By Luc Wade, Marketing Director at Hive Business.

I find that many dentists continue to focus on controlling costs as a way to drive earnings. Not good, because when controlling costs dominates the businesses agenda you can bet it sucks the oxygen out of any growth plan.

Conversely, at Hive we’ve found that companies that have a clear agenda for organic growth and pursue it systematically outperform the competition.

How companies actually capture that growth, however, has changed drastically with the rise of digital marketing. Digital has changed the nature of growth by rapidly accelerating the pace of business, expanding the scope of competition, even introducing new business models seemingly overnight. (Look at HelloFresh and Uber.)

In the dental sector, the businesses that are most successful are always those that can execute across multiple dimensions, analysing information with speed, and responding to what they see with tactical agility.

Here are three things that successful dental practices are doing frequently:

• Investing. They use funds to double down on existing high growth activities like facial aesthetics and implants.
• Creating. They’re building value by designing great experiences, building credibility and deploying new products and services.
• Performing. They continuously optimise capabilities in marketing, selling and customer experience.

If you’re struggling with competing priorities and pressures, this framework affords a simple method to assess your vision, build a plan for growth and identify the capabilities needed to follow through on them.

It really works: the average NASDAL practice sees 7% annual growth, whereas the Hive Business average is nearly double that at 13%. Our best performers enjoy 20%+ annual growth.

Many owners single out just one dimension for growth, but that will never cut it. It’s far better to extract maximum value and maximum effect from your marketing activities through coordination. You wouldn’t neglect to coordinate your clinical work, thereby leaving opportunities for better clinical outcomes on the table, would you?

When you really think about it, you won’t want to leave growth opportunities on the table either. Find out exactly what that means for your business with a Hive Business diagnostic day. Contact us on 01872 300232 or email us at hello@hivebusiness.co.uk.