Wouldn't it be great to predict how much you'll produce this year? There's a way to do it, and it’s by tracking this one metric. In this episode of Metric Mondays, Kirk Behrendt brings back Miranda Beeson, ACT’s director of education, to break down production per day and how to use it to achieve your production goals. To learn how to stay on track with your daily and annual goals, listen to Episode 889 of The Best Practices Show!
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Main Takeaways:
Quotes:
“Production per day is a simple metric that's easy to run a report on. It's also something that is really great for planning and building your schedule around to help you get where you want to go and work the amount of days that you want to work. Basically, what it means and what it's measuring is the total dollar value of treatment that's completed and posted in a single day. This can be measured for the office as a whole. So, office production per day. It can be measured by department. Perhaps your practice wants to look at it as office production per day, and then also break that down into doctor production per day and hygiene production per day. You can even go as granular as if you have two doctors and four hygienists. It can be doctor A production per day and doctor B production per day and hygiene A, B, and C. You can even just look at per provider. So, ultimately, you're looking at the dollar amount that was produced. This could be gross and net. You can measure it either way. That's going to help for you to look at not, ‘What did we complete?’ So, that's the lagging piece because that's always looking backwards. But as a leading indicator, we can also say, ‘What do we need and want our production per day to be?’ and then build our schedule to suit that.” (4:42—6:03) -Miranda
“You and I did a webinar not too long ago on scheduling and we showed a metric of a practice that was up and down, and up and down, week over week with their production. Then, they implemented some strategic scheduling . . . and it started to plateau at a consistent weekly production amount week, over week, over week. And we talked about what it must feel like in that office to know that there's predictability now, and even if we are a little slower and we don't feel as busy as we felt before, how nice it is to — we just talked about Monday, that fresh start. You're not afraid to go to bed Sunday night because you know you don't have to wake up and go meet the chaos on Monday morning. It's pretty spectacular.” (9:13—10:00) -Miranda
“Production per day is a snapshot in time of one day's performance. We've talked before about what's scheduled ahead, and we often will talk about production. Like, what did we produce last month, or perhaps last week? So, looking at it as a day allows for you to identify patterns, slow days, overbooked chaos, hidden inefficiencies in the schedule, treatment that maybe could have been accepted that wasn't, and then we can break it down even more granular than just per day, getting into each visit. What are we doing? What's our service mix? What services are we offering? What is our case acceptance?” (12:08—12:49) -Miranda
“When you track production per day over time, it's going to show you if your systems are turning into delivered treatment. So, you just mentioned you don't necessarily need another associate to make more money. You might need to look at your treatment presentation system. What are you doing chairside? Maybe you're not even using photography. What if you started using photography? What is that going to do to your case acceptance? What would that end up doing then to your future production per day? Like we said earlier, it's those little, small turns of the dial that help to modify and grow and tweak these things over time. Again, what are our systems consistently doing to change the way that we deliver treatment? Maybe we do have clear aligner therapy, but we have no system for sharing that with our patients. It's just if they ask for it. And then, all of a sudden, we say, ‘What if we actually started taking pictures of every new patient that came in, or even our existing patients, and then asking them what they like about their smile, or if they had a magic wand, what they would change?’ We might get one more case a week than we ever had before, and it’s just with the simplest of changes. But if you don't start by looking at these metrics and planning intentionally for what your goals are and what you need, it's really hard to make that progress.” (13:03—14:25) -Miranda
“You need to look at what would your goal for production per day be, and you need to know what you want in terms of your annual overall goal. Like, what do you need and what do you want from a production and income profitability standpoint for, say, this coming year? Say it's October and you're strategically planning for the next year, and you're thinking like, ‘What do I want to achieve by way of that? How many days do I want to work?’ You often talk about, and I do the same thing, printing out the public school schedule, marking out the days that you know you're not going to be working because you want to be able to be with your kids, or perhaps you already know about a CE that you're going to take on the other coast, so you're going to have a few extra days off and a family vacation. Start planning that out to have an idea of how many days you're going to be working. Then, you just do some simple math, as Barrett would say, fourth-grade math, and you're going to divide those days into that production. That's how you're going to know what would be the goal per day for the practice.” (14:38—15:39) -Miranda
“Once you have that production per day goal, you're going to run a really intentional huddle every day with your team. That's going to highlight production opportunities. We say all the time that huddles are for patient care, not practice care. We're looking for opportunities to improve the way in which the patient experiences their appointment that day, and we're looking for opportunities and for a way in which we can make sure that we're meeting or exceeding those goals that we have for our practice. So, every day at huddle, we're going to report on, ‘What's our production today? What's our production tomorrow?’ We're going to look for weak spots or gaps or things within the day that may limit us from hitting our target or put us in a position where now we're off target. If we show up at huddle and there was a cancellation overnight — and heaven forbid, it was one of your high-production primary block cancellations — that's the opportunity for you to run a really intentional huddle and have a conversation around, ‘How are we going to recover this?’ because we all know and agree that this is what we're working towards on any given day.” (15:41—16:48) -Miranda
Snippets:
0:00 Introduction.
3:07 Why this is an important metric.
6:50 Make more money by working less.
10:47 More producers and more ops isn't the answer.
14:26 Countermeasures.
17:11 Last thoughts.
Miranda Beeson, MS, BSDH Bio:
Miranda Beeson has over 25 years of clinical dental hygiene, front office, practice administration, and speaking experience. She is enthusiastic about communication and loves helping others find the power that words can bring to their patient interactions and practice dynamics. As a Lead Practice Coach, she is driven to create opportunities to find value in experiences and cultivate new approaches.
Miranda graduated from Old Dominion University, and enjoys spending time with her husband, Chuck, and her children, Trent, Mallory, and Cassidy. Family time is the best time, and is often spent on a golf course, a volleyball court, or spending the day boating at the beach.