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Dr. Jack Bayramyan

The Extraction Formula: The #1 Tool for Dental Practice Success

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The Obstacle is the Path in Your Dental Practice  

If you’re a dental practice owner, have you read Extraction yet? Recently, I published my first book, Extraction: The Surprising New Formula to Systemize, Scale, and Sell Your Practice. The response from readers has been overwhelmingly positive, and we’ve made Bestseller status on Amazon in several categories! I’m proud of this achievement. It started as a simple enough idea. I had been working with my dear friend Sean Stephenson who was coaching me in my business. In fact, it was Sean who coined the title, Extraction.   

Extraction for your Dental Practice

His fundamental drive in life was to help others extract themselves from the prison of their own mindsets to achieve greater levels of personal freedom and fulfillment. Many times in my journey, I have found myself in my own self-imposed prison. For example, right after the pandemic, I injured my neck and hand and discovered that clinical dentistry was something I could no longer practice. I was at a loss; I was nervous about what my future may hold for me, and I was searching for new meaning.   

Sean’s life and mentorship reminded me that meaning lies in what we do in service to a greater cause. Of course, we can always amass more: more wealth, more success, more money, more stuff. But we aren’t going to find much meaning in any of that. To find true meaning, we must train our abilities and skills to contribute to our families, communities, and society because purpose comes from serving others. And that was the spark of an idea that eventually became my book.    

Why I Wrote Extraction  

My injury became a blessing in disguise. It forced me to take stock of myself, my career, and how I can continue contributing differently as an author and entrepreneur as much as I did as a clinical dentist. I had to forge a new path for myself, and that path would be rooted in a principle I have stuck to my entire career, the true measure of one’s success is creating value in the lives of others.   

I wrote Extraction mainly for Dental Entrepreneurs. I wanted to bring a set of strategies I used over two decades to build, scale, and finally exit a tremendously successful dental organization that continues to serve and thrive today. By laying out my strategies, mistakes, obstacles, and achievements, I can help other dental entrepreneurs avoid the same mistakes and challenges I faced.   

Breaking Free from Your Dental Practice  

There is another fundamental reason I wrote my book. While building my organization, I ran into a paradox. As I continued to build and scale my practice, I became increasingly enveloped with the day-to-day challenges of running a multi-practice organization. I needed to take a 10,000-foot view of my organization and where it was headed. I was, in fact, mired in the minutiae of daily operations. This needed to be more sustainable. I coined a term for this place I had landed in the trajectory of “success,” I call this place the dental entrepreneurial prison. I wrote about this concept in an earlier blog post.     

It is deeply frustrating for an entrepreneur to work tirelessly day after day for years to find that the success you’re gaining is only giving you a ton more work and less meaning and fulfillment. So, how do you avoid getting locked in a prison of your own making?

A New Formula for Success

The formula I’ve created and defined in Extraction is designed to help you avoid this paradox and many others as you build your practice and organization. The first step in this formula is to define your Point A. Where are you in your life as an entrepreneur? Do you know how to define it? And where is your organization in its lifecycle? Determining where you and your practice(s) are will allow you to map out a path for where you want to go and, importantly, how you want to get there.  

Defining the Roadmap, From Point A to Point B 

After you honestly and fully understand where you are in your practice, your Point A, we define your vision. Dreaming big is imperative to your overall dental practice strategy and growth. But ‘big’ means different things to different people. In the book, I walk you through the steps of defining a personal vision for yourself and your dental organization that works for you, not your competitors, fellow entrepreneurs, or even what your family wants. We figure out what you want for your life and your business. Vision is not a destination. It sets the direction of your growth.  

Next, we figure out how we will move toward your vision. And it is here where we ensure you stay focused on building your roadmap or strategic growth plan by assessing all the internal and external obstacles that stand in the way of realizing our vision. At this point, we’ve built your dream team to support you and implement your strategic plan. We also break down your company goals into yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly, and even daily steps so everyone is transparent and accountable. Finally, you create a template of actionable steps to keep you on track to meet your goals and, eventually, execute your vision.   

From Dentist to Dental Entrepreneur and Investor

Finally, we hone your skills as a leader. You invested time and money in dental school. But unfortunately, dental schools fail to teach us how to be a leader of successful teams. Dental schools also fail to teach us how to be an entrepreneur in a successful, scalable organization. That’s our job.

