Episode 40
40: Four Ways to Immediately Lower Overhead - Scott Leune
Everybody wants to create more profit in their dental practices. What if I told you that more profit doesn’t mean more patients or more work? Instead, it means finding the inefficiencies and making more profit. Dentists are busy with patients, teeth, and everything that goes with running a dental practice. My guest today has opened, ran, or partnered with hundreds of practices and learned a few tips along the way.
Dr. Scott Leune is the owner of Breakaway Practice an education and practice management company that helps dentists in all stages of practice find efficiencies to make more and earn more without working more. Dr. Scott Leune shares proven best practices, tools, techniques, and a few tips that should be obvious but aren't on today’s show.
You can find Dr. Scott Leune here:
Breakaway Practice on Facebook
Show Notes
[02:47] David specializes in helping dentists all over the country with legal contracts.
[02:33] Scott is a dentist who opened a practice from scratch when he was right out of school. The practice was huge, and the saw 350 new patients a month.
[03:02] This was challenging but it also led to success. This success led to multiple practices, and he had 10 associates by his fourth year.
[03:12] He had to figure out how to control overhead, how to market, and how to manage people.
[03:20] Scott learned a lot of lessons the hard way.
[03:25] He sold three practices, and then build seven more from scratch.
[03:49] He learned a lot of lessons and started noticing ways to hack his way to dental practice success.
[04:00] Soon he started teaching people how to open practices and started opening practices in partnership with other people.
[04:10] They even began managing practices from afar. Today he is connected to about 370 offices.
[05:33] Is it more expensive to be a practicing dentist today?
[06:47] The importance of overhead control.
[07:16] Four ways to control overhead.
[08:09] Too much focus on production and not enough focus on profitability.
[09:17] How it's not what you produce, it's what you keep.
[09:42] Fixing supply management. How to spend your marketing dollars. Cleaning up account receivables. And maximizing phone effectiveness.
[10:20] Supply overhead and choosing the right brands.
[12:00] Either choose the best quality when quality matters or choose the most affordable when it doesn't. A limited number of manufacturers will allow you to take advantage of manufacturer rebates.
[12:36] The formulary needs to be owner driven.
[15:48] Setting a supply budget.
[19:37] The overhead component of marketing.
[19:49] The importance of listening to every phone call before analyzing your data.
[20:13] Finding the best way to market in an environment where you are trying to cut costs.
[21:10] Direct mail has the highest patient acquisition costs, and SEO has the lowest patient acquisition costs.
[23:11] The value of a patient to a practice in the first year. It's important to know what a patient is worth in your practice when they come in with certain messaging.
[24:48] It's important to know the conversion rate of your phone calls and if you are diagnosing enough.
[25:25] It's the combination of a lot of things that affect overhead. Operating your practice in a certain way and making sure that when a customer comes in there is a whole lot of success.
[27:21] Online reviews are important to a practice’s success.
[29:15] AR and calculating the numbers. Dental Intel data mining software. How many days on average to collect a dollar owed to you.
[31:06] Look at patient AR and insurance AR separately.
[33:05] The importance of pre-op and post op x-rays for the insurance company claims.
[34:43] A ratio for AR days and the importance of catching errors and lost claims.
[35:46] Emailing patient's statements and setting up an online payment portal will get more patients to pay.
[37:12] Overhead problems can be corrected with best practices.
[37:58] Breakaway offers different business seminars.
Links and Resources:
