staffing
A practice collecting $1.19 million this year is handing roughly $10,800 of margin to its payroll that it did not hand over in January 2021, and not one person on staff got rich in the process. That is five years of dental economics compressed into a single number,
staffing
Six points of payroll on a $1 million practice is $60,000 a year. That is the difference between a practice that buys its own chair and one that finances it, and most owners cannot tell you within three points where their payroll ratio sat last month. Our view: a
Practice Management
The clearest dividing line between a practice that collects $500,000 and one that collects over $1,000,000 isn't the marketing budget, the number of chairs, or whether there's an associate. It's that the smaller practice reappoints about 60% of its hygiene patients
Practice Management
A single-doctor general practice running a 12% hygiene no-show rate and a 4% restorative no-show rate is handing back roughly $67,776 of production a year, and most of that owner has no idea which half of the loss actually matters. They will spend the next quarter buying text reminders
Financial Strategy
Dental Practice Overhead by State 2026: ADA HPI benchmark data and what it means for your practice.
Practice Management
Summer Slowdown in Dental Practices: What Causes It and How to Fix It: ADA HPI seasonal benchmark data and what top practices do differently.
Practice Management
Your associate collects $720,000 a year, and the day they resign to open an office four miles away, the non-compete sitting in your personnel file is worth exactly what one judge in one county decides it's worth. In three states that number is zero by statute, and
Practice Management
Only one clinic out of 42 surveyed could name a single quality improvement that came out of its Net Promoter Score results. That finding, from a systematic review of 12 peer-reviewed studies in Health Expectations, three of them involving dental clinics, is the most useful thing published about NPS in
Practice Management
An operatory costs real money to plumb and then costs money every month whether or not a patient is sitting in it. The best peer-reviewed estimate available says that adding 10% more operatories buys a general practice about 1.2% more patient visits, while adding 10% more chairside hours in
Financial Strategy
The average general practice in this country bills $965,660 a year, and the average practice never sees about $86,900 of it. That figure comes from putting two numbers side by side: the ADA Health Policy Institute puts 2025 average gross billings per dentist in private practice at $965,
Practice Management
The most expensive patient in your practice is the one you got for $150. That patient came in for a discounted cleaning, no-showed the restorative, took a copy of the treatment plan to price-shop, and consumed 90 minutes of hygiene time you could have sold to someone else. Meanwhile the
Financial Strategy
An associate buy-in is four decisions, not one: what you're buying (stock or LLC units), what price the stake is set at, how you pay for it, and what happens when the partnership ends badly. Most deals that blow up were priced fine. They fell apart on the