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4 Ways to Grow Your Dental Practice

by Triumphant Transition Partners

As a dentist, if you’re a solo or multi-practitioner, you likely have big plans for your career. You’ve successfully launched your business, but you probably want to ensure you reach your next goal. Planning for the future can help you grow your dental practice towards that next step, whether it’s a new associate dentist, a new location, or increased collections.

The problem, of course, is in the details. If you’re already busy trying to keep up with the number of patients and administrative work you need to accomplish, finding the time to think about how to grow your business might seem impossible. It is challenging, but with the proper planning, you can implement quick and impactful strategies to grow your business. 

Read on to Learn How to Grow Your Dental Practice!

Find the Right Patients

When looking to grow your dental practice, it’s important to not just think about finding new patients. The types of patients you find are a huge part of growing your dental practice. You likely see many patients for routine cleaning. This is an important part of dental health, but it’s not the only way to grow your dental practice. 

Improving your marketing to educate your patients about your services and find additional patients is critical. Your existing patients might see you for routine exams and cleanings, but they might not know about your additional services. Educating your existing patient base through your marketing efforts is key to growing your dental practice.

Additionally, you need to find ways to bring on new patients, ideally patients with the specialized needs your practice wants to see. Your marketing strategy, whether through email marketing, Pay-Per-Click advertising, or social media, will be instrumental in helping you achieve your goals. 

Put More into Staffing & Hiring

Staffing and hiring are probably not what you think of when you think of growing a dental practice. After all, you might even be asking yourself what these focal areas have to do with growing a dental practice.

In factuality, staffing and hiring are often forgotten but critical elements of a successful practice. You can only be in so many places at once. As a dentist, you naturally want to be doing what only you can do, which is tending to the health needs of your patients. However, without the right staff around you, you might find yourself answering phones, scheduling follow-up appointments, and ordering replacement materials. These are all necessary parts of a growing dental practice, but they aren’t tasks you should do as a dentist. Hiring the right staff to assist means you can delegate these duties and focus on what you need to do.

The challenge, of course, is finding the time to tend to HR issues and hire properly. Hiring, vetting, and training take time, and you only have so much of that. Even once employees are successfully onboarded, you will likely need to serve as Chief Human Resources Officer and be responsible for their career advancement, retention, and routine HR asks. That can be a lot, especially if you are a solo practitioner. 

Increase Profitability with Operational Changes

Your operational efficiency is another often neglected strategy for growing a practice. You might be focusing on the number and quality of patients you’re seeing as a dentist, and those are great starting points for a dentist looking to grow their practice. However, it is just as important to focus on your operational efficiency. You likely aren’t an expert in operational processes, but you might need to develop a passing competency in the subject. The reason is pretty simple: your practice’s operational effectiveness directly impacts your bottom line.

Many dentists struggle with the realities of running a small business, and operations can often be one of the first areas to falter. Wasted time spent dealing with IT, logistics, and accounts payable issues can derail your practice. The errors don’t need to be insurmountable to have an impact. Outdated equipment that wastes your staff’s time. Delays in receiving key shipments of supplies. Lost calls from patients when you lack a competent call answering machine. 

Again, you likely recognize that you need to think like a business owner – not a dentist – when it comes to optimizing the practice. However, that is easier said than done.

Find the Right Partner

These are great ways to grow your dental practice, but you might struggle to implement them. After all, improving your marketing, hiring the best, and fine-tuning your operational processes requires time, effort, and money. If you’re barely treading water as a practice, you might not be able to implement any of these strategies to grow your practice, and your business will likely suffer for it.

That’s why bringing on a business partner can make a lot of sense. 

The right dental support organization or dental partner organization can be a great additional resource to bring alongside your practice.  A good dental support organization can …

  • Help Recruit and Hire Top Talent
  • Offer Additional Resources for Practice Updates
  • Manage Marketing and Customer Service
  • Streamline Procurement and IT 
  • Provide Additional Networking and Continuing Education

A dental support organization can make a lot of sense for a dentist looking to increase their collections and regain their nights and weekends. After all, if you could work less AND make more money, why wouldn’t you?  The right dental support organization can help you achieve that goal.

Now, it’s important to highlight one word: right. The simple fact of the matter is that the right dental support organization can be a huge boon for your practice. The wrong dental support organization can decrease your work satisfaction. Few things impact your sense of career fulfillment as drastically as a bad business partnership, and not all dental support organizations will fit your unique needs. 

That’s where a seasoned dental broker like Triumphant Transition Partners can help!

Our process is simple. We know the dental transition game better than anyone and have the resources you need to transition your practice to a dental support organization on your terms at your price! 

We will…

  • Help You Understand the Value of Your Practice
  • Present Your Practice to Our Private Buyers Network
  • Qualify Your Buyers 
  • Advise on Specifics of the Process
  • Equip Your Attorneys with Market Data to Achieve the Best Possible Terms at Close

Contact Your Trusted Triumphant Transitions Partner for a Courtesy Consultation!

3 Common Misconceptions About Dental Support Organizations

by Triumphant Transition Partners

You have likely heard a lot about dental support organizations if you’re a dentist. 

How could you not have? 

Many of these organizations are active across the US and Canada, and they’re often highly visible at any dental conference or in industry news. These organizations can benefit any dentist looking to jump to the next step in their career, and you probably know many dental colleagues who have contracted with DSOs. You may have considered the same for your practice. 

However, as dental brokers, addressing some common misconceptions about dental support organizations is essential. These organizations can supercharge your dental career, but these misconceptions must be put to rest before you partner with a dental support organization. As dental brokers, we have deep and rich relationships across the dental industry and wanted to share our expertise on dental support organizations.

