An interview with Dr. Howard Farran

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 Dear all,

One thing whcih I admire of Dr. Howard Farran is his passion for punctuility and the ability to take quick decisions. I feel that has been one of his reasons fro success.

So read on and note that the interview is open for discussion. 

If you would not have become a dentist what would you have been?

I would say a journalist, or involved in media somehow. Actually, I’m already doing it. I have a huge interest in reporting what I see and sharing it with others. There’s a show on television hosted by Anthony Bourdain that reminds me a lot of what I’m doing. Bourdain travels around the world and shows all the different foods that people eat. I find it absolutely amazing. There are seven billion people around the world, and everyone is the same. They all need food, water, clothing and shelter. They all have religion, government, politics and sports. I love being able to share what I see in my own travels, regarding dentistry. Seeing all the slight differences in how they develop their dentistry under different constraints of money, whether they have insurance, whether the government subsidizes it, their access to capital. I love telling people about these things.
 
How do you take feedback from patients?
When I was 18 I thought that to become successful the hardest part would be learning math. Now that I am 50 years old, looking back, I realize that was the easiest part of life. The hardest part of life is dealing with humans. The human brain weighs about three pounds, has more than one trillion circuits, and it is affected by genetics, diet and chemicals. People are so complex. Remember, you’re not working at a restaurant where everyone is happy to see you. You work in a dental office. Your patients are scared and emotional. It’s going to cost a lot of money, and you’re going to hurt them. Try to be compassionate. Listen to them.

After the economic meltdown, did you downsize?
No. We followed what Michael Dell (founder, chairman and CEO of Dell, Inc.) did in previous recessions. Dell said that during a recession, you need to double or triple or quadruple your advertising to replace all your current customers who now don’t have money to buy anything. What my practice did during this economic downturn was double our marketing efforts. We did direct mail, a Facebook page, Twitter accounts and Google ads. We did everything we could because we knew it would eventually pass.

How to maintain quality while taking care of overheads?
About 50 percent of Americans only shop based on price. The other half is not as price sensitive and is willing to pay extra for something with more bells and whistles. Let’s use cars as an example – there is the low-cost Honda Accord and the higher cost Acura RL. About half of the population will go for the Accord. These are the people who shop on price. The other half of the population wants the Acura. These are the people who are not as concerned with price.

 

These same two markets exist in dentistry. But what I see dentists doing wrong is they have low-cost prices but are doing high-cost procedures. If I’m building an Acura but am only charging for an Accord, I’m going to have high overhead. Serve your market.

 

The low-cost market wants low-cost extractions, dentures, partials, silver fillings and removable. If your folks are willing to spend a higher cost, then you’re going to charge more, and your overhead will go down.

 

The second variable is time. We only manage three things: people, time and money and we routinely see dentists with 50 percent overhead scheduling 45 minutes to do a crown and dentists with the average (64 percent overhead) spending an hour and a half to do the exact same crown. You need to build the technology and the capital and take continuing education courses so you can do dentistry faster so it can cut down on your overhead.

Class practice or mass practice. What do you prefer?
The bottom line is demographics, demographics, demographics. I see dentists all the time go listen to some famous dentist lecture in New York City or New Delhi or the richest part of town, and then they try to go back to their small town practices and implement the same thing, and it just doesn’t work. Demographics don’t lie. If you’re in an area where the population is mostly in the bottom economic half, you need to focus on the bottom economic half. The biggest companies always are the ones that are tops in cost leadership; they have the lowest prices. Southwest Airlines is the lowest cost airline, they’re the biggest. Wal-Mart is the lowest cost distributor, they’re the biggest. Ikea is the lowest cost furniture producer around the world and is number-one in furniture. If you want to become a major success, I would aim toward the middle class.

Your comments on GDP’s doing orthodontics.
Farran: If you want to be a community dentist and treat your village, you need to learn how to do all kinds of specialties. Now if you’re in a major market that has 5,000 or more people, if you absolutely have an interest and love and want to do a specialty whether it be periodontal treatment, root canals or orthodontics, then do it. You’re going to practice for 40 years. Have fun. Do what you enjoy. If you want to do orthodontics, go for it. If you’re busy and you don’t need to do orthodontics, and there’s an orthodontist next door who you like, then refer. When my four boys were little, if I put them in the sand box with nothing in there they’d leave and go find something else to do, but if I put them in the sand box with shovels and Tonka trucks to play with, they’d stay in there forever. So just have fun and do what you enjoy.

 

 

        

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