... continued f rom cover my wife Elizabeth, “the engineer.” We were on a path toward freedom. And then, out of the blue, my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. My father wasn’t a dentist (and it’s a long story), but he was the owner of a practice 45 minutes west of mine. He’d been healthy (or so we all thought) until the day he was diagnosed. We always knew things were financially tight for him, but he’d been too proud to ever tell us how bad things really were. He called us to his bedside at the Mass General Hospital during his final days and told us that his practice was really struggling. He had a lot of debt and no retirement put away for my mom, and he had canceled his life insurance years prior. His dying wish was for us to turn his practice around, just as I’d done for my mine. He asked me to build financial security for my mother. I called that practice my negative inheritance. The day we took it over, I wrote a check for $100,000 from my account to his … just to keep the doors open. We inherited a failing business, but we weren’t about to let that stop us. We did what we had learned to do: We went in and turned his practice around. My mother needed something to live on. We’d promised my father, and we were determined to come
through for them both. We dove in and transformed his failing practice into a profitable business within just a few years. It was neither witchcraft nor magic — we applied a hefty dose of what Elizabeth calls “willful suspension of disbelief.” We paid no attention to the apparent differences between our two practices. We simply applied the “Gems” that had already proven successful in the first practice to our second. Our mindset was never going to be fixed and limited about what we could accomplish. If you want to successfully serve your patients at the highest possible level and grow your revenue, you must dispel limiting beliefs. Thoughts like, “That may have worked for them, but that’ll never work for us,” or, “We can never make that much money with only a few chairs (or a small team or with our patients)” will hold you back from achieving the level of practice and income you deserve. Our Insiders’ Circle TM Team Training Toolkit is only as useful as your belief in its ability to affect your practice and your life. If you are willing to cast off your limiting beliefs, the tools and systems we share can help you reach or exceed the practice and life of your dreams. That’s what we did for our family, and that’s what we aim to do for you and yours.
If You Had to Do It All Over Again …
By Tom Rich, MBA
Regardless of what your schedule looks like or the balance of your bank account (personal or practice), this is the one thing you know for certain: You have earned the right to be called “doctor.” You are improving your patients’ health and lives each and every day. What they didn’t tell you in dental school is that the earning potential and personal satisfaction of that title is directly proportional to your ability to harness opportunity. That’s why it’s critical to remember you have control; it’s your name on the door. Your patients come to see you. They trust and need you to do what only you can. The best part is that you don’t have to do it alone. In fact, you shouldn’t. It may be hard to believe, but the most successful, satisfied, and profitable dentists have discovered they can do more for their patients and have more time, money, satisfaction, and freedom … while working less.
When I ask dentists to finish that thought, many of the dentists I talk to say they would have taken a slightly different path. Some wish they had been more aggressive in marketing, team training, or leadership. Others say they should have been more cautious about who they trusted, how they made decisions, or the business risks they took. Both types of answers are completely understandable.
The most heartbreaking answer I ever heard was “I would have picked a different profession.”
No doubt, dentistry isn’t as easy as it was in the ‘80s, ‘90s, or before the Great Recession. But that doesn’t mean it has to be hard. Those who want to throw in the towel or dream about a life where they went down a different path have forgotten the nobility and prestige of the profession. They’re looking at what’s missing rather than what they achieved.
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