Do you have a real, workable, yearly planning process for your practice?

For most, when I ask this question, the answer is… no.

And look, people make New Year’s resolutions all the time – to start hitting the gym, get healthy, etc.- but that’s not what I’m referring to here.

I’m talking about planning for your business.

Now, again, for many people, when I bring up the subject of longer-term planning, I get two reactions, almost back-to-back:

1. People love the idea. They love, love, love it. “Oh, I want to plan, this or I want to do that.” And then…
2. The second after (OK maybe ten minutes) you start getting into the details of what’s involved… you get this glazed-over look. Or the bored look. Or the bored-overwhelmed look—for lack of a better description.

And this is despite the fact that we all know that real satisfaction comes from planning something out and pulling it off exactly as planned.

So, what gives? People obviously want to do this.  A solid plan is a desirable objective. But for whatever reason – many can’t, won’t or don’t.

I think a large part of this is when you’re doing longer-term planning for a business with employees, variables, different departments, and a thousand moving pieces, it becomes – at least from the outside looking in – way more complex than it has to be. And from there people go into overwhelm and just give up!

Hence, the purpose of this post. I want to give you something workable. Something that’s easily applied by the average working small business (or practice) owner. A rundown of steps—a process, with a checklist—you can use to plan out the next year (in this case, 2026) and have it come off the way you hoped… or even better.

A Warning: Watch Out for These Two Issues!

Before you start planning, I want to point out the two points where planning tends to bog down. Why? Well, if you know these going in, you won’t get stuck in the same trap.

1) People make plans that are “unrealistic”

I hate using this word because “realistic” is debatable.

For example: you have a Schedule Coordinator and you tell them:

“I want all my primary (high value) procedures in the morning.”

They say, “Nobody wants mornings. They can’t get off work.”

So, your mornings are empty… and now you’re prepping four crowns at 6:30 PM like your life is a punishment.

Then you hire someone else.  You tell them the same thing and they say, “Okay.”  Suddenly – as if by magic your mornings are full.

So, was the goal unrealistic?

No.

It was doable. It just required a person who was willing to do it and that had the know-how.

So “realistic” is often in the eye of the beholder.

But there is such a thing as, I don’t know, actually unrealistic.

If I tell you to drive from Miami to New York City in six hours… that’s not realistic. Unless you know something about physics that I don’t.

Unless you’re on The Jetsons.

Or if I tell you, “You have 47 on your schedule this morning out of 10 chairs.  You’re scheduled to prep them in the next two hours.” Can you prep 47 crowns? Sure, but not in two hours out of ten chairs!

(Writer’s note: waiting for the comment from someone who says they can do this…alright then take your shot)

The problem is: people build plans and to-do lists that ignore time, bandwidth, and reality.

You want people shooting for the stars—you don’t want someone doing 80 a month setting a goal of 81. That’s not planning; that’s sleepwalking.

But you also don’t want people setting goals that would take ten years and then demanding it happens in one.

Because that’s how you plan a “humongous loss.”

So, when you’re planning, you want:

• challenge
• pressure
• a stretch

…but it still must be attainable.

Otherwise, you set yourself up to fail. Which leads us to the second point.

2) People can’t confront “too much”

This one is related to the first.

People give themselves too much… and then they can’t deal with it. It’s overwhelming.

Let me give you an example.

I had a newer client—working mom, chairside all day, running a full-time practice. We sit down and make a list of 20 things she needed to do.

Two or three weeks later, we meet again.

“How did you do?”

“Not good – Zero targets completed.”

And not by any stretch due to laziness.

It was because 20 was too much. It was overwhelming. She kept looking at the list, just shut down mentally and went back to what she did normally.

So, we dialed things back. We looked at the three most important targets, just three. We wrote them down on one little piece of paper. The shortest-looking list you ever saw.

And then…when I see her a week or so later?

All complete. Ready to move on to the next targets!

And that’s the lesson.

If you can’t confront what you’ve written down, you won’t do any of it. And overwhelm leads to paralysis.

So when you plan, you need to focus on what’s truly important.

Because when everything is on the list, nothing is urgent. Nothing gets done.

When to Do Your Yearly Planning (Hint: Not January)

If you’re planning for 2026, when should you do it?

Most people say: “We’ll do it when we get back in January.”

Wrong.

Because by the time you “get geared up,” it’s February.

Ideally, you want to start planning next year no later than early December.

Early, mid-day at the latest.

You want to hit the ground in January running—not still deciding what “running” means.

Can you plan earlier than that? Sure. The only drawback is you don’t have the full year’s stats yet, so your comparisons aren’t complete.

But late in the prior year is the sweet spot: not too early, not too late.

Who Should Be in the Planning Meeting?

This planning meeting isn’t a “doctor sits alone with a notebook” situation.

