The Associate Awesomeness Project

Maximize Your Career

As an associate, you don’t have to idly stand by, hoping for crumbs of work to be tossed your way. You can control how successful, productive, and skilled you become.

With more competition than ever before, lack of loyalty from patients, and our instant gratification society, it can be a challenge to keep patients in the practice and even harder to attract new ones.

However, many associates are growing their careers and their following at a record rate despite these changed circumstances. These successful associates don’t buy into the theory that external factors dictate whether they succeed or struggle.

Instead, they know that their success is 100% dependent on the inputs they apply. Being better may help you to survive. Being different is what will allow you to thrive.

Group of young professionals huddles together to celebrate

Module 1:

HEALTHY NUMBERS - UNDERSTAND YOUR OVERHEAD

Do you understand your numbers? As an associate, you do have overhead – it’s just smaller than when you are an owner.

Get your numbers working for you to minimize your costs while maximizing your profit so you take home more per hour.

1 - The Health of Your Business

Let’s get you thinking like an owner. Wrap your head around expenses and production to understand what contributes to your total compensation at the end of the year. Start thinking about what you can be investing in that contributes to levelling up your production. 

2 - Increasing Your Production (part I)

You have more control over what happens with your part of the practice than you think. If you can understand the breakdown of your production, you will be better able to transform your production levels. In this lesson, you will dissect what you do and what it is doing for your overall production – good or bad.

3 - Increasing Your Production (part II)

You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Have you ever taken a step back to look at what you do in a day, week, month, and year? Have you thought about what you could be eliminating completely or training someone else to do? This lesson will help you to systemize what you do so that you can increase your efficiency exponentially.

4 - Task Analysis

Understanding your production allows you to gravitate towards your favourite and most productive skills while making it clear where the best place to be spending your time in practice is. Use this information to design easier, more gratifying, and more productive days.

Module 2:

HEALTHY VISION - IDENTIFY YOUR VISION, MISSION & CORE VALUES

If you don’t know where you are going, you may never get there! Get clear on what you want from your associateship by identifying what you are about and where you want to go.

5 - Goals

You will examine where you are going inside and outside of your career. Project where you want to be 10 years out and create the steps you need today to get there. Design your roadmap to realizing your dreams.

6 - Vision and Mission

Craft where you want to take your patient care. This will not only guide where you are going as an associate, but will also get you thinking about where you will want to go if you become an owner. Get down to the essence of who you are, what you do, and why you do it.

7 - Core Values

What inherent behaviours do you need to succeed on your own and with the team you work with? What standards can you create for yourself that will guide you and your team as you reach for the stars?

8 - Ideal Clients

You can’t be everything to everybody. There are people you will work well with. There are people you will cringe at when you see them on the schedule. Start figuring out who your ideal patient avatar is so that you can start attracting those people to your part of the practice.

Module 3:

HEALTHY SERVICE - CREATE THE WOW EXPERIENCE

How would your clients describe your customer service (be honest)? You can be the best dentist in the world, but if your customer service is lack-lustre, you will not enjoy the success you seek.

Set yourself apart the moment a patient meets you while creating simpler, more effective days with processes that create a wow experience every time.

9 - WOW EXPERIENCE PART I

Wowing your patients goes beyond your technical skills. How you interact with your patients – from the first time you meet them, to when you work on them, to when you call them after hours – crafts a wow experience that will be memorable to your patients and will get them talking about how amazing you are.

10 - Wow Experience Part II

Part of wowing your patients is creating a consistent and efficient experience for them. Take a look at what you are doing that is slowing you down and making your patient interactions cumbersome. Walk away with a plan of attack for how you could practice being so much better for tomorrow.

11 - Booking Efficiency

Slower doesn’t mean better. Slower just means slower. When you design your day to maximize your production, maximize your patient care, and reduce chaos, you will start to enjoy your day in the practice so much more. It will also create a higher level experience for the patients who are coming to see you.

Module 4:

HEALTHY TRANSFORMATIONSPLAN FOR SUCCESS

Do you have a plan for success? Plan for success… literally, make a plan!

Plan for more balance in your life by working efficiently at the clinic while taking more vacation time to rest, recharge, and innovate your skills.

12 - Meetings

When you take time to regularly to work on your career, you start to see massive transformations of your career in all aspects. You will learn how to organize everyday with your team, work on your own skills, as well as create bigger dreams that you can work towards every month to move you closer to achieving your career goals.

13 - Vacation

All work and no play makes a dentist dull in so many ways. Time away from practice allows you to get more creative, work more efficiently, as well as see the long-game more easily. Learn how to take regular vacations to keep yourself at peak performance while not compromising on your ability to sustain an incredible living.

14 - Skills Acquisition

Owner dentists appreciate associates who invest in their skills. Learn how to plan to acquire higher level skills based on the needs of your current patient base as well as what you are passionate about in practice. Learn to schedule and budget to achieve the skills acquisition schedule you desire.

Module 5:

HEALTHY COMMUNICATION ALSO KNOWN AS...SALES

When was the last time you gave your patient a good listening to? You may be making an educated guess at what your patients want and you may be shocked at what their answer is when you start asking the right questions.

It’s an art form that will have you providing better, more directed customer service to your patients that gets patients on board with treatment.

15 - Sales

Some dentists think that sales is a four letter word, but it’s actually five. It is not about trying to pressure your patients into getting the care that you think they need. Rather, it’s about finding out exactly what they want from you and delivering exactly that. Learn how to have better conversations that will get patients choosing to access the care that they want for themselves.

16 - New Patient Experience

An outstanding new patient experience goes beyond just good customer service. When you are doing a thorough assessment, it will allow you to wow patients because you’re taking care of them in a way they likely have never experienced. Learn an efficient way to do a comprehensive exam in under 20 minutes that will allow you to make sure you have all your bases covered while learning how to craft a better team approach for the new patient experience.

17 - Treatment Presentation

Case acceptance is one of the most common barriers to success for associates. Most often it has to do with not communicating at the patient’s level, not addressing the patient’s desires, and also pushing your own agenda. Learn a way to communicate with your patient that will make it easy for them to understand what they can achieve based on what they want as well as what you perceive as being needed. Watch your case acceptance go through the roof.

Module 6:

HEALTHY MARKETING - SET YOURSELF APART & GET FOUND

Do you believe that marketing is the practice owner’s job? Think again. This final module pulls everything together to get you more new patients while organizing your marketing to reflect the outstanding care you provide.

With all the other 5 dimensions in place, you can move forward with a strong patient attraction strategy that will increase your patient base and have you prepared to best serve these new faces lining up at your door!

18 - Go-To Clinician

Building your following as an associate is not easy. However, when you set yourself apart, you’ll have patients requesting to see you. If you can figure out what you are most talented at, most passionate about, and go hard after your dream, this is when you can truly create a name for yourself and become a go-to clinician.

19 - How You Present Yourself

Patients judge you on many parameters – the least of which is your technical skills. They will remember how they were treated, they will remember how you looked, they will remember how they felt in your care. Learn how to level up the experience for your patients so that they see you as more than just an associate. They see you as a go-to practitioner that they can trust their care and their families’ care to.

20 - marketing Your Brand

Bringing patients into the practice is not just the job of the owner. You have the ability to be marketing yourself in order to build up your part of the practice. Learn the lesser known tactics that will make the biggest difference in how many patients you have in your base.

Have Questions?

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Let’s explore how you can earn more, while working less.

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