While being concerned about your bottom line as a practice owner makes sense because that is your take home pay, maybe you’re worrying about the WRONG bottom line. Is it really how much profit your practice made this year or are you focusing on the wrong thing?
Are you reducing your bottom line?
Breaking “the bottom line” down as a subject, there are many “hot” items to consider that influence a bottom line. Here are a few examples of how to reduce your take-home pay:
- Keeping costs down by having a too small delivery space can definitely limit your top line (income) and therefore the ultimate size of your bottom line.
- Very often, “keeping payroll as low as possible” can actually work in reverse for you and SHRINK your bottom line. You need quality staff for optimum return on your dollar spent. And sometimes you can be too short staffed and no one has time to handle the “telephone shoppers” properly and you lose 2-5 New Patients a week that way. No workable bonus system that incites top notch production levels is a missed opportunity to increase your top line and therefore reduces your bottom line.
- Some practitioners try to spend as little on marketing as possible … and that is GUARANTEED to reduce your bottom line for sure. Properly spent marketing dollars drive in more business and increase the top and bottom lines. There are excellent marketing methods available that really do attract new patients or clients.
The REAL Bottom Line
In essence, the real bottom line that you and your team should be focusing on with all your might is delivering the most ideal care possible to each and every single one of your patients and clients. Every patient deserves to receive ideal care. If you achieve such a level of abundance in your care to your patients, your practice will expand and flourish, and your bottom line will follow suit.
However, it is a rare practice that delivers the highest level of service and attention to each patient to make their visit perfect. This requires having a team of dedicated, cheerful staff who work smoothly together, with no negative emotions present in the practice, greeting patients or clients warmly and with care for the details of ultimate service, running the practice on time, having the ultimate in treatment plan presentation skills (sales skills) so the patient or client goes ahead with the ideal care they deserve to have, using a system of follow up care or calls after difficult treatments, having a correctly done recall (or recare or reminder) system so no one is ever lost in the cracks and forgotten. And so on.
Management Tools for a Better Bottom Line
A well run practice does not happen by accident. It requires the CEO of the practice to be a well trained manager or executive. There are tools to quickly see where the quality and quantity of service are falling down or improving, on a weekly and monthly basis. These are called statistics. There are tools to use to fix drops in care levels and improve them. Stats should measure service and keep the practice focused on ideal care to the patients or clients. Bonus systems designed on that system inspire the team to excel in the delivery of ideal care.
Sales training from front to back of the practice is essential in helping patients or clients to choose and go ahead with the ideal care they deserve to have. They need help with those decisions, not soft sell and not high pressure sales either.
Marketing gets easier when you have such a high level of care and quality of service in a practice. Word of mouth increases. However, you still need to do certain marketing actions and PR activities and be found on the internet in most cases to fill your practice to the brim.
Bottom, bottom line:
If you would like to stop shrinking your bottom line (i.e. take home more profit), refocus yourself and your team onto giving the patients the highest quality of care. If you check with your patients or clients it’s fairly certain that they believe that that is what they are paying their hard earned money for too!!
For the Management Tools and Systems described above,
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