Hopefully you have been fortunate over the years to surround yourself with trusted advisors or mentors who have been influential in your growth and development–both personally and professionally. Often the advice they give comes in the form of words or phrases that stick in your head and resonate. One of my favorites is “the harder I work the luckier I seem to get.” I so totally believe that!

Consider the doctor who attracts 40 new patients a month. Did these patients just fall out of the sky? I don’t believe so. That doctor has spent money and time to develop a great website. He also employs an energetic and social media savvy staff member who has been given the opportunity to spend one hour a day maintaining an active Facebook Page, publishing posts and engaging and responding to followers. That is work–not luck!

Consider the doctor who started two large veneer cases this month. Does that happen by chance? I don’t think so. That doctor has spent countless hours on continuing education courses with the best of the best. That doctor spends the time and money to fly to Scottsdale a few times every year to improve clinical skills hanging out with the likes of Dr. Frank Spears. That takes effort and dedication and commitment and work.

Consider the doctor who actually loves going to work every day because she has made the effort to surround herself with a fabulous staff. She has built and maintained a great team of talented customer service oriented people. She has created a wonderful atmosphere where staff truly want to work, and patients love to visit and refer others.  Can this all happen because she is lucky? This is the result of a lot of hard work.

It is my opinion, after interacting with 600+ practices over the past 19 years, that probably 85% of dentists significantly under-achieve their true potential. They don’t do this intentionally. They may often feel successful on some fronts. But they simply are just not aware of the upside.

On a personal level and as a way of illustrating my point, I want to tell you that for years I have been consistently going to the gym and putting in the time. This past January, I decided to hire a trainer. I have lost 14 pounds and am in the best shape of my life. I now realize that what I thought was a workout at the gym was the equivalent to a walk in the park!

So the sooner you stop waiting to hit the lottery with your dental practice, the better off you will be. Lady luck is unlikely to pay you a visit. There is no substitute for setting goals and then working really hard – harder than you ever thought possible – in order to achieve them. Then – and only then – will you feel lucky.

In February 2012, I was excited to publish a blog post announcing a new look to my website. That post discussed a re-design or re-skin of my original website that had been created in 2008. You can read that post to learn the benefits of such a project. Ten months later–in December of 2012–I was still trying to stay ahead of the curve, and I asked TNT (my long time website developer) to reformat the site with a new technology called responsive design.

Responsive design was important then, and it is particularly important today, considering the continuing trend of expanding screens (Galaxy Note, Kindle Fire, iPhones, iPads, etc.). An issue that serves as an immediate turnoff for nearly half the population is a website’s failure to display correctly on a mobile device. As far as these visitors are concerned, if it doesn’t fit or load correctly on the screen of your phone or tablet, it may as well not even exist. A mobile responsive site, on the other hand, automatically adjusts to the size of the screen on which it is being viewed.

Time goes by quickly when you are having a good time! So just a few weeks ago, I had TNT to do another re-skin for me. Here’s what my site used to look like. Here is the newer version. And here they are side by side. I decided to go with a brighter and cleaner look–a bit more open space to make things look less cluttered and easier to navigate–more youthful colors, and a slightly larger and more modern font. I also made the page somewhat wider and increased the  space between the lines of content for ease in reading.

What you don’t see is the underlying code structure behind the site. The re-skin alters this code in order to improve the way that SEO spiders crawl the site and index it, promoting better search results. A re-skin is substantially more cost-effective than building a new site from scratch, thus it offers a relatively inexpensive and time efficient opportunity for your web developer to review and improve the functionality of the site’s backend.

Here is how I look at external marketing. When you use direct mail or radio spots or TV ads, or subliminal Facebook ads to attract new patients, you are essentially hoping to get your message noticed by someone who wasn’t really thinking about going to the dentist. You have to bombard this potential audience over and over – spending LOTS of money – hoping someone will eventually respond. On the other hand, when someone goes to Google and does a search for a dentist or a dental procedure, they have taken the initiative and are truly motivated to find what they are searching for. Totally different!!

The Internet is HOT.  Studies show that people read and believe Google reviews. If people are searching for neurosurgeons on the web, they certainly are searching for dentists. Conclusion – it is absolutely imperative that your website be easily found on a search from any device.