In my book, I lay out all of the values and principles that allowed me to become the leader I needed to be, not just for my organization or my teams, but for myself. I needed to find a way to break free from the dental entrepreneurial prison, and that meant becoming a leader that people trusted enough to carry out a vision that I laid out for them that they couldn’t quite see yet. They needed to trust me to hold that vision for them while they worked toward it. We did it, and you can too.   

Invest in Yourself, Not Just Your Dental Practice   

Avoiding the paradoxes of entrepreneurship is daunting while you’re building your practice and organization. But there are concrete steps you can take to avoid those traps; traps like stagnation in your business growth and the paradox of success. I wrote my book specifically outlining how to avoid those pitfalls or get out of them once you’re in.

But your business, practice, and organization will always have challenges and obstacles. The aim isn’t to remove all the obstacles. That’s an impossibility. The aim is to see those obstacles as the path to your success. Each obstacle becomes a lesson of growth. I hope I can assist you on your path and lighten your load as a dental entrepreneur.   

The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”
~Marcus Aurelius

In fact, I didn’t just write a book to help the dental entrepreneur; I built a company too. Optimize Practice Alliance is dedicated to assisting the dental entrepreneur in building a solid organization and a lasting legacy. Our motto is our mission, keeping the future of dentistry in the hands of dentists. Our goal is empower dentists to become the masters of their own destiny, however that looks to each entrepreneur.

Turn the Extraction Formula into a Clear Plan

The Extraction Formula isn’t just about working harder or adding more tactics, it’s about leading with clarity, intention, and alignment. Real growth happens when you know where you’re going, why it matters, and how each decision moves you closer to that vision.

That’s why we created the Extraction GPS. This tool is designed specifically for dental entrepreneurs who want to translate the principles of the Extraction Formula into a practical, actionable plan. It helps you clarify your values, define where your practice is today, map out your long-term vision, and break that vision down into annual and quarterly priorities you can actually execute.

When your vision is clear, leadership becomes easier. Obstacles feel more manageable. And your team can align around something bigger than day-to-day tasks.

Ready to put the Extraction Formula to work in your practice?

Download Your Extraction GPS

When is The Right Time to Move from Dentist to Investor in Your Dental Practice?

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Are you ready to be an investor in your dental practice? This is a big question, but the answer is deceptively simple, and you don’t have to give up practicing dentistry to make the transition. However, there are several factors to plan for and implement to make this transition successful.

So, here’s the answer, the right time to transition from dentist to investor in your practice is when the revenue of your practice finally comes mainly from your team. Transitioning your mindset from clinician to investor is another story –  

How Do You Transition from Dentist to Investor in Your Dental Practice?  

How do you get your revenue to start coming from your team rather than yourself? You must build the foundation to scale your practice before you make that transition. There are several elements involved in this process:  

  • You need to onboard new doctor associates 
  • You need to train these new associates in the vision, processes, and culture of your dental practice 
  • You need to redesign your schedule to transition your time from mostly clinical hours to mostly administrative hours 

Once you’ve effectively implemented these strategies, then you will be ready to transition to investor. You can and should keep clinical hours, but those are minimal compared to the time you use each week for scaling out your business as an investor.  

Check out this short video on my process for transitioning from solely dentist to dentist-investor in my practice:  

Are You Ready to Become an Investor in Your Dental Practice?  

Transitioning from dentist to investor is one of the most important, and challenging, shifts in a dental entrepreneur’s career. While the opportunity is exciting, it only works when the right foundations are in place: strong teams, clinical duplication, and the ability to view your practice as an investment rather than a job.

At some point, many dentists realize they didn’t just build a business—they built themselves another chair to sit in. Reclaiming the entrepreneur role requires stepping back, gaining perspective, and intentionally designing the future you want your practice to support.

That’s why we created the Extraction GPS. This tool helps dental entrepreneurs clarify their values, assess their current reality, and define a clear path forward, so you can decide how (and when) to transition into the investor seat with confidence. It gives you the structure to align your vision, your role, and your growth strategy before making big moves.

At Optimize Practice Alliance, we believe the future of dentistry belongs with dentists, and that includes dentists who are ready to think, lead, and invest like owners.

Ready to step into the investor role with clarity and intention? 

