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How Dental Practices Can Increase Their EBITDA and Why You Should Care: 1 Way to Scale

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My Views on EBIDTA  

I’m of the firm belief that using EBIDTA to measure the growth of your dental practice is an essential measurement for its health and success. You never want to overlook the amount of debt you’re taking on and how that is impacting your business. And you don’t want to use EBIDTA as your only measurement of growth. But it is an effective tool if you use it to increase your cost conserving measures and pay attention to your expenses and investments.   

In the short video below, I discuss the importance of increasing your EBIDTA and two methods for increasing it. Not everyone uses this method of measurement in their practice, and I think that is a mistake. If you use it strategically to do monthly deep dives into your must-haves and nice-to-haves, you can get a very good idea of how effective your cost-cutting measures are month over month.  

What is EBIDTA? 

So, what is EBIDTA?  Basically, it’s a way to measure your practice’s overall financial performance by stripping out interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization –  

Use EBITDA in your Dental Practice

Check out this article on Medium for a more broad context and understanding of EBITDA and how it generally works in business.

Strip out all these other factors and you will have a basic view of your dental practice’s profitability. In my mind, this is an important measurement because it helps you see gauge which cost-cutting measures you take are working. Also, when you strip out all the other numbers, you can focus on the essentials: your operating profitability and your cash flow.  

This is by no means the only way you should measure the success and profitability of your dental practice. You still need to take into account the other factors, but this is another great tool for your entrepreneurial toolbox.  

Increase EBITDA in Your Dental Practice

Why Should Dental Practices Increase Their EBIDTA Margin?  

First, what does increasing your EBIDTA margin mean? Sounds complicated but it simply means lowering your operating expenses in relation to your total revenue. The margin is the percentage of expenses to revenue. So, increasing your monthly EBIDTA margin by 10% means you’re lowering operating expenses or increasing your topline revenue by 10% of your revenue. 

It’s incredibly important for dental practices to be mindful of their operating costs in relation to their revenue. There will be times when your investments far exceed your revenue, but this is the exception rather than the rule. Buying a new piece of digital dental equipment that will increase the value of your offerings, or building out a new software system are essential to practices staying relevant and efficient, but these expenses should be taken in moderation at strategic times.  

Two Methods for Increasing EBIDTA in Your Dental Practice 

When I work with dental entrepreneurs, I like to show them two ways of increasing EBIDTA. These two methods are customized for dental practices and the unique challenges they face in an industry with quite large expenses and investments, especially at the outset of a business venture.  

Learn and Earn –

  • See the advantage of learning while on the job; learning a new piece of equipment; learning a new dental technique; as an investment. By learning while you earn, you continue to develop your skills as a dentist and entrepreneur while increasing the value of your dental practice to the community you serve. The more value you provide raises your production, which attracts more patients, and increases revenue.

Deep-Dive Accounting –

  • On a monthly basis, make sure you take a deep dive into your expenses. Pay close attention to your must-haves, the essentials of running your practice on a daily basis. You cannot run your dental practice without them. But also make sure you pay attention to your “nice-to-haves” and see where you can cut these expenses. You don’t need them. Pay attention to your vendor pricing. I’ve seen prices go up without discussion, get paid, and negatively impact a practice’s valuation without the dentist even knowing it happened. They will enhance your dental practice, but they are not essential to daily operations. The more you manage these expenses the more you increase your EBIDTA margin.  

These two methods increase your operating profit and your EBIDTA margin and that is an attractive measure for you as a dental entrepreneur and anyone looking to invest in your company.  

Turning EBITDA Insight into Action 

Understanding EBITDA is only powerful if you can actively influence it. Increasing EBITDA isn’t about chasing one big change—it’s about consistently improving the operational drivers underneath it: scheduling efficiency, case acceptance, patient retention, provider productivity, and cost control.

That’s why we created the Optimize KPI Tracker for dental entrepreneurs. This tool helps you monitor the metrics that directly impact EBITDA, so you can identify trends early, address inefficiencies, and make smarter decisions with confidence. When you know what’s driving your numbers, you’re no longer guessing, you’re leading strategically.

