The Investment Grade Practice

Your business is your greatest asset. So ask yourself this: Is your business something that is going to last? Is it a business other people would want to buy? All smart entrepreneurs want to build a business that is so structurally sound that anyone could run it successfully. So today, I’m going to talk about:

• What an investment grade business is
  
• Why it makes for a better business model
• What you can do to make sure you’re building your practice as an investment

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Hi, this is Dr. Bruce Baird with the Productive Dentist Podcast. Looking for a fantastic new year, you can tell my sinuses, I’m in North Texas, the cedar trees are doing their thing. And so I’ve been kind of down and out for a week or so.

But what I want to do is today I want to talk about something that at Productive Dentist Academy we’ve been doing now for really the last couple of years, but it’s how to build an investment grade business. And when we say investment grade business, it’s just like if you had any type of business, whether it would be a furniture store, whether it be worth anything to build an Investment Grade Business, what does that mean? Well, what it means is, is it a business that other people would want to buy? and and you know from my perspective, and is it a bit is is it a business that’s going to last the EMF, great book, I’ve recommended it several and several other podcasts.

But the EMF you can read the E myth revisited. You can meet read the E myth for dentists, I think they have one like that. But bottom line is you want to build a business that has systems so built in place. So So structurally sound that anybody can do that job. Now, it’s true. Not just anybody can do any job. But through training, and we’ve talked about this over and over the last couple of years. But it’s it’s so important to spend that time training your team and spend the time to get them to do things the way you want it done, but also the most effective for the business.

I’ll tell you, you know when over the last 15 years as we built our team, and as we got our systems to be finely tuned and and as all of that happened, it still didn’t occur to me. I still thought that when I left that left the handpiece down when I put the handpiece down, and when I decided to step away from clinical dentistry. I thought the practice would crater. And this was just my own personal thought. And to my surprise, I learned a very valuable lesson. What I learned was if you build an Investment Grade Practice, it will continue on even past your time there. I know Dr. Jeff Buski my partner, I mean, his productivity has skyrocketed since I left and and the entire office.

You know, yes, productivity went down because I was such a high producer on those two days a week. But we brought in a couple associates and now the productivity is back to the time even before I hung the handpiece up. So it was an eye opener for me because I really thought Oh, I’m so valuable and so important. But you know, if you build an investment grade business, that means another person could come in and buy that business. And with some training that Dr. Buski and I had worked together for a long time. So he It was a natural progression for him.

But then we brought in another doctor, Dr. Grammer who has had a lot of experience he’s been practicing and just moved to the area and I’ve got 25 plus years of experience. He just stepped in and is taken off. So it’s true. It’s going to take a little bit of time for dentist to understand the systems but once they do, productivity takes off and any business now I look at I look at our opportunities that we have, and in helping and taking care of patients. The you know, we’re all doing different treatment planning. We’re all doing different things. So all of our treatment plans are different. But if you have the systems in place the systems for collections, the systems for case presentations, the systems for know, recare, the systems for perio recall for treatment pending?

These are immune dentistry is not that complicated. Yes, there, we probably have 10 systems in our business. And when I put the hand piece up, I felt like on a scale of one to 10. I’m never gonna say 10. But I would say most of those systems are running at an eight or nine, maybe even one, close to a 10. Because we follow up and we make sure that are we making the phone calls when we’re supposed to make the phone calls? Are we reviewing charts the night before our patients show up?

In our morning meetings, are we talking about the things that we need to be talking about that increases productivity, and not only increases productivity, but increases patient acceptance, and not to the treatment plans, but patient acceptance of your business and your team, and everybody that works with you, you want to have a certain air or a certain feeling that that just exudes from your business. I love the fact that our business is it’s kind of like family, you know, it wasn’t like that 25 years ago. But it’s much more like that now. And you know, I do miss going in and doing surgery and doing full smiles. I miss doing that. I love that. But I miss more the relationships I had with my patients.

And the relationship I had with my team. That’s been the hardest thing for me stepping away, not not really the dentistry, but just the interaction, the human interaction, and taking care of people and taking care of each other. And, you know, I use the term uncommon, and surrounding yourself with uncommon people. It’s something that I tried to do early on in my career. And I probably had quite a few uncommon people that came to work for me. But I was a crappy Boss, I was a poor leader. So I didn’t allow that uncommon person to really show what they could do. And I hear this way too often in dentistry of if I could just get my team to do that. And if I could just get my team to do that, if I could just get them to do this. And the truth is, most of our problems, and I’ve said this many times, most of the problems are right between our own ears. It’s you know, and I can speak for myself.

