The road to success begins with a Best Practice Health Check

As the business owner of your dental practice, it's your responsibility to be the visionary - to look forward and see the bigger picture. It's your job to spot problems and find solutions, to define business strategy and set goals for the future. The only person who will be genuinely motivated to grow your business is you.

To successfully grow a business to the "next level", it is essential to play to your strengths. While nobody knows the ins and outs of your business like you, it's OK to admit that there may be some areas where others can support you with their specialist knowledge and support.

Growth takes place in a number of different ways and the secret is to work out what the best route is for your business. In this modern age of technology, solutions often fall into the "work smarter, not harder" category. There are often keys that can drive efficiency in your business sitting in plain sight. The answer is to find an advisor who can provide a neutral, outside perspective. Someone who has your best interests at heart.

We often find excuses to not seek outside expertise. Common ones include "I don't have enough time" and "nobody can do it as well as I can". What these mean in reality is that we are allowing distractions to get in the way of driving the practice's optimum performance.

In dentistry, principals would be over the moon if a few key criteria were met: Patient recalls just automatically happened; new patients self-booked appointments around the clock; and chair-time utilisation was fully optimised. And of course, a happy practice manager who has the entire operation under control.

The good news is that Software of Excellence (SOE) can help achieve this. SOE's specialty lies in optimising dental practice performance in several key areas. The first is in driving recall effectiveness, where their research shows that average practices run at just 57 percent efficacy, compared with top-performers, which achieve recall rates of over 85 percent. The next is in ensuring optimum chair-time utilisation, where "next level" performers regularly see in excess of 90 percent utilisation. And the third is in helping practices attract a regular flow of new patients, market effectively to existing patients and monitor overall practice performance.

"One way we help our clients achieve these impressive results is through our Best Practice Health Checks provided at no cost," said Software of Excellence General Manager Jonathan Engle. "We have a drive for optimum business performance and we want to help turn your good practice into a great business, with maximum efficiency, performance, and profitability. One of the ways we support our customers is by offering Best Practice Health Checks to practices who want to take their performance to a higher level."

"We identify areas for improvement and recommend best practice strategies based on global research from over 1,500 dental practices across Australia, New Zealand, and the UK.

"We've helped numerous practices globally and regadless of which practice management software you are utilising, we encourage all business owners and principal dentists to participate in one if they haven't done so already."