Episode 122 – Requested Replay: What Are Your Dental Practice Goals?

“In business, it’s so important to plan your plan.” ~Dr. Bruce B. Baird

One of the biggest mistakes business owners make is failing to set goals and make a plan to achieve those goals.  

You may be thinking right now: “Hold on, Bruce. I have a plan.” Well, I am going to challenge you to examine if you really do. 

The stakes are high. Failing to plan properly can cost you thousands of dollars of income, valuable team members, and years of unnecessary frustration and in the worst cases, it can cost you time with your family and a comfortable retirement. 

So here’s my question for you today: what is your 1, 3, 5? What I mean by this is what is your 1 year goal, what is your 3 year goal, what is your 5 year goal? 

In business, it’s so important to plan your plan. To figure out what your goals are, and then make a plan to get there. To know what your numbers are saying and what numbers will help you achieve your goals by what point in time. This way you can make adjustments in your business to ensure you are achieving your goals.  

This is true ownership of your business. It’s understanding your dental practice, your finances, your systems, your numbers at an intimate level so you can set your goals, make a plan, and then work towards achieving the timeline you set for yourself. In other words, plan your plan, and then execute your plan. 

I believe every dentist deserves to have a practice that allows them to live a wonderful life today, while building value to support their future. So today I’m going to walk you through the method I used to plan my goals, control my business, and secure my future by understanding:

• What the focus of your 1, 3, and 5 year should be
• What numbers you should understand and look at to keep yourself on track
• How to stay committed to your plan

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Bruce Baird
This is Dr. Bruce Baird with the productive dentist podcast episode 46 and today we’re talking about what is your 135? What do I mean by that? Well, what I mean is what’s your one year ago? What’s your three-year goal? And what’s your five-year goal? This is something that, you know, most individuals don’t do on a regular basis and it’s something that I’ve been doing now for, I guess probably the last 30 years. I started out by using yellow notepads, and the yellow notepads, I would write down, you know, these long lists of the things that I wanted to get accomplished this year, and the next 12 months, and I usually would do this in January of every year. As a matter of fact, the productive dentist, at our seminars and with our coaching clients, we actually do this every year with the office, we help design, what is your one-year goal? What are your three-year goals? And what are your five-year goals? The one-year goals are important you can even break them down into monthly goals, even hourly goals, but I’d like to have a one-year plan that says this is where I’d like to be and we’re not just talking about your dental practice, we’re also talking about any goals that you have, for instance, physical goals, you know, I’d like to weigh this much by the end of this year, you know, and then I break that down into quarterly goals, just say, okay, by the end of the first quarter, I’d like to be at this way, the end of the second quarter, not only weight-wise, but I’d also like to have increased my muscle mass by a certain amount, I would like to be doing my aerobic exercise. So that’s one another one might be your spiritual goals.

Dr. Bruce Baird
You know, I wanted to I want to attend church every Sunday, this year when I’m in town and I do that on a quarterly basis. If I don’t go, then I have to reestablish that. You know, I want to attend certain programs or certain opportunities, professional goals, I’d like to get through these courses. By the end of this year, I want to sign up and I want to get through all of these courses over the next 12 months. Now a lot of the things that I’m doing nowadays are a lot of online-type type stuff like online courses and those types of things. So when I look at my practice, I’m saying okay, our practice did, say 1 million last year. This year, I looked at all of my production by procedure reports, what procedures did we do this year? In other words, what procedures did we not do this year that ordinarily we do? And I check this every single year? I also predict what we’re going to produce for the year. In other words, how much are we going to produce this year? And when I say predict, how do you come up with a prediction that is accurate?

