Build a Leadership Brand
To be effective in building your practice name it’s important to understand how your brand messaging grows a practice quicker than any other activity. Today Cornelia Outten with Dental Advocacy Group interviews Ben Shaver of Venture Practices about how to build your leadership brand.
Venture Practices focuses on leadership, team behavior, and brand development.
Q: Why do practice owners spend money on marketing and the practice still doesn’t grow?
A: To have a successful practice, leadership needs to create a vision, that vision helps create the culture for the team, that culture drives the behaviors of the team and then that culture ends up being the brand. The ultimate goal is to have high retention rates with both staff and their patients. this helps the practice grow organically without the need of high cost marketing.
Q: When you look across the market, and you work with small offices and large offices, multi-location offices, What trends are you seeing today?
A: I think people are becoming more self aware. They’re thinking more about leadership. Unfortunately, dental owners only focus on becoming efficient. And all the management companies focus on efficiency, and you certainly have to have that. But it can’t stop there.
There’s this whole area of development, business development and the organizational behavior that really makes you effective. And that’s where I see the trend heading, is you have to pay more attention to the people side, you have to pay attention to what area you’re in. Dentistry is hyper-local. If the area you’re in doesn’t support your vision, then may have to alter that to some degree.
You also have to hire right. We help a lot of clients figure out what type of an associate you need. If you need a leader in the practice, that’s an associate that’s very different than having somebody that comes in and just as clinical work. So successful owners are really starting to focus on the tools and behaviors leaders can use to be organizationally healthy.
Q: How do you help dentists that want to own multiple locations? How do you help them position themselves to be successful?
A: By the time most owners get to me, there’s a little bit of pain. They’ve probably bought that second, third, fourth practice, but they’re still working a full schedule. They’re still working five days a week, they haven’t transitioned from being a dental owner, to a business owner. That’s what I’m passionate about. I love to help them transition to being that business owner.
We help them get a leadership team in place so that they don’t have to be everywhere at once. We recently helped a client that had an operations manager handling finances. What we found the But what they really needed was a financial controller that handles insurance and all things financial. They needed an operations manager that was in charge of the office managers. And then a director of development that provided all the resources for the staff.
Nowadays every employee you have wants to control their own success. If you don’t value what their journey is, and where they’re headed, they’ll eventually either become a not so great employee, or they’ll go somewhere else. But it’s so easy to figure out what it is they value and give that to them. You have to move past the management mentality of I’m paying you money, do what I say. Build a leadership brand that staff and patients want to be a part of and refer.
