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A Minute (Or Two) With Colin Receveur, Episode 17

- How do you place higher in the organic search results is a good question to ask, but I think the better question is do you want to rank high just to rank high?

- In other words, I talk to a lot of dentists who hold up this sheet of paper that shows how many number one rankings they have, and it's almost like they got another degree to put on their wall.

- They got a diploma, a plaque, and I think they frame the report of how many number one rankings they have.

- And in reality that number one ranking isn't really getting them anything, because the unspoken truth of Google is it's not how many number one rankings you have.

- It's who are the patients that are actually searching for the terms that you're ranking for, and Google, it is operating in what's called a web 3.0 capacity, a semantic capacity, where they're not just looking at the keywords people search for anymore.

- They're looking at the last thing the person searched for, the place, the time.

- Google bought Nest, which means they know when you're home, they know when you're not home.

- They know more about why you're searching for what you're searching for.

- It's not about the keywords you type in. Those are still important, but keyword ranking reports are six to eight years deprecated.

- No good, because that's not how people search and think anymore. They use voice to text.

- Hey Siri, Hey computer. It's getting into the kind of Star Trek era, if you just talk to the computer.

- How do you improve your organic search ranking?

- Well, you have a comprehensive approach, looking at the great unique content you have, looking at link-building, looking at schemum, all these technical things.

- I'm not going to get into all that stuff. But you've got to have a comprehensive approach because you're not going to trick Google with a one hit wonder, like you used to be able to.

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A Minute (Or Two) With Colin Receveur, Episode 16

- Why does a practice want to grow? Why do they think they need to grow?

- I think the answer comes down to how they define success.

- Practices want to achieve a certain level, whether that level is growing to a million, a million and a half, two and a half, five, 10 million, have one successful practice, five successful practices, 50 successful practices.

- I think growth, achieving growth comes down to achieving their version of success.

- Some dentists are happy at $1 million, playing golf three days a week. That's awesome. - Some dentists want to build a DSO with 50 practices underneath them, and that's what they're looking at as success and, of course, everywhere in between.

- Growth is just a component of success.

- What is truly successful in your eyes may not be what is successful for another dentist, which means the plan to become successful is different for you.

- The GPS, if you will, if I'm in New York, my GPS to get to Miami is a lot different than if I'm starting in Kansas.

- Everybody has, they need a GPS of how to be successful. Ultimately, that plan is going to dictate how to get to where you want to go.

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A Minute (Or Two) With Colin Receveur, Episode 15

- When a practice is not achieving the level of success they want, maybe they're having cash flow issues.

- Maybe they're not hitting the financial milestones they want, maybe they have holes in their schedule, maybe their staff and the doctor just don't feel like they're busy enough.

- A lot of times, these problems come back to the patient's leaving out the back door and not new patients coming in the front door.

- The common mindset is, well, if I just had more new patients, I could fix all these problems, just spend more on marketing.

- That's oftentimes what a doctor comes to us and says. "Well, I thought I needed 30 new patients a month. I actually need 50 new patients a month."

- We've got a really, really cool graphic that we can do a snapshot of the practice and show, hey, here's the positive, how many patients you're gaining, and then here's also the negative, here's how many patients you're losing.

- Oftentimes, you see this line going along of new patients and it's about here, and then you see this line of losing patients and it's just growing and growing and growing.

- The practice is net losing 20, 30, 40, 50 new net patients a month because of the attrition going out the back door.

- And understanding the dynamics in the practice, if you're a practice that's trying to survive on just new patients alone, you better be prepared to spend on marketing because that's what drives that.

- If you're willing to look at other strategies to tightening up and pulling some different levers to making sure the patients aren't leaving after they come in, there's a lot cheaper ways to grow your practice.

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A Minute (Or Two) With Colin Receveur, Episode 14

- When we're looking at growing a practice, there are five metrics that we can grow any practice with, the five As.

- Answer, Appoint, Attend, Accept, and Average.

-When we're talking specifically about social media with those five things, which one of those five things is social media going to affect a change on?

- Which one of those five things is going to be able to increase?

- Answer. We're not going to be able to answer more calls because your social media is great.

- Appoint. We may be able to appoint more patients because we'll get inquiries or whatnot through social media.

- Attend. Probably not going to do any appointment reminders through Facebook, so we're not going to see anything there.

- Accept and average, again, not going to see a whole lot of change there.

- The goal is to either get new patients to schedule more or get existing patients to schedule more.

- And within that parameter, social media can be effective at doing just that, either finding new patients or retaining existing patients and keeping them in the ecosystem, getting them rescheduled.

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A Minute (Or Two) With Colin Receveur, Episode 13

- I think the biggest thing any dentist who wants to rapidly, incrementally or exponentially increase their skills on answering, appointing, attending, acceptance, or average is first accept that they want to change something.

- If you don't recognize that there's an opportunity for a change, you can't improve it.

- A great example is we all operate at what we think is our peak potential...

