An interview with Dr. Howard Farran

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More questions to Dr. Howard Farran 

• How much increase you give your staff year after year ?

Again that depends on how the business does. If the business does better, then we give out more money. If the business doesn’t do better and we start making less money, we start getting rid of certain benefits. So I think if the doctor is going to make more money, so should the staff. And I think if the doctor is going to make less money, so should the staff. It’s what I call a team-based reward – you already give individuals their individual rewards based on their hourly income – but I think your business should have team-based rewards, where if you guys are all successful and play well together and make more money, they should split sdome of that.

• How do you train your staff ?

First of all, on training your staff, I prefer the question: How do you reduce staff turnover?. You know, Aa lot of dentist look at staff and say they are so expensive to train. Well they are expensive to train if your average staff only works with you for two2 or three3 years. You know I’ve had Jan who has been with me for 25 years, so I look back in the last quarter-century of all the classes and institutes I took her too, man what a return on investment! Because she’s been with me for 25 years doing all the stuff we learned. So I would train your staff online. Again, the biggest university in the world is not in New York City or LA or Berlin; the largest university in the world is University of Phoenix online, and they sign up 70,000 new students a month and you can teach your staff everything you need to know about marketing, root canals, fillings, crowns, practice management, business – all online for an incredibly low fee.

• What is to be done if staff is not punctual ?

Again, I’ll compare it to sports teams. Let’s say you own the most successful soccer team in India, are you really going to fire your star goalie because he came late to practice? HR is incredibly the hardest part about business and life. I think the greatest thing about being alive is the people and friends that I love, and I think the worst thing about life is some of the people around me that I just can’t stand. For every Gandhi and Mother Theresa, there’s an Adolf Hitler, a Pol Pot, and a Joseph Stalin . So there’s just no simple rules for HR; I mean humans are just so complex. Obviously if it’s your star goalie on your soccer team, the others might think he’s a prima donna because he gets away with coming in late. But you aren’t going to cut off your head to save your little toe. Like Jan, in 25 years, like anyone who has been married for 25 years – they’ll say, we had some great years, we had some tough years, we had some challenging years, but we made it. And interpersonal human relationships are the biggest complexity that I’m aware of in the universe.

• How should the front office staff present treatment plans to patients ?

I think they should treat it in their own words and they should use a combination of words, pictures with the digital X-rays printed out or intra-oral camera photos, and take notes. I think if all you do is talk in the patient’s ear, the research shows that in three months they won’t remember 5 percent%. If you print out pictures of the diagnostic X-rays and you explain it to them while they are looking at the X-ray, they might understand or remember a little bit, maybe a third of it. But if you print out X-rays or a photo and draw notes on the pictures on the words that they understand, then they do very well.

• How do you train the front office staff to present treatment plans to patients ?
I train them by having them watch online courses on Dentaltown.com.

• Features of a good practice management software

The best feature of a practice management software is when it hooks into your accounting software. So at the end of the day, your software can tell you what your percent of cost was from labor and lab and supplies and it can tell your office what time in the day you break even. But if you have half your data on Quicken and Peachtree and the other half on dental practice software, then you basically have a schizophrenic system with multiple personalities and at the end of the day you have no way of knowing what’s going on.

• Some tips for husband &wife dentists

Yes. For a husband and wife dental team, it is more important than ever that you get an office manager and stay out of the details. What I would do is work like your associate dentist during the day, and then at night you might want to talk about interesting clinical things you saw or an interesting case you had, but having a husband and wife manage five to5-10 women is very confusing. You know, we only have one pope in the Catholic church, not two. Every country I know only has one President, not two. So it’s very confusing for the staff when the husband is saying go left and the wife is saying go right. It’s very confusing. I think the two of you should only talk to one person and that is in private and that is with the office manager.

•Female dentist-male patient. What precautions need to be taken ?
None.
Do you give sodexo pass coupons to staff as a motivation ?
I’m not familiar with Sodexo pass coupons, but we do have a series of perks and bonuses that we give our staff. We think that staff – like all humans – crave recognition. I remember with my four boys, at least once an hour I would hear “look daddy, look daddy, look daddy!” Staff need to be recognized. They are not going to dive for the ball and work their butts off to not be noticed. I think there are 5 ways you can do it, according to research. Some like gifts, some like money, some like time spent – sometimes you take them to lunch. But you definitely want to motivate your staff any way you can.

        

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