2 Types of People You Need to Hire if You Want to Grow Your Dental Practice

When building a dental practice, most dentists know to hire team members like dental assistants, hygienists, other dentists, lab technicians, administrative personnel, and dental specialists like oral surgeons or orthodontists.
Those team members help take care of day-to-day operations of your practice, so you don't need to do everything yourself. They’re vital to building a practice to run without you. They also provide the capacity for you to grow your practice because you can’t grow a practice unless you have the ability to serve more people.
If you want to grow your practice exponentially, however, you need to have two other types of people involved.
1. Business specialists for dental practices
Dental school teaches us a lot about teeth, but very little about things like bookkeeping, cash‑flow management, financial accounting, traditional or online practice marketing, social‑media strategy, or content marketing.
Despite that, many dentists spend hours a day pouring through spreadsheets, bank statements, and boxes of receipts trying to figure out their finances or project into the future. Other dentists spend too much time trying to figure out what to post on social media, how to grow a relevant following, and how to turn it all into practice growth. The list goes on.
Dentists who try to do everything themselves find it impossible to grow. For better results (and better personal fulfillment) they should hand off tasks they either struggle with or dislike to business specialists who are experts in those business activities.
This helps your practice grow in two ways. First, business specialists will be much more effective than you because they spend all day, every day doing one specific task. You get the benefit of all of their experience and keep up to date on the latest trends and strategies.
Building a dental practice is a lot of work and very stressful if you try to do everything yourself. Outsourcing to specialists any activities you dislike or struggle with helps you get more personal fulfillment and reduce your odds of burning out.
If you’re struggling to fit outsourcing into your budget when just starting out, you can purchase courses or memberships for existing employees and block out time on their schedule for them to perform certain activities. For example, instead of outsourcing to a vendor, you could subscribe to WOW U and have an administrative professional learn and apply the latest practice-growth strategies including social media marketing and online reviews, avoiding cancellations, and setting fees and goals for profit taught in there for you for a set number of hours a week.
2. Business coaches
The second type of person to hire is a business coach.
In short, business coaches work with you to help you get from where you are to where you want to go. Business coaches provide a number of highly valuable services for you that virtually nobody gets from family, friends, or current team members, who are often either too close to a situation or biased.
Coaches will push you outside of your comfort zone. They’ll be trusted, independent voices. They won’t be afraid to say “no” to you. They’ll hold you accountable, and give you support and confidence in making tough decisions.
Because business coaches are trained to help you set and achieve goals, business coaches are often the best choice as a first hire to help you. If you’re just starting out, they can help you establish your vision, culture, and core values; and then build a team and systems to accomplish your goals and build a brand that stands out. If you have a well-established vision, culture, core values, team, systems, and brand, they can help you identify what activities to outsource to specialists, identify and evaluate opportunities, or make other difficult practice decisions.
The best athletes and business executives in the world work with business coaches. They’re the best of the best in their fields, yet they are constantly working on their craft. Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Alphabet, Inc., (Google’s parent company) famously said in a YouTube video he recorded when he was CEO of Google that everyone needs a coach. Even Mark Zuckerberg hired an executive coach to help him identify and hone the skills he needed to run a rapidly growing company.
Although you might not be working at the same scale as Google or Facebook, you can achieve similar benefits for your practice by hiring a business coach to guide you, keep you accountable, and give you the support you need to grow your practice.
It’s time to take action.
You can benefit from hiring a business coach and outsourcing tasks to specialists no matter where you are with building your practice. Without these people involved in your practice, you’ll work harder, longer, less effectively, and with less personal fulfillment.
If you’re looking to grow a practice that helps you work less, make more, and enjoy your life, your next step should be to connect with a business coach whose job includes helping you work with the right business specialists at the right time for your practice.
Finally, don’t let your budget keep you from moving forward. If you’re just starting out or your budget is too tight for one-on-one help, you can even start out in a group setting like WOW U for the latest information, monthly live coaching and strategies as well as support in a group setting.
