Hey everyone,
This question is geared more toward practicing dentists and the business side of dentistry.
How was the transition for you, from dental school or residency into the real world, and eventually into owning and successfully running a practice? How did you go about learning to manage the business side of dentistry on top of the clinical demands?
Specifically, what helped you most when it came to understanding how to finance, budget, advertise, and make smart spending decisions that ultimately brought in revenue?
As a current dental student, I know the clinical side is our main focus, but I’m really interested in learning how to prepare for practice ownership. I understand that a lot of learning happens once you're “thrown in,” but is there anything I can be doing now to start building a solid foundation in the business side of dentistry? What are the best books/podcasts that are actually practical and that you have used to help with buying and running a practice?
Thanks in advance!!! I really appreciate any insight or advice you guys can share!
Business just makes sense. It doesn't require you to be the best clinician, just a clinically acceptable clinician who can talk to patients. As a solo practitioner, you put on many hats - salesperson (selling your treatment), clinician (execution of treatment with minimal failures), CEO (guiding the overall direction of your office), COO (operations, workflow), HR (getting the right employees), Marketing (understanding what demographic you want in your office, how to attract them, and making sure your cost per patient acquisition is lower than profit per patient, and other things that you can choose to delegate or do yourself. I do recommend understanding as much as your practice as possible that may not necessarily be your expertise, but in case your support team (such as IT, plumbing, electrical, etc...) cannot make it on time, you can make basic on the fly repairs that will reduce your cost and allow you to continue operating
Salesperson role - Learn to talk to people efficiently and friendly. Be concise, build that relationship quickly because you're not getting paid to talk. For long conversations that some patients may want, delegate that to auxiliary staff. They also need to be incentivized to sell for you. Proposing treatment doesn't matter if the patient doesn't agree to it.
CEO - overall direction you want to go. You need to put all the pieces together and think of the direction you want your office to go. Are you going to hire a bunch of associates later on, stick to one location, solo practice, sell to a DSO eventually and cash out?
Operations - this is my favorite since I like to be fast, efficient, and maximize my productivity. You need to learn how to implement operational workflows that maximize your efficiency, reduce your headaches, and maximize your productivity. In a solo practice, the bottleneck is really mostly you, staff, and number of rooms. You have to learn how to do things quickly and objectively measure how much each procedure produces per minute and whether it is worth keeping or not. This is what dental school is best for - to figure out how to make your procedures more efficient to hit a production per minute target. From there, you need to make sure that your staff is efficient in every step of the workflow. From patients walking in, to being brought back, to radiographs/probing/diagnostics, to interpretation, to treatment planning, sales, then execution of proposed treatment, and eventually placed into recall. Think of that on a single patient v. simultaneous multiple patient input (i.e 1 pt per hour v. 20 per hour).
Marketing - No point in being efficient if you can't bring patients in. I advocate for cheap mass advertising in the beginning, then you can do more targeted advertising afterwards. Ethical advertising is important, in that you can't claim superiority of your dentistry to others directly or bash other dentists. You really have to think about what your target demo wants and appeal to them.
I don't think there's really a book that will directly help you, but understanding some fundamental concepts of queuing, patient psychology, basic accounting/cash flows, and procedural workflows would be a good start. Most of these "dental business gurus" will prey on business idiots to try and sell you into their systems.
As students, it is important to keep an open mind in that the dental school way is typically the safe but inefficient way. You have to always be open to doing research on your materials, more efficient materials and methods, and ways to speed up your productivity. Some examples include bulk fill flowable, 7th gen bonding agents, and 1 second curing lights. Just don't get in trouble with your school as they usually have a stick up their ass when it comes to sticking to their methods. I am against doing more than what is required at school (unless you have instructors that let you do whatever you want and experiment/guide you for success, and those are usually the PP/part timers), as they tend to reinforce slow and inefficient habits.
