Your goal was to get one thing and you settled for another. You changed your goal. Sometimes you alter your goal, but we never want to settle. We never want to just get by in life, we want to be successful.

Dear Ms Marketing:  I know you don’t have a crystal ball, but I need some help with what to do about the future of my laboratory. Can you help?

Don’t let yourself get trapped into thinking that when others seek you counsel and advice it is a distraction from getting other (more important) tasks done. To be sure, management is about doing things right.  Leadership is about doing right things. We need both skills in our dental laboratory profession.

Are you struggling in the effort to make your small business successful? Does it feel like you are working harder and you still don't see the results you desire? Or maybe you want to grow your business to the next level of success. Let's take a look at the top 10 ways to increasing productivity and better time management.

As I work with clients this tool is becoming increasingly important. To try to track your correspondence, email, documents, phone calls and appointments with your customers and prospects is nearly impossible to do on paper. I have yet to find someone who has done it successfully. Even those people who are not computer savvy need to understand and learn this powerful tool. Why? Because it can increase your productivity and bottom line.

Every laboratory owner should have a customer agreement that establishes an understanding of who takes responsibility for what. Many of these areas include the fitness of any appliance for a specific use, final determination of fitness, warranty on said work and even terms for payment. Having a written policy on your prescription form can reduce the likelihood of having problems involving lawyers.

Dear Ms. Marketing: In the past I had tried a Web site and had little response. Do you think that with all the advancement in new technology should I revisit a Web site?

Typically a recession drives small businesses to evaluate, re-design and refine their product offerings and marketing processes as they focus on cash flow, costs, customer retention and survival. There has been an upsurge in Internet and email marketing, yet many top decision-makers in businesses nationwide and even globally still rely on traditional marketing tactics such as direct mail when positioning products, developing media strategies.

One of the most important things a business owner can do is learn how to speak about their business to others. Being able to answer the "What do you do?" question and sum up the unique aspects of their business in a way that excites others to inquire more in a brief and concise manner. This is often called the elevator pitch for the intended time it takes you to ride an elevator. Can you answer the "what do you do?" question in 30 seconds or less and entice your audience to want to learn more?

If you have been in a leadership position for more than 24 hours then you have already experienced problems of one type or another. What are your options when the problem is one of your associates?

A retired technician expresses his frustration concerning a segment of denture laboratories specializing in same-day dentures. This opinion piece reflects Cosner's thoughts and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of NADL.

Dear Ms. Marketing: We have had a couple of new female dentist open new practices in our area and I want to do some marketing just to those accounts. Is there anything I need to change about my material to make it more female friendly?

When the economic environment is not favourable good leadership is vital to ensure that the company keeps on track. Indeed it is one of the secrets to a company's success.

The two biggest opportunities that dentists miss that cost them millions and cost you hundreds of thousands!

I don’t know if Moore’s Law took into consideration the fact that as technology grows faster and faster and gets smaller and smaller, so does the writing in the operating instructions. It seems as though as soon as I figure out how something works, it becomes obsolete or is ready for an upgrade. 

With work slowing down, so have payments from my accounts.  Do you have some helpful tips on how to collect?

Good customer service can help a business in more ways than one. It can help you gain a substantial edge over your competitors; help with bringing in repeat customers and gain greater customer diversity, in addition to boosting the goodwill and the reputation of your business.

I have recently gotten into two fairly heated debates on Dental Town and the IDF (Internet Dental Forum) on separate, but in my opinion, related topics. One is the proliferation of unlabeled generic zirconia products and the other is the huge number of off shore laboratories that are not disclosing materials or country of origin when distributing their work.

Before you start your presentation, write down your goal, research your audience, figure out two to three points you want to make, and how you'll show those points. Will you have a theme? For example, the theme of this tip is "high-impact, low cost" - it runs through everything I write. You write all this down before ever opening up PowerPoint.

If you're a business owner, entrepreneur, or manager at any level, you need to know how to persuasively present your views in writing. Even if your job doesn't require you to write formal proposals, you almost certainly must write letters, e-mails, and memos to persuade others to accept your ideas, commit to your causes, fund your projects, try your products, or buy your services.

Let's examine some of the breakthroughs of modern marketing that have produced some big results for companies.

What can we do in our dental laboratories to be like American Express and not like the airline in this tale? Let’s vow to make the rules fit our best customers, the 20 percent or so who account for 80 percent of our revenue and profit.

There seem to be many questions recently regarding the Hepatitis B vaccine protocol so it’s time to review this safety issue. Education of workers prior to acceptance or refusal of a vaccine is critical; therefore, your facility’s safety training program must be thorough in regard to this information.

There is a feeling at the workplace. People get the idea from management that it is OK to play around or that work is serious business. We are not saying you shouldn't have fun at work. Work should be a blast. The most fun thing at work is to succeed by taking pride in what you do.

"Success is doing what you love and I mean with your work and free time. I think success has very little to do with how much money you have and more to do with quality of life. I have met plenty of people that are not rich and I believe they are very successful," said Kris E. Schermerhorn, CDT, with Northern Virginia Dental Laboratory, Inc. in Woodbridge, Va.

Dear Ms. Marketing: I have a customer that is always complaining. Do you have any suggestions on how to handle an unhappy customer?

There's a saying among marketers that a buyer needs a hundred eyes, the seller only one. But as brands multiply and customers become more selective, the seller needs to get smarter.

We have been here before and we will be here again.  I know the credit markets give this recession/bear market a bit of a twist, but our economy is truly cyclical.

I caught a lot of flack for it because at the time I predicted that milling machines would be a passing fad, and that they would simply be a small stepping stone to other technologies. I boldly stated that I would never buy one. Fast forward a decade or more, and my laboratory is filled with buzzing and humming milling machines, and we are working  with models milled from urethane blocks.

OK, no one really likes change. Author W. Gary Gore suggests that even though an employee's perspective of their workplace culture might be crummy at least it is their personal crummy. They know it, they deal with it, and as bad as it may be, it is at least, a comfortable bad.

One of the most important tools of a quality system relates to your investigation of the cause of internal reworks and remakes.  FDA and DAMAS both require a corrective action process for handling of customer complaints and non-conforming product.

Being aware of the business's needs allows you to consider suggestions from the professional and to make the best decisions for your business.

The survival of a small business depends on the kind of business data you want to archive for the purposes of small business data backup. The first thing you must do is identify all the critical data that must be stored or recorded on a regular basis; of equal importance is that you must decide upon a regular schedule of archiving the data.

Download 3M ESPE’s guide to making better impressions to share with your dentist clients at an impression-taking seminar at your laboratory. Read The Dreaded Remake in the November/December 2008 issue of the Journal of Dental Technology to see how one laboratory owner worked with his dentists to improve their impressions and curb remakes. Not a JDT subscriber? Call NADL at (850) 950-1150 or click on the subscribe link above to start getting the industry's best magazine.

You nominated CDTs for the CDT of the Year Award who made a difference and even in this august company Orville G. Colby, CDT, stood out. Click here to read the article.

It’s that time of the year again to see what happened last year in regard to OSHA’s activity during the fiscal year 2008 (October 2007 through September 2008). The following were the top 10 most frequently cited standards for all types of industries.