Take a look to discover how you can identify, measure and improve the numbers which will make the difference between nearly getting there and ABSOLUTELY getting there.

What do you do to measure your progress against your goals?

What will you do now after hearing these three insights?

You are invited to leave your comments in the box below.

Plus he shares the four key insights you need to know in order to effectively and confidentally ‘sell’ to your patients.

You are invited to leave your comments in the box below.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are not figures you find in your annual accounts. Neither are they included in your monthly or quarterly management accounts.

And yet, as accountants to dentists and dental business consultants, we continue to urge dentists to measure and focus on these vital numbers. In fact we unashamedly bang on about them! Why?

Because it’s these numbers which influence your financial results. These are the underlying numbers which drive financials and make them better. Improve your KPI results and your financial results improve. So you can see it makes sense to focus on them, doesn’t it?

Clear Vision meets with dentists every week. So we have access to the KPIs measured by dentists across the UK. For the second year, we have crunched these figures to work out the average results for the key dental business KPIs across the UK. The results are most interesting…

Recommendations from existing patients

Looking at the new private patient figures achieved, I can reveal the UK average number of new patients recommended by existing patients to be 3 per month.

What is more revealing, however, is around 20% of dental businesses making this measurement report a noticeably higher monthly figure than the average. Some double it on a regular basis. Others exceed it even further.

So around 4,000 of the 22,000 UK dental practices (using BDA figures) are really getting ahead here.

By now you know that we’re eager to share what works for dental businesses , so you can read details of what these exceptional practices do to increase their figures in our full KPI report.

New patients from websites

The average number of new patients UK dental practices generate via their websites is 4 per month. Once again, it’s important to stress this is the average figure and there are dentists we see generating 9 new patients from websites per month. How?

Firstly by recognising online marketing is a specialist area, recruiting a specialist to help them and then sticking to what they do best.

They have set up productive and effective agreements with their specialists to deliver more traffic to their websites and more enquiries for their dental businesses. If you’d like to read more details on how this is done, you can check out the full report.

Recalling patients

Our statistics indicate the average exam recall rate across the UK rose from 50.77% in 2011 to 61.8% in 2012. Plus there are dentists we see giving this fundamental system keen focus and achieving rates as high as 90%.

The average hygiene recall rate was 71.93% last year.

The dentists generating the best recall results are finding new ways to illustrate the value of their exams and regular hygiene sessions. Again, you are welcome to read more in our report.

Some focus on the raft of new regulations imposed on UK dentists, their looming CQC inspections and rising costs.

Others have a more sunny outlook, noting these pressures but also citing the health of the UK dental sector.

To round up Clear Vision’s blog posts for 2012, allow me to put forward my case to suggest you ‘pitch your tent’ with the second camp.

• The UK dental market is healthy

A significant piece of research commissioned by the British Dental Trade Association in April 2012 on the Perception of Dentistry highlighted a ‘considerable appetite’ amongst current patients (both NHS and private) for non‐essential and cosmetic dentistry: 52% of NHS patients and 45% of private patients expressed an appetite for these services.

A market with customers interested in the non-essential services provided indicates a well-performing and trusted sector to me.

Added to this, Medenta Finance has once again reported a 10% increase in patient finance provided in 2012 compared to 2011.

That’s 10% more private dental work carried out via this channel alone. A healthy rise by most people’s standards.

• The treatment you provide has great value

I met a dentist just this week who admitted to feeling uncomfortable when quoting for his bigger private treatments.

I advised him to consider the placement of a crown. A treatment we see typically costing £300-£600 across the UK.

Can there be many other investments an individual can make which last a full 10 years? You won’t get a flat screen TV or computer guaranteed for that length of time.

• There are highly successful dentists leading the way

As I work with dentists across the country, I note certain aspects which are common to the top 10% in helping them generate consistently impressive results:

1. These businesses have a clear vision
2. The owners of the businesses have shared this vision with their team and aligned their team with it
3. The dental businesses provide an excellent, differentiated patient experience

These are business aspects every dentist can, with the necessary focus and attention, emulate.

