That’s the question you want to answer for yourself when you embark on year-end planning.

It always starts in November. Most dental practice owners work hard in Q4 to finish the year strong, while planning for the coming months.

And, of course, the analysis starts.

Here we are, the end of December and you may be asking yourself, “How will 2020 be different?”

If you are asking yourself this question, you are on the road to success.

We recently ran a poll on social media asking dental professionals what they wanted to learn from me?

 There was a resounding response that dental professionals wanted to hear what my success secrets were.

Let me define success for your dental practice in 2020.

1. Create the Plan

You must take time to create your success plan. What this requires is looking at the previous year and assessing where you are today.

• What did you do differently this year?
• What worked well this year?
• What did not work well this year?

2. Share Your Vision

Take time to write your vision. Plan for the next five years and break it down into bite-size pieces. What will life and your dental practice look like in one year?

Next, break this down into nine months, then six months and a ninety-day plan.

Basically, you are re-engineering where you want to be in five years and then plan down to what you will do in ninety days to get where you want to be in five years.

3. Systems

Maybe this should be listed as number 1. Having systems in place will help you STOP working so hard.

Everyone on the dental team needs to know what is expected of them from greeting, seating patients, up to handing off the patient and everything in between.

At Dental Practice Solutions, we teach our clients a Dental Practice Optimization method. Our focus is the hygiene department but with a team approach.

Everyone on your team needs to understand the sixteen systems for the hygiene department. There are a lot of moving parts. If you wish to have a hygiene department that operates like a well-oiled machine, you must have systems for each one of these 16 areas and everyone on your team must know their exact role within each of these systems.

This is a team approach.

Create and implement a strategic success plan that takes the guesswork out of how things are handled for the next year and farther.

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