Dr's Consulting Insider Tip: Learn the #1 Rule to Successfully Expand to Multiple Dental Practices.

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As a younger dentist, having a successful private practice lead to a desire to expand. If you are good at one dental location, maybe you'll be good at two dental locations. Then you can hire and help other dental associates. Let me just explain a little bit of my journey in trying to expand into two, three, and ultimately four offices and some of the challenges that came along with that. Want you need to think about if you're thinking of the same thing is that you want to just start to duplicate your success and it's not as easy as it looks because we all get intoxicated by all these DSOs, these dental service organizations out there that have 10, 50, 100, a 1,000 dental offices that we think, if that dentist and that dental group went from one office to a 1,000 offices, then why can't I do it?

There's a couple of shortcomings to this whole entire thing. The explanation from my own personal experience where my shortcomings were can be helpful. The biggest shortcoming that I had is, although I thought I had systems in place, I had no systems in place. What is a system? Well simply put for us little dentist, is that a system is how do you do things? For example, what's the policy about taking radiographs inside your office? Is it written down? Is a dental assistant that you would hire new, would she or he be able to follow that really simply? Most dentists don't have these systems or these policies written down. When they hire a new dental assistant or dental hygienist or admins to work the front desk, there's no policies for these people to follow.

Before you decide that you really want to expand big, even going from one to two offices, unless you decide to write down the policies that you have for each procedure inside that office, you are not going to be able to grow. Going from one to two offices, you can be okay trying to manage that and splitting my time. As well as having an associate that worked out okay. Going from two to three offices was an exponential aggravation increase. Expanding from three to four you start to truly dislike dentistry. The reason you'll dislike it is because as an administrator and owner of the entire organization, the lack of any system in place cause aggravation. What did it really mean to the hygienist?

The hygienist, the dental assistants and the admins, they want to follow the rules, but unless they know what the rules are, they decide to do things on their own. Now all of a sudden a hygienist is not taking blood pressure on a patient when they come in. The dental hygienist is deciding that we're not going to probe every patient every single time. That breakdown in systems does two things, causes me as the owner an enormous amount of frustration because I knew that when I did it the original way in my one office, everything worked out great. We had an amazing hygiene program and patients loved us. When you start to expand, all of a sudden the hygienist didn't know what to do so they took it upon themselves to decide what they wanted to do. Well, that was a problem because now the quality that you wanted to give patients wasn't being duplicated from office to office to office.

Although among our little dental colleagues we hate to talk about franchising and trying to have a franchise model. But when you think about it, when you go to a McDonald's, Burger King or Kentucky Fried Chicken the experience is exactly the same. What you need to be able to do in your dental office is to create that experience every single time when a patient comes in to matter what location. The only way that happens is by having systems and policies written down so that the people that work for you can follow the systems and policies that you want as an office owner or as a small dental group. The first and hardest thing to do is to sit down, literally sit down at a computer and start writing up policies for every single thing that you do. Once you do that, then take the next step about growing your practice into multiple locations.

In our next video, we're going to talk about hiring dental associates and how to incentivize them. How to keep them believing in your vision and making them part of your vision. If you like what I'm talking about, go ahead and click the like and subscribe to our YouTube channel. But I really want to talk to you about the next step, which is hiring associates.