The First 3 Practices....Mistakes made

Around 6 years ago The Neem Tree Wandsworth opened its doors to the public. Over the last 6 years we have learned loads about opening practices and for sure, our latest practice is by far our best practice, in my opinion.

Why? Well on several factors, namely costing, look, location and marketing.

Most dentists never go beyond one practice, and quite often many make their mistakes on their first practice, in terms of location selection, equipment provider, budget......One practice is enough for most sensible people. But then again we probably are not that sensible when it comes to opening businesses. As you can probably tell, we quite like opening new practices.

Hindsight is a great tool, and we can see that we made many mistakes in our first Wandsworth practice, when we compare it to our latest Esher offering. Just 3 of the mistakes we made in our first practice include:

1. Being sold way too much equipment by the dental trade. Only buy what you need, not what you may be need. Although our first practice looked great, we were pretty green, and dare I say it over kitted out our first site and hence spent too much.
2. Our location, although not bad, near a main railway station, we probably would not choose the same location again. We would probably want a busier location.
3. Our team, some of our team from 6 years ago still remain at our Wandsworth site, but we have seen our fair share of nurses, receptionists and dentists. The key learning point from this was the hours of operation. Although, we created hours that worked really well for the patients, for many of the team this was not so good for them - hence them moving on!

In our Esher site, on all counts we have been so much more careful on all these fronts.

1. Equipment - This time around we have been much more sparing on our equipment spend and who we bought it from, however, we did have a major issue with x-rays (see below)!
2. Location - The location has been a hit - opposite Waitrose has had the desired effect and certainly beaten our expectations in terms of patient bookings (64 new patient registration in just the first 2 weeks!) Daily we are now getting between 1-3 bookings. Although our marketing has been pretty good, if I do say myself, the location and of course the look of the practice has helped significantly.
3. Although our hours are long, with Saturday's included, they are much more structured and the team we have in place, including dentists, all appear to be working very well together!

Some Key Mistakes We Made

In setting up a dental practice in Esher, we of course made some mistakes, but nothing too major!

1. X-ray Supplier - Our x-ray supplier went AWOL after we gave him a deposit of £2500. We are still awaiting a refund, so if you are reading this blog Mr X-ray, expect some not so nice letters from lawyers to be coming your way soon. Luckily, we, with help of some great suppliers, we managed to get an X-ray system (Durr) installed the morning of opening, just before the first new patient!

2. Flyers - Our strategy of printing a lot of flyers and getting them distributed to local homes although theoretically good, practically is proving to be a problem, mainly because of the quality of the distributors. We know we have a problem when patients are calling us saying they have just had 10 flyers put through their letterbox!! Not a great first impression! Two companies sacked so far, third time lucky!

Over the years we have compiled an invaluable list of people or companies NOT to use. If you want this you will need come on board one of our programmes.

Photos!

Some nice pictures of the new practice can be seen here!