Episode 771: End of Year Prep: Assessing 2023 + Forecasting 2024

 Folks, it’s time to start wrapping up this year and prepping for next. Kiera talks about how to put a bow on 2023 through three steps:

1. Assess the year
2. Review each department
3. Set goals for 2024

Beyond that, she encourages offices to seek ways to maximize efforts and exponentially grow next year, and gives ideas on how to go about that.

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Transcript:

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0:00:00.0 Kiera Dent: Hey everyone, welcome to The Dental A-Team Podcast. I'm your host Kiera Dent. And I have this crazy idea that maybe I could combine a doctor and a team member's perspective because let's face it, dentistry can be a challenging profession with those two perspectives. I've been a dental assistant, treatment coordinator, scheduler, filler, office manager, regional manager, practice owner and I have a team of traveling consultants where we have traveled to over 165 different offices coaching teams. Yep. We don't just understand you, we are you. Our mission is to positively impact the world of dental. And I believe that this podcast is the greatest way I can help elevate teams grow VIP experiences, reduce stress, and create A teams Welcome to The Dental A-Team Podcast.

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0:00:50.6 Kiera Dent: Hello Dental A-Team listeners. This is Kiera. Ooh, it's some of my favorite times of the year. It's end of year prep time. I love to do a podcast at this time of year where we start to prep you guys for next year. And if you are a part of our Dental A-Team platinum family where we come to your practice or our virtual one, either one, we actually started prepping all of our clients in October. We actually did it in September and that way they could be ready for Q4. So if you wanna be a part of that, we have an elite mastermind group, we meet once a month, we share the most pressing topics. Our doctors communicate with each other. We have a doctor only one. So if you wanna be a part of that, don't miss out. I make sure I'm prepping all of our clients.

0:01:31.5 Kiera Dent: I do try to prep you guys on the podcast, but you better believe my clients are getting VIP firsthand experiences things before they even come to the podcast. They should. They're paying clients. So if you wanna be a part of that elite group, reach out, [email protected]. Become one of our platinum clients. Don't wait. It is the season to execute. And I'm gonna get you guys ready to rock and roll for 2024. I hope you're ready for it. I love goal setting. If there's one thing that I think I do really, really well, it's that of setting goals. I'm really good at it. I'm really good at teaching it. And so I hope you guys are ready to buckle up and get ready for your end of year. All right, here we go.

0:02:08.8 Kiera Dent: So first things first, you got to assess baseline. How did this year go compared to what you were hoping it would be? Let's have a real honest look with ourselves of how did this year go? Did you have the profitability you wanted? Answer me, don't lie to me. I didn't. I can tell you that much.

[chuckle]

0:02:26.6 Kiera Dent: All right, there's Kiera's honest hour with you. Did you have the life you wanted? Were you able to take a vacation stress-free this year? Did you make the money you wanted to make this year? Did you have the amount of time in the chair that you wanted and the amount of CEO time that you wanted or not? Did you get the family time that you wanted this year? These are yes or no questions. And if I was you, I'd definitely be writing these things down in case you wanna know. I listen to things, I write in my notes on my phone all the time.

0:03:03.6 Kiera Dent: That way I'm actively listening instead of passively listening. Did you have the life, the practice, the profitability, the systems, the organization, the lack of stress that you wanted to have this year? Let's do a solid baseline right now. Because my year was pretty awesome. I developed a leadership team. I had less stress. We didn't quite hit the profitability numbers that we wanted and that's okay. We built two new products, we beta tested, we brought on new consultants, we brought on an entire marketing department that's never been in our company before. And the reality was I had more free time than I have ever had in my entire career.

0:03:44.8 Kiera Dent: And I don't know how that happened. So while yes, I may have missed my profitability margins, we were still highly profitable and we still grew. We didn't grow at the same pace that I've always grown in the past. And was I a little frustrated by that? Yeah, you better believe I was. But I also realized that, that was okay. Because it was a growth year, it was a learning year and we still grew. But it still wasn't the profitability that I wanted. So when I say don't lie to yourself, I can't lie to myself. Those things were not accurate. So what we're gonna do next is, once you figure out what you want and how it was. Now, and even if you had the best year of your life, there's still a next level gap for you. Okay? So we still have that next level.

