The Magical Practice: The Journey to Creating and Maintaining

By Elizabeth Prothro

"The Magical Practice" provides a firsthand guide to creating a successful and sustainable dental practice. Elizabeth Prothro worked in the dental industry for 30 years and the lessons she learned the hard way are available to you in one easy read!

You will learn the fundamentals of creating and maintaining a system for everything you and your team do. You'll be able to remove guesswork and know how to respond to any situation as it arises. But "The Magical Practice" is more than just a guide, it is a companion that will teach and reassure you throughout your journey.

Are you building a dental or medical practice? Are you working in one, or hope to some day? This book provides clear and insightful guidance to achieving success and managing your team.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098342906

Book preview

Offices

The Magical Practice

I’ve been blessed to have been a part of The Magical Practice for over sixteen years. I can honestly say that it truly is a magical experience. From the very first time that I walked through the door for my interview, I knew it was where I wanted to be. I felt their genuine authenticity. I told them very confidently that I wanted to come to work with them.

I can remember the doctor telling me, I only ask one thing of you. Please don’t offend my patients by asking them for money, he explained. I see many different people of all walks of life and all that matters to me is that they remember me every month. WOW! I was just blown away! Before this office, I had just left a practice that actually required a deposit to schedule an appointment. I was trained that the doctors time was valuable, that just like hotels we should require a deposit to reserve a space in the schedule for them. Once again WOW!

As I began my journey here, I was greeted by a dental family like I had never seen before. I had just replaced a front office person that had been there for eleven years and frankly I thought people wouldn’t be accepting of a new person, but I was completely wrong. In the Magical Practice I was greeted by an incredible group of patients that welcomed me into the Family.

At this point, I had already been in dentistry for twelve years. I had worked in 4 other practices where I did lots of internal and external marketing. Before I worked at this practice, it was a constant struggle to get ten to twenty new patients a month. At this practice, we were getting twenty-five to thirty-five new patients a month and did no marketing! That is when I began calling it the magical practice.

I began to discover the true magic of this practice was simply just taking care of people. When I speak of taking care of people, I’m talking about taking care of everyone; from your team and your patients, to the suppliers, from the people that pick up and deliver to and from your office, to the lab technicians. It is a culture of taking care of people.

The key to the magical practice is to create and cultivate a culture truly focused on taking care of people. If you take care of everyone and genuinely care about them, the money quickly follows. Taking care of your team comes first. If you take care of your team, and I mean really take care of your team, they will take care of you and your patients. When you do this, the patients quickly notice the difference. They are glad and excited to give you awesome reviews and to refer all of their family and friends to see you. The quality of care you have provided in their perception is profound. Patients can’t help but rave about the experience they have when they come in to see you because of your team.

Your team becomes a shining example of how your patients are being treated. If you make your team happy, they will exude happiness and that happiness becomes contagious. They naturally want to tell new patients all about how amazing you are, and how confident they feel about the care patients receive.

When I talk about having the magical practice, I focus mostly on taking care of people. But, creating and having structure is another major part of creating a magical practice. I can honestly say I have seen firsthand how much more a team can accomplish by adding structure. By creating and having a system for every aspect of what you and your team do, you remove the guesswork out of the equation. You and your team will know how to function and respond to any situation as it arises. When I started writing this book, my plan was for the book to be a guide to help others create their systems. But as I started writing, I soon realized I wanted it to be more than just a guide. I wanted this book to be an example of what can work, and what doesn’t work. Once you create your systems and you and your team work together using your systems, it creates structure. I hope this is helpful to you and your team.

Obviously, it’s not just your treatment of patients and your team though. You need to be really good at what you do. You have to strive to be the best of the best and continually cultivate an environment of success and greatness. This includes making sure to keep up with the latest technology and continue to educate yourself and your team. It is doing all the things you can do to provide the best care for patients.

There are many examples and steps to take that will help you develop and create the best experience for your patients. The first is to pay attention to what you and your team are doing on a regular basis, to never get stagnant, or just assume everything is continuing to be done with your vision and mission in mind. Role playing with your team can make a big difference; it can help your team to get comfortable with how to communicate with the patients and each other. The more you pay attention to what and how you and your team are treating each other and your patients, the more you will succeed.

Dental Consulting/Coaching

You may be asking yourself, Why Dental Consulting/Coaching?

Let me start first by introducing myself and telling you a little more about my experiences and why I chose dentistry, and how it became my passion.

Hello, I’m Elizabeth and I have been involved in the dental field for nearly thirty years. I know this may make me sound ‘old’ or ‘stuck in my ways,’ but contrary to popular belief, this is the furthest from the truth. As we grow and change in life, so follows our development in our careers and work life. I believe that we live, we learn, and we continually grow. In my experiences with dentistry, I have been growing and evolving as the industry itself has grown, advanced in new technologies and ideas, and changed in so many ways. I love every single day of it! I love dentistry and it is my calling.

