It is best if practice owners do NOT spend a lot of time on management.  They should instead focus on servicing patients with the best possible care. Stay focused on helping patients get better; not on the money. The money will come if you stay focused on helping as many people as possible in your community by improving the quality of their lives through excellent dentistry. Revenue normally follows close behind when a dentist really puts attention on communicating with the patient and honestly cares about how he or she can help the patient improve their oral health. Many times, it’s...

Value The key to effective case presentation is to get patients to understand by raising their dental IQ, which results in patients who place value on their treatment plan. This way when you send someone up to the front desk, the treatment coordinator will have a patient who is more willing to figure out the financing of their needed treatment. Whether the patient can pay or not is another story, but at least you've given the front desk staff a fighting chance. Your case presentation skills (or lack thereof) come into play for only about 20% to 30% of your patients. This...

Many dental practices can appear very busy, but over the years, when I have drilled down into my client's numbers (pardon the pun), I have found many were underproducing by as much as 40% or more based on their production capacity. For a practice to produce at the highest level it is capable of, the key has everything to do with your staff and your skills in leading and managing them. The practice owner From a management viewpoint, the biggest problem in most dental offices is the practice owner. Why? Because most dentists want to be Dr. Nice with their staff....

The Achilles' heel of many a dental practice owner is to avoid dealing with unpleasant staff situations. A good example is a recent new client of mine.  I found him to be very congenial, so I had a hard time believing this guy was the "dental devil incarnate” described by the majority of his staff. I asked each of the staff members in his practice the same question: "Has anyone in the practice been treated unjustly?” All fingers pointed to one person—we'll call her Sally. Sally had apparently been going around telling other staff members about how the practice owner was...