Lazy days of summer

Summer has flown by. Baseball keeps my family busy and this summer has been no exception. Wil’s team earned a spot in the state championship tournament and that’s where they finished their little league career. His team practiced every day that they were not playing in a tournament. Batting cages, drills, fielding practice. Even scrimmage games. That took much of my time this summer but when they played practice games and made errors, it occurred to me, “This is why we scrimmage.”

Several dentists that I have spoken with had a rough July. It seemed that the schedule really slowed down. My suggestion is to scrimmage when you see those holes in your schedule. Don’t put your head in the sand. Don’t be lazy about your practice’s results. Determine what your weaknesses are and role play. Rehearse. Be sure that your phone is answered professionally. Enhance your new patient’s experience. Look for patients who are seated and tell them you appreciate their loyalty. Ask for referrals. And if you need help with any of the above, call me.

Don’t let the lazy days of summer get you down. Let it be the break that you need to truly accomplish something that you have put off because your patient schedule kept you busy.

Lost?

I am still in awe of the TV show Lost. I will miss it. If you are one of the millions of fans that watched the final show of the TV series, Lost, then you may be like me. I loved the story. I found myself frustrated and bored by some of it but the story was always compelling, rewarding and worth coming back to.

In the final show, we had closure on many questions. Yet, the series allowed us to hold on to the belief that life is a process. It is a journey. When it comes to dental management I always encourage my clients by reminding them that success is not the end of the process but enjoyment in the process itself.

My enewsletters continue to give you rewarding tips on the practice of dental management. This week’s newsletter is filled with topics and headlines for writing email newsletters. Write your story and allow your patients to know you better and enjoy your dental family. The newsletter does not have to go out via email frequently but they can be compelling, rewarding and worth coming back to. To sign up for Jamison Consulting’s biweekly newsletter go to www.jamisonconsulting.com and sign up.

This blog is just part of the story.

Boom Boom Pow

I was supposed to be with my client and friends in New Jersey tonight. Weather dealt the northeast a Boom Boom Pow. So a girlfriend and I scooped some tickets on the street and went to see the Black Eyed Peas. Wow! It is always amazing to watch performances that are so well orchestrated. This was an awesome visual and experiential concert.

The weather has dealt many dentists a blow this week. Days are coming and going with no patients on the schedule.  If your schedule has lots of time available already, then you may have just discovered how you are able to be more productive in fewer days. Every scenario leaves an opportunity. On a day when patients are unable to be seen, get some practice. The Black Eyes Peas delivered a highly professional, jaw dropping product. It takes practice. If your weather prevents travel, use the internet to find seminars on www.dentaledu.tv. Assign different seminars to individual employees. Share best notes with one another by instant messaging or perhaps a conference call (arranged by the phone company). Remember, the weather doesn’t have to leave you feeling helpless.

Tonight’s going to be a good, good night…. ooh, hoo.

Lost Dog Found!

How many of you have a beloved animal? My dog’s name is Coco. He was at my heel yesterday while I was moving something from our house to the storage area and then he wasn’t. I looked in the house, then took a lap around the block, then the village. A half hour had passed and the worst part was that he didn’t have a collar on. I was excruciatingly upset. One of my gifts in life is solving problems. What could I do that I knew worked and would work fast. I made 25 flyers as quickly as I could and retraced my steps to post them throughout the immediate neighborhood. A call came 5 minutes after I started!! I was so relieved. A lovely young couple had Coco and were out searching for Lost flyers. Thank you, thank you.

The take away lesson for dental clients is to ask yourself, “What works?” and “What can be done that will have the most immediate impact?”. If you are struggling with any dental practice issues, read the blog posted below entitled, Are all your i’s dotted and t’s crossed.

For the time being, I have put a collar on my dog, Coco. Are there any practice issues that shouldn’t have happened in the first place i.e. Employment compliance and HR issues, lack of training for a new employee, allowing below average work to pass as acceptable. Look for my article on www.DentistryIQ.com.

Get Linked In

Do you have $ 75 and 10 minutes of your time to invest in more new patients?

 Are you getting as many new patients from your website as you possible can? I am convinced that an interactive tool for your website is truly significant in bringing you more new patients. The technology is called LinkBox™ and is now available. This product allows a prospective patient to click on an icon strategically placed on your web pages. The link connects your new patient to a microsite that enables them to see what promotional offers you currently have in your practice. There are more benefits than meets the eye. For a demonstration, click on www.citywidedentaloffice.com. I am one of the first authorized consultants to offer this technology. To discuss how you can benefit from this patient referral marketing tool, please contact Laura Jamison at jamisonconsulting@verizon.net or toll free at 800-637-3947.

