How to Implement Winning Strategies in Your Practice

[00:00:00] Welcome. You're listening to the Grow Ortho podcast presented by HIP. This

[00:00:05] podcast is dedicated to orthodontist who want to stand strong in their market

[00:00:10] and be leaders in their community. Now, on to today's show. Dr. Anne Marie

[00:00:17] Gorsica, I'm so excited to be chatting with you today on the Grow Ortho podcast.

[00:00:23] Well, thank you for having me. I'm honored to be here. Definitely. So, just to kind look pretty much summarizes what I did the first seven years of my practice to build my practice in a very short amount of time. And as we mentioned in marketing, there are so many things you can do, but the most important

[00:01:40] thing is that you do something, that you always are active and always doing something to further probably every speaker. I read many, many books. And the first book, the marketing book, 201 marketing tips for month's marketing plan. We were going to deliver donuts to 25 referring offices to say hello and remind them we're there

[00:04:22] to serve their patients.

[00:04:24] And so that day at the meeting, in it. Yeah. Is do it. Just do it. That is your from what I've read and I've read all your materials that you sent me. I agree with just about 99.5% of every single thing that you say. But I think your secret sauce is accountability and implementation.

[00:05:43] Yeah, I appreciate you saying that and picking up on it. And I think, you know, here's what we got to do. Here's, you know, the next step we need to do. And she's like, hey, I just want to tell you, like I don't necessarily want a game plan, but that's the way my brain thinks. So when I'm talking to business owners, you know, mainly who I talk to nowadays is orthodontist for really the past five years, I'm always thinking, how can we fix this? well because it's so easy for us to make a change, do what's necessary, cut back, move forward. A decision can be made. There's no meeting. There's one owner and the decision is made that day. I really like the solo practice model.

[00:08:22] Many years ago, when I got after I got married,

[00:08:25] I did entertain the thought of maybe opening level and then maintenance becomes the key. And one thing I learned that I didn't really know, around year 10, everything you've done, you've got to keep doing it. Because every case you finish, you've got to replace. So marketing never ends most people need a new retainer. It's just gross by that point, you know? You need a refresher. Yeah. But not only do you get new patients coming in for new retainers, some of them will need spring clip aligners which are, is active treatment.

[00:11:01] Some of them might choose to do in Viseline.

[00:11:04] The postcard goes to the family home.

[00:11:06] Maybe they don't come in, maybe their brother Well, I was very fortunate when I was at Harvard School of Dental Medicine. I had the opportunity to get a master's in public health at the Harvard School of Public Health. And it was in the Department of Health Management and Policy. And we had a very good marketing course.

[00:12:21] It was taught by a Harvard Business School famous, and she said, when the patient comes for the exam, just put in the separators that day. And I'm thinking, oh my gosh, you don't have an informed consent.

[00:13:41] You don't have the permission of the family.

[00:13:45] You don't know if they're going to start treatment. management consultants in the United States of America and orthodontic practice is too small for them and even some Consultants that I think are very good that could help dentistry They're starting commitment is 40,000 a year and that's a lot of money for a solo practitioner What I've tried to do in my lifetime is

[00:15:03] illuminate maybe nine. I would say one was excellent. I would say two were very good. I'd say three were okay. And then there were a few very poor ones. And the thing I learned about I don't about 20 years in that I said, you know what, I'm going to make these calls myself. And the way we do it in my practice is we do the exam, we hope they start that day. We do promote same day starts. If they don't start that day, we call

[00:17:40] them back two days later. And two days is a with that. And how long does it take me to call 35 people? Two hours maximum. I've got two hours. And I tell myself, each call I make is worth $3,500 to me. That's how much my call is worth to my practice. Now,

[00:19:03] do I have time for that call? I certainly do.

[00:20:02] desk does that and it's like, hey, that's great. But to your point, when you ask about the list

[00:20:07] to call for pinnings, what if they are doing their job

[00:20:13] but their conversion rate of getting those people back in

[00:20:16] is extremely low, whereas you know,

[00:20:19] if you had somebody excellent in the role,

[00:20:22] here's kind of what the conversion rate should be.

[00:20:25] So let's just say they calling her during the day, interrupting her schedule, telling her they're getting home from school.

[00:21:40] And she's just not focused like she was five or 10 or 15 years ago.

[00:21:46] So you've got to consider that also. It's too high. Okay, what if we added three months or six months to your contract and it went from 200 to 150? Could you afford that? Oh, I can afford that. Or what if you said, well, you like to do care credit?

[00:23:00] With care credit, you can do zero down just starting hip, our company. And so I took an adjunct professor job at a community college and I was teaching design. And they told me that I failed

[00:24:20] more people than any other design professor there. One of the things that I asked in a class was, Hey, who do you look up to in terms of sales? Have you read these books? Typically it's, you get zero. How important do you think that is for maybe not in the beginning to necessarily hire someone, but if you're going to train them, you know, and they're going to be great, how important do you think that is?

[00:25:41] Well, we're always educating ourselves.

[00:25:44] Yeah. I would take it even further and say, I would never give up until you get a yes or a no. Agreed. I've had patients come back from having done their exam nine years ago to start in a visual line treatment.

[00:27:00] I've had surgery cases come back from seven years ago

[00:27:04] to start their surgery treatment.

[00:32:20] the monthly calls. The first surprise I had is that once you get past that one month, in my opinion, the average one of the average time of those pending list after a month, many of them would start the next year or a few months later. Sometimes they would tell me, we're not going to start this year, call me back in Dr. Gurska calling. I'm just calling to ask if you've given any more thought to starting Sally's orthodontic treatment. And if you're ready to some degree, died and gone to heaven because I could literally talk about this till doomsday. It's so interesting because we created a proprietary, it's actually a patent-pending secret shop tool. And the reason why we did it is nos, you're gonna get people hanging, especially if you're running Facebook ads, Instagram ads. You have to have that resilience. Like you talked about, you have to be okay with getting nos, and you have to be skeptically optimistic. Oh, they hung up. Maybe there was a bad connection. Maybe they were busy. Maybe they didn't know who I was

[00:33:41] because they don't have my number saved.