0:04:27.7 Kiera Dent: We still have the things where we're gonna wanna make sure that we're growing constantly. 'Cause if we're not growing, we're dying. You guys have heard that so many times. So, no matter if you had the best year of your life, you had the worst year of your life, great news is all of us have another year ahead of us and we get to do this again. Talk about the coolest thing. Every year gets to be a reset for us, every year gets to be an opportunity to restart. And so if you prep and prepare, you'll be able to have a better year, a stronger year, and a more productive year. So, up next is we need to figure out how are all of your departments in your business doing? So I'm not kidding. I go through and I kid you not, I made myself a little document and what I did is I went through all the departments in my company, what's going really, really well and what areas need to change, every one of them.

0:05:15.6 Kiera Dent: Okay? So dental assistant hygienist, front office doctors, billers, TC schedulers, office manager, leadership team, all of those departments. Then after that, go through all the aspects of your business. How is your marketing department? How is your finance department? How is your legal team? How is your HR? How is your... You can look at your financial advisor. How much is your personal wealth? How much is your time in your chair? How much, how are we doing on all of our compliance issues? OSHA, HIPAA, all of those areas. What's the insurance on your business? How is your malpractice insurance? Looking at all of those areas, are they good? Do they need to be reviewed? Looking at your tech stack, merchant services, software, all those different pieces, how are they? What's going well and what needs to be improved? 'Cause if you'll do this and you'll spend the time, you're then going to be able to find the gaps that you need to improve on and you'll be able to make huge headway because you spent the time looking at where you are, that's going well and then the gaps.

0:06:13.3 Kiera Dent: And then after that we get to set goals. Every single year you should do a minimum of a 10% growth. Year over year, over year, you should be growing at least 10%. And if you're not, we need to change that. If you're a new practice, a startup, practice a younger practice, we need to make sure that we grow you guys more than you were dying.

[chuckle]

0:06:34.1 Kiera Dent: Okay, I got to grow you more than that 10%. So if I did a million last year as a practice, your growth goal at a minimum would be 1.1 this year, okay? 'Cause that would be a 10% growth. Then what we wanna do is you wanna actually do a forecasting if you want and everything I'm telling you on the podcast, we literally go through with our clients, whether it's step-by-step with them or we help them, we hold them accountable, we review it with them. So just so you know you don't have to do this alone. I have a client and I love this and she told me, she said, Kierra, the forecasting that you had us do last year, which is what I'm about to tell you, she said was game changing for me. She said, "But I never would've done it just listening to the podcast, I needed you to hold me accountable to look through it to make sure I did it right.

0:07:15.9 Kiera Dent: And then every single month you held us accountable and we looked through this to make sure were we on track or were we off track?" I agree. It was amazing. They had their best year they've ever had and they took off more time than they've ever done because they had planned for it and they'd prepared for it. So that's the next piece of forecasting. How many days off are you going to be each month? How many providers, what their goals need to be? And you can accurately then set goals month over month. If I'm doing just 1.2, I divide that up over 12 months, I need to hit 100,000. But I don't know about you guys. Do you have a Sucktember or was it a Slam Dunk September. Kudos to my office who coined Slam Dunk September giving you a shout out.

0:07:56.9 Kiera Dent: They said, we're not gonna have September watch this care, we're gonna have Slam Dunk September, had one of their highest months. A doctor broke their records because they were committed to not having a Sucktember. So if you know this, one, you can plan for and prepare for it. But just setting arbitrary goals of just $100,000 a month, just because we have 12 months, is a really shoddy way to do this. And it's probably not going to get you the results you're looking for as easily as if you plan, prepare also those doctors who wanna take time off and you wanna have vacations, plan for it now.

0:08:26.7 Kiera Dent: I will tell you, as an office manager, the best thing you can do, the greatest gift you can ever give any of us, is the gift of giving me your schedule early and not changing it. Because then I don't have to move as many patients. We can plan team vacations at the exact same time. So lower payroll costs, better planning for patients and I can schedule better and make sure we hit goal because I know proactively when you're going to be gone. So, yes. Does that take planning and requirements? Of course it does. But if you will do this, you will actually have a better schedule, more predictable production. You'll know when you'll have a down month and you can plan for it with with costs in the business and productivity. So for that, I want you guys to forecast it out if you want.

