A Practical Reason To Set Your Sights Higher

As a dental practice management consultant I tell clients if you want to produce and collect $100,000.00 a month you need to set your sights higher. 

No matter how good you may be at presenting dental treatment every dentist has a certain “failure” rate.  In other words, just because you present $100,000.00 in treatment, that doesn’t mean that’s how much is going to get scheduled and done.

I find that even my most successful dental clients still have a “failure” rate of 20%.  So if they set their sights on doing $100,000.00 a month, my best clients still need to present, at the very least, around $120,000.00 in treatment. I mean, even Michael Jordan’s shots didn’t drop in 50% of the time!

Almost every dentist I’ve worked with thinks his or her dental case presentation is better than the 20% failure rate.  Then I start pulling the charts.  I’ll pull about twenty charts at random and we’ll add it up.  I usually find that only 60-70% is actually getting scheduled.

One way you can keep track of this is to see if the dental patient scheduled the appointments and made the financial arrangements after you presented the treatment. 

Failure to present enough treatment to meet the goals of the practice is why some docs are so hungry for new patients.  The sole cause of a high failure rate can be summed up to your inability to get people to see the value of dentistry.

I’ll discuss in future blogs what can skew this failure rate and what to do to decrease your failure rate.

Back to Dental Practice Management Consulting Blog Archives