Dr. Bruce Baird
Well, you can’t do that. If you’re not tracking, you can’t do that. If you’re not looking at all the things that you do on a monthly basis, a daily basis. A lot of people say, Well, you know, I really have a daily goal. Yeah, and when you break it down to hourly, you know, well, it doesn’t really matter, truthfully, because you’re going to be looking at your goals on an ongoing basis during that time but I look at these days, so I know where we’re at. So let’s just say you had yourself and your associate and three hygienists. I set a production goal per hour. Say your goal is 700 an hour. What that means when you set a goal of 700 an hour, what that means is you’re committed to 700 hours, meaning if you’re going to work 128 hours this month, you have a goal of X amount for the month. I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you want to produce $90,000 in a month. Okay? And let’s say hygiene, your goal for hygiene is to do 15,000 Each per month and your associate was to do you know 50,000 For the month

Dr. Bruce Baird
and when I say supposed to do this is a commitment with the team And that says I will do that. So let’s just say it’s 90 and 50. That’s 140 plus another 45. That’s $185,000 in production and your practice, that’s a two, two and a half million dollar practice or 2.2 $2.3 million practice, this is a big deal. So as you look at this, and you say, I’m committed to this, that means if you go on vacation, and you’re only going to work 12 days instead of 16. That means you’re going to put your hourly production still to reach that $90,000 goal. Why do you want to do that? Well, from a financial standpoint, you’ve got to set your business up with a Budget to Actual and I’ll talk about that in future podcasts but you’ve got to know you know what you’re budgeting for, it helps you run your business, this old deal, I wrote a series of five articles in dental economics about what’s called the dental rollercoaster one month, we’re rich next month, we’re poor, we did great we did poor, we did great when you’re poor. That’s not the way to run a business. It’s stressful, it’s very difficult.

Dr. Bruce Baird
That’s when dentists say oh, just think I’ll go do something else. Or they go through these issues and so from my perspective, this is what is so important is to plan your plan and then to execute that plan and in business, do that in your life, do that in I’m working on my golf game and I really want to get my handicap down to a 10. Or whatever it is Be realistic. I mean, if you’re a 14, so you’re not going to be a 10 in two months but you could set that up and break it down. So that’s the one-year goals, what about three-year goals, those are when you start talking about educational goals, as well as your business, what I would love to have is a practice that’s doing two and a half million by this period of time three years from now and you can also break that down into 12 quarters and so you’re going to work this plan over a period of three years and so this is where you’re saying, I’d like to go through and I’d like to get all of John courses, courses are taken over the next three years, I have a goal of I want to go to become digitally proficient in dentistry, which is the new wave, the new way that things are being done is lots of things are being done digitally, from all on four all on six to Joe impressions, to Invisalign to clear aligner trays and trays, whatever it is making nightguards these are all things that are being done now digitally.

Dr. Bruce Baird
So you’re getting rid of all these impression materials it is so that that might be your goal over a three-year period and so that’s what I look at, what about over a five-year period? What are we looking at? Well, at five years, you want every time this all shift one year at a time. Does that make sense? So I’ve got a one-year goal, a three-year goal, and a five-year goal. At the end of that year, I now push out another one-year goal, another three-year goal, and another five-year goal. So by setting out what I want to be in five years, in five years, I would like to be doing community projects, I would like to behave a take-home pay of 600,000 a year, I would like to have you know my handicap down on my golf game down to town and being enjoyed and planning on playing at least once a week, or I want my weight to stay consistent X, I want to continue to do my exercise because the truth is, if your business is healthy, and you’re physically healthy, and you’re spiritually healthy, and you know you have your friends that you’re getting to spend time with, and you’re doing the things that you love. That is I mean, that’s living and so I really

Dr. Bruce Baird
I really implore you to set up this one, three, and five-year goals. Also set up an accountability partner, with your coach or with another dentist in your office. These are the things that I want to do for the office and make that become a vision. You know, one year maybe it’s quarterly but start out by putting your quarterly goals or your monthly goals on a piece of paper. This is what I wanted at the end of the month and so it is it’s a process that you go through to find out how much time do I want to have? How much how many days a week do I want to work? I know that if I’m doing 800 an hour, I’m making an amazing amount of revenue and take home. So do I need that revenue? Or do I would I rather have time with friends and time with family and that’s going to change you know over this 135 After you go through this process for 20 years, your needs and your wants and what successfully for you is going to change Have you fully funded your retirement plan you’ve put money away, you’ve done those things you may set up over this period of time and a five-year plan. If you’ve been in practice for a long time, you may be saying, Well, I sure would like to retire at this point. I see way too many doctors that get to that point is that, okay, I need to retire. Or something worse, they haven’t spent the time staying fit, they haven’t spent the time doing the things that they need to do for themselves and they, again, have difficulties. So you need to plan this out.

