Running a successful dental practice is no easy task, but setting goals for your dental practice can help you stay focused. Besides providing top-notch dental care, you also need to handle the challenges that come with running a small business. Staffing, marketing, accounting, billing, and customer service; there are so many business aspects that a dentist must consider.
Meanwhile, ever-changing technology means that what you learned in dental school may one day become obsolete. Dentists need to be aware of the latest advancements in dental technology and procedures.
Staying on top of everything can be difficult. That’s why it’s important to set goals for your dental practice. Goals allow you to set objectives and track progress in all areas of your practice. When deciding which goals to pursue, you need to consider your dental practice, its needs, and the specific challenges it faces.
Let’s examine how you can set and pursue goals throughout 2018.
HR and Team Goals For Your Dental Practice
Your dental practice can only be as good as your team. You need to make sure that you have qualified staff that fit the company’s culture, provide excellent customer service, and complete the highest-quality work possible.
There are many team and human resources goals to measure, including:
- Reducing staff turnover by a certain percent.
- Identify and addressing bottlenecks and trouble spots.
- Increasing employee morale and productivity.
- Conducting regular staff training sessions.
Business Goals for Your Dentistry
For many dentists, the hardest part of running a dentistry is handling the business processes. Pursuing concrete business goals will make it easier to track and improve your business performance. Establishing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is essential for a dental practice.
Sample goals and KPIs could include:
- Signing five new patients per month.
- Increasing Google Ad ROI by 15%.
- Producing four dentistry-related blogs for your website per month.
- Increasing profit margins by 3%.
Many dentists prefer to focus on providing dental care. That’s good, but any dentist who owns or manages a practice needs to make sure that they aren’t losing sight of business goals. A poorly managed dental practice will struggle and business-side problems will be detrimental to patient care.
Knowledge and Skill Goals For Dentists and other Practitioners
The world is in a state of constant change, and the same is true of dentistry. Some of the practices used today will be outdated and perhaps even obsolete in the future. It’s important for every dentist to stay up-to-date on the latest practices, procedures, and research. If not, you could fall behind competing dental practices.
So how can you use goals to make sure you’re up to date? How about attending one conference every financial quarter? How about reading one scientific article per month and a high-quality dental newsletter every week?
Other knowledge and skill goals you can set:
- Studying the latest developments in a specific subfield, such as prosthetics, every quarter.
- Attending six training seminars per year.
- Listening to four dentistry podcasts per week.
- Taking two online alternative business education courses per year.
Make 2018 a Year of Opportunity
Setting and pursuing goals is essential for your dental practice. Even if you don’t achieve every goal, as long you make progress you will be building a more successful dental practice. Goals allow you to track performance, and the data gathered can help you identify problems. To maximize your growth, both personally and professionally, make sure goals are a part of 2018.