It is ‘easy’ (easy, especially with our help) to plan what you want to achieve, set goals and outline what your dream life and practice looks like. Then comes the harder part…translating the dream vision into reality.

Where should you start?

If you’ve set goals and outlined your dream practice with us in a strategy session or at one of our workshops we would have checked with you that the goals are what you REALLY want.

Far too often plans are based on what you think others expect of you, society expects or what your colleagues have done. And ‘should’ goals are therefore set. ‘Should’ goals can end up being challenging to achieve because you don’t actually have the deep desire to achieve them.

Have a look at this YouTube clipwhich really gets you to think how badly you want to achieve your goals and gets you to think about what success really is for you. Are your goals ‘want’ goals?

Break the goals down into key milestones

Sometimes goals can seem really daunting and almost unbelievable until you look at the stepping stones along the way.

As an example, if you want to increase your turnover by doubling it in the next three years, what does that mean for year two and what does it mean for the next twelve months? How many new patients will you need each month and each week?  This will then give you an indication of the level of marketing you need to do.

Have a dashboard to monitor progress

How will you know how you are doing against your goals? We are passionate about helping our clients come up with a simple one-page dashboard in order to have a very simple view of progress being made.

What are the key indicators that will help you to know that you’re on track or not and if not will give you the impetus to do something about it and get back on the correct pathway? How will you know you’re achieving your goals?

Some of the indicators might be your turnover, your profit, your number of new patients and treatments, number of cancellations, the percentage of active patients, the saturation of the clinic and each practitioner, patient visit average to name a few!

Managing your 86400 seconds a day

We all have the same number of seconds in a day, yet some people seem to get so much more done. One of the first things to check is that you are the right person for all the tasks you do.

Often when we start working with practice owners they are doing absolutely everything because it costs money for someone else to do it.

Your time would most likely be far better spent doing the higher value tasks that will reap long term rewards rather than doing the cleaning, the books, general admin etc. Evaluate how you spend your day and ditch or delegate tasks which you really do not have to do or do yourself.