In our book How to Create a Healthy Dental Business, Dr. Traci Lennemann and I outline a comprehensive process on how to overcome pressing challenges you may have in your dental practice. However, if the main thing you want to accomplish is additional profits in your dental business in a post-Covid world, let’s look at the 7 best ways you can grow the profits in your dental business.

• Your Hygienist Needs to Be Identifying Needed Procedures. Is your hygienist simply performing prophy’s on patients, or are they really looking for issues in a patient's mouth that needs treatment? Your patients relate better to your hygienist than you as you have “DDS” next to your name and anything you recommend might be viewed as self-serving. Your hygienist is at the same level as your patient, so when they recommend a needed procedure, it’s more like a trusted friend helping than an authority figure insisting on something.
• The Cheapest Lab isn’t Always the Best Lab. So, you look at your lab bill and want to cut expenses by finding a lower-priced lab. If the quality is comparable, that’s great. However, a lot of low-end labs do not have the quality product you want to put into your patient’s mouth. I’ve seen to many dissatisfied patients give a dental clinic a bad name (and thus drive away new patients) because an implant or crown failed because of poor quality coming from the lab. 
• What are you doing to retain your employees? It’s a fact that the longer you retain your Dental Assistants, RDH’s, and front desk people, the more productive they become. Figure out why an employee would leave and go work at another dental clinic, or another job all together. If you are paying below industry standards, raise their pay. If you have dysfunctional team dynamics, conduct team training, or get rid of the negative “Cancer” employees. 
• Do you know how much it costs to get a new patient? It’s great that you have an active marketing program in your business (you do have one…correct?) but do you test and measure how effective that marketing program is working? If you are sending out 10,000 post cards out in the mail, or blasting out Facebook ads, how many new patients are coming from those marketing investments? Once you identify what is, and is not working, you can double-down on what is working, and stop wasting money on what is not working
• Are you consistently working to reactivate old patients? Go back into your flies and identify how many patients have not been in to see you in over a year. Remember, it costs around 5 times more money to keep a current or past patient active than to get a new patient. Develop a script for your front-office people to call these old patients and have them call when it’s slow. Even if only 1 out of 20 old patients that come back, it only takes one procedure from those reactivation patients to make the calling worthwhile. 
• Do you use a budget to control your expenses? The fact is every dental business owner should be looking at their financials at least once a month. However, it’s not enough to just know where you are financially. You need a spending game-plan, and that is where a budget comes in. 
• Use the concept of “Flow” with your calendar to be more productive. What is it like for you as a dentist to go from a crown and bridge to an implant, and then to single crown, and then to a drill and fill? Jarring perhaps? What if you put all your implant cases into a single day in a week? I’ve seen my clients do this technique and they get around 20% more efficient by creating a natural flow of doing one procedure and getting into a “Groove” that day. Start looking at your calendar and see if you can start using this concept.

Driving profits in your dental business are all about making small changes over a period of time. Start implementing at least one of these strategies, stick with the strategy over time, and be open to making changes in your approach if you are not getting the profit results you want. Let me know how I can help.

Kevin Weir - 8/15/2022