Ready to take control of your practice’s profitability and long-term value?

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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?

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#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?

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How to Scale Your Dental Practice Successfully: 5 Essential Building Blocks

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Read this checklist before you start growing your dental practice. When successfully scaling a dental practice, the key is to focus on the patient experience and the business operations. You can successfully scale your dental practice by creating efficiencies, streamlining processes, and enhancing patient experience and team alignment. Let’s look at five ways you can lay the foundational groundwork that will allow you to scale your business successfully.

Dental practice scaling and exit strategies

Develop A Strategic Plan for Your Dental Practice

The first step to scaling your dental practice is to create a strategic plan. Start by considering the current state of your practice, your current capabilities, and your future goals. Then, develop a plan to take you from where you are to where you want to go. One simple way to create your plan is to decide what goals you want to achieve over the next 3 years in terms of scaling your practice.

Next, and this is the fun part, work backwards to figure out what steps you need to take leading up to that 3-year completion. Determine what steps you need to take and goals you need to set in each year. Break those years down into monthly goals and then break those goals down into weekly goals and daily tasks to accomplish the weekly and monthly goals. Working backwards allows you to create a plan that you can chunk down with steps that you can create with your team and get everyone on board and excited about this growth phase.

Automate Your Dental Practice Systems

The next step is to look for ways to automate processes and create efficiencies. Automation can streamline tasks, decrease administrative costs and free up time for both staff and patients. For example, by automating appointment scheduling, billing and follow-up communications you can lighten the load of your team members so they can focus on ‘bigger rocks’ like the daily tasks needed to achieve that weekly and monthly goal chart bringing you closer to your 3-year scaling achievement.

Create and Refine an Excellent Dental Patient Experience

Creating a comfortable patient atmosphere is essential for a successful dental practice. Make sure your office is clean, comfortable and inviting. Patients should feel relaxed and at ease when they enter the practice, so provide comfortable seating and decor that reflects the practice’s values and mission. Offer convenient and flexible appointment availability. Patients want to be able to schedule appointments that fit their schedules. Offering flexible hours and options for online scheduling makes it easier for patients to set up appointments that work for them.

Also, utilize technology. Technology can be a great way to enhance the patient experience. Implementing an electronic health records app and offering other digital tools makes it easier for patients to access their records and schedule appointments much more effortlessly. You can also use digital tools to inform patients about their treatment and follow-up reminders. These automations add ease and control for your patients and streamline activity and effort for your team members.

Invest in a Marketing Strategy

Marketing is an essential component of scaling a dental practice. As a dental entrepreneur, focusing solely on providing the best possible services to your patients can be tempting. While this is undoubtedly important, you must also investing in marketing to help scale your practice. Here’s why: Marketing helps you reach more people. When you invest in marketing you increase your visibility in the local community. In addition, a robust online presence can help you establish yourself as a reliable and trustworthy practice.

Additionally, marketing can help you get the word out about new services, promotions, and other offerings that may attract new patients. Marketing also helps you build relationships with your existing patients and create new relationships with prospective patients. By creating content tailored to your target audience’s needs and interests, you can build a reputation of trust and loyalty in and among your community, both online and offline. Finally, investing in marketing can help you generate more recurring revenue over time.

Build Team Alignment within Your Clinical and Support Teams

Your scaling plan is only as strong as the team you’ve selected to implement and execute your strategic plan. You need a strong team capable of trusting your leadership through some rough waters. If you’ve got a team that can trust and execute in the tough times, that makes the more fluid times easier to navigate. I speak a lot about teams so I won’t go into too much detail here but team alignment and team strength is a fundamental requisite of any scaling plan.

These five essential and foundational activities: developing a Strategic Plan, automating where you can, refining patient experience, investing in offline and online marketing strategies, and building an aligned team all lay the groundwork for eventually scaling your organization successfully.

Once these systems and strategies are in place they are designed to free you and your teams up to focus on the new tasks and goals in your Strategic Plan that will allow you to scale and grow.