I believe the strong work ethic and principals I share with everyone and utilize every day are because of my past experiences. My first job was working with a fast food burger restaurant when I was only fifteen years old. It wasn’t the best job in the world, but I credit this job for teaching me the basic fundamentals of customer service. It wasn’t long after that I went to work at a printing ink company at just seventeen, and by nineteen, I became a manager. It was an incredibly challenging, and naturally a dirty job, but someone had to do it. For the department I was in I managed a team that consisted of all men that were several years older than me.

This was at a time when it was difficult enough being a woman in a position of authority, but it was that much more difficult because I was literally the only woman in the department! I had to earn the respect of men who had been doing their jobs for a large part of their lives.

I had to work even harder and set the example by showing them that I could do their jobs just as well as them, if not better and in doing so, I gained their support and they respected me for it. It was one of the most invaluable, important experiences in my life, and it was so important in shaping my future as I continued working. This company was eventually bought out and closed their Colorado branch, so I had to move on.

I soon after began working as a customer service/expeditor for an electrical components company. I had customers from very diverse industries, and contractors that needed parts to build complex components and machines, including circuit boards for rockets and weaponry. I was the middle man between sales teams that would promise unattainable production dates, and contractors and customers that needed products yesterday. It was high stress and the pressure was heavy to meet deadlines. I spent most of my time trying to rush parts to keep production going, and then putting fires out from escalations, in short, doing everything to make customers happy. It was just another challenge along my career path, which eventually led me to dentistry in the oddest of circumstances.

Strangely enough, my path in dentistry began when one of my co-workers started dating my dentist. She mentioned to me that he wasn’t happy with his front office person and she recommended me to help, and so my dental journey began here working for my own dentist! I literally had four hours of training from my predecessor and was just thrown into the fire, as they say. I give my doctor a lot of credit at the time for taking a chance on someone like me that didn’t have any dental experience. He was incredibly patient and kind to me. I remember running back and asking him questions nearly every time I answered the phone, and I’m sure it was as nerve-racking for him as it was for me.

I did training online to figure out the practice software and learned to utilize it for all it was capable of doing. When I started at his office, he was still using a paper schedule. I convinced him very quickly to switch to the computerized schedules and the rest is history.

I stayed with him for five years, building up the business and supporting patients I was given a great gift and opportunity building a practice and realized I wanted to help other doctors like him to build their practices. I went to work with a dentist that was practicing and utilizing Dawson Academy Training. I also worked for another dentist that used the Pankey Institute Model, and both doctors were amazing dentists that really stuck to their philosophies and programs. Both offices provided incredible, unique experiences for me. These doctors practiced preventative, comprehensive dentistry. These philosophies focus on all aspects of patient health, not just dental health. In both practices, I stayed as long as I felt I was making a difference, and when I left, I felt they were operating at the highest level.

I moved from these offices and took a position at a practice that the dentist utilized a consultant. The consultant would fly into town once every six to eight weeks to check on how things were going. I have to say, my experience with her wasn’t great. At this time, I was the only front office person in a practice where the dentist’s goal was to produce $1M a year, working 3 days a week, a very lofty goal. I worked extremely hard and dedicated a lot of my time and tools to accomplish those goals and was very successful. I helped increase production for this office by 35% in just eleven months.

After the last interaction with the consultant, she sent the doctor, a list of things that I wasn’t doing. He came to me and handed me the list, telling me that I need to do those things on the list. The consultant never asked me what I was doing or how I was performing any of my daily tasks. Needless to say, I didn’t take it very well.

But, I was curious and I ran the numbers from the eleven months prior to the consultant being involved with the practice, and eleven months after to see a clearer picture of how the consultant was able to really impact the practice. When I compared the two reports, the numbers hadn’t increased.

I decided to send her a list of what I felt she could do better as a dental consultant. I made a list of all the things that she wasn’t doing (that I felt she should have been doing). I faxed it to her and when I hit send on the fax machine, I knew if it came down to her or me I most likely would lose my job.

The consultant was the person that ultimately fired me, and not in person, but over a conference call with her, the doctor, and myself. The reason provided by the consultant for this termination was insubordination. After we hung up with her, the doctor proceeded to explain, I had to keep the consultant because I paid her upfront. He then continued to explain to me that I was the best front office person he ever had, and he would not consider this to be a termination. He said he would give me the highest recommendation and I explained that I understood. My old coworker told me he fired that consultant two months later.

Why do I tell this story? Why am I sharing this experience with you? The experiences we have in life, often teach us