#277 The Reason General Dentistry Mathematically Doesn't Make Sense in 2026

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If you're running a pre-COVID model, the math doesn't add up.
Here's why it used to be easier pre-2020:
• Fewer people were marketing.
• Easier to drive new patients.
• People had more money to spend on treatment.
• Labor was a smaller percentage of the PNL.
• Insurance reimbursed more; in-network actually worked.
• Everything used to cost less. We've eaten about 29% of cumulative inflation since 2020.
Here's what you have to do now:
• Market aggressively; it's way more competitive, and your dollar doesn't go as far.
• Build a real culture in your office. Your team will treat patients exactly as you do.
• Go out of network in most cases, not everyone, but if you're trying to make the math work, staying in-network on every plan won't add up.
• Present patient financing to every patient, every time.

Dr. Blake Hamblin walks through exactly how to present patient financing without it feeling salesy in his CE course on My Dental Playbook:
https://mydentalplaybook.com/courses/ce-series/patient-financing/

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

All right. Today I'm going to be talking about why dentistry doesn't make sense mathematically in 2026. So someone actually posted this on Facebook and it was a really interesting question. Why is the math not mathing like it used to for general dentistry? And it's a very valid question. And I want to give you the answer that I posted because I think it's really relevant to what a lot of people are going through right now. So pre-COVID or pre-2020, dentistry was a totally different place. And that was only six years ago. I know it feels like 16 years ago, but it was only not even six years ago, five and a half years ago. And the whole world changed. And when it did, it rug pulled a lot of people. So back then, pre-COVID, uh less people were marketing, first of all. Uh there was just less dentists that were aggressively marketing. It was very common for dentists to spend maybe a thousand, two thousand dollars on marketing. That was like a very common thing. It's not the case anymore. Um, it was easier, way easier to get new patients. Just opening up a building, you would get new patients. Just uh just a basic website, people were getting new patients. There was people that were getting a hundred new patients a month and paying almost nothing in marketing. That's that's very rare today. Uh, people also had more money to spend on treatment. There was more money in the patient's pocket, just overall. And so they were more apt to buy treatment. It was easier to sell treatment. Also, labor was a way smaller portion of the total uh your total PL. If you go back and look pre-2020 and look at the percentage of labor that you were paying in your business compared to now, I guarantee you it's higher now. Um, insurance reimbursements were way higher. I remember when people used to love being uh love being in network with Delta Dental. I remember that was like, well, we're out of network, we're fever service, but we we still do the Delta Dental premiere. Now, in a lot of states, Delta Dental is worse than Medicaid. Like the reimbursement rates are lower than Medicaid, and everything costs less. I actually pulled this up. So pre-COVID, we've experienced a 30% increase in prices on average, just as if you take everything. So 30%, you're paying 30% more for everything. So anything that you buy for your practice, doesn't matter what it is, you're paying 30% more today than you were back then. That's going to eat into your margins. So today, what do we have to do? Well, number one, if you want to grow, you have to market. I see over and over and over again startups who are get their building built, get everything ready to go, get their website up, and they're like, oh, what do I do for new patients? I have a thousand dollars. It's like you're gonna die. Your practice isn't gonna make it. Your business will die. You have to be able to aggressive aggressively market. And uh the the new bar isn't $2,000, $3,000. It's seven, eight, nine, ten thousand dollars if you want to grow. And a lot of people are just like, man, that's a lot of money. And it is, it is very, very expensive. Um, you have to build culture in your office now. Why? The labor force is built a little bit differently than pre-COVID, just in the last six years. The other thing is that your team will treat patients the way you treat them, and that you're stressed out, so then your team's stressed out, and then your patients don't want to come to your practice anymore. It's a it's like a revolving door catch 22 situation, and that's not good. Um, the other thing is, is you got to drop some insurances. There's no way that you just stay in network with all the insurances and survive for like 99%. Now, am I saying that you should drop every single insurance and for every office? No, I'm not saying that. But if you can, I would. Um, they're just gonna continue to tighten the bolts. The other thing is uh you have to present patient financing to every single patient now. If you do that, you will see more people say yes. Right now, I think a lot of dentists have missed that there's people who are coming into these practices every single day and they're walking out because they just don't have the finances to afford what you're selling them. They want to do it, but they just don't have the finances. And so you have to give them ways that they can pay for it. You have to. If you don't, they will walk out and eventually they'll end up getting the dentistry done, but it'll be somewhere else. We actually have a whole playbook on that. If you want to learn how to present treatment to every single patient with a payment plan, we have a financial menu, we have a whole training on it with uh Dr. Blake as well as a his TC. And we had a bunch of dentists go in and they were asking questions in a live session. So it's really good. It answers a lot of your questions. We also, Cherry, our sponsor, has uh some special pricing in it as well. The link's right down below. Go check it out. Thanks so much for tuning in. Hope you have a good day.