Uncovering Your Hidden “Boutique Practice”

When dentists talk about building a dream boutique practice, what they are usually saying is simply that they want a dental practice that attracts the right kind of patients. The fact is, however, those patients are often right there in the practice, waiting to be discovered.

It’s an undeniable truth of dentistry that you can only treat what you see and you only see what you know. So it stands to reason that when you expand the boundaries of what you know, you are going to expand the boundaries of what you see. I have had many dentists who have gone through our workshops explain this phenomenon to me in very excited tones—that they were suddenly seeing new opportunities with patients they had been treating for years. In other words, they realized that the breakthrough that occurred didn’t happen because they found a lot of the “right” kind of new patients; it occurred because they became a new kind of dentist.

For many dentists, the idea of achieving breakthrough growth in the practice can be both exciting and scary. It’s exciting because nearly everyone likes the idea of creating greater prosperity and success in their career. But it can be scary too if you are a dentist who already feels almost tapped out in time and energy. After all, since hygienists are usually limited in how much they can produce, and you are usually limited in how many hygienists you can have on the team, any significant increase in production has to come from the dentist’s chair.

So even if you improve your diagnosis and case acceptance and treatment skills, where do you find the increased capacity to serve the demand? Where is that additional productivity going to come from?

I have written before about how much of the answer simply lies in scheduling strategically, making sure you reserve the right time for the right cases so that you are getting more value from your time, and I have produced an online lesson that outlines that strategy clearly.

But for now let’s talk about just how many significant cases it would take to create a surge in practice productivity. It may not be as many as you would expect. Let’s break down a fairly conservative scenario:

Let’s say that you do one $5000 case a month—something that should be within the reach of any dentist applying the right diagnosis and value creation techniques. And just every second month you do one for $10,000. Finally, twice a year, you find yourself involved in a complex, comprehensive $20,000 case. That comes out to $160,000 in revenue—from just 20 patients.

As your skills improve, maybe you do a $20,000 case quarterly, a $10,000 case monthly, and a $5,000 case weekly. That’s $440,000 in clinical care from only 64 patients a year. That comes out to about five patients a month, which should not be difficult to incorporate into even the busiest schedule.

Don’t get too hung up on the exact dollar figures—I am using them just as a method of illustration. The point is, there is always room to grow and to fit more success into the schedule when you think about growth in terms of value, not volume.