Ep #171: The 5 Growth Levers

In this episode, Julie Parker and Ameena Basile explore five key “levers” that can dramatically improve practice performance when implemented consistently and strategically together.

Many practices immediately focus on attracting more new patients when production slows down. But sustainable growth usually comes from improving several areas at once, not relying on one single solution.

Resources Mentioned

5 Levers Calculator
5 Levers Calculator

Dental Business Mastery Academy
The Academy

The Academy includes:

•  100+ team training videos 
•  Practice management resources 
•  Communication and leadership training 
•  Financial and operational tools 
•  AI-supported learning assistance for dental teams

Interested in taking your personal, team, and dental practice to the next level? Contact Julie and Ameena today to explore the possibilities for growth and success!

Visit our website, Dental Business Mastery, at https://dentalbusinessmastery.com.au/, and book a complimentary, obligation-free Discovery Call to discuss your specific needs and goals. Schedule your call here: https://tidycal.com/3l298p1/30-minute-meeting

If you have any questions or would like more information, feel free to contact us via email at info@dentalbusinessmastery.com.au.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

You are listening to the Digital Digital Mastery Podcast, where you discover management insights and strategies for your successful digital practice. There are also interviews with two people in the industry who have advised and help you and your team achieve great success.

SPEAKER_02 0:20

Welcome to this episode of the Dental Business Mastery Podcast. And we are your host today, Amina Vasile. How are you? Hi everyone. Good morning. And Julie Parker. So we're loving to have everybody here with us. Today we are talking about one of the magnificent calculators that we've got sitting inside the Academy. Our Academy members know all about it, but if you have not come across the Academy yet, the Academy is our community online learning portal. Over 100 training videos that are designed to be lunch and learns for your dental team, covering all sorts of topics: practice management, team management, patient communication and engagement, customer service, financial management, all the things meaning it has.

SPEAKER_00 1:07

It does. It's absolutely amazing.

SPEAKER_02 1:11

It also has an AI-driven chat as part of it. So when people put in questions and get AI assistance within the academy, it's like getting assistance from Amina and I on the spot with you at all times. And so it's pretty fabulous. We'll provide the links on the Academy in the show notes so you can have a look at it yourself. The area that we wanted to focus on today is there are certain levers that you can pull for the benefit and better success of your dental practice. And what happens when we pull those levers? However, what's more important for this discussion today is what is the impact when we actually pull all five levers at once? So let's first of all go through our five levers. So Amina, I'm just going to share my screen so people on YouTube can follow us along a little journey here.

SPEAKER_00 2:10

Often when we're wanting to shift and change in a space, there's usually a few levers to move, isn't there? It's not usually one thing that we have to change for overall success. For example, if we are wanting to lose weight, we can't just exercise but not change our diet. And so in the dental practice, it's it's you know similar in some ways. So one of the things, as an example, we often hear is oh my goodness, my books are quiet. We need more new patients, more new patients. We're gonna market, we're gonna do$5,000 worth of Google Ads every month, all that sort of jazz, and people freak out. But actually, what we probably need to do is move several levers from our experience. That's what we see really creates that shift and change, and we get a little bit of improvement for each of these things in total, you know, is a really big deal.

SPEAKER_02 3:03

It is a really big deal, and I really love your analogy of weight loss because when you are going down a weight loss path, you can say, Well, I'm gonna reduce calories, the intake of calories. Or you can say, I'm gonna go out for a run every couple of days. Or you can say, I'm going to start lifting weights. Or you can say, if it's gonna be about reducing calories, I'm gonna go on a keto diet as well. But what happens when we pull each one of those singular levers, we get a particular outcome. But what would happen if we had the motivation and the staying power to actually pull all levers at the same time? So we're on a keto diet, and we're reducing down the amount we're eating, and we're doing that cardio, and we're doing weight training as well. What happens then?

SPEAKER_00 3:52

And when we think about it from in that weight loss scenario, if you're pulling all of those levers, what happens? Transformation, doesn't it? That's good. Yeah, and that's exactly what can happen in your dental practice.

