Have you ever wondered why your practice isn't growing as fast as you think it should? You can either get bitter or get better. Let's listen to Dr. John Meis in Episode 13 on how to grow your dental practice.

Dr. John Meis: If you've ever wondered why your practice isn't growing as fast as you think it should, well I'm gonna tell you why. I can tell you about my own practice. There was a time when my practice was growing extremely slowly. There was a gentlemen who was in one of my mastermind groups, whose practice was growing extremely rapidly, and it was frustrating the daylights out of me, because he wasn't anything special I didn't think. Why was his practice going so well, and so I created this whole list of reasons, I thought they were reasons, a whole list of reasons why his practice was doing better than mine.

Dr. John Meis: I thought he had wealthier patients. I thought he had a better team. I thought he had a better location. I thought he had all these advantages that I didn't have, and that's why he was doing better than I was. The frustration was building in me, and frankly I was getting a little bit bitter about it, and then one of my other friends had an expression that was so meaningful to me at the time. He said, "You can get bitter, or you can get better. You can't do both," and so I decided I was gonna do better, and I was gonna figure out how this guy was doing so much better than I was, hopped on a plane, flew down to Florida, rented a car, drove up to his office, and as soon as I got there I realized that all the reasons that I had put for why he was doing better than I was weren't reasons at all. They were excuses.

Dr. John Meis: When I pulled into his parking lot, I was expecting to see Mercedes, BMW's, and Lexus's and fancy stuff. Nope. His parking lot looked just like mine, a whole smattering of cars, some nice and some not so nice. I walked into his office. His office was frankly in a lot of ways, not as nice as my own, and so all these excuses, I was just crossing them off, and I was just dumbfounded. How is this happening, and once I understood that my reasons were excuses that entirely freed my brain to think about, "Okay, how can I do things differently to match what he's doing? Right?

Dr. John Meis: I started to follow each person around the office, and figure out what they were doing differently than the people in my office was doing. I followed the doctor around, see what he was doing differently, made a long list of things that I could change to improve the performance of my practice. Had I not been there, had I not made this transformation from reasons to excuses, excuses to reasons. If I didn't understand that, I would have never been able to make the progress that I did.

Dr. John Meis: Here's the exercise I'd like you to do. Go ahead and make a list of all the reasons why your practice isn't growing faster than you would like it to. Maybe it's that you can't keep a great team. Maybe it's because you don't get enough new patients, maybe it's because you don't have a great location, or you don't have great signage, or your marketing isn't working, or just whatever those are. Mark them all down as reasons, and then look at them and say they're excuses, because you're the boss. You're the dentist. You go ahead and figure out how you're going to make each one of those better. Just don't stick with them as reasons. Just look at each and every one of them as excuses, and when you're mind starts to think that way.

Dr. John Meis: Now all of a sudden, you don't get in that bitter category, you stay working on getting better, and that's how your practice will progress. One of the things that when you're in that bitter place is you have all these mental barriers that you are now infecting the team with, because they'll pick up on it. Whether you think they're picking up on it or not. They are. They're picking up on it. They understand what you're excuses are. Sometimes they understand that they're excuses, and sometimes they buy into them as a truth, and when you're team buys in to the inability to grow, because of some outside force, now they don't push as hard.

Dr. John Meis: Now we're not doing as much same day dentistry. Now we're not trying to get patients in the schedule. Now we're not calling for recall, because if we did, gosh that would blow our whole experience of what our reasons are. Don't look at reasons. Think of them as excuses, and figuring out what you can do to make them better, and it's just that simple. If this has been helpful to you. Go ahead and share this video with anybody that you'd like. Go ahead and like it on whatever social media that you're seeing it, and share it if you would with anybody you think it would be helpful to. I also wanted to say one thing more, and that is most of the successful dentists I know, and I've met and trained hundreds of them. Most of them know something kind of simple and liberating, and that is you don't have to figure it all out yourself. Right? It's not your fault that you don't know stuff. You don't have to figure it out. All you have to do is find the tools and strategies that are working, and implement them in your own office.

Dr. John Meis: One great place to learn more tools and more strategy is at our annual summit. It's the Champions of Dentistry meeting, and we share all of the latest technology, all the latest tips and tricks on how to get your practice to grow. You can learn more about that at championsofdentistry.com, and you can register for the meeting at that website. Championsofdentistry.com.

Dr. John Meis: I always like to leave you with something interesting and inspirational, and so I have this quote from the great basketball coach, John Wooden. "It's when you learn after you know it all that counts," and it's so true that when we're very confident about what we know, it's the time that we need to be most curious, because if we're stuck in what we know, we could be wrong. It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. Don't be a know-it-all. Be a learn-it-all. Alright, and that's it for this episode of the Dr. John Meis Show.