marketing and Customer Service
- Streamline Procurement and IT
- Provide Additional Networking and Continuing Education
A dental support organization can make a lot of sense for a dentist looking to increase their collections and regain their nights and weekends. After all, if you could work less AND make more money, why wouldn’t you? The right dental support organization can help you achieve that goal.
Now, it’s important to highlight one word: right. The simple fact of the matter is that the right dental support organization can be a huge boon for your practice. The wrong dental support organization can decrease your work satisfaction. Few things impact your sense of career fulfillment as drastically as a bad business partnership, and not all dental support organizations will fit your unique needs.
That’s where a seasoned dental broker like Triumphant Transition Partners can help!
Our process is simple. We know the dental transition game better than anyone and have the resources you need to transition your practice to a dental support organization on your terms at your price!
We will…
- Help You Understand the Value of Your Practice
- Present Your Practice to Our Private Buyers Network
- Qualify Your Buyers
- Advise on Specifics of the Process
- Equip Your Attorneys with Market Data to Achieve the Best Possible Terms at Close
Contact Your Trusted Triumphant Transitions Partner for a Courtesy Consultation!