SPEAKER_02 4:06

That's for sure. That's for sure. So there are many levers. We're talking about five of those levers today. So let's go through each one at a time. So lever number one, we won't worry about so much the calculator at the moment, just talk about these levers at the moment. Increasing of fees. Meaning, what's been our experience when we go in and start consulting programs with clients? Where are their fees generally sitting?

SPEAKER_00 4:33

And what it's surprising, isn't it? And it's a little bit all over the shop. And you find some areas of the practice are um, you know, heavier than others, and uh there's no real trends, um, I find. And people are so um caught up on the exam and hygiene fees, and I feel like the rest of them kind of get lost for quite some time often. And when you talk about increasing fees, it's usually a lot of fear around increasing fees, particularly this day and age, preferred providers and all those sorts of things.

SPEAKER_02 5:13

That's for sure. And you're right, with the preferred provider status, you're really restricted to how much you can actually increase your fees because you can only increase the fees of your practice for the patients who are paying a regular practice fee. If it's a preferred provider, it's a different story. We've got other helpful aides in the academy on how to better manage things when you're a preferred provider and even how to get out under the preferred provider banner. But the increase in your fees is something that needs to be done every one to two years just to try to keep up with your rising costs of laboratory fees, uh, courier fees for your consumables, the consumables themselves, electricity, water, everything. I mean, we've got property tax, we've got all sorts of things going on where our the cost of doing business is always going up. Staff wages generally go up and they don't tend to come backwards either. So we do want to have to we do want to make sure that we are increasing our fees to an appropriate and professional moral level, uh, but we're doing it regularly enough. One of the things that we do for our clients is we put their fee list into our framework, which has the Australian Dental Association survey fee. Uh, that was the 2025 version, was the most latest version. We've got fee lists that are pretty current for all the preferred providers, but also other dental practices that would be possibly in your area, but certainly within Australia. And we actually have a look. Where do your how do your fees compare? Where are you higher? Where are you lower? It's just one of a data tool, one of the data tools that you use to determine where to place your fees, because it does depend on more than what your competition is doing and what the ADA are indicating as the average. It depends on your unique practice, where you are, what your costs are. Because running a dental practice in the early days costs more because you've got leases and equipment leases and all the things. If you're at the other end of your career, you may have already owned the building, you own all the equipment, and so the costs are less. And so it is always just one of the data pieces, the R fee level assessment tool that we've got. But it's an important one. And so we put your fees through that, determine where are we sitting, is there the need to actually increase our fees? How about the second lever meaning? Uh, reduce appointment time down to appointment downtime.

SPEAKER_00 7:46

Yeah, this is a big one, isn't it? And sometimes this can get out of hand, just poor management. Sometimes the um front office person's gone on leave, either they're sick or on holidays or something, and then we've just got the dental nurses stepping in doing their best they can. But we often find there's a the appointment book will take a big hit. Um so sometimes the uh downtime increases because of things like that, the management of the appointment book and people not being around. Sometimes we just get this influx of cancellations, don't we? Um, illness, different seasons. And sometimes we're just far too flexible, and people just know that they can move around whenever they want. It makes really, really hard. There's no scarcity surrounding the appointment book. So lots of reasons why. And if we add up the total over a year of what the cost of that runtime is, it can be very, very significant.

SPEAKER_02 8:45

It can be significant. And when an average dentist, it's quite reasonable to say that an average dentist would have about a$450 per hour turnover production rate in that surgery. And if they over a year lose just two hours a week in their schedule because of maybe a 15-minute gap wasn't filled in between two appointment times. Maybe a point a patient didn't turn up, maybe another one late cancelled, maybe the time was just never filled in the first time, in the first place. Just two hours a week ends up equating to, over the year, over$40,000. And so it's always going to be a bit more than two hours for some practices, maybe less with others, but it's an indication of how much we actually lose. You think about it, maybe what could we do with an extra 40 grand in a dental practice per practitioner?

SPEAKER_00 9:36

Yeah, that's right. And I think it's one aspect that the team really don't have a good understanding of a lot of the time, you know, and really understand the impact of that cost. That's it.

SPEAKER_02 9:51

So reducing downtime is another lever you can pull. What can we put in place in terms of systems and awareness to reduce down the amount of downtime in our book so we can claw back a bit more production from that perspective? How about the third lever? Improved treatment plan convergence.

