Note: Practice management as well as management of small business and small business marketing must rely on the power of moral authority. Using moral authority will help to get new patients and grow your management. Use patient marketing skills to show your authoritative power through morality.

Most professionals, such as doctors and dentists, have forgotten how to use the important fact above, Moral Authority. Real power in the world or workplace is not the technology or the weapon power you possess but the moral authority that you possess. To be honest, I can see why business owners forget. I am the first to admit that it is easy to forget, as it seems so imperative to have superior technology and professional skills in any practice.

It is the ‘moral authority’ that has more power than all the technical skills and years of experience a person has. What is moral authority? It simply means the moral image which you portray to other people and that is strong and unwavering. Being known for a person who stands for certain virtues, being known for a person who gives help with no vested interest in mind, being known for a person with certain ethical standards – this perceived image alone will attract enough people to you and your practice and thus make it safe for people to trust you with your recommendations.

People are not looking to do business with a sleek sales person or a doctor with 10 diplomas and 50 years of experience. People are looking to do business with people they can trust and they can like. And how do they know they could trust and like you? This is the job of “UN-Advertising” which is having other people toot the horn for you versus you having to toot your own horn – as in advertising.

The personal likable doctor will always get more business, will always be able to charge more for his service than the technically perfect, but socially not well-known ( and thus not well-liked) doctor. And that’s the way it is.

It is all about perception. It is the perception people have about you that counts, and this perception must be about 5,000 times stronger than you think it should be.

If you think that your authority, your reputation, your being recognized is great, but you are not having all the good paying patients to fill your practice to the rim, and you are not in the need to hire more doctors, then the perception of the people around you about you being an authority is not strong enough.

People elect presidents of countries, choose doctors, lawyers, car mechanics, and spouses, etc. by personal liking of their character – by what is the perceived moral image.

Some business people, whether they are doctors, or car mechanics, who have tried hard to market their ‘professionalism’ and yet do not get enough customers, wonder why they are having financial problems despite ‘superior’ technical skills.

It was not their profession, or their uncompromising drive for perfection in their profession, but their neglect of building a moral authority that has failed them.

Did you know that Harvard University’s MBA program does not admit any students who have no record of participating actively in social and community activities?

Check it out – the Dean of Harvard has talked about this in an interview on a Charlie Rose show.

Remember: In the medical profession, for instance, do not depend only on traditional advertising to ‘convince’ a prospect to come to you, why not establish a strong moral authority in your medical practice and thus have other people tooting the horn for you? You will see that attracting a higher quality patient pool would not be so difficult once you have established that moral image through the help of other powerful entities around your medical practice.

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Note: Learn how to get new patients and boost your profits, even in a bad economy, by using mailing lists wisely. Whether you work in the restaurant industry or health care field, mailing lists can be vital to your management marketing and practice advertising.

1. Why do you call this mailing list collection program Infrastructure?
Because it is the infrastructure of your whole marketing process and without it nothing will work the way you want. It is like the road system, or the sewage system. If you do not have it, or if it is faulty in different ways, trouble will occur. Why do you think the USA is more prosperous than India? Because we get more done in less time and often get a higher quality that is consistent. And why do we get more done better? Because we have a better infrastructure of roads, sewages, mails, phones, general communication systems, etc. A good infrastructure speeds up the process, and speed is money, as you will have many very successful people confirm. Move fast and you will win, move slow and you will lose!

2. Which lists are the most important?
All are important, just like in a car. You cannot leave out car parts. You cannot leave out groups of people, which means it is impossible to leave out different mailing lists.

3. Which list should I do first?
Here is a general idea of which lists you will collect first.

• The local newspapers, radio, and TV. Do not forget the ethnic papers and stations, and the religious papers or other special interesting papers
• The community leaders, such as fire department, schools and principals, police, city contacts, churches and their leaders, etc.
• You must purchase the school teachers’ mailing list separately. (Usually it costs $120 for a 5-7 miles radius around a doctor’s area).
• All practitioners of all professions, except your own – and even those might have a purpose once a year.
• Some special businesses, which are good for potential networking, such as lawyers for chiropractors
• All businesses in the area
• All locations of street events. Your marketing person must also compile this list
• A list, even if somewhat loose and unofficial, of establishments such as grocery stores, donut shops, beauty salon or any other store, where they let you post flyers about your social events. Those stores which let you do that are easy to convince to let you have a booth as well. It’s all about getting your foot in and breaking the ice, making friends, and being different as a person rather than as a professional.

