‘The needs of the business can often be forgotten’: This month, Eleanor and Emily Pittard break down the important elements of a successful laboratory business.
Private dentistry is one of those unique areas where, because the focus is so primarily on the quality of the health care provided, the needs of the business can often be forgotten.
In general businesses you have a sales team, a CEO/CMO/CFO, IT team, HR team and so on. But in dentistry you have health care professionals spanning multiple departments with the practice manager, laboratory manager/owners frantically trying to juggle a variety of hats while still adhering to the critical eye of the governing bodies.
The result of this is that we often spend time working in the business and forget to work on the business. We place great emphasis on delivering safe and appropriate healthcare – which is of course of paramount importance – but give little thought to marketing, financial projections or inter personal relationships, for example.
When you work in a dental laboratory, it is very easy to fall into the trap of focusing on immediate solutions and completing work to schedule. Both are great to help sustain your business. But neither will help feed your growth.
Create set goals
It is important to develop trust within your team and to build a community of like-minded individuals with a set aim to learn, grow and develop together. This way you can create strong relationships and create adaptability to change.
If you effectively communicate your goals, you can create strategies with input from all team members which they will be more likely to follow as they helped to create them.
This may mean reiterating your goals at meetings as you discuss strategy or checking in randomly with team members throughout the month to see if systems are being followed. If they’re not, find out the reason – perhaps they have a better solution or perhaps they just don’t understand why they’re in place to begin with.
Thorough communication
In order to effectively grow a business you need reliable leadership and communication throughout your team.
It is important that those in a leadership position are aware of everything that is going on and have the power to make certain decisions. They must also be safe in the knowledge that they will be backed, unless for a very good reason.
In addition, they should know when to pass decisions on to the owners. This means regular meetings (at least daily), end of day check ins and a quality CRM system which everyone knows how to use.
It also means managers or supervisors need to feel safe to not only bring problems to the owners for advice, but also – and this is crucial, to identify to the owners where they need to improve and provide feedback from the team when necessary.
Empowerment
The key word is empowerment. Your team must feel empowered to act.
This means they understand your vision so intricately that they know how you would respond. They therefore feel fairly confident that they can respond well to certain situations.
Systems need to be in place and easy to follow to take the guess work out, and new team members need to be inducted in every aspect of your business.
Having standard operating procedures will make this much easier from the outset. This means new team members can spend the first few days reading through your policies and procedures to get a really in-depth understanding of the business and what is expected of them.
Financial management
From a financial perspective, having good feedback from management on stock ordering, work in progress, output and having a good tracking CRM system in place that is used effectively by the team can be really helpful.
This is because it will help to provide projections, analyses and help you set monthly budgets that will be easier for the team to try and meet.
Make it as easy as possible for your team to provide you with this information. This could involve end of day or week emails, or updating a system or spreadsheet you all have access to.
Little and often reduces the likelihood of this becoming a burden to anyone.
Marketing
Marketing is something that needs to involve everyone. You will never get enough content to satiate social media if you just rely on one person to provide you with it. There are not enough hours in the day.
It would be far easier for all team members to be encouraged to send content or give ideas for content at meetings.
It is also important to let everyone know when a marketing campaign is running and what it is saying. This is incase someone who doesn’t usually answer the phone just happens to jump on to help a colleague.
Top tips
- Take the time every Monday to sit and look at the week ahead. Try not to get pulled straight into problem solving or specific projects, but rather look at everything holistically to pick up any potential problems later on
- Invest in a CRM system that allows you to communicate quickly and effectively. This will clearly show accountability and will be easily accessible by all team members
- Be as open as you can about what everyone is doing. Transparency makes it easier for everyone to do their job. No one really gains by creating secrecy or vying people off against each other. It just ends up creating a toxic environment where everyone competes against each other, not against the outside competition
- Have an anonymous suggestions box for team members where thoughts can be addressed at the monthly meeting. Take out anything inappropriate if it has been put in and then list the problems people have identified. Ask the group as a whole to come up with solutions for them. Then put them into practice
- Allow team members to have access to some kind of photo and video equipment – whether it’s their own or a central team phone. This is so that they can create content through-out the day to help the marketing team.
Debrief meetings
Finally, one of the most vital meetings you will have is straight after a problem has occurred. No matter how large or small, it is important to have a de-brief will all team members involved.
This will allow you to analyse how it went wrong – without pointing fingers and accusing people – but rather to ensure something is put in place to make sure it doesn’t go wrong again.
Rarely do people every actually want to make mistakes. Therefore, it is vital that they feel safe enough to know that should it happen, they can admit it and aren’t going to get raked over the coals.
Instead they will be supported in solving it and educating the whole team so no one else makes the same mistake.
Catch up with the previous Technically Speaking column:
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