We dental entrepreneurs are high achievers. When we see a doctor owning a business and paving the way for a life of personal and financial freedom, we want that. Likewise, when we see a dentist being a total boss, taking charge of an entire team, and running the show, we want to be like them.
After a new dentist works their tail off to finally step into the shoes of practice ownership, they often find it’s a much different reality than they expected. Being at the apex of the pyramid, being the person making decisions, being the person whose shoulders the success of the business rests—the weight of that is really hard to explain until you live it.
It’s not necessarily bad or overwhelming; it’s just like a new pair of shoes you need to get accustomed to. Those shoes feel a little more rigid than you expected and are giving you blisters because they’re not broken in yet. In other words, they feel more like a suit of armor than like a comfy pair of sweatpants.
Only when you try the new owner suit do you realize there are certain restrictions or limitations to your range of motion. Your expectations are different from reality, and it takes some getting used to. That’s why, for this week’s article, I want to tell you about three dental practice ownership challenges many new dentists learn the hard way during their first year of practice ownership.
1. You will never be able to communicate with your team enough.
Communication can make or break our business; it’s the foundation for any dental practice between scheduling, treating patients, running marketing campaigns, and more. Without a good stream of communication, you’re going to struggle to get into a flow.
The fact of the matter is that any new business owner is going to be frustrated when trying to build their communication skills. A process of trial and error is inevitably required, and each bump on the road that distracts you from your path is going to be an inconvenience (to say the least). However, for dental practice owners, communication is an even more frustrating beast to tackle—because, no matter how good you get at it, you’ll never be good enough.
The truth is, no one on your team will ever think you communicate enough. You could have an internal newsletter, you can have group chats, you can have the morning huddles every day, you could run department meetings, you could have quarterly whole team meetings, and so on. Even with all the meetings in the world, people will always still feel out of the loop. You need to learn to be okay with not meeting everyone’s expectations, and that’s something that a lot of us people-pleasers would be wise to focus on. Thus, implementing effective team communication strategies is crucial for overcoming this dental practice ownership challenge.
2. No matter how good your team is, they’ll never care about your business like you do.
Let’s face it: as a practice owner, your business is your baby—and no one is going to care about it like you do. You could have A+ employees, but they have a job—not a business. They’re just not going to care about your practice like you do.
Many dentists are people-pleasers and perfectionists and it leads to a bad combo where we end up micromanaging our staff. It’s an “unholy trinity,” and we could all do with forgoing those three habits (people-pleasing, perfectionism, and micromanaging). What’s hard for many of us to realize is that we can’t do it all—that we can’t be all things to all people.
That’s why we need to trust in our team and do away with any hesitation to delegate. If you can’t trust your team to confidently assign tasks to them and take the “hands-off” approach, then you’re going to be in trouble. You’ll end up running around like a chicken with its head cut off.
While it’s easy to blame your team and say they’re the issue, a good practice owner takes accountability. If their team isn’t “good enough” to handle responsibilities, perhaps it’s because you’re giving them a lack of direction. Understanding the importance of delegation in dental practice is a key lesson from first-year practice ownership.
3. Hygiene is the “engine” of any dental practice.
Any dentist will see a diverse array of patients come through their doors. Even for those who choose to specialize, they’re still treating a broad spectrum of cases and interacting with a wide range of patient profiles. Some of these cases might reap more dividends than others, and, likewise, some will be more time-intensive than others.
There are so many small, moving parts that’ll go into you working toward your vision. But hygiene is going to really drive your revenue, case acceptance, and so on. If your dental practice is a car, then hygiene is going to be your engine. Your steering wheel might be your vision, and your front desk might be your decal, but you will need hygiene to get the wheels rolling.
That doesn’t mean that you should have a practice that focuses too heavily on hygiene, though. In a nutshell, too many hygienists per doctor is going to make it hard to maintain patient relationships. So, if you’re a one or two-doctor practice, don’t go looking for six hygienists to make your engine “purr”—in all likelihood, you’ll end up overheating. Effective hygiene department management is another critical lesson from first-year practice ownership that many dentists learn.
Growth isn’t always comfortable.
There are so many errors I’ve made throughout my career, and a good deal of them were during my first year of practice ownership. It makes sense: dental school doesn’t teach us about running a business, and we’re thrown into the lion’s den. These were three lessons from first-year practice ownership I learned the hard way, and I know I’m far from alone. That said, overcoming problems like these is what set me up for success in the future.
I run a community full of dental professionals who can tell you about the dental practice ownership challenges they’ve faced (and how they’ve overcome them). So, join the Nifty Thrifty Dentists Facebook group and reach out! People from all across the globe will be happy to let you in on their two cents and share their experiences with effective team communication strategies, the importance of delegation in dental practice, and hygiene department management.