You have a valuable ‘product’, success stories to tap into and statistics showing your audience is willing to buy from you.

2013 looks good, doesn’t it?

If you have feedback on our blogs this year, whether you have found them useful, would like us to cover a particular aspect of running a dental business or have any suggestions for improvement, please do post your thoughts below. Clear Vision works to serve dentists and we believe in keeping improving the way we do it. Thank you.

A happy festive season and a positive and prosperous 2013 to you from all at Clear Vision.

So I think it’s high time I laid out a checklist of points I recommend you cover now, in order to get off to a flying start in 2013.

Take stock of your practice and its performance now, and you improve its future…

• Mystery shop your competitors – and your own practice(s) too!

Once the domain of the retail sector, ‘Mystery Shopping’ is now used by dentists. There are dental practices already gaining on their competitors as they learn how they can improve their initial patient experience.

So decide who are your closest competitors and ask an appropriate person to call them to gauge how well their receptionists respond to your call, what information they offer and what fees they are charging.

You can only find out about so much, so decide what’s most important to you first.

The fee information is especially useful at this time of year, when you need to consider where you can and should raise your own prices from the start of 2013 to counter-balance your growing costs.

Then ask someone to do the same for your practice so you can compare the initial impression your practice gives to the outside world and how well your team does in motivating potential patients to choose your practice over one of your competitors.

Which leads me on to…

• Review your patient experience

When was the last time you and your team took a step back to consider what it is like to be a patient at your practice?

It’s a vital thought process if you want to protect the patients you already have and encourage them to talk about you to others.

The above review will show you whether you need to be working harder on your initial phone impression in order to ‘stand out from the crowd’. So you can start there and work through the different points of your patient ‘journey’ to ask yourselves where you can make the experience a little more ‘special’. Remember, it’s the little things that count.

This can also be a process which helps rejuvenate and re-focus your team for the coming new year.

• Review your key numbers

What numbers do you measure in your dental business? Profit? Turnover? Cost of materials?

These are all vital figures of course – as accountants you’d expect us to say nothing else – but consider for a second: where do these numbers come from? How are they generated?

Your bottom line financials don’t just appear. They are a result of what you do every day. Your efforts. Your systems. They are a consequence of these things.

And as a consequence of these things, it makes sense that in order to improve them, you need to work on the underlying numbers which have influence over them. The factors which drive them and make them better.

So take a look at your patient recall rate, your treatment conversion rate and so on and ask yourself whether you’re completely satisfied with these numbers.

If you don’t feel they are as good as they can be, look at your working systems and think about how you can improve them.

(POINT TO NOTE: We’ll be putting together our annual Dental KPI review shortly sharing the 2012 UK average of these figures – bookmark www.clearvisiondental.co.uk to get hold of a free copy.)

• Benchmark your financials

When a dental accountant looks at your accounts, they will calculate certain ratios within your numbers.

I’m not referring to standard accountancy ratios such as your current assets vs. current liabilities here. A specialist dental accountant will also look at industry specific ratios such as the percentage of your material and lab fees vs. your overall fees, your wages bill as a percentage of your fees and so on. And if, as a result of their specialist knowledge, they can see you aren’t achieving the kind of ratios they would expect you to, they’ll suggest constructive and realistic ways to redress the balance.

They’ll be able to help you review the return you have seen from your marketing investment as well.

It is important to assess your marketing spend and success at this time of the year, so you can make informed decisions on whether you continue paying for adverts, online directories and so on, next year.

• Book your 2013 holiday time

Another crucial point for maximising the performance of your business is protecting yourself!

As far as you can, sit down with the other people involved in the decision and earmark when you’ll have time off next year. Then reserve it in advance in your practice diary.

The result?

• You avoid working without a proper break for long periods during the year
• You maintain a more refreshed and renewed approach to your practice, your patients and your work
• You have an enhanced sense of purpose to your everyday activities as you look forward to your next break
• Your team know in advance when you’ll be off, so there’s no confusion about when to book patients or how to allocate team members

(pssst…you are the owner of your business – shouldn’t you get ‘first dibs’ on holiday time?)