Download Your Extraction GPS

Escaping the Dental Entrepreneurial Prison: A Personal Perspective from a Prison Escapee

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"Entrepreneurs can sometimes become trapped or imprisoned by the very systems, processes and teams that built their success."

~Dr. Jack Bayramyan, Extraction

As A Dental Practice Entrepreneur, Are You in Prison?

As a dental professional, I have experienced firsthand the challenges of building and managing a successful practice. But unfortunately, I have also witnessed the paradox of success, where the same systems, processes, and teams that once propelled your practice’s growth become obstacles to further progress. This phenomenon, which I call the “dental entrepreneurial prison,” inspired me to write my book,  Extraction: The Surprising New Formula to Systemize, Scale, and Sell Your Business, and to found Optimize Practice Services to help my fellow dentist entrepreneurs escape this trap and unlock their practices’ full potential.  

So how do you escape the prison you, yourself, built? I’ve got some thoughts about that… 

As A Dental Practice Owner, Do You Even Know You’re in Prison?  

As a dental practice grows and evolves, it is typical for the systems and processes that once facilitated its success to become outdated and hinder its progress. Unfortunately, many dentist entrepreneurs, me included, have found themselves trapped in a never-ending cycle of managing and maintaining the structures that initially brought them success. The dental entrepreneurial prison is a paradox where growth and transformation become increasingly complex and recognizing that you’re trapped is the first step to overcoming it.  

So how do you know when you’re beginning to see obstacles where there were once only opportunities? One of the most effective tools I use is a business lifecycle chart. This is not the traditional lifecycle of a business explanation understood in corporate circles. I’ve rewired this concept to fit the entrepreneurial needs of myself and other dentists figuring out how to grow their business models without the traditional dips in growth and revenue. Every business has a lifecycle, that is universally understood concept in business growth. You start out strong, on the upswing, then maybe you hit some stagnancy and have to reassess your systems and processes. Next, you go through some restructuring, which brings a downturn in growth until those new systems run smoothly and you’re on the upswing again. These evolutions are much more intricate than that, but there is a basic flow to every practice’s growth, stagnancy, decline, and renewal, almost like seasons in a year.  

All of this is very natural. The problem comes when you can’t see where your business is in its Lifecycle or where it’s heading. You’re essentially blind to obstacles and blind to the path to freedom.   

My journey to escape the dental entrepreneurial prison began with the concept of extraction. By identifying when and where to extract ourselves from outdated systems, processes, or teams, we can free up time and resources, allowing us to focus on expanding and improving our dental practices. This involves outsourcing specific tasks, hiring new personnel, and sometimes implementing new technologies to streamline operations and enhance patient care. So how do you identify and diagnose where our business is and where it’s going?  

Identifying Where Your Dental Practice Is in Its Lifecycle 

As I said, an essential aspect of embracing extraction is understanding the Lifecycle of your business. Recognizing the various stages of growth and transformation, from inception and launch to expansion and eventual maturity and transition, is the responsibility of every dental practice owner. By understanding these stages, we can better identify when and where to extract ourselves, allowing for a more efficient allocation of resources and increased focus on practice growth. 

Ok, how do you identify where your practice is in its Lifecycle? Every business faces issues almost daily, so how do you know if the current problems are quotidian or if they indicate systemic issues that need to be addressed? This is where you let yourself out of prison. By teaching yourself, as the dental practice entrepreneur, to work on your business rather than just in your business, you will have a greater understanding, control, and a more holistic view of your practice rather than just the view from the dentist’s chair.  

Caption: Lifecycle of a Business chart. Credit: Nida Zafar

Three Keys to Unlocking the Dental Entrepreneurial Prison 

There are three keys to help you figure out the obstacles your business faces and how to deal with them. These keys will allow you to take a 10,000-foot view of your practice and determine where it is in its Lifecycle. You can prescribe the proper remedy when you figure out where your business is. So, what are these keys that unlock your freedom?  

1. Measuring and Testing 

As the saying goes, you can’t improve what you don’t measure. I take measuring growth through KPIs, lead and lag measures and other instruments very seriously. It must be part of every entrepreneur’s scope of work. After all, your motivation as an entrepreneur and business owner is, in part, seeing the growth of your business. You can’t grow a business, just like you can’t grow a garden, in the dark.

