Imagine a day much like every other. You’re hunched over a dental chair for the umpteenth hour this week. Your back aches, your neck is stiff, and your brain hurts from trying to calculate what insurance will reimburse versus what you had to spend just to keep the lights on. Plus, you haven’t spent any time with the family lately… and forget about hobbies. They’re stuck somewhere gathering dust because here you are, grinding away — literally and figuratively. 

What happened to the vision you had of healing and helping? The dream of financial freedom, with the time to actually live your life? This life of churn and burn, drill and fill is not what you signed up for.

You didn’t endure years of dental school and grueling hours of practice to live life as a cog in some corporate machine. You struck out on your own to make a difference, build a legacy, and live a life of pride, power, and prosperity. And that dream is far from dead — it’s just waiting for you to seize it. 

In fact, private practice owners are striking out boldly like never before. You just need to avoid the naysayers and engineer the kind of practice and life you truly deserve. 

To start, let’s review your financial situation and…

3 Key Decisions to Make For Financial Success.

Decision #1: You must understand how your fees, and how you build and deliver your dentistry, make your time more valuable as a doctor.

As a private practice owner, there really is no limit to what you collect. That number is inherently the result of a process involving sales, patient experience, diagnosis, case presentation, prepayment, and then the scheduling of the dentistry. Collections has nothing to do with production in a healthy ownership-based practice model.

On the flip side, your fee has 100% impact, not just on your production, but also your value of time.

When you think about fees, realize that your fees impact your time, leverage, and profit. There is a strategy to set those fees that has nothing to do with Patterson’s (or anyone else’s) percentage guidelines. Your fee is exclusively based on reverse engineering your goals.

Decision #2: You must know the number that makes your life work.

What is the number that makes your life work? It’s simple and the most important result to reverse engineer. For example, let’s work through the total amount you want for a year.

For now, here’s an easy monthly formula: monthly target = income + profit.

• Income is money for your lifestyle, house, food, and this or that. It’s the things you want to enjoy now.
• Profit is money for your retirement, bucket list, giving back, and wealth building.

That’s why most private practice owners have income, but they have no profit. They’re spending all the money, and so they never get to really build what they could have. When you set it up properly, your profit will be way more than your income. In fact, it ought to be two to four times your income. That’s what allows you to accumulate a lifetime’s worth of wealth in ten years, a decade’s worth in two or three, because the multiplier of profit accelerates and grows beyond income.

Once you have your monthly target income and profit, you add your overhead: monthly target = income + profit + overhead

 When adding the overhead, remember there are fixed expenses, team expenses, and variable expenses. This number is your monthly, gold-minimum expectation benchmark. Your overhead is not your expectation, and your income is not your expectation.

You’re shooting for a number that includes your overhead, plus income, plus profit (you can also include items like debt service, future equipment purchases, real estate investments, team bonuses, and other things inside this formula.)

Once you have that number, you divide it by clinical days: monthly target / clinical days = MAGIC NUMBER

 This Magic Number is the daily number that you must surpass to make all this happen. If you want to do production, you can divide that by your hourly run rate. So, if your total number is $10,000, with eight hours, you need to earn $1,250 an hour. The Magic Number is also a collection number, which has no limit. This means you need to present two to three times this number in dentistry. You also need to ask for prepayment of two to three times the number that makes your life work.

That’s how you expand this into a formulaic approach to reverse engineer the only number that matters. There are no arbitrary daily goals and no insurance-based anything — just the top line objective that makes the bottom line possible. This is what aligns the planets and makes your life work.

Decision #3: You must intentionally take out the money.

Once you have a base of cash that is sufficient for you, like the amount of an entire month’s overhead, you pull everything else out of the account. You can build a cushion and create a little savings for equipment, CE, 401(k) accounts, taxes, or for whatever you want. Beyond that, you must move the money out.

Remember, your salary is enough to make your lifestyle work and meet your goals. This includes caring for kids or grandkids, 529 accounts, a health savings account, savings for vacations, retirement, and taxes. With all of this, you have got to have enough salary baked in. There’s also profit over the top, and the only way you’re going to have it is if you extract it out. That’s your decision. You decide what that cushion number is and then plan for the rest to flow out of the account.

Here’s the key. You can’t leave it up to your accountant, CPA, tax person, computer, QuickBooks, P&L, or reports at the end of the month. You need to know for yourself how much money you’re making and how well you’re doing.

You must be a creator; you must profit on purpose and give yourself permission to do so.

This is the linchpin, the underlying force, that allows you to not merely do more for money, but to also do more good things in the process by utilizing profit as your power.

Have A Sense of Urgency Mindset.

There’s one more mindset you must understand and embrace: you must have a sense of urgency. Life is too short to move slowly. If your goals are worthy enough, you cannot delay because life goes so fast. The hourglass does not stop. If your mission has meaning, you must move. You must act NOW.

If you are leaving it up to chance, hoping there’s money left at the end of the month, you are “accidentally” managing your profitability, and you’ve got to fix it. Everything hinges on this: every week, every day, every visit, every patient, every interaction, every spin of the drill, and every placement of the appliance. It includes everything from delivering implants to surgery and all other aspects of your production. Once you take control and make these decisions, your profit will begin to increase instantaneously.

Remember, time in means money out. Time in means fulfillment out, and time in means lifestyle out. You should be paid what you’re worth with fees that truly reflect the value of your time. You deserve freedom of time, where you have more time away from your practice than in the practice.

Make the decision now to harness the power of profitability because it’s what makes everything else possible. It’s profit on purpose, it’s prosperity on demand, and it’s a win for all the people involved: your patients, your team, and you. Once you learn that not all dollars are created equal, that not all profit is worth it, and that not all production delivers the same, you can engineer your practice to go straight for the richest parts. You’ll reach your goals a heck of a lot faster. Now, are you ready to defy the odds and shatter the status quo?