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A Flux Capacitor, Planning and Your Practice by Joseph Sivori

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by Joe Sivori

You've just hung out your shingle and opened the doors to the orthodontic office you've always dreamed of owning. Congratulations!

As you start out in your new business, you're probably a bit curious about what the future will bring you and your practice. You're in luck, because in the back closet of your new office is a time machine. It's outfitted with a "flux-capacitor" and other bells and whistles that will send you into the future to let you see how the next five years will unfold. Ready to go? Strap yourself in and fast-forward into the future.

As you pass over each month and each year, you see that your practice has operated relatively successfully. Stopping your time travels near 2018 (a nice, even five years from now), you jump out of your time machine to get a good idea of what your practice has become. From the way things look in your busy front lobby, you realize that you've created a fairly robust practice. It appears to be a growing single-office operation that is producing a sustainable revenue stream with a consistent bottom line. On your trip forward in time, you also discovered that your practice had very good growth in its first year of operations as well as a solid second year. You also saw that the office was able to maintain its consistent profitability along the way and that the third year was a great year, too. With everything moving along nicely, the fourth year offered another growth spurt. As year five comes into view, you see yourself planning for another good year, but one that's maybe at a little off from the previous years. The rate of growth isn't bad, but it's not like it was in the years you just saw fly past in your time travels.

Admiring your office, you notice your future self at a desk working. You look over the shoulder of your future self and you hear yourself asking some basic business questions: Is everything working the way it should be? Is my office running efficiently and at full capacity? Is it time for me to bring in an associate? Would it be good to open another office? Should I eat the other half of that muffin?

These questions, aside from the muffin, are all valid business questions that arise from the life cycle of a business. A business cycle typically goes through set phases that include a start-up (or initial) phase, a growth phase, a maturity phase and a transition phase (or in some cases an ending phase).

Most businesses, including orthodontic practices, usually follow this cycle, especially if it begins as a start-up. There are many factors that can affect this business cycle, factors such as marketing, demographics, referral sources, competition, local and global economics, office capacity, scheduling, staff dynamics, location and reputation (and don't forget a bit of luck).

Accordingly, one of the more important aspects of being an owner of an orthodontic practice is to decide on what type of business you want to run. You also must decide how you will guide your practice through the various business phases. For example, do you want to develop a practice that you'll own indefinitely, with no intention of selling it? Or do you want a practice that will grow continuously over its business cycles and culminate in a sale 10 or 20 years from its opening day?

Getting back into your time machine, with half of that muffin, you speed back to today with a perspective of what you need to do to make your office into what you want it to be in the future.

How are you going to guide your office through all of the business phases and challenges it will face in becoming that office you saw in the future? It will mostly be accomplished through following a simple concept – planning.

Did you set objectives and goals each month, quarter and year that are achievable? That means not just thinking about how you want your practice to be operating in five years from now; it means actually writing your plans down in detail and adjusting them constantly as new ideas, opportunities and challenges arise.

Creating and running a business is tough. No one hands it to you or promises that it will grow every year like clockwork. Planning is the key to the success of your practice. Without planning you have nothing to execute in the way of developing your business. Essentially, you are leaving the performance of your practice in the hands of fate, which is not the best strategy. If your office struggled to grow and generate an acceptable profit, the most likely culprit would be the lack of planning. You wouldn't have any idea of what to correct or change in your practice because you didn't have a plan in the first place.

What a good plan does is lay out how you're going to achieve your objectives and goals. A solid plan will include specific objectives as to how you will train, educate and develop your staff so that they are an extension of you when it comes to performing their duties in the office. Fully developed plans will detail how many days you want to schedule each month while taking into consideration seasonal patterns and events that affect the practice during the year. Planning will help you identify referral sources that can provide patients to your practice and how strategic marketing campaigns can help build your practice and establish your brand in the community. All these strategies help develop a steady flow of patients to your practice. From your plan, you'll decide how you will get consult appointments, how you will convert those consult appointments into a high percentage of new patients, and how those patients will become very satisfied patients who tell their family and friends that they should see you if they need any orthodontic work.

Knowing what you want from your practice, understanding the business environment and cycles your business will encounter and setting out a detailed and comprehensive plan to achieve your objectives and goals will allow you to know that your little glimpse into the future will come true.

By the way, did you happen to check out all the winning Lotto numbers during your time traveling?

Author's Bio
Joseph Sivori is the Chief Financial Officer for OrthoSynetics, a business services firm that assists orthodontic and dental practices utilizing a full-service, turnkey management approach to address all non-clinical practice functions to gain better efficiencies and profitability. For more information, visit www.orthosynetics.com.
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