The search for profit must be a constant in all companies. If your practice is going through a period of low sales or even if your sales are up, but you hardly notice a profit, this article is for you.
How to increase the profit of a dental clinic
It is the profit that allows a clinic to remunerate the partners’ investment, hire and pay better professionals, update the company’s equipment, renew the team’s knowledge, among other advantages.
But, within the consulting process for Senior Consulting dental clinics, we always seek to make our customers aware that there are only two ways to make a profit in a dental clinic:
01 – Increase sales
02 – Decrease costs
Despite seeming simple, these tasks require planning, time and effort. Let’s go into more detail about each item.
01 – Increase sales in dental clinics
Before thinking about profit, you need to sell your treatments. Whatever the focus of your clinic, remember that increasing revenue through more sales goes through three paths:
What is the best strategy to increase the clinic’s profit? All! Apply all of them in your clinic in a coordinated way.
Always try to sell your service at the fairest price for you and your customer, always aiming for higher profit margins (we will explain later how to do this).
01 – Sell your service more expensive
02 – Sell more service to the same customers
03 – Sell new services to new customers
If you already have a customer base, it is necessary to think about recurrence, that is, sales plus services to those who are already your customer. This can be done with a loyalty program, with permanent dental marketing campaigns that show the importance of regular visits to your clinic, etc.
Last but not least, it is necessary to focus on attracting new patients every day, with the dual objective of increasing sales and also replacing patients who abandon or finish their treatments.
In other words, to increase your clinic’s profit, you need to have a constant focus on sales, always combining profitability with increased revenue.
We want to remind you that we’ve seen many clinics fail because they don’t work on the profit pillar associated with increased revenue. One must guide the other, because working too hard doesn’t mean your practice will make a profit.
02 – Decrease costs
What are the main costs of a dental clinic? As a rule, the biggest costs are:
Laboratory
Team
Taxes
If you pay a lot of tax, you’re probably selling a lot, which, as we’ve seen, might not be such good news if you’re selling at the wrong price that doesn’t cover your costs + expenses + profit margin.
For this, it is essential to have a specialized consultancy for dentists who know how to correctly price their procedure price list.
In terms of staff, the biggest cost has to do with the dentists who work for you. There are several ways to pay dentists: Commission, fixed price per procedure, daily and even CLT?
What better way to hire dentists to work in your clinic? This gives a complete article, but let’s sum it up by saying it depends. It depends on so many factors, but one fundamental detail needs to be clear: You who own the clinic should always earn more than your colleague who performs the procedure.
Regarding laboratory, prosthetic and other costs, it is necessary to verify if the production volume x costs does not justify keeping an internal prosthetic in your clinic.
On the other hand, it is never good to be exclusively linked to a single prosthetist or laboratory.
The ideal is to divide your production between 3 or more professionals, always analyzing the production capacity and quality of each supplier.
We could talk about many other aspects related to reducing the costs of a dental clinic, but we will leave that for another article.
Conclusion
To increase the profit of a dental clinic it is always necessary to work on two fronts together: increase sales with profit and reduce costs in key aspects of your clinic.
For a personalized and professional dental consultation for your practice, contact and speak with one of our specialists in dental clinic administration.
Senior Consulting