When overhead climbs above 65% of collections, most practices aren’t facing a revenue problem. They’re facing a cost structure that hasn’t been reviewed systematically. The fix starts with knowing which expense categories are out of range, who owns each one, and what a realistic target looks like for a practice
The first three years of dental practice ownership are not primarily a clinical challenge. They are a systems and identity challenge, and most dentists walk in expecting the opposite. If you graduated with strong grades, passed your boards, and produced well as an associate, the assumption is that ownership is
If your practice only runs well when you show up, you do not own a business. You own a job with overhead. The good news is that the fix is not about working harder or seeing more patients. It is about making a specific set of decisions that most owners
A denial lands. Someone works it, calls the payer, resubmits, maybe wins it back six weeks later. It arrived in billing, so it gets handled as a billing problem. It was not a billing problem. That claim was decided weeks earlier, on a two minute phone call, before the patient
Most dental practice cash flow problems aren’t cash problems, they’re visibility problems. The money moves through payroll, supply orders, lab fees, debt service, and insurance holdbacks, but nobody has a clear picture of where it actually lands. By the time the owner notices something is off, the month is already
Dental practice owner decision fatigue isn’t a personality flaw or a time-management failure. It’s a structural problem, and it shows up in measurable ways: a schedule that stalls when the doctor is in a room, a team that waits for approval before acting, and an owner who ends the day
