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938: Fail to Plan, You Plan to Fail – Ariel Siegel

You're good at planning your vacations. But how about planning for your business? In this episode, Kirk Behrendt brings back Ariel Siegel, one of ACT’s amazing coaches, to break down how to strategically plan for your future and build a thriving practice. When you fail to plan, you are planning to fail! To learn how to make a great plan for a great future, listen to Episode 938 of The Best Practices Show!

 

Learn More About Ariel:

Learn More About ACT Dental:

More Helpful Links for a Better Practice & a Better Life:

Episode Resources:

Main Takeaways:

  • Failure is a consequence of not having a plan.
  • A thriving practice doesn't just happen! It happens with planning.
  • With the right tools and strategies, planning won't be as hard as you think.
  • Analyze the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in your business.
  • Use the SWOT analysis to plan and create an aligned, smart, and healthy practice.

Quotes:

“Does anyone really plan to fail? By not having a plan in place, that's where we see those failures come into it. So, you're not intentionally, but it's an unintentional consequence.” (2:10—2:22) -Ariel

“Thirty-one years of doing this, I have found dentists do a better job of planning vacations than they do their business. Like, they'll tell me about every detail, what they're going to do, on what day. But they won't spend the same amount of time planning success for their business. That's crazy to me. Could you imagine if you're a dentist who does comprehensive work, and a patient comes in and you didn't do treatment planning? You're like, ‘No, I got this. We're just going to go to work on these things.’ That's silly. Or worse yet, let's say you and your significant other decide to build a home, but you don't have a blueprint. You're like, ‘We're just going to get started. We're going to clear these trees.’ No — it starts with a good plan and sticking to it.” (3:36—4:22) -Kirk

“Dentists went to school to be dentists, so they're not going to necessarily think about, ‘When do I work on the business instead of in the business?’ That's when they take it home and they're doing it after hours. That's not what we want for you.” (5:20—6:13) -Ariel

“Planning is not as hard as you think. There's a strategic process for it, and you don't necessarily need a coach to do it. Coaches definitely make it easier because we can help provide the tools. But hopefully, after listening today, you'll at least have somewhere to start so that you can start taking control over your time, your finances, and your team development so that you can move your practice towards long-term success and get out of that day-to-day grind and get off of that hamster wheel that sometimes you feel like you get stuck in.” (6:27—6:59) -Ariel

“What we have done is we've created a tool that helps you think clearly about the three pillars of success in your business. We believe that the three pillars are aligned, smart, and healthy. Aligned is, do we know the vision? Do we know where we're headed? Does my team know my vision? Do they know the plan to get there? Are we smart about it? Do we have the best practices, systems, and processes in place to be able to achieve that vision? Healthy is, do we have that team culture? Do we have the right people in the right seats to be able to process and run those systems so that we can achieve that vision? A successful business and a successful dental office is going to have all three. You cannot have one without the others.” (7:12—8:04) -Ariel

“We've created this tool that says, let me look into these different areas and see, what do I do well? Where are my strengths? This is an important part that sometimes we skip when we're making a plan. You want to know, what are we doing well? Let's keep doing those things. Don't overlook what we're already good at and what our strengths of our team are. What sometimes we do is skip straight to where are the weaknesses, where are the areas of opportunities? Without doing the strengths, now it just feels negative. There's a balance, right? We're doing some things well. We're doing some things that are not so well and have areas of opportunity. Can we take those weaknesses and say, how can I help improve these? Are there hidden opportunities in our business that maybe we're not utilizing? Do some of our team members have skill sets? Do we have technology in our office that we're not utilizing to the best of its ability? Did you take a CE course last year, and you haven't fully implemented those learnings yet?” (8:18—9:26) -Ariel

“The last part of the SWOT analysis is thinking about the threats. What, from outside in, could put us at risk? Not necessarily going out of business, or not meeting our financial goals, but what are some of the risks internally that could stop us from achieving some of these goals? It could be lack of time. It could be lack of education on some of our team members’ part. We need to call them out in order to say, what do I need to do to move forward from this?” (9:28—10:04) -Ariel

“The last part of the pillars is the healthy section. Like you said, if you say you care, if you have these, do you have these core values? Does your team know them? Do they show up? Are all of your decisions supporting those core values, or are there some things that we say, ‘Yeah, that's a core value. But we're doing this?’ So, we have to really look at the SWOT analysis and say, are we really living those core values, or are they just written on a wall? Or maybe we communicated them to the team one time, but we couldn't really name them if we wanted to, and, ‘Yeah, my team embodies them, but we don't really celebrate them,’ so that's an area of opportunity.” (22:33—23:21) -Ariel

“Maybe you have great core values, and your team does embody them, and you live them. Then, my next question would be, do your patients know your core values? Do we communicate why we do things? It all comes back to those and having that patient communication, because a threat to healthy culture is that hiring is hard. So, if we lose our team members, it's tough. Especially right now, a lot of our teams are looking for really good team members. So, we know that we have to have that healthy culture, one, to keep our good team members. Then, two, when we are bringing team members in, they're going to want to stay. They're going to want to join our team because of these combined values. And like I said, we don't have to be best friends. We don't have to be going out to happy hours, or hanging out on the weekends, or hugging each other hello and goodbye. But do we all respect each other? Do we all know our roles and responsibilities? Do we all have those similar values and working towards that common goal?” (23:22—24:30) -Ariel

“Running an amazing practice that's aligned, smart, and healthy requires thought.” (29:36—29:41) -Kirk

“You can't fix what you don't see or what we're turning a blind eye to. I mean, I put the clutter in the closet, and I close the door. It's still there, but I can't fix it. So, it's having a clear, honest assessment of, what are we doing really well? Like I said, start with those strengths, because I don't want you to forget about them or even stop doing some of them. Then, look at those weaknesses and opportunities, and be realistic about threats that could help us or hinder us from achieving those goals. And planning leadership is a necessity if you want to truly move your practice forward. So, you have to take the time to clarify your vision and your goals so that you can lead it with intention instead of just reacting on the day-to-day and putting out all of those fires.” (30:00—30:54) -Ariel

Snippets:

0:00 Introduction.

1:38 Why this is an important topic.

7:02 SWOT analysis, explained.

10:05 The three pillars for success: Aligned.

19:10 The three pillars for success: Smart.

22:30 The three pillars for success: Healthy.

25:34 Select key areas to focus your planning.

29:52 Final takeaways.

32:42 About ACT’s To The Top, tools, and resources.

Ariel Juday Bio:

Ariel has a master’s in healthcare administration and several years of dental experience in all aspects of the administrative roles within the dental office. Her passion is to work with dental teams to empower team members to realize their full potential in order to better serve patients, improve office systems to ensure a well-functioning team/office, and to help everyone have fun in the process!
ACT Dental Team

ACT Dental Team

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