4. How do I collect those lists?
First of all, almost all lists – except the media list – could be obtained easily from mailing lists companies. (You can even check with us if we have such lists.) Those lists are about 65% – 75% good. This means that of all available names in your area (usually a 3 -5 mile radius), the lists will have about 70% of those names and be able to reach them.

5. How do I get the rest of the 30%?
You could, and down the road should, start hiring telemarketers, who can call to gather those addresses. For community leaders and doctors this is recommended, but for businesses it is a bit of a waste of time as they change so fast that you will never catch up. The whole maintaining of a good database is actually quite a job. Anyhow, for starters, you are a lot better off doing this than doing nothing, which is what you have done before.

6. Why can’t you get me a better list?
The numbers change very fast, so when you get the yellow page to your door 25% of all numbers are already bad. We do buy some of the better lists available and any upgrades would cost fortunes for very little in the way of better results. But look at it the good way: having 65% or 70% of all names in the radius, where you do business, is probably infinitely more than what you have done so far. So, be happy and run with it. It will change your marketing efforts drastically.

7. Do all names have fax numbers?
No, they don’t. Fax numbers are hard to come by, since they usually are not published and some businesses do not have dedicated fax lines. For our customers that get their mailing lists from us, our online program will give you a count on how many names, fax numbers, e- mails we will provide you with. This does not mean they are all good and deliverable, as I have said before.

8. Did you say somewhere that faxing is illegal?
Yes, I did. Read the section well. It says that unsolicited faxing for the purpose of selling or promoting goods or services is forbidden, and can get you a fine of $500 to $1500 on a state and on a federal level. So, why do we talk about faxing?

Again, read the statement about the law I have made in the program: “Unsolicited for sale and promotion. When we are telling you to fax we are also telling you to use it ONLY for announcing social messages for the purpose of helping someone, but absolutely no promotion for your service or product.”

9. Is it possible that someone still sues me?
Absolutely. You live in a country where we have more lawyers than the rest of the planet together. So, what do you think those lawyers have to do? Right, they have to sue someone. And just because they might lose, that does not discourage them to start a lawsuit, which is why the very, very vast majority of lawsuits are settled out of court.

10. Do you advise about faxing and about the legal aspect? And are you a lawyer?
No, my advice is not legal about faxing or the law about faxing. I am also not a lawyer. My advice is not even an advice. It is my opinion only. You should check out with a lawyer even about the paragraph about what constitutes unsolicited faxing.

I am only a marketing guy who does not care about this aspect very much; who does believe that it is totally within the law; who would fight it if someone sues, and who has seen no problem of any magnitude when I and my clients have faxed, as I have described, for over a decade now. But you, and you alone, must be the judge about it. There always are letters, postcards, phone calls, emails left to use if you decide not to fax. And, of course, you can call and ask for permission to fax as well, something we do strongly recommend if you do fax for advertising purposes.

11. There seem to be very few fax numbers for community leaders, church leaders, etc. on the list, which you provided.
Yes, churches and just about all community leaders should be called for their fax numbers and any other data that is missing, and at the same time they should be told about whatever social event you currently are doing. They should also be asked whether they know of any street events happening in town during the year.

12. Why should we send a letter to each school teacher, when we have already sent a letter to the school?
The fax, or even a letter to the school, will usually end up with one and the same person all the time. If that administrative person does not pass it on to the principal, then you have lost out, but if 30 school teachers get a postcard or a letter, then your chance just improved by 30 times. One of the teachers will use it for his/her class, and/or will talk about it to other teachers enthusiastically, and even may present it to the principal. It’s all about getting your foot into the door and getting your messages to many hands.

13. Does e-mail marketing work?
Yes, it does and it starts working more and more. Now, when I say it works, it does not mean that it will bring you dozens of patients or clients and that you can drop other marketing. It does not even mean that I am basing my comment on any percentage at all. I do not believe in estimating any results of anything based on known percentages very much. All I am saying is that you would get some attention, which you would not have gotten otherwise, and this attention is gotten in an inexpensive way.

14. What is the best method of contacting potential buyers?
There is no best method. There might be here and there some methods better that another, but you should never be looking for that best way. I know of no one way which gets all the business you need, but I do know of about 10–20 ways which will get you all you need and more.

15. Why would it be better to hand address the letters to teachers (and anyone else for that matter) if printing labels is faster and cheaper?
Because a handwritten letter to a teacher might come from a parent or a handwritten letter to a doctor might come from a patient, and thus about 50 times more people will open a hand-written envelope. You can hire college or high school kids to hand-write letters for you. If you put an ad on Craigslist.org on the internet, you can probably get many people who are willing to write envelopes for you by project.

