Dentaltown December 2019 - 16

professional courtesy
column

Annual Checkup
There is a certain rhythm to the months and seasons.
Beyond the weather, celebrations and sports is the
dental practice: Every six months or so, the same faces
reappear, the daily procedures start to melt together
and the office occasionally feels smaller. Inevitably,
the year comes to an end so the cycle can
start all over again. As the year comes to
a close, I find the same annual rituals on
my to-do list.
Each year, I create an office holiday
card to send to my patient list. It costs
roughly $1 per household and I find it's well
worth it to send an old-fashioned physical
greeting. We send a custom-designed
postcard that includes pictures of everyone
on the team. The message on the back
is a great opportunity to share with our
patients some of the improvements we've
made throughout the year, and we provide
insights into any changes planned for the
coming year. If you have any hesitation about a future
goal for your practice, announce it to your patients
and you will get it done. The fi nal (and sometimes
underappreciated) benefit of mailing this postcard is
that the undeliverable cards that are returned in the
mail-in our practice it is standard to verify addresses at
the start of every visit; this serves as a proof of that policy.
Sharing plans with our patients is also an opportunity
for me to prepare a second list to share with my team
at our first monthly meeting of the year. Long ago, I
learned that each new year would bring changes and
we must be prepared to respond. We must also focus
on our opportunities to be agents of change. It's easy
to get into a comfortable rut in your
daily practice; in fact, many people
crave consistency and fear change.
When you're leading the change,
there is less reason for fear, and the
pursuit of improvement is often very
energizing.
You might have a team member
who needs some one-on-one training

to get better with a skill, or a piece of equipment that
you know will need to be replaced very soon. Financial
goals provide a yardstick for teams to monitor progress,
but there's often a disconnect between the day-to-day
activities around patient treatment and the sum of fees

collected. Look for other goals and milestones that your
team can strive to reach, such as reorganizing parts of
the office to improve efficiency, choosing new office
colors, or finding a patient in the practice who would
be a worthy recipient of some charitable care.
Closing the books is my shorthand for preparing
documents for the accountant every year. I'm sure each
practice does it a bit differently, but the end of the year
means you're making sure every account is reconciled in
QuickBooks, you've run final reports in your management
software, and you're gathering documentation for any
large purchases you made throughout the year. If you
have a retirement plan, this may also be time to ask
your TPA for profit-sharing calculations. It is certainly
too late to make an important financial decision for the
benefit of 2019, but you might identify an area that
needs to be a focus for 2020.
Please visit this article online and share some of
your year-end thoughts and goals for 2020. What will
you do differently in the new decade? If you have a
question or need a bit of advice, you can reach me via
email: tom@dentaltown.com. ■

by Thomas Giacobbi, DDS, FAGD, editorial director, Dentaltown magazine

16

DECEMBER 2019 // dentaltown.com
http://www.dentaltown.com
Dentaltown December 2019

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