0:09:08.2 Kiera Dent: Like I said, we help our clients with this. So if that's something of interest, email me. [email protected]. So then you're going to figure out what exactly is your annual goal. You might realize you're taking too much vacation and you're not hitting at least that 10% growth. So we might need to do a couple of things. One, you could add in more days. Two, we can actually add in more procedures. How can we make our days more productive? Three, we could add providers or, four, come up with a myriad of other things. But those are just some quick pieces. So you've got to make sure where you want to go, your schedule, the days you're there and the hourly production you're doing will actually meet the goals you're looking for. So maybe you need to add some CE in there. Maybe we need to add another doctor.

0:09:51.8 Kiera Dent: Also, if you're planning to hire another doctor or another hygienist, be sure to forecast that in so you know when they're coming in because the goals will change for the practice when we get new providers in as well. So now you know, all right. Number one, what's my baseline? How did I do this year compared to where I wanted to be? Number two, you reviewed every aspect of the business. You've gone through every department. What's going well, what needs to improve? We've gone through the entire aspect of the entire company. Yes, this also means I print my P&Ls and go line item by line, item by line item to see where do I need to change, where do I need to improve. Then we forecast. We look to see what needs to happen, literally forecasting to see what months, what providers, how much do I need to do?

0:10:36.0 Kiera Dent: What do we need to produce? And making sure it's at least that 10% annual growth year over year. Or if you're in massive growth month, 20 to 30 to 40% is totally normal and very doable, especially startup doctors. DSLs, large group practices, don't be afraid to put those goals out there. There are lots of ways you can do it. I have a practice they produce about, gosh, let me think. They do about two million with their practices per month. So you can put that together about 24 million. We were able to add hundreds of thousands of dollars to their practices just through doing different types of procedures and training their team and laser focusing in on it. So don't think, well, we're tapped out. I want you to always be looking for what are adjunct services we could bring in? How can we laser focus on these and how can we make sure that we're really maximizing all the aspects of our practice?

0:11:32.3 Kiera Dent: I will say kudos to this group practice, because they are laser focused. They get the entire team bought in. They use me for training their team on it, and we go after it hard. We go after those goals, we go after the things and we do not mess around. And they stay super laser focused on it and they have grown exponentially this year. So I want you guys to never, ever be like, "well, we're tapped out." 'Cause to me, that's just lazy thinking. And you can always be growing, always. You're either growing or you're dying and you really get to determine that. So I want you guys, then after you do these pieces, then you go back. You now should know your number. You need to go look then to see what is your bam, what does it cost you to run your business?

0:12:19.1 Kiera Dent: Because you need to strive for at least a 50% overhead or a 20% profitability, including paying doctors. The math works out either way, it just depends on how you wanna look at it. Doctors, I'm super pro, you paying yourselves. Because if you don't, there's no way to replace you ever. And then it's a... Your business is not an asset, it's a liability. 'Cause if anything ever happens to you, that business will not serve you. And you've done a lot of hard work to get that business to become something that is serving you, that becomes an asset and not a liability. That's my own personal preference. You can do whatever you want, but I definitely have all my doctors where their fee is included in it and their total costs. That way they can work themselves out of the business and successfully have a business that generates revenue for them, even if something happened to them.

0:13:05.0 Kiera Dent: So whatever you wanna do. People always wonder, how do I work out of the chair? That's how you do it. So you need to figure out what your monthly costs are. If you're not at a 50% or 20% profit, we got to go back and rework that forecast. We've got to go rework the numbers to where it really will be a profitable business and you have a low overhead and a high profit margin. Team members, why do we need that? How stressful is it to live paycheck to paycheck? Yeah, it's super stressful. And a business who has $100,000 worth of expenses every single month, just think about how quickly money goes and comes. We need to make sure we have that 20% buffer. So this way we're never living paycheck to paycheck. We always have opportunity to hire more team members when we need to, that we can expand in the business, that we can grow the business as necessary.

0:13:49.0 Kiera Dent: That way we're never, ever getting the business into hot water because we didn't have enough leftover profit. So teams, that's why when you look at that big production goal, so if we're producing $100,000 and collecting $100,000, just so you know, typically a 50% overhead means at least $50,000 of that $100,000 is going to expenses. Then there's another percentage. Usually our doctors are 30%. You guys know that, it's 30% of adjusted production. So of that $100,000, $50,000 goes to all of our expenses. Paying you, paying for the building, paying for payroll, paying for supplies, all those pieces. 30% goes to pay our doctors for the production. And then 20% is what we need to have left over at the end to make sure we're not paycheck to paycheck. Just real quick, so you guys know of that 20% taxes comes out of that.