As the owner of your practice, the literal buck stops with you. If you don’t know how well your business is doing, you won’t know where to improve, when to expand, or how to scale to keep growing. Therefore, you need to develop strategies around measuring and testing that allow you to see immediately how well your efforts are performing, where to put your investment dollars, and when to upgrade old technology or outdated systems. Many services allow you to keep track of this kind of data nowadays, and it is worth the investment to track how well your business is doing and see the trends. 

Every business has lead measures as well as lag measures. These indicators allow you to see what tools and strategies have been successful and which have not, and they also allow you to look back into the past and see what didn’t work so you can do things differently moving forward. Therefore, it behooves every business owner to invest their time in studying these measures and use the right tools to decipher these measurements correctly.  

2. Team Communication

The most important key to unlocking your prison is communication with your team. You may not know if the new software system you just upgraded to is helping or hindering workflow, but you know who does? The team that is using that software. You may not know if your patients like the new scheduling platform, but who communicates with your patients the most? Your team.  

Team communication is essential for you, the practice owner, to know where things are going right and where things are going wrong. Without good communication, you won’t know if something is not working until it may be too late. Fixing a problem with your software or new technology is much easier than restoring your reputation. A tech problem may take a few hours or days to fix. A reputation may take a lifetime for your business to improve.  

So, communicating with your team keeps you current on where to put your energy and focus on solving problems fast and getting ahead of issues before they become obstacles. There is probably no better key to removing obstacles and continuing growth than communication with your team.  

3. Documentation 

Documentation is, in a word, BORING. Amiright?? Who comes to work says, “I can’t wait to document every little thing I do today.” No one. But done it must be. Why?  

To avoid the pitfall of repetition, sloppiness and loose ends, you must document the way you do things. Nothing gets a business stuck in stagnation faster than a team doing the same thing over and over, in the same way, expecting different results. That’s the definition of insanity, and yet we see it in business every day. For example, we’ve all had the experience of calling our healthcare provider and waiting on hold while they try to “find your information” in their system. Things that technology promised would be difficult no more become obstacles to success because little issues are left to fester, stay undocumented and get overlooked, becoming a nuisance, at best, for your customers or patients.

One of the biggest reasons small issues don’t get resolved is that they get sidelined by more significant or pressing concerns facing the business. So, the way to overcome neglecting the small stuff is to document your processes. This documentation become a living depiction that your team can review when shoring up issues and cleaning up those very processes creating obstacles. Every business has issues, but if they aren’t communicated and documented, they fester and become obstacles.  

To truly get a 10,000-foot view of your business’s successful and not-so-successful strategies, document the following:  

  • What works 
  • How it works best 
  • What doesn’t work 

Documenting these three areas will allow you to develop standard operating procedures and successful strategies for dealing with obstacles as they arise or even avoid them altogether.  

This type of documentation is imperative to a smooth-running practice, especially if you plan to scale your operation. Scaling is so much about duplicating what works; documentation is how you repeatedly duplicate your success.    

Achieving Financial Freedom in Your Dental Practice 

To stay out of dental entrepreneurial prison, you need to know exactly where your business is in its Lifecycle. How do you figure that out? You need three keys: measuring, communication, and documentation. These keys will give you the insights to keep growing your business and stay out of prison. The bottom line is you need to keep working on your business, not just in your business, as a dental entrepreneur. It’s not enough to show up in the dentist’s chair every day in front of your patients. You must know the intimate details of your practice so you can keep growing it.  

Through my own experience and the experiences of countless other dentist entrepreneurs, I have learned that achieving financial freedom goes beyond merely accumulating wealth. It is about making conscious decisions regarding time allocation, resources, and energy, without being tied down by the day-to-day demands of running a dental practice. By extracting ourselves from the quotidian responsibilities of dentistry, we can free ourselves from the dental entrepreneurial prison, enabling us to enjoy the fruits of our labor and focus on future growth and expansion.   

Escaping the dental entrepreneurial prison has been a transformative experience for me, and I am passionate about helping other dentist entrepreneurs achieve the same freedom and growth. By understanding the Lifecycle of a dental practice, making conscious decisions to extract ourselves from outdated systems and processes, and embracing evolution and transformation, we can unlock the true potential of our practices and experience the freedom we initially sought as entrepreneurs. Remember, extraction is an ongoing process, and staying vigilant and adaptable will ensure continued success and growth in our dental practices. 

