How to Increase your Business’ Profit Margin in Under One Year
But first – A MikedUp Blog Original:
How we almost became broke business owners
At first, it was finding a price that was agreeable to both sides. Which is not normally a difficult thing to do in the dental field. There are variables, sure, but most sale prices are within an industry-standard range that’s based on how much money the practice generates.
Moving a dental practice is incredibly expensive
And (I’m laughing as I type this) with 2 days remaining the negotiations came to a stand-still.
If things didn’t change quickly, we were on a course to run out of money
There was certainty in what expenses we would have when those 8 months were up, but the one major variable in this equation – was income.
This is that plan:
Step 1- Keep or hire the right people
We started with the employees that we inherited and evaluated each and every one for whether or not they showed the potential to buy-in.
We needed to hire and avoid anyone jumping ship and delivering their 2-weeks notice
Our hiring process consisted of a minimum of 3 different interviews
Step 2- Institute extreme ownership with our Team
As I finished reading through Extreme Ownership the first time – I decided the book would be our business’ onboarding program
From that point on our days were spent growing the business and at night I’d cycle through 1-on-1 phone meetings with the Team. Discussing one chapter at a time with each employee individually.
What is Extreme Ownership?
Step 3- Design every aspect of the customer experience
I don’t care who you are, you can’t fake that
Step 4- Get the customer in the door
With some “big guns” in our ranks, we first took a look around to see what our competitors were doing
Because we had focused so hard on Steps 1-3 above, generating referrals wasn’t too difficult
To get people in the door ASAP we attacked with an aggressive online presence
With all of these tactics (and a few more) working toward a common goal, success was bound to follow soon – right?
Step 5- Perform better than any competitor your customer has used
Step 6- Say thank you and get the customer excited to come back
We thanked our patients just like you’d want a business to say thank you – we gave them free stuff!
This approach was great for so many reasons
-
The patients got free stuff
-
We had some awesome pictures of sweet giveaway items to promote across our online presences
-
We made videos and theatre of the drawings to choose the winners
-
As the thrilled winner came in to claim the prize, we’d have more pictures to promote of happy smiling patients…
Step 7- Ask for an honest review
In month 7 we started deploying some tech as backup
-
5-stars: 95
-
4-stars: 4
-
1-star: 1
There’s one in every crowd, am I right?
Time to get on the phone and argue, beg, and bribe the patient to remove the review?
So – Did the plan to increase profit margin and earn reviews work?
(Fast forward to 3 weeks ago – the day our final round of payments were due…)
Back to reality
Reader’s Input
Thanks for reading!