
Remember The Godfather? Michael Francese, a real-life New York City Mafia lieutenant went “straight” as he left a life of crime to become a legitimate businessman.
He even wrote a book about the business tools the Mafia uses to make money, because at heart, the Mafia is a business, or more accurately, a whole lot of businesses, making money for all concerned. His book is called “An Offer You Can’t Refuse,” and he makes a fascinating point. Whenever someone came to him to ask for a loan to start a business, say, a dry cleaner or a gas station, he always asked, “How are you going to run the business?”
“The most frequent answer was, ‘The same way everybody else runs them,’” Francese writes.
If that was the answer, however, no loan.
Francese says that as a business lender, albeit at outrageously high rates of interest (and God forbid you don’t pay the money back on time), he was always looking for uniqueness from his borrowers. If they didn’t have a unique idea about how to run their prospective business, he wanted nothing to do with them.
You might ask what this has to do with dentistry—or maybe you already see the connection.
The connection is this: If there isn’t something unique about your dental practice, chances are, you have commoditized yourself, and you are not likely to last long in today’s hyper-competitive and corporatized dental services market.