Escaping the Entrepreneurial Prison Starts with Clarity

One of the fastest ways I learned to escape the entrepreneurial prison was by replacing assumptions with facts. Feeling trapped often isn’t about lack of effort—it’s about lack of visibility. When everything lives in your head, the business owns you. When the right numbers are tracked, you regain control.

That’s why we created our KPI Tracker, a practical tool built specifically for dental entrepreneurs who want clarity, confidence, and freedom in their decision-making. By tracking the metrics that truly matter, you can identify bottlenecks, reduce overwhelm, and start building a practice that runs with intention instead of urgency.

When you know your numbers, mindset shifts naturally. Fear loses its grip. Decisions get easier. Leadership becomes proactive instead of reactive.

Ready to stop feeling trapped and start leading with clarity?

Download Your KPI Tracker

AI and Your Dental Practice: 6 Actionable & Achievable Applications

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Is your dental practice ready for the future? I recently attended the Abundance360 Summit hosted by Peter Diamandis. Abundance360 is an annual event where “visionary entrepreneurs, investors, and executives meet to solve the world’s biggest challenges.” It’s a yearly mastermind with community-led mini-masterminds, monthly workshops, and year-round coaching designed to support entrepreneurs to challenge their mindsets and expand their comfort zones constantly.  

This year’s theme for the event was about learning to leverage new technologies, specifically AI, in your business. The summit provocatively stated, “In the next ten years, we’ll experience more progress than in the last 100 years.” There is so much new technology, sensors, AI, robotics, 3D printing, synthetic biology, blockchain, etc., that it can be highly intimidating and challenging to know what to implement in your dental practice, much less how.  

New Technologies and Your Dental Practice 

Abundance360 wants to inform, instruct and guide entrepreneurs on how and where to use these technologies so business owners feel empowered to use them rather than be so intimidated they walk away. Doesn’t it feel like we’ve already been moving at light speed in the first half of the 21st century? How can we go any faster? And if we, as entrepreneurs, are not ready, we will be left behind. So, I want to use this post to enlighten you about new and emerging technologies and how they might fit into your practice. My goal is to inform and prepare you, the dental entrepreneur, so you feel excited, rather than overwhelmed, by what is coming. 

One of the recurring themes of the conference was to show businesses that fail to incorporate AI within the next 5 to 10 years would be left behind or eliminated. While the conference covered a broad range of sectors, I was most interested in how AI applied to dental practices and the dental industry. In this blog post, I’ll explore the potential ways AI can be integrated into dental procedures and the benefits they will bring to dental entrepreneurs. Let’s dig in.  

AI in your dental practice

Six Areas of Emerging Technologies Applied to Dental Care 

So much new technology is being designed, created, and innovated that figuring out where to start feels challenging. Below are six areas of emerging technology that I’ve curated for this post that are simple to investigate and implement in your practice.  

Of course, you will face some challenges, there will be a learning curve, and you may even experience push-back from your teams and even your patients. Still, taking all of this in stride and creating a new mindset of embracing challenges, these new tools will enhance rather than hinder your practice.  

AI Diagnostic Support in Your Dental Practice 

  • One of the most immediate applications of AI in dentistry is its ability to enhance diagnostic accuracy. AI-powered tools can analyze X-rays and dental images, quickly identifying issues the human eye could miss. With a more accurate and timely diagnosis, you can provide more targeted and better treatment plans, ultimately improving patient outcomes. 

Dental Patient Engagement and Communication 

  • Your dental practice can leverage AI chatbots and virtual assistants to enhance patient communication and response. By handling appointment scheduling and reminders, AI can streamline administrative processes and free your staff to focus on more critical tasks. Furthermore, AI-powered virtual assistants can provide personalized oral health tips, answer FAQs and check in with patients on their health plans fostering deeper patient engagement and promoting preventative care. 

Treatment Planning and Customization for Dental Practices 

  • Advanced AI algorithms aid you in developing personalized treatment plans by analyzing various factors such as a patient’s medical history, current known conditions, and personal preferences. So, then you can create tailored treatment plans that cater to your patient’s unique needs. This way, you use AI to consider many factors rather than yourself, trying to remember and write down every patient’s specific condition, requirements, preferences, etc.  

