As with the human body, monitoring and benchmarking your dental practice's vital signs can alert you to weakened operating systems, work culture dysfunctions, threatening trends, and money leaks. 

The first blog of the Dental Leadership series discusses the absolute hardest part of leadership: terminating an employee. Many leaders convince themselves that keeping a bad employee is the best thing to do. It rarely is. Read the blog to explore reasons why releasing weak and poor employees is vital to the success of your dental practice.

Scheduling is one of the most important elements of your practice. It is intimately tied to your profits, stress level, and patient satisfaction, yet I see practice after practice allowing their schedule to reduce their income, create work chaos, and drive patients away.

First coined by the philosopher Aristotle, the phrase “a whole is greater than a sum of its parts” still has a lot of relevance in this day in age. This is the basis behind the idea of teamwork. If the full dental team isn’t working in synergy your practice isn’t going to be as effective, efficient or run as smoothly as it could, or should, be.

In business school, the mantra they pounded into my head was, “exceed your customers’ (patients’) expectations every single time.” It seems obvious and a no-brainer, but it is much easier said than done. Why? Today’s dental patients are very different from patients even five or ten years ago. There are three core trends that are changing expectations of the dental patient.

In my 35 years in dentistry I have heard this phrase over and over again. Most dentists didn’t get into the profession because they wanted to run a business; they did it so they could be DENTISTS! Unfortunately, the business side of running a dental practice often ends up being so overwhelming they aren’t able to enjoy their true passion of dentistry.

Are you looking for ways to increase your dental practice’s annual production? According to a study conducted by Harvard Review, businesses with healthy work cultures produce, on the average, 31% more than those businesses without one. There are three fundamental pieces to ensure a healthy work environment - and bottom line - for your dental practice.