In the years following the Great Recession of 2008, dentists lay awake at night wondering how they were going to pay the bills and keep the doors of their practices open. With the economic recovery now in its eighth year, the worries have changed – although they’re no less powerful.
Today, most dentists are drowning in patients. They’re nearly running between operatories because their schedules are slammed with patients. That sounds like a success scenario… but it’s really not.
Those dentists are slammed because more people are working, but a very large number at jobs that don’t pay all that well. Even those patients with dental insurance can’t afford or don’t want to pay for much more than insurance will cover. Those overwhelmed dentists are seeing mostly low case value patients and getting beaten up by tightfisted dental insurers.
The bottom line is that dentists are having to work too hard for too long to increase their bottom lines by not enough.
What keeps dentists awake at night now are these questions:
“How long can I keep this up?”
“Do I really want to keep doing this for another 10, 20, or 30 years?”
“Will I be able to sell my practice for enough to retire comfortably?”
That last question is a big one. Dentists rely on the sale price of their practices to ensure a very comfortable retirement with plenty of freedom. But the days of dental practices selling for multiples of revenue are gone. Today, a dentist is lucky to get 70 percent of earnings at sale.
Don’t Underestimate The Boredom Factor
A steady diet of drill and fills, routine exams, and the occasional crown is demoralizing to most dentists. Sure, it’s part of the job, but it shouldn’t be the job. Did you really spend four long years in dental school and incur hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to be nothing more than “just another dentist?”
Not likely. You almost certainly felt on some level that you’d be making an impact by helping to better people’s lives. Do you feel like you’re making a difference in your practice now?
Dentistry is too good a profession to be this bad, and it’s doesn’t have to be that way.
There’s A Cure For What Ails You
You can change your business model from high-volume, low-profit to one that allows you to work less, earn more, and enjoy life. The key to that change is to focus your marketing efforts on the better dental prospects in your market. Better prospects aren’t price- or insurance-driven because they have the ability and willingness to pay more for the right dentist.
Unless you practice in an economically disadvantaged area, better prospects can account for up to 30 percent of your potential patients. They’re out there; you just have to convince them that they should trust you and no one else to solve their dental problems.
SmartBox works with hundreds of dentists on three continents to help them succeed on their own terms. We provide a steady stream of better dental patients so our doctors can focus on actually doing the dentistry.
Discover what our industry-leading Patient Attraction System® can do for your practice. Click on the green “Get Started” button and reserve your free, no-obligation Practice Discovery Call
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Invest 25 minutes in a phone call that SmartBox will use to create your personalized Patient Attraction Roadmap. We’ll show you how you can thrive no matter what the competition in your market does.
And we’ll show you how you can sleep soundly again at night.
The post What’s Keeping Dentists Awake At Night? appeared first on SmartBox.