The Recession Proof Your Practice Workshop

That’s the choice before all of us as we enter into the socio-economic aftermath of COVID-19.

That’s what this program is about.  Our choice is not for you to Dive, or even to merely Survive, but to Thrive.

And you will.

It’s about being taught the right navigation tools to steer your practice in the right directions, based on wet-gloved experience gained from several previous recessionary periods we’ve seen since the 1980’s. It’s about having senior colleagues share past experiences, past mistakes, and how to avoid these mistakes, thus empowering and equipping you with the knowledge you need to create, control and maintain fiscal efficiency.

It’s about dentists, helping dentists, helping dentistry.

Because sink or swim, we’re all in this together.

No more “No-shows” !!!

We all know that an empty hole in the schedule means continued expenses but zero revenue. It’s more than just a hole, it’s a black hole that sucks up your profit margins. We also know that patients can think of a number of reasons to cancel an appointment on short notice or else not show up at all. This puts your front desk staff under major pressure and stress trying to fill these last minute cancellations, while you stress over the lost opportunity to provide the services you needed to do, and how to pay the bills.

This part of the training will teach you why people bail on appointments and how you can communicate with your patients so they don’t do that in the future.

Evolution of a 50% overhead practice

Is 50% overhead a myth, magic or is it simply a mystery to those who have never been trained in how to achieve it?

This program will provide you with strategic protocols that will guide you on the road to bringing your overhead to 50% and even below that. But once again, we need to be black-and-white about this—there is no “magic” in the formulas you’ll learn that can transform your overhead to 50% (or less), so it won’t happen “overnight”. But it can happen and it will happen if you take advantage of the strategies presented in this workshop. When you do, it will probably triple your after-tax disposable income.

Imagine the kind of freedom this training will give you.

The science of consumerism
—Why they buy (or don’t)

How would you change your practice modalities if you could accurately predict what direction dental consumerism would take in the next 5 years? Imagine what kind of marketing advantage you would have if you were ahead of the curve, rather than playing catch-up? In the early 1990’s, Dr. Orieux was teaching audiences who were “addicted” to amalgam restorations that they needed to change their mindset and embrace composite resins for posterior teeth. Then in the mid 1990’s, he predicted that dental insurers would cut back their coverage for 6 month recare appointments to once every 9-12 months. At the time, he took a lot of flack from conference attendees for both of these predictions, but the fact remains—
…he was right.

Dr. Wayne Halstrom, past president of the Canadian Dental Association, has referred to Dr. Orieux as the dental futurist because of the socio-economic research his company, Aararat Consulting, has performed over the past twenty-seven years. In this workshop, you will learn some of the latest socio-economic research findings that will help you position your practice way ahead of the consumeristic curve.

Overcoming “only if my insurance covers it”

Your treatment plan is sound, your recommendations are patient-centered and you have spent the last half hour explaining to your patient why their fractured lower left first molar needs a crown, yet the patient says “Only if my insurance will cover it”.

How many of us have heard patients use this phrase more often than Vancouver Canucks fans saying “Maybe next year”? Yet if you were doing socio-economic research on Craigslist in the Spring of 2010, you would have found Vancouverites willing to pay over $3000 per ticket for seats in the nosebleeds because they (desperately) wanted to see their team skate off with Lord Stanley’s silverware (and no, their ticket price was not covered by their dental insurance).

People pay for what they want.

This workshop will help you learn how to get your patients to “want” the dentistry they need.

You Never Heard These Things in Dental School – or Anywhere Else

Which is why the choice before you is very quickly going to show you that the course of action people will take will be either black or white. Either you learn the MBA’s of how to manage your way through a recession now, or you do the same things you’ve always done and somehow hope that you will weather the storm, a storm that economists are saying is going to last a long (long) time.

When this Recession Proof Your Practice training was first introduced in the Fall of 2008 and dental practices everywhere were diving in a sea of lost revenue, the dentists who took our training reported that they didn’t just survive the economic storms, they learned how to thrive in spite of them.  The results were so dramatic, the Mentor of Recession Proof Your Practice, Dr. Kevin Orieux, wrote a book to describe the philosophical mindset that takes businesses from the brink of oblivion to the new heights of optimization. That book is:

Survive, Thrive or Dive.

No more “No-shows” !!!

We all know that an empty hole in the schedule means continued expenses but zero revenue. It’s more than just a hole, it’s a black hole that sucks up your profit margins. We also know that patients can think of a number of reasons to cancel an appointment on short notice or else not show up at all. This puts your front desk staff under major pressure and stress trying to fill these last minute cancellations, while you stress over the lost opportunity to provide the services you needed to do, and how to pay the bills.