[00:33:43] I'll just call them back.

[00:33:44] I'll just send them a text message.

[00:33:47] I'll call them back.

[00:33:48] If I don't need it, everything's perfect. I haven't had one person tell me they're at max capacity. In fact, the big thing that I hear all the time is we just need more new patients. And it's like, okay, let's go look at your website.

[00:35:00] Let's pull every form submission for the past year

[00:35:03] and let's look and see when they were contacted.

[00:35:05] Oh, I don't you can say, how far away are you? You can still make it. They might be in the grocery store. They might be in traffic. You can tell them, we still want to see you keep coming. We still want to see you or do you need directions? Right?

[00:36:20] But if someone does miss their exam, they should be rescheduled immediately that day a big problem for treatment coordinators because they're trying to make calls then someone at the front desk needs help or maybe someone needs help with records or maybe they get a phone call's partly my executive assistant. And it's like, well, that's probably not gonna be good. If you wanna get new patients, then we'll go in an office.

[00:39:02] And it's kind of like musical chairs

[00:39:04] between two people on who's gonna be TC

[00:39:07] for the hour in the book. You know, men are gonna be reading this book. You can't put in, use different color fluorescent markers with sparkles and you know, write little notes to yourself

[00:40:22] because that's not gonna fly.

[00:40:24] But when I call my list, I do that.

[00:40:26] I, you know. I said, and I tell the patients, if you want the lowest price available, then I. We even have some people who do get callbacks and they still struggle to close the deal. So I mean, there's so many things you have to like you to go back to what you were saying in the beginning,

[00:44:04] David Moffatt, I interviewed him years ago, great book. Brian Tracy, John Gordon.

[00:44:07] How did you know, I mean, Ray Dalio,

[00:44:10] how did you know to read these books?

[00:44:13] Michael Gerber, did you research?

[00:44:15] Did you, were you already studying those people?

[00:44:19] My family and I and my son,

[00:44:22] we have this tradition every Friday night.

[00:44:26] We go to read this book. It's obvious that you know sales. It's obvious that you know sales just by your printed material, what you've written here. Years ago, I hear this probably, I don't know, five or ten times a year. Yeah, we had a lot of no shows last month. Some of them want to get back on the schedule. Should we get a down payment? Or, you know at Chick-fil-A if people wait longer than five minutes, the whole company freaks out. You know, it's like a literally a war breaks out in the building. That is an important point. And in your office, your new exam

[00:48:20] should always be the top on the list

[00:48:23] because you do not want them to wait.

[00:48:25] They should be greeted at the door, Okay, Sally, we have an opening tomorrow at 9 a.m. Let's get her started. And I do think it's helpful for the doctor to know when is the next available opening. I mean, if you can do a same day start, if the treatment coordinator can do the records right then,

[00:49:40] obviously do it.

[00:49:41] If someone in my office, I might ask a treatment coordinate,

[00:49:46] I might ask one In my office, the goal starts, everyone gets the same bonus from the treatment coordinator to the front desk, to the person who put the braces on. I just think it's a better teamwork strategy. Yeah. And then we have our bonuses gradual

[00:51:03] as the number increases, the bonus increases.

[00:51:07] Yeah, I love that. I didn't think in my office that was worth it. Now, someone who did work with EOS is Jay Bowman in Kalamazoo, Michigan. If you'd ever like to interview him, he actually worked with EOS for one year. But we have implemented all of their systems

[00:52:23] and I wanted him to write a woman, the second endorsement from Amy Hyatt, Executive Coach of the Table Group, which is the company of Patrick Lencioni. Oh, wow. And I did work with her for two years. She was my leadership coach. I was in an organization where I was president

[00:53:43] and I was leading the board of directors But, you know, we're busy seeing patients, putting on braces, and this particular practice, and this can work in some practices, it's the two doctors and then everybody else. And I see this all the time. I just did a org chart review with somebody else where one doctor, everybody else, no leadership.

[00:55:00] So, a lot does book from the restaurant industry.

[00:56:20] I just read this yesterday in fact that in a very high end restaurant, three star or

[00:56:26] four star Michelin restaurant, they have signed up. projects is you need to meet, plan it out, get it done? Yeah. Yeah, and I think a lot of people are nervous of doing something like that, or they might feel awkward, even in the morning huddle, because they don't have a format, or they tried it once, and it seemed like the team didn't like it,

[00:57:45] or wasn't bought into it,

[00:57:46] and it's like, hey're too long, whatever. Okay, let's fix that. Let's fix that. After you get through about a year, maybe, you're going to be getting tens because everyone's going to come prepared, everyone's going to bring their reports. They want to get done as soon as possibleuddle is I usually call from the car, my front desk, financial coordinator, I say what's new, she says this, that, and that, what's on the schedule today, this, that, and that. If she wants to call the team, she's off site. If she wants to meet with

[01:00:22] the team in the office, she does that. But that's my. Yeah, I think there can be a hundred ways, probably more, to skin the cap. The key is, I think it goes back to communication. And largely, when you find broken teams, broken businesses, broken processes, it all goes back to communication. Somebody didn't know this

[01:01:42] person didn't talk to this person. Somebody updated the best way to contact you? Well, I'll give you my personal email address, which is AMGOrtho at AOL.com, or you can call me at GorsicaOrthodonics at 925-759000 in Antioch, California. And I look forward