It’s the twilight years of your mature dental career. Maybe 5 more years before you’re calling it quits.
Your dental hump may be showing a little more, but nothing like a few cracks at the chiropractor couldn’t solve.
But as you make an appointment for an adjustment, you feel searing pain. This episode jolts as sharp barbs of electrical pulses. Clamping into your right shoulder.
It’s an old Polka injury. Happened when you were doing a Bohemian front triple dip and your shoulder suddenly gave out.
Now the years of over use, jabbing patients with anesthetic, repeatedly utilizing a death grip with undersized forceps have come to a reckoning.
It’s time to think about cutting down a few hours. It’s time for an associate.
Now your wee little dentist trained brain kicks in. I call it the funnel of doom. It can only think about the gloomy ‘future forecasting’. Dark cloudy amalgam thoughts will dirty the mind.
What if this associate is lazy? What if they don’t get along with my staff? And what if they can’t do dentistry to the same standard of care that I have come to expect in my practice?
Hmmm…
All legitimate questions. But I think that undermines the real issue at play here.
What if you’re really bad at recruiting and retaining the most talented dentists?
Ever thought of that?
A dental office is really good at dentisting. As it should be.
But when it comes to hiring a staple member of the practice, what is the norm? You tell the office manager, mind you, they have to manage a practice full of dental monkeys. And now you want to stack on create an influential ad? And not just any ad. An ad that will attract the most intelligent, informed, highly skilled and well educated dentists. These people are not dumb. They became a dentist for god’s sake!
And how does that office manager know how to write a hiring ad for a dentist? They instantly do one of two things.
- Google ‘How Do I Write A
GoodGreat Hiring Ad’ - Read the last 5 dentist hiring ads on the local state association website.
After a fast and furious night of changing every 5th word of semi-plagiarism with a little plug and play of your benefits package, you now have an a-la-carte generic dentist hiring ad that reads dryer than a forgotten half broken graham cracker still in the brown waxy plastic wrapper at the bottom of the box.
So you’re telling me, the most influential ad you need, for a most critical position in your practice, is left to an office manager who mostly doesn’t have enough time to even eat their lunch each day trying to manage your busy practice?
I know I’ve harped on this before. Influential copywriting is the most basic necessity in any ad creation. It takes more research than a shoddy google search and a half baked attempt at copying what’s already out there.
Because what’s already out there is a bunch of life sucking boring reads. It makes my eyes bleed just thinking about having to read other practice ads.
This is step one.
Stand out from the crowd. And create a product that actually gets someone up from their ass and want to apply to your not so boring ass job.
That’s my not so subtle way of saying, WRITE BETTER HIRING ADS.
And that doesn’t mean lying. As part of thriving, I think of it as highlighting your best attributes. And sometimes authenticity IS your best attribute. Telling right away, maybe you don’t have the latest equipment, or the most esthetically modern practice with the feel of a metropolitan art museum.
But you might have the most awesome patients. Or you might have the greatest staff on the face of the planet.
Even better yet, maybe you are willing to invest your time into this up and coming associate.
And that’s worth a damn lot more than some fake veneer of aromatherapeutic massage op chairs other practices hold up.
That’s a perfect way to end today’s bloggy rant. Leading to next week where I’ll go over why INVESTMENT is not only necessary to attract the most talented dentists. It’s a requirement to retain them.
Stay tuned on my crazy ass dental cliffhanger my thriving friend.
Cheers,
Lam