SPEAKER_00 10:09

And we see um such differences in the dental practice between practitioners when it comes to uh in um recommending treatment and then converting treatment. Um so again, this investing, you know, either in yourself or the other clinicians in the practice to get this part happening really, really well is important because we can diagnose till the cows come home, that if no one's accepting that treatment, um you know, we've also got an issue. And the thing is monitoring these aspects of the practice so that you can even identify that there is a problem in the first instance is a big thing, but then acting like you know, is the next crucial step to making sure that you'll take advantage of what revenue could potentially be around in the practice.

SPEAKER_02 11:00

That's it, because that diagnosis just forms one step of that conversion. You can't convert anything if you don't know what to convert, but it's the rest of it where a lot of us go, oh, you know, we just don't seem to get the conversion rates that we think we should. But there are absolutely things that can be done to improve the treatment plane conversion rate. And as you say, one of the big steps at the very start is determining where you are at at the moment. We come up with the subjections. I reckon most of our dental plan suggestions are being accepted by patients, but do you know for sure some of the tracking within the dental software can provide some assistance with that? And if it's around that, quite often a very simple method of manual tracking of this is the most accurate way to do it. And you can work together as a team on how to improve this because yes, the practitioner has a lot of large role to play in this, but the dental assistant can as well, the receptionist can as well, and other general symptoms of the practice. So that is another lever to pull to improve your productivity as a dental practice, and that is to increase the triple spain conversion rate.

SPEAKER_00 12:07

The fourthly, yeah, some of the reasons amongst that too are quite interesting because sometimes you see these practitioners that diagnose and do really comprehensive treatment planning, and then they're like a fire hose going at the patient, and their patients are just all confused, it's all too much, they they leave and they don't convert, and then you get the other end of the scale where um the clinician's a bit shy, not too confident to say too much, doesn't want to look pushy, you know. So it can go both ways. So after you've identified what you know that there may be an issue in that area, it's then that little bit deeper to find out what kind of issues are happening.

SPEAKER_02 12:49

That's it, because it is one thing to know and to identify, or there's a gap here, we need to do something about this. But what do we do? What do we do? And then how do we get the whole team on board with that new way of doing things to improve in these areas? Big challenge, which is why we do workshops. Lever four, increase new patient numbers. That's a quick place for a lot of people to go to. The minute that the appointment book is looking light on, or we need more production, we just need more new patients, more new patients. It's not always the answer, but we definitely need to always be attracting more new patients, yes.

SPEAKER_00 13:25

Absolutely. And um, you know, attracting new patients into the practice isn't the quickest, easiest thing to do, you know, in general. I mean, nurturing your current database and uh the patients that you have within that, making sure the recalls are all working properly, all those things would be the first thing to do. But um certainly having the amount of new patients being healthy and if not growing, if you're in a growing phase of uh practice is really important. And um particularly, you know, if we've got some patients that are leaving, they'll leave because they're moving or they they pass away or all sorts of things happen. We definitely need to be replacing them, but if not growing on that as well.

SPEAKER_02 14:19

And when you're thinking about a practice that's run really well and has the patient journey as a key focus of the way they do things, then you would imagine that that practice has certainly been our experience. Those kind of practices do tend to get a lot of word-and-mouth referrals. And so they've got good healthy numbers coming through. It's not always a number of new patients, though, is it? It depends on how we're attracting them, the type of new patient we're bringing in. If we've got special deals for half-price cleanings, we'll get a whole bunch of new patients. But are they gonna keep coming back when they start getting paid? You go into getting charged the full fee cleaning, and you know, maybe you were just actually outside of their general area as well, they only came to a special offer. So we have to always be mindful about the type of new patient that we are attracting. It costs a lot of time, energy, money to get them. Let's make sure they're ones that are going to be staying with you for a long, long time and really loving the context that you deliver to them. So increasing new patient numbers is yet another lever to pull to increase your practice effectiveness in terms of production. The fifth lever we're talking about is increasing the hourly rate per practitioner. So this is where you look at the number of productive hours, not hours that you know, take away lunch breaks, take away the time that we were running early, take away FTAs, all those sort of things. But the time that the practitioner within the surgery is the inpatients, count those numbers up. Should be very easy to do just with a standard report of your report report. How much money was generated in that time from that practice, divide one by the other, and you've got the hourly rate. It's an area where a lot of practitioners don't necessarily jump to straight away, but small tweaks can make a substantial difference to that hourly rate, and that can make a big difference.

