Dentists are not firefighters, so you shouldn’t be running around trying to put out fires all over the practice. If everything feels urgent in the practice, it’s because it’s running on reaction instead of intention, and when that’s the case, nothing gets improved. You don’t need a firefighter — you need a system!
No one teaches you how to run a dental practice. You spend years mastering the clinical side—and then you open your doors and realize the business side is a completely different discipline. That’s exactly where Bourbonnais Family Dental found themselves.
How you utilize your schedule is one of the keys to a great practice, because when it’s full, everything is better. Tracking your Capacity Percentage will inform you of the percentage of available clinical time that is actually used for patient care, which tells you how efficiently you’re using your time.
Every Day, You’re Marketing. The Question Is What. Every day in your dental practice, you’re selling something. It’s not just dentistry. It’s you. It’s your team. It’s the feeling a patient gets from the moment they walk in the door to the moment they leave. The best part? It doesn’t cost a thing. The worst part? You might not realize how much is already being communicated.
Most dentists would love nothing more than to focus on clinical dentistry, but that’s not possible. As a result, it can be difficult at times to focus on those things outside the clinical dentistry sphere, which can make running the practice extremely tiring. When you’re putting out fire after fire caused by
Ever look into a mirror that’s covered in dust, smudged, clouded, or dirty? You can still make out your reflection, but it’s distorted and unclear. The details start to get fuzzy. And if you’re trying to get a clear picture of what you actually look like? That’s a problem.
Having a full schedule is crucial, and one way to ensure that is to focus on your Pre-Appointment Percentage. It refers to the percentage of active patients who leave your office with a future appointment already scheduled, and you can calculate it by dividing the number of active patients who are scheduled for a
One difficult case. One bad month. One unhappy patient review. It’s one thing after another and, suddenly, it feels like everything is falling apart. Your whole practice seems broken. But is it really?
It doesn’t matter how great your practice is; even if you have the best systems, patients, and clinical skills in the world, if you keep hiring the wrong people, your culture will always suffer. You need the right people in the right seats, and that means improving your hiring process. However, when you truly break it
Common sense just isn’t so common anymore, and you’ve probably seen examples pop up daily at your practice. Patients are eager to pay for expensive veneers… but refuse to floss. They insist they don’t need X-rays because TikTok says they’re dangerous. Even staff can be guilty: a team member shows up late and acts surprised that it’s a problem.
