Dental Practice Heroes
Where dentists learn how to cut clinical days while increasing profits - without sacrificing patient care, cutting corners, or cranking volume. We teach you how to grow a scalable practice through communication, leadership, and effective management.
Hosted by Dr. Paul Etchison, author of two books on dental practice management, dental coach, and owner of a $6M collections group practice in the south suburbs of Chicago, we provide actionable advice for practice owners who want to intentionally create more time to enjoy their families, wealth, and deep personal fulfillment.
If you want to build a scalable practice framework that no longer stresses, drains, or relies on you for every little thing, we will teach you how and share stories of other dentists who have done it!
Dental Practice Heroes
The Dollar-Per-Hour Blueprint That Builds a Profitable Practice
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Ever set a production goal that felt exciting, then realized the math didn’t support it? We walk through a clear, no-fluff framework that turns revenue wishes into achievable targets by anchoring everything to one number: dollar per clinical hour. From there, we test whether your current systems can carry that load—diagnosis habits, treatment acceptance, and patient volume—and show how small, targeted adjustments create outsized gains without adding chaos to your week.
We start by reverse-engineering annual revenue into a realistic hourly target and explain why that figure becomes your true north for scheduling, staffing, and time off. Then we dig into the three levers of growth. First, diagnosis: how to set ethical, consistent criteria, present risk clearly, and avoid the trap of under-diagnosing teeth at obvious risk of catastrophic fracture. Second, case acceptance: practical scripts and front-desk tactics for surfacing objections, clarifying value, and making financing easy so more patients say yes to care they need. Third, volume: when and how to expand through marketing, better phone conversion, airtight recall, and full hygiene capacity without burning out your team.
The payoff is predictability. We show how to translate your dollar-per-hour into a block schedule that builds steady production days rather than volatile peaks and valleys. By aligning each provider—including hygiene—to a defined target and a purpose-built template, you reduce stress, hit goal consistently, and reclaim control of your calendar. You’ll walk away ready to set numbers that make sense, diagnose with confidence, lift acceptance with simple training, and choose whether to grow through volume—on your own terms.
Take Control of Your Practice and Your Life
We help dentists take more time off while making more money through systematization, team empowerment, and creating leadership teams.
Ready to build a practice that works for you? Visit www.DentalPracticeHeroes.com to learn more.
Have you ever noticed how some dentists just pick a production goal out of thin air? Like, yeah, I want to do 2 million this year. Why? Okay, based on what? Why do you want to do 2 million? If I ask that person, what is your required dollar per hour to hit that goal? Or how many days will you need to work this year to make that goal? Most people freeze because they have no idea. And here's the truth: you can't hit what you can't calculate. Until you know your practice math, how many hours you're going to work, how much you diagnose, and how much of it gets accepted, your goals are just wishes. The amount of patients you see, the amount you diagnose, and the amount that gets accepted, it's all related. You see, production problems, they are not random. They're mathematical. If your case acceptance or new patient flow or dollar per hour production isn't aligned with your goals, no amount of motivation or working harder is not going to fix it if the math doesn't work. So when you understand the math, you stop guessing and you start managing with precision. And that's what we're going to be talking about today. Now you are listening to the Dental Practice Heroes podcast, where we teach dentists how to build a profitable team-driven practice that gives them freedom, purpose, and peace of mind. If you want to make more while working less and finally hit your goals on purpose instead of by accident, you are in the right place. I'm your host, Dr. Paul Etchison. I'm a dental business coach and author of two books on dental practice management and the owner of a large five-doctor practice that runs effortlessly while I work just two clinical days a month. So let's talk about these production goals and all the math that goes into it. Let's dive in. Now, back in the day when I was a solo doc, there was one year where I told my team, I said, this year our goal is to hit two and a half million. I thought I can work harder, I will push harder, I will do more dentistry, problem solved, 2.5 mil, no problem. But when I sat down and I did the math, it just didn't add up. If I wanted to hit two and a