SPEAKER_00 16:10

Yeah, absolutely. And particularly, you know, you might be at this point evaluating whether to get, you know, a hygienist or another dentist and all those sorts of things. So really looking into um this area of the practice, what everybody's producing, what their hourly rate looks like, what works for your practice, what might not, what might not. And also, you know, um a lot of people have their doubts about getting hygienists or are nervous about that um and worried, we hear it all the time. Oh, but what if I, you know, I don't have any more patients for exams and scale and cleans, I'm not gonna make any money. Um, because though that comes from those who are their books are heavily filled with scale and clean um appointments. But um in actual fact, if you started doing restorative work every hour of the day, obviously your hourly rate is going to increase. And there are so many things that you can do to increase that um hourly rate. So if we actually sit down, spend time, have a look at what everybody's doing, and then finding out where we would actually like to be, then we can come up with some solutions for what that gap might look like. You know, for example, it might be um adding a couple of whitening appointments a week. Um and so we think, okay, we'll market around that to try and get our hourly rates up. If we have those two goals, we're there. Or if we're able to um do one crown per day, that's that would help us meet our targets and increase our hourly rate overall, you know, over the course of a day. So, so many aspects there that you can look at to improve that. Um increasing the hourly rate of every practitioner is you know a very big thing in the practice, it's gonna have a huge impact. And probably for associates, they're gonna be a lot more engaged and excited if they can see potential to do a bit better there as well.

SPEAKER_02 18:22

And I think with the you know, young younger dentists, that you know, that's one of the growth areas that they're always focusing on, isn't it? You know, I need this length of time to get things done because I don't have all the experience and practice under my belt yet. But as I progress, I should be needing less time for some treatments moving forward.

unknown 18:41

Dr.

SPEAKER_02 18:42

Mark Hassett, the relaxed dentist, if you if people out there haven't heard of him or researched him, research him, contact him. He's got some fantastic systems on how to be more efficient in your treatments. So you are going to be getting more treatment done in a given day than you would have normally using some of his systems, and that will increase your hourly rate as well. Maybe you've got a practice of that with the size that it is, you're better off actually hiring a stery nurse. And so the room changeovers are super swift, and we don't need to allow that much time for the stery to be done by the nurses, and so we are again getting more treatment done in that one appointment time. There are, as you said, Amina, there are so many different ways where we can positively impact the hourly rate of the practitioner, even when you start to assess each of the practitioners and what their hourly rate is. If one wants to increase their hourly rate, then all they have to do is look at the others that only have a higher hourly rate and say, what are you doing differently? It might be, as you were saying before, I mean, you're doing more uh high production generating treatments in the time. And to do that, even more so, you get somebody else to check their scale and clean, so you get a hygiene department on board. And so it can become quite a process within the practice where each individual dentist can be setting themselves particular goals and finding out from others within the practice in sort of actually how to get there. You want to say something else, maybe?

SPEAKER_00 20:10

Yeah, so yeah, another thing about that is that the the fee list often doesn't really fit with the hourly rate of the practitioner. So this is what I often find, you know, those general restorations, you know, three surface, posterior, lower restorations that are going to take them 45 minutes or an hour, but um the fees, you know, probably only at half an hourly rate. So evaluating the length of time it actually takes you to do these procedures and do them well and what the fee is, um, is another good way of looking at your hourly rate and your fee list to make sure it all sort of within reason and adds up.

