No matter how hard we wish for it, there just isn’t ever going to be a way to make more time. There are 1,440 minutes in every day, and nothing we could ever do would add even one minute to that total.
We all know this, but think about how many times you have said out loud, “If I only had a few more minutes … ”
The phrase “time management” has been around since we’ve been keeping track of time, yet I guarantee you, most people value money more than they value time, while still quoting the popular phrase, “time is money.”
The fact is, having enough time is not the difference-maker in your business.
What is the difference-maker? What you, your employees and your customers do with some of those 1,440 minutes.
As dentists or as business owners, we scrutinize how we spend our time—so much so, that we often fail to see a huge part of the picture: the time of our employees and our customers as they relate to the processes in our business. Every business is a series of processes that involve trading goods or services with customers. Don’t make it any more complicated than that.
I’ve already said that we can’t make time, but we can save time, and more importantly, we can value time. Imagine if you were to put a dollar amount on every minute of the day. You’d be much more aware of every passing second, and whether those seconds were being spent in a way that brought value back.
The following excerpt is from my new book, “Uncomplicate Business: All It Takes Is People, Time, and Money.” The book comes out in October 2015 and is available for preorder at HowardFarran.com.
Excerpt: In 1776, the great economist Adam Smith examined the way a factory made pins. He broke down the process of making pins in a pin factory and determined that, by dividing the labor needed for each step of the process, productivity soared. With one worker making the head and another the body, each one using different equipment, productivity was greater than if both workers carried out the full process.
You can revolutionize your own business by defining it as a process.
In my dental practice, for example, we once used the anesthetic lidocaine to numb a tooth. Back in the day, I would numb the tooth with lidocaine and then go back to my office where I wasted fifteen minutes sipping coffee and talking on the phone while I waited for the anesthetic to take effect.
A few years ago a new anesthetic, septocaine, came out that is twice as fast and effective as the traditional lidocaine. I asked my dental assistants to begin timing how long it took for the drug to take effect. As a result we are down to four minutes of wait time before a filling, potentially saving enough time in a day to see another patient.
Instead of spending those four minutes on the phone or drinking coffee, we stay and bond with the patient, enhancing our quality of service.
Dan Carney, who co-founded Pizza Hut with his brother Frank, mastered this process twenty-five years ago by developing the concept of the buffet. Traditionally Pizza Hut built a restaurant containing twenty-five tables where the average customer would wait to be seated upon entering. Once the customers were seated, the waitress took their drink orders. While the customer looked over the menu, she went to get the drinks. She then took their order and delivered it to the cooks who spent twenty to thirty minutes preparing the food. Finally the waitress served the food to the customers who ate, paid, and left. Start to finish, the entire process took about an hour.
Pizza Hut wanted to move things along faster. The price of the food remained the same, but now, while the servers were off getting the drinks, the customers were already at the buffet getting what they wanted. Then by the time the waitress came by with the drinks, the customers were eating. The average customer was done in thirty minutes instead of an hour. With the same number of tables, Pizza Hut doubled the return on their assets. …
By introducing the buffet, Dan Carney increased the number of customers he could serve at any given time, thus increasing his profit margin and his return on assets. By maximizing his use of time, he increased service to his customers as well as his income.
Leave a Reply