How Can I Reinvent My Dental Practice Before It's Too Late?

There are lots of ways a dental practice can reinvent itself before financial decline sets in. The single most important thing to remember is to start this process long before you feel the need.

The classic 2011 Harvard Business Review article, “Reinvent Your Business Before It’s Too Late” has important
lessons for any business. While it profiles enterprise companies, there are many pearls of wisdom for the average dental practice.

The crux of the article centers on the tendency of businesses to wait too long to reinvent themselves. Businesses can be effective in fixing what’s broken; however, if they don’t do this early enough, they still risk failure. The financial arc of a business moves slower than the arcs of competition, capabilities and talent.

What does that mean? It means that financial results can mask the need to update and reinvent the business based on changing dynamics in the industry, competition, and technology. The business may be performing very well financially, so no one is thinking about the next step. By the time sales start to decline, the business may have lost too much ground to fully recover.

The idea is fixing things in your business that may cause your growth to stall out, long before your growth actually starts to stall. However, this is counterintuitive. When the going is good, most business owners will keep doing what they’re doing – because it seems to be working! Yet this is the perfect time to start thinking about your next step, so you can be ready to launch when your core business starts to decline.

A Dental Practice Example

Let’s say you’ve been in practice for 15 years. You bought a small practice to start, marketed it, and have grown it to $1.1M production. You have 6 days of hygiene, digital x-rays, a Cerac, and a nice friendly office. In the last few years, your growth has declined slightly, and it’s right around 4% right now. But, you feel like your production is solid, and you’re filling your operational capacity well.

The temptation is to say, “Okay things are looking pretty good, I’m taking home a good salary, paying my employees well. We do some marketing, and seem to stay busy so it all seems to be working.” You’ve noticed that a new practice has opened up a block away, and they are offering implants and Invisalign as well as traditional dentistry. It shouldn’t be too much of a problem though, you have a much longer standing in the community.

Over the next few years, your growth continues to drop, and even go negative, and you wonder what you should do to get it going back in the right direction. Imagine if you’d started thinking about that when the going was good, and formulated a growth plan that you had the time and resources to implement and take your practice to the next level.

Reinventing Your Dental Practice

One of the best ways to decide what specifically you want to do to reinvent your dental practice is by listening to your patients. What needs do they still have outside of what you’re already providing them? Do you have any competitors who are providing services to fill those needs? How is technology changing to accommodate patient needs in new ways? What do your team members hear about unmet patient needs?

Here are some practical ideas to start reinventing your business:

Set the stage with your team that you are looking to the future, and want to grow the practice in new ways. Empower them to bring you ideas and feedback on what patients need and want. Discuss this at regular team meetings and make it a routine part of your strategy.
Explore new technology to bring into the office, evaluate the return on investment for any new capital purchases. Make sure it fits with what your core patient population needs.
Consider expanding service offerings like bringing a specialist into your practice 1 day a month, or seeking additional training on new procedures like implants, orthodontics, or sleep medicine.
Look at new patient demographics to bring into your practice. Maybe a large company has opened a new office near your practice and you’d like to draw in those employees.
Bump up your marketing efforts, consider new marketing ideas and partnerships to reach more new patients.

Always keep reinvention at the forefront of your mind, while still nurturing your core businesses that are producing financially. Making this a normal part of your business will allow you to keep growing steadily into the future. We’re here to help with this!