A Lesson in Consistency

Suppose I offered you three million dollars today – don't get too excited, this is just a thought experiment. Now suppose I made you another offer; instead of the three million now, I would give you one penny and would double that amount every day for a month. Which would you rather have?

You probably think that there is a catch here and that the second offer is probably better, and you would be right. Most people are still astonished to discover how much better that second offer actually is. After doubling the amount for 31 days, that original penny would have snowballed into more than 10.7 million dollars. Now of course you don't usually find compounding opportunities like this in real life, but it is an example that serves to illustrate the incredible power of geometric progression.

I have been teaching this concept for more than 30 years. I always try to drive home the point that it is about steady consistency and understanding the value of each increment. In this example, the big money doesn't start occurring until the last few days, but each doubling along the way is essential to reaching that final figure.

To take a closer look at the implications of not being consistent—or rather, of being consistently inconsistent—let's use an example from real life in a dental office.

If you have one patient this week that doesn't show up for a hygiene appointment, that will cost you around $125 in lost revenue. That amount doesn't seem like a lot in the course of a busy week, so it's easy to just let it go.

But what if that once-a-week no-show happens routinely? Now you are talking $500 a month. Extrapolated over 20 years at 6 percent interest, that comes out to more than $231,000 in lost revenue and this does not include lost clinical opportunities that may have come from those hygiene visits. To put it bluntly, allowing one missed hygiene appointment a week can end up being almost a quarter-of-a-million-dollar mistake. I have seen enough practices that have practically eliminated this problem to know that it is possible to conquer the no-show issue.

Just think for a moment about the effect that kind of revenue will have on your retirement fund or on your ability to grow the practice over the years. Whether we're talking about multiplying pennies into millions or multiplying hygiene appointments into lifelong sustainable revenue, the lesson here is that consistency counts and every win matters.