Are You Capturing All the Value in Your Practice?

It's a simple fact of life in dentistry that a practice's productivity is limited by the time of the provider. You only have so many hours to work with and you can only visit with one patient at a time, so it stands to reason that every successful practice will eventually outgrow its capacity to serve the patient base.

After a certain point, the more successful you are in terms of patient demand, the more you end up leaving on the table as untapped revenue, and the longer your patients have to wait for dental care.

One way to capture that surplus success you have built is to bring in another pair of hands. This allows you to create what is essentially another practice within the practice by selling a portion that you're not using effectively anyway. This way you optimize your cash flow, the patients get ideal care in a timely way, and you get a healthy return while growing the practice. Everybody wins.

Many dentists are fooled into thinking that as long as there is any down time in the hygiene schedule, they can't justify bringing in another practitioner. The fact is every schedule will inevitably have some down time no matter how many providers you have. As long as you continue to have new patients coming into the practice and you're retaining the ones you have, you are going to have excess value to be captured. If you capture that value early by transitioning in an associate you can create even more growth and the upward spiral continues. This is how the most successful practices are built.

Just about every practice will be ready for a value transition like this at some point. It's a shame that only some dentists seize the opportunity. It's simply a matter of recognizing when the practice is ready to support another provider, and timing your transitions to capitalize on those opportunities. When it is done right, you're compounding the value that's in the practice and the return you get on exiting at retirement will be several times what you would get from hanging on to the end and doing a one-time sale.

My advice for maximizing the return from a dental career can be boiled down to three imperatives: Retain your patients, grow your patient base, and enter the transition process as early as possible to get full value from your practice throughout your career.