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

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practice grows and evolves, it is typical for the systems and processes that once facilitated its success to become outdated and hinder its progress.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. 

Mastering your Mindset

My partner in Optimize Practice Alliance, and its CEO, Josh Gwinn, and I run a monthly mastermind built exclusively for dentists. A mastermind is a group of peers that come together on a regular basis to work out their biggest challenges in their practices, share resources and lean on each other to get through the rough patches and celebrate the wins. It is the single most effective tool that an entrepreneur has in his or her entrepreneurial toolkit.

Join Our Mastermind and Grow your Dental Practice

One of the best ways I have learned to remain steadfast in my goals, bust through my obstacles and find resources and community to keep me strong is when I joined a Mastermind. It truly was a game changer for me, for my business and for learning to create and stand by a vision that became bigger than anything I could have imagined before the support I found with my peers. Other benefits of our dentist mastermind are the incredible opportunities you will get to improve your leadership skills, understand the importance of team culture within your practice, as well as DSO structures, scaling knowledge and so much more. You will learn from those who’ve walked in your shoes and found success.

We have created a strong community and we would love for you to join us. Click the button to register for the next one and we’ll see you there!