Should You Hire an Orthodontic Practice Consultant?

There's no shame in hiring an orthodontic practice consultant to assist with your office's countless responsibilities. In fact, it's one of the best decisions you can make to ensure your practice's health.

To the point, take a moment to consider the many duties you need to fulfill each day. Your work involves much more than correcting smiles. You need to understand accounting, human resources, leadership, and even have a basic knowledge of psychology. To say you wear many hats is an understatement.

Considering these many responsibilities, managing your practice alone can be overwhelming—even risky—if you don't fully understand what you're doing.

However, with extra help from an outside perspective, it's possible for your practice to thrive in today's changing market. Here are a few ways an orthodontic practice consultant can place you on a path toward achievement and success.

You'll Reach Every Goal

First, a lack of growth in your practice can cause a great deal of stress over your finances. As a result, you may question whether a consultant is in your budget.

However, allowing an industry expert to intervene and help you strategize can significantly improve your return on investment (ROI). With such a benefit, the extra cost is worthwhile. A small dent in your budget is manageable when you have a valuable asset in front of you.

Moreover, sustaining a thriving practice requires you to be an informed business manager. You need to maintain an awareness of today's marketplace, consumer, and competition. Especially now, considering that data-driven decisions have become the force required to achieve competitive advantage. To differentiate your practice, you need facts, not guesswork.

To the point, high-performance teams use key metrics to measure and analyze the progress of numerous workflows. Through data, they strategize attracting new patients, turning exams to starts, maintaining a robust observation program, clinical efficiency, and more. Unfortunately, with the demands of day-to-day operations, it's easy to neglect these important matters.

But with an orthodontic consultant, you gain an outside perspective to help you strategize. By building on the protocols and systems you already have, they can help your team stay focused on each goal. With this guidance, you can identify trends, alter your course, and be a high-performance practice.

Your Technology Will Be Easier to Use

Technology is integral to orthodontic practice management. If you and your staff are having trouble navigating your software, you're creating issues beyond slower workflows. From staff and patient frustration to lost revenue and incorrect data entry, misunderstanding your technology is far too risky.

Fortunately, orthodontic practice consultants can provide the training necessary for you and staff to fully understand your practice's technology. This way, your practice avoids costly mistakes, like incorrect data entry and lost patients due to slower processes.

Equally importantly, consultants show you the full scope of your software. By understanding the full capabilities of your practice's technology, you can use it to your best advantage. Then, you can find more ways to be productive and save time with faster workflows.

You'll Expand Team Knowledge & Accountability

Maybe your treatment coordinator isn't communicating effectively, and your patient flow is suffering for it. Or, because your front desk forgets to schedule follow-up appointments, you notice fewer patient visits and lower treatment compliance.

For your practice to run smoothly, your team needs to work well together. But if their performance is lacking, your practice's performance will be, too.

If you're not sure how to address these issues, an orthodontic consultant can help you examine your team's performance. To see how everyone is doing, they'll partner with you to analyze performance metrics and track staff performance. This will enable you to measure progress over time and identify areas where staff may need additional support or guidance.

Additionally, your consultant will help you with coaching your staff. Then, with feedback, training, and tangible goals to work toward, they can develop and improve. Your practice also gains an accountability structure. With performance reviews and clearly defined job descriptions, your staff members know their responsibilities and what's expected of them.

Further, it's important to note that you aren't alone in this process. It can be difficult to get new habits to stick, but consultants remain by your side to provide ongoing support. With regular progress monitoring and helpful guidance, you can expect to see improvements.

You'll Gain an Effective Marketing Strategy

Along with financial stability, an effective marketing plan is a key factor in your practice's growth. Marketing ensures higher case acceptance rates and practice growth. However, you won't have much luck targeting prospects without a proper marketing strategy or a budget allocated for it.

With an orthodontic consultant, you can develop marketing tactics that engage your target audience and place your practice on the map. This includes analyzing patient demographics, competition, and market trends to determine a marketing plan for your practice's unique needs.

Additionally, consultants can assist with checking off other parts of your marketing to-do list. Brand development, online marketing, referral programs, and patient retention strategies are other ways they help you attract and retain patients.

Gaidge 360 Consulting: Your Guide to Orthodontic Practice Growth

A thriving practice requires organization, leaders, and accountability systems to create a strategy, empower team members, and monitor performance. With orthodontic experts Gaidge 360 Consulting, your practice can achieve high-level performance that exceeds goals:

· Improve productivity and highlight growth opportunities by analyzing day-to-day operations, measuring practice performance metrics, and identifying trends to address

· Assist with software training for more productive workflows and the fullest understanding of your management system's capabilities

· Coach team leaders, define staff roles, and create accountability structures for optimal practice performance

· Implement marketing strategies that build your practice's image, ensuring you attract and retain the right audience

· Decrease stress with practice management guidance so you can build the practice you've always wanted

Altogether, Gaidge 360 Consulting gives your practice the guidance it needs to reassess, retool, and re-engineer its operations. With their combined expertise, Gaidge 360 consultants help you through every part of your growth journey. At every step, every milestone, and every goal, you'll have a reliable team by your side.