I mean, some of you guys are just natural born leaders. I wasn’t, but I feel like I’ve worked extremely hard to become a much better leader. And I know Dr. Basically has I know that. Really, some of that is just maturity. Some of those as we get older, we’ve been beaten up so many times, we start to understand how important relationships are, we start to understand, you know, how taking care of people, how it feels, and how it feels when they’re taking care of you. I told the story probably in one of the first podcast, but there was a time in my business where we lost our computers went down. And we lost two days of data. And it was on a Friday. I came in Monday morning, and I start seeing patients.

And I had no clue that my entire team had been up there the entire weekend, recreating all the data, meaning patients names, patient nodes of charges, you know, now at that time, we did have paper charts we were writing in there. So that allowed us to put things into the computer, but it was a nightmare for them. For me. I had built that family type deal where they were like, Oh my gosh, we won’t be able to work and that is uncommon effort. Or the time that I found somebody in on a Saturday I go up to the office just to check out some things and look at my charts for Monday and look at my records for Monday. And there was somebody in the equipment room cleaning the floor that worked for us. And she said and I said what are you doing here? It’s Saturday, you know, get out of here, go home, what are you doing? She said, Well, there was some some oil and one of the oil out of the compressor something and it leaked onto the floor in there and she just didn’t want that to be there. So she went in and played it.

Again, uncommon effort. So I see way too many people right now, saying I want to open up business number two, I want to open up business number three. And number four, I want to have 10 practices. I listened to a guy this morning on a on a webinar. And it was interesting. He immediately went, got one practice, and he was doing doing very well, he took home 600,000. And he was like, Man, that’s great, I’m gonna open up more, he opened up to more with intentions of opening the app six to eight to 10. And then after a couple of years, he got the epiphany that, you know, if I had a one really good practice, you know, of which I’ve known, you know, because if I have one really good practice, I could probably profit as much as if I had five or six.

And believe me, the DSOs out there are looking at your business models, they’re looking at how your business is run. And if you’re building an investment, right business, what does that do to your value, it is so much higher value, because most of the time, you’re able to do more on less, meaning you have less team members, but you’re doing actually more productivity, that means your overhead is lower means your profits are higher. All of these things lead to people who look at your business and go, wow, you know, I have no issue or it might be for all of you Doc’s that have owner Doc’s that have associates. You don’t think that associate knows what’s going on in that business, real hard to get an associate to buy in what do you think’s the real, real hard to get him to buy in with you sees all of the warts and all the bad things are going on in the office. But if you can build that type of an investment grade business, they see this thing runs beautifully.

Now two things will happen. One, they’ll see the value, and then you know, they’ll want to buy in and become a partner. The other option is that Dennis, who’s never been an associate before that’s sitting in your office, and they’re your associate, and they look at this, and they say, well, that’s easy. So easy how you do that Doc, it’s easy, I’m going to open up my own practice. And then they realize it’s not so easy. So it, you really have to, to build an investment grade business. And I’ve said this like 50 times, but investment grade business, you’ve got to put the time in, you’ve got to dedicate yourself, because what it ultimately ends up doing is it makes for a better team.

It makes for better patients that come in because they expect things to be a certain way. It reduces stress in the practice, you’re not catching up during lunch and catching up at the end of the day who wants to buy into that business? Not me. And that’s really what productive dentist you know, we have our foundations course that we do online, which you can go to productive dentist, I think forward slash foundations. We’re doing a new one April, I think it’s April 13. But don’t, don’t hold me to that. And this course is totally about building your vision and, and setting up what kind of business do you want to have. And it doesn’t matter if you’ve been in practice 30 years or three months, you need to have these things crystal clear in your mind.

So that when you start to hold people accountable, if they understand the vision, it’s so much easier for them to, to to help you in their business. And it becomes they have more organizational interest. They if they feel like they’re a part of building it. It’s not about money anymore. It’s about recognition. It’s about all of those things. So hopefully this has been an interesting podcast today. It’s something that I believe has really changed Productive Dentist Academy over just this last few years. Because we’re seeing all these Doc’s opening up multiple offices and they were struggling in their first office makes no sense. What I would do, if I had that inkling to do it, I’d build one that was just not down just as close as I could get to where I want it to be. Then duplicated, then duplicate it bring people in that can help you duplicate that. So anyway, I hope you guys have a great week. It’s gonna be it’s gonna be a good one around here. We’ve got great weather I might even get out and play around a golf so if you have any questions, please send the questions to bruce@productivedentist.com.

I get questions every week. And it’s about time that I do a Q&A podcast just on questions that people have about how do I do this or what do I do? So thank you guys. I look forward to talking to you guys next week. Remember, this is Dr. Bruce B. Bayer the productive dentist signing off but before I do, make sure you go to our website, productive dentist podcast.com give us a like and we look forward sharing some more information with you on our next podcast.