Read on to Learn More!

Why You Might Partner With a DSO

First, let’s clarify: A dental support organization can significantly help many dentists. The simple fact is that many dentists are incredibly busy and need help to run their practices more effectively. Many dentists’ are on an island, and DSOs offer a tremendous dental community support system that is doctor-centric and typically doctor-led. 

A dental support organization (DSO) or dental partnership organization (DPO) is an organization that provides non-clinical business and operational services to a dentist, freeing up the dentist to more effectively care for their patient base. 

There are so many ways that dentists and dental support organizations can set up these agreements, but generally, an excellent dental support organization could assist with:

• General Administrative Services

• Human Resources and Staffing

• Payroll and Billing

• Insurance Coding and Insurance Services Liaison

• Advertising and Marketing Services

• IT Services 

• Building and Facilities Management Services

• Procurement Services 

• Accounting Services

• Regulatory Compliance

A dental support organization can revolutionize your career. However, while the above benefits are helpful, we still think it’s important to highlight three common misconceptions about dental support organizations that must be dispelled. 

Misconception: DSOs Are for Retiring Dentists

Many dentists sell their practice near the end of their career. It’s easy to see why. Selling a practice is a great way to transition into retirement, and many dentists are familiar with dental support organizations entering the picture at the end of a dentist’s career. 

While this is a common use of dental support organizations, we’d be remiss if we didn’t point out several other benefits of dental support organizations. Many dentists might sell their practice as an exit strategy from dentistry and use the funds gained from the sale of their practice to pivot to another vocation. Selling to a dental support organization is a viable option for early to mid-career dentists ready to say goodbye to the administrative part of dentistry and focus on the clinical or growth side of their dental practice. 

It’s also worth reminding the dentists out there that many dentists elect to stay on after the sale of their dental practice. It breathes new life and extends one’s career once they partner with the support they gain, and the incremental wealth built by partnering. It also gives an exit strategy, young or old, whether five or 25 years, out to a doctor, especially when they have built a great practice that the average dentist cannot afford. When you achieve a certain level of revenue and growth, it is challenging to find a confident buyer or doctor to sell to and that can take on this type of undertaking. This is a very common dental support organization arrangement. If you love dentistry, partnering with a dental support organization can free up your time to focus on patient care. The dental support organization has the resources and operational expertise to focus on business management and can simplify your practice and improve your quality of life. This often increases your income while decreasing the amount of administrative work you need to do. That can be a win for all parties involved! 

Misconception: DSOs Are Always the Right Call

We have seen and worked with countless dental support organizations and + dentist partnerships, leading to tremendous benefits for both. However, any dentist looking to contract with a DSO must find the right partnership for their unique needs and circumstances. There are thousands of dental support organizations, each with its unique core offering, specialty, and value proposition. You could be setting yourself up for failure if you do not consider each dental support organization against your own unique needs. You also need to know what the deal terms mean and how it benefits you in the short and long term. You do not know what you do not know, and we equate it to taking a knife to a gunfight. The devil is always in the details.

Let’s say you intend to stay on as a dentist and want the operational aid support of a dental support organization. You must understand what degree of input you will have in the practice regarding various operational decisions such as hiring, procurement, and marketing. Some DSOs prefer to handle all operational decisions with a templated method, which could mean that you’re left without much control of the practice, aside from clinical decisions. However, other dental support organizations are much more flexible and willing to customize transition plans accordingly to ensure you retain input into important decisions. They want a true partner where you have as much control as you desire, and they are there to support you as much or as little as you wish in the areas in which you need support. They want to align with the right doctor and encourage you to remain the leader in the practice.  The moral of the story here is that not all dental support organizations suit every situation, and how do you know which is the right one for your short and long-term aspirations? 

DSO Initial Offers Are Non-Negotiable 

You’re probably thrilled if you’ve received an offer from a dental support organization! After all, if a dental support organization has reached out to you with an offer, it’s an honest and accurate gauge of your practice’s value. 

Well, not always. Many dental support organizations have teams that reach out to dentists to entice them to sell. They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on direct marketing, business development team representatives, and paying their own partner doctors significant referral fees to entice you to sell to them directly without representation. You need to know precisely what the deal terms and valuation mean. The adage of them wanting to buy low, sell high. The offers extended from these teams are often lower than what the dentist might receive if fielding multiple offers from qualified buyers. If you have received such an offer from a dental support organization, that’s great! It’s a sign that your practice is valuable and that you should consider every possible offer before selling. 

That’s why it’s so essential that you have industry-knowledgeable representation in the form of a dental broker with you as you sell your dental practice! The right dental broker will help you increase the value of your practice, expedite the sale of your practice, increase the number of interested buyers, generate more interest than you can alone, have an entire auction/bidding process, and equip you with the best terms and highest valuation. A dental broker represents your interest, while a DSO represents their interests. 

At TTP, we offer….

  • Unique Sell-Side Advisory With Buy-Side Experience
  • Detailed Discovery, Practice Valuation & Review
  • Access to Our Private Buyer and DSO Network
  • Management of Letters of Intent and Buyer Screening 
  • Offer Qualification & Representation Through Close
  • We represent your interest
  • We custom-tailor every transition to meet our vast array of clients’ specific needs
  • Negotiate the best deal terms for YOU
  • Create a competitive bidding process

You have put too much time into your dental practice to sell to the wrong dental support organization or with the wrong price or terms. Partner with a top dental broker and call Triumphant Transition Partners today!

Get Your Courtesy Consultation Today & Call Now!