I am a dentist and I have an office manager (hired a little over half a year ago) who I feel does not 100% believe in the value of what we can do for our patients. The most egregious example was when a patient was in such pain and I would have even treated at cost and I told her to help the patient make the numbers work and that I just needed her to ask up front for just enough to cover some up front costs. I kid you not, I brought the patient to her and said to both of them that I would really want to work with her to get things to work, and all this employee did was take out a paper, point to two things on said paper, “this is how much it costs and this is what we can do for you”. That was it. word for word. I was flabbergasted.
I feel like she diagnoses the patient’s financial wallet and makes judgments about their situation and even said that patients would rather spend money on an iphone or other items than their dental health.
It’s her job to talk about money and I have never heard her ask a patient “how can we make this work?” or “okay, I understand that you cannot pay everything up front, but what can you do?”
I try to explain the rationale behind some treatments to her and why the patient needs it but at this point, she is too set in her ways. She doesn’t believe that many important swaths of the field, like orthodontics, etc. are worth the money. I need to put her on a performance improvement plan soon but I’m not sure how to say, “the biggest performance issues is that you do not believe in the value of dentistry”. If she believed 100% that patients NEED to be able to chew and eat and NEED to have their cavities treated, I think the office would do a lot better. I’ve never struggled with this kind of issue before.
Any advice?
If you don’t have a system in place then all an employee can do is perform their job based on their own home made idea of what is best.
You simply need a pipeline to funnel your customers into different baskets and a flow chart for your office workers to follow.
Insured
Full cash
Needs financial assistance.
Then define what to do with each basket.
But all that aside, this person is toxic AF and why would you want someone like that in your life. This is your baby, your practice, the culmination of your life’s work.
Success and fulfillment as a business owner is correlated to your ability to hire fast and fire fast.
My step father was a dentist, my favorite doctor is a dentist who does jaw surgery exclusively. He is a saint. He has about 20 people in his practice and does trauma and facial surgeries for babies, amazing person. And yet his practice is all fucked up because he hasn’t been able to fire some toxic personalities and now his practice is divided and the customer experience is awful.
My step father was also a kind person and did a ton of work for underprivileged. But also suffered from the same issue. My mom was able to help him out. The reality is there are some people who prey on doctors and get into their practices and start to mentally manipulate them. These folks often end up embezzling money.
You have to find it in yourself to protect yourself AND your other employees AND your patients from these type of people.
You never know who these people will be but sadistic beliefs like the type you described this person having is a big red flag.