Have you ever had the experience of a downturn in September? I sure have. I’ve charted out the last 10 years of production and it always seemed like there was about a 10-15% drop in average production in September: I could never figure out why.
For the last 2 years, I’ve been dedicated to fighting the belief that this was going to happen. I’m set again this year to make sure it doesn’t. If there is a slower production month, it won’t be for lack of trying.
So this year, I’m trying 3 strategies that will hopefully mean that September is either average or above average:
- Invisalign and 3-D Scans: This year we are going to make a huge push to scan every patient with wellness scans. This isn’t going to be a heavy push to sell tons of cases, but just to focus on education and recordkeeping. Just by scanning and teaching, this will help us to educate patients on their bite, their esthetics, and how we can help them achieve better outcomes through Invisalign or clear aligners.
- Financing: We just signed up with Proceed Finance. Thankfully, we have a good partnership with them through DSN, and so I’m just getting on-boarded now and adding it to our financial menu. With another financing option, hopefully patients will start to accept higher dollar amounts of treatment. Proceed Finance helps to cover the costs of treatment all the way up to $75,000. Just yesterday, we had a patient get approved for $18,000: more than enough to get 2 implants and a 4 unit bridge. (The great thing is that it was both instant, and easy to get going for the patient.)
- Solid-Unified Treatment Planning: We are planning on getting every doctor and hygienist together for a meeting and going over good treatment planning techniques and reviewing our Calibration Manual. We have about a 110 page manual that goes over every sort of clinical outcome and procedure, and so we will pick 2-3 patients and go through a treatment plan to make sure we agree on how it was done. This will help make sure patients always receive the same treatments from us.
If this helps smooth out the production over the course of the year, it will be a win. However even if it doesn’t, these practices are solid habits to build into your practice everyday.
I hope that you can take these ideas into your practice and help make “Sucktember” a thing of the past!