Increasing Profitability in Your Practice

Many dentists put in grueling hours—sometimes six days a week—yet still struggle to cover overhead. The problem isn’t effort. It’s structure. Profitability in dentistry doesn’t come from working yourself to exhaustion, but from aligning your systems so they work for you instead of against you.

When your practice is well-organized financially and operationally, you can work fewer hours, provide better care, and actually make more money. Here’s a step-by-step look at where most practices go wrong—and how to fix it.

1. Check Your Overhead

The first thing to evaluate is your overhead. Think of overhead as the foundation of your practice’s financial health. If your overhead is bloated, no amount of additional patients or hours will make up for it.

Common problem areas include:

• Personnel costs that exceed recommended percentages.
• Marketing expenses that aren’t producing enough new patients to justify the spend.
• Facility or administrative costs that creep higher without anyone noticing.

Industry benchmarks exist to help you determine whether you’re overspending. For example, personnel costs (not including the doctor) should generally sit around 20–22.5% of collections. Marketing should stay in the 5–7% range, and facility/admin overhead about 8–10%.

If you discover your overhead is too high, don’t panic. This is actually good news—it’s something you can fix. The key is isolating the category that’s out of alignment, making adjustments, and bringing expenses back into proportion.

2. Diagnose Your Production Problem

If your overhead looks fine, the issue usually lies in production. In dentistry, production isn’t just about the procedures you do—it’s about case acceptance and having enough opportunities to present treatment in the first place.

Here are the three biggest reasons production suffers:

• • Case Acceptance Issues: Diagnosing correctly, but patients aren’t saying “yes.” This comes down to communication and sales skills.
  • Not Enough Opportunities: A weak hygiene department or low new patient flow means not enough treatment is being presented.
  • Poor Coordination: Cases slip through the cracks if no one is responsible for treatment presentation or if the schedule is too tight.

Bottom line: Without enough opportunities and a strong case acceptance system, you’ll hit a ceiling—no matter how many days you work. If you really want to hone your case acceptance skills, I highly recommend you attend the MGE Communication and Sales Seminars. Attendees see an average increase of $26,000 per month in collections within 12 months.

3. The PPO Trap

Even when overhead and production are handled correctly, many practices still find themselves barely breaking even. The culprit? PPO participation.

PPOs are the #1 profitability killer in dentistry today. They slash reimbursements by 30–50%, forcing you to work harder for less. The math simply doesn’t add up.

Insurance companies have done an excellent job of marketing the idea that dentists can’t survive without PPOs. But the reality is the opposite: dentists who successfully transition away from PPOs not only survive—they thrive.

When you drop PPOs the right way:

• Patients often stay, because they value their relationship with you and your team.
• You get paid fairly for your services instead of writing off large chunks.
• Your stress levels go down because you’re not running on a hamster wheel of volume-based dentistry.

The key is having a strategy for communication, so patients understand that leaving PPOs doesn’t mean leaving you. Done correctly, this move often marks the turning point where practices finally become profitable and stable.

4. Should You Raise Fees?

Many dentists immediately look to raising fees as the answer. While this can help, it’s not the main issue in most practices.

If you’re already operating fee-for-service, your private fees should naturally cover your overhead. If you’re still contracted with PPOs, higher fees won’t solve anything—because reimbursements are locked in by the contract.

That’s why raising fees alone rarely produces the breakthrough dentists are looking for. The deeper issue usually lies in overhead mismanagement, production inefficiencies, or insurance participation.

Now, if you haven’t raised your fees in the last decade, it might be time to check your local fee guide and see where you stack up. Tools like the Wasserman Guide are great for this. You can pick which percentile you’d like to be in and adjust your fees from there.

The Takeaway

If you’re working long weeks and still barely covering overhead, the problem isn’t effort—it’s systems.

• Audit your overhead to make sure expenses are aligned with industry benchmarks.
• Strengthen production by increasing opportunities and mastering case acceptance.
• Drop PPOs strategically to reclaim control of your profitability.
• Revisit your fee structure only after fixing these core issues.

By focusing on these fundamentals, you’ll be able to work fewer hours, reduce stress, and actually see your practice grow stronger financially.

When the right systems are in place, dentistry becomes not just sustainable—but profitable and enjoyable again.

And look, If still you need help with this area don’t hesitate to schedule a free consultation and we can go over your numbers with you to find these lost areas of profit. visit mgeonline.com/free-practice-analysis to book today.

For any additional questions, give us a call at (800) 640-1140 or email me at Sabrib@mgeonline.com.