North Texas Dentistry Volume 6 Issue 5 North Texas Dentistry Volume 6 Issue 5 | Page 18

practice finances

Financial
GROWTH
Building Muscle in Your Business
by Bobby Haney, DDS
Nelson Mandela once said, “Money won’t create success, the
freedom to make it will.” As a dental practitioner, you very likely
have that freedom. And it’s probably obvious, but the financial
growth of your practice is the “bottom line” indicator of the
health of your business. This is the measuring stick we all use.
And, when it’s all said and done, this is the type of growth we
hope to achieve by getting up every day and going to the office.
Certainly, we need to have the “how may I help you” attitude
and deliver excellent dental service in a caring environment.
And that mindset will bring you great rewards.
But it is, after all, the dollars that pay our bills and feed our families. And as long as we live in that economy, those dollars need
to be in adequate supply.

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So, let’s look at financial growth in your practice from both ends
of the spectrum.

Balance production and overhead. First of all, you want
to increase the amount of dollars coming in the practice, and
secondly, there is a need to decrease the amount leaving the
practice. Simply put, it comes down to production versus overhead – raise your production and lower your overhead. Now,
increasing production will also tend to raise overhead most of
the time, so we need to evaluate overhead on a percentage basis
in order to have an accurate assessment of our practice health
and growth.

There are several ways to increase production. One is to
increase the number of patients coming to your office. You want