This part of the training will teach you why people bail on appointments and how you can communicate with your patients so they don’t do that in the future.

Slash your supply bills by thousands

There are a number of reasons why some suppliers will sell the exact same supplies at substantially lower prices than the competition. The black-and-white of it is, dentists who do not have a strategy for inventory control are simply going to pay more, and dental suppliers know that. Dental school simply didn’t teach us anything about inventory control and comparative shopping.

This part of the program will teach you how to implement your own inventory control program, plus give you the tools to train your staff members to rise to the challenge of saving your practice money.

For those who take this particular part of the training to heart and are prepared to invest the time (minimal) to gain the financial savings (maximal) you can EASILY cut your supply bill by as much as 20-50% compared to that of your colleagues.

Evolution of a 50% overhead practice

Is 50% overhead a myth, magic or is it simply a mystery to those who have never been trained in how to achieve it?

This program will provide you with strategic protocols that will guide you on the road to bringing your overhead to 50% and even below that. But once again, we need to be black-and-white about this—there is no “magic” in the formulas you’ll learn that can transform your overhead to 50% (or less), so it won’t happen “overnight”. But it can happen and it will happen if you take advantage of the strategies presented in this workshop. When you do, it will probably triple your after-tax disposable income.

Imagine the kind of freedom this training will give you.

What forms of advertising are a total waste of money — and why.

Our keynote speaker, Dr. K J Orieux, has a unique background. Prior to going back to school to become a dentist, he studied sociology and socio-economics, leading to a career as the Vice President of an advertising and marketing company. For the past twenty-seven years, he has been a lecturer, keynote speaker, author of two books Survive, Thrive or Dive and What’s Your ROI ? as well  , and provided consulting on marketing expertise and socio-economics in healthcare nationally and internationally.

Dr. Orieux will teach you the principles behind “Patient Loyalty for Life” which are based on well documented tenets of social psychology, socio-economics and interactive group dynamics.  The things you will learn from “DocKO” are based on over 25 years of research from his company Aararat Consulting.  Check out the websites.

The science of consumerism
—Why they buy (or don’t)

How would you change your practice modalities if you could accurately predict what direction dental consumerism would take in the next 5 years? Imagine what kind of marketing advantage you would have if you were ahead of the curve, rather than playing catch-up? In the early 1990’s, Dr. Orieux was teaching audiences who were “addicted” to amalgam restorations that they needed to change their mindset and embrace composite resins for posterior teeth. Then in the mid 1990’s, he predicted that dental insurers would cut back their coverage for 6 month recare appointments to once every 9-12 months. At the time, he took a lot of flack from conference attendees for both of these predictions, but the fact remains—
…he was right.

Dr. Wayne Halstrom, past president of the Canadian Dental Association, has referred to Dr. Orieux as the dental futurist because of the socio-economic research his company, Aararat Consulting, has performed over the past twenty-seven years. In this workshop, you will learn some of the latest socio-economic research findings that will help you position your practice way ahead of the consumeristic curve.

Eliminating bad debt & write-offs

Before you fix a problem, you first have to admit the problem exists.

Most dentists have been conditioned to believe that “bad debt” only accounts for a fraction of one percent of their production. Dr. Orieux will tell you the damage to your bottom line is probably in the realm of 1000% higher than that, it’s just that the whole realm of account receivables is so convoluted that it’s often extremely difficult to identify all the different ways in which losses are occurring. For those who have the courage (and the stomach) to do their own investigative research according to what you’ll learn in this workshop, many will find out they are losing tens of thousands of dollars a year. What’s worse, many of you are still paying taxes on non-existent revenue. Bad debt is a much larger problem to the typical dental practice than what we’ve been led to believe.

In this part of the program, Dr. Orieux will teach those who want to learn to diagnose the truth about why their “bottom line” seems to “bottom out” far lower than they think it should and how to gain control over bad debt.

Overcoming “only if my insurance covers it”

Your treatment plan is sound, your recommendations are patient-centered and you have spent the last half hour explaining to your patient why their fractured lower left first molar needs a crown, yet the patient says “Only if my insurance will cover it”.

How many of us have heard patients use this phrase more often than Vancouver Canucks fans saying “Maybe next year”? Yet if you were doing socio-economic research on Craigslist in the Spring of 2010, you would have found Vancouverites willing to pay over $3000 per ticket for seats in the nosebleeds because they (desperately) wanted to see their team skate off with Lord Stanley’s silverware (and no, their ticket price was not covered by their dental insurance).

People pay for what they want.

This workshop will help you learn how to get your patients to “want” the dentistry they need.