By Jay Geier
Think back to your favorite childhood television show. No matter your age or gender, it was hard not to love the daring antics of Batman and Robin, and their constant struggle to uphold justice in Gotham City. Have you ever noticed that almost every hero has a trusty sidekick, and that they always work together toward a common goal? This dynamic duo discovered that they could maximize (and truly double) their impact by working together.
What if you had your very own Robin that could help you double what you could accomplish every single day? That means you'd be doubling your capabilities, your production, and your collections. But it sounds too good to be true, right? Wrong! You have the ability to do this in your practice every day by duplicating your clinical capabilities. There are more than 1.8 million dentists treating patients every single day at the same time that you are hard at work in your office, treating your patients. So why isn't it possible to have someone else treat your patients at the same time as you right in your office? What is preventing you from making the decision to literally double your practice's value?
For a lot of you, the barrier is ego. Maybe you are hesitant to share your power with another practitioner, or worried that having someone else with the capability to treat patients as you do will diminish your value in the eyes of your staff. But that isn't the case at all! Mastering the process of clinical duplication (or training sidekicks) will maximize the growth of your practice, and increase your team's respect for you.
Clinical duplication is the process of training and elevating other members of your team to your level of expertise, meaning that even when you are preoccupied, patients are receiving the ultimate level of hygiene care and assistance. This also means that your associate is able to take on important tasks and handle them in exactly the way that you would handle them, were you available. Clinical duplication is essentially training "clones" of the doctor within the practice. Your team needs to be in sync with your skillset, mindset, and goals – because you are the leader of your practice!
When it comes to continuing education and training, it is essential that you make those investments in the other producers in your practice, not in yourself! If you are the one person in your practice with all of the know-how, you're building a stagnant environment that prevents you from concentrating on your business, and prevents your associates and clinical team from expanding their abilities and increasing production on their own. When you realize the enormous advantages of clinical duplication, you will have much more energy to focus on improving other areas of the Big 5, and you will see a burst in the growth of your practice!
The secret to the clinical area of the Big 5 is that it must run like a business within a business, and you, as a leader, must learn to properly delegate responsibility to your team. Your associate doctors, hygienists, and assistants need to take the reins of production and quality in their area of the practice. At the Scheduling Institute, we have developed nine comprehensive trainings that focus on your clinicians and the significance of an "ownership" mentality.
Keep in mind that you went to school to be a dentist, not an entrepreneur or a business owner. That being said, even a team of hygienists with the best skills and knowledge of the newest techniques would be completely wasted if you couldn't leverage this expertise to your clients. Imagine offering an incredible procedure, but never marketing it. Doesn't make much sense, does it? So you have to always remember, each piece of the Big 5 (human capital, space and equipment, marketing, clinical, and finance) is in a constant balancing act with the other four, and if you neglect any one area, the other four will tumble.
