THE EDITOR'S CORNER
Practice building is the single most important factor in the orthodontist's financial well-being. It is the difference between one orthodontist doing well in a community and another doing poorly. It is the difference between one orthodontist staying in a community and another leaving. It has become the difference between survival or actual failure in orthodontic practice. There are orthodontists whose practices have failed, who have had to go to work for another practitioner or institution, or move to what is hoped are greener fields, or who have returned to general practice.
A profile of the average orthodontist who has failed in practice is revealing. He is not incompetent in orthodontics. To the contrary, he has frequently been a skillful operator and a creative individual. His problem almost to a man has been that he was a loner, he was not gregarious, he did not relate well to people--meaning patients, parents and dentists--and he had not the slightest idea of how to compensate for these deficiencies in practice building. Each one watched helplessly as his practice went dry.
Professions have traditionally attracted bright students who could succeed in the courses and who were drawn to an occupation that depended on their brain power. Often these were introverted individuals. In times when the volume of patients per doctor was high, such people were successful in orthodontics in spite of themselves. As the volume of patients per orthodontist declines and will continue to decline, the practice of this type of individual is among those affected first, because he never really did anything about practice building and does not know how to go about it now.
Know Thyself is the first principle of L.D. Pankey and should be the first principle of every orthodontist. For, whether you decide that you are one of these vulnerable introverted individuals, you may be a non-introvert who has neglected practice building. So, each of us should take stock of how we are doing in the practice building area: how we are relating to patients, parents and dentists; what our practice building efforts are now; how effective they are; what our capability is in practice building; what do we know about practice building; what steps should we start taking today to improve our practice building effort.
What to do? As you would with any building, make a plan. As you would with any other building planning, either borrow ideas from other people or hire a building consultant. We have orthodontists who are unusually successful at practice building and who write about it and lecture about it. Read everything you can. Take their lectures. There are also practice consultants who can accelerate the process of practice building. If my practice was declining and I didn't know what to do about it, I would do all of these things including finding the best practice consultant that I could.
You may need help in evaluating whether your community is the one you should be practice building in. Is the tax structure in your community driving businesses away? Has the child population disappeared? Has the affluent portion of the population moved elsewhere?
Have your referring dentists retired or cut down? Do you have no relationship with the new crop of young dentists in town? Should you take on one of the young orthodontic graduates and through him establish a relationship with both the younger dentists and the younger community in general? Have so many orthodontists moved into town that there cannot possibly be enough patients to go around? Someone is going to have to leave sooner or later and it will be the one who couldn't build his practice.
It may be impossible or even undesirable to try to change one's personality. However, it would be both possible and desirable to use that brain power to do some studying, to take some courses to try to understand human interrelationships better and some of the simple and rewarding positive actions involved in how to win friends and influence people.
It also requires an evaluation of your office and your staff. Is it the kind of physical and personal environment that you would look forward to visiting? Do you have the right people on your staff? Can they be retrained or must they be replaced? Do you know what the right people are?
Have you scorned all those motivational methods such as changing decor, bulletin boards, photos, prizes, poster contests? Is your office dull? Do you keep lines of communication open with patients and parents with intreatment progress reports and posttreatment evaluation consultations? Do you keep lines of communication open with dentists in any way other than dull, repetitive letters?
In the months and years ahead, nothing is going to be more important to orthodontists than ongoing practice evaluation and strenuous practice building. Survival as an orthodontist could easily depend on how soon and how well this is understood and undertaken.
