The 5 Most Reliable (and Immediate) Practice Profit Multipliers

I’m always surprised when Doctors deny themselves the right or suppress the opportunity to maximize their practice’s profitability.  That is the point of owning the business.

There are of course other reasons.  Summarized by the founding principles of Dental Success Today: giving you the necessary permission, strategies, systems, support, and resources to practice on your own terms by your own definition of success.  

I call this a Lifestyle Practice… controlling your own schedule, practicing clinically the way you feel is best, and choosing what you do (or don’t do).

That said, all of those benefits and ideals are made possible by having a more (not just a) profitable practice.

It gets even better because a profitable practice means you can provide a better career opportunity to your team and you can enhance your patient experience whether that’s with time or technology or both.

The big problem is when a doctor, as business owner, feels some discrepancy between these objectives; as if they are not completely interconnected.

Yes, there are doctors and corporations that focus on nothing but profit at the sacrifice of quality.  Along the way, they deteriorate the integrity of patient experience and the overall standard of care.  However, they don’t remain profitable (or in operation) for long – it does catch up with them.

There are also great doctors who do impeccable dentistry and truly help their patients in life changing ways, they just don’t do it with very many people because they haven’t given the business aspect of the practice the attention it deserves.

I will tell you this… you can’t show me a doctor who feels they are undervalued or who is constantly stressed or who has a lifestyle out of balance or has a back account on a roller coaster ride – who is also doing a great job day in and day out with their patients, their team, and their family.

You can argue it at your own peril.  The fact is prosperity begets peace of mind and peace of mind begets professional potential and they become a closed loop.

Of course, there are doctors who let this get the best of them through greed but not you, not here.  If anything, doctors here reinvest into your business to a fault instead of into your life outside of the practice.

Yes, it’s true you can find a lot of great doctors who live on modest means and you can find a lot of doctors you wouldn’t let near your mouth who have found a way to flourish financially.

But you won’t find any doctor who has the total package with life and practice in complete harmony who has not made it a deliberate quest to find a balance of both.  And by balance, I mean maximizing their potential in and out of their practices with their people and their profits.

Have you committed to your own quest?

Far too many doctors stay stuck because they don’t embrace the reality that the business isn’t going to be profitable by itself – it requires the right model, the right strategies, and the right engineering.

Which brings me to the fastest and most sustainable profit multiplier inside of your practice.

It has to do with the other part to the people equation that you have in your practice.  We’ve talked about your Team and now I’m talking to you about your Patients.

The reason for this is very simple (and perhaps obvious), it’s because they are in the greatest quantity – no matter what that number is.  If you elevate the value of your patients, you give yourself the single most powerful move from addition to multiplication there is in business; all without significantly impacting the other variables that make up your business.

Therefore, the fastest realization of sustainable profit growth comes from your Patients.

Let’s begin with the quantitative aspects with the five ways to work patient math in your favor and then we’ll go into patient experience and the less tangible qualitative opportunities next week.

By the way, if you haven’t received and studied my newest book all about this topic, what are you waiting for?  Either you like to do everything the hard way or you prefer a shortcut to everything you’ve always known is possible…

Claim Your Free Copy of My New Book:

Creating A Highly Profitable Dental Practice (That You’ll Actually Enjoy!)

Okay, so your obvious path to more profit from your patients:

1st – The most obvious of them all and one that I have already made the case for when we were talking about increasing your time value to yourself many weeks ago… You can (and most likely should) raise your fees.  If not on every procedure and every minute of your time, at least on certain procedures and places within your clinical execution that you are tapped out on capacity or where demand is way up on supply.

I prefer a much more deliberate and engineered way of looking at and setting your “fee schedule” but it is worthy of and warrants a Weekly Report Series unto itself.

You might find low hanging fruit just dealing with your insurance dynamic or your most frequent procedures or all of the above.

Do the math on if you increase every ‘clinical transaction’ and see how powerful that is to your bottom line.

2nd – You can increase the size of your appointments by bundling more dentistry together in fewer visits.  While this is also very obvious, it is the most common flaw among practices because they just don’t move the needle on their average visit value even when they think they are doing quadrant or comprehensive dentistry, they often are not.

The action step here though is to see from your treatment planning and your expectations on treatment flow where it is getting diminished and broken down in the first place; whether in the operatory, at the front desk, or anywhere in between.

The math doesn’t lie and this one has huge impact across the board.

3rd – The next one is often the culprit for the above two points… your treatment planning and the comprehensive nature of diagnosing.  As easy as it is to say, the goal is to actually get it done and that is increasing the overall average value of your treatment plans period.  

I will give you two quick examples but this topic also warrants a series of Reports to do it justice.

First, you must make sure that you are treatment planning all the details of the case and that you are getting paid for what you actually do.  Yes, there is an argument to be made to avoid ‘nickel and diming’ the patient but most of that is just your own discomfort and value.  

I haven’t ever seen anything less than at least an immediate ten and up to twenty percent bump in value just by being more detailed and thorough with what you are doing clinically.

The next example is something that came up at my last Wealth Group session with the smartest and most profitable doctors in the country.  Yes, even they found a way to give themselves a challenge to do a better job of getting paid for phases of treatment up front.  In one instance taking restorative into ortho into cosmetic and questioning why would that ever be handled as a step by step process.  Instead, begin with the end in mind for the patient’s total health.

By the way, I haven’t even talked about the subject of actually diagnosing more dentistry.  You should take a hard look at your own case building and clinically proficiency coupled with your communication skills and the experiential presentation of life changing dentistry with your patients.

Be bolder, think bigger, see more, and redefine what comprehensive dentistry and complete health actually is.  Do more for your patient and the rest will take care of itself.

4th – Now we get to have some fun because the next strategy that drives profitability is attacking your schedule from both sides.  To build on what we have talked about already, you want to consider what visits you can eliminate altogether or reduce the number of times a patient comes in.

The easiest thing is to look at ortho or sleep or tmj or follow-ups or post-ops or whatever else.  You are the doctor, you make the decision.  I’m just asking you to look at it and break free from your mindset of you are selling time or visits.  Instead, realize you are actually selling knowledge, skill, benefits, and outcomes.

And then the other side of the equation is how can we get the dentistry done faster.  Not in a volume position.  I’m talking about whitening or perio or implants or appliances or whatever.

How can we condense the time between visits and therefore make the schedule and that patient worth more?

Now both of these also have another benefit in that they also reduce the total cost of the procedure in terms of time, space, and team members.

5th – We have arrived at the fifth strategy (not the final, as we are just scratching the surface of this topic and by no means is this an exhaustive list). 

And this is a big one but I’m going to leave you hanging.  I’ll give you a hint: your greatest growth factor is engineering a practice that lifts up every component.  It is about maximizing every patient, every room, every treatment opportunity, and every team member from start to finish.  

The fact is: more treatment leaves and even goes undiagnosed than ever gets done in your practice.  We’ll fix that next week when we pick up right here.

Lastly, I began this Weekly Report discussing mindset because the biggest limiting factors are always in your own belief of what’s possible and your comfort level with profitability in the first place.  

Know that the more profitable you are, the more good you are doing for your patients and your team.  It’s time to win in bigger ways than ever before for the benefit of all who are involved and impacted by the amazing work that you do.