Let’s talk about something that too many doctors get wrong: your practice should serve your life — not the other way around. I see doctors time and time again letting their practice take over everything, pushing their personal lives, their freedom, and their time into whatever leftover scraps the practice allows. It doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, it shouldn’t be that way.
The Lifestyle Practice Formula is about flipping that mindset on its head.
It’s about making your practice a conduit for the life you want—not a prison that forces you to squeeze your life into whatever gaps are left. You didn’t become a dentist to be chained to a schedule you can’t control. You’re here to build a lifestyle—one that gives you freedom, flexibility, and control.
Here’s the key: it all starts with defining your lifestyle first. The practice is designed around the life you want, not the other way around.
The First Step: Knowing the Number That Makes Your Life Work
It starts with a single, crucial question: How much do you need to make your life work? I’m not talking about just getting by or paying the bills. I’m talking about the number that lets you thrive—the number that makes your life truly work. Call it income, call it profit, call it whatever you like, but you need to know the number that opens the door to everything you want.
How much do you need for the house, the vacations, the time off, the experiences with your family? You can’t build a practice that serves your life until you’ve nailed down that number.
This number is your north star—the guiding light for everything you do in the practice. Without it, you’re spinning your wheels, doing more dentistry but feeling stuck. With it, you’re laser-focused, because you know exactly what you need to make your life and practice work in harmony.
Building Time Off Into Your Practice
Once you’ve defined the number that makes your life work, the next step is just as important: deciding how much time you want off. Here’s where most doctors struggle. They let the practice dictate their schedule, and they end up working themselves into the ground. But here’s the deal: if you want a lifestyle practice, you have to be in control of your time.
Let me challenge you—take at least one week off every quarter. That’s the minimum. Most of my doctors aim for a week off every month, and they make it work. You don’t build your life around your practice—you build your practice around the life you want.
It might mean planning around school schedules if you have young kids—spring break, summer vacations, holidays. Or maybe you’ve got the freedom to travel and want to take longer breaks—two, three, or even four-week stretches at a time. The point is, you decide what works for your life, and then we reverse-engineer the practice to make it happen.
If you don’t set these boundaries, the practice will take over. You’ll be running a schedule you don’t control, with no space for yourself or your family. That’s not the lifestyle practice we’re building. You get to set the terms—not the practice, not the patients.
The Simple Math Behind the Lifestyle Practice
Once you’ve got your lifestyle number and your time off, it’s time to put the pieces together with simple math. Take the number that makes your life work and divide it by the number of clinical days you’re going to work in a year. This gives you your daily production number—the amount you need to produce to hit your goals.
But we’re not stopping there. We’re going to take that number and multiply the results. You don’t need to see more patients or work harder. Instead, you focus on driving up your hourly and daily values while maximizing your overhead efficiency. This is how you multiply your results without adding more grind to your life.
This approach leads to what I call the 50% net model—where every dollar you produce, half of it goes into your personal bank account. Not the practice’s account—yours. The practice is simply the conduit, but the point is to move that money to where it matters—your personal wealth, your freedom, your life. You’re not building a practice to make the business rich. You’re building it to make your life rich.
Once you’ve got this formula—knowing your number and your clinical days—you’re in control. You don’t need to see more patients, and you certainly don’t need to take on more headaches. You just need to maximize the value of every clinical day.
Running Your Practice on Your Terms
Now that you’ve got your daily number in place, you’re in a position of power. You get to run your practice on your terms. You decide how many hours you want to work each day. You decide what kind of dentistry you want to focus on. You decide which patients you want to serve.
This is the beauty of the Lifestyle Practice Formula—you’re no longer scrambling, reacting, or chasing after patients. You’re no longer at the mercy of insurance companies, market fluctuations, or the competition. You’re in control. You’ve done the math, and you know exactly what you need to produce each day to make your practice and your life work in perfect alignment.
And once you have that power, you can stop being all things to all people. You can elevate yourself from the world of commodity dentistry—where you’re stuck in a race to the bottom on price—and move into the world of premium, in-demand, concierge-level dentistry. That’s where you deserve to be.
This is how you build a practice that doesn’t just generate income, but creates freedom—freedom to work with the patients you want, charge the fees you deserve, and live life on your terms.
Confidence in the Formula — Freedom in Your Practice
The best part about the Lifestyle Practice Formula? It’s based on facts, not feelings. When you know your numbers, you don’t have to guess. You don’t have to worry or wonder if you’re making the right decisions. You can move forward with confidence, knowing your practice is built on solid, stable ground.
This gives you the freedom to run your practice the way you want. You’re not a commodity dentist serving everyone at rock-bottom prices. You’re building a premium, concierge practice where patients come to you because they know you’re the best—and they’re willing to pay for it. You’ve moved beyond the noise of competition, beyond the constraints of insurance, and into a place where you set the rules.
This is how you create the life you’ve always wanted.
The Final Word: The Power of a Premium Practice on Your Terms
When you have control over the numbers, you have control over your life. The Lifestyle Practice Formula frees you from the grind and lets you focus on what matters most: building a practice that serves you.
The beauty of this formula is that it gives you the power of choice. You don’t have to chase after every patient or accept whatever the market hands you. You have the math on your side. You have confidence in the numbers. You can finally break free from the desperate-minded thinking that keeps so many doctors stuck.
And when you have this control, you no longer need to be all things to all people. You can stop serving at the level of convenience, commoditization, or trying to meet everyone’s demands. Instead, you step into your authority. You become the premium-priced, in-demand dentist you were meant to be, offering relationship-driven dentistry done on your own terms.