SPEAKER_02 20:53

Yeah, and you're highlighting it, you know, another area of it, isn't it? Make sure you're itemizing effectively. Because that's what makes uh true like the time taken to do that restoration effective. So if it's going to be a full surface filling, make sure that you've got the cup overlay and you've got the additional item numbers that go into that treatment that bring that fee up to what it really should be for the time that you spend doing it. Yeah. And so those five areas, lever number one, increasing your fees, and so they are appropriate. Lever number two, reducing the downtime in your appointment book. Lever number three, improving, increasing the treatment plan conversion rate. So more patients are taking uh booking in for the advised treatment. Number four is increase your new patient numbers coming in, and lever number five is increase your hourly rate per practitioner. Now you can look at any one of these and say, yes, let's increase our fees by 1.5%, 2%. Let's reduce our downtime by 20%. Let's improve. Our treatment plan conversion rate by 10%. Let's increase our new patient numbers by 20%. And let's increase our hourly production per practitioner by 15%. And they are all wonderfully productive things to do within your dental practice. And that will all develop an outcome of increased production to a certain degree. Now, within the show notes, there is a link to this particular calculator because what Amina and I talk about is not just the impact of pulling each of these levers, but when you pull all the levers at once, there is a compounding effect, and the impact on your practice is even better. So if number one, if you haven't increased your practice fees for the last couple of years, three, four, five years, sometimes even longer than what we found a meter, and if you go, okay, we're increasing our practice fees, we're going to be mindful about it, we're not going to be hiking up the exam and cleaning fees and the crown fees, we're going to look across the board and do it all appropriately. We've got to increase our fees. And so now all of a sudden, if the minute you increase your fees, you can imagine that increasing the hourly rate per practitioner has a double effect. One, they're increasing their hourly rate, but they are also increasing the hourly rate with the increased fee on top of it. And so there is that compounding effect. And within our calculator, we're going to put in here as an example. You put in your annual turnover for the particular practitioner. Let's just say this particular practitioner turns over$800,000. The current hourly rate might be$600. The downtime that that practice is moving through per week might be eight hours a week. And the treatment plan conversion rate, you might be sitting at 60%. The new patients per month might be 20%, and the average value of a new patient when they come in for their checkups and cleans might be$800. The checkup and clean x-rays, and you need a couple of billings. So on average, it's around$800. Once you put all of this information into the calculator, then you go down into step two where you start pulling the levers. And if you are listening to this on the podcast, we really encourage you to go to the actual link so you can play around with this calculator yourself. And so we're first of all going to increase the fees by 3%. And then we're going to reduce, we're going to reduce the appointment downtime by two out down to two hours, improve treatment plan conversion rate, we're going to increase it by 15%. Increase new patient numbers, we're going to increase that to 25 per month. And increase the hourly rate per practitioner by say 15%. Then up the top here, you will see the sum of all of those leaders being pulled is actually a whopping half a million dollars. Just magnificent how wonderful this kind of thing can be. But if you pull them all together at the same time, then you can actually have a compounding bonus of$93,000. And an additional$100,000 nearly, just because you're pulling them all at the same time. It's pretty impactful, isn't it, Mate?

SPEAKER_00 25:35

It's amazing. It's powerful and attractive.

SPEAKER_02 25:38

It is powerful and attractive. That's right. Who doesn't want to do that? Who wouldn't want to do that? That's for sure. So do jump into that within the show notes. As we say, it's also available along with a bunch of other calculators in the academy that we provide. We're always adding to. So you get a strong sense of what you can do as dental practice owners and managers to really supercharge the potential that lies within your practice. This is the sort of stuff that we do when we do programs for practices. We've got the advisory program, we've got the master program, we've also got workshops. We can come out with your team for a day, move through how to actually pull each of those five levers. What does everybody need to do in order to be able to activate that kind of change and teach you how to track those sort of changes as well? So we can help in any way, Meanie, if people want to go down this path and they're not quite sure what the first step to take is.

SPEAKER_00 26:40

We absolutely can, and we're absolutely pulling levers in people's practices and seeing fantastic outcomes. So don't hesitate to contact us.

SPEAKER_02 26:51

Don't hesitate. Jump on it now. Make sure this time, in six months' time, we're looking at an enormous amount of growth that you didn't actually realise was possible within your. See you next time.

SPEAKER_01 27:06

If you enjoyed this podcast, then I encourage you to head over to Amina and my website, digitalmastery.com.au. You'll find all the information that you need. If you would like to gain our assistance in helping you and your team achieve great success. If you would like to find out more, you can also email us directly at info at digitalmastery.com.au. Thanks so much for listening.