Knowing that success in any dental practice really comes down to a chain of smaller successes, how would you feel about achieving a 90 percent success rate across the board in all the links in the chain listed below? After all, in just about any endeavor, if you are successful 90 percent of the time you are doing pretty well, right?If you invest in the following eight drivers of success to the highest level and with the greatest commitment, you will find that that is where greatness lies.
- Success in acquiring and retaining patients drives exams…
- Success in examinations drives diagnosis…
- Success in diagnosis drives treatment planning…
- Success in treatment planning drives presentations…
- Success in presentations drives case acceptance…
- Success in case acceptance drives your schedule…
- Success in scheduling drives productivity…
- Success in productivity drives your overall effectiveness…
If you are 90 percent effective at each one of these links and multiply that right down the chain, you actually come out with an overall effectiveness of just 43 percent. Giving 90 percent in each link might sound good, but this is a perfect example of how good is the enemy of great—as as Jim Collins wrote in his book, "Good to Great."
And it gets worse quickly. Change that success rate to 80 percent for each and you come out with only 17 percent overall. It is easy to see that the forces that drive success in the practice are all interconnected and being "good enough" at each only gets you to mediocrity in the end. This reality is rather eye-opening.
As I wrote in a previous article, consistency matters. What this proves is that consistency has to be at the right standards, too. You will never achieve perfection of course, but it is the drive for perfection that gets you to excellence.
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June 2nd, 2014