However, printing labels and getting the letters out is still 100 times better than not sending anything out.

Remember: Dental practice advertising and practice management marketing will improve your income, even in a bad economy, with the proper use of mailing lists. Doctors and small business owners, you must know that prospective new patients and clients won’t know you exist if you don’t tell them you are here. So get out those mailing lists and get to work!

Note: Doctors could hire a practice management consultant to coach them on all aspects of organizing the office. However, when it comes to staff meetings, many people still do not have a clue how to do it correctly. Below are some of the common questions that I get asked and the answers to them. But remember, there is no such thing as absolute perfection. Always maintain a strong focus in the area of new patients marketing. While you are engaged in medical or dental practice management, you cannot neglect medical or dental practice marketing.

1. What is the purpose of a staff meeting?

The purpose is to build the future of your practice by also building the future of your staff members. In fact, your practice’s future is directly proportional to how you can enhance the future of every single staff member of yours. Staff meetings are there to let the staff know what is happening in the company, which new things are going on, what marketing strategy is currently applied, etc. Staff meetings are here to align the staff so that they pull in the same direction, and/or know what the other staff members are doing.

2. What would be the correct way to write a goal?

What “you want” is the wrong goal. What you can provide for others is what you need to write down, for example, the people cured or kept healthy and the smiles saved. If you do not concentrate on what you want to provide to other as the purpose of your activities, then your own wishes will always stay wishes. After all, if you need a million dollars for a nice house, then you will need to provide some service or product to someone so that they will pay you. And you will need to provide that in large enough quantity to get the million dollars.

3. Why is it important to have a good statistics program?

With a good statistics program, which monitors the actual performance of each individual employee, you will be able to sort the winners from the losers much, much better. Read the book by Jack Welsh called “Winning”, where he writes about how he handles the top 20% of producers, the bottom 20% of producers and the ones in the middle. And trust me, it was successful in his personal and business life having run General Electric with 300,000 employees for 20 years.

4. What do you base your decisions on?

The statistics, good or bad, are the only thing, which you want to base your decisions on.

5. What must a manager do?

Managers might be the managers, because they can do all the jobs and can do it well. But they MUST stop doing it and MUST start running the place. If this sounds like it will cost you money, because you are too small to have a manager who does “nothing but manage”, then I might remind you that the large companies do not do the things they do (such as having managers, training people at great expenses, having lots of meetings, spending lots on marketing and public relations) because they are large. They are large because of the things they do while they are small.

6. Why are staff meetings more rah-rah meeting than anything else?

The staff needs to be made to look into the future of the company and to get their security from a safe future. Showing how the current company’s programs are securing such a great future portrays this future.

7. Why do we have to repeat staff meetings every week if we do not have a new program and it will be the same old thing?

First of all, it never should be the same old thing. You always should find one or two small things which are new and on which you might want to train the staff on.

Also, you should know that the repeated enthusiasm is the ONLY thing which keeps the flame going. As Mr. Jack Welch said, “I sometimes get sick of saying the same thing, but I have to and will make sure that I always sound new and excited. If I, the boss, cannot be excited how can anyone else be?”

8. What if I announce a goal and it flops, as many of my past projects have, and then I’ll have egg on my face?!

Well, the chances of all your projects flopping are very huge if you do not sell the idea with great enthusiasm to all your staff. That’s right, I said, “all your staff”, not only the few who will work with the project. Some, maybe even more than half, of your projects will fail anyhow. But without enthusiastic staff meetings, way more will fail. And more devastatingly, you will stop engaging in new projects for fear of failing, and thus become a complacent, indifferent, apathetic individual, and soon the whole company will be the same way. The wolf pack runs only as fast as the leader wolf.

9. Is there another kind of meeting rather than what we call a staff meeting?

Yes, there should be a production meeting with the department head every day or at least twice a week. In small companies everyone could easily be included in this production meeting, and of course the department heads should have a separate production meeting with the workers in their department anyhow. Production meetings are there to very specifically ask what was done, what was the target and what can we do to reach the target in the next day, or whatever time frame is covered. Targets and quotas should be (must be) short range and very specific. Who does what and when, must be as exact as the steps of a heart surgery or of flying an F15 fighter plane. The long-term targets might be talked about, but only so that we know we are aligning the short-term quotas and targets to our long-term targets and goals.

Which meeting is more important? The Staff meeting, which spreads enthusiasm for our projects and does a bit of training towards them or the Production meeting, which give the managers and thus the crew a very specific step by step outlay of what to do when? That is like asking “what part of a car is more important, the engine or the steering wheel?” Or “What body part should we let get sick, the liver or the heart?”

