From implementing checklists to being open to feedback, Kunal Thakker shares his best practices for achieving operational excellence.
In any business, you need to be operationally excellent to ensure that you’re able to scale up and give your patients the best possible journey. The truth of the matter with operational excellence is you’re never really excellent, because it’s not an end state.
Operational excellence is all about journey. It’s all about getting better day by day, week by week, year on year, and as long as you’re constantly increasing the benchmark and upping your game, that’s where true operational excellence really comes.
Finding excellence in the team
So, how do we achieve operational excellence at Toothclub? Well, it actually starts with our people: hiring the best talent in the industry and bringing those people in to work for Toothclub is a really, really important part of achieving operational excellence.
The next part is around culture. One of the things about our Toothclub culture is about excellence. Everyone knows, whether you’re the implant dentist, the cleaner or the receptionist, in your job, we need you to be excellent. Having that ingrained in the culture of every part of this business has been really important.
Your team should be really clear that nothing but being excellent is acceptable – that’s really important.
Checklists and feedback
All of these things are a little bit fluffy, but what does it mean in reality? And how do you really achieve that in your dental practices?
For me, it all comes down to having clear system processes, so making sure that you’ve got checklists in place for various different things, making sure there’s a process and there’s a procedure, and your teams have been trained on them. Over time, what you’re doing is testing those and being really receptive to feedback, whether that’s feedback from your staff or from your patient.
Putting the ego to one side and really listening to that feedback to see how you can get better week on week or day by day is key. So, having the checklist, the systems and processes are really important to deliver operational excellence, but actually it comes down to making sure when we’ve not quite achieved it, we’re open to the feedback and we find ways to make it better.
Watch the full video for the rest of Kunal’s tips.
Catch up with the rest of the Developing a Squat Practice series:
- Buy and build versus squat practice
- Top tips for opening the perfect squat practice
- The dos and don’ts of opening a squat practice
- Funding a squat practice – everything you need to know
- The key to marketing a squat practice.
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