Oral Body Inflammatory Connection

 It is not too soon to be considering how you will be promoting Dentistry has a Heart Month in February.  To read about Laura’s experience in Baltimore with the world renowned cardiologist, Dr. Marvin Slepian and trail blazing periodontists, Dr. Neil Gottehrer, look further in the blog. Dentistry has a Heart.com will link you to all of the tools and quotable resources you will need to inform your patients of the preventable nature of heart disease and your role in their overall health. If you are frustrated by holes in the hygiene schedule, look for Dentistry has a Heart on www.DentalEDU.tv as of September 15, 2009.

Dental Masks for Patients

 Lastly, if you are looking for a way to help your patients, offer free dental masks. This season of H1N1 flu has many people concerned and offering a mask to take back to work may get your patient’s attention. Be healthy and stay healthy!!

Celebrations

We have two things to celebrate here in my family’s household. My son, Wil, is graduating from elementary school . My baby:(  He is moving on up to middle school next year and is prepared and excited to do that. The second item is that we are celebrating that my husband sold his motorcycle. It got too dangerous to drive around. I am grateful the he has made that decision and is ready to move on.

Celebrations are important!! In your practice, do you take the time to celebrate the little things? It is the little celebrations that really count because it could be a month or a year before you celebrate something huge. So here are a few suggestions for saying thank you to your team members when they finish a project, do something special for a patient or hit a weekly goal.

Enjoy!

1) Time spent with you on a personal basis. 2) Personal notes of encouragement. 3) Hand out mixed bags of Hershey’s Hugs™ and Kisses™. 4) Plan a team retreat for encouragement and renewal. 5) Write a note on a blank puzzle, break it apart and send the pieces. 6) Give a video rental gift certificate with a bag of microwave popcorn. 7) Have a mobile detail service come to wash cars for the day. Give a 100 Grand™ candy bar with a note: “You’re worth 100 Grand to us!” 9) Give a long stemmed rose. 10) At your next meeting, surprise everyone with party decorations. 11) Feature a member of the team in a newsletter or in your reception area. 12) Have a massage therapist and nail technician come in for an afternoon spa day. 13) Send a cookie gram.14) Make a button for everyone with “My boss appreciates me.” 15) Personalize Christmas ornaments for the holidays. 16) Have a whitening party. 17) Submit photo of your team to the local media and run an ad that shows appreciation for the team. 18) Personalize a coffee mug for each team member. 19) Give a seasonal bouquet of flowers. 20) Have t-shirts made with the team photo on them.

If you have ideas that you would like to share, contact Laura at jamisonconsulting@verizon.net or by calling 800-637-3947.

Back to basics

My husband and I shared a good laugh this weekend. A new washer and dryer were installed a month ago. My husband, Tim, bravely installed it with a friend. When the first load of laundry went into its spin cycle, our whole house shook violently. It took several weeks before Tim got back to the installation process. He fortified the floor, set the washer and dryer side by side, even dismantled the machines to look for something wrong. After many hours of frustrating efforts, I called Maytag. The very young female voice on the other end of the phone asked if we had removed the “packing straps and bolts” from the machine when it was installed. I was told that if not, then the machine would shake frantically. “Oh Honey. Did you remove the packing straps?” In looking at the installation manual, guess what Step One says? Remove the packing straps. Problem solved!!!

How often do you feel that you need to complete a lengthy process of trial and error to figure out the solution to a problem? Dentists tend to be isolated in their approach. They don’t really know what is causing their production to decrease or their collections to plummet. I recommend several things:

1) Know your numbers. Set goals and range norms in place to follow daily, weekly and monthly.

2) Have a business agenda at one of your team meetings each month. Discuss the numbers and the problem areas with your team. You will be amazed by what their insight is.

3) Go back to the basics with your systems. There is a good chance that what was step one in a system for phone enrollment, appointment scheduling, your new patient exam, financial arrangements has been missing for some time. It could be that a new employee never got that bit of information or an employee of record just didn’t want to do things the way you outlined them.

Oh, the mystery of step one. Where do you feel that you can go back to step one in your practice? Call me if you would like the help. My number is 8132-251-6401 and my email address is jamisonconsulting@verizon.net.