If, and only if, you want to succeed and have a practice which not only makes you all the money you want, but also lets you live to tell about it, then you need both. Otherwise, if making money and having free time to do the things you cherish, because your business runs quite well with your employees – rather than you – doing the job, is not important to you, then you can choose to drop either one of the meetings, or both.

10. How can I make my dreams come true?

By continuously imagining the very thing you want. Anything you cannot picture very clearly will not come to you. This is why saying ‘I want to be successful’, simply does not work. It is also not enough that you alone have this nice picture of what you want, but that all the people who will somehow help you in this task will know this picture as well and see it as colorfully as you do.

Otherwise, they cannot help whether you pay them enormous sums of money or minimum wage, or whether they are friends and want to help just for the sake of helping. This is why you hold staff meetings with more enthusiasm than you ever had before. Force yourself to be enthusiastic. It is contagious and will even catch on to you and thus you will not have to force yourself any more.

11. What is it you have to picture the most?

The things you want, of course. But here is a bit of help that will make all the difference in the world.

Do not simply dream, and imagine, and paint a perfect picture (all the same thing) of the thing you want as a reward – a house, a new car, a pretty wife, a lot of money, long vacations etc. Of course, you should picture those things as well, nothing wrong with it. But in order to get that house, car, even the pretty girl, you have to do things.

We call that ‘taking action’. It means to provide a service or a product for which someone else will give you something back (usually money, but not always, as in the example about the pretty girl). With this money, you will buy things. But the important thing is that you picture and get your staff to picture the actions you have to perform to get the target, such as more sales, more cars made, etc.

Remember: Medical or dental practice management must include properly done staff meetings. However, despite of so many medical and dental practice management advice, I have found that there is simply not enough emphasis on the importance of new patients marketing. You must learn how to market for new patients without costly advertising. Go to my other articles for more tips on this.

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Note: As a medical and dental practice management consultant, I can tell you that goals are needed for you and your business to be your best. Is your goal to have the best dental or medical practice and attracting a lot of good new patients? Read this article on how to make your dream come true.

What the business owner can’t imagine he will not achieve!!

It is the business owner, which has to be the main dreamer in the place.

Everyone should be a dreamer for his own life and for the area of his business endeavor.

Let me give you the hierarchy of dreamers, managers and workers.

As said above, all of the best are dreamers. But the “chief dreamer” is best off only to dream. No working if possible. By the way, by a dreamer we are talking about a goal-maker. So every time I use the word ‘dreamer’ or ‘goal-maker’ I mean the same.

It goes like that:

It is the company’s boss, the practice owner, who sets the direction and goals of the practice. This is a well-known fact and every doctor does that, even long before he ever enters medical school.

This is exactly my point: You must dream up something for it to happen.

Then the practice is open, patients start coming in, and everyone, including the practice owner gets busy.  That is good; in fact, it is what the practice owner dreamed up before and during medical school.

But here is where the trouble starts and the dreaming ends. Well, actually the dreaming does not quite end but the time to implement the dreams is gone.

The goal-maker is too busy seeing patients, making sure billing is done, OSHA is complied with and the staff in general does what they are supposed to do, otherwise NO profits at all.
The rat race has begun; expansion is slow, overhead high due to government regulation, stress is up and it looks like the dream of yours is not making it. What changed?

Too much work to be able to dream and to implement the dreams.

No time. You started trading time for money and are totally engrossed in the mechanics of practicing and in the daily operations of the practice.

The same, by the way, is happening with your managers.

They after all are supposed to set goals for their departments and then get them executed.  They are supposed to constantly check whether all other employees are doing their job. Right ?

But what usually happens is that the office manager really is only the best person for all the jobs and she/he is just doing that. Your office manager has little or no time to manage because she/he is doing the actual work. Sometimes they call it ‘trouble-shooting’. The only reason too much trouble-shooting is needed is because of lack of organization. Also called ‘no real managing’ going on.

Of course not, the manager has no time because he is doing the actual work.

This, my dear doctor, is a real cut-throat situation. It robs you of most of your dreams.

Workers do the work. While they do their work, such as billing insurance or making phone calls or sterilizing the instruments or performing a surgery, they cannot manage and cannot set goals.

The actual ‘work’, by definition, demands the person to be hands on. There is no possibility of doing other things while working.

You might have noticed that I put the doctor as a ‘worker’. Because that is what he is when doing the health care work — a higher paid worker than a typist, but still a worker.

So, a manager must have lots of time to manage, organize and give orders which can be executed by the staff at a certain pre-determined time.

