The Whole Truth About Why Trump Has The American Economy At Record Highs, Yet The American Solo Dentist Is On The Brink Of Devastation
According to some powerful Dental insiders and influencers, the number of private practice owners continued to shrink throughout 2019. And with 2020 potentially shaping up as yet another consecutive year of record numbers of solo dentists struggling, filing bankruptcy, taking second jobs and flat out going broke, the time is coming when every solo dentist will need to engage in what some call “desperate measures” or face complete annihilation.
Some frightening facts as we look back over 2019 and 2018 that you simply can no longer afford to ignore…
• The Stock Market (Dow – S&P 500) are at near ALL TIME HIGHS
• Virtually every POSITIVE U.S. economic indicator available has been triggered in recent months
• Consumer confidence is higher right now than at ANY time in the last 19 years!
Whether you like the President or not… these are the economic improvements that have happened on his watch. Improvements that EVERY dentist on planet earth should be THRIVING in. Right?
If I told you the stock market was DOWN, U.S. economic indicators were at alltime lows, and consumer confidence was the worst ever… you’d assume solo practitioners were having a hard time and struggling… and you’d be right.
However, with the economy booming, WHY were 2018 and 2019 “the year of the bankrupt solo dentist”? If consumers are confident and investors are flushed with profits, WHY is every professional dental organization reporting more dentists LEAVING practice than at any time in the history of this profession? If you really think about it carefully… THAT JUST DOESN’T MAKE SENSE…
Until You Consider The Following…
1. Corporate Dentistry with their obscene marketing budgets and DEEP pockets have invaded every major city in the United States. (Corporate’s ruthless tactics have crippled all but a small minority of solo dentists… and that small minority is in the cross-hairs)
2. Patients are spending less money than ever on dental care, creating a vacuum in the industry. (In spite of elevated consumer confidence. This is very, very bad.)
3. And for the market share that remains for non-corporate practices, now LARGE private mega practices are buying up everything left in sight, including that market share.
4. Insurance manipulation is worse than ever. 5. Young Millennial dentists (with less clinical skills than you) are leveraging high-tech modern marketing methods, eating up the remaining available new patients not already engaged with corporate.
6. The ADA says under normal circumstances Dental Practices lose 12% of their patient base (national avg) each year and have no marketing system in place to replenish these patients year after year. (src: ADA)
7. Solo Dentists have become notorious for using “old and outdated” new patient acquisition strategies, like “word of mouth”, or a standard “website”.
A careful review of these 7 simple facts about the average solo dentist starts to paint a clearer picture as to why solo dentists are going bankrupt at such alarming rates in spite of a booming economy.
If You’re Reading This Article and You’re A Solo Dentist, You Really Only Have One of Two Choices At This Point…
1. You can choose to be a dead man walking – or –
2. You can choose to do something completely different
The objective of this article is NOT to scare you but in fact quite the contrary. I want to inform you and give you a life raft to save you from the smoking, sinking ship that is solo dentistry.
If there’s anything we know for sure about solo dentists it’s that they’re incredibly intelligent, clinically skilled and STUBBORN beyond all comprehension. And while stubborn can be a tremendous attribute when employed in the right time and place, right here, right now, in 2020, in the middle of dental armageddon… stubborn will get you financial ruin and nothing else.
Choosing to stubbornly dig your heels in and simply say “this is how we’ve always done it” is simply choosing to be a “dead man walking” because that is a 1 way ticket to bankruptcy and becoming yet another solo dentistry statistic. I mentioned at the outset of this article that “desperate measures” were called for. And by “desperate” I simply mean something drastically different than what “normal” “average” solo dentists in 2005 did.
If you’re still doing things the way you did in 2005, you owe it to yourself, your family and community to save YOURSELF and them. You and I both know that solo dentistry is a noble profession and an essential presence in our communities, and yet that noble profession is going straight down the tubes UNLESS something DRASTICALLY changes.
