If you haven't shut down for Christmas on the 21st of December, you'll be shutting down soon, and even if you haven't shut down mentally, you probably have.
Christmas is different for different people, but for me, it's an extraordinary time, the only time of the year when the vast majority of people stop. Incoming traffic disappears, and if you can create enough time in your life, you can think about stuff, important stuff, the big stuff. That's why people get all funny about projects and plans at the New Year.
One of the things that would be worth thinking about is what you charge for the work that you do and how you charge. This is definitely one of the areas in dentistry which is massively overlooked, one of the areas that people are never taught, how to consider or think about it and one of the areas that doesn't spill easily or rapidly from other industries.
As you enter next year, in January, and start to look at how you're going to do it again next year, (more about that in a blog to come, next Sunday). One of the easiest ways to increase your turnover is to increase your prices. I say easiest because you can just change your prices, but everybody has a problem with that, everybody has difficulty with that and many, many people have problems justifying that.
We have adopted a system where we increase prices, if appropriate, twice yearly. We have also built a system that makes it very, very simple for us to change our prices on our practice management system.
If I could suggest one thing related to pricing for anyone working in dentistry, I would make sure you have a system that makes it easy to alter your pricing as quickly as possible.
What I mean by that is to be able to change the prices in an hour or two, press a button and activate it for the following day.
One of the worst things you can do in pricing is to overjustify your price increases.
This is like an apology, where people who don't want to raise the prices raise them, and then apologise for raising them, and then, in the very worst case scenarios, backtrack from that.
That's why twice-yearly price rises are easier because they're smaller and more subtle.
If you want to talk to your customers about prices, talk to them about the value and benefit of the services and the products you provide. Don't write to people and say, I'm sorry we've had to put our prices up, but our suppliers have put their prices up. Write to people and say, “We aim to provide even more value next year, even more quality, even better service”.
If you do that, though, make sure you increase the value and the quality and the service and then this becomes the game. The evolution and revolution that occur inside your business on a week-by-week and year-by-year basis are fueled by the pricing.
The pricing goes up a bit, and therefore, the quality has to go up a bit. The quality goes up again, and therefore the pricing goes up again.
This is part of the mechanism of racing to the top of the pyramid.
The alternative, unthinkable.
Colin Campbell, Chris Barrow, and an intrepid group of dentists will be cycling across the plains of Tanzania from Kilimanjaro in early February 2026. If you would like to support the charity, Bridge to Aid, and this extraordinary challenge, please click here.
Thank you for your generosity.
Leave a comment