0:14:36.3 Kiera Dent: So you can just slash that 50% right in half basically. So if we have that $100,000 practice, $50,000 goes to payroll expenses, supplies, labs, $30,000 goes to our doctor's salaries and then $20,000 would be left over. But let's slash that in half 'cause $10,000 would for sure go to taxes minimum. And then we have $10,000 left over. Well on $100,000 that feels a bit scary if it might seem like a lot 'cause you're like, well I don't even get paid that, which I agree with. But your expenses every month are not $50,000. The office's expenses are $50,000. So $10,000 buffer feels a little scary. So that's why, just so you know teams, we've gotta make sure that production is offsetting the cost and we need to look at that otherwise we don't wanna get it to be ever scary. We don't ever want our practice to get into scary financial trouble because then doctors start to get really stressed out we have to cut team members' salaries, we have to cut things back and that's not a direction any of us ever wanna go.

0:15:31.3 Kiera Dent: So just to hopefully clarify why we need these things so all team members can get behind it. After we get that done, we then now know. So final end all, what we need to do to put a pretty bow on this is you need to have, one, your production slash collection goal for next year, your overhead goal for next year, and then whatever other goals you wanna add on there. I usually recommend no more than four focuses for the year. So production overhead and then if you're like, "we wanna get implants in," fantastic, but I'm gonna challenge you, make sure it's specific. So we wanna do at least two implants a month or we wanna place at least 10 implants this year.

0:16:09.5 Kiera Dent: That's gonna be a lot more specific than I wanna do implants this year. Maybe you need to get your operations manual completed, maybe you need to hire an office manager. Maybe you need to do a myriad of other things. That's totally up to you. But you get to decide what's going to move the business forward. And that's based on looking back at all the different areas of your business. You need to make goals based on if you could choose one or two things, what's going to maximize your efforts and exponentially grow you. That's what you're gonna be looking for. So that's how I love to set these goals. And then we break them down to every quarter. So the next step I do is once I get my professional goals, I also make my own personal goals and I do the same thing. I allow myself up to three of them, I look to see what I want it to be and then I break both of them down into quarters.

0:16:58.1 Kiera Dent: So for me, I go through this whole exercise and then I literally break down Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4, what needs to happen in the business and what needs to happen in my personal life, in order for me at the end of 2024 to successfully hit all of my goals. So to me it's a little quick skeleton bullet list. So for example, if I wanna place implants, well in Q1, I need to take a CE, Q2 I need to place my first implant, Q3 I need to be placing at least five implants per month. So one per week. And then Q4 is I'm gonna just continue that same process. Does that make sense? So you're breaking it down and you're basically building yourself a loose outline to make sure you know your mile markers. These mile markers change. I promise you. Mine change every single year, but at least I have a quick little guide to see what do I actually need to do If I could only do a couple of things, what's gonna maximize my efforts?

0:17:52.2 Kiera Dent: And it really just gives me a guide. So for personal things, I don't even know. 2024 is still to be determined in cure dense life right now. Don't worry, I always have these things mapped out before the beginning of the year. But things like, I wanna go on a month long trip. I don't know about my husband. We'll see if he can join me or not. But what I would need to do is I would need to break it down. I need to figure out where I wanna go. I need to figure out when I'm gonna take the time off so that way my team knows when I'm going to take the time off and then I need to figure out what needs to be in place. So for me to take an entire month off, I need to figure out a plan for how I'm gonna care for my clients.

0:18:30.4 Kiera Dent: So, am I willing to work two days a month in that month to serve clients possibly. I need to make sure that I have my leadership team set up to be able to make all the decisions when I'm not there. I need to make sure that I've got all of the tech stack and different things set up. So our entire emergency pieces, making sure that the team is set and prepared for that 'cause that's really going to, to help us. And those would just be some of the things. So I'd need to make sure, like Q1, I set up my emergency thing, Q2, I make sure leadership starts making all the decisions for me if I'm planning to take a trip in Q3. So that way I would prepare them, they start making the decisions that way. I'm set up to take that month off in Q3. In 2023, I wanted to buy a boat.

0:19:14.9 Kiera Dent: You guys, I lived to be on the lake. And so I put it up that we needed to buy a boat by Q2. So we were ready to go for the summer. And guess what we did? We found a 20-year-old used boat. And it's amazing and I have loved wake surfing every single day that we were able to be on the lake. But those were personal goals I had set for myself of things I wanted to do this year to make it super, super enjoyable. I wanted to play the guitar, I did play it one time. Next year I need to make that more specific if I'm going to play one song. So I actually am a little more specific. So with your goal setting, the biggest challenge I think is number one, just sitting down and doing this. I enjoy doing this when I fly, I do fly.