Dr. Bruce Baird
What I’ve chosen to do, remember is on a yearly basis, and then I break it down, I look at all of our production by procedure reports, I want to see exactly what our production was, and what’s interesting, Jeff Boesky, my partner, the first time he experienced this probably 15 years ago, I said, this is what we’re going to do and in December, we would always meet and we go through the same things that production by procedure, what new technology have we implemented? Are we using the technology that we talked about, let’s set our goal for this year and our goal might go up by 5% might go up by 8% might go up by 10%, dependent upon the procedures and what your goal is and so I remember setting it up and I told Jeff, I said next year, when we get to this point, you’re gonna see how predictable This is and sure enough, the next year, we got to the end of the year, and we had actually overshot our goals that we had, that we had set by about 10% 11%. So we literally kind of blew those goals out of the water. Now. That’s awesome. Because as a business, I planned on a number that’s a million dollars, I have expenses that I have to pay with that million-plus what I was I taking home, whatever that is and so I remember Jeff saying tally, we hit it. I mean, we nailed it. I said well, we only nailed it because we had the goal.

Dr. Bruce Baird
We knew where we were headed. We work together, daily, weekly, monthly, you know, to make sure we reach those goals. Sometimes I might take off, oh gosh, two weeks to go on vacation, and then I knew I only had a few days to work. So I pre-loaded my treatment into the next month. So I would put in the bigger treatment. In the bigger cases I’d have somebody that needed several implants and a bunch of crown and bridge or veneer case, I would say I was already on goal for this month. So I was telling him I said Mary, are you a year-round? I’d really like to do this on July 13 or 14th. That week, they’ll say yeah, I’m around or no, and then I’ll find another time but I’m pre loading that schedule so that I know consistently, over and over and over again, I’m going to be able to reach those goals and that helps you from a business standpoint. It helps you from a personal standpoint, family, friends, all of those things. So hopefully this has been this is just something that I’ve done for years and again, I started out with yellow notepads. Today, most of the time, it’s on software, of some type, usually an Excel spreadsheet. So I hope this helps and remember to sign up for the Productive Dentists Podcast, go to productive dentists.com If you’re interested in coming to one of our seminars, or coming to one of our pods, one of our workshops and I will listen I mean I will talk to you guys soon.

Dr. Bruce Baird
And thanks for listening. This is Dr. Bruce Baird here and I have a question for you. Do you feel like no matter how hard you try, you can’t get off the plateau and to the next level of your business. I get it. It can be incredibly frustrating to work harder and longer and not see any increase in your revenue but I do have great news for you. Productive dentist Academy is hosting a productivity workshop from September 22 through the 24th in Frisco, Texas, so you and your team can come to learn the tools and systems. You need to get your dental practice to the next level. We’ve been doing this for 18 years and it is a course that you really don’t want to miss, come learn for yourself what hundreds of other independent dentists have learned, you can get off the plateau. It’s just about knowing what levers to pull when you’re in business. To make things a little bit easier for you.

Dr. Bruce Baird
You sign up for the PDA productivity workshop we will give you access to PDA online for free and a two-hour comprehensive business advisory session so you can start increasing your revenue right now even before September. Again, sign up for the PDA workshop and you’ll get PDA online the advisory session is $2,500 value is our free gift for you. So save your seat and go towww.productivedentist.com/workshop now, that’s www.productivedentist.com/workshop This workshop is already 50% Full for September. So register today to secure your seat one last time visit www.productivedentist.com/workshop. Thank you for joining me for this episode of the Productive Dentists Podcast. If you found this episode helpful, make sure you subscribe and pass it along to a friend. Give us a like on iTunes and Spotify. Or drop me an email at podcast@productivedentist.com Don’t forget to check out other podcasts from the Productive Dentist Academy of productivedentist.com/podcasts/ Join me again next week for another episode of the Productive Dentists Podcast