Delivering WOW: How Dentists Can Build a Fascinating Brand and Achieve More While Working Less

Introduction

Dentists are under increasingly higher stress today. The constant anxiety of student loans and high overhead and the pressure of running a business are even running some out of the profession altogether.

There must be a better way. There is a better way.

I wrote this book because I found that better way and want to share it with you. I believe we as dentists can build more profitable and even thriving practices if we take the focus away from doing business as we have always done. This means admitting to ourselves (as well as to our teams) that we might not have all the answers right now, but we can find the answers we shift our mindset, look carefully at our leadership, and take action to dream, plan, and take action.

Many people in our profession and other small businesses falsely believe we need to work hard for decades before we can have experience the success and freedom we dreamed of having when we started. They believe the only way to succeed is a slow and steady crawl.

But that simply does not have to be the case. It’s a myth.

The truth is you can quickly build a practice of your dreams. All you need to do is decide what that means to you, surround yourself with the right people to help you, and develop and implement a plan to achieve your vision. This book will help you do that.

After reading this, you’ll be able to create a clear vision for your practice and your personal life, you’ll better understand what it takes to turn your patients into loyal raving fans, and you’ll have everything you need to create an action plan to achieve your success. You’ll be ready to Deliver WOW!

If you want to achieve more while working less, you’re in the right place. If you struggle building a winning team, you’re in the right place. If you’ve tried everything you can think of to grow new patient numbers but still can’t grow, you’re in the right place. If you constantly fail to get patients to accept treatment they need, you’re in the right place. If you want to learn how to build a fascinating brand and use Facebook and other social media platforms to make more money, you’re in the right place. And if you’re tired of feeling guilty, stressed out, or frustrated trying to juggle too much work in too little time while you make too little money, you’re in the right place. This book was created, updated, and expanded specifically to help you by sharing even more strategies you can use to build the practice of your dreams. I also share stories from students and clients of mine who have successfully built Delivering WOW practices of their own.

Are you ready?

It’s time to create a new reality.

Burnout Versus Balance

Dr. Scott leans forward and looks into her patient’s mouth as she prepares the tooth for a crown. It’s a routine procedure she’s done many times, but she can practically feel the stress and anxiety radiating from her patient, who, at the last minute, grasps her hand to stop her.

Will it hurt, Doctor? the patient asks, staring intently at Dr. Scott’s face.

Dr. Scott gives the patient a reassuring smile. No, it will not hurt, she says, straightening up and freeing her hand from her patient’s grip. Dr. Scott has explained the procedure already but takes more time to explain it again as she tries to ease her patient’s anxiety. After a smattering of additional questions—all of which were answered earlier in an appointment—Dr. Scott’s ready to move forward, when Marie, her receptionist, walks into the tiny room, smiling politely at the patient.

Marie whispers into Dr. Scott’s ear, whose heart immediately sinks. The next patient is waiting and getting restless, threatening to leave if she isn’t seen right away. Dr. Scott quickly glances at her watch. She’s been behind all day, since the first patient walked in late and the second appointment took longer than it should have. Every appointment since then has started late, and she hasn’t been able to catch up. With this patient’s high anxiety, Dr. Scott knows this appointment also will run over.

Dr. Scott had hoped to take a lunch break but knows it will be impossible, as is often the case. In addition to the patient who is waiting and threatening to leave, she has agreed to squeeze in a patient for an emergency visit.

Her lower back is throbbing and sweat is beginning to roll down her cheek as she mulls how the rest of her day will be. There’s now no chance she’ll be able to make it to her son’s ballgame that afternoon and dreads the inevitable argument with her husband when she calls him in between patients to break the news. This is the second game she’s missed in a row. If nothing changes, she might miss the rest of the season.

I can’t keep doing this, she thinks to herself, feeling her blood pressure climbing. Her stress and anxiety are getting to her.

She graduated from dental school with so much hope and excitement, but in the ten years since, something changed. She no longer feels excited about her work. On too many days, it feels like a grind. She enjoys helping patients, but there’s so much more to her job than that. She has a solo practice and feels like she has to do everything herself. Her patient care is only a small part of her work week, and she feels crushed by the paperwork, budgeting, and other operational activities required of her. When she gets backed up with appointments, which seems to happen more and more often, nothing seems to go right.

In addition to her back pain, her doctor just put her on blood-pressure medication. Her marriage is under strain, as she and her husband are always fighting about her work and how it takes over their lives. She feels helpless and hopeless.

When she wraps up with the patient, she sticks her head into where Marie, her receptionist, sits. Give me two minutes, she states, rushing to the restroom to splash water onto her face to try to calm her nerves before the next patient. After taking a few deep breaths, she stares into the mirror, takes another slow, deep breath, and unconvincingly attempts to reassure herself, I can do this.

As she walks out to greet her next patient, she wonders whether she really can.

Dr. Scott’s story is the reality for far too many dentists. Dentistry is a high-stress, high-risk profession where anxiety among patients and their dentists runs high. In fact, research tells us that the incidence of high blood pressure and coronary disease is twenty-five percent higher among dentists than the general population, and the effects of their work are causing havoc in their lives—their marriages are rocky, their health is in disarray, and their happiness is low.