Managers might be the managers because they can do all the jobs and can do them well, but they MUST stop doing them and MUST start running the place.

If this sounds like it will cost you money, because you are too small to have a manager who does “nothing but manage”, then I might remind you that the large companies do not do the things they do (such as having managers, train people at great expenses, do lot of meetings, spend lots on marketing and public relations) because they are large. They are large because of the things they do.

Read the above again. This is important.

Sure, you might have to start small, free up your manager to do the managing some of the time, and you will find that business is expanding more smoothly.

Don’t stop there, continue to free up your manager to manage more and more and expand more and more.

Now, if what I said is true for the manager, then what do you think would happen if you, the practice owner, starts concentrating a lot more on the creation and implementation of your goals?

The moral of the story is that most small business owners and practitioners work too hard so they have no time to dream and set goals. Never mind that they have absolutely no time to organize their dreams into actions to be performed by their staff. Even if they give orders to get some new project (a dream or a goal) going to the office manager, it will hardly ever get done because the manager is herself too busy doing physical work and will have little time to organize the staff to implement your orders. She herself has only two hands and can’t do it alone either without neglecting the other necessary workloads.

So, in order to not neglect the necessary work which services the current patients and pays the bills, most new expansion projects which could bring some well deserved freedom and peace of mind, fall under the table.

Most of the time, such attempts at implementing new dreams not only falter shortly after, due to what I explained above, but in the meantime they distract from the current affairs of the practice.

Contained in our consulting programs are exact ways which you could work your way out of a ‘worker’ position and become a true goal-maker.  All you need to do is to believe in your dreams and dare to dream and think big.

Dream on doctor, dream on – and your dreams will come true.

Remember: Doctors and dentists, like small business owners, work very hard – they have to deal with billing, practice management, staff management and new patient marketing etc.  But they must make it just as important to set goals and dream.

Note: Get new patients by applying great practice management. Inspire, inform and motivate your staff to be their best. While you are focusing on medical and dental practice marketing, create a great crew that stands by your practice goals.

There simply is nothing more important than keeping the staff rooting for the place they work for. Nothing – except giving them direction and orders which they can execute.

But here we are talking about instilling a sense of belonging and of going somewhere, even if the staff member is only looking at the position in your practice as a transitory stepping stone, or even as a “it was the only job I could get.”

It is normal that people will not work for you their whole life – why should they? There is a big and beautiful world out there which needs exploring.

So it is the boss’s job to make the staff pull hard and with enthusiasm while they are with the company.

There is only one way you can do this:

You, the boss, must give your employees more than just money. Money you must give too, of course, so I always suggest paying just a bit more than the average salary in your area for the particular job.

However there is much, much more than money (especially since the salary of the average medical practice is nothing to write home to mom about anyhow).

You must give your employees knowledge. Knowledge is future employability.
Knowledge is potential betterment for survival in the future. Knowledge and getting knowledge is also fun and that in turn keeps people with you and working just a bit harder.

The reason almost all people want to work for Microsoft, GE, Hilton and any other large company is not so much the money, and not even so much the job security, but the potential to move on.

The hope of advancement, better positions, greater and more opportunities, is what we all are driving for.

Every boss has a lot of knowledge and inspiration to pass on to his juniors. Be generous with your knowledge; do not keep it for yourself – this is how some of the most incredible technologies such as building the pyramids and Taj Mahal, making silk towels as big as a couple of beds which then fit into a much smaller box, etc have been lost.

Ok, I should have made my point. You have an awful lot more to offer than money, but you must be inventive and courageous and most of all be willing to give it all yourself.

In order to make your mark and have staff members remember and admire you way after they have left your practice, you must help them for life, not just buy them with your salary.

Maybe you don’t care about them remembering you for the rest of their lives. That of course, if this is your attitude, makes you a bad boss with little hope of great and lasting success.

But besides of that, money alone will never – and believe you me, will never, give you a crew of dedicated – give-it-all employees. It is hard enough to get this dedication with providing excitement, future growth, etc. It is simply impossible without your decision to care for them and to help them for life.

In life you got to first give, and you need to give what others want.

A mind wasted is an awfully bad thing – it is in your hands as a boss to never do that. If you do take care of the minds that are under your employment, the financial, as well as the emotional rewards, will be surpassing your wildest dream!

Its hard work and probably will take longer than you want it to take, but it is really the only road you have. If you want to be successful, that is.

Remember: While focusing on marketing for new patients or practice management, it is also important to inspire and motivate your dental or medical practice staff. Not only will your staff be happy, but your new patients will feel it too. And soon your business will be thriving, despite any economic climate.