The 4 Business Mistakes Dentists Make with Their Practice and How to Avoid Them.

1. Not taking your role of a business owner seriously

Dentists spend anywhere from 8 to 14 years learning their skills and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get taught the knowledge to ensure they don’t hurt people when performing dentistry.

Conversely, though, there are no similar requirements in order to open a business. You don’t need business qualifications to open a dental practice—because if you fail at that, nobody else gets hurt but yourself. And there are no laws against hurting yourself financially or causing yourself a ton of stress.

So naturally, most dentists don’t take the business side quite as seriously as the clinical side. Typically, most dentists’ business education is limited to reading a few articles in Dental Economics, online forums, chatting with other dentists, or getting feedback from their CPA or banker.

The reason why so many dentists run into difficulty with their practice: they are not approaching the business side of their practice with the same level of professionalism as the clinical side.

Operating a business is NOT any easier than practicing dentistry. It’s often harder.

In fact, I have received an excessive amount of business education myself—I got a bachelor’s in economics, worked on Wall Street and at the Federal Reserve, and went back to grad school to study further on business and economics—and one of my main takeaways is that opening a business is?hard!?Roughly 50% of small businesses fail within the first five years. And after 10 years, 70% have failed. Those aren’t good odds!

2. Neglecting proper organizational structure

?I often see dentists trying to increase production by adding more producers in the back. I’ll see a dentist with a full-time associate, two hygienists, multiple assistants…but only a couple of people up front.

Not to mention, these staff at the front desk usually don’t have clearly defined duties. They’re just doing “front desk” work—a bit of scheduling, a bit of insurance billing, a bit of answering the phones, a bit of recall, etc.

It’s no wonder that production isn’t increasing enough despite the fact that they feel “too busy” all the time. They are understaffed up front, they need structure, and they need clearly defined roles for the staff so they can focus on what they need to be doing instead of constantly scrambling to catch up.

3. Not keeping their eyes on the numbers

Which numbers (or “key performance indicators”) are you tracking? And how often do you look at them?

For many doctors, they just get a quarterly Profit & Loss statement from their CPA that might not even arrive until the end of the following quarter! By the time they reach July, they realize they were screwed in February.

Keeping track of the important numbers and reviewing them on a weekly basis is vital. It shows you when something is wrong before it becomes a disaster, and allows you to actually ensure you reach your monthly, quarterly, and yearly goals in real-time.

4. Not offering efficient staff training

Your staff are what make your business run. It’s important that they are competent at what they do and know exactly how the practice should operate.

It’s tough to train your staff when you don’t have materials to train them on and you don’t know how things should be done properly yourself (see point #1 above). How can you teach someone to answer the phones effectively to schedule new patients if you can’t do it yourself? Same for designing the schedule or getting treatment accepted.

Your first step?is to schedule a FREE strategy session with someone who can help you, second to show up

Pick the time that will work for you, if some reason you can not find a time that will work for you, just send me a direct message here on LinkedIn, I will find the way to accommodate you.

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