As a dentist, there are many tactics you can adopt to cut down on your expenses, increase your revenues and earn more profits from your practice. These include offering easy payment options to your customers, acquiring dental equipment by lease finance, getting more referrals and so on. Below we take a detailed look at 6 ways which you can use to make your dental practice more profitable –
Be Unique: Try to differentiate yourself from other dental clinics. This can be done by various methods. For example, you can offer a wider range of dental care option than the rest of the clinics in the region, or you can specialize in a few select procedures and become the best dental service in the area. Whatever it is that you do, try to make the patients feel that your dental service offers them something that they don’t get at other clinics. And when you are successful in creating such an impression in the minds of the customers, you will succeed in attracting more people to your clinic.
Easy Payment Options: Don’t limit the payment options of your patients to just cash alone. Offer them additional ways to pay your fees like credit cards, debit cards, online transfer, cheque and so on. They will be more comfortable with this many payment options available to them. If possible, get in an arrangement with a financing company so that you can offer them high-priced services with a monthly payment option. This is sure to boost your revenues since the patients don’t have to worry about securing finance from a third party for any procedure.
Expense Control: As with any other business, try to control your expenses while maintaining the highest quality of service. Look at where you can cut costs and implement them. If you are starting out, it might be a good idea for you to obtain your dental equipment by lease finance. By doing so, you will only need to pay a fixed monthly payment as acquisition cost of the equipment instead of wasting capital. Plus, you can also replace the equipment easily with no extra investment.
Good Staff: This is a very important factor you should keep in mind. Ensure that all your staff are well trained and have a professional and pleasing behavior. When a patient visits your clinic, most of their time is likely to be spent in the waiting room where your staff will be. If the staff are very friendly with them, able to strike up a conversation and get into their good side, they will enjoy the visits and will have a positive outlook towards your clinic. But in contrast, if the staff appear too cold, uncaring and unprofessional, the patients will have a very unfavorable view. This is why having a good staff is important. And this is one of the few situations where you can go a little overboard with your budget if it means you can get the best people as your staff.
Easy Scheduling: Make the scheduling process easy for the patients. If they find it very tough to schedule an appointment with you, they may look for other clinics. This is especially true for first time patients. Don’t just offer a telephone appointment option for them. Instead, provide them the ability to schedule appointments online. There are many companies who offer such online scheduling services for a small monthly fee. Sign up for them, set up your account and let your patients schedule appointments with you at their comfort.
Referral Customers: One way to quickly grow your dental practice is to have your existing customers refers other customers to you. To make this happen, firstly the existing customers must feel very good about your service. You can then use some marketing tactics to make them refer other people to you. For example, you can offer coupons to your customers that they can distribute to their friends of relatives. Another way to get more patients is to ask doctors from other fields to refer customers to you. For example, you can come to an agreement with a skin specialist to refer your clinic in case their customer is looking for a good dentist.
Try to implement some of the above tips into your dental practice and you will surely see a difference. But above all, do not sacrifice the quality of your services in any way in order to get more profits. Stick to providing the best quality care to your patients and your practice will definitely benefit from it.