Robotic-Assisted Dentistry 

  • Although still in its infancy, robotic-assisted dentistry holds tremendous potential for the future. AI-powered robots can assist dental professionals in intricate procedures with increased precision, reduced fatigue, and shortened procedure time. As technology advances, we can expect to see more complex procedures being carried out with the help of AI-driven robotics.  

Dental Practice Management and Efficiency 

  • AI has the potential to revolutionize your practice management by automating repetitive tasks and optimizing resource allocation. From inventory management to billing and insurance claim processing, AI can identify patterns and trends that lead to cost-saving opportunities and more efficient operations. We see these applications already in companies like Amazon and industries like shipping logistics. And that same type of application can be implemented in your dental practice to streamline specific tasks and processes.  

Continuing Education and Skill Development within the Dental Industry 

  • Finally, using AI-driven educational tools, you can stay updated with the latest industry advancements and best practices. AI can also help you identify knowledge gaps and recommend targeted learning materials, ensuring you remain at the forefront of your field. How incredible is that? An AI tool will automatically give you reminders, strategies, and tools to keep you competitive and informed about new knowledge and technology; that is a game-changer.    

A Brave New World for Dental Entrepreneurs—Grounded in What Matters

Integrating AI into your dental practice opens powerful opportunities for optimization and growth. From improving patient outcomes to streamlining administrative tasks, the potential is real—and accelerating fast. Dentistry is no exception to this shift, and adopting the right technologies can absolutely strengthen your practice’s long-term relevance and competitiveness.

But with innovation moving this quickly, it’s normal to feel overwhelmed. Where do you start? Which tools actually make sense for your practice? And how do you know whether a new technology is helping—or just adding complexity?

The most effective way to approach AI is to ground innovation in clear performance metrics. That’s why we created our KPI Tracker, to help dental entrepreneurs measure what truly matters before, during, and after adopting new tools. When you know your numbers, you can confidently test new technologies, evaluate impact, and scale what works—without guesswork.

Start small. Choose one or two innovations that align with your goals. Track the results. Let your data guide your decisions.

Ready to innovate with clarity instead of overwhelm?

Download Your KPI Tracker

#1 Rule of Successful Dental Practice Owners: Measure What Matters 

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Do you measure what truly matters in your dental practice? Nearly every conversation I have with a fellow dentist-entrepreneur circles around how to know your investment and time is working, ‘how do you know that you’re actually growing your dental practice?’ 

You Can’t Improve What you Do Not Measure

Common sense tells us that in order to keep improving you must keep examining the results of what you’re doing. What is the point of doing a tremendous amount of work unless you’re going to review it to see what has been effective and what has been a waste of time? 

“In God we trust, all others bring data.”

-W. Edwards Deming

Reading a slew of reviews about a business who consistently makes incredible hamburgers but their fries are always soggy is literally reading the lagging indicators of a business that refuses to accept feedback and examine its protocols to address what is working and what is not. Reviews are one way to gain insight into what’s working in your business and what’s not working. They are also a look back into the near past: one person’s recent experience at that one hamburger joint. Make sense?

Here’s What to Measure in your Dental Practice

So, how do you measure and what do you measure? Two vitally important questions every business needs to ask and answer constantly and consistently.  

In the case of dental patient treatment plan acceptance, patient nurturing and dental patient experience, not all actions are created equal. Some of our actions have a greater impact on our environment than others and it’s a good idea to know which ones have a greater impact and which ones have a weaker impact.  

Lead Measure Vs. Lag Measure

First, let’s define some terms. Lead measures or lead indicators help you predict which actions might successful and which might not, in other words, what to keep doing to keep getting the same successful results.  

A lag measure or lag indicator, measures your wildly successful goal with results that have already passed like profit, revenue, and patient satisfaction. They are a little harder to gauge because the results are correlated to actions taken in the past.  

In my book Extraction: The Surprising New Formula to Systemize, Scale and Sell Your Business, I breakdown different forms of measurement and the importance measuring growth and goal achievement play in your leadership role. Let’s look at three measurable areas of your practice here.  

