by Why the office manager is one of the most important hires you make for your organization.
Do you realize the power that your office manager has? A good office manager can change just about everything for your organization by streamlining your processes and organizing your monthly budget.
One of the major challenges that office managers face is bringing clarity to chaos and making things work in a difficult situation, so it’s important for the leadership team to equip and empower them wherever possible.
Hiring an office manager
Here’s what’s happening in most offices: the office manager got promoted. This person was probably well-liked and great at their job.
Is there any training involved? Probably not! Without the structure of a training process, there will likely be no clarity about the role or the responsibilities. Your new hire has gone from a technician level role to running a $1- to $2-million business (or more, depending on the practice).
Since there is likely not a formal training process, the new hire will probably get a lot of leadership by telling. If one of your doctors comes back from a DEO event with a new initiative they want to try for the organization, how will you train the new office manager on how to launch the new initiative?
This perpetuates a vicious cycle where new office managers are hired and then given an enormous amount of work without any clear direction, only to walk away from the position shortly after. These are high turnover positions because they are high-stress and low clarity. When you hire an office manager, you need to equip and train them to run the operations of your organization efficiently.
How the office manager impacts the bottom line
One of the major things taught by the DEO is that everything is about the bottom line – that’s how you drive success in business. This is especially true for the role of the office manager, who should be taking ownership over the P&L of the organization on a weekly basis.
Typically, office managers oversee several major financial responsibilities – revenue, cost of goods sold, and practice expenses, which include employee costs, marketing costs and administrative overhead costs.
First, office managers are largely responsible for collecting the revenue that comes into the office every month. Revenue is only reflected on the P&L once it hits the account, so office managers need to understand how production can directly impact the collections process.
Plenty of doctors are great at producing dentistry, so they need an office manager who can ensure that their office is collecting what is being produced. How many patients walk out without having their copay collected? It might be small charges of $25 here and there, but those eventually add up.
Good office managers need to get in the mindset of trying to figure out how to collect on the production they billed it at, not against the production that they’re charging inside the month. Production is a formula: production per patient times the number of visits they had in their office.
Tackling the supplies head-on
Another task that any good office manager should be doing is going into every operating room and taking stock of all of the various supplies. If you have cabinetry, pull everything out to get a good look at it. More than likely, you will be shocked at what’s being kept in those cabinets.
All sorts of supplies get stuffed into those cabinet spaces, so it’s important to take stock, check expiration dates, and create a centralized process for stocking supplies for your office to ensure that important (and expensive) supplies are not hiding amongst the clutter of everything else. This will also allow you to clean and purge all the unused items, as well as organize your space. A central stock hub is a great way to streamline your processes and clean up the stock rooms.
Once you can figure out where everything is, create a budget for supplies that makes sense for your office. For example, don’t over order stock that you won’t fully utilize – no one needs a three-month supply of prophy cups. After you create the budget, you can then begin to incrementally decrease it each month to ensure that everything is lean and tight financially.
Once the budget is set, you need to monitor it to make sure that everything being purchased is within its parameters. If you partner with a vendor, you only need to buy the gloves that your agreement stipulates. Staying within the percentages set by the budget and the office manager profitability dashboard allows you to get a better handle on the margins.
Take it a day at a time
While some new office managers will come into an already organized and proficient dental office, others will have the challenge of straightening out the chaos and cleaning up the mess. The best way to be effective in a setting like this is to take everything one day at a time.
Some dental offices will be stuck in their old way of doing things, so it will likely take a good bit of A/B testing and patience to see what will work for your team. As you begin to implement initiatives, be prepared make changes along the way as you discover what works and what doesn’t.
The best thing to remember about improving office efficiency and productivity as the office manager is to approach each challenge one at a time. Taking these smaller steps to improve efficiency is the best way to ensure that you and the rest of your team don’t get overwhelmed by all of the details.