- Nobody comes to work and thinks, "Man, I really suck at this today. I'm doing an awful job, and I can't improve it."

- Very few people think that way. Because, we all think we're doing the best we can or the right thing, until we're shown otherwise, that there's opportunity to increase.

- What I'm referring to is just recognizing that there's an ability to improve upon where we've been before.

- Yeah, you can rapidly improve anything you want to improve, if you first recognize and accept that there is opportunity for improvement.

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A Minute (Or Two) With Colin Receveur, Episode 12

- And how many hours a week should you be spending doing your marketing in your dental practice?

- I would say the better question to ask than that would be how many hours a week do you not want to be doing dentistry in your practice?

- And by not doing dentistry, I don’t mean playing golf or driving your sports car or enjoying time at your daughter’s dance recitals or your son’s soccer game.

- I mean, how many hours a week do you want to be in the practice working and not producing income, revenue, money for your practice because you’re not doing dentistry. - So if you want to be working and not producing money 10 hours a week, then divvy up that 10 hours a week amongst all the things you want to do.

- If you’re one of those dentists that wants to be as productive as possible and maximize your earning potential…

- ...maximize the amount of money you’re creating and the value you’re creating, not only for yourself and your team, but also the value that you’re creating for your patients, right, because when you’re doing dentistry, you’re creating value in helping your patients...

- Then I would tell you to minimize the amount of time you spend on your marketing.

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A Minute (Or Two) With Colin Receveur, Episode 11

Higher – better – dental practice numbers are great, but only if you’re tracking the ones that really matter. Learn why the 5 A’s are the ones to watch… closely.

- The biggest five metrics that every practice needs to pay attention to is this; they need to pay attention to the rate at which the staff answers their phone during business hours.

- All too often the staff is overloaded, they're checking somebody out, they're handling multiple tasks.

- It's why the BatLine concept that we teach is so powerful and profitable.

- Because first off, so many practices don't even know how many calls they're answering or not answering.

- Or they hope and think they're answering all the calls, which in fact they are not.

- The second metric that they need to be paying attention to is the appointing rate.

- Again, so many practices think and hope because they did pass training on appointing of patients, that it's going well.

- And in reality they're really appointing at 30 or 40%, and they're leaving a whole lot on the table in terms of opportunity for growth.

- The third metric that really have to hone in on is attending. I see so many Practices that have 15 or 20% cancellation, and no shows in their practice.

- It's really, really difficult to overcome that if you're answering and appointing, but then the attendance rate is just flopping.

- Oftentimes the attending is one of the easiest steps to fix of all the five A's.

- The fourth is we got to look at case acceptance, and we need to further break that down into hygiene and restorative case acceptance.

- We need to look at the different sides of this to make sure that our hygiene is producing where it needs to be, as well as our restorative also producing where it needs to be.

- And then the fifth item is average. The average treatment value, the average visit value of our patients.

- This is really critical because if your average visit value takes a swing ... let's say you're an average practice seeing 500 patient visits per month, which is around a million, or a million and a half, or a $2 million Practice, depending on what your model is.

- If you're a volume practice or more of a higher value practice. An average Practice doing 500 visits a month, a $50 deviation in your average visit value is $20,000 a month in revenue.

- If you don't understand average visit value and how acceptance, and attendance, and appointing, and answering plays into that, you're going to have a roller coaster of a year. - That's why it's so critical to look after the five A's; Answer, Appoint, Attend, Accept, and Average.

- And that's why the top 1% of Practices around the country are doing just that, and that's why they're in the top 1%.

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A Minute (Or Two) With Colin Receveur, Episode 10

There’s many a slip between the ring and the answer. Most dentists seriously overestimate the percentage of calls that are actually answered.

- I was giving a seminar last month and I asked the crowd, I said, what percentage of your phones do you think are answered during business hours?

- I said raise your hand if you think 95% to 100% of your phones are answered during business hours.

- And about a half to two thirds of the room, a half to three quarters of the room, raised their hand, that 95% to 100% of their phone calls during business hours were being answered in their practice.

- I said okay, how many of you think 90% to 95% of your calls are being answered?

- A couple people raised their hand.

- Then I said how many of you feel that under 90% of your calls during business hours are answered?

- I bet there were maybe three people in a room of 450 dentists actually raised their hand.

- So then I advanced the slide on my presentation and I showed them the reality of where the average practice is in the United States today.

- The average practice answers 66% of their phone calls during business hours.

- The top 10% in the United States based on a sampling of almost 20,000 practices, a top 10% practice is at 90% to 91%.

- An average 50th percentile practice is at 66%, and the bottom 10% are at 34%.

- When I showed these stats, nobody, nobody thinks that that is their practice.

- Nobody even can dream of thinking.

- Let me tell you, of the 20,000 practices that were a part of our study, the top performing practice, the single top performing practice, answered 96% of their calls.

- 96% is the top during business hours.

