Dental Marketing and Practice Management

Editorial
by Jim Du Molin

Step One: Preparing to Hire a Dental Hygienist

“The moment I take my hands out of my patient’s mouth, my income stops.” Almost every dentist comes to this realization at some point in his career. At this point, many dentists start to think about investing in gold mines in hope of achieving that long-sought-after dream of passive income.

Passive income comes, as we know, from applying capital in such a way that we can earn income from the labors of others. The communists in Russia called this “exploiting the masses” and the net result was that the Czar lost his head. In America we call it “capitalism,” and once again, many dentists have lost their heads over the concept of passive income.

In a dental practice, income is derived from the treatment of patients. Traditionally, this process begins with the new dentist performing all treatments personally.

Eventually, as the practice grows, the dentist realizes that it pays to focus on providing more complex treatments which have a higher economic return for the time they take to perform. There is more bottom-line profit in crowns than in prophies, even though both are clinically necessary.

The next step is to hire someone to perform the prophies. At this point the dentist takes the first step toward becoming a full-fledged capitalist who is about to exploit the labor of another human being: a dental hygienist.

This capitalistic venture is really a two-step process. The first step is the application of capital to equip an operatory space with the tools and equipment necessary for the hygienist to perform the required treatments. This comes either from the dentist’s savings or from a capitalistic institution - the bank. In either case, this represents an investment of capital and a degree of risk.

At this point, the dentist has acquired one of the most important elements necessary in achieving passive income - an asset. The primary asset in every practice is operatory space. We measure this asset in terms of operatory days.

The concept that must be understood is the linking of capital assets (operatories) to time (the number of days you can use the asset) to generate income.

While this may seem very basic, it is amazing how few dentists ever fully utilize their asset of available operatory days to generate income.

Step two in the capitalistic process is to actually hire a hygienist… I’ll get to that next week, so stay tuned!

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