Spring Cleaning

In Tampa, Florida you know that spring is in the air. The oak pollen is driving most people crazy. It leaves everything coated in a yellow dust that is tenacious in clinging to everything that it encounters.

When yellow pollen needs to be cleaned, it requires a deeper scrubbing and evacuation of the stuff. It occurred to me that during this deepening recession we as dental business owners must be digging deeper. This recession doesn’t seem to be easy to brush away.

Spring cleaning is a time of renewal. The act requires that we plan our approach to the deeper cleansing. We create time to take a little longer with our process. We know that it isn’t something that we do daily or weekly and so we do a better job with spring cleaning.

In your dental practice, determine what problem areas need to be addressed. Schedule time to discuss your approach with your team and take some of the time that may now be available to you due to broken appointments to conduct training, research answers and share with the team or actually clean the office. When cleaning the office, tour the facility as if you were a new patient with a discerning eye. Examine the parking lot, the grounds, the entryway, the reception room, the appearance of the business office and each treatment room. Get rid of the old magazines, mountains of brochures and sticky note wallpaper. Dispose of tattered posters and old ceiling tiles. Paint the baseboard. Freshen the reception desk with weekly flowers. Spring is in the air.

This is a good time to get rid of the newspaper in the reception room. There isn’t any good news anyway and they look messy as the day goes on. Be selective about the magazines in your reception area also. Keep the bloody disasters off your counters.

I know that spring is a time for opening the door again. Be open to doing things differently. If you wish to have an objective eye look at how you are meeting your patients, please call me at 813-251-6401.

Picture yourself once your cabinets and closets have been cleaned. It feels great to see the fruits of your labor after a day of spring cleaning, doesn’t it?

Have you noticed?

You’ve noticed, haven’t you? It seems that the world is evolving very quickly in the field of customer service. In my interaction with 20 different businesses over the last month, it seems that 19 now have made a solid commitment to excellent customer service. Airlines, hotels, cable providers, you name it. I have heard more sincere acknowledgements for my business in the last month than I have heard in one year.

How does this apply? The statistics from Michael Gerber’s EMyth Revisited invite us to believe that 500,000 small businesses start each year but by year ten, only 20,000 are still in business. What do the success story owners have to share about their frutifulness? They have learned that you must treat the customer in a way that exceeds their expectation not once, but every time. There is a formula for this. It is E=R5. Effectiveness=doing the right thing, at the right time, in the right way, for the right person, knowing that the customer is always right. Be grateful for every business opportunity that exists for you.

I am grateful to the Midwest Implant Institute Fellows for inviting me to be part of their mid winter meeting. I am impressed by the technology involved in performing live surgery and beaming it into the conference center for dentists interested in implants to learn from some talented doctors. Dr. Michael Cohen of Seattle Study Club is also on my list of people I am grateful to this week. I had the opportunity to make a presentation on the importance of appointment scheduling to students at the University of Washington. Dr. Cohen invited me to come and we spent time reliving his experience with all of his attendees at the SSC annual symposium. He reassured me that teaching dentists how to relate to their patients is going to continue to be a big part of what I can bring to the table. Dental consulting, particularly, Dental management consulting is what I do. Lastly, I am grateful to Chase Health Advance financing options and Lighthouse PLZ for sponsoring the program at MII.

Who are you thankful for? Have you noticed?

The Boss reigns (rains)

Do you know The Boss?!? Bruce Springsteen was in town for the Superbowl. I was smart enough to register as a volunteer to participate as a fan on the halftime field. Oh My Gosh!!! If you saw it, you know what I’m talkin’ about. Glory Days!

As fans we rehearsed all day on Sunday. It was hot. I met a lot of nice people from Iowa and from California. The next rehearsal was on Thursday. From the time we checked in at 2pm until we finished early at 8:30pm, it rained. I mean it poured. I was never so thankful for hooded ponchos. But in my squishy running shoes and wet jeans I began looking for the positive spin to this story. We were there and trained to be cast members. The Boss and the E Street band performed flawlessly in the pouring rain not once but twice on Thursday night. I was impressed.

Why might this observation be relevant to your dental practice? Practice makes permanent. In these critical and challenging economic times you better be rehearsing. Don’t leave key situations to chance. This includes the telephone intake, the new patient experience and the hygiene visit. If your practice is slow, commit to practicing regularly. It is all about the relationship. The producers of the hafltime show continually reinforced how much Bruce Springsteen wanted the fans to interact.

The Superbowl experience was unbeatable for me and my husband. Is your practice Super?