As accountants and consultants to dentists, we are often asked ‘how can I generate more profit in my dental business?’.

It’s a regular query and if you haven’t asked it yourself of late, you should.

Why?

Because your costs are rising as you are obliged to spend to maintain regulatory compliance and it is important you balance these additional outgoings with sufficient extra income. Your profit margins are under threat and you will see less money in your pocket if you don’t redress the balance.

There is no one big secret the most successful and profitable dentists share. No holy grail to unlocking profit.

It is a question of looking at a number of different areas where you can make incremental profit increases. Incremental increases which, when added together, make a significant difference to your bottom line.

We look at the 10 BIGGEST AREAS where a dental business typically has the potential to tap into extra profit with our clients. These include:

1.       Increase recall figures

When you recall, how you recall, who recalls… it all makes a difference and you can work out system generates the best recall rates for your dental business when you systematically test and measure changes in each of these areas.

Remember – your recalls are your engine room. The key system for your business. Keep your patients coming back!

What extra profit would a 5% increase in your recall rate look like for you?

2.       Increase cross-selling to existing patients

If all your patients don’t yet know about all your services and treatments, you need to tell them. If you owned a shop, you wouldn’t hide part of your stock out the back.

Dentists are often surprised about the amount of treatment their patients take up when they tell them about it.

Use a Smile Questionnaire, market what you do around your practice and in your newsletter. Just make sure you get the information in front of your patients.

How much would an additional 10 orthodontic cases make you? 15 tooth whitening treatments? 20 white fillings?

3.       Tap into your hygiene potential

Give your hygiene function the attention it deserves and you benefit your patients in a way which also benefits your dental business.

The key is to treat hygiene as a separate business in its own right.

Systematically highlight the patients who don’t see the hygienist on your day lists and agree a practice-wide approach for educating them about the potential boost to their oral health. Use visual and scoring aids to help you.

Consider how much an additional 50 patients seeing your hygienist twice a year would bring you…

4.       Make savings on marketing costs

Measuring where every new patient comes from is the first step towards identifying which of your marketing activities work for you and which don’t.

Do this and you can identify the marketing spend which does not provide you with a return on investment.

How much could you save when you cut out the advertising which doesn’t bring you new patients?

5.       Look at your associate contracts

A controversial area clearly, but if you are incurring bigger outgoings, shouldn’t your associates be taking on an appropriate amount of these additional costs? Associate percentages are now reducing in the UK (already at 30% in the US).

It is possible to negotiate contracts which are fair to both parties at this time, such as the introduction of sliding pay scale.

What profit would you recoup when you reduce your associate percentage from 50% to 45%?

When you consider the overall effect on profit these incremental increases will bring you, you start to realise you can tap into significant additional profit for your dental business.

Want to run through all of the 10 BIGGEST AREAS and see where you can increase your practice profit? Watch out for our ‘How your practice can stop leaking profits’ webinars at www.clearvisiondental.co.uk . It costs nothing to join us and I’ll walk you through each profit area in the comfort of your own home or practice.

Something quite invisible and yet entirely tangible…

Can you relate?

You park up. You step inside. The environment is perfectly welcoming. The team members are friendly and completely polite. But something’s missing.  It’s that certain something…  There’s no ‘buzz’.

It happens when you work in the same place every day.  Doing the same thing. With the same people.  The atmosphere can become flat. A little lifeless.

So how can you give your team a shot in the arm? How can you find that bit of added zing your team and your patients can enjoy?

Speaking from the experience of running my own business and working to keep my own team buoyant, I believe I have found a solution: do good and you feel good. Feel good and you buzz!

Allow me to explain.

In 2011, I attended a conference for accountants. A guy called Paul Dunn was presenting on ‘The WOW Factor’ and how to develop it in your business.

His energy, his passion, his ‘buzz’ was absolutely infectious. It was the buzz of feeling good by doing good. The buzz of giving.

