A blueprint is a set of plans that provide details on how an architect wants a building to look. It includes everything that composes the building. It shows not only what the building looks like but how to build it. Building a successful business requires a plan too. Creating a blueprint dental strategy for your practice sets up the design of your dental practice. It envisions its look and feel. It lays out the building blocks to ensure profitability. It shows how all the pieces work together. Most importantly it increases the quality of care you give your patients.
Your dental business blueprint includes both the big picture and the small details. It provides the design for:
- What your vision is for your dental practice.
- What the necessary components are for your practice.
- What systems and procedures you need in place to make your practice profitable.
- Who you need on board to make your practice grow and succeed.
Let’s take a look at how to make a blueprint for a business and build your dental practice for success.
What Is a Business Blueprint?
A business blueprint organizes all the parts of a business that make it work. It demonstrates how to strategically execute your business and set it up for growth.
A business blueprint is a composition of documents that communicates:
- The vision and purpose of a business
- How to implement business practices to realize that vision
- The strategic goals and goalposts to roadmap growth
- Expected outcomes and performance measurements
Your blueprint dental practice plan is a communication tool showing how to structure, manage, market, and grow your practice.
Why Is a Blueprint Dental Strategy Important?
A dental practice is not a static operation. It changes and grows over time like any other business. Your dental clinic blueprint is a business plan for your practice that can change and grow over time too.
Building a blueprint dental strategy is important for:
- Dental associates wanting to make the move to becoming a practice owner.
- New practice owners who want to understand how to run their practice.
- Established practice owners who want to manage a more efficient and profitable practice.
Overcome Bottlenecks
As businesses evolve, they experience different bottlenecks that impede growth, like an unbalanced scale that tilts off center and affects profitability. One bottleneck happens when growth is fast, and there is not enough time or personnel to cover operations. Frustration and burnout ensues. Another bottleneck happens when growth is slow and there is not enough revenue to cover costs or make investments to stimulate growth. A blueprint dental strategy is a solution for bottlenecks, providing a plan for successful growth.
ON, Not Just IN
A dental office blueprint shows you how to work ON your dental practice and not just IN your practice. It gives you a plan that allows you to properly balance between providing exceptional oral healthcare and managing a successful business. Learning how to create a blueprint for your business helps you to care for your patients effectively.
How do you develop a business blueprint for your dental practice?
Components of a blueprint dental strategy:
- Define your vision
- Create your organizational chart
- Employ best business practices
- Set business goals
- Learn to measure outcomes
- Design a system for review
Define Your Vision
Envisioning what you want your dental practice to be is big picture thinking at its finest. Whether you are a new practice owner or more established, picturing your practice helps you define the purpose of your ownership. This purpose drives your decisions on how you structure and manage your dental business.
To define your vision, answer:
- Why do you practice dentistry?
- What makes your dental practice unique?
- What do you do that makes you stand out?
- What value do you offer patients?
- What do you want to accomplish?
- What is your brand?
- Who are your patients?
- How do you help your patients?
Describe the answers to these questions in detail. This description is your vision. It is foundational to accomplishing what you want with your practice. It defines why you do what you do, how you do it, and where you see your practice heading. It is the first stop in creating a blueprint of a dental practice on the road to success.
Create Your Organizational Chart
Planning who you need for dental practice to thrive is crucial. It helps avoid those bottlenecks when you know who you need where and doing what. It is an essential part of a successful oral healthcare blueprint strategy.
Plan your organizational chart for growth. What and who are vital? Determine the workloads of each position with brief descriptions of roles and responsibilities. Figure in quality standards and expected outcomes to ensure quality and consistency for patient care.
Define and document:
- How tasks are completed along with work flows
- Who each position reports to
- Procedures, operations, and training instructions
Employ Best Business Practices
Understanding the business side of dentistry leads not only to a more profitable practice but also to providing better oral healthcare to your patients. Giving the most to your patients means understanding both the business side and the healthcare side of your practice. Improving your business practices is a blueprint to healthcare quality for your patients. Establishing business practices in your blueprint dental strategy that promote and support growth is a necessity.
Profit Margins
Learning how profit margins affect your business is critical. Profit margins are like balancing a scale. On one side of the scale is your revenue. On the other side are your costs. If your costs outweigh your revenue, your profit decreases. If your revenue outweighs your costs, your revenue increases. This balance is straightforward, but trade-offs need to be weighed too. That is where profit margins become about business decisions.
These decisions are affected by a fundamental understanding of what contributes to your dental practice profitability. Implementing sound business practices can help increase your dental revenue and decrease your overhead costs.
Maximizing your profits increases the success of your dental practice, helping you weather unpredictable circumstances that can undermine your business efforts.
Dental Healthcare Marketing Strategy
Marketing will always be a part of managing your practice. Make this easier by creating an organized marketing plan and building it into your dental office blueprint. Oral healthcare digital marketing needs to be a part of any plan you implement. Planning a beginning to end strategy with targeted campaigns and a unified effort understood by your team will maximize your return on investment. Your marketing needs to be an organized strategy, not just a collection of efforts.
Set Business Goals
Dreaming big is aspirational, but it is not how dreams are achieved. Establish business goals that show you are succeeding. Goals should be reachable yet challenging. They should focus on achieving better productivity and not on aimless money-wasting endeavors. Utilize SMART goal setting by making them specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound.
Examples of smart business goals:
- Cut overhead by 5% over the next year
- Attract ten new patients a month
- Increase case acceptance by 15% annually
Communicate the business goals to your team. Everyone should understand what goals have been set and how they can be a part of achieving them.
Learn to Measure Outcomes
Measuring outcomes is an exercise in collecting the necessary data to:
- Understand what is working
- Troubleshoot challenges efficiently
- Refine when necessary
Build the infrastructure to measure and monitor outcomes and determine outcomes that fit your practice.
Design a System for Review
Like your practice, your blueprint dental strategy is not static. It is a living document that needs updating as your practice grows. There is always room for improvement and refinement. Build a system for review into your business blueprint.
Focus on Growth in Your Blueprint Dental Strategy
Implementing a dental practice blueprint allows you to hone in on your growth strategy. It shows what areas you can focus on to achieve that growth. It lays out the ways and means for you to provide the best care for your patients. A blueprint dental strategy is a plan to build the successful practice you envision.