As a practicing dentist, I know how stressful our work can be. We’re taught the ideal of perfection in dental school and come out doing our best to attain it. Some might even have every intention to do excellent dentistry, but the dentistry is often rendered imperfect due to time and patient inattention or neglect.

Many of us got into this profession because we wanted to help people, but the reality of our work is we spend a lot of time doing much more than that. Those of us in small or solo practices often do all the work ourselves, taking care of patients, handling bills, budgets, marketing (when we can), inventory management, and a host of other activities we didn’t anticipate as enthusiastic dental students. To make more money to try to keep up with rising overhead costs and repay student loans and practice debt, we take on as many patients as we can, often working through lunch, into the evening, and even on weekends. That only exacerbates our stress.

We hope things will improve someday, believing we’re paying our dues and it will take time to build our practice revenues. But then we see dentists who have been practicing for more than twenty years, and it seems like too many of them are still working as hard as we are and fear there will be no end to the constant stress and strain.

This is a recipe for burnout. And it’s the reason we see dentists who lose hope and hate their work. It’s also the reason some dentists give up on the profession altogether and go off and do something else.

Is that the answer to this high-stress, high-risk work—that we need to either hate our lives or quit our profession?

I don’t believe so.

There is another answer!

I wrote this book to help you find your answer so you don’t waste the best years of your life stressed, depressed, and hopeless. The steps in this book can help you transform the way you work, how you live, and the return on your investment of the time, effort, and money you’ve put into your studies and business.

This book will help you get your patients to feel the WOW of your practice by teaching you how to deliver a Delivering WOW experience to everyone in your practice! The Delivering WOW experience uses innovative approaches and strategies to give your patients a WOW experience, generate more revenue, and create more free time for yourself, so you are no longer crushed under the weight and demand of patient appointments and administrative duties. With the added revenue you bring in by implementing the Delivering WOW experience into your practice, you can even build a practice that can run without your day-to-day, constant involvement. By implementing or outsourcing some of the simple but sophisticated tactics such as building dental-marketing funnels to turn strangers into patients while you sleep, you’ll be able to get more control of your practice while shifting much of your marketing and onboarding time to serving new patients or taking a much-needed vacation! You’ll have everything you need to finally build the practice you dreamed of when you were a young, hopeful dental student.

You’ll have everything you need to go from burnout to balance.

To start, you need to shift the way you see your patients. No longer are they just patients. You must also see them as customers. This shift is important, because when we think of those we serve as patients, we can get a bit complacent and sometimes feel as if they must come to us because they need our help. Sometimes we can feel like we’re the only one who can help them. If a patient has a toothache, he must go to a dentist. He can’t go to a dermatologist or an internist. He has to come to us.

The problem with only seeing them as patients is it implies a sense of entitlement to their business, like customer service is unnecessary. That doesn’t serve us well, and it doesn’t serve our patients well. When you shift your mindset to viewing your patients as customers, you shift from thinking of them as people who must come to you to thinking of them as people who choose to come to you.

Thinking of your patients as customers also encourages you to communicate with them better to find out how to serve them better, keep them coming back, and turn them into raving fans who refer people to you. It helps you focus on what they want when they come to you and tells you how to communicate with them more effectively. No patient comes to you to buy a crown. They come to you to buy the peace of mind that their teeth won’t break on their next vacation. They don’t want scaling and root planing; they want peace of mind that their teeth won’t get long or loose. This simple shift helps you look for ways you can Deliver WOW experiences to them, to delight them, so they come back and refer others to you. Treat them as patients by giving them the dental care they need, but always see them as customers whose business you must earn.

You do this by Delivering WOW to everyone who walks in your office. Delivering WOW is an approach I first implemented in my practice, Jamaica Cosmetic Dental Services, before sharing it with other dentists and small-business owners so they could implement the concept in their offices. Delivering WOW focuses on six essential areas of business, including your practice’s Vision, Culture, Core Values, Team, Systems, and Brand. When you implement the Delivering WOW experience in these key areas, you’ll see a remarkable difference in the quality of your practice.

Action Was My Middle Name!

My journey as a dentist began when I graduated from the University of Alabama School of Dentistry in 1999. When I got out of dental school, I was ready to take on the world. I was ready to put into practice all that I had learned. I was ready to give back and help others. I was ready to make a difference! I decided to remain in Birmingham and had the fortunate opportunity to work in several types of practices. One was a very fast-paced, low-fee practice. It was very focused on money. I would often hear the office manager say, We need to make $10,000 today. I was very uncomfortable in that environment. I knew that money was important, but the core could not be the money. It had to be the people. Relationships. That practice was about high volume and money goals. Needless to say, I left that practice after only six months.

From there, I went to work for a dentist who was really big into cosmetic dentistry and customer service. We did things like bake cookies so that the office would smell like home. We read books like Raving Fans by Ken Blanchard and went to seminars with Dr. Tom Orent. With that opportunity, my eyes were opened, and the foundation was laid. After about a year at that practice, I opened my own office and