- I think that just goes to show you like what percentage of calls should I be answering?

- Well, the answer is all of them.

- What percentage of the calls in your practice can you answer?

- Well, if you have the right processes and the right training and the right people, and you use something similar to what we teach with our Bat Line system, which is extremely effective, you can get to 90% or 95%.

- Should you be answering more? Ah, I don't like the word should. It implies I'm not doing something right.

- If the top 10% of the practices in this country are growing at 35% year over year and they're answering 90% to 92% of their calls during business hours, that's pretty good in my book.

- I think that's where you need to really aim for is let's be in the top 20%, let's be in the top 10%. Answering 100% isn't practical.

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A Minute (Or Two) With Colin Receveur, Episode 9

Your dental practice team aren’t robots, and expectations of performance without coaching, support, and accountability are futile. Beware the dreaded spreadsheet.

- Spreadsheet accountability is one of my favorite topics.

- Spreadsheet accountability is what so many consultants preach out there against.

- It goes like this. Doctor's not happy with what staff is doing. So doctor hires consultant.

- Consultant comes in and creates a mathematical model and a spreadsheet of exactly what the staff needs to do to produce the results that the doctor and the practice want and need.

- Doctor takes spreadsheet and hands it to the staff and says, "Here. Go do this." And they wonder why that doesn't work.

- Spreadsheet accountability, spreadsheet driven businesses never work because we're not dealing with cells on a spreadsheet.

- We're dealing with people and we're dealing with behavior that we have to change, right?

- If your staff knew what they need to do to drive the outcome you wanted, they'd be doing it.

- I promise you with 99.99% accuracy that your staff is not coming to the office every day and saying to their coworkers, "I hope I suck today and I don't do anything that the doctor wants me to do. And that I don't drive towards the goals that we have."

- No, none of them are saying that, minus the 0.001% of truly bad apples that are out there.

- They're coming to the office every day and they're doing the best they think they can do.

- And if you hand them a spreadsheet and say, "You know Susie, you're only selling two crowns right now. You actually need to be selling four. Go do this."

- No, they're not going to work.

- And this is why so many doctors that try to implement spreadsheet accountability, their staff revolts, they have a coup d'etat on their hands, and their staff leaves and the doctor's frustrated and the staff's frustrated and it doesn't work.

- It never will work because that's not the problem.

- The problem is not they know they need to be selling more crowns.

- The problem is much deeper.

- And you've got to get to that deeper problem to solve the issue that's going on there.

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A Minute (Or Two) With Colin Receveur, Episode 8

If there’s one thing that abounds, it’s misinformation. And trying to grow your practice with bad information is not going to get you where you want to go.

- I was talking to a doctor in a Midwest city last week.

- We're talking about practice and goals and where he wants to get to, and I said, "What do you want to do?"

- He said, "Well, I want to I want to grow my practice."

- I said, "Okay, how many patients are you seeing a month right now?"

- He said, "Well, I'm seeing about 30 new patients a month."

- I said, "What's an average value of a new patient to you?"

- He said, "Oh, we have a really great value. It's about $2,400. We give great care, we have a great team, and when our patients come to us, we really take good care of them." - I said, "Man, you're seeing 30 new patients a month, $2,400 average value, this is great. Where do you want to get to?" and we established that.

- Anyway, jumped forward.

- We did a snapshot of his practice, looked at all of his data, analyzed everything, and then we came back to him with a plan to getting from where he's at now to where he wants to be.

- What I thought was interesting in the plan was that when we actually looked at what his practice was doing, instead of doing 30 new patients a month like he thought, he was actually doing an average of 14 new patients a month over the last six months.

- He thought he was getting 30. He was actually averaging 14, which meant some months he was down in the single digits.

- His average patient value, what he thought was $2,400, was actually $1,580, almost half of where he was at.

- When I get asked the question, what do you think doctors are missing about growing their practice?

- I think the biggest component, the biggest piece of the puzzle are missing is the data.

- If I'm trying to fly a little Cessna airplane, I can probably get in it and figure out the joysticks, and how to fly, and the flaps, and I can probably fly with no instrumentation and I can probably take off and land it – I've never flown a plane in my life – with pretty reasonable chance of surviving and not dying.

- Much like many dentists are able to start up a practice and they do 500, or a million, or a million and a half, or some dentists that are exceptional business folks get to several million dollars without any kind of coaching or planner process.

- If you're trying to fly a fighter jet and you're trying to do it without dials and gauges and instrumentation, your dashboard in front of you, you're going to crash it before you ever take off.

- That's the difference between the practice that you probably have now and the practice that you want to get to, is what's missing is where you're starting.

- If you're trying to get to Miami, the GPS is a lot different from New York versus Topeka, Kansas.

- If you don't know where you're starting, you don't have the data to understand what you need to correct to go get to that 2 million, or 4 million, or $10 million practice.

- That's the piece that so many dentists and small businesses are missing. It's just understanding where they're starting.