half million, I needed to produce about 1550 per hour. And when I looked at my case acceptance and my diagnosis rate and how many new patients I was seeing, even if I was going full throttle, I was mathematically capped just under 2 million. Now let me explain what I mean by that. Under 2 million for me would be doing 1250 an hour. That's what I was doing back then. And I don't think I could have done any more. I was working really hard. No amount of additional hustle was going to fix that. That's what my dollar per hour was. And that illustrates a major point that I want you to understand is that it's all math. The math needs to work. So let's talk about the production equation. Essentially, whatever your goal is at the end of the year, you need to divide it by your clinical hours, and that'll give you your target per hour. Now, in the previous example, I wasn't taking hygiene into account. I was only taking what the doctor was going to produce. I wanted to produce as a doctor two and a half million. But let's do an example, okay? Let's say that you're gonna work 50 weeks this year. All right, so you're only gonna take off two weeks. You're working eight hours each day, and you're doing four days a week. So how many hours is that total for the year? That's four days a week times 50 weeks times eight hours a day. That gives you 1600 clinical hours as the doctor. Now, if your goal is as a doctor to hit 1.5 million at that amount of hours, you need to produce$937 per hour. So we just take 1.5 million and we divide it by the 1600 clinical hours that you're gonna work in the year. Now that is your true north. You find out what your dollar per hour goal is. And then once you know that, the next question becomes will your current systems support that? And if not, where is the gap? Is it in the diagnosis? Is it in the acceptance, or is it in the volume, meaning the amount of new patients that you're seeing, or how fast you can move through your clinical day? So let's do an example here. Let's say, as the doctor, you diagnose$1 million and your case acceptance is 30%. So out of that 1 million, 30% will be accepted. Now you're gonna produce$300,000. Now, do you want to grow that number without adding more patients? Well, you have to raise your case acceptance. And even a small improvement in case acceptance can have a big effect. Say you take that case acceptance from 30% to 35%. In our example, that's gonna give you another$50,000 of production. So for a lot of dentists, they will look at this and they'll say, we need more new patients, but completely overlooking the opportunity that is to raise case acceptance. I mean, we can do things like train our front desk on how to present cases better. This is one of the training masterclasses in the DPH program, is there's a treatment coordinator module that teaches your front-end team exactly how to talk to patients, how to fish for objections, and how to handle them so that more patients say yes, and also so that we can help more patients, because ultimately, if the patients don't say yes, we don't help our patients get dentally healthy. So that's how we look at case acceptance. Let's talk about diagnosis. Now, if you're diagnosing too little, you're never gonna hit your number, even if you have perfect 100% case acceptance, because you can't do work on things that you don't diagnose. So let's say in the previous example, we don't change our case acceptance, but we increase what we diagnose. So that's another way we can hit our goals. We increase what we diagnose. But let's face it, typically you're going to diagnose what you're comfortable with. We shouldn't be diagnosing things that don't exist, right? We've got to be ethical. But I can tell you from working with a lot of associates, what I do see, I see a hesitancy to treatment plan more than one crown on a patient. I see a hesitancy to treatment plan a crown that doesn't have a complete fractured cusp. I mean, the associates, they typically want to take the layups, the easy teeth, but they don't want to do anything with that molar that has two fractured marginal ridges and it's got an old amalgam in it that's giant. They look at that and they say, I don't know how to present this in the patient in a way that they'll say yes because it doesn't hurt and it doesn't have a broken cusp, or they just typically don't see the value in treatment planning that and treating that tooth. Now, as far as I'm concerned, is if you've got fractured marginal ridges and you've got a big filling in it, that needs a crown. Say that tooth breaks and it breaks into the nerve chamber and they need an endo, or it breaks and it breaks down to the root below the bone. Now they need to get that tooth extracted. If that patient came back to you and said, Hey, doc, this tooth's got to come out of my head now. Was there any way six months ago you knew this was gonna break? And then you're gonna look that patient in the eye and say, Well, I saw two fractured marginal ridges and I saw a huge filling, but