Dental Practice Revenue Growth

  • Leading Indicator: The leading indicator here is the Number of Qualified Patient Leads. By measuring the number of qualified leads generated, your business can predict future sales growth. In a dental practice, your qualified leads are patients who call for an appointment—for a service you can provide with a payer you accept. If the number of qualified leads is increasing, it’s likely that sales growth will follow. If your qualified leads are decreasing this is an area that you want to pay attention to with your team to decide why they are decreasing and what can be done to stop and reverse the trend, essentially get ahead of the ‘problem’ before it becomes one.  
  • Lagging Indicator: Dental Practice Production or Revenue. Production or revenue is a lagging indicator because it shows the results of past sales efforts. As we know, production in your dental practice doesn’t happen if the patient doesn’t show up, accept the treatment plan, and ultimately pay for the dental care you delivered. After sales have been made, revenue is generated, but this data is historical and cannot be used to predict future sales growth. It can help you look back and evaluate what you and/or your team did to increase revenue or the reverse: review what you did that possibly decreased revenue.  

Safety in Your Dental Practice

  • Leading Indicator: Number of Safety Training Hours. By measuring the number of safety training hours completed by employees, including HIPAA and OSHA trainings, a business can predict the likelihood of workplace accidents. There is a documented correlation of safety in the workplace to awareness of rules, laws, regulations and best practices. If the number of safety training hours is increasing, it’s likely that the number of accidents will decrease in the future. 
  • Lagging Indicator: Number of Workplace Accidents. Workplace accidents are a lagging indicator because they represent past events that have already occurred. By the time an accident is recorded, it’s too late to prevent it from happening. But it’s not too late to review protocols, training hours and best practices to ensure accidents decrease and awareness of safety protocols are top of mind for your employees.  

Managing Employee Turnover in Your Dental Practice

  • Leading Indicator: Employee Engagement. By measuring your employee engagement through surveys, anonymous feedback systems, communications and strong morale engagement, your business can predict your future turnover rates. If your employee engagement is low, it’s likely that turnover rates will increase in the future. 
  • Lagging Indicator: Employee Turnover Rate. Your employee turnover rate is a lagging indicator because it shows the results of your past employee retention efforts. After employees have left, turnover rates can be calculated, but this data is historical and cannot be used to predict future turnover rates. However, if your turnover rate is high, you can take a look at your employee engagement protocols to see what is lacking and where you can improve employee engagement.  
What Type of Growth is Expected in My Dental Practice?

The Measurement of Growth is A Measure of Leadership

These are just a few examples of how using and measuring your leading and lagging indicators can improve so many areas of your dental practice. The key takeaway is that leading indicators can be used to predict future outcomes, while lagging indicators show the results of past actions. By tracking both leading and lagging indicators, you can better understand how your actions, decisions and the actions of your teams affect performance so you can make more informed decisions about future strategy. 

The role of a leader is not just to delegate, guide and grow, it is also to measure so you can continue to improve on what has come before. If you’re working with a strategic plan in order to scale your practice, how will you know when to buy your second practice? Is it simply when you’ve socked away enough money or is it when your key performance indicators show that, not only are you financially ready to buy but it’s also the right economic environment to buy?  

Mastering Dental Practice Entrepreneurship

Successful dental practice owners don’t grow by guesswork, they grow by measuring what truly matters. If you’re ready to assess the real health of your practice and make confident, data-driven decisions, the next step is putting the right metrics in front of you.

That’s why we created our KPI Tracker, built specifically for dental entrepreneurs. This tool helps you monitor the key indicators that drive growth, profitability, and sustainability, so you can spot trends early, identify opportunities, and lead your team with clarity.

If you’re ready to stop relying on assumptions and start leading with insight, this tracker gives you a simple, actionable way to stay focused on what moves the needle.

Ready to measure what matters most?

Download Your KPI Tracker

How Building Strong Teams Can “Make” Your Dental Practice

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You gotta get the right butts in the right seats

Building teams is one of the gifts and difficulties of true leadership. Building a great team for your company is an absolute necessity, but it is also a process of trial and error.

Shannon Waller, my coach and author of, How to Gracefully Let Go of Wrong-Fit Team Members, taught me how to assess our employees, make sure they were in the positions that allowed them to thrive the best, and gracefully let go of team members that were not the right fit for our company.

A good leader takes the time to assess all angles of team-building to make sure that your employees are happy, fulfilled, thriving and living up to the position that they are in. And if that’s not happening, it’s up to you, as a leader, to quickly reassess and make the changes needed to restore balance and confidence.

Learn more about how Extraction principles can help you build a strong team and grow your dental practice through the Extraction process.

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