How to grow your dental practice like a CEO

Are you overloaded with work, but not seeing the results you want?

When you’re working in the practice day in and day out, it can be challenging to zoom out and see where to focus.

As the practice owner, you are the CEO. And CEOs have one thing in common: focus. They know what matters, and they shift their attention there.

Two truths to shift your mindset

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1. Marginal gains can make a big difference to your revenue, over time.

2. More patients doesn’t always equal more revenue.

Where do you start?

It all depends on where you want to get to. Do you have a revenue target you’re aiming for this year? If yes, congratulations! you can skip ahead.

If not, review the last year.

How much revenue did you make?

How much do you want to make this year?

When do you want to retire or sell the practice, how much would you like it to be turning over then?

As a starting point, ambitious practices might target a 10% revenue increase year-on-year.

Set yourself a SMART goal to keep accountable:

SMART stands for: Specific Measurable Achievable Relevant Timely

Example:

Specific: Increase the practice's total revenue by 8% compared to the previous year.

Measurable: Track monthly revenue and compare it to the same months in the previous year. Use practice management software to check progress.

Achievable: Based on current patient numbers and average revenue per patient, an 8% increase is challenging but realistic.

Relevant: Increasing revenue by 8% aligns with the goal of selling the practice in 2027.

Timely: Achieve this 8% revenue increase by the end of the next year, starting July 1, 2024, and ending June 30, 2025.

Some months may be quieter and some may be busier. Take that into account when you break down your revenue target by month.

You can’t improve what you don’t measure:

Now you have a goal, you need to start measuring progress towards it.

At the most basic level, you should track these metrics on a monthly basis:

• number of enquiries
• number of consultations
• number of treatments booked
• revenue per treatment
• revenue

This will tell you, at a glance, whether you’re trending in the right direction.

Plug your numbers into this revenue calculator.

Now let’s think back to the goal you set. Play around with the number of enquiries, revenue per treatment and the conversion rates to see how tweaking each metric can impact revenue.

For example:

• if you increase your case acceptance rate, how does that impact revenue?
• if you increase average revenue per treatment by placing more implants, what will that do?

Decide on the top one or two metrics you want to focus on to reach your revenue goal (remember: focus)

Influencing the funnel

You can think of the stages of the patient journey like a funnel - at each stage there is some drop off. Your role as CEO is to minimise that as much as possible by using all the methods at your disposal.

Thinking like a CEO will help you to work on the business more and in the business less.

If you’d like to talk about anything covered here, contact our team. We’d love to help.