The Explorer Winter 2018 Explorer_Fall_2018 | Page 10

MAXIMIZE THE ROI OF
YOUR CE
By Howard Farran, DDS, MBA
Reprinted with permission from Dentaltown Magazine, Dentaltown.com
Does it matter which CE courses you
take? Of course—but not in the way
you’re probably thinking.
Business is, in three words, supply and
demand and yet I see a lot of dentists
who spend their CE budgets—all their
time, all their money—on things that
their patients never asked for.
Some dentists choose to focus their CE
efforts on sleep apnea, TMD or
cosmetic dentistry. These are important
topics, but often represent a small
percentage of your practice productivity.
That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
If you have a passion for these types of
cases it is a worthwhile pursuit, but if
you are focused on rapid growth, focus
your energy on where the money is.
I mean, I get it if it’s fun—I took those
types of courses at one time, too!—but
this is especially true for newer dentists
who’ve got $400,000 in student loans.
Look at the average income for
dentists—those in general practice make
$174,000 but endodontists make
$325,000.
You might not like doing molar endo,
but do you like sending a $1,000 molar
to the endodontist every week, while
you’re trying to make payments on your
$400,000 in student loans? Oral
surgeons make an average of $413,000 a
year—that’s more than the average
dental student graduate’s total
indebtedness from dental school and
undergrad—and yet you say you don’t
like pulling wisdom teeth?
Orthodontics: $301,000. Pediatric
dentistry: $347,000. Periodontics:
$257,000.
When you say you’re going to take CE,
I will tell you a million, trillion,
gazillion times: Take courses on root
canals, extractions and surgery. That’s
how you pay back your student loans
the fastest.
PAYBACK IS A … CHALLENGE
The hardest thing about life is getting
through it, and when we die we’re all
going to live in the same-sized house six
feet underground, so it doesn’t matter,
but I’ll tell you what: Money is the
answer … what’s the question?
You decided to borrow other people’s
money, at the tune of $70,000–$100,000
a year, so that you could become a
dentist and start paying back the loan.
You could have said, “I’m going to get
out of school and I’m going to work for
10 years and save up enough cash to go
to dental school,” but you didn’t. You
wanted to do the OPM route—Other
People’s Money—and now you’re
sitting on $400,000 in debt. What’s the
quickest way to pay them off? The
numbers show that the biggest money is
made in oral surgery, at $413,000 a year,
then in endodontics.
After them: pediatric dentistry. We have
a pediatric dental rock star right here in
our backyard in Phoenix: Dr. Jeanette
MacLean, Dentaltown’s newest editorial
board member, did a couple of CE
courses for us on silver diamine
fluoride, and they’re some of our most-
viewed online courses.
(Tangent: Don’t you dare try to tell me
you don’t like working on children—
you used to be a kid! I’ve flown a
thousand times in airplanes to get to
lectures, and nothing makes me more
upset than when some man’s freaking
out because there’s a kid crying, and this
grown adult keeps looking back, trying
to glare at the child and the parents.
How old were you when you were
born? If a crying child really bothers
you, buy some noise-canceling
headphones, put in some damn music
and turn on the speakers.)
If you decide you “don’t like treating
children,” then you pass up the
opportunity to earn some of that
$347,000 a year that pediatric dentists
do. It’s also really easy to be a unique
selling proposition when a lot of
pediatric dentists are still doing stainless
steel crowns, but now there are white
composite crowns that parents likely
will prefer to use.
The bottom line: Life is an attitude, and
your attitude determines your altitude.
Your return on investment in CE comes
down to what I discussed above, and not
those cool-sounding but peripheral
topics that don’t translate into much
income in your practice. 䡲
Los Angeles Dental Society Explorer