Your Practice: Avoiding Burnout

There comes a point in the life of just about any solo practitioner when they feel they are approaching burnout in their practice. Year after year of building and sustaining your practice take can take its toll as you find that you have created more success than you can handle, and you understandably look for ways to find relief from the stress.

Finding relief from the stress of your practice can take one of three forms:

1. Reducing hours. This is the most obvious solution for your practice. If you feel you are working too much, you simply decide to work less, by either reducing the number of patients you see in a day, or the number of days you work per week. The issue here is that even if you compensate for the lost hours by increasing your hourly production, you are inevitably going to be scheduling farther out and some patients will move on to other practices rather than wait too long for an appointment. And losing patients is not a sustainable outcome for the long-term health of your practice.


2. Limiting the kinds of cases you do. Another solution is to maintain the hours you put in but limit yourself to just doing high-value, high-satisfaction cases in your practice. This can feel like a great way to solve the burnout issue, but again the question becomes one of long-term sustainability. What is going to happen to all that routine dentistry in the mouths of your patients? If they start going elsewhere for that treatment, that is going to have a big impact on your foundational source of complex cases. But there is another way...


3. Bring in another pair of hands. This is the simple solution that allows you to take either of those first two approaches—reduce your hours, reduce your case types, or both—while still ensuring that patients are served in a timely and complete way and maintaining or even growing the patient base in your practice.

I understand that while the principle itself is simple and sound, the process of finding a new dentist and assimilating him or her into your practice requires a significant investment of your time and energies. But remember, devising a transition strategy is something you are going to have to deal with one day anyway, when it is time for you to think about your exit. Why not put in that energy now, when a transition can help you capture all that value you have built? And at the same time, allow you to go on practicing dentistry on your own terms, without all the stress of trying to keep up with it all yourself?

No burnout. No compromises. That's the motto to adopt as you take your practice to the next level.


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