You want:

• Owner/doctor
• Office manager
• Any other executives in the practice who have decision-making responsibility

Larger practice? You might have:

• an OM
• a front-office manager
• a back-office manager
• maybe a PR or marketing person

Anyone who has substantial responsibility and authority needs to be involved.

And one more thing:

Do this on a day when you won’t be distracted.

Don’t do it during patient hours.

Don’t do it where anyone is going to be called out of the meeting.

Because here’s something people don’t think about:

• If I have 10 people in a meeting, and one person arrives 10 minutes late… that person didn’t waste 10 minutes.
• They wasted 90 minutes for the rest of the attendees.
• Nine people sitting there times ten minutes.

So set this up when nobody has something else to do, or needs to leave early. That even includes “just stepping out for a second to take a call.” Sure, you’d have scheduled breaks, but the break is for everyone.

And keep in mind, this is a real executive meeting, and it might take a couple of hours. So do what you need to do, coffee, snacks, lunch – whatever.

Some clients even go off-site so they don’t get pulled into fires and interruptions.

Just make sure you have access to your data—laptop, reports, and practice management software—because you’re going to need it.

The Simple New Year Planning Process (2026)

To make this easy, we have a New Year Planning Checklist that you can download by clicking here.  I’m going to explain HOW to use it below, so you’ll want to have it handy as you go through the rest of the article.

And as I go through these steps, you’ll see why I like this process:

• It’s simple.
• It’s workable.
• And it prevents overwhelm while still producing a real plan.

Step 1: Do a Year-End Postmortem (Reality Check)

You start by doing a year-end postmortem. A reality check.

You’re looking at year-over-year performance: last year vs. this year-to-date.

Now, if you’re doing this December 15^th or 20th, you don’t have the full year returns yet. True.

So you can:

• look at monthly averages
• compare months
• use year-to-date vs. year-to-date

You don’t need perfection. You need clarity.

On the worksheet, you’re comparing last year to this year-to-date for:

• Collections
• Production
• Profit
• Profit margin %
• New patients
• Treatment acceptance %
• Collections divided by staff
• Payroll % of collections
• % of collections in A/R over 60 days

And next to each, you track the change and any key notes (closed for a month, staffing shakeup, etc.).

Let’s unpack the few that trip people up.

1. Profit and profit margin

If your P&L is current, you should be able to see profit and margin.

Now: profit numbers can get weird depending on how the owner doctor compensates themselves.

If you’re chairside and you take a small salary and then pull distributions, that can skew the numbers.

But here’s the key:

Use the same method consistently so you have a valid comparison year-over-year.

Another  reference point I’ll give you:

If you own a practice and an associate is doing the dentistry—and you’re mostly providing oversight—your net should be at least 20%. Twenty is the floor. I’ve seen 23–24% and even 27%, but 20% is your baseline.

That’s a separate discussion, but it helps for a sanity-check.

1. Treatment acceptance %

Keep it simple: it’s dollar value of Treatment presented vs. treatment accepted.

Presented $10,000. Patient accepts $2,400? That’s 24%.

Most software can pull this. You’re looking for the percentage and whether it’s improving.

1. Collections divided by staff

This is an efficiency statistic.

If you collect $100,000/month with 10 staff, your collections per staff is $10,000.

If you add a staff member, your collections should rise accordingly (after a reasonable ramp-up).

To calculate:

• Use your average staff count (count part-time as halves)
• Divide collections by average staff

Compare year-over-year.

1. Payroll as a percentage of collections

This is where you check if payroll is creeping up.

For this number, don’t include owner-doctor or associate compensation. This is staff payroll—hygiene, admin, assistants, Office Manager, etc.—and payroll taxes.

Rule of thumb:

• U.S.: 22.5%, including employer payroll taxes
• Canada: 20.9%, not including employer payroll taxes

You’re comparing last year to this year-to-date to see if it’s improving, staying the same, or getting worse.

Step 1B: List Your Wins and Losses

After stats, you list:

• Wins (areas you succeeded)
• Why you think those wins occurred
• Losses (areas you didn’t win)
• Why those losses occurred

We’re not looking to affix blame here. We’re looking for what might have actually contributed to each of these.

Then we move on to the reflection piece:

• What were you most proud of this year?
• If you had to live the year over again, what would you do differently?

When you finish step one, you have a clear picture of:

• What worked
• What didn’t
• What must change

Step 2: Define What 2026 Looks Like

Now you define next year.

This is where people get weird because they hear the word “vision” and start floating into space.

Don’t do that.

This is simple:

If I took a snapshot of your practice at the end of 2026, what would I see?

Examples:

• We have 6 hygiene days now; we’ll have 12 by end of 2026
• We collect $130k/month now, we’ll consistently collect $220k/month
• Inactive patient base is 4,000;  it’ll be down to 2,000

This is not “dreaming.”

