Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Business consultant Julia Riese outlines a framework for a better way in business in her new book, Beyond Dentistry: Mastering the 4 Pillars to Succeed with Your Dental Practice. By Stephen Downie
Does this sound familiar? You’re a highly skilled and successful dentist has decided to bite the bullet and open your own practice. The problem is, as good as you are at handling a dental drill, managing a business is completely foreign—not to mention something you’ve never trained for. Soon you discover you are in way over your head and not sure how to get this dream of dental success on the right business track. Facing tighter profit margins and a higher costs, you wind up throwing in the towel.
After a decade working across a range of dental roles, this is a scenario business advisor Julia Riese of Bright & Bold Consulting admits she’s seen all too often. “I’ve worked with a lot of dental practice owners and when they go out by themselves, they often realise, ‘Oh boy, this is a lot different than just looking after the clinical side.’”
Riese is also the group marketing and operations director for Gold Coast-based Coastal Dental Care, where she oversees more than 20 dental practices.
In her new book, Beyond Dentistry – Mastering the 4 Pillars to Succeed with Your Dental Practice, Riese shares her hands-on experience of providing business solutions to dental practice owners. She describes it as a playbook for dental practice proficiency, giving owners the skills to fire up their business. The major reason for writing the book, she says, is that the reality of modern practice ownership is not taught in dental school. Between managing staff, navigating finances, and fighting for patients in a crowded market, she believes it’s too easy to feel like the business is running you.
“It would be great if we could enable individual owners to keep operating and fulfilling their business dream, but with better systems, less stress and more profit for them in the end,” she says.
With this goal in mind, she has identified the following four key pillars crucial for dental practice prosperity.
People
It may be stating the obvious, but it’s impossible to run a successful business without a good team.
“It starts with recruiting the right team members and then retaining them and giving them a long-term development pathway, so they stay happy and engaged,” Riese says.
One potential tripping point she sees is failing to give team members clearly defined roles complete with responsibilities and expectations.
Riese says it’s important to set achievable KPIs (key performance indicators) and to celebrate team wins.
“It might be, ‘Look, we’ve got a 100 Google reviews’, and that’s something that the whole team can celebrate. Or it could be printing out a great review where the patient complimented the receptionist for having such a great manner.
It starts with recruiting the right team members and then retaining them and giving them a long-term development pathway, so they stay happy and engaged.
Julia Riese, business consultant and author
“Having those little recognition rituals in your day-to-day practice really helps to get people aligned with business goals and motivated to do their best work.”
On the topic of remuneration, Riese believes creating a culture which gives workers reasons other than money to want to stay at your practice is vital. Creating a great culture is “the foundation of your business”, she says.
Systems and processes
Recruiting the best people for your team doesn’t mean much if you don’t have the right onboarding process in place to keep them. “You can hire people who are willing to do a good job, but if you don’t give them the right skills and explain how you want things done, then it’s really hard for them to achieve in the role,” Riese explains.
Also, every touch point in a patient’s journey should be systemised, she adds, “so it’s a process your team doesn’t have to overthink every time. That frees up your time as a practice owner to then focus on the clinical because everyone else knows there are systems that take care of certain things.”
AI can also potentially help dental practice owners improve their systems, assisting with treatment plans, diagnostics and administrative tasks that allow dentists to spend more time with patients.
“If you roll out those systems, you can drastically increase efficiencies in your practice,” Riese says.
Planning and analysis
This pillar, Riese says, is a chance to look under the hood of your business. It’s where to focus on what the business is spending money on and whether that’s impacting your balance sheet.
“When we talk to business owners, they often say things like, ‘I look at the bank account and there’s no money left at the end of the month,’” she says. In identifying the cashflow problem, it’s an opportunity to ask some tough questions, particularly whether staff are being best utilised.
“This is when to ask if you’re underutilising your chairs, or spending a lot of money on dental supplies that you’re not actually using? So, there might be just a one per cent tweak on one of them, but it can make a big impact, in the long run, on the bottom line.”
Marketing
In an ever-competitive market, it needs to be clear what distinguishes your dental practice from others. Once it might have been easy to win patients by being cheaper, but these days, Riese insists, patients aren’t as easily convinced by price alone, especially with the wealth of online reviews. The focus must be about building your business into a brand.
“That comes down to consistency,” she explains. “It’s about delivering the great patient experience but also encouraging patients to share their experience in a Google review and ensuring you respond to Google reviews.”
Ultimately, Riese hopes the book gives people the “knowledge and tools” to understand the root causes of why their practice might not be performing, as well as provide a “road map for getting them back on track”.
