Leadership and Goals for the Orthodontic Practice

By Roger P. Levin, DDS

Introduction

The best companies are driven by a leader’s vision. The same is true for the best orthodontic practices. What is vision? It means having a clear understanding of what you want to accomplish and where you want your business to go in a specified time period. Business owners, including orthodontists, must have a vision for the future of their businesses if they are to successfully grow and prosper. Effective leaders share the practice vision with the orthodontic team. Explaining the vision helps the staff become active participants in building the practice and achieving all goals.

Running a successful orthodontic practice is about more than just practicing orthodontics. It is about leading a group of people on a journey focused on achieving measurable goals. It is about maximizing talents and teamwork to accomplish something that could not be done individually. It is about providing exemplary patient care while attaining increased levels of production and profitability.

Write It Down

The starting point for all these achievements is a vision statement. It entails clearly written information describing where the practice is going in the next 3 to 5 years. A vision statement can vary from a short, single paragraph to a series of several paragraphs. In most cases, however, brevity is a virtue.

The pace of orthodontic practices has dramatically increased over the past years, limiting the time orthodontists have available to carry out management and leadership roles. The orthodontist should identify the most important practice achievements he or she would like to accomplish in the long-term.

Establishing a vision requires that you ask yourself a series of questions, including:

How many days a week do you want to work?
How do you want to manage the practice?
How do you want the practice to run?

The answers to these questions and others will give you an understanding of where you want to be in the time period you determine. Examples may include reaching top percentiles of production or having the best reputation in the community.

This list should be reviewed regularly with goals added and subtracted until the orthodontist is satisfied that the final list captures the essence of the practice vision. The list can be pared down to the four to six key phrases that will be incorporated into the vision statement. Remember, any item removed from the list is not eliminated because it is undesirable or wrong, but simply because the practice can only accomplish so much over time. For example, an orthodontist may wish to become the top orthodontist in the state, but if the practice is a new one, a more reasonable goal might be to become the leading orthodontist in the county.

Many orthodontists do not have a vision for the next 3-5 years for their practice. Because the world is changing rapidly and it is often difficult to make long-term projections about the future of orthodontics, I recommend that the vision be created for no longer than a 3-5 year timeframe.

From Vision to Reality

Once an orthodontist has created a practice vision, the next step is to set annual goals. Remember three important things about goals. They must:

Be written in clear, specific language

Goals must be communicated to the team as well. If your staff doesn’t fully understand what the practice goals are, how can they be motivated to achieve them?

Have a deadline

Can a practice reach $500,000, $1 million or $1.5 million in gross production in the next 12 months? Naturally, this depends on where the practice is today, but a realistic assessment should be established and a deadline assigned to that goal.

Be measurable

Just because a doctor feels that he or she is “getting there” does not guarantee the practice is moving in the right direction toward achieving the desired goal. Numbers – not feelings – verify if a goal has been achieved.

Orthodontists who set goals are clearly focused on where they want the practice to go and when they want to get there. They want to make their practice vision a reality.

Conclusion

The orthodontist who truly wants a successful future must make the time to create a vision. The vision maps out a clear direction for your practice so that it can provide you with the highest levels of satisfaction. If a practice does not provide the financial resources for the orthodontist and family to enjoy a certain quality of life, then satisfaction will be fleeting. Even in a practice that produces tremendous financial income, if the orthodontist is fatigued and highly stressed, practicing orthodontics will not be satisfying. The excitement of developing and pursuing a realistic vision makes orthodontics a rewarding experience.

Roger P. Levin, DDS, is founder and CEO of Levin Group, a leading dental practice management consulting firm that is dedicated to improving the lives of dentists through a diverse portfolio of lifetime services and solutions. Since the company's inception in 1985, Dr. Levin has worked to bring the business world to dentistry. A popular lecturer, Dr. Levin addresses thousands of dentists and staff worldwide each year in 100-plus seminars and at the dental industry's most prestigious meetings.