This is describing the outcomes you’re targeting in plain language.

Then you set:

• growth targets (production, collections, new patients)
• profit targets (margin you want to reach)
• major changes or accomplishments you’re planning to achieve (add chairs, complete certifications, expand hygiene, etc.)

Step 3: Identify the Big Actions Required

Now you ask:

What big-picture actions must occur to reach these targets? The operative word here being “MUST.” What MUST happen if we want to pull this off – because that’s what we’re going to make darn sure we get done!

If you’ve looked at the stats and set a clear picture of 2026, the required actions should be painfully obvious.

If your schedule is a disaster and a normal schedule would add $30k/month… that’s a major action area.

But keep this high-level.

Not granular – i.e. hire a scheduler, train scheduler, redesign schedule templates, calculate procedure times and 50 other micro-steps. That’s going to come later – you’ll see and you’re absolutely not going to do in an exec meeting format. We’ll leave that to the person responsible.

Instead, we’re looking for more:

• “Stabilize scheduling, and increase production by 15% with a trained Schedule Coordinator and effective schedule policy.”

Again. Big picture.

You may end up with five “Big Picture” targets at the end of this step. Maybe a few more. But absolutely not 20, 30, or 50.

Step 4: Assign Responsibility (Or It Won’t Get Done)

Now you assign one person accountable for each big picture target.

If nobody owns it, it becomes everybody’s job—which means it becomes nobody’s job.

Then you get finger-pointing later.

So instead, we’re going to affix accountability to one person for each – i.e.

• This target belongs to the office manager
• This belongs to the back-office manager
• This belongs to the hygiene lead, and so on.

One owner per target.

Step 5: Priorities and Sequencing

Now you sequence by time.

What must be done by March? April? June?

Example:
If you need an additional operatory by June, you list the targets that must occur before June.

The point is: you’re creating a timeline.

And here’s my viewpoint:

If you have a trained office manager, and they accept responsibility for a target, I’m not going to sit there and figure out how they’re going to do it.

That’s their job.

If they don’t know how, they figure it out. They get training. They ask questions. They bring a plan.

It’s like this: And tell me if this rings true for you.  If I’m assigned an objective and I don’t know how to do it, I’m not waiting for my boss to show me. I’m studying, asking questions, and building (and proposing) a solution.

So, your annual plan doesn’t need every micro-step.

It needs ownership and deadlines.

Step 6: Oversight Meetings (So This Actually Happens)

You can build the cleanest plan in December… and if you don’t talk about it again until next December, who knows what happens.

You need regular oversight.

Typically:

• weekly executive meetings: check progress on targets
• quarterly leadership review: bigger look at stats, targets, direction

That’s how you prevent “set it and forget it” planning.

Step 7: Get the Staff On Board

Once leadership has the plan, you bring the rest of the team into it.

At your kickoff staff meeting in January, share:

• the goals staff should know
• the major initiatives that affect them
• what the practice is aiming to accomplish

This way, everyone understands the direction, and nobody is confused about what you’re trying to do.

Step 8: Do a Full Financial Review

This last step won’t be done on December 15th. It might happen in early January.

But at least once a year, you need a deep financial review:

• audit expenses
• identify creep and waste
• review variable items that drift (payroll, lab, supplies, marketing)
• check credit cards for “why are we still paying for this?” items.

You should have monthly oversight, quarterly deeper review, and then every 6–12 months a full audit.

Because things can slowly spin out of control.

Why This Simple Process Works

Someone might look at this and go:

“Gee, Jeff. That’s too simple. It’s not that complex.”

Exactly.

I’m assuming you’re a working doctor/owner – not a CEO with no further responsibilities that has weeks to spend on long term planning.  If you are, I could lay some stuff on you that would take three days to explain in a seminar.

But I’m assuming you’re not sitting around idly dreaming up ideas for your practice. You’re working!

So, I wanted to give you something you can actually do, because most people don’t do any real planning at all. They do a little wishful thinking and call it a plan.

And some planning is better than none. That’s the point.

Can you plan longer than a year? Sure. Ten-year goals? I guess  if you feel like it.

But super long-range plans have a problem: Things change.

If you made a five-year plan in 2019… wouldn’t it have changed slightly in 2020?

So, I like long-term goals—but yearly execution.

Each year, shoulder to the wheel, figure out what you need to do this year to move toward the long-term target.

That’s how it becomes real.

Here’s to an Amazing 2026!

I hope this gives you something easy to do that puts you ahead of most practices. Because most practices are doing little to no planning. And again: some planning is better than none.

So here’s to you having an amazing 2026—where you hit every target you set.

And don’t forget: the link to the New Year Planning Checklist is earlier in this article. If you haven’t done so already, make sure you take a second and download. And, you know, use it!

And if you want to find out more about MGE, you can find us online at mgeonline.com or call us at (800) 640-1140.