nope, no way to tell, no crystal ball. I think it would be very hard to look that patient in the eye and say there was no way for you to know that it was gonna break. We saw the cracks, we knew it was gonna break someday, and we allowed it to break randomly. I would rather get a crown on that tooth, we're protecting it. The crown is like a helmet that protects the tooth from breaking. When we let that tooth break randomly, sometimes it breaks in a manner that we don't like. So we can increase our diagnosis in that way. But if we don't want to increase what we're diagnosing on each patient, well, then that comes in the next variable, the volume variable. Can we see more new patients? So that we don't have to increase our diagnosis per patient, but we're gonna diagnose more work because we're seeing more volume. Well, that's where marketing and new patient conversion come into play, optimizing our recall, making sure our schedules stay full, that we see enough patients, making sure that we completely fill the hygiene capacity. So we see how all these things are related. We're looking at our volume, our new patients, the amount of people we see. We're looking at how much we diagnose, and we're looking at how much gets accepted. And based on that, we may or may not be able to hit our dollar per hour production goal to get to our annual goal. So, what I want you to do is I want you to look at the number that you want to hit. Okay. You're gonna do this for every provider in your office. You're gonna do this for your hygienist. You're gonna figure out what their dollar per hour goal is, you're gonna do it for the doctor yourself. You say, What is my dollar per hour goal? And when you look at your annual goal and then you look at the numbers, such as diagnosis and case acceptance, and you optimize it and the numbers work. You can then decide how many weeks are you gonna take off at the end of the year? Say you want to hit 1.5 million and you do the math and you say, Hey, I can hit that with taking eight weeks off. Well, if you can hit your goal and take off eight weeks, it's gonna feel a lot better for you when you take that week off because you know that you hit your goal versus when we have no goal and we're just flying blind. When you take that week off, it is very hard to not be on vacation and still be thinking about how much production you're losing, the opportunity cost of taking time off, which is why most doctors who are solo doctors don't tend to take off a lot of time, maybe two, three weeks a year. So sit down and do the math. Here's what we covered today. All right, your production goal has to be tied to the math. It can't just be tied to the motivation. You're gonna use your hours, your yearly annual hours that you're gonna do clinical, and you're gonna calculate what your required dollar per hour production is. And then you're gonna work backwards. You're gonna see if it works through your diagnosis percentage, your case acceptance, see if you have enough volume, see what's missing. And when all of that works, you can then take your dollar per hour goal and design a DPH block schedule that guarantees you're going to hit it. So you can then get intentional about your scheduling. This is what we teach all of our clients to do when we work with them one-on-one and in our programs. We teach you how to create a schedule that hits that goal. We don't have big days, we don't have small days. We have days that we hit goal. They are consistent, they're low stress, and they're high production. And that's how we like to practice dentistry. And I assure you, if you try it out that way, it'll be the way that you want to practice dentistry as well, because it's super chill and it's fun and we hit our goal. There's no ambiguity to it. So this week, I challenge you. I want you to pull out a piece of paper, I want you to write down your goal, and then I want you to divide it by the clinical hours that you plan on working this next year. That is your dollar per hour number, and then figure out a way to make it happen. Then ask yourself does my current level of diagnosis, case acceptance, or volume make that possible? And if not, then you've got a gap to fill. Figure out how to do it. And that's exactly where your focus should be. Or the math behind what we're talking about today. That's what we do with our clients when we work together. So set up a free strategy call at dentalpracticeheroes.com slash strategy, and I will talk to you about what's possible for your practice, let you know what coaching options we have, if we can help you. And in the bare minimum, you're gonna walk away that call with a few action items, the next steps for your practice, so that you can continue to build a practice that works for you. All right, everybody, thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate it. And if you get a chance, please leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts. I would so much appreciate that. Thank you so much for listening. Take care, everybody.
