Be very careful who you take your business advice from

In the excellent book ‘Building a Millionaire Mindset’ written by Jonny Wimbrey which I read in three days on holiday, he writes about the importance of valuing yourself and not letting instigators and spectators infect your life, your goals and most importantly your mindset.

I find this so true, especially when some dentists come to discuss their fees with patients and I do say some dentists, not all have this issue. Let me give you an example of what I mean. Often, on my courses dentists will tell me that they regularly discount their fees in their head. So, for example if a crown is £600 by the time it comes out of their mouth, it is £550, and £50 has gone missing. All this took place in the dentist’s head, so the patient does not know a discount has been given. There is not a course that I have ever delivered, where at least half a dozen dentists inform the class that this is a common behaviour. On questioning a dentist on why they do this, they often inform me that they do this because they feel if they make the treatment slightly cheaper, then more patients will say yes. The other common reason I hear is that they tell me how a patient has made some sarcastic comment about their fees. Examples of these comments are ‘am I paying for your car?’ or ‘where are you going on holiday this year?’ I am certain you all have had a time when you have heard this from a patient. The challenge is that some dentists take this to heart, and it then starts impacting their behaviour and they get into the habit of fee reduction.

Now the big problem when you reduce the fee in your head, is that it becomes a habit that is very hard to stop and these £50s don’t half add up. If you just did this twice a day and you work five days a week, you could potentially be talking about £500 a week, which amounts to £20k a year and over a lifetime, you could be talking about many hundreds of thousands of pounds in lost income. All because, some patient made a sarcastic comment about your fees.

If this resonates with you, here is the big take away from this short article. Stop listening to people who are not qualified to give you business advice. You will never learn to value yourself if you let these instigators infect your mindset.

Every day you provide incredible value to patients lives in terms of giving them amazing smiles and of course the many health benefits you provide on a day-to-day basis. If you start to think like this and stop listening to some of the negative feedback you receive, you will never reduce your fees ever again and you will get properly rewarded for the value that you bring every day.