Dental Practice Advice- HCG Weight Loss & Dentists

In my dental practice advice series let’s discuss the diet phenomenon.

Let’s face it—we live in an era of abundance of calories in the western world.  Calories are cheap, quick, and easily consumed.  Eating only 100 calories beyond what’s required for maintenance will add a pound to your girth every 35 days—folks that’s a little more than a tablespoon of peanut butter!

It doesn’t take much input (good food or bad) to create those 100 calorie increments.

Keep up your momentum with the extra 100 per day and your annual “bonus” to your ass is ten pounds.  Ever wonder why that sleek and svelte hot chic or super hunky guy back from high school or college now looks like Goodyear should be using them as a floating beer ad?  Well, they added a few extra 100 packets per day OR a few extra drinks a day.  I have a few friends that I look back at the photos of and can’t believe my eyes—Coors light all the way baby!

The diet industry has been in a non-stop boom since the 70’s.  All kinds of plans, schemes, meal services, OTC fat loss drugs, and competing nutritional thoughts and guidelines.  To be honest, when you start digging into the research, not a whole lot of claims of any kind completely hold up.  Furthermore, there’s little science to back up any claim of a particular regimen of eating being universally applicable to cause longevity.  Lastly, one always has to look for bias in research since academics rarely upset the cart that comes by to drop off the grant cash.

If you want to take a read of a book that exposes a lot of unfounded nutritional advice, take a look at Tim Ferriss “4-Hour Body” book.

http://www.amazon.com/4-Hour-Body-Uncommon-Incredible-Superhuman/dp/030746363X

Recently, the hCG diet has regained prominence.  There’s some science that makes sense other science that doesn’t add up.  New studies in the works.

Probably the most intriguing part of the diet is that it creates a medical opportunity for a physician-dentist team to create a high-profit silo of business in one of the practices dispensing the diet and medications for the protocol.

I speak a fair amount to our members in my dental practice advice series about tending “silos of business” inside their dental practice (think hygiene/perio, implants, dentures, reconstructions, general dentistry, apnea, etc.) and that there is a limit of how many of these silos you can focus on, market for patients for, and tend to, before there simply isn’t enough time, energy, focus, or reward to add another silo.  Three is pretty doable by most with good time management skills and personal leadership (oh yeah, and with knowledge of marketing and selling).  Five is about the max unless professional management is hired to help keep all the pieces working.

A second type of silo is to simply create an entirely new business separate from the existing one that may or may not share facility space and overhead. This dental practice advice has been used with great success by many of my program members.

Dentists who have successful practices often look for ancillary medical businesses to operate as second businesses since after all anyone who gets good (or buys good consulting advice) in the arenas of marketing, selling, and staff training can create a health oriented business with substantial cash flow and profit in just about any industry as long as its not already too crowded in your location.  Speed is important as there are usually only 5-10 year windows before market crowing is ensured.

What are some of these 2nd businesses that can work well with dentists as owner (not performing procedures of course) in market areas that aren’t saturated yet?  They include: dental assistant training programs, diet centers, longevity medical center, free-standing medi-spas, sleep study centers.  I know of one doctor who may actually wind up with an accredited private dental hygiene school—imagine the cash flow that will create!  There is an abundance of “hired help” available both in the MD and DDS arena to professionally staff your empire!

The catch with all of these 2nd silos of business type is that one has to be very good at using external marketing in BIG, mass media, and then driving the legions of prospective patients into very good qualifying and selling systems both on the phone and in person in the clinic.  Basically, all the same things that are top level clients do in their dental practices with reconstructions and implants except for a different service—and with high margins than most dental procedures! The good news is the same concepts and strategies work to sell pretty much any medical-cash based service.

Notice “dental spa” wasn’t on the wish list above.  Dental “spa’s” are probably one of the worst get on the “band-wagon” examples of dentists not understanding that the 2nd business is actually a much different model before everyone started pouring in like lemmings calling their stinky old regular dental practice a “spa” and having a go at spa services.  Read much about dental “spa’s” in the trade magazines lately?  No?  That fact tells you something—they didn’t work!

Spas don’t belong inside a smelly dental office with the sounds of the drill and screaming children interrupting those paraffin dips.  [If they happen to be able to do a prophy and bleach the be-jeezus out of your teeth at a real spa than that’s an added benefit.]

Botox as an ad-on service in a regular practice—if you get good at the procedure, have a very large patient base, market heavily internally to that patient base, and discount treatment—-is actually what makes the most sense for fitting something medical-dental related into the basket of services one might find at the dentist.  Our UK Commonwealth brethren figured this out much faster than we did in the U.S.

However, most of the doc’s who have been trained in the Bo-Tox procedure never use up the injectable before it expires because of the glaring absence of ability to sell something that requires cash payments.

Back to hCG, expanding waste lines, and the never ending search for weight loss answers……

hCG creates another opportunity in an arena that makes sense as a 2nd separate business silo IF the practitioner has been a long-time student of marketing and sales.

While a substantial part of the population doesn’t need teeth and many more simply don’t care about their teeth, there is a never ending supply of overweight individuals looking for the simplest solution possible.  And, if, because of hCG or some other combination of diet, nutrition, and fitness regimen, they get all sexy and hunky again, it just might reignite their passion to have a nice smile!

A business silo one can really sink one’s teeth into!  Check out my website here to learn more about my program or try my #1 top selling book on Amazon.

The NYT featured an article today, showing pro’s and con’s of the procedure.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/nyregion/08hcg.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=hcg&st=cse