Motivational Moments with Eric Vickery: A series on Ideal Day scheduling, emphasizing the need to set daily goals per provider and breaking them down into achievable targets. By consistently tracking and meeting these goals, practices can ensure they hit their monthly and annual targets.
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About Eric Vickery
Eric holds a degree in business administration and brings a strong business and systems approach to his consulting. His initiation into the field of dentistry was in the area of office management. He managed dental practices for over ten years and has been consulting over 250 offices nationwide since 2001.
Episode Transcript
Transcript performed by A.I. Please excuse the typos.
00:02
This is Dental All-Stars, where we bring you the best in dentistry on marketing, management, and training. Hey friends, welcome to your weekly Motivational Moments with Eric Vickery, President of Coaching at All-Star Dental Academy. I’m very excited about this week. We’re gonna start a new series, and this new series is on more of a systems focus. So we talk about, should you be very intense and really strive to grow, or should you be consistent?
00:31
And what we found is that consistency always wins out. So here’s some systems to help you create a consistent pattern to help you develop more success. 94% of your success is in your system, but you have to consistently deliver it. So this week we’re gonna start with Ideal Day scheduling. This will be a two-part set of videos. So this week and next week. So this week I want you to really challenge yourself to understand this. If I were to ask you, what is your daily goal per provider?
01:01
Would you know the answer to that? Maybe pause and see if anybody knows the answer. Oftentimes I ask that question and I get a long pause, I get a hesitancy, and I get confusion. I want you to think about what your goal is by provider, not as a practice. The whole practice thing, it’s hard to compute. You always wanna bring your goal down to the smallest number, the smallest.
01:28
ability to track it and that ends up being by provider daily. Now that daily goal should add up to your monthly goal, which should add up to a quarterly goal. The 12-week year is a great book and that is how we’ve operated for decades on a 12-week year. What he really means by that is, hey, let’s focus on a quarter. We actually focus on a month. We focus on a four-week year. We’re trying to establish a goal every month, every month. So we’re not going, hey, at the end of the year, did we hit our goal? That’s too long.
01:58
Even a quarter is too long. A month, yeah, it’s okay, but daily is where we really establish some momentum when it comes to inspiring each other, when it comes to getting excited about something. There’s nothing worse than having a team member come up to another team member who’s in charge of tracking it and saying, this is always around the 28th, 29th, 30th of the month. Hey, are we gonna hit our goal? I’ve been eyeing a new bag, a new watch. I’m wondering if we’re hitting our goal this month.
02:28
You should know what your goal is every single day so that you know at the end of the month, you’re actually going to hit your monthly goal. So I believe my system is establish what your annual goal is as a practice, break that down by provider, establish what your monthly goal is, and then divide that by the number of days you work on average. That will create your monthly target.
02:57
Then you take that daily goal by provider, and then you can put that in your practice management software, and you can establish what you wanna hit each day. Then, at your morning huddle, which we’re gonna talk about in a couple weeks, you’re going to be able to say, hey, when we hit our goal yesterday, when we’re scheduled for goal today, when tomorrow we’re scheduled for our goal. So, if a typical practice, you know, I like using round numbers, so let’s just say your practice yearly goal’s a million dollars. It might be
03:27
More than that might be less than that. Million dollars, I know that’s $83,333 a month, and then I know what hygiene can do. Typically, a hygienist is going to be about, that’s tough because of the country and costs and everything, but let’s say $1250 a day. That’s a pretty normal number, taking exams out, which means it’s about $5,000 a week, which means that’s about, four days a week, that’s about $20,000 a month. So at $83,000 a month, for a whole practice,
03:57
and one hygienist is at 20,000 of that, that’s pretty consistent. You get two hygienists, you take 40,000, that means your doctor only has to produce $43,000 a month. That’s pretty attainable these days. That’s why the new figure is 1.2, but we don’t wanna confuse you with imperfect numbers here. So then I just take my doctor, let’s say it’s $50,000 a month, and I break that down by the number of weeks, the number of days they work, and I have a target that I hit. Once I have that number, let’s just say it turns out to be
04:27
Let’s do round numbers. $5,000 a day. The goal is now $5,000 per day per doctor, $12.50 per hygienist. Those are pretty locked in. Doctor could be anywhere depending on how your doctor produces. So let’s say it’s $5,000. You want 80% of your goal of that day hit in the first five hours of your day. So in your primary rock, high productive time,
04:55
80% of 5,000 is hit in the first five hours. Well, that’s $4,000 in the morning. The afternoon will take care of itself. Your ideal day schedule, we’ll talk about rules next week. So now $4,000 is in the morning, and now I just take my five hours into that 4,000. And so we take $4,000, divide it by five hours, you’re at $800 an hour in the morning. So now I know in order to schedule to goal,
05:24
in the morning, I need $500 an hour appointment to go in that morning. If it doesn’t hit $500 per hour, it can’t go in the morning. It could be a two-hour appointment at $1,000, it goes in. It could be a half-hour appointment at $250, it goes in. You have to figure out what your rules are, which we’ll talk about next week. All right, guys, wonderful. If you like this and you’re not doing your ideal day scheduling, your blueprint scheduling, your perfect day scheduling, if you’re not scheduling to success,
05:52
Let’s make sure that you have this conversation with your team this week and get this dialed in at your weekly meeting and know what you’re trying to accomplish.
06:02
We hope you enjoyed this episode of Dental All-Stars. Visit us online at allstardentalacadmey.com
