How Do You Increase Your Dental Practice With Quarterly Goals and Themes
How do you eat an elephant?
One bite at a time.
How do you grow a successful business?
Hitting your goals one quarter at a time.
Quarterly goals are important because it gives you incremental markers to create success. Sometimes in dentistry, months fluctuate and it is difficult being consistent across each and every month. But by breaking that down into quarters, that allows things to average out and give you a more realistic understanding of where you are going and how to get there.
Annual goals are hard to achieve if you haven’t also planned where you need to along the way at key periods throughout the year. The quarterly goal serves that purpose.
If you can remember back in school, you had a certain feeling on the first day of school and a very different emotion at the end. And when you completed that year, you would have some type of celebration for mastering your skills for that period.
In that process there is a definite beginning and an end. There is a set period of time in which a list of events must be completed. And on the last day you know that year is over and you have a sense of completion.
The following year, there will be a different set of tasks and objectives to meet so you are always growing.
In a dental practice, there is no end because it is a continuous process. Weeks roll into months, months into years and everything is ongoing. You can’t say that at the end of the month or year you already finished your practice.
But with quarterly goals, you can set up definitive time spans and associate those with certain targets that you want to meet to give you and your team a sense of completion.
I find this is most effective if you also tie a ‘theme’ to that quarters goal. Make it fun. Give the team an objective for just that quarter. It helps them grow as individuals and the practice as a whole entity.
In our office, we always had a quarterly theme to make it exciting. During each month we had key numbers we tracked like production, collection, new patients, etc. But for that quarter, we would pick one other factor that we wanted to improve and focus on during that time that tied back to increasing growth of the practice.
So, for example, we would target increasing referral for a quarter. And we also ties to a fun theme- like Las Vegas. If we hit our referral goal, then we had a Vegas style celebration at the end. Throughout the quarter they would put up pictures around the team area of Vegas, poker chips in each other lockers, and anything that reminded them subconsciously what they were all focused on.
Themes are meant to be fun and creative. Another time, we had a CSI or ‘Customer Service Investigator’ theme. We wanted to improve our patient satisfaction score. And by increasing those, it also increased our production and collection numbers. We had a body outline in tape in the team room so when everyone walked in for that day, they were reminded of our theme and what we were working on.
Make your quarterly theme fun and successful with all of these insights from New Patient Attraction Automation.
Good luck!