Scaling a business is a monumental task. These strategies will free you p to focus on your overall strategic plan. Once these strategies are implemented you, your teams and your whole organization will be more nimble and resilient to meet the challenges of scaling and growing your company. This is what it means to work ON your business rather than simply showing up to the dentist’s chair every day.

You are the leader of your organization and every leader needs a strategic plan.

Scaling Your Dental Practice Starts with Clarity, Not Speed

Scaling a dental practice isn’t just about growth, it’s about readiness. Many practices want to scale, but far fewer have the clarity, alignment, and structure required to do it sustainably. Without a clear understanding of where you are today and where you’re going, growth can create more stress than success.

Before you take the next step, it’s critical to define your Point A, clarify your long-term vision, and ensure your goals, team, and systems are aligned to support expansion. That’s exactly why we created the Extraction GPS.

The Extraction GPS is a practical planning tool designed to help dental practice owners assess their current reality, clarify their values and direction, and map a clear path forward. It gives you a framework to decide if, when, and how to scale, so growth is intentional, not reactive.

Thinking about scaling your dental practice?

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3 Ways Your Dental Practice Can Supercharge Your Teams and Win with the Flywheel Concept

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A well-run dental practice requires a strong team working together every day. We’ve all been there when the team isn’t behind us. We find ourselves pulling all the weight trying to make the dental practice hum…by ourselves.

A dental practice is like a well-oiled machine, in this analogy, a flywheel. This machine needs every part running smoothly in order to be effective. And achieving a smooth flywheel function requires removing friction and applying force, especially at the beginning of operation when momentum is key.

The flywheel effect in your dental practice results in an accumulation of small wins over time and is based on teamwork, consistency and excellence. Jim Collins introduced the ‘flywheel effect’ in his book, Good to Great. It’s a wonderful analogy to apply to your dental practice as a clear template for creating and sustaining momentum, efficiency and excellence with your teams and your dental practice.

Without teamwork, appointments may be missed, patients may feel neglected, processes may be overlooked and the overall efficiency of the practice may suffer. Each member of the team plays a crucial role, from the receptionist who schedules appointments to the dental assistants who assist the dentist during procedures. Their collective efforts create a positive and comfortable environment for patients, promoting trust and satisfaction. Effective communication and collaboration among team members are key to maintaining a well-run dental practice and delivering high-quality dental care.

Flywheel - Optimize Practice Services - Dental Practice

The Flywheel Concept

The Flywheel Effect pertains to how you can try to build efficiency and teamwork in the practice every day. To illustrate this, I want you to imagine a huge flywheel that weighs thousands of pounds. Your goal is to get that flywheel moving. So, you push and push as hard as you can.

Over time, it slowly starts to move, but it’s a lot of work. Now, add an excellent practice manager, hygienist, an associate or two, and dental assistants trained and ready to get that flywheel rolling. Not only do you not have to work as hard, but you see results faster. With every turn of the flywheel, it gets a little easier.

Eventually, the momentum shifts, and boom! The flywheel is turning, and the “inertia” is working for you, not against you. You find that not everything rests on your shoulders anymore. You’re not making all the decisions. You’re not double-checking everything and the momentum for your business doesn’t rely on one person, you, any longer. You’re created a well-oiled and fully spinning machine.

3 Ways to Leverage the Flywheel Concept in Your Dental Practice

The Flywheel Effect reminds us that real transformation doesn’t happen overnight. Momentum is built through consistent effort, shared commitment, and a clear direction everyone can rally around. When frustration shows up—as it inevitably will—that’s often a sign to lean back into your vision and recommit to the long game.

Progress accelerates when your team understands the destination and how their work contributes to it. Alignment turns effort into momentum, and momentum turns small wins into lasting success.

That’s why we created the Extraction GPS. This tool helps dental entrepreneurs clarify their values, define their current reality, and map a clear path forward—so the flywheel you’re turning is aimed at the right outcome. With clarity of direction, momentum becomes easier to build and sustain.

Ready to create alignment and build momentum that lasts?

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