076 - How To Build a Thriving Profitable Practice With Dr. Joanne Rief

In this week’s podcast episode I interview Dr. Joanne Block Rief.

Joanne is a third generation dentist that started in the dental field when she was 13 years old. She has a Bachelors in dental hygiene from University of Rhode Island as well as her DDS from University of Maryland. She worked as an associate for her father for 18 years before buying her own practice in 2004. Since that time she has built the practice, moved the practice and expanded the practice.

She started out with one computer, about 200 paper charts and two employees. She now has 2,500 patients, 18 computers and 12 employees in 13 years. Her collections have more than quadrupled in those 13 years and she has no paper charts.

Her passion is marketing her dental practice and sharing ideas with her colleagues. She enjoys going to lots of dental CE courses especially when it pertains to the business of dentistry. Dr. Rief has started lecturing to numerous dental study clubs on how she runs her successful dental practice and has consulted with dental practices also. Her motto is that she does not just work in her practice, she works on her practice.

In this episode we focused our discussion on the steps that you can follow to create a thriving, profitable practice.

In particular, we discussed:

• The importance of defining and communicating the vision, philosophy and goals of your practice
• Hiring people who have a passion for dentistry and a shared philosophy
• Team communication within the practice and team building outside of the practice
• The techniques that Joanne has used to build such a profitable practice
• Highly effective patient recall systems and why they are so important
• The ‘out of the box’ internal and external marketing strategies that Joanne and her practice have been using with great success
• The accounts receivable systems that Joanne has in place
• Why marketing is the one thing that is really helping her to grow her practice right now

To get in touch with Dr. Joanne Rief you can email her at [e-mail] and click to her dental practice website.