So my business joined Paul’s global giving initiative Buy1Give1 (“B1G1″) and now we make regular gifts of goats to families who need them in Kenya during the course of doing what we do. And when we make a gift, we tell our customers how they have helped us to do so and pass them a formal certificate of appreciation.

It’s not just Clear Vision. Dentists are doing it too. B1G1 featured Lifestyle Dental Clinic in Preston recently in its marketing. This dental practice gives access to clean water for 100 people in Malawi each and every time they carry out an Oral Health Assessment.

And it’s something the team and patients clearly get a kick out of.  It creates a buzz in the practice.

I would hazard a guess that this practice has a vision which includes ‘caring’ and the process of giving via B1G1 is its way of extending caring for the team and patients out to the wider world.

To buzz or not to buzz?

Now maybe you’re asking yourself at this point why you should bother about having a buzz about the place.

What you may not have seen is some seminal research presented by Harvard Law School last year which reveals there is very real business case…

It pays off too!

The Harvard forum concluded that there is a ‘measureable payoff’ coming from a number of different areas for businesses which seek to benefit the wider world as they do what they do, or are ‘corporate social responsibility attentive’ to give it their rather grand title.

So the question is…knowing that the interests of the beneficiaries and your dental business are aligned when you do good…

how can you run with this idea of creating a buzz by doing good in your practice?

Questions or feedback on this blog? Simply leave a comment. I’d love to hear what you have to say.

Consider the following…

• Do you want to keep your patients in the long term?
• Do you want to attract new patients to your practice so they don’t go to the one along the road?
• Do you want to be able to recruit great team members to fill any vacancies which crop up?
• Do you want to keep the great team members you already have?

Yes?

I put it to you that a major factor in achieving these things is maintaining a buoyant team spirit, one which your team members and patients enjoy. And I put it to you that the first step in doing this is being able to measure how happy your team are at the moment.

Time to share a neat and simple way you can do this I think…

Far from treating it as an intangible calculation, some dentists are now measuring the happiness of their teams through the use of a ‘Mood Board.’

This system encourages each team member to declare their current mood as they enter the practice each day by placing their photo or another image they have created on the practice board. Should someone not be happy, it gives their fellow team members the chance to check whether they can help their colleague to feel better, or attempt to remove the obstacle to their happiness.

The overall team mood is then calculated on a monthly basis, so each dentist can track their team’s contentment over time and know when they need to address any adverse trends which creep in.

In this way, the dentists actively gauge both general team spirit and also monitor the happiness of individual team members.

Mood Boards are clearly not the only way to measure team happiness, but they are proven to work and you can also inject some fun into yours as these real life examples following show…

What are you doing to measure the happiness of your team?..

• 10% of dental businesses are continuing to report healthy, often growing, profits month on month
• 80% are experiencing mixed fortunes, with fluctuating financial results
• 10% continue to struggle each month, some of which are close to going to the wall

So what is it the top 10% are successfully doing, which the others aren’t?

There are two very significant differences between these dental businesses and their counterparts:

1. These businesses have a clear vision
2. The owners of the businesses have shared this vision with their team and aligned their team with it

I liken a business vision, whether for a dental business or another type of firm, to a lily pad on a pond.

You can set your vision but in order for it to grow and flourish, it needs the support of a root system.

A key part of this root system is your team. After all, it is your team who help you to make your vision a reality. Or they hinder you.

Your team therefore needs to know, understand and be motivated by your vision.  This is certainly the case in the top 10% of dental businesses. The business vision isn’t simply in the principal’s head, their teams are living and breathing it.

Plus your team needs the other necessary factors in place to help you support and pursue your vision on a consistent basis:

• Core values to uphold as they go about their work – these are the guiding principles which govern your team members’ dealings with each other and your patients
• Defined systems they can refer to at any time which create an exquisite patient experience
• The non financial measurements which are key to the development and growth of the business
• Systems in place which keep the team accountable to taking actions agreed, and upholding the business systems and values

The top 10% have these factors in place. I see their teams work together in a constructive manner. I see them follow their excellent patient systems all day, every day. I see them discuss and take action to improve the key measurements which drive their success.

What are you doing to take care of your lily pad?