How I Increased My Dental Practice's Revenue By $100,000 Without Increasing My Fees Or Working More

Your dental practice is gaining more patients and your chairs are filled, but you still struggle to maintain profitability.

Or maybe your chairs aren’t filled.

You have lots of patients, but they just don’t need you as often as you’d like.

How can you turn things around? How can you increase the revenue of your business without raising your prices?

I faced this situation when I first set up shop with my dental practice. I had plenty of active patients -- they just weren’t active enough.

There were weeks when my staff and I only needed to open the office three days a week. I even had to use my personal savings to make payroll a few times.

So I took a close look at the situation and began to develop a solution.

The answer I discovered?

Adding new procedures.

When you expand your service offerings, you can earn the same revenue with fewer active patients.

For instance, if you offer basic treatments such as fillings, single unit crowns, and simple extractions, then you may need 1,300 active patients. But if you provide additional services such as molar root canals, wisdom teeth extractions, and dental implants, you can make the same amount of money with just 800 active patients.

Adding procedures earns you more and saves you money.

Think about it -- the patient attrition rate for most dental practices is said to be somewhere between 5% and 20%. Assuming a 10% rate, if you have to maintain 1,300 active patients to maintain a profitable practice, you’ll need to replace 130 patients each year. If you can earn the same amount with just 800 patients, your new patient acquisition target drops to 80.

You’ll earn a higher margin on each procedure and also spend less time on recruiting and retaining patients.

But adding procedures is not simply a matter of attending workshops or conferences to learn the skills you need.

Your dental practice consists of a team and every team member needs to be on board as you make changes. I learned this the hard way. I had diligently worked to add new procedures to my skill set at a rate of one new procedure every two years. But I wasn’t seeing the traction that I expected. I was experiencing the bane of dentists everywhere -- low case acceptance.

I had learned the procedures but I hadn’t explained them to my staff. Trust me, if you want to put a bone graft into a patient’s jaw, your patients expect your staff to know what one is.

I know trying something new can be intimidating. The good news is that you don’t have to figure it all out on your own. You can benefit from my experience.

After a decade of trial and error, I have put together the following list to help you choose the best way to expand your practice.

5-step Process for Adding New Procedures to Your Dental Practice

1. Know your facts and figures.

You won’t be able to learn everything at once. When adding procedures, you need to choose those which will bring you the biggest increase in revenue. Review your referrals and determine just how much money is walking out your doors. If you aren’t keeping track, start now. Figure out the value of each type of procedure being referred out for a three month period.

When I took this step, I found that I was referring out $25,000 in dental implant procedures each quarter. Because of the added procedures that go with dental implants, extractions, grafts, and implant crowns, bringing that work in-house meant a $100,000 annual increase in revenue!

2. Understand your community’s demographics.

The dental services that are most likely to be needed by your potential patients are going to be determined by the demographics of your community. Do you serve an area filled with young families who will need orthodontics and pedodontics? Or should you be focusing on dental implant placement, cosmetic dentistry, and oral surgery to serve a mature community?

3. Aim to keep 80%.

Using these first two steps, I was able to select the advanced courses that would best serve my community and increase the revenue of my dental practice. I am now able to keep at least 80% of the cases that I previously referred. Consider how many procedures you refer out each year. What would your annual revenue be if you kept 80% of those?

4. Educate your entire team.

A highly educated team results in a higher acceptance rate and much less stress.

Each member of your dental practice is a representative of your dental practice. You may think that you are too busy to spend time onboarding your staff for each new procedure, but the costs of not doing so can be great.

If the only thing your team knows about the new procedures are complicated and costly, what do you suppose they will tell your patients?

When you add a new procedure, make sure your staff not only knows the benefits but can discuss those benefits with your patients. I send my team to educational conferences to get the training they need. They return well-informed and able to discuss the real benefits of each treatment we offer.

5. Refer out those services that cause more stress than they are worth.

Everyone has personal likes and dislikes. As part of your long-range plan, take steps to eliminate offering procedures that you find stressful and replace them with ones that your prefer.

It is okay to refer out procedures that aren’t a good fit for you.

For instance, I don’t enjoy removable prostheses such as partial or full dentures. I find the multiple visits and low patient satisfaction rates to be challenging. So I choose to refer those procedures out.

Conclusion

Opportunities are abound for you to expand your practice, increase your revenues, and improve the services that you provide to your community. You just need to crunch the numbers and decide which methods work best for you.

When you expand your practice offerings, it is a win for everyone involved. Your patients will enjoy the convenience of not having to see yet another doctor for treatments. Your staff will find their work more challenging and their employment status more secure.  And you’ll benefit from learning new skills and spending some time each year with like-minded peers.

We can sometimes be so focused on what we are doing that we forget we are a part of a growing and changing industry. Don’t forget to keep learning and growing. It’s good for you!