We write blogs so that we can share our thoughts with our colleagues, friends, family and patients but our last bog post (PART I) struck a cord with a lot of people - especially people, who like us, have just started new businesses and people who are thinking of doing so. We were talking in our last post about how you need to deal with every situation in your clinic- no matter how small because if you don’t do it no one will. This was a learning curve for us because up until this time we were working as consultants in other dental clinics where we would just walk in, do our job and walk out. When we say you need to know how to do everyones job, we don’t only mean that you should be able to do the job but also know the ins and outs of each position. 

The key to growing and expanding your business into a well-oiled machine is delegation. Delegating tasks to your employees is the key to making a business work smoothly. This can be very difficult for people who want things done a certain way and will nit-pick at every small detail ( *cough* Dr. Shivani *cough*). But as a business owner you cannot physically be in all places at once hence you need to train people as part of your business. We learnt that it is always better that you personally train a new employee rather than having an old employee do it. Say you have an old assistant train a new one- the new employee will pick up the bad habits of the old assistant and then some. So we learnt early on that we need to train new employees if we want them to work in a certain way. As we said before - the retention rates of employees is very low and when you have more people going than coming in- it becomes problematic. We have found that writing down the tasks required for each position and then handing them over to a new employee significantly helped us in the training process. When you spell things out in detail and give your employees a step-by-step instruction guide to do their job-your work becomes easier.

Also only when you are familiar with every aspect of your business you can figure out which position you want to hire for. Do you need another full time doctor or someone part time / consultant? How will you manage cases which are not your specialisation? This requires a serious thought process because you do not want to be in doubt in front of your patient. Learning the details of your dental clinic helps you put a protocol into place and then build from there. We strongly believe that only when you have a solid foundation in place- only then you can build your business and scale to the ‘summit’.