Dental Success Today works with doctors by building a custom Lifestyle Practice Blueprint for each practice. It is a written plan that starts with the schedule and income you want, then works backward to the daily numbers, the insurance decisions, and the team that make it possible. The process starts with a one-hour call with Scott Manning, and every blueprint is built around one practice, not a template.
Who Scott Works With
Most of the doctors Scott works with own an independent practice and feel like it owns them. Some are still tied to several PPO contracts. Some are mostly fee-for-service and haven’t seen the payoff yet. Others have the income they wanted and now want fewer clinical days to go with it. Scott has spent nearly 20 years helping dentists across North America build practices around their own goals.
What they share is a wish to earn more while seeing fewer patients. Scott is the wrong person to call if your goal is more new patients every month at any cost. A Lifestyle Practice is built on fewer, better planned patient days, and he won’t draw up a plan that depends on volume.
Why Scott Starts With a Blueprint Instead of a Program
Two practices with the same collections can need opposite plans. One doctor wants three clinical days and summers off with her kids. Another loves the work, wants to add implants, and would rather work fewer hours than fewer days. A fixed program fits one of them at best.
So Scott starts with you. He asks what you want your week, your year, and your income to look like. The plan comes after that answer, and the numbers have to support it.
How the Blueprint Process Works
Step 1: You Request the Call
Fill out the short form on the Lifestyle Practice Blueprint page, or email Diana, who handles scheduling. Tell us what you want to accomplish and pick a time that works.
She can be reached directly at [email protected]
Step 2: You Will Receive Two Resources Before We Talk
The moment you request your call, you will receive two valuable resources designed to help you uncover opportunities and start thinking differently about your practice’s profitability: the Lifestyle Practice Prosperity Package and the Lifestyle Practice Blueprint Guide. The Prosperity Package reveals seven hidden profit leaks that may be quietly costing your practice revenue, limiting growth, and keeping you from reaching its full potential. The Blueprint Guide provides the critical questions and actionable first steps to help you identify opportunities for improvement before we even speak. This way you will come prepared to recognize opportunities, ask better questions, and begin seeing what may be possible for your practice.
Step 3: We Spend an Hour on Your Practice
The call is 60 minutes. Scott takes you through the same analytical process he uses with the doctors he works with most closely, and the two of you roll up your sleeves on your actual numbers.
We work through the four areas the Four Freedoms cover. The first is your time: how many weeks off you want, how many days a week you want to work, and what a good day looks like. The second is your money, meaning your daily production target, your overhead, and your profit margin. The third is insurance, where you stand with PPOs today and how far you want to move. The fourth is your team, who is on it now and how often it changes.
Step 4: You Receive Your Customized Blueprint
You will receive a personalized, highly customized blueprint plan designed specifically for you. This is a clear vision for what your practice and life can truly look like. Built around your unique values, talents, team, and goals, it connects the dots between where you are today and where you want to be. You will see the ideal schedule you want to live, the daily numbers that make that lifestyle financially possible, and the highest-impact changes to make first. This is where your vision becomes a plan and your plan becomes a path to a more profitable practice, a more empowered team, and the freedom to live life on your terms.
Step 5: We Decide What Comes Next Together
Some doctors take their blueprint and confidently put it into action on their own. Others choose to have Scott alongside them every step of the way, with personalized one-on-one coaching, guidance through the decisions that matter most, and focused team development to ensure the changes take root and create lasting results. There is no one-size-fits-all path. Your blueprint is uniquely yours, and the next step is guided by what it reveals, where you want to go, and the support you need to get there. The goal is more than a better practice. It’s building a practice that supports your vision, empowers your team, increases profitability, and gives you the freedom to enjoy the life you worked so hard to create. First, we uncover what’s possible. Then, you decide how you want to bring it to life.
What Working Together Looks Like
The blueprint rests on your numbers, your insurance position, and your team.
It Starts With Your Magic Number
Your Magic Number is the dollar amount of dentistry you want to produce on each clinical day. Scott gets to it by working backward from the life you want. Take a doctor who wants eight weeks off a year and an average of three and a half clinical days a week. That is 44 working weeks and 154 clinical days. At $10,000 a day, the practice produces about $1.54 million a year. Change the daily number, the weeks off, or the days per week, and you can see what each choice costs and what it frees up. The same math is in Chapter 5 of Scott’s book, The Four Freedoms of Dentistry.
It Looks at Your Insurance Position Honestly
Doctors come to Scott at every point on the spectrum. If you are deep in PPO contracts, we plan how to drop PPOs at a pace your cash flow can handle. If you are mostly fee-for-service and the rewards haven’t followed, we look for why. If you want to go fully cash, Scott will show you how.
It Brings Your Team Along
A new schedule only works if the people running it understand why it changed. Turnover is one of the Four Freedoms every blueprint is built around, because a team that keeps changing costs the practice time, money, and patient trust. Where the blueprint changes what your team does, we plan the team building that keeps them with you.
What Doctors Aim For
Every blueprint is built around the Four Freedoms: Insurance Freedom, Financial Freedom, Time Freedom, and Team-Turnover Freedom. The target Scott sets on the financial side is a profit margin of 50 percent or higher.
Doctors who have worked with Scott describe the result in their own terms. Dr. Vickers of Flower Mound, Texas, reduced his clinical days by more than 25 percent. Dr. Bartish of Cincinnati, Ohio, credits the work with an extra $300 an hour in collections. Dr. Schmidt of Jackson, Wyoming, says that within 90 days he was making more money and working fewer days. Results depend on the practice and on how closely the doctor follows the plan.
Where to Start This Week
Set a timer for 30 minutes and write down four numbers: the weeks off you want each year, the days a week you want to work, the annual production you want, and what your practice produces on a typical clinical day now. Multiply your working weeks by your days a week to get your clinical days, then divide the annual production by that number. The result is your daily target. The gap between it and your real day is the first thing we would talk about. If you can’t say your real daily number in under a minute, that is your first finding.
Related FAQs
What is a Lifestyle Practice?
A Lifestyle Practice is a dental practice built around the life the doctor wants, with fewer clinical days, a daily production target that supports them, and independence from insurance and patient volume. Scott describes the goal as Income, Impact, and Independence.
What happens on a Lifestyle Practice Blueprint call?
Your private, one-on-one call with Scott lasts approximately 60 minutes. Before we meet, you’ll receive a curated guide and practical toolkit to help you prepare and make the most of our time together. During our conversation, we’ll take a deeper look at the key drivers of your practice: your ideal schedule, financial performance, insurance positioning, and team dynamics to uncover hidden opportunities, identify what may be holding you back, and reveal where meaningful improvements can be made. Following our session, you’ll receive a customized Lifestyle Practice Blueprint built around your unique goals, challenges, and vision for the future. This isn’t generic advice or a one-size-fits-all formula. It’s a strategic roadmap designed to help you unlock your practice’s potential, strengthen profitability, build a more empowered team, and create a practice that supports the lifestyle you truly want. One conversation. A fresh perspective. A personalized roadmap for what’s possible.
Who is the Blueprint process for?
It is for owners of independent dental practices who want more income, more time, and less dependence on insurance and patient volume. Doctors at every stage of the move away from PPOs are welcome, from fully contracted to mostly fee-for-service. It is a poor fit for anyone whose main goal is more new patients per month.
Do I have to drop insurance before we work together?
No. Doctors come to Scott from every starting point, and how far and how fast you move away from insurance is part of the plan we build. If you are deep in PPOs, we plan the exit around your cash flow. If you are already fee-for-service, we look at why the profit hasn’t followed.
Do you work with my team or only with me?
The blueprint is built with you, since the schedule, the numbers, and the insurance decisions are yours. Your team comes in where those decisions change their work, and team development is part of how Scott helps you bring them along.
Does it cost anything to start?
The Blueprint call is free, with no obligation to continue. What happens after that depends on your blueprint and on what you want to do with it.
Scott lays out the thinking behind all of this in The Four Freedoms of Dentistry, his free book on how the doctors he works with rebuild their practices around fee-for-service dentistry, lower overhead, and a schedule they own. Download it, or request your Lifestyle Practice Blueprint call and we’ll start on your numbers.