0:19:53.9 Kiera Dent: So if that's not something you have the luxury of doing, maybe set it up and go to a coffee shop or do a weekend escape for yourself where you go and you really hunker in and work on the business and work on your personal life as well. So that's number one. Number two is we get in the minutiae and we get so stressed out of how are we going to do this that we don't actually execute on the goals. So as Tony Robbins says, the tyranny of how and execution trump's planning every single day of the year. So make sure we create a plan, but we've got to make sure we execute. So don't get stressed, don't get stuck in how am I going to do this? Just make the plan. And then the third thing is I don't feel like people really keep it simple.

0:20:32.8 Kiera Dent: So you've got to make sure it's just very simple, very clear and very specific so that way you have a clear guiding star in front of you. And I'll give you guys a quote. I've said it several times on the podcast, but I feel like it's worth repeating. My therapist gave me this quote several years ago and she said, Kiera, goals are stars to guide by, not sticks to beat ourselves with. So goals are stars to guide by, not sticks to beat ourselves with. So as you're preparing, as you're getting ready for next year, I want you to do all these pieces. There's a lot in there and make sure you have clear specific goals. And the last final little bow on this is pick your word for yourself for this next year. What is the word that's going to embody. It for me for 2024 the word is decisive.

0:21:14.6 Kiera Dent: I feel like I'm sometimes very, very lackluster and I don't stick with a decision. So it's decisive is my word for 2024. For our company word last year was ownership. And this year I want to change it to execution and I'm gonna put execution of ownership because I want people to take their ownership, but they really need to make sure they're executing consistently. So that's gonna be our word. Who knows? I could've picked the wrong word, but those are the ones that I feel. So choose a word for you and if you want, I've done it for my company and I really enjoyed it. Last year's word was ownership. This year it's going to be on execution. And you guys, if you want like I'm gonna give you like 3.0 status, I also do a book club based on the word that we choose.

0:21:54.6 Kiera Dent: So last year I did extreme ownership. We read that in January. I had all of my team pick how they were going to have ownership of their role. I checked in with them every single week on it. We measured it, we reviewed it. And so this year it's going to be on execution. So we'll have a book club in January around execution and that's how it's gonna go. So hopefully that gives you guys, I know it's a jam-packed episode. This is why people hire us because these things are hard, they're hard to do on your own. These things I've made up over the years of coaching tons of clients, of being coached myself and really, really prioritizing. I don't think I'm perfect at this, but I do think we have a lot of help to hold you accountable, to give you that roadmap to really figure out where do you really wanna go in the next one year, three years, 10 years, hold you accountable, check in with you every quarter, make sure you have those quarterly sprints every single month, every single quarter and then every month we're just making sure we're moving you closer to that while dealing with the fires that happen day in and day out.

0:22:50.0 Kiera Dent: So if you're like, "I know I need help, I haven't done it, my year hasn't been the year I want it to be." Stop waiting. You're literally listening to a podcast of people who have the answers to your success and willingly will share it with you. Reach out, [email protected]. You have the answer sitting in front of you. This is your prep for 2024. Do not allow 2024 to not be your best year. And promise me it will be your best year and you will do whatever it takes. You'll make the hard decisions, you'll make the hard calls, you'll hire the consultant, you'll execute. It's terrifying. Hiring a coach is absolutely terrifying. You have to have the most amount of humility, I think, to admit that you need help and then the courage to make the call and then the courage to execute and follow through.

0:23:44.2 Kiera Dent: But I promise you, I have had nobody that I have let fail. Every office that works with us, our fee is covered. I guarantee it. Your stress is less and you'll be happier. We have raving, fan clients and I can't wait to have you be our next one. So reach out, [email protected] or go to our website, thedentalateam.com and click book a call. Cheers to 2024. You are ultimately the leader of driver of your success. So whether you are successful or failing, it's you. You just have to be willing to make the decisions necessary to have a different life. And as always, thanks for listening guys. I'll catch you next time on The Dental A-Team Podcast.

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0:24:31.5 Kiera Dent: And that wraps it up for